Such words had the strangest effect on her. Her legs already spread inexorably wide, she tilted her pelvis in offering. When he, ever so slowly, popped his thick crown past the tight mouth of her slit, her eyes rolled back in her head and she moaned so loudly he had to capture her lips to swallow the noise.
The stretch of him was always almost too much for her. He could be rough, she knew he wanted to be, but Gregory tempered his ferocity to roll his hips with an almost calculating sensuality that peeled her flesh from her bones. He coaxed from her all the gentle words he wanted, relished her hands dancing over his body, Arabella caressing the muscles corded in their work to please her.
When she was just at the cusp of perfection, he demanded words, his voice breathy as he thrust. “Tell me you are mine.”
Not even aware she was speaking, Arabella admitted her ruin, sliding her arms tighter around the source of her encroaching oblivion. “Yours.”
Her actions made him frantic and what would have been a gentle climax was stirred up by his sudden passion. Snapping his hips, trying to climb inside her, he plunged recklessly into her body, his tongue mimicking the movement of his cock in her mouth. He pounded so ferociously that the air grew vulgar with the sounds of wet slapping flesh. Caught up in him, the world went white, and Arabella felt a storm centralize in her belly, tightening until it blasted from her spine to burn each limb. Even lost in that perfection she gripped the flesh of his rear, pulling him deeper, greedy to hear him moan at her ear in time with the hot spurts of his cock.
When at last he could manage speech, Gregory kissed her deeply, panting, “Do not doubt me...”
“Will you stay the night? I do not sleep when you are away.”
He hushed her, nuzzled her cheek, and held her closer. “Did you think I would leave?”
“When it comes to you, Gregory,” Arabella found herself on the verge of tears again, “I never know what to think.”
Chapter 16
B efore the sun had fully risen outside Stonewall Grove, Mr. Harrow was gone for London, Arabella having tied his cravat herself. Her mouth still swollen from the way Gregory liked to nip, she’d frowned, pretending she felt no loss in his absence. An hour later, Magdala tended the baroness as if the woman had not seen the state of the bed, dressing her modestly to cover marks left by rough teeth and eager lips.
“Am I a fool, Magdala?”
Thin fingers stopped in their work. “You are a widow... it is not uncommon for ladies in your situation to take a lover.”
There was no point in avoiding the obvious. “One who openly courts my friends’ sister before slipping into my room?”
Eyes edged by paper-thin wrinkles met hers, Magdala honest. “It was foolish to allow it here. Should you have been caught...”
“How long have you known?”
The housekeeper went back to tugging Arabella’s gown into place. “Mr. Harrow’s regard for you was obvious from the start. And he makes no secret of what he leaves behind on your sheets.”
Cheeks blooming red, Arabella looked to the bed, not having considered the servants might wonder at the dried remnants of a man’s pleasure. He had plundered her repeatedly in the dark, and again before the sun broke, having left plenty of traces for Stonewall Grove’s staff to snicker over. “They will think it was Edmund...”
Magdala eased her lady immediately. “They will think nothing, because I will remove the sheet and say you bled upon it. It will go straight to the laundry and I will watch it soak.”
Relieved Magdala was far cleverer than she, Arabella took her hand. “And now I must wonder if he did such a thing on purpose. I am never sure of him when he says one thing and does another.”
The older woman disengaged from Arabella’s touch, shamefaced. “When you were ill, twice I caught him in your room while you slept. I could hardly keep him from your chamber, or spirit him away from the doctor’s sight. The only currency I had to bribe him with was conversation. He asked a great many questions.”
Livid, looking at the woman as if she’d never known her, Arabella hissed, “And what did you tell him?”
“Why I came to serve you...”
The baroness looked at her as if Magdala had ripped out her heart. “What does that mean?”
Magdala was not an affectionate woman, even so, she tried to pat her lady’s shoulder as if to offer comfort. “I was lady’s maid to Iliffe’s mistress, Miss Bethany Sawyer. One morning, I came to wake her and found a sight I wish I could unsee. I ran from the house, from the blood. Months later, Solicitor Griggs found me working as a kitchen maid in a public house. He told me what his brother, the doctor who attended Benjamin Iliffe after Mamioro trampled him, had found in the walls of the Baron’s estate. He told me he’d discovered you. I had never much cared for Miss Sawyer, she could be cruel and deceitful, as much as you are stubborn and skittish, but the guilt I bore for leaving her corpse and saying nothing...” Magdala swallowed, shaken by memory. “Mr. Griggs claimed you would need a woman’s support.”
Tears marked Arabella’s cheeks, the baroness equally horrified to see the same on her stoic attendant’s face. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were a wild thing when I arrived. You ran from anyone but Payne. You needed care, I needed absolution. I have been dedicated to you since the first day I saw you huddled in the corner, nothing but bones.”
* * *
Perfunctory, that well described Solicitor Griggs’ arrival to Crescent Barrows on the heels of sensational news. The Marquise of Glauster had indeed been murdered.
Standing tall and rail thin, the man urged, “We cannot pretend this is not a boon. You must go back to London, and you must do it now, my lady.”