Page 20 of Misadventures with a Duke

Chapter Five

Bastien

I should have done this sooner.

But I hesitated, direly afraid to smash our dream by unleashing my full passion on her. I should have remembered that banked fires often burn the hottest. That restraining the hammer of my lust would only cure it into a mallet of unstoppable need. That it would be forged by my worship for this woman. The forever goddess in my soul.

The delusion I truly must be having…

Yet if this is delusion, let me never know sanity again.

Let me never remember how I had to leave her in a puddle of her own blood. How I never had time to put a diamond on her finger and call her mine before the world. How I watched every flicker of life disappear from her eyes…

Vitality that glows again at me, so perfect and whole. That flows through every naked inch of the writhing curves beneath me. Doing things to me.

By every saint I can no longer recall, the things she is doing to me…

“Oh!”

With every hot, hypnotizing repetition of that sole syllable…

“Oh no or oh yes, my sweet lily?”

My question elicits a response I have not predicted. Not in my dirtiest fantasies.

“How about you and this awesome cock trying for both?” she proposes, delving a hand beneath the flap of my britches.

While I flounder through my mind for an answering groan, she wraps her other palm around my backside, scratching my flesh with her urgent grip.

“Well,” I finally choke back. “How about that being an excellent idea?”

She laughs, washing my jawline with her soft, sultry breath. “There are many more where that came from, your lordy dukeship of everyth—”

She slices in on herself with a tiny shriek that is, unbelievably, more arousing than her banter. It spills from her again as I slide inside her with a harder thrust. Our flesh slaps. My senses turn to star fire.

“My holy God,” I grate. “Already so deep. Already so tight in your greedy glove.”

More of that riveting fire in her eyes, the green depths like an otherworldly sky for my stars, before she rasps, “Greedy is right. I don’t want to stop!”

“Then we most certainly will not.”

I twist my hips and celebrate every note of her deeper moans. Then the tighter tugs of her sweet little chatte. Oh, especially those.

“But we have to. Oh, damn it, we have to. I was on the pill until three weeks ago but ditched them out of spite. Just let me up for a second. I’m sure I’ve got a few friendly Trojans stashed in my—”

“Trojans?” I halt my thrusts. Completely. Does she expect me to do anything else after mentioning a stash of men—however thousands of years defunct—that she wishes to retrieve? What kind of a freakish realm has the woman led me to? “And whom, I must request, does this regal cache include? The entire army, or just Hector, Alexander, and Cassandra?”

Her lips quirk.

I cherish every second of the look, preparing for the repartee to follow. The quick wit that entranced me long before the passions of her body.

No swift sarcasm erupts from her. Not even a well-paced barb. Instead, she is laughing. Not a few giggles. This is a laugh, full and rich, taking over her whole body until she is clenching me anew in all the right places. Yet in this moment, all the wrong ones. Not if she expects me to hold out…

“Magique.”

Hold out? It is all I can to hold on now…

“Oh! Desperado.”