My Last Duchess, стр. 18
Time passed. Ophelia decided to stop bothering about what he was thinking. Peter never—no. More generally, she doubted thatmany men thought about poetry while they were in bed.
Hugo’s fingers were making their way down her sides, creeping across her stomach. But all the time his lips kept going fromone breast to the other until her legs were trembling. To her shock, her whole body was damp, her hair sticking to her brow.She couldn’t stop moving either, wiggling under his weight, trying to silently suggest that he direct his attention elsewhere.
“May I?” Hugo asked sometime later.
She raised her head and stared at him. His eyes gleamed at her, desirous. He didn’t look like a duke any longer.
But that was all the intelligent thought she could muster. She’d never appreciated her breasts before. No, that wasn’t true.She had been inordinately proud of them for producing milk on command when Viola had needed it.
But now?
This was different. Every time he tightened his lips around one of her nipples, heat connected to far-flung parts of her body,making her shiver.
“May you what?” she asked belatedly, hoping that he meant he would take that large . . . tool of his and do what God had designed it to do.
But no.
“Kiss you again,” he said, with such a sweet expression that her lips shaped a smile without conscious thought. In one smoothmovement, he moved up so his elbows were on either side of her ribs. They fell into a kiss. A different kiss than she’d everexperienced, because she had never, ever, felt a shivery excitement that tightened her chest and made her entangle her legswith his like a wanton.
Her hips couldn’t stop arching toward Hugo. His response was to kiss her more deeply, hovering over her, kissing her withthe same ferocious attentiveness that he gave her breasts. As if there wasn’t something better to get to.
Finally she had to ask.
She pulled back.
“Phee?” His voice rasped, and when she put her hand on his chest, it was not heaving . . . but his heart was pounding.
“Aren’t you wishful to go on to the rest?” She couldn’t think how else to phrase it.
“No.”
“Because I haven’t agreed to marry you?”
“Yes and no.” He started dotting kisses on her face. “I’m enamored. I’m metaphorically at your feet. I don’t want to muckthis up. I want to know everything about you. I could happily do nothing but kiss your breasts for hours.”
She couldn’t think what to say to that.
“Except I’d probably spend in your bedsheets,” he added, in the most matter-of-fact tone imaginable.
Ophelia shook her head. “I don’t think—”
“You’re not ready for this?”
“Is that terrible? I’m sorry.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m supposed to be a merry widow, and I was feeling . . .But this is just all so new.”
He brushed his lips over hers. “Absolutely fine. Deliciously fine. You allowed me to kiss your breasts. Bloody hell, the manwho wasn’t grateful for that would be dead. Why do you look so worried?”
“It’s like . . . It feels as if the maid has served tea but no biscuits,” she said, trying to explain.
“I don’t want biscuits,” Hugo said. He leaned toward her again, face intent, and kissed her precisely on the nose, on eacheye. “Tea, glorious tea, is every Englishman’s delight. I never touch biscuits. Wouldn’t, even if you begged me.”
A smile curved on Ophelia’s lips despite herself. “Not even if I begged you?”
“Never.” His expression took on the stoic heroism of a British officer facing a French battalion. “Tea is enough to sustainme forever.”
“Huh.” Ophelia’s mind slipped away again, into a memory of her marriage—but she pushed that away. No thinking of Peter here,in bed.
Instead she pushed herself up against the headboard. She was still quivering, aware of a disturbing throbbing sensation betweenher legs, sweat behind her knees, a fast heartbeat. Evidence that—
Hugo shifted and moved to sit beside her. His legs were very hairy, his skin a darker color than hers. Obeying impulse, sheleaned over and trailed her fingers over his knee and up his leg. She avoided the . . . avoided the private part of him, which was standing up in a very public fashion.
Her caress had an effect on it, and she heard a muffled sound in Hugo’s throat.
“Aren’t you going to put it to rest?” she asked, feeling her ears grow hot with embarrassment.
“To rest?” He turned, his face alive with pure delight. “Darling!”
“What?” she asked. “I’m sorry if I used the wrong terminology.”
“I rather like the idea that I have control over my privates.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not around you.”
Ophelia shook her head. The night was getting odder and odder, so odd that she could scarcely remember how it began. “I’mnot that sort of woman.”
“I do not think you are a loose woman, if that’s what you’re saying.”
“I mean that I’m not the sort of woman a man loses his head over.” She took a shuddering breath. “In fact, we should be honestwith each other.” She looked at him. “I don’t know why you’re in my bed, but it hasn’t much to do with me, has it?”
He looked at her, every inch of his expression conveying a stubborn belief that it did, in fact, have a great deal to do with her.
“I’m not the sort of woman who drives a man to desperation,” she said, trying again. “I’m short and fairly round.”
His eyes shifted to her breasts, and from the corner of her eye she saw his tool jerk forward, as if it was volunteering anopinion on her roundness.
“You seem not to mind that,” she added.
“I don’t.”
“Well, my point is that there are many roundish women in London.”
“They aren’t you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I’m getting to,” Hugo said. “I like everything I’ve found so far.” He grinned, just in case she missed the innuendo. “I seeyour point, though.”
“You do?” The news wasn’t entirely welcome.
“We need to get to