Rising onto her knees, she pulled free of his working fingers and angled his cock. The moment the flared crown notched against the clenching entrance of her sex, she began to tremble. He caught her hips in his hands, steadying her, but allowing her to set the pace with which she took him into her.

Wanting to feel every inch of him, Jess lowered herself slowly, a soft keening cry accompanying the deliberate, relentless impalement.

She reached up and gripped the narrow lip where the upholstered back gave way to lacquered wood, sinking down on him with a leisurely measured pace. He bruised her with his grip.

“Jess. Wait!” His thighs were rigid between hers. “Give me a moment. You’re squeezing me like a fist. No. For God’s sake, don’t move … Ah, Christ!”

He climaxed with a primal groan, his teeth grinding audibly, his cock jerking inside her as his semen spurted in thick, creamy pulses. He was only halfway in her, but the sudden flood of lubrication gave her no traction to delay further. She sank onto him to the root.

Her toes curled; her nails dug into the leather and wood. He came hard and long, trembling beneath her. She watched him, awed by the ferocity of his pleasure and how erotic she found it. He was a man who knew sex in all its extremes, and she’d brought him to a raging orgasm with just her love and enthusiasm.

“Jesus.” Alistair wrapped his arms around her, bent her backward, and buried his damp face in her cleavage. His laugh was sharp and humorless, derisive. “You went to all this trouble … for this.”

She pushed her fingers into the silk of his hair, understanding that he’d learned to place literal value on the pleasure he could give; it would be a hard lesson to unlearn. “I would circle the world, barefoot, for this.”

He looked at her, his face flushed and eyes gleaming. The carriage swayed as it moved at a crawl over cobblestones, the sounds of the city filtering into the hushed and humid interior. His jaw clenched as he rocked deeper into her.

“Your pleasure is mine, Alistair, my love. I would have none without yours. I would be empty without you to fill me.” She kissed the tip of his nose and smiled. “And you’re still hard inside me, with stamina to spare. You’ve never left me wanting.”

He moved in a burst of graceful physical agility, lifting her and carrying her to the opposite squab. Everything shifted as she found herself beneath him, pinned to the seat by the relentlessly hard, thick length of his penis. Her back was cushioned by her lined velvet cape; her front was mantled by his large, powerful body. He braced himself with one palm against the backrest and the other above the armrest near the door. He held her open by planting one knee on the squab and pinning her leg to the back. Her other leg dangled off the edge, her foot flat to the floorboard next to Alistair’s.

She was completely vulnerable, her shoulders curved in the corner in a manner that gave all the leverage to Alistair, who used it to his advantage. With a practiced roll of his hips, he massaged her with his cock. Heated pleasure spread outward from her sex, making her moan.

“You must be quiet,” he whispered, then made that impossible with another devastating stroke.

Jess gripped his hips, achingly aware that they were both fully clothed except for where they were joined. His pelvis lifted, dragging the furled underside of his cockhead across quivering tissues. He paused with only the tip of him inside her, watching her as she writhed, his gaze darkening as her nails dug into his flesh. Then he sank into her in a long, deep plunge. She bit her lip but couldn’t contain a plaintive whimper.

“Shh,” he admonished, his eyes gleaming wickedly. He knew damned well what he was doing to her by setting this torturously slow pace. His hips lifted, then fell again. Shallower this time, a short fierce dig.

“Alistair …” She clenched tight around him, the tiny muscles rippling greedily.

“My God, you feel good,” he breathed. He ground against her, teasing her clitoris with fleeting pressure, his cock so deep in her that she was utterly possessed. “I can feel my semen in you. You’re soaked with it. But I have more to give you.”

She was panting now, maddened, misted with perspiration. She needed hard, driving strokes, a deep relentless pounding that would give her the friction she craved. What he gave her was painstakingly slow withdrawals and leisurely surges. Like a liberally oiled apparatus, tireless, his hips smoothly pistoned, shafting her tender sex with his iron-hard cock. In and out, the rhythm so fluid and precise it rivaled Maelzel’s metronome.

Arching, she fought to quicken his pace, her body strung tight as a bow. He covered her mouth with his hand, muffling the sobs of pleasure she couldn’t contain.

With his lips to her right ear, he murmured, “We are surrounded by dozens of people, and I’m fucking you.”

She shivered, her passions raging beyond all reason. In a distant part of her mind, she heard the voices of pedestrians just outside the carriage. She heard the rolling of passing carriage wheels and the laughter of the passengers within. The very real threat of discovery was akin to throwing kerosene on an already raging fire. She was insensate with lust, reduced to a primitive state in which only the quest for orgasm mattered.

“If only they could see you as I do,” he purred, “sprawled across a carriage squab with your skirts around your waist and your sweet, slick cunt drenched in my ejaculate and crammed full of my cock.”

She met his gaze over the hand covering her lips, seeing a fierce love and aching tenderness in the aqua depths that belied the coarseness of his speech. There were so many sides to the man she loved—some smooth as river rock and others rough as gravel; some innocently vulnerable and others wickedly depraved. She couldn’t imagine living without any of them. Together they made up the whole that completed her.

He rocked his hips, touching the end of her. “Your wantonness is a gift to me, Jess. You are a gift, and I know it. I know the breadth of trust and love required for you to give of yourself in this manner.”

A lush, expert stroke took her to the edge. She hung there, arched and rigid, breathless.

“And I love you for it,” he growled, taking advantage of a rut in the road to deliver a hard, ramming thrust that hurled her into orgasm. “I love you too much. More than I can bear.”

Jess quaked violently beneath him, her sex clutching and sucking at his throbbing erection. He climaxed with a serrated groan that he muffled in the sweat-slick curve of her neck. They clung to each other, grasping and writhing, straining for the closeness they required but couldn’t attain while dressed.

Lost in each other while surrounded by the teeming city.

My sympathies to the debutantes hoping to snare the magnificent marquess. The previously icy Lady T, now widowed and ablaze in red, drew the mesmerized Lord B to her like a moth to a flame. Dear Readers, the heat was palpable.

So scandalous. Now infamous. Decidedly delicious …

Michael finished reading aloud and lowered the paper, staring at Alistair with brows raised.

“What?” Alistair asked, before enjoying a long drought of ale.

“Don’t be coy. I saw Jessica last night. That dress … What have you done to my sister-in-law?”

“Why don’t you ask what she has done to me? That answer is far more profound, I assure you.”

Alistair’s gaze swept over the great room of Remington’s Gentlemen’s Club. His casual perusal was met with many nods and smiles. He now understood the interest that had baffled him the week before. Everyone had known of his change in circumstance before he did. He was still catching up. Still reeling.

He’d called on Albert’s widow earlier in the day, attempting to ascertain her circumstances and offering whatever assistance she required. She had been left with a large bequeathment, but she’d loved his brother and she would need more than coin and property to see her through the immediate future. She would need a strong shoulder to lean upon, and he offered his to her, knowing how vital a loved one could be to the simple acts of rising in the morn and breathing. In return, she had given him something that could change so many things. He held her gift close to his heart, debating what to do with it.

“Your name, paired with Jessica’s, is all I have heard all day,” Michael groused.

“The announcement of our engagement will appear in tomorrow’s gazettes, smothering all prurient interest with the blanket of propriety and respectability. The notices would have appeared today, but I was … detained last night.” Alistair had decided he was going to keep that carriage for the rest of his life. He and Jess would christen others with their passion, but that one would remain in his carriage house forever, waiting for him to ravish Jessica in it long after the equipage lost its usefulness in serving its original purpose.

“What of your parents?” Michael asked. “They looked less than ecstatic.”

Alistair shrugged, feeling a sharp pang of regret but no responsibility for it. “They will manage.”

The crumpling of the newspaper drew Alistair’s attention to Michael’s clenching fists. He wondered what he’d said to elicit such a response. Then he noted that his friend was looking beyond him. Following the line of Michael’s gaze, Alistair glanced over his shoulder and saw the Earl of Regmont enter the room with a boisterous pack of cronies following swiftly on his heels.

“Should we invite him over for a drink?” Alistair asked, turning his back to the man.

“Are you mad?” Michael’s dark eyes narrowed in a dangerous fashion. “I can barely tolerate knowing the man breathes.”

Alistair’s brows rose. There was really nothing he could say to that. Despite the similarities in their circumstances, he certainly couldn’t concur, not considering that in his situation it had been Michael’s brother who’d laid claim to the woman Alistair coveted.

“What the devil is the matter with him?” Michael bit out. “His wife is home ill and increasing with his child, and he’s carousing as if he was a bachelor.”

“Most peers do.”

“Most peers aren’t married to Hester.”

“I would suggest leaving the country as a solution, but you cannot.”

Michael looked at him. “Is that why you were absent from England for so long? Because Jessica was married to Benedict?”

“Mostly, yes.”

“I had no idea. You concealed it well.”

Waving one hand carelessly, Alistair said, “I was adept at hiding it from myself as well. I convinced myself that my interest was base and easily resolved by indulgence. In hindsight, that self-deception was probably wise. If I’d known then that she would turn me so completely around and inside out, I might have run in terror.”

“You do seem different,” Michael mused, studying him. “Less agitated. Calmer. Tamed perhaps?”

“Bloody hell, lower your voice when you say such things.”

Raucous laughter drew Michael’s attention back over Alistair’s shoulder. “Excuse me a moment.”

Alistair sighed and shook his head, taking another drink. In truth, he didn’t understand Regmont, either. The only reason Alistair was sitting in Remington’s was because he didn’t have Jessica to go home to.

“Lord Baybury.”

He looked up at Lucien Remington and smiled. “Remington. How are you?”

“Too well. May I join you a moment?”

“Absolutely.”

“I won’t monopolize much of your time. If I’m not home within the hour, my wife will come fetch me herself.” The proprietor smiled and took an empty seat next to Michael’s vacated one. “Forgive me in advance for my boldness. As you might be aware, I know a great many things about every gentleman granted membership here.”

“You would have to.”

“Yes.” Remington’s eyes, renowned for their rare amethyst color, lit with humor. “For example, I know you and I are alike in ways others wouldn’t suspect, and I can guess from that affinity how difficult your present situation must be for you.”

Alistair stilled. Remington was the bastard son of a duke. Although he was His Grace’s oldest child, it was his younger legitimate brother who would inherit the title and entailed properties.

“Damnation,” Alistair muttered, understanding that Remington knew of his bastardy—a secret only his mother, Masterson, and Jessica were privy to. He’d heard the rumors about the depth and breadth of information on file for each member of Remington’s, but he could not have imagined this level of knowledge. Which led him to wondering if Remington knew who his father was …

“If you ever require assistance or just a sympathetic ear,” Remington said smoothly, as if he hadn’t just shaken Alistair to the core, “I would be honored to assist you.”

“We bastards must stick together?” Alistair queried, refraining from asking questions he wasn’t sure he wished to know the answers to.

“Something of that nature.”

“Thank you.” There were some men worth keeping in one’s corner; Lucien Remington was one of them.

Shouts came from the bar. Remington pushed agilely to his feet. “If you will excuse, my lord. I must see to a problem that has become overly troublesome.”

Alistair looked over his shoulder at Regmont’s boisterous associates. “A moment, please, Remington. Regarding your problem … In light of the fact that his wife is soon to be my sister-in-law, should I assume he might be problematic for me as well?”

“Yes.” Remington gave a regal bow of his head and departed.

Standing, Alistair looked for Michael and found him lounging insouciantly against the bar—near to Regmont’s group, but not a part of it. He went to him. “Let’s go.”

“Not yet.” Michael reached into the inner pocket of his coat for the silver case that held his cheroots. Nearby, Regmont laughed and began to protest Remington’s admonition that he quiet down or quit the room.