Waking Up With a Rake by Connie Mason, Mia Marlowe Page A

legs returned. All he had to do was look at her and the low drumbeat started.
    “It’s all right,” he said. “What you’re feeling is perfectly natural.”
    “How could you know what I’m feeling?”
    “Because I’m feeling the same sorts of things, only from a male perspective,” he said, meeting her gaze in the mirror. “Every sensation is heightened, every touch potent with meaning.” He ran his palm from her shoulder down her arm to engulf her hand in his. The sleeve of her nightrail fell away so her ribs and the indentation of her waist on one side were visible in the looking glass. He reached around and cupped her exposed breast.
    Her breath hissed in over her teeth.
    “I love holding you like this,” he murmured and pressed a string of soft kisses to her nape. His hand was so warm, almost feverish on her skin. His thumb circled her nipple, making the ache even stronger.
    She leaned back, reveling in the hard maleness of him. She’d always thought of herself as all angles and elbows, but in comparison to him, she felt soft. Feminine. Even her small breast seemed perfectly large enough, cradled as it was in his sheltering palm.
    His kisses strayed to the side of her neck and up to her earlobe. He took the bit of flesh between his lips and sucked. All the air fled from her lungs in a whoosh. While he distracted her with that torrent of sensation, he pushed the nightrail off her other shoulder. The garment slid down and would have slipped past her hips to the floor if she hadn’t caught it and clutched it to her waist.
    “What are you doing?” she asked.
    He straightened to his full height and eyed her reflection. The crown of her head fit neatly beneath his chin. “Showing you that you’re beautiful. All of you. Don’t you want to see that you are?”
    All of her. Surely he didn’t mean that.
    “I’ve heard that even some husbands and wives might not ever see each other in the altogether,” she said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but completely disrobing is not required in order to do the necessary, is it?”
    “ Do the necessary ? Why on earth would you make something so pleasurable sound like a chore? From whom have you been taking sexual advice?”
    Some of her information had come from giggled conversations with other girls who were likely as ignorant as she. Knowledge of the basic mechanics of the act came from her close association with horse breeding.
    Then there was Mrs. Noddlingham’s Practical Advice for Young Ladies of Quality , a book her mother had given her in lieu of actually talking to her about what passes between a man and a woman in the marriage bed. The book was light on specifics, but according to Mrs. Noddlingham, disrobing wasn’t actually required for taking a bath either.
    “A chaste girl might do very well to bathe in her shift,” Mrs. Noddlingham advised, “in order to avoid seeing her own body and thereby entertaining any lewd thoughts that unwholesome sight might engender.”
    The sight of her bare body in the mirror didn’t seem particularly unwholesome, and Olivia wouldn’t class any of her thoughts as lewd. She was more bewildered than anything else. Olivia wished now that she’d asked Babette about it. Surely one who’d been a lady’s maid for a courtesan would be a fount of sensual information.
    “It might surprise you to learn that I do know something about the subject,” she said, hoping to sound worldly while trying to ignore the way he continued to massage her breast. “Because, ah…” He gave her nipple a little flick and the shock of it resonated to her toes. “Er…you see, I’ve…I’ve read a bit about marital urges.”
    “Marital urges. Lord spare me. Something that could be called ‘doing the necessary’ with your clothes on is not my idea of how to satisfy any sort of urge, marital or otherwise.” He cupped her other breast as well. “There’s nothing about what you and I are doing that’s ‘necessary,’ but you can’t deny