“Plunder…me.”
“Your person. I want to enjoy your intimate favors. This is not a real engagement, and when it ends, I will go back to being York’s most boringly dressed inquiry agent, while you…”
“While I?”
She passed him his cane. “While you resume the life of a duke’s genius heir, flirting with all the merry widows and straying wives, making fortunes in all the wrong industries, and hiding treasures where nobody will find them. A little trysting with me ought not to impose too much on your busy schedule until you can resume your usual diversions.”
He caught her hand when she would have stalked off across the room, for he appeared to regard her proposition with something less than enthusiasm.
Perhaps that was for the best.
“Abigail.” He kept hold of her hand. “Is this what you want? An illicit affair with a scapegrace lordling who can’t even manage to promenade around a ballroom with you?”
When did anybody, ever, ask Abigail what she wanted? “If you aren’t inclined, you need only say so, but your kisses have been convincing, and you tell me that honesty characterizes—”
He braced his cane across her bum, grasped an end in each hand, and pulled her closer. “I want you. I want you until I am insensate with longing, until you haunt my dreams and preoccupy my waking thoughts. I had to toss myself off in the damned coach on the way to fetch you. That came out wrong.”
“I know what you meant.” And the image of him, falls undone, cock rampant, all that velvet, leather, and lace luxury around him while he…“Shall we find a bed?”
Sexual congress did not require a bed, but Abigail would have few enough opportunities to be intimate with Stephen Wentworth. Some awkwardness was unavoidable. Nonetheless, she wanted their memories to be sweet, not of itchy carpet or a hard desk.
“We have a bed,” Stephen said, easing the pressure of the cane against her backside. “The sofa folds out, like the benches of a traveling coach, only more commodious.” He crossed to the sofa, bent down and released some sort of latch, then gave the bottom cushions a yank. The sofa flattened out into a sizable bed.
“Et voilà tout. Shall I undo your hooks, or will we go about this dressed?”
He probably knew eighteen different ways to copulate without removing a single stitch—the wretch.
“We have time. Why not dispense with some clothing?”
Stephen closed his eyes, hands braced on his cane. “Abigail, you are a woman after my own heart. Come here.”
She crossed her arms.
“Please, rather. Please come here that I might be your lady’s maid and finally, finally get my hands and lips and tongue on the luscious abundance of your breasts.”
He did more to arouse her with words than Champlain had done with his entire repertoire of loverly overtures. “Please suffices. You needn’t lapse into erotic flights.”
Stephen wiggled his fingers at her. “No second thoughts, Miss Abbott, and one doesn’t lapse into flights. One soars. More accurately, two will soar into flights and raptures.”
“Such humility about your amatory skills.” Abigail crossed the room and turned her back to him. She expected to feel deft fingers undoing her hooks, but nothing happened.
“My lord?”
“I am marshaling my self-control. If a stray bit of tinder were to land on my imagination right now, the Great Fire would be a mere glowing coal by comparison.”
Something was afoot with all this prolixity. Not shyness, exactly, but self-consciousness, perhaps?
“My hooks, Stephen, and my stays. Be about it, please, or we will have to go shopping when we could be cavorting instead.”
She barely felt his fingers brushing at her nape as he undid the back of her dress. Her stays loosened without any of the usual tugging.
“You have the hands of a safecracker,” she said, turning. “Allow me to reciprocate.” To stand around in loosened stays and an undone dress in the middle of the day was peculiar and naughty. Abigail liked the daring of it, and made a production out of removing Stephen’s cravat pin and sleeve buttons, then his watch and fob.
“Why do you wear silk cravats?” Most men preferred starched linen, though the silk was exquisite to the touch.
“Several frolicsome relationships ago, the other party had a taste for being bound when I used my mouth…” He tipped his chin up, as if consulting with the dragon on the ceiling. “She liked to have her hands tied during certain intimate acts. I could not countenance rope against a lady’s wrists, so I took to wearing silk cravats.”
Abigail drew the cravat from around his neck. “I see.”
“You don’t, but if the Deity is merciful to a man about to sin as boldly and joyously as he possibly can, you will soon.”
She unbuttoned his waistcoat and shirt, and pushed his coat from his shoulders. “I should take off your boots.”
A frisson of wariness flickered in his eyes. “We should take off our boots, unless you’d like to be rogered while you wear stockings and boots.”
Abigail considered it. “Not this time.” She pulled the draperies closed on both windows, then shimmied out of her dress and laid it across the desk. Next, she sat on the sofa and unlaced her boots. All the while, Stephen merely watched her, and she ignored the bulge displacing the line of his falls.
“What?” she asked.
“You, sashaying around my study in your shift, boots, and stockings. You are very bold.”
She bent to unlace her boots. “And you are shy.”
He shrugged out of his waistcoat and pulled his shirt over his head. “Me, shy? My family would be overcome with hilarity to hear that description.”
Abigail set her boots aside, undid her garters, and rolled down her stockings. “I want to kiss you, want to shove you to your back and run my hands all over you, but if I stop for that now, I will never get you out of those breeches.” She rose from the sofa and held out her hand. “Boots, Stephen.”
He sat and held out his bad leg to her first, then the other one. “When we go shopping, I will buy you some chemises that do more to inspire a man’s imagination. Every trousseau needs a few dainty negligees and wedding night—”
Abigail straddled his lap and kissed him into silence. They would never have a wedding night, but they could have a consummation. When she sensed hesitance in Stephen’s kisses—not delicacy, but a hesitance—she desisted.
“Abigail?”
“I’m marshaling my self-control, and you are being a goose, my lord.”
“More of a gander, actually.”
“Ganders don’t care what their knees look like,” she said, standing, “and I don’t care what your knee looks like.”
He peered around at his study, which now resembled a theater dressing room. Abigail’s stockings were draped over the back of the reading chair, her dress adorned the desk. Stephen’s waistcoat and shirt were half falling off the bookshelf, and his coat graced the reading table.
“The knee is ugly,” he said. “I’ve tried ignoring it, but then the lady eventually catches sight of the scars, and she’s horrified, so I’ve tried keeping my breeches on, and that limits the opportunities. There’s always waiting for dark and moonless nights, but—I hate this.”