“Would more kissing be out of the question?”
No.
“Yes,” she snapped, working the hair pin deeper into the lock’s inner mechanism. “You truly are a despicable rake.”
“A rake, perhaps. But you did not seem to think me so despicable a few moments ago when your tongue was in my mouth.”
Her hair pin dropped to the ground from suddenly numb fingers, landing on the gravel path with a distinctping.
“Lord Dorset,” she sputtered, sure she should be outraged he would dare to refer to her response to his passionate kisses so directly.
“Ambrose,” he said, his tone silky.
Somehow, referring to him as his given name, especially after the kisses they had just shared, seemed more intimate than it had before. Far too intimate. There was a heaviness in the air between them.
In an attempt to distract herself, she sank low to the ground, trying to locate her hair pin.
“You shan’t find it in the darkness,” he said.
But then he had sunk to his haunches as well, and his fingers were traversing the moss-and-gravel path far too close to hers. Their fingers brushed. Once. Twice.
The third time sent a new wave of desire washing over her.
She paused. “I suppose I shall have to use another. My lady’s maid is a deft hand at using as few pins as possible. I hesitate to remove one lest the whole effort come tumbling down.”
“Here it is.” His tone was triumphant, his eyes glinting in the moonlight along with the flash of his even, pearly teeth as he grinned.
She plucked the pin from his fingers. “That was an extraordinary burst of luck. Perhaps fate’s fickle wheel is deciding to give us a good turn after all.”
“Blame it on fate all you like, but I have extremely skilled fingers.”
Clementine could not stop the hitch in her breath at his sinful words as she rose and turned back to her efforts at the lock. Nor could she quell the yearning spreading through her. During her days at Twittingham Academy, she and her friends had managed to get their hands on a number of books which were ordinarily forbidden to young ladies. And she could not help but to find herself thinking of all those stories. Or of what the Marquess of Dorset might do with those skilled fingers of his.
Ambrose.
His name was Ambrose.
And she wanted him to kiss her again, heaven help her. But no, she must not allow it. To do so would be wrong. Just as wrong as allowing this feigned betrothal of theirs to continue would be.
I despise rakes, she reminded herself.
Walter is my own true love, and to even allow my head to be turned by such a scoundrel as Ambrose is…
“Damn and blast,” she hissed.
She had just called him Ambrose in her thoughts.
“A shocking curse from such lovely lips,” he said behind her, his tone provoking. “Never say you have dropped the hair pin again.”
“I have not.” Because she had not even been trying. Much to her shame, she had been standing there, pin in hand, arguing with herself.
With renewed persistence, she jammed the hair pin into the mechanism. But it was proving stubbornly insistent. There was no hope for it. She was going to have to use a second hair pin to make a lever.
Praying her hair did not come unraveling around her shoulders, she felt about for a second pin and removed it. Her hair still seemed relatively stable, thank heavens, so she returned to the art of picking the lock. After bending the second pin to the angle she required, she slid it into the lock, then used the other pin to press about for a vulnerability.
“Will you be needing a third hair pin?”
Dorset’s voice, so near to her left ear yet again, gave her a start. She cried out, the sound echoing in the gardens, reverberating off the gravel and hedges and the stone of the main house wall.
