Мэри Бэлоу - Someone to Romance

“My hair must be squashed.”

His eyes came directly to hers. “I will give myself the pleasure of withdrawing the pins and brushing it out,” he said. “The first part may not be as easy as it sounds. It is a work of art.”

“Ruth is good with hair,” she told him.

“We will have to see,” he said, “if I am better.”

His voice was low. She seemed to hear it less with her ears than with some location low in her abdomen. What a foolish thought to be having. And now something down there was aching and pulsing and she swallowed.

“Perhaps,” she said, “I ought to have hired you as a lady’s maid instead of as a husband.”

“Ah,” he said, “but you did not hire me as a husband, did you, Jessie?”

And why did the sound of that particular variation on her name almost take her knees out?

“Besides,” he added, “we are not sure yet, are we, that my skills surpass those of Ruth.”

“Are you good at ironing?” she asked him.

He gave her a look that implied a clear no . “Come,” he said.

He seated her before the dressing table, and she watched in the mirror as he removed all the pins from her hair. He placed them in a neat pile on the dressing table, she was relieved to see, rather than sending them to join her gloves and bonnet on the floor.

He was in no hurry. But something struck her. He was already making love to her. His fingers untangled each curl as it was freed of its pins, and his knuckles caressed her scalp each time. He kept his eyes on what he was doing rather than on her image in the glass. He had a brooding look on his face. No, wrong word. But she did not know what the right word was. He looked wholly intent, wholly engrossed. He was in no hurry at all.

And then all the pins were gone and her hair was in a riot of untidiness about her shoulders and she swallowed again. Strange men ought not to see one with one’s hair down. But he was not a stranger. He was her husband.

For the first time he looked into the mirror.

“It is horribly untidy,” she said.

“Gorgeously disheveled,” he said.

“Is that not a contradiction in terms?” she asked.

“No.” Just the one word.

He picked up his own brush from the dressing table and began to draw it through her hair with long, slow strokes from the roots to the tips. Smoothness replaced the riot and her hair shone in the sunlight, which was beaming directly on them. He was still fully dressed in his wedding finery. Lace half covered his hands. There was a strangely enticing contrast between the femininity of the frills and the masculinity of the hands. He might have been a businessman, but she doubted he had spent all or even most of his working days behind a desk.

He put the brush down and drew his fingers through her hair at the temples to draw it back behind her shoulders. He held her eyes with his own before he dipped his head and kissed the side of her neck. Her toes curled up in her slippers. His hands closed about her upper arms, and he drew her to her feet, still facing away from him. Then he swept her hair forward over one shoulder and unbuttoned her dress down the back, from her neck to her hips. He moved it off her shoulders and down her arms. It whispered down her body and pooled about her feet and he left it there. Ruth would have a fit.

Her stays went next. He untied the laces and let the stays fall on top of her dress. Only her shift and her stockings—and shoes—remained. As well as her pearl necklace.

Oh my. It was a short shift. It did not even reach her knees. Neither did her stockings from the other direction. Her knees were bare. He turned her and looked her over without even trying to respect her modesty. He seemed very fully clothed in contrast to her. Apart from the lower halves of his hands there was not the merest hint of bare flesh from his chin on down.

She was going to die. Of mortification? Or . . . of something else?

His eyes were heavy lidded. Even when they looked back up into hers. And then—oh goodness me—he went down on one knee before her and began to draw off one garter and roll down one silk stocking to the ankle. He lifted her foot—she braced herself with one hand on his appealingly solid shoulder—and removed first her shoe and then her stocking with the garter. They landed on top of her dress and stays. The other garter and stocking and shoe joined them in the next minute or so. He really was in no hurry. He stood up.

And while she watched, he shrugged out of his coat. It was a tight fit. It was more like a second layer of skin, she thought, than a garment. His silk waistcoat followed it to the floor. Was his valet the sort of man to have a fit? He removed his neckcloth. Then he pulled his white shirt free of his knee breeches, crossed his arms, and drew it off over his head to drop onto the heap of their combined garments. And . . .

Oh my and goodness me.

And heaven help us.

He was magnificent. He definitely had not spent the past thirteen years sitting behind a desk wielding a pen. His upper arms, his shoulders, his chest, all rippled with firm muscle.

Jessica licked her lips, and his eyes dipped to watch the progress of her tongue. One hand came beneath her chin to hold it in the cleft between his thumb and fingers while the other hand spread over the back of her head. And he kissed her with open mouth while no other part of his body touched hers.

She would surely explode. And somehow not knowing what to do did not matter any longer, for he clearly did know. She was glad it was daytime, with sunshine and nothing of her own in the room except her person and her wedding clothes, all but her shift of which were on the floor. She was standing barefoot in the middle of them. His tongue was moving inside her mouth, stroking surfaces, tangling with her own tongue, and somehow—oh, how did he do that?—making her whole body sizzle with pain that was not pain at all and . . . Ah, and with a terrible longing for something else. Something more. Something she wanted. And wanted. She wanted him .

“Gabriel,” she said when he lifted his head. It came out on a gasp. Her arms, she realized, were at her sides. But she could feel him—his body heat, his masculinity—though he touched her nowhere except beneath her chin and against the back of her head.

Those heavy-lidded eyes gazed into hers. “Come to bed,” he said.

Yes. Oh yes, please. Please, please. She was not speaking the words aloud, she realized.

He waited until she was beside the bed and he had pulled back the bedcovers before grasping her shift at the hem and lifting it upward. She raised her arms, and the next moment there was a little pile of shift on the floor. He watched as she lay down on the bed, strangely unselfconscious about her nakedness, for he was clearly liking what he saw. He kicked off his shoes, peeled off his white stockings and then his breeches.

She closed her eyes briefly. Not out of fear or modesty or shock, though she certainly felt at least some of that last. She closed them because for the moment the desire she felt was more than she could bear.

He was on the bed with her then and raised on one elbow and leaning over her, his free hand touching now far more than her chin and the back of her head. It was touching her everywhere, exploring, caressing, pressing, even scratching lightly. And his mouth kissed her mouth and then her throat and then her breasts, drawing her nipples, one at a time, into his mouth and suckling them before he opened his mouth and exhaled warm air on them. His hand meanwhile had moved down to secret places to explore, to touch, to tease, to reach inside her with one finger. Shock hit her even as her own hands, without her quite knowing it, were moving over his upper body, feeling all those warm, powerful, rippling muscles as she breathed in the cologne and shaving soap smell of him.