“Very well,” she said with a sigh. “I suppose I can allow you... three kisses.”
His mouth fell open in scholarly outrage. “I show youcattleya mossiae, and it only earnsthree kisses?”
“I did like those,” she admitted. Who knew there were so many kinds of orchids? “Very well,tenkisses. In honor of our ten days together.”
“May I give them to you... anywhere I like?”
His masterful expression of angelic innocence was extremely suspicious.
It was also a temptation impossible to deny.
“Anywhere you like, as long as I like it, too.” She did not recognize the breathiness of her own voice. “Ten kisses, and only ten.”
He nodded. “Unless you ask for more.”
“What makes you think I would ever—”
Kiss number one cut off her half-hearted haughtiness mid-sentence and proved her the eager wanton she’d long suspected she would be, if ever alone in a bedchamber with Elijah Weston.
She wrapped her arms about his neck and sank backward onto his pillow, pulling him with her. His weight felt solid and reassuring, as though their bodies were made to fit together. His arithmetic, however, was suspect. She was fairly certain they were already up to fifty individual kisses, but since they hadn’t stopped for breath, she was more than willing to count it as just one.
He tugged the hems of her shirts free from the waistband of her breeches.
“What are you doing?” she gasped against his lips.
“Preparing kiss number two.” Her linen shirt and cashmere overshirt bunched just above her navel. Cold air rippled across the newly exposed strip of her bare stomach. “Unless you’d rather I not?”
“You... Yes... I...” Was she making sense? Probably not. “Carry on. An agreement is an agreement.”
“In that case...” Keeping his eyes locked on hers, he lowered his mouth past her chin, past her neck, between her breasts, down her abdomen, to the thin strip of bare flesh between the raised shirts and the top of her breeches.
She hadn’t felt particularly like an irresistible siren this morning. Now that she found herself in the center of her childhood enemy’s bed without a single petticoat to obstruct his path, her choice of clothing felt far less practical and instead strangely seductive.
“This means nothing,” she remembered to blurt out just before his warm mouth touched her cool skin.
Her pulse pounded in her veins.
The wretched cheater was torturing her with a hundred sensuous kisses, but never quite fully lifted his lower lip from her skin before moving on to the next unkissed morsel of flesh.
When he pushed her hems up to just beneath her breasts, she didn’t stop him. If he hadn’t done so himself, she’d have been tempted to rend the fabric in two to speed things along.
“Three,” he murmured huskily, before providing the same careful attention to the newest expanse of bare skin.
This time, as he feathered light kisses over her stomach, his cheek kept brushing against the underside of her breasts. Her nipples tightened in response, their interest starkly visible as they jutted up through the insufficient layers of thin linen and fine cashmere.
Thiswas what she got for refusing to ride hindered by cumbersome stays. She got a devilishly handsome scoundrel peppering kisses over her bare flesh.
She might never wear stays again.
“I want to touch your nipples,” he murmured.
Did he just say...?
He did.
“Do it,” she stammered.
“No.” He shook a finger at her. “Kisses only. An agreement is an agreement.”
