“I can see that you are likely shy,” she said.
“I am?”
“It’s difficult to expose yourself for the first time.”
“The first…”
She was standing up, and his voice trailed into silence. First she pulled off her stockings. They dropped to the ground, frail and silken, with a gleam like trapped sunshine. Damon’s eyes followed them with some fascination, she thought.
She waited until he met her eye again, and then slowly, slowly, she began unlacing the front of her gown.
He didn’t move. In fact, he looked as frozen as a man might be who was trying to lure a fawn into eating from his hand. But Roberta didn’t feel like a fawn. She felt like a powerful woman doing exactly as she wished. Her bodice gaped open as she bent to pick up her glass.
He turned slightly red. Roberta took a drink and surreptitiously checked his breeches…yes. He was interested. Very, if that look in his eye were any indication. She bent to put her glass down again, thought about kissing him, and decided that she might as well get rid of her gown first. So she gave an easy roll of her shoulders.
It fell to the ground, all embroidered silk and gold lace. “It was heavy,” she told him. He didn’t look as if he would disagree; his eyes were eating her up.
“Those stays are heavy as well,” he said.
“They lace in the back.” She turned around and waited.
He must have leaped to his feet, because she heard a bang, as if he knocked against the table, and then his long, clever fingers were at her back. She held the stays against her and turned around before she let them fall to the floor. The bodice of her chemise was extremely low, the better to accommodate the neckline of her gown. In fact, it barely covered her nipples at all. And it was made of fine lawn edged in lace.
“Your next move would surely be a spinner,” Damon said. His voice was smoky, almost sleepy. He pulled his breeches down and put them away.
Roberta was afraid to look. Her heart was thudding against her ribs, dancing a rhythm that she hardly knew and yet recognized with an age-old wisdom. That same wisdom was in her smile as she put her arms around his neck and then, still without looking, brought her body against his.
He made a muffled sound, like a groan, and his lips were in her hair and his hands were against her back.
“Buttercup,” he whispered, “there’s no going back from this. You do realize that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. She’d discovered his ear and was doing exactly what he’d done to hers earlier: kissing it and then, daringly, touching him with her tongue.
“No,” he said, and put her away.
Roberta grinned at him. He was having male scruples, no doubt. She’d watched her father wrestle with those for years, and in her opinion, the wrestling always ended up in the same way: her father did exactly what he wanted to. Her job was to make sure that Damon wanted to do exactly what she wanted.
So she lifted her arms and started pulling pins from her hair. It had been coiled and curled and pinned all over. She pulled pin after pin, and he said nothing. Finally her hair tumbled beyond her shoulders. She bent over and gave it a good shake to get rid of the powder.
Damon stared at Roberta’s sweet little bottom as she bent over and had the feeling of a man drowning—with nary a soul to throw him a life buoy. Kissing Roberta was one thing…but her virginity? He’d never done such a thing.
He could only do it if he were intending to marry her.
But she didn’t want to hear that yet. She was giggling, and the sound went to his heart and his blood sang with joy.