“Everywhere,” she told him, nuzzling his hair.
Those silky strands felt so smooth and good against her cheek. She inhaled deeply the scent of him—the shampoo he had used to wash his hair, the delicious scent that was all him. Cologne, musk, Decker, man.
Delicious man.
How had she ever imagined another could help her to fulfill the items on her list?
“Everywhere?” he repeated, his voice a decadent rumble. His fist snagged her skirts, lifting them. “Show me where.”
If she had a modicum of honor, she would leap from his lap and throw herself to the squabs opposite him. But was that not why she was here? Her lack of honor? Her desire to be alone with a man, to be wicked, to complete the items on her fanciful list?
Yes, it was.
But still, Jo found herself opening her legs as Decker’s hand slid beneath her skirts. Up her calf, past her knee. He lingered on the hollow there, teasing her until she gasped, wriggling. She wanted that touch on her thighs. Higher, too.
The words, however—shocking, inappropriate words—gave her pause.
“Here?” he whispered, caressing her knee.
“No,” she told him.
Their faces were close, so close. The striations in his sky-blue eyes were vivid. This was a new intimacy, the sort she had never imagined. The kind she would never have dared.
His fingers skimmed on, daring to trace circles over her inner thighs. “Here?”
Jo was certain she was going to turn into flame. She was desperate for those knowing fingers to find her most intimate flesh.
“Higher,” she dared to say, though she was fairly certain a man as experienced as Decker would know where she wanted his touch and how and why. He was simply toying with her, heightening her need, fanning the flames.
But before he could give her what she wanted, the carriage rocked to a halt.
They had arrived at their destination.
Decker’s hand withdrew from beneath her skirts. He pressed a tender kiss to her lips. “We are—”
Before he could finish what he had been about to say, the carriage door was wrenched open. The imminent rain had finally unleashed itself upon the city. The night was dark, a torrent of water lashing the street.
But it wasn’t the violence of the storm, thunder and lightning booming and flashing overhead, that stole the breath from Jo’s lungs. Rather, it was the figure standing on the street in the midst of the deluge. A figure she recognized all too well.
“Josephine.” Her brother Julian’s voice was cold as Wenham Lake ice, her name cracking like a whip above the din of the tempest.
They had been caught.
Decker could blamehis current predicament upon his prick.
He could blame it upon lust.
He could blame it upon that cursed list Jo had unintentionally delivered to him, which had made him randy as a sailor returned from a lonesome tour of the seas.
But in the end, the fault for what had happened between Decker and Lady Jo Danvers fell solely upon his inability to resist the forbidden. He was the experienced seducer. He was the jaded man who sought pleasure at all costs. He was the one who had continually pursued her, unable to put an end to the mad attraction between them despite all the risks.
Only one fate derived from dallying with virginal misses. Decker had known it, and yet he had ignored it for the sake of his raging, unabated desire for her. Now, he was about to pay the price.
With his life.
“I expect you want me to marry her,” he told the irate Earl of Ravenscroft as he faced the man in his own study, dripping on the carpets.
He was soaked to his skin from the relentless storm still raging outside. Jo had fared little better, but she had been bundled off by his efficient housekeeper, who had clucked over her like a mother hen and taken her to a chamber for tea and towels. Which meant Decker was alone to face his reckoning.
