Free Andrew: Lord of Despair by Grace Burrowes Page A

sweetheart. You can’t lie about all day when your lover needs attention.” Astrid sat up and shot him a confused glance. He smiled back at her, looked pointedly at the damp cloth, and then at his own wet, softening member. “Don’t tell me you’re horrified at the very sight of the goods.”
    “The goods,” she said. “Yes, well…” Horrified, she was not. “The goods,” she repeated, running one finger gently over his length. She was horrified to think of two years of marriage wasted on the wrong man. What had she been thinking?
    She was fascinated and appallingly grateful Andrew could be this way with her: sensual, frank, relaxed, and arousing as perdition. She indulged her curiosity, slipping his foreskin over his glans, combing her fingers through the down at the base of his shaft, and shaping him in her fingers. To her consternation, her touch was effecting changes .
    “Andrew?” she asked, holding his growing erection straight up from his body, as if to show it to him.
    “Astrid?” he replied from behind closed eyes.
    “Whatever are you about?” She gave his erection a wiggle to emphasize her point.
    “I am enjoying your touch, sweetheart, and thinking of swiving you again, though I shouldn’t, God knows.” His tone held regret, almost bitterness, which Astrid registered through a haze of curiosity.
    “You mean you can swive more than once?” she asked, sleeving his length with the circle of her thumb and forefinger. Had she uttered the word “swive” to her late husband, the poor man would likely have swooned with shock.
    “ We can,” he said, looking like some Roman faun on a midsummer’s afternoon, “when you arouse me so, but only if you’re willing.”
    “Why on earth would I not be willing?”
    “Because what we are doing, Astrid, is wrong,” he said with something approaching anger. “It isn’t wrong for you to want to be pleasured, appreciated, and cherished; it is wrong for me to be the one to afford you those things, though I have to admit, I’ve never enjoyed sinning more.”
    How could he sermonize and incite her to argument like this? When they were naked? When she was touching him?
    “I do not sin with you, Andrew. I understand you feel pity for me, or perhaps compassion, nothing more. I am grateful to you, and a woman grown. And”—she let go of him, when what she wanted was to wrap her fingers around him more tightly—“I believe—I have always believed—we are friends. Friends are kind to one another.”
    “We are friends,” he agreed, sitting up and looping his arms around his drawn-up knees. “But before we go back to that house, Astrid, we need to reach some kind of understanding regarding this… lapse of propriety. You, my dearest goose, refuse to see me for the scoundrel and blackguard I am.”
    Why must he carp on this? “You are neither, Andrew. You are a kind, honest, if somewhat troubled man.”
    And you do not want me to love you. You hardly allow anybody to love you. The irony, that she’d married a man who’d also been uncomfortable with certain varieties of demonstrative emotion, was not lost on her. Was she doomed to choose only troubled men?
    “You,” Andrew said, brushing a finger down her nose, “would canonize Beelzebub.”
    Astrid pushed him onto his back and swung her leg over to straddle him.
    “I would marry him, Andrew,” she said, glaring down at him, “if he made me feel the way you do.”
    These were the wrong words to say, though she didn’t know why. Such bleakness passed through Andrew’s blue eyes that she curled down onto his chest to hide her face.
    “I won’t be marrying you, Astrid,” he said, his hands slipping around her back in slow sweeps down her spine. “If you weren’t expecting, I wouldn’t risk what we’ve done so far. You know this?”
    “I do now, you awful man.” Though in fact, she appreciated he was gentleman enough to spare her the fate that had befallen Cousin Gwen. “And I most