I sigh, completely content, while he devotes our bath time to smothering me in his body, feeling me everywhere and squeezing me tightly. He’s humming that soft tune. It’s becoming very familiar to me now. I know when he’s going to draw breath and when the tone changes, and I know when a small pause is approaching, when he’s sure to take the brief silence as an opportunity to press his lips to the top of my head.
My cheek is resting on his wet chest as I slowly circle his nipple with my fingertip and stare across the vast expanse of his skin. Relaxed and tranquil go nowhere near to describing how I’m feeling. It’s these moments when I feel like I’m experiencing the real Miller Hart, not the man who’s hiding behind fine three-piece suits and an impassive face. The serious Miller Hart, the man disguised as a gentleman, hides his inside beauty from the world, leaving it facing a man who seems hell-bent on repelling any friendliness he encounters or confusing people with his impeccable manners, which are always delivered with such aloofness, they snuff the fact that he is, in fact, well mannered.
‘Tell me about your family.’ I break the silence with my quiet question, almost certain he’ll brush my enquiry aside.
‘I don’t have any,’ he whispers simply and softly, kissing the top of my head again as my brow wrinkles into his chest.
‘None at all?’ I try not to sound disbelieving, but I fail. I haven’t a family, so to speak, just my nan, but the value of at least one family member is . . . well, invaluable.
‘Just me,’ he confirms, leaving me silently sympathetic and pondering the loneliness his admission signifies.
‘Just you?’
‘It doesn’t matter what way you say it, Livy. It’ll still just be me.’
‘You’ve got no one?’
My body lifts and falls with his chest when he sighs. ‘That’s three. Shall we go for four?’ he asks gently. He’s not displaying exasperation or impatience, although I can tell if I try for that fourth he might do.
I shouldn’t find it so hard to believe, given my own sparse family. I have Gregory, too, and George, but only one blood relative. One is more than none, and one is a piece of history. ‘Not a living soul?’ I wince as soon as the fourth slips from my lips and immediately apologise for it. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve no need to apologise.’
‘But no one?’
‘And we have number five.’ There’s humour in his voice, and hoping I might catch a glimpse of that rare smile, I lift from his chest, but all I find is his wet, impassive beauty.
‘Sorry.’ I smile.
‘Accepted.’ He manoeuvres me, taking me to the other end of the bath, and lays me on my back. My thighs are spread and he kneels between them, taking one of my legs and lifting my foot until my sole is resting on the middle of his chest. My tiny size five looks lost in the vast expanse of muscle, even smaller when his manly hand starts stroking over the top as he watches me thoughtfully.
‘What?’ My voice has been reduced to nothing more than a breath of air under the piercing passion of his blue gaze. Miller Hart has passion seeping from every pore of his striking body and even more through that purposeful blue stare. I’m hoping it’s special and kept only for me, but I know I’m hoping in vain. Perhaps Miller Hart only ever expresses himself and removes that mask when he has a woman to indulge in.
‘I’m just thinking how lovely you look in my bath,’ he muses, lifting my foot to his mouth and slowly, painfully slowly, licking from my toes, over the top of my foot until he’s at my shin, my knee . . . my thigh.
The water ripples around me from my mild shift, and my hands splatter against the sides of the tub, slipping on the shiny porcelain. My skin is warm from the heat of the water and the steam in the bathroom, but with the heat of his tongue burning through my already heated flesh, I’m on fire. I’m quietly gasping. I’m closing my eyes and preparing myself to be worshipped, and when he reaches a point where my thigh meets the water, he slips his forearm under my lower back and lifts effortlessly, bringing me to his mouth, making the need to shift my hands essential if I’m going to stop myself from slipping under the water. I find the rim of the bath and grip as best I can, being gently guided into his realm of utter rapture – a place where the throes of passion are intense and where I fall deeper and deeper into the curious world of Miller Hart.
His light nips over my clitoris are difficult to deal with. The light dashes of his tongue that follow each one of those nips are torturous. But when he slowly slips two fingers inside me and thrusts lazily in time to his nips and tongue dashes, I lose any hope that there was of maintaining the silent serenity surrounding us.
I whimper and bow my back, the muscles of my arms that are holding me up instantly aching and my stomach muscles tensing in an attempt to control the sharp twinges sparking in my groin. My mounting desperation only encourages him, his thrusting fingers upholding his desired pace, but the strokes becoming firmer, more determined.
‘I don’t know how you do this to me,’ I mumble to my darkness, my head slowly shaking from side to side.