How To Bed A Baron by Christy English

quickly, with the efficiency of a decent valet, for she had tied her father’s cravats for years while they were on the dig, after his Italian servant had left them for lack of wages.
    She took his coat off next, and he helped her, shrugging out of it as he had when they were younger and going swimming in the lake on her father’s land. It fell away as he skirt had, and he did not move to pick it up, so neither did she.
    This was as far as she had ever gotten in disrobing a man, and Arthur seemed to know that without being told, for he stripped away his waistcoat and shirt, so that the golden hair on his chest shone in the firelight.
    “You look like Apollo,” she said without thinking.
    “And you had too much wine with dinner.”
    She laughed, and batted at him to punish him for his dismissal of her sincere compliment, but he caught her hand in his and raised it to his lips. His breath was hot on her fingertips, and on her palm, as he moved his lips into the center of her hand, and tongued her gently, softly, as much a question as an exploration. Her body leaped and the heat below her waist seemed to throb, and she wondered what else he might do with his tongue, where else he might kiss her. She had heard rumors when she was in Rome dining with married women with no men present. Surely such talk had been idle bragging. At the time, she had thought the whole idea perverse, but now that she stood with Arthur alone in his room, she was not repulsed by the concept, but intrigued. Of course, Arthur was not Italian, nor was he French. He was the best man she had ever known. No doubt such an idea would never even occur to him.
    Arthur picked her up, making her squeal, and then laugh at herself for her foolishness. He laughed with her, but low, his lips on her throat as he lifted her high before laying her down on the silk counterpane of his bed. “Not too loud,” he said. “The servants might hear.”
                  She bit her lip as she watched him drop first his breeches, and shuck his hose and his small clothes to lie down on the bed beside her. They had lain side by side near the lake when they were children, but they had only been talking and laughing then, drying off from their swim in the sun. Now he was a man, and she a woman, and this was altogether different.
                  Serena thanked every listening god for that.
                  His hand moved to her thigh, drawing her shift above her waist, as he caressed her very lightly along her inner thigh. Arthur touched her, his blunt, calloused fingers finding her spot of bliss with the unerring certainty of a bloodhound, and she stopped being able to think at all.
    ***
    Arthur touched her with the careful reverence, but his hand was shaking. He wanted her so badly, more than he had ever wanted any woman who had ever graced his bed. He had cared for some of them, and liked others, but always, after they had coupled, his thoughts would return to this one woman, and how he wished that he had been with her. Now Serena was here, in his bed beside him, and it was all he could do to keep his lust in check long enough to satisfy her first. He would give her the gift of care, of loving kindness, for all the gifts she had ever given him. He would do this for her, and then he would make her his wife.
                  He toyed with her gently, his fingers playing over her body as he had learned from his other lovers. In that moment, all those lovers ceased to exist as if they had never been. Arthur Farleigh found himself once again in Eden, and grateful to be there.
                  She reared under him and gasped as he circled her place of bliss and slipped three fingers into her passage. She whimpered then, and pressed her body against his hand, and it as all he could do to keep his focus on her pleasure. As she began to moan, he wondered if the servants could hear her, and found that he did not