Wanton (Regency Scandal 1) Read online

  He carefully removed his fingers, taking a moment to enjoy the sight of that now gaping and ready hole. “Turn over,” he encouraged gruffly.

  She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Why?”

  “I want us to be facing each other when I enter you there.” His cock throbbed and the bottom of his spine tingled at the thought of gazing into Diana’s eyes when he entered that now-slick heat.

  Her eyes widened. “I really would rather not—”

  “It was not a request,” he said, not unkindly but with a firmness which brooked no further argument.

  Diana turned slowly, golden hair tousled, eyes glittering a deep blue, her cheeks flushed, lips full and swollen. Her nipples were hard and tempting, her curves slender and enticing. The golden curls covering her mound were damp from the release of her juices. She watched him as she allowed her slender legs to part, revealing the red and swollen lips of her pussy.

  Xavier knelt between those parted legs and watched her through narrowed lids as her pupils dilated until there was only a ring of blue around the edges. They darkened even more as he scooped up more of the salve and stroked it along the length of his cock.

  He straightened once he was satisfied his rod was thoroughly slicked with the salve. “Are you ready for me?”

  Her smile was slightly nervous. “I believe so, yes.”

  Xavier studied her searchingly. “We do not have to—”

  “Will you please just do it!” she demanded shakily.

  His mouth firmed. “You are once again using that unladylike tone—”

  “Unladylike?” she repeated in a scornful voice as she moved up onto her knees in front of him. “I believe I ceased being that the moment I asked you for this.”

  “You have never looked more beautiful to me,” he assured huskily.

  His words gave Diana the courage to take matters into her own hands.

  Or, more aptly, Xavier’s cock into her body.

  Chapter Ten

  Diana held Xavier’s gaze as she moved forward until she was able to grasp his shoulders to aid her as she straddled her legs across his thighs, his cock sliding between her arse cheeks. She continued to hold his gaze as she lifted up onto her knees before reaching behind her to curl her fingers about his cock and guide it past the relaxed and slick entrance.

  She drew in a sharp breath at the initial intrusion. “You are so big.”

  Xavier’s hands encircled her waist. “Too big?”

  “No.” Diana closed her eyes as she slowly and surely lowered herself down onto that throbbing length, an inch at a time, aware of his pleasurable groans but not stopping until Xavier’s cock was fully inside her. “God…” Her thighs trembled at the feeling of fullness.

  “You are so hot and tight,” Xavier muttered shakily. “I have never experienced anything like it before.”

  A feeling much like pride swelled in Diana’s chest at being able to share this with Xavier. It also gave her the courage to use her knees as leverage as she slowly lifted up and then slid down again. The pressure inside her eased when each lift up and then down stretched her wider still, so that within minutes, she was able to glide up and down that rigid cock with ease.

  Xavier’s hands moved to her hips to support her as she maintained the rhythm that gave them both the most pleasure. Diana had never felt anything like this before. It was a combination of sensual and naughty that only added to the intensity of passion.

  Xavier’s fingers dug into her flesh, and he gave a low growl. “I want to watch my cock moving in and out you.”

  It took Diana several seconds to pull herself back from the pleasurable haze she had been lost in. She felt her face heat once she realized what he had said.

  “I need to see it!” Xavier continued to look at Diana as he released her fingers from their hold on his shoulders and then slowly lowered her until she was lying on her back with her bottom resting on his thighs. “My God…” His fingers gently touched where the length of his cock disappeared inside her arse. The skin was stretched about his swollen flesh, telling him Diana was going to feel him there tomorrow too. A fact that filled him with a perverse pleasure.

  “Xavier, please.” Her plea was a cross between need and embarrassment.

  He continued to touch her intimately as he glanced at her. “You are all mine now, Diana.” He didn’t care if he sounded like an uneducated barbarian. “Every inch of you now belongs to me,” he stated with satisfaction.

  “But—”

  “There are no buts, Diana.” He leaned forward to loom over her. “These are mine.” He grasped the globes of her breasts. “This is mine.” One of his hands cupped her mound. “And this,” he smiled as he caressed the sensitive skin surrounding his cock, “this is now also mine,” he stated with satisfaction.

  Diana had no time nor any inclination to say more, as Xavier grasped hold of her hips and began to thrust his cock inside her in a fierce and relentless rhythm.

  Within seconds, Diana reached a climax, followed quickly by another, the contracting of her inner muscles seeming to drive Xavier over the edge too as, seconds later, she felt the hot spurts of his cum deep inside her and knew that Xavier had ruined her for all other men.

  “What do you mean Her Ladyship is not at home?”

  Diana’s butler winced at Xavier’s obvious displeasure. “It is exactly as I said, Your Grace, Her Ladyship left the house in her carriage shortly after lunch, and she has not yet returned.”

  Xavier’s eyes narrowed. “Did Lady Diana say where she was going?”

  “She did not, Your Grace.”

  Xavier bit back his frustration with the butler’s reply and instead turned on his booted heel to return to his own carriage.

  His displeasure had begun when he woke at five o’clock this morning to discover Diana had already dressed and left the house. It was their usual practice to wake together, make love, and then spend several minutes more lying in bed as they made arrangements for him to call upon her later in the day.

  They might not have done that this morning, but, even so, Xavier had assumed Diana knew he would call upon her this afternoon as it was what he had done every other afternoon during their relationship.

  Instead, she had left the house before he arrived.

  Deliberately so, as a way of avoiding seeing him?

  If so, why?

  Was Diana, in retrospect, disgusted with what had transpired between the two of them last night? To the degree she was now avoiding him?

  If that was the case, then no matter how much he had enjoyed it, he would not hesitate to promise her he would not ask for that level of intimacy again, knowing it disturbed or made her unhappy.

  But first he had to find Diana to be able to give her that reassurance.

  “Walker House,” Xavier instructed his driver as he climbed into the back of his carriage. There might be others, but Tabitha Walker was the only friend Xavier knew of who had remained true to Diana after the scandal.

  Lady Tabitha gladly received him and lost no time in informing him she had not seen Diana today, although she had offered one suggestion as to where her friend might have gone.

  It was a beautiful spring day as Xavier strolled down the gravel pathway. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. The birds singing in the treetops the only sound to break the silence.

  Until Xavier heard the soft murmuring of a female voice he recognized as belonging to Diana.

  He came to a halt the moment he saw her seated on the ground beside a grave inside a fenced family plot which had what looked to be a relatively new headstone upon it. The carving on the headstone confirmed it: Lord Jeremy Edgar David Wilton, died June 1815.

  Diana’s brother.

  Xavier had not known the younger man well, but he knew him as a friend of his brother, Raphael, and that he had died a hero’s death at the Battle of Waterloo.

  Tabitha Walker had informed him earlier that Diana regularly visited the graves of both her husband and brother.

/>   “It was exceedingly silly of me, darling Jeremy,” Diana now murmured ruefully. “So silly that if you were here with me now, you and Raphael would both laugh and laugh.”

  Xavier’s interest sharpened at mention of his deceased brother. Although he had more of an understanding as to why and how Raphael had died in Diana’s bed. His own orgasms with her were often so intense, he felt as if his own heart might cease and never resume beating.

  “I can hear the two of you laughing together now at my expense,” Diana continued self-derisively. “In my defense, I can only say that I tried my damnedest not to love him,” she acknowledged with a groan. “But he’s so much of a presence, while also being surprisingly kind and considerate, that I confess I fell completely in love with him.”

  Xavier knew he should leave, that it was intrusive of him to listen to any more of what Diana had to say during what she believed to be a private confidence, albeit to a dead man.

  Xavier knew what he should do. But the mere thought of Diana, his Diana, discussing the feelings she still had for Raphael with her dead brother had robbed Xavier of breath and taken away his will to move.

  He had bullied and seduced Diana into their affair in the first place and had refused to listen when she told him her affections were engaged elsewhere. To now know Diana had been in love with Raphael this whole time gave Xavier no choice but to release her from their arrangement.

  Quite how he was supposed to carry on as normal with his life in the knowledge Diana was no longer his was beyond him at the moment. Perhaps with time—

  No amount of time could or would help to ease the pain of not seeing or being with Diana!

  She had become his everything. His first thought when he woke in the morning, his last before he fell asleep beside her every night. Nor did she leave his thoughts for a single moment during the hours of the day until he could be with her again.

  Indeed, Xavier wondered what he had done with his days and nights before he had Diana in them. She—

  “What on earth are you doing here?”

  He closed his eyes briefly as he realized he had spent so long thinking of the pain he would suffer in having to release Diana, that she had left her brother’s graveside and now stood a short distance away on the pathway. Her expression was guarded. “Lady Walker advised you might be here,” he dismissed.

  “Tabitha did?” Diana looked puzzled. “When did you see Tabitha?”

  Xavier was starting to feel foolish for having rushed all over London after learning Diana was not at home, first to visit Lady Walker and now here, and all, it transpired, in search of the woman he had just heard confess she was still in love with another man. “You know perfectly well I call upon you every afternoon, but today you were not at home when I did so.” His tone was clipped.

  She appeared puzzled. “So you called upon Tabitha instead and asked her where I might be?”

  He scowled his irritation at Diana’s incredulity. “The two of us left a conversation unfinished last night.”

  Diana lowered her gaze in her desire not to have Xavier see the pain she knew would be reflected in her eyes. For a few moments, she had thought, hoped, Xavier had changed his mind in regard to ending their relationship. His immediate reference to his statement that our arrangement no longer works for me, told her he still felt the same. That it was only because Xavier was a true gentleman he had felt compelled to seek her out and ensure there were no doubts that he wished to end their affair.

  An assurance she had hoped to avoid by last night leaving Northcliffe House the moment Xavier had fallen into a deep sleep.

  She straightened her spine as if for a blow, albeit a verbal one. “I believe you made your meaning perfectly clear.”

  “And?”

  She gave a dismissive shrug. “And I decided to circumvent that conversation by not being beside you when you woke this morning and, if you should feel compelled out of politeness to visit me today, ensuring I was not at home to receive you.”

  “Diana—”

  “Please do not make this any more difficult than it needs to be,” she cut across his words. “We engaged in an affair we both knew would not and could not last beyond desire. The time has arrived for us to end even that.”

  His gaze became icy, his expression cold, giving him the appearance of the haughty Duke of Northcliffe with whom most in Society were more familiar. “Apparently it has, yes.” He gave a formal bow. “I will leave you to continue your visit with your brother.” He turned and walked away.

  Leaving a devastated and heartbroken Diana behind him.

  Chapter Eleven

  Eight weeks later

  Walker House, London

  “You are looking very beautiful this evening, Lady Walker.” Xavier politely complimented the hostess of the musical evening he had decided to attend, purely for the reason she might be persuaded into giving him news of Diana.

  It had been fully eight weeks since Xavier last saw Diana—plus two more days, six hours and thirty-six minutes, to be exact—and he was now desperate for any knowledge of her. Even to the point of attending Lord Thomas and Lady Tabitha Walker’s musical soiree, the sort of mindless Society event Xavier would usually have avoided.

  “And you are looking handsome as ever, Your Grace,” Tabitha Walker returned with a knowing quirk of her lips. “Now we have dispensed with the niceties.” She sobered. “Could we go somewhere more private to discuss the subject which is more urgent in both our minds?”

  “Diana?”

  “Exactly.”

  He glanced around the crowded salon. “She is not here this evening?”

  “She sent her apologies.” His hostess linked her arm through the crook of his to steer him toward the open doors leading out to the terrace.

  It was a warm evening, and several couples were enjoying a stroll about the garden. None of them were close enough to overhear the conversation between Tabitha and Xavier.

  “How is she?” Xavier had no intention of engaging in idle chitchat.

  Tabitha gave the question some thought. “Difficult to say,” she finally answered him. “On the one hand, I am happy to report she is looking as beautiful as ever. Certainly she is not wasting away out of yearning for you,” she derided.

  “I never thought she would.”

  “No?”

  “No.” He might have wished for Diana to miss him as much as he did her, but he would never wish her ill health.

  She nodded. “Nevertheless, beneath Diana’s beauty, something is different about her.”

  Xavier’s interest sharpened. “In what way?”

  His hostess sighed. “That is what I cannot say. She seems happy, more so than I have seen her for many months, but…”

  “Something is different,” Xavier repeated her earlier phrase.

  “Yes,” she confirmed.

  “Perhaps she is still missing my brother?” He had heard Diana say as much at her brother’s graveside.

  “Now, there is something else which has never sat well with me,” Tabitha murmured. “Until you propositioned her,” she gave him another pointed glance, “I would have said Diana was the last woman ever to indulge in an affair.”

  “I am not sure it can be called that when both Diana and Raphael were free to do as they pleased. Besides which, we are all aware he died in her bed,” Xavier reminded harshly.

  “Did he?” his hostess mused.

  “Of course he— You have reason to doubt that is what happened?” he prompted sharply as she looked at him challengingly.

  She shrugged slender shoulders. “My husband tells me that it is rude to speculate about such matters, but I cannot help the fact I am more observant than others perhaps choose to be. In your brother’s case, those observations led me to realize that any flirting he did was nothing more than a sop. A mask, if you will.”

  Xavier’s nostrils flared. “To hide what?”

  “I am told that beneath your own mask of cold politeness, there is a temper,” she drawl
ed. “I would appreciate it if you did not lose that temper with me if I tell you my thoughts on this subject.”

  Xavier’s nostrils flared. “I cannot promise, but I will certainly endeavor not to do so.” He had no control over his emotions when Diana was involved.

  “That will suffice.” Tabitha nodded. “Your brother, Raphael, was a handsome and charming gentleman whom all the ladies adored. Some of the gentleman too,” she added after a brief pause. “He, on the other hand, showed no preference for any of them.”

  “Diana—”

  “Not for Diana either,” she dismissed. “Oh, he liked her well enough, but the only company your brother sought out and enjoyed almost constantly was that of Jeremy Wilton, Diana’s brother.”

  “The two men were good and longtime friends.”

  She nodded. “Since university. You were out of the country at the time, but did you know Jeremy was also present in Diana’s house the night Raphael died?”

  Xavier reared back. “What on earth are you implying?”

  Tabitha grimaced. “We have some ridiculous laws in this land, one of which prevents certain people from loving each other. Perhaps some time in the future, you might join my husband and brother in attempting to dispense with that one? No doubt you will not succeed, but I would appreciate someone of your importance, and a personal friend of the Prince Regent, also making his displeasure on the subject felt. If, of course, you do feel that displeasure?”

  “It is an archaic law which needs to be abolished.” Xavier studied her closely. “You have a personal interest in the matter?”

  She nodded. “My older brother and the man he loves are forced to spend their lives living as employer and his secretary. Which is perhaps the reason I am more attuned to such relationships than many others are,” she allowed ruefully. “Your brother, I am certain, was in love with Jeremy Wilton, and Diana and her husband, and then Diana alone after Percy’s death, helped them to meet and be together in their home. I believe Diana also helped to conceal that relationship by allowing others to believe Raphael’s interest was in her. I would happily do the same for my own brother,” she admitted. “Of course, Raphael was not supposed to die at Fitzwilliam House, but having done so, I know Diana’s soft heart well enough to believe she would happily have stepped in and let others assume Raphael was her lover.”