How to Catch a Duke by Grace Burrowes (most inspirational books .TXT) 📗

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.”

“You hate being imperfect.” Abigail knelt and started on the buttons of his falls. “I’m none too keen on some of my shortcomings either. My breasts are different sizes. I never noticed, until Champlain kindly pointed it out to me.”

“He pointed it out to you?”

She finished with his falls. “He made something of a study of the matter, and even wanted to measure…It’s all ridiculous. Do men go around measuring their cocks?”

“Some of us, figuratively if not literally. Promise me you won’t run shrieking for the carriage?”

Abigail wrapped her arms around him and pressed her cheek to his bare chest. “I won’t run shrieking to the carriage.”

“There’s something else. About my canes.”

She swiped her tongue across his nipple. “Hmm.”

“I can’t…you know…unless my cane is within my reach. That feels lovely.”

She teased him for a moment, long enough to get herself stirred up—more stirred up—then she sat back. “I will take off my chemise when you remove your breeches.”

“Dear God, Abigail, that’s rather…Oh, very well. You first.”

He’d risen to her challenge, but she had expected no less of him. Taking off her chemise was harder than she’d thought, though. Perhaps one lost the habit of physical intimacy, or perhaps one learned the price of folly. Abigail remained kneeling before Stephen and drew the shift over her head.

“The right one is larger,” she said, looking down at her bare breasts.

“Nonsense. They are both perfect.”

If Stephen’s expression was any indication, they were. “Champlain was an idiot,” Abigail said. “Thank you for illuminating that fact. Your breeches, Stephen. Now.”

He stood, put a hand on her shoulder, and used her for balance as he stepped out of his breeches and kicked them onto the reading chair.

When she’d risen to stand next to him beside the sofa, he took her hand and bowed. “Miss Abigail Abbott, may I make known to you Lord Stephen Wentworth, in all his abundant natural glory, and more than a bit aroused. Will you please come to bed with me?”

She wrapped her hand around his shaft, which was arrowed straight up along the midline of his taut, muscled belly. “Yes. Yes, absolutely, I will come to bed with you.”

“Don’t you want to inspect my knee?”

“No. Stephen, I do not want to inspect your perishing knee.”

He pulled her close and fell with her straight back onto the sofa.

Stephen did not normally make a fuss about taking off his clothes. He was usually too eager to get to the part about mutual pleasure and bone-deep satisfaction. Abigail Abbott, however, had ambushed him.

He hadn’t been able to manufacture subdued lighting, a big bed that sat low enough that no steps were needed to climb into it, a perch for his canes, and other accommodations that freed him to focus on frolicking. Instead he was sprawled on the pulled-out sofa in a room full of ledgers and correspondence, sunlight finding its way through the cracks in the curtains.

Abigail crouched over him, her breasts a soft wonderment against his chest. “There’s a name for this,” she said, nuzzling his neck. “When the female is atop the male. I forget what it is.”

“You will forget the day of the week, if I acquit myself properly. The term for it is happiness, at least for the male. I want to be inside you.”

Oh, that was gracelessness incarnate, that was.

She nipped his ear. “One did get the impression you were interested in making my intimate acquaintance. Guess what I want?”

To have me inside you. “To have the size of your breasts compared by