Free The Pearl at the Gate by Anya Delvay

Chapter One
    Roake Barbenoir looked at his wife over the breakfast table and watched the rain-filtered sunlight play across Jenesta’s profile. Objectively, he could state she was not beautiful. In height, she was average. Her features were regular. Dark brown hair waved back from a forehead some perhaps would consider too prominent. With a soft, rounded face, unremarkable nose, and brown eyes to match her hair, nothing set her out of the ordinary.
    Yet Roake could not force himself to look away.
    The light cast caressing fingers over her skin, slipping along her cheek and down her neck to make Jenesta’s flesh glow.
    Roake wanted to follow the sunbeam’s path using his fingers, teeth and tongue. Strip away her modest clothing and allow the light to reveal every inch of her to his rapacious gaze, ravenous mouth and cock. The scent of her cunt seemed to swirl in his head, a memory from the night before. Fingers tingling with the phantom sensation of her sweet moist flesh, Roake drew in a silent shallow breath, and then another, trying to control the frenzy of desire she aroused by simply being.
    Jenesta took a sip of coffee and carefully replaced the cup in its saucer. Roake followed the action, watching her graceful hand manipulate the fine china.
    There was nothing wasted in the movement. Jenesta was calm, good-humoured and capable. In fact, prior to their marriage, she had been considered a fine example of Regency maidenhood.
    He wanted to feel her hands on his body, surety of movement lost to passion, fingers clutching and stroking, calm shattered in the face of his lust. In his fevered imaginings, she screamed his name, begged and pleaded, caught in that place where pleasure hung torturously just out of reach. In his wicked mind, she writhed, suspended between wanting him to stop and never wanting him to stop, moaning as she waited to see which he’d choose.
    After years at sea, Roake was more familiar with bordellos than with ballrooms, but he knew to leave the sexual knowledge gleaned on his travels outside her bedroom door. So he came to her in the dark, touched her as gently as he could, kept their encounters brief. Her acceptance, the warm regard with which she treated him, meant more than any treasure he had ever earned. If he were to frighten Jenesta, or give her reason to despise him, life would not be worth living.
    If she knew of the dreams haunting him since they met, she would be terrified.
    Again he swore to protect her from that knowledge. Protect her from him.
    As the rain lessened, the clouds grew thinner and the quality of the light in the room improved. Jenesta looked up at the window, her face alight with the soft sheen of a flawless pearl.
    How appropriate.
    In some parts of the East, the pearl was revered as a symbol of purity, in others it represented perfection.
    It had taken him one meeting to know he wanted her and six months to manipulate her father into a position where his suit could not be refused. Roake Barbenoir may have the stench of trade about him, but he was also exceedingly rich, and Viscount de Lindsay had five daughters to find matches for. Jenesta had all the characteristics Roake prized in a wife and mother. Confident but not bold, amusing but not silly, innocent and yet not so young that she had to be entertained like a child.
    What was it in him that would have him destroy the very characteristics that first attracted him to Jenesta? Why did she bring out this almost demonic lust in him?
    Roake looked away and forced his hands to cut a bite of herring, even though his stomach rolled at the thought of eating it.
     
    “Will you still be traveling to Bournemouth today?”
    Jenesta watched her husband put his cutlery on his plate and wipe his mouth before he replied. “Yes. I’ll be gone for three or four days.”
    “May I perhaps come with you? It would be a good time to look at fabric for the morning room.”
    Roake shook his head. “Not this time. With this rain, the roads