Odd.

“I think I like you here the best of all,” he whispered. His fingers were under her, shaping her bottom. The very bottom she had scampered up the ladder so that he couldn’t see. “It’s got the kind of curve that could make a man burst into tears, you know, Josie?”

“No,” she whispered.

He was kissing her neck. “Your thighs make a man want to sink into you, sip you, taste all the sweetness you’re hiding.”

“Oh,” Josie breathed. She had her hands in his rumpled dark hair, but his head slipped away and then he was there, tasting the sweetness, and the muddled pleasured joy of it spread through her body.

It wasn’t all that much later when she was shuddering, her dress around her waist, and she didn’t even care that the sunlight was there and he could see everything, not when his eyes were wild and dark, and telling her—

“If even one of those hundred women, Josie—”

It hurt a little bit, so she squirmed. But it hurt and felt good at the same time.

“What about the hundred women?” she said. “Not that you should be bringing up such insensitive subjects—Ouch!”

“Does that hurt?”

“No, I just enjoy pain—Bloody hell!”

He stopped, and a stricken look crossed his face. “It’s too soon. I’m an idiot. I’m so sorry, Josie, I—”

She stopped him before he started babbling. “Just stay there,” she ordered him. He froze. She wiggled a little, letting her body get used to the intrusion of him. “All right,” she said.

“All right what?”

“You can—” She waved her hand. “You know.”

He looked as if he were frozen in place.

“Come in a bit more,” she said ungraciously. “Isn’t there any language for this sort of thing?”

He choked on a laugh, and then slowly inched forward. Hair fell over his face and he looked so dear that she smiled and didn’t even notice that he was stealing forward again.

“Are you extraordinarily large?” she asked a second later.

He seemed to have trouble getting his voice, but then he said, “I don’t really know.”

“Well, all those women must have told you, although I do think that we should stop talking about them,” she observed.

“I was trying to tell you, Josie, that if even one of those women—not that there were a hundred, because there weren’t—but if even one of them had…” He gave a funny little sound in his throat. “Are you sure you want to do that?”

Josie arched her back again. “It feels good.”

He angled his hips in a different way.

“That,” she gasped, “feels better than good.”

So they enjoyed that for a bit, until they had a rhythm. It was almost like dancing, to Josie’s mind, except that she was terrible at dancing, and she seemed to be all right at this. In fact, she didn’t think that Mayne had any complaints. She was discovering all sorts of things about him that she liked. The two little hollows on the side of his hips, for example.

“I like your ass,” she told him, clutching him there.

He gave that choked kind of groan again and arched up, bracing himself on his arms so that he could look down at her. Josie knew her hair was all damp with sweat but she didn’t care. He’d ripped her gown so he could kiss her breasts, and so she arched up toward him in invitation. He laughed, and panted, and tasted her again, and then said: “Just what sort of a lady uses the word ass, Josephine?”

“Did you want to marry a lady?” she said, not caring about that because she could feel all her moorings to the earth starting to float away. Waves of delicious heat were rolling from her toes to her fingertips and she didn’t really care what he said as long as he kept thrusting into her in just that way.

Mayne looked down at her and forgot to answer the question. Because when Josie looked like that, all cream and roses, panting and sweaty and sweet, clutching his ass with both hands and wrapping herself around him, he didn’t want to marry a lady.

But he didn’t forget the other thing he had to tell her; he just waited until they had collapsed into a sweaty little heap. Then he pulled Josie on top of him so the straw wouldn’t give that gorgeous cream skin of hers a rash, and said it into her hair.

“If one of those hundred women had had your body, Josephine My Wife, I wouldn’t be married to you, and that’s the truth.”

“Huh?” She sounded startled, so he said it again.

“I wouldn’t have been able to leave her. I probably would have had a duel with her husband, and killed him, and then had to leave the country.”

“Well, I’m glad that didn’t happen,” she said, sounding skeptical. “You must be blind so I’m sure you would lose in a duel.”

He smiled into her hair. “You’re the blind one.” She smelled like a saucy woman, everything he’d ever dreamed of. Not that he’d had enough brains to dream about someone as intelligent as Josie.

“Just think. I might have ended up married to someone who really understood horse breeding,” she said.

“Vixen.”

“I’m not a vixen. I’m your honey-sweet wife.”

He snorted. “Must have got yourself mixed up with my other wife.”

Josie lay on top of him, face buried in his shoulder and thought about how sweet she was going to be to him. Just as soon as he stopped saying stupid things. “You don’t have any other wife,” she observed. “You’ve been too busy bounding from skirt to skirt like a jackrabbit looking for a carrot.”

He gave her a little pinch. “I think I was looking for a rabbit hole.”

The enjoyment in his voice cued her in. “That’s debauched!” she said. “I’m no rabbit hole for your pleasure.”

“Hmmmm,” he said, sounding a bit sleepy. “And I have a carrot for you…”

It was all so ridiculous that she couldn’t even bring herself to point out how debauched his language was, and that clearly he’d learned his odious jokes from all that hell-raking behavior. Instead she just stroked his hair because it sounded as if he might be going to sleep.

And she didn’t want to wake him.

39

From The Earl of Hellgate,

Chapter the Twenty-fifth

I saw her…and I wanted her. And yet she was everything I was not: clear and beautiful in soul and body, as chaste as the snow and as virtuous as an angel. Would she—could she—marry me? That was the challenge I set myself now. Not to soil an angel, but to marry her. To win her heart, win her hand, win her place next to mine.Ah, Dear Reader, what do you think of my chance of success?

One week later

Whitestone Manor, Surrey

J osie awoke and grinned at the ceiling of the matrimonial suite of Whitestone Manor. Otherwise known as the seat of the Earl of Mayne. And that of his countess.

As of this morning, Josie had officially kept the Earl of Mayne in her bed for seven nights. And seven days, if you counted what happened in the library yesterday. She moved her legs experimentally and winced a bit. Unfortunately, the pain persisted. Of course, it didn’t persist all that long.Every time Mayne…well, every time they began, she said ouch, and had to resist an impulse to push him off. But he was always slow and sweet in the beginning, and whispered apologies in her ear, and did other things with his hands. And before she knew it, her body would decide that she didn’t mind the invasion after all.