A Marriage Most Inconvenient (Inconvenient Matches Book #1)

Chapter 23: Ben

The smell of roses was forever ruined for him, because the only thing that scent could conjure now was the lotion she had lathered before she had taken his raging erection into her dainty, supple hands. That was a sight that would haunt his dirtiest fantasies for years.

Ben tried to bite back a groan of sheer mortification. The finest education in all of England through Eton and Oxford, a vast vocabulary that he frequently put to use in Parliament and the absolute damned best he had been able to come up with was 'You make me so fucking hard' and 'That feels so fucking good' ?!

Shakespeare would have wept with envy at such mastery of the English lexicon.

At least he hadn't told her she had the best bust in all of Britain. 

Or perhaps he should have, an alliteration might have been just a fraction better than the base words he had offered her in truth. Dear Lord, how the devil was he supposed to show his face to her following that particularly pathetic showing? But then again, what was the alternative? Telling his wife that she was so pretty he had forgotten to speak?

Though, he allowed himself a private smile, she hadn't seemed to mind his coarse language all that much when she'd climaxed all over his fingers. He wanted to shake his head in amusement at the thought of his (delightfully naked) wife, beautifully sated, teasing him. Only his wife would have managed to make him laugh when he was a hairsbreadth from his own release. He had never in his life known that it could be fun to have sex. Pleasurable? Yes. Satisfying? Definitely. But never in his life had he been so damned amused with a woman's legs thrown over his shoulders.

And that didn't even include what had happened after they had climbed into bed, and settled in each other's arms. They hadn't slept until the sunlight was streaking through the windows, they had stayed up and talked. For hours and hours, teasing and laughing and exchanging happy stories. It was the best time Benedict had had in years. And it had been so damn good to be able to speak of Charlie without the aching chasm of loss that usually accompanied even the mention of him.

He knew now that she favored lavender, both as a color and as the scent of her bath soap, and that when she was five she had fallen out of a tree and broken an arm. She could not ride to save her life, nor was she particularly gifted with instruments. She loved to read and had a small private library that he had not yet seen in some part of the house that was filled with only adventure and romance novels. She was trying to teach herself to play chess. She knew how to cheat at cards. When she was eight her biggest aspiration in life had been to marry a prince, to which he joked that she'd found a duke which was really just one step below and they had laughed, their marriage no longer a source of Benedict's greatest bitterness. 

In turn, he had told her of the time Charlie and Graham had stolen an older boy's lewd picture book, which Ben had then stolen from them because they wouldn't show him because he was too young. He had thoroughly been traumatized and had sworn at the wise age of eleven to never engage in such depravity. How had he been supposed to know that a little depravity was a lot of fun? 

He'd told her of the time when Ophelia had made her debut and Charlie had harangued all of their friends into dancing with her so that she never felt like a wallflower. And the times the three of them had snuck out of the house at night to race their horses. He'd told her of all the scrapes he'd managed to land himself in because only Charlie could cajole him into abandoning his studies and doing something stupid. And it hadn't hurt one bit to speak of the only person in Ben's life who had wanted more from him than to be a dutiful, responsible young man. It had been, dare he say, cathartic. Like cleaning an old wound that had never truly healed. 

Today, Benedict had woken with a smile on his face. He was....happy?

'Rothbury, are you listening to me?' His mother's chiding tone cut across his musings, he repressed a grimace. Maybe he had spoken too soon about happiness.