Free Not Quite A Duke (Dukes' Club Book 6) by Eva Devon Page B

snorted.
    “I can assist you with things that Mrs. Barton can’t,” he pointed out.
    “Oh?” She folded her arms across her bosom, book still in hand. “I doubt it. She’s very skilled.”
    “There are certain skills she doesn’t possess.”
    She turned up her head and challenged him. “Such as?”
    He paused. For a moment he was tempted to act the gentleman and escort her home, but it was that very temptation which suddenly had him yanking her into his arms.
    Her book dropped to the grass.
    She let out a small sound of surprise as he pulled her tightly to him. As he held her with one arm, he wove the fingers of his opposite hand into her elaborately coifed hair, tilted her head back then devoured her mouth.
    Oh God. The pleasure. The perfect pleasure of her lips beneath his drained away his years of jaded ennui. He loved kissing. He’d always loved kissing but he’d done enough of it that it had no longer transported him the way it had done when he’d been a youth.
    Lady Patience’s kiss stole away his reason and launched him into a sort of pleasure drunk ecstasy.
    He fed her soft kiss after soft kiss and though at first she was reserved, her limbs relaxed against him in slow degrees until, at last, she was grabbing fistfuls of his coat, pulling him towards her as if she wished they could intertwine like the oak and the ivy.
    This was bliss. Bloody hell. This was perfection.
    Unheeded by reason, which had fled him, he kissed her with such abandon that the next thing he knew, he was tracing his mouth along the ivory column of her throat, working to the swells of her barely-covered breasts.
    He kissed and nipped and savored every sweet sigh of hers as he then lowered a hand to cup her perfect bottom.
    Pulling upward, he cradled her hips against his hard cock.
    She let out an exclamation of surprise but not protest.
    If anything, she seemed as lost in madness as he. In fact, she pressed herself to him with even deeper intensity.
    ’Twas as if they’d both been starving for each other, having never even known what they were hungry for all these years.
    Which was absolutely ludicrous, of course.
    He didn’t believe in anything at first sight except lust. . . But this didn’t feel like simple lust.
    Kissing her felt like being enveloped by an inferno.
    An inferno that was as marvelous as it was terrifying.
    Terrifying? What the devil had made him think that?
    But yes. As he kissed her breasts then began pulling up her skirts, skimming her stockings with his fingertips, he knew he was terrified. But in the most magnificent way.
    He was terrified because he felt on completely unfamiliar ground with Lady Patience because she truly was unlike any woman he’d ever known and so he had no idea how to manage her.
    Stroking his fingers up her thigh, he traced the line of her silk garter. How tempting to pull the tie. Instead, he slid his fingers upward, wondering if she would allow him to slip his fingers between her thighs and discover if she was hot and wet for him.
    Would she allow it?
    Would oh so proper, terse Lady P permit such a thing?
    But then again, in this moment, she wasn’t simply Lady Patience. She was an entity entirely unknown to him. She was P. Auden, the maker of worlds, the knower of those who’d experienced the most sensual temptations and the worst of destructions. She was a creator and destroyer and adventurer all in one.
    And he wanted to brand her body with his.
    The feel of her beneath his hands filled him with a hunger so wild, so deep, he felt as if he were about to lose himself and that was why ever so slowly, he didn’t wait to see what she would allow.
    Retreat was the wisest action here. For if he traversed too far, he had a strong feeling that he would be flung forever from her lands.
    And quite frankly, he wanted to discover every hill and valley of her.
    It was jarring. Women had always been his domain, but not her.
    She was terra incognito and he felt like an explorer which might