“Lean on me, Susannah. Let me be your support.”
Will’s hand moved higher, stroking, petting, teasing, until Susannah could not have remained upright without resting against him. Nobody had touched her this way, nobody had called forth this longing and frustration.
She should stop him, but what danced across her mind was the realization that while she’d wanted Edward Nash to just get it over with, she wanted Will to caress her without ceasing. Susannah had mentally declaimed tragic soliloquies rather than attend Edward’s furtive liberties. In this stolen moment with Will, all of Susannah’s attention was focused on what Will would do next, as if time itself waited for Willow Dorning’s command.
His touch became intimate as he glossed a fingertip over a slick bud of flesh and sent sensation skittering across Susannah’s nerves.
“Breathe, Susannah. Don’t push the pleasure away, let it come to you.”
Had Susannah been able to speak, she would have told Will the feelings were not pleasurable. The physical experience he conjured was shocking, intense, and unsettling.
And yet Will was all around Susannah, solidly at her back, his arousal obvious where she pressed against him. Susannah could bear the welling desire because Will was with her, in every sense. She could explore the growing tide of need, and as he’d bid her, let it come to her.
The lilt of the violins from the ballroom receded to the periphery of Susannah’s awareness, the voices murmuring around the corner faded as Will’s touch became diabolically delicate and…relentless.
Moment followed moment, and Susannah had all she could do to breathe and to remain silent, and then pleasure was upon her, consuming her from the center out.
“Willow—”
He bent his head to cover her mouth with his own, while his fingers kept up a rhythmic torment that sent white heat exploding behind Susannah’s eyes. For an eternity, she hung suspended between “too much” and “God help me,” while Will cradled her against his length.
Eons of pleasure later, Susannah’s skirts brushed down over her knees, and she was left panting against the wall, Will at her back, his arm around her waist. He turned her in his embrace and held her loosely.
Every part of Susannah was renewed and exposed. The soft night air caressed her cheeks, the shadows flickering from the sconces danced across her vision. Will’s heart beat against hers like a timpani of sheer life force that echoed between her very legs, and inside…
Inside she was poetry, ancient wrath, orchestral crescendos, and every rose ever to bloom unseen under a waning summer moon.
“Hold me,” Susannah whispered, leaning her entire weight against Will.
His embrace became more snug, while Susannah’s grip on him remained desperate. His hand smoothed along her back, bringing peace and sanity. Susannah’s lover was in no hurry to leave her, he was not ashamed of what they’d shared.
And neither, by God, was she.
*
Jonathan Landsdowne Farnsworth Verulam Tresham slouched against a pillar in the ballroom and allowed every iota of his antipathy for the assemblage to show in his gaze. He was in London contrary to his will, he was in evening finery contrary to his will, he was in this very ballroom contrary to his will, and contrary to his better judgment too.
The author of that last misfortune went dancing by in the arms of Viscount Effington, her smile ferociously bright. If Lady Della Haddonfield had seen Tresham, she did an excellent job of hiding her reaction.
Tresham suspected subterfuge was central to her ladyship’s nature, though to be fair, she’d begun her blackmail attempts by writing to him discreetly, her note addressed as if from some fellow in Surrey.
Near the next pillar, the Earl of Casriel was commiserating with a kilted Scotsman about the price of wool and the necessity of taking a bride, and Tresham’s mood went from surly to vile.
Earls might consider taking a bride, but a ducal heir committed an offense against God and nature when he reached the age of twenty-eight without marrying. Quimbey had made that increasingly apparent, though His Grace couldn’t threaten Tresham with a tightening of the purse strings—Tresham’s own purse was quite ample, no thanks to his immediate progenitor.
So instead, Quimbey—dear avuncular, mild-tempered Quimbey—wielded that most brutal of familial weapons, guilt.
An ironic coincidence, that Tresham’s only living relative and young Lady Della should both attempt to coerce him, the duke with the leverage of a close family member and the lady with…
Tresham wasn’t entirely sure what Lady Della had up her sleeve. Though she and Quimbey had nothing in common, she yet reminded Tresham of the duke, for nothing would stop His Grace when he’d fixed on a goal.