“That your mouth is as kissable as I remembered.”
A dry, flummoxed laugh escaped him. “An empirical exercise, then?”
When he put it like that… “Precisely.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was possible Lady Beatrix was trying to be the death of him.
“So, this kiss…” Dev attempted to grab hold of the thought that had been hounding his heels since their kiss in the conservatory. “This kiss was an exercise?”
She blinked, drawing his attention to the dark fringe surrounding her gray eyes. They were more beautiful in this moment than he’d remembered.
“Pardon?” she asked.
Oh, how to articulate to her something he hadn’t fully articulated to himself.
“The first kiss had been a show for others, and this one a confirmation for yourself?”
“Yes.”
And it struck him like a thunderbolt… “That’s not how kisses are supposed to be.”
There.
That was his nagging thought articulated.
“Not a first kiss,” he continued. “And certainly not a second kiss.”
And Dev understood.
He had a kissing situation to rectify.
His hand slid around her waist, to the small of her back and snugged her against him. With his other hand, he cupped the back of her head. The breath had caught in her chest. He knew because if it hadn’t, it would be whispering across his mouth. “A kiss shouldn’t be a cold exercise,” he muttered nearly against her lips. “A kiss should be hot and messy and desperate.”
How small she was in his arms. Delicate, even.
“A kiss,” he said, “should be likethis.”
And he lowered his mouth onto hers.
Slow and deep, this kiss was for her.
And perhaps for him, too.
For with this kiss, there was confirmation he sought, too.
Of an ineffable something that sparked between them.
Objectively, Lady Beatrix St. Vincent was pretty. There was nothing special about her scent or the color of her hair or the mode of her dress, which when left up to her was decidedly indifferent. Yes, her eyes were beautiful, but even so, beauty abounded in the world. Beauty was a superficiality that, in truth, had never held much interest for him.
But now, as he held her against his body and tangled his fingers through rain-damp hair and ran his tongue across her lower lip and pulled a feminine sigh from her parted mouth, he understood at a fundamental level there was something special inthis.
In the spark between their bodies.
In the spark between their minds.
It was the latter spark he found most alluring.
