“She’d already tucked herself in,” Sara said, “and Polly was right behind her. We’ve all had a busy week.”
Beck shrugged out of his dressing gown.
“What are you doing?” Sara tried to keep her voice level and did not move one inch from her post by the closed bedroom door.
“Getting ready for bed myself.” He yawned and scratched his chest, giving her a shadowed look at the front of him before propping one foot on the raised hearth. “I assume you’ll want me on the bed, but regardless, I’m fastidious by nature.”
She knew that and liked it about him. He bent to use his washrag on one sizable foot, and the play of firelight along the curve of his spine and buttocks nearly had Sara’s knees buckling.
He straightened. “Perhaps you’d like to do the honors?” He wrung out his rag and held it out to her.
“Me?” She took a step closer.
“Or I can finish myself.” He dipped the cloth and started on his other foot, bending forward again. “I truly enjoy washing my feet, which probably has some biblical connotation, but it keeps the sheets clean, and it’s really nobody’s business but my own. Shall I wash your feet, Sarabande?”
“What else do you like to wash?” She’d moved to the end of the bed, a few steps closer.
He shrugged. “I just like to be clean. I was teased for that by my brothers, but they’re as fussy as I am.”
“I don’t think of you as fussy,” Sara said, watching the muscles of his forearms and biceps flex as he wrung out the washcloth again.
“I certainly hope you don’t see me as fussy.” He swiped the rag along the back of his neck, though from the scent of him, Sara suspected he’d completed his ablutions before she’d arrived. “Shall you finish this job for me?”
“You look clean to me.” He looked naked to her, naked, desirable, and completely at ease with it. She’d never seen Reynard entirely naked, never wanted to, but she knew the view wouldn’t have been half so impressive as this.
“I’ve missed a spot.” Beck smiled at her. “An important spot.” He tossed the rag at her and held her gaze as she caught the cloth. “Go ahead, Sara. Indulge your curiosity.”
“I am indulging it.” She licked her lips but couldn’t help darting one glance to his genitals. Turned as he was, his groin was still shadowed, but she thought she could see a hint of tumescence to his… To him.
Had she inspired that?
“You are tolerating your curiosity. Lying again. Indulge it.”
She read a challenge in his expression, but something much more seductive than a simple taunt: behind his cool humor, his overweening male confidence, his patience even, there was tenderness, a willingness to abide by her wishes out of genuine regard for her.
A form of kindness.
She’d told him too much at the pond. Were she not aware that Beckman could on any day be summoned to leave the property and not come back, she might have found the strength to walk away from that tenderness.
“Touch me, Sara. I’ll not beg, and you’ll not regret it. Let me give you what you want.”
“Turn around.” She closed the distance between them and grasped Beck by one arm, turning him to face the hearth. He watched while she moved the basin and took a seat on the bricks beside it. “You’ll tell me if I misstep.”
He nodded, his expression becoming unreadable as Sara positioned herself, realizing only as she did that her face—her mouth—was nearly level with his groin.
She laved his thighs in slow, rhythmic strokes, but sweet, holy, perishing saints… “Turn.”
She spent a long minute admiring his buttocks, then used the washcloth to make measured trips over his flanks then the backs of his thighs. “Turn again.”
She heard him take an audible breath before he complied, keeping his hands at his sides but planting his feet half a step wider. His cock was showing unmistakable signs of interest in the proceedings, and he didn’t try to hide that from her.
Sara frowned at his genitals, but wrung out the flannel and this time used it on the insides of his thighs.
Rinsing the cloth again, Sara slid it in a careful, general pass over his groin.
“Not like that.” Beck closed his hand over hers and brought the washcloth directly over his cock. “Like this.” He swabbed himself with her grip, up and down several times, the angle of his erection increasing as he did. He bent and picked up her other hand. “And then you tend it like this.”
Holding his cock up against his belly, he showed her how to use the washcloth on his testes, then let his cock go so it bobbed against the back of her hand. She snatched her hand away, glaring up at him accusingly.
“And now I’m clean enough,” he said. She took a breath, set the washcloth and basin aside. When she would have risen—would have lost her nerve—he reached out and cradled a hand along her jaw then stroked it down over her head from her crown to her nape. “When we’re in that bed, you’ll touch me, Sara. However you please.”
She wanted to. Sara was ruthlessly honest with herself, and she admitted she wanted to. That wasn’t surprising, because he was right: she was curious. She could resist temptation if she had to, but there was something unusual about this encounter with Beckman Haddonfield.
Men had often attempted to seduce her—practiced, polished, worldly men, some of whom had been musically literate. Reynard would have crowed with glee had she taken lovers, because lovers would mean gifts, even extravagant gifts, and gifts would mean more good food, decent wine, and late nights at cards for him.
Those men had looked at her with desire, and a few of them had even been handsome, intelligent, attractive men.
But the lust in their eyes hadn’t been bounded by the respect she saw on Beck’s face. He would not pressure her, and if and when she capitulated to her desires, he would want it to be an independent decision on her part, not a lapse she could blame on him or attribute to a weak moment.
He wanted her to choose him, but for her sake as much as his own.
Beck hunkered on the rug, letting her hide her face against his shoulder. “Come to bed with me, Sara. You can indulge all of your creative impulses and allow me to explore a few of mine, too.”
She nodded against his naked, muscular shoulder, no longer recognizing herself. God help her, but she wanted to put her mouth on his shoulder, taste him there, open her teeth on him while her hands ran riot over the rest of him.
“Come.” Beck straightened and raised her to her feet. While she stood, docile and self-conscious, he undid her dress, took off her stockings, stays and slippers, and then untied the bows of her chemise. He paused and met her eyes to ask the question.
She considered, finding she wanted to be as naked as he was, and that too was something that hadn’t ever happened with Reynard.
Which, she realized, made her fiercely glad. Reynard had been flawed, troubled, and morally diseased, but it had been easy, particularly as a young woman and a new wife, to think the flaw had lain with her.
Well, it hadn’t. The look in Beck’s eyes, the reverent feel of his hands as he drew her chemise off her shoulders, they told her, if nothing else ever had, she was desirable, wonderfully, wildly, irrefutably desirable.
“Come to bed with me.” He held out his hand and let her see in his eyes his pleasure in her nakedness. When she put her hand in his, he drew her to him and enfolded her against him. “Just one more thing…” She stood patiently while he drew the pins from her hair, until her braid was swinging down her back, brushing against her naked backside.
“That is an odd sensation.” Wicked, peculiar, and ticklish.
“I want it all the way undone.” He drew her braid over her shoulder and brushed the tip of it over her breast.