You’ll be shocked, but you’re a lady. You were always going to be shocked.” Another slow thrust, seducing her with bits of pleasure, luring her in like a fish to a baited hook. He needed her desirous—and then he needed her disappointed. Aroused and unsatisfied. Whatever it took to keep her here for another act, for another interlude. For another feverish few minutes of passion. “But I promise you, you’ll enjoy it.”
She pitched forward on the next thrust, her breathing ragged as she braced herself against his chest. Her curls tickled his chin as she struggled to right herself, to push herself back upright with arms that trembled against the effort. He could feel the fight in her, the internal war she waged between her need and her good sense. And he exulted in the sweet, lost sound she made as he moved again, angled her against him with his hands on her hips, precisely where he knew she ached the most.
“You can’t unbutton my dress,” she said, and he rather thought she had made an effort to sound severe, as if she had drawn a line in the sand.
“Agreed,” he said, and tipped her chin up for one last hungry kiss before he would have to release her before the Ravenhursts returned.
And really, he didn’t need to unbutton her dress. Not when slipping beneath her skirts would be so much more fun.

∞∞∞

Sleep was impossible. Jilly was exhausted in a way that she had never been before, a bone-deep tired that had suggested that she had only to fall into bed and she would succumb to sleep immediately, but that certainly hadn’t happened.
It was the darkness. It wound around her like a promise, cradling her in its depths the same way James had cradled her in his arms. The soft linen sheets around her ought to have been comforting, but they only abraded her over-sensitized skin.
She should never have stayed through the play. She should have pleaded a headache, made her excuses, and begged Nora and Robert to take her home in a hired hack. Instead she had courted ruination purely to assuage her curiosity…and succumbed to the temptation to savor a few wild minutes of hedonistic pleasure. It had been glorious and reckless and thrilling.
It had been agonizing.
She rolled onto her stomach and buried her face in her pillow, muffling her groan in the downy softness of it. He had been toying with her, the arrogant ass. He had taken advantage of her inexperience, exploited her ignorance, only to torment her. And he had enjoyed it. That much had been obvious, from the silky laugh he had buried in the curve of her throat as she had writhed beneath the strokes of his clever fingers.
She had been on the verge of something incredible, there in the darkness, during the interlude after the third act. He had wasted not a single moment of time after Robert and Nora had deserted them once again, and while she had believed him when he had agreed not to unbutton her gown, she had certainly not expected him to shove his hands beneath her skirts.
Not that she had protested. And when he’d touched her in a place that had made her head swim until she’d had to brace it against the wall—well, if she had even considered protesting, it had been driven from her mind, along with every other thought contained in her head. And her hips had surged into the tender caress of his fingers of their own accord; he had turned her into some sort of shameless creature without a care for anything but seeking pleasure. And he had reveled in his power over her. She had heard it in his softly crooning voice, the smug satisfaction of a man who knew he’d won.
She hadn’t cared at the time. She had been mindless, heedless of anything but the powerful sensations he had evoked in her. He had whispered all sorts of wicked things in her ear, things she had hardly heard in the moment, but that had echoed in her head long afterward. Things that had tumbled through her head through the entirety of the fourth act, while she had sat stiffly in her seat beside him, still trembling from the unrelieved tension he had wrought in her. Things he had repeated during the fourth act interlude, when he’d effortlessly pitched her right back into that fevered madness.
“Darling Jilly,” he’d murmured in her ear.