“Perhaps you are not quite the infant I thought.” His voice was strangely husky. He inched his hand farther up her leg, creeping over her silk-encased calf. “No, indeed,” he drawled. “Definitely not the leg of a child.”
His hand slid higher. His fingers skimmed her garter where he toyed with the ribbon and traced her bare flesh above it. She closed her eyes and shivered, knowing a proper young lady would never allow such liberties, but his attention and his warm hand on her cool skin excited her beyond description.
With a smile, Marcus retrieved the now-empty bottle she clutched to her chest and tossed it to the ground. He guided her hands to the ropes suspending the swing and flipped her skirts above her knees to position his body snugly between her thighs. Lydia gasped at the boldness of the move. She tried to pull her legs back together but his body prevented her. Though she trembled, his heat warmed her to the core, pooling low in her belly and sending a flood of moisture to her secret place.
“Shall I stop, Lydia?” he asked as if reading her mind.
She responded with an unsteady shake of her head and a soft hiccup.
With a low guttural sound, he slid his hands completely under her skirt, gliding over her skin to blaze a hot trail toward the apex of her thighs. She gasped again when his fingers found and grazed her soft, downy mass.
Her breath seized but she failed to push him away. “Do you ever touch yourself here, Lydia?” he asked in a low, hoarse whisper.
The question made her insides convulse. “N-no,” she lied.
His voice coaxed, soothed. “Would you like me to touch you there now?”
She answered with a helpless whimper, clutching the ropes while his skillful fingers explored, traced, and teased in rhythmic strokes. She knew she should make him stop but the pleasure of his touch was dizzying. Her world spun further out of control when he found and began circling her small hidden nub, increasing the pressure until her body racked with little tremors and a muffled cry.
“You do like that,” he said. She bucked against him and set the swing back in motion. “Not so quickly, little one.” Marcus laughed and withdrew his hand. He grasped her waist to pull her down beside him and rolled on top of her with his arms anchored on either side of her head.
Lydia lay stunned beneath him, her body still coiled with desire. At the press of his erection against her belly, she came instinctively to life and undulated against him.
“God help me!” Marcus groaned. “I hadn’t planned this, but damn me if you haven’t given me a mind to finish what we started.”
“Wh-what do you mean?” she gasped. “We are not wed yet. I cannot lie with you!”
“I’m not asking you to, Lydia. There are other, less hazardous ways to give a man relief,” he spoke with long-suffering effort. “I have already shown how I can pleasure you with my hands, now I want you to do the same for me.”
“You wish me to stroke your…your privates?” she asked, wide-eyed in affright.
“Yes, Lydia” he answered in a tight voice. “I want you to fondle my aching…” He grasped her hand to demonstrate, bringing it to his crotch, but Lydia recoiled. She squirmed beneath him in an effort to retreat, which only seemed to annoy him. “Bloody hell!” he groaned. “It’s not got teeth! If you won’t touch me, at least allow me to rub against your body. I must have release!”
“Release?” She froze under him.
Marcus took a deep, calming breath. “You enjoyed the friction when you moved against me. I enjoy that too. I can use it to come to completion.”
“Completion? With our clothes on?” she asked, incredulous.
“Yes! With our bloody clothes on if that’s the only way to cease this infernal throbbing.”
“It’s painful?” she asked.
“Bugger the questions, Lydia! It’s just damnably uncomfortable.”
“But—”
“Enough!” Marcus groaned and stemmed her flow of questions with his mouth. Unlike his gentle hands, his kiss was hard and demanding, matching the urgent thrust and grind against her pubis that made her entire body thrum. Lydia soon met his rhythm, angling her hips to grind against that hidden place of exquisite sensation until her nubile, young body racked with the spasms of her climax. Marcus followed with a great, shuddering groan and collapsed atop her. They lay there in a stunned silence, punctuated only by their ragged breaths, until Marcus helped her back to her feet and escorted her wordlessly back to the house.
*
Lydia went to bed in a daze. It had been a night of many firsts—the upswept hair, the silk gown, the taste of champagne, but the most remarkable of all was her initiation to passion. Her hand swept her body and her lips curved at the remembrance of how Marcus had looked at her with desire in his eyes. The rapture she’d experienced under the swing had banished her virginal qualms, replacing them with eagerness for her wedding night with Marcus.
She closed her eyes with a sigh of contentment. The evening that had earlier portended such disaster had transformed into a rite of passage from girlish innocence to awakening womanhood.
Chapter One
Bloomsbury Square, London—1748