“Are you experiencing a death?” she asked, playing with the oozing head of him.
“You mustn’t,” he gasped. “I’ll spend and make a mess of you. I’ve wanted you too long.”
“I want to make you come, Julian. So I can think about it later. When I’m distressed.”
What he wanted to suggest was the essence of pure dastardliness. He whispered it anyway. “Perhaps if you knelt down and used your mouth.”
He deserved a slap for that, but instead she gave him a very wicked smile.
The one she saved for when she was at her most provocative. God, he’d missed that smile.
She sank to her knees and looked up at him beneath her lashes, smiling. Her lips traced tentatively against the head of his cock, her tongue alighting at the very tip.
“You taste like salt,” she whispered.
Christ.
“Tell me what to do,” she murmured. “Hurry.” She took him in her lips.
Outside, the crowd gasped in time with the swishing of the ropes. The dancers were building up to the climax of their performance.
“Yes, like that, take me in. Suck … Gently, just your tongue, no teeth.”
The world grew dark and contained to their joined flesh. He let his fingertips fall into her hair.
“That’s it. A bit deeper. Christ, Constance.”
He thrust as gently as he could stand to as she laved the underside of his erection with her tongue, his need swelling in his bollocks, the shouting of the crowd just beyond them making the whole thing so wrong and so essential.
“Do you like it, doing this where we could be seen?” he asked raggedly. He could barely get the words out, but he had to ask, had to know.
In answer, she only whimpered and gasped out “Yes.” If he let her keep going, he would spend in her mouth. He bit his knuckle to keep from shouting.
“Christ,” he said. “That’s enough. Sweet girl, stop, I’m close to death.”
But she didn’t stop. She glanced up at him, not breaking their connection. And then she gripped him more firmly and sucked long and hard, pressing his hip against her temple.
He pulled out and narrowly managed to spill into his shirttails, burying his face in his arm to keep from bellowing with the pleasure of it.
He sank down to his knees in shaky gratitude and drew her against him and wiped her lips with the cuff of his shirt. She was warm and pliant, panting just a bit.
“You’re a very naughty man, Lord Bore,” she whispered, smiling up at him. “It’s really rather shocking.”
Outside the crowd gasped. The performance must be nearing its end. They needed to right themselves while they still had time. But instead he heard himself saying, “You have no idea. Open your legs.”
He expected her to protest, but instead she laughed a laugh that contained a hundred filthy secrets. “They’re nearly done. Quickly.”
He reached under her skirts until he found what he wanted. She was wet—dripping wet. He kissed her voraciously as his fingers found the pert flesh at the juncture of her thighs and worked at it indecently. He knew she was close. He knew that the danger, the crowd, the champagne, were having the same effect on her they’d had on him. Her pussy throbbed beneath his fingers. “Fuck, what I would give to sink my cock inside you.”
At his words, she began to come undone. He felt her go still and tense with it. He did not relent, and as her orgasm hit her, she cried out into his mouth, collapsing against him on her knees. As she did it, he lost his balance, his knee slamming against the hard marble floor. He wobbled, sending her arm flailing out to catch the curtain.
He realized it was happening precisely too late to stop it. As she clutched the curtain, the whole thing began to topple down around them.
Her low orgasmic cry rapidly became a shrill, full-bodied one as yards and yards of linen came collapsing down around them, sending them reeling back onto the ground in a pile.
The noise of the crowd went hushed.
He scrambled to free them from the curtains until he could see.
The startled acrobats, just ending their routine, were careening toward them on ropes, their expressions puzzled.
A tiny, dark-skinned woman in pantaloons landed just next to the balustrade.
She raised her arm, and presented the tumbled sight of them to the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Westmead’s voice boomed dryly. “May I present the Earl of Apthorp and his future countess.”
He stared out at a sea of aghast faces, and he was glad.
Because some things were so shocking you could never, ever recover from them.
Some things were simply irreparable.
It was selfish and inexcusable and wrong, but he didn’t want to let her go.
And now … he wouldn’t have to.
Underneath the pile of drapes and the mess of her skirts, Constance felt Julian’s hands quickly working to discreetly return their garments to rights before the marveling crowd could see that they were not only jumbled in each other’s limbs, but also in a state of complete indecency.
The furious chatter from downstairs made it clear the guests were already eagerly speculating about what the two of them had been doing alone behind the curtain to cause it to collapse with them entangled in each other’s arms.
She did the only thing she could think to do to stop the speculation. She gave them something to watch.
She leaned forward and put her lips to Julian’s cheek.
The crowd roared its approval.
She plastered the biggest smile she could muster on her face, untangled her gown from the drapery, rose, and curtsied to the crowd.
“Bow,” she whispered to Julian through her smile.
He did.
The crowd roared louder.
“Say something,” she hissed.
“Ladies and gentlemen, my future bride,” he said. “Isn’t she stunning?”
Cheers.
She stood in a daze, her body still murmuring with the aftershocks of what they’d done, and accepted this surge of approval as the orchestra cued the first strains of the minuet. Apthorp took her hand and, with another flourishing wink at the crowd, led her down the stairs and through the parted throng to the dance floor, smiling as though nothing in the world was wrong.
As the orchestra surged around them, and the room filled with the ethereal rain of flower petals falling down from the ceiling like shooting stars, he bowed and whispered in her ear: “Marry me.”
He said it in a low, rough voice. But when she looked at his face, he was beaming at her.
Her heart leapt.
Still, it wouldn’t do to force him into something he’d regret simply because a curtain had fallen down. “We don’t have to,” she said quickly when their hands next met. “Nothing has changed.”
“Everything has changed.”
“I don’t want to force you to do something you don’t want to.”
“Good. Because I’ve been in love with you for eight years, and there’s nothing I want more.”
She stopped dancing.
“Julian, is that really true?”
He smoothed a lock of hair that had fallen into her eyes.
“Yes,” he said tenderly. “I told you.”
“I thought you were pretending because you felt guilty.”
“I know, sweet girl. I didn’t want to pressure you to do something you didn’t want to. But it’s true. I’ve always wanted you. The night I asked you about proposal gifts … I asked because I wanted to buy one for you when the bill passed.”