Saucy minx. He would leave those words in this room, where she’d dropped them. He dared not carry them into the night, or his resolve would crumble. He was only a man, after all.
He strode to the door and pulled it open. “After you, my lady,” he said in the most condescending, aristocratic voice he could muster. He needed distance from this woman, his wife.
Otherwise, she and her fresh scent and her sweet cunny would haunt him all the night.
Otherwise?
He snorted. It was a given. He would be haunted.
Through the ride back to Asquith Court and until she’d disappeared from view up its grand staircase, they spoke not another word. From the set of her mouth and the flash of fire in her eyes, he could see she was angry with him.
So be it.
He could handle her anger.
Her desire, on the other hand, was a whole other beast.
One that cut through all resistance and immunity.
One that could bring him to his knees.
Chapter Seventeen
It was tooblasted hot in this bed.
Hortense spent the next few minutes kicking and untangling her legs from several layers of covers. Sir Bacon gave a little growl of annoyance before heaving himself up and vacating his place. From his new spot curled up in a plush armchair on the other side of the room, he shot her a baleful glower.
“My apologies for disturbing your beauty rest, your royal highness,” she groused.
Madness. Agitation. Wretchedness.
Those were the words Mariana had used to describe the madly in love.
She could think of another condition those words quite accurately described:
Mad, agitated, wretchedlust.
It was those hot kisses.
And the man who had delivered them.
He’d set her alight.
Her back against the wall, his lean, hard body pressing into hers, his thick cock straining against her stomach. His long masculine fingers first clutching at her, then sliding along her throbbing, wet quim.
Oh, how she’d wanted those fingers inside her.
Then he’d stopped.
She was possessed of willpower, but none like that, for here was the thing: he’d wanted her, too. She’d seen the wanting in his lust-glazed eyes, felt it in the clutch of his hands and in the press of his hard cock.
In name only.
He must have remembered and gotten a case of scruples.
Wrongheaded scruples.
Irresponsible scruples.
