Everything changed.
With a growl, his mouth was upon hers, hot and insistent. His fingers still splayed against the wall on either side of her head, but the muscles of his shoulders trembled as though it required all his willpower to keep his hands on the walls and off her body.
His mouth moved against hers, recklessly, desperately. He devoured her in hungry kisses, suckling her tongue, her lower lip, seizing her every breath and replacing it with his.
More than his hips jutted against her. Something long, hard, and unmistakable pulsed between them, sending a frisson of danger up her spine.
She found his sides with her fingers, intending to thrust him from her trembling body, but instead found herself gripping his hips to pull him even closer.
He was everywhere, his mouth bruising hers, his chest chafing her nipples, his molten thighs rubbing against hers, and that throbbing hard length of him stroking a place no other man had touched.
Evangeline shook with the forbidden pleasure of such delicious contact. She gripped him closer, delighting in the heightened sensitivity and half-wishing she could widen her legs to better allow the exquisite, tantalizing friction. He set her flesh afire with every kiss, every caress.
Without warning, he ripped his mouth from hers with a tortured gasp.
“Go,” he rasped. His ragged panting sent shivers across her skin.
Shecaused him to struggle for breath, to fight for control, to throb between her thighs. The realization that desire could be mutual made her long for his touch even more. She rubbed her body against him slowly, seductively, and reveled in her first taste of feminine power. He groaned. Shuddered. She smiled and licked at his lips.
“Go now,” he repeated, his expression pained but his tone desperate. “Unless you want to experience more than mere kisses, right here in the hallway.”
Evangeline’s smile froze as she realized the peril of stoking such an unpredictable, dangerous fire. He viciously jerked an arm back to his side, as if the last thing on earth he wanted was for her to escape the intoxicating heat of his embrace.
With his burning gaze still locked on her lips, she removed her shaking hands from the hard warmth of his sides. His eyes closed. She hesitated. His heat throbbed against her belly.
She fled.
Chapter 10
Before Evangeline could complete the mere half dozen steps between the dressing room door and her looming bed, the narrow door opposite the smoldering fireplace flew open and Susan Stanton burst into the room.
“There you are,” she announced, flashing a delighted smile before crossing directly to the rack of brass stokers next to the fireplace. “Were you lost? You took so long returning, I thought Lionkiller had perhaps struck again.”
Susan laughed at her own jest. She might not have done so had she been aware Mr. Lioncroft had in fact been up to wickedness—although not in the sense Susan intended.
Belated guilt frosted over the warmth of remembered passion as Evangeline stared at her companion in horror.
Heaven help her. She was supposed to be entrapping him with Susan, not rubbing her belly against—well. Evangeline’s cheeks burned, and she hoped when Susan turned from the flames, she’d attribute any flush of her face to heat from the now-crackling fire, rather than shame.
Only a wanton trollop kissed another woman’s intended in shadowed passageways. When had Evangeline turned into a wanton trollop?
After a final jab with the poker, Susan returned the brass instrument to the rack and flopped into the sole wingback chair. “Well?” she demanded, arms crossed and feet outstretched. “Where did you go? I’ve been ever so bored without you. Pacing up and down one’s room is no fun by oneself.”
“I…” Evangeline began, and then faltered. She glanced around her room for inspiration. Her gaze lit on the row of hip-high bookcases along the rear wall. “I went to the library,” she finished truthfully, “and picked out a novel.”
At least, she thought it was a novel. As dark as the library had been, she might have grabbed a treatise on the history of mercantilism in India. And…oh, no. She’d left the book lying on the floor in the middle of the hallway, forgotten because of an exquisite forbidden kiss.
Susan’s eyes widened with interest. “What book did you select?”
Evangeline started, broke eye contact, and turned to the bookcases. She lifted a hand to the closest set, intending to tug a volume free at random, and almost groaned when every book on the top shelf proved immobile. Only the twisted mind who’d designed her bedchamber’s nightmare-inspired décor would display something so diabolical as a row of false books.
She rested an elbow atop the bookcase as she fished for an alternate avenue of conversation. “Do you read?” she settled on, when a better topic failed to present itself.
“Of course. But real life is ever so much more interesting. Some people might think nothing could be stranger than attending the house party of a reclusive blackguard like Lioncroft, wouldn’t you agree? Yet, every guest here is equally odd in his or her own way. Except, perhaps, for Mr. Teasdale. He’s just old. I wasn’t at all surprised when he left the music room in favor of his bedchamber.”
“Except, he didn’t,” Evangeline mused, forcing thoughts of Mr. Lioncroft’s delicious heat aside as she recalled the fury distorting Mr. Teasdale’s wrinkled face. “I saw him hobbling down a corridor with his cane. His leg seemed to trouble him something awful, no doubt due to all that dancing.”
“Or worse,” Susan intoned darkly.
