This is wrong, Gabe. Think of your duty, your honor. Stop this madness at once, before it is too late.
There was the voice of reason which had been eluding him, arriving far too late to keep him from madness. He raised his head against his will, ending the connection, staring down at her flushed cheeks, her kiss-bruised mouth. Her eyes were wide, fringed with tear-stained lashes. Glazed with passion.
Scalding shame hit him, joining the perilous heat of his ardor. What had he done?
A second word hammered its way through his thick skull then.
“Huntingdon.” Helena blinked, as if she were dazed, her hands returning to his chest and pushing.
Her tongue ran over her lower lip, almost earning another groan from him. He was harder than he had ever been, rigid and ready in his trousers.
What had he been thinking? That he would take her against the wall of books?
Dear God, he hated himself. He had not thought of Lady Beatrice or the consequences of his actions once. Not until now. Not until he had already gone too far. Grandfather was surely rolling in his grave. Mayhap he was no better than his mother and father had been. Cut from the same disastrous, selfish, sinful cloth.
“Huntingdon, you must go,” Helena was saying, dragging him from the depths of self-loathing.
Shaking him from his thoughts.
What had he done?
“Forgive me,” he said stiffly, before realizing he was still cupping her face.
Instantly, he released her, stepping back in retreat.
“We have not much time.” Helena smoothed the fall of her skirts and raised a hand to her hair, tucking an errant tendril back into place. “Lady Clementine Hammond is expected within minutes.”
All the fire in his blood turned to ice. “Lady Clementine Hammond?”
Though he need not ask. He knew well enough who and what she was. A notorious gossip with a reputation as a lady who had forced more than her fair share of marriages after catching couples in alcove embraces and moonlit kisses.
Helena nodded. “She was to have happened upon Dorset and myself… Oh, dash it all. We haven’t time to tarry, Huntingdon. You must go, now, or risk being caught in a compromising position with me. What will Lady Beatrice think?”
Likely what he thought of himself. That he was an abysmal rogue.
Still, whilst he knew he needed to put as much distance between himself and temptation as possible, he felt the need to explain himself. Not that he could.
“I will go, then. But first, I must apologize for acting in such a dishonorable fashion.” He paused, attempting to gather a proper excuse when there was none to be had, save that she hopelessly enthralled him although she was the last woman who should. “I cannot think what came over me. You are like a sister to me, and I was so overcome by my need to comfort you that I acted irrationally. I should never have been so familiar, and I can promise you, such a loathsome, unworthy action will not occur ever again betwixt the two of us.”
He heard himself and inwardly winced at how bloodless he sounded. How cruel and cutting. It was a brutal lie to suggest he had kissed her for any reason other than that he had wanted to feel her lips beneath his more than he had wanted his next breath. But he could never admit as much to her.
Hell, he could not admit it to himself.
The truth was terrifying, and better left buried. But as he railed against himself for what he had done, for giving in to this desperate, terrible weakness he possessed for her, he noticed she had gone pale, all the color leaching from her expressive face.
“You are forgiven, of course, Lord Huntingdon,” she said coolly. “Naturally, I would never expect such aloathsome,unworthymoment to happen again. And mayhap I, too, should ask for your forgiveness. I never meant to force my attentions upon you, and I assure you it is not my intention to entrap you into scandal. Which is why it is imperative that you go before Lady Clementine arrives.”
Damn it, he had mucked that up, had he not? He had somehow managed to act the cad and then insult Helena as well in his attempt to make amends for his lack of control. Gabe would go, because what other choice had he?
He bowed, feeling like the world’s greatest ass. “I shall take my leave.”
With that, he hastened from the library, hating himself more than he ever had before.
Chapter Five
One need only look to the territory of Wyoming, where women have enjoyed the right to vote since 1869, for an example of how women’s suffrage benefits the community.
—FromLady’s Suffrage Society Times
