The wife was forced to pretend the other woman did not exist. Mama had warned her. After all, her father had kept at least as many mistresses as wives. Her brother Alessandro’s Spanish mother had been Father’s mistress before becoming his third wife. Mama had been his fifth.
“Come,” Searle demanded then, cutting through her concerns by gently clasping her elbow and guiding her to stand before the looking glass she had so recently abandoned.
He stood behind her, exuding heat and his own potent magnetism at her back. She stared at their reflections wordlessly, taking him in first, tall, strong, and so handsome, she ached. Their gazes met. His hands settled upon her waist, anchoring her there, drawing her snugly back against his body.
“What are you doing?” she asked, cursing the breathlessness in her voice. The hardness of his shaft was unmistakable, a ridge prodding the curve of her lower back. He had not answered her question, and her weakness for him nettled her.
Was this his means of avoidance? His way of distracting her so she could forget the questions crowding her mind? And curse her, why was she allowing him to succeed?
His gaze challenged hers in the glass. “What do you think I am doing, wife?”
“Distracting me,” she answered without hesitation.
A grin kicked up the corners of his mouth. “Is it working, darling?”
Darling.
Oh, how she hated the simmering, sinful burst of longing that lone word sent though her. If she had thought him a blade, she was wrong. This man was a cavalry sword, mowing down anything in his path without mercy.
But how sweetly he mowed.
And neither was she certain she wished for his mercy in this particular circumstance.
“Of course it is working,” she answered honestly. Her own tone held a note of flirtation she had not even known she possessed. “You are a handsome devil, and you know it.”
“Am I?” His head dipped, that divine mouth of his pressing a kiss to the whorl of her ear.
“Yes,” she whispered, for his hands had roamed from her waist, sliding over the dressing gown until he cupped her breasts.
His fingers tightened, grasping her with the same debilitating confidence he had visited upon her the previous night. He bit her ear gently, then kissed behind it, his tongue tracing over the shallow dip. “Tell me. How am I distracting you?”
She shivered, her knees going weak. A twinge of pain rocked through her leg, but she ignored it. “You know.”
“But what if I do not know?” he countered.
He pinched her nipples through the silk of her wrapper and nightdress. Between her thighs, her flesh pulsed and throbbed with awareness, with possibility. Yes, indeed. No mercy was preferable.
“Touching me,” she admitted at last. “Kissing me. Standing so near I can feel you pressed against me. I cannot think with your hands or your lips upon my body, and you know it.”
“I do now, sweet Leonie.” He kissed down her throat, finding the curve where her shoulder and neck met. And there, he bit into her skin with more tender ferocity.
This, too, would leave a mark. Another love bite to add to her collection. Traces of him she could wear upon her skin. This should not thrill her. Perhaps something was wrong with her to feel such a desperate need for him.
To want him as much as she did.
But she would not worry about any of that now. She was like a drunkard, but lost in desire rather than liquor, eager for her next taste of passion. Of whatever he would show her, whatever he would give her.
“No one has ever called me Leonie,” she said as his thumbs and forefingers rolled her nipples.Dear heavens, how weak he made her. His tongue flitted against her racing pulse, his fingers working their magic.
“Do you like it?” he asked, tugging at her nipples once more.
She was not even certain what he referred to—his lovemaking, his diminutive for her name, the way he felt against her—but the answer was the same regardless. “Yes. Yes, of course I do.”
“It seems somehow fitting, for you are now my lioness,” he said, murmuring against her bare skin, against the flat blade of her collarbone. “I do not have a mistress. Was that your question before I began…distractingyou?”
Relief swelled within her, along with a great, bursting tide of want, which she had been keeping at bay until now. She relaxed, her head falling back upon his shoulder, the admission escaping her. “Yes.”
He nipped her overly sensitized flesh as he gave her nipples another delicious pinch. “Do you want your gift now, darling?”
