“How is this, my lady?”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid you still look as if you are about to tear someone in two.”
He felt as if he could, just to keep her safe. To keep her here with him in the sanctity of this moment, no one to interrupt.
“How am I meant to look, then?” he asked gruffly, trying his best to banish these inconvenient longings.
Lady Deering sighed. “You’re still scowling, you aren’t properly sitting in the chair, and your spine is stiffer than a staff.”
He glowered at her some more. This was the height of lunacy. It was the bowels of the night, she had told him she didn’t like him, and now she was directing him about as if he were a recalcitrant child in her charge.
“What would you have me doing, Marchioness?” he growled. “Dance a cotillion whilst grinning like a Bedlamite?”
Remaining here in the salon with her and indulging her whims had been a mistake. He ought to go at once.
But Lady Deering was huffing out a little sigh of irritation that somehow landed directly in his cock, and then she rose to her feet, padding across the Axminster until she hovered over him with her maddening scent and equally maddening curves. His fingers itched to touch, so he burrowed them into the plush arms of his chair instead.
She had abandoned her folio and porte-crayon on the chaise longue, and he liked to think if he’d have known her intention when she’d risen, he too would have shot up from his chair and made haste in quitting the chamber. Because her small, elegant, ladylike hands were now upon his, as soft as they looked.
“Let go of the chair, if you please,” she grumbled, sounding thoroughly put out with him.
And all Theo could think about was that touch, the wonder of her skin against his. Her hands on him. His breath froze in his lungs. She had touched him in the darkness the night before, but he had been so overwhelmed by her kisses that he hadn’t felt the full effect sink into his bones. A woman touching him of her own volition—how long had it been? Ages. A lifetime. And not just the touch, but the manner in which she did it, bare fingers plucking nimbly at his as if she truly believed she possessed superior strength, enough to force his hands from the chair if she wished.
He gave in, not because he had to, but because he could. And he wished to please her, to soothe the furrow from her brow. For a moment, she held his hands in hers, her success giving her pause.
“There we are,” she said triumphantly. “You were holding on to that chair as if it were your enemy. Isn’t this so much…” Her head came up, her gaze colliding with his, and her words trailed off for a moment before she finished them. “Isn’t this so much more pleasant?”
“Yes,” he agreed. “It is.”
But he wasn’t talking about releasing the damned chair and relaxing his grip upon it. He was talking about her hands in his. Her proximity. He was talking about the ability to pull her into his lap and take her lips with his.
Which he shouldn’t do.
He wouldn’t do.
Except that his hands weren’t inclined to listen to his head, and they pulled away from hers to land on the lush, feminine curve of her waist instead. She wasn’t wearing any stays beneath her dressing gown. By Deus, she felt decadent. Like something rare and special and in the wildness of that forbidden moment, likehis. His hands molded to her, traveling over her softness as if he might imprint the feeling of her upon his palms. But it wasn’t enough, touching her, holding her.
Her eyes were wide on his, her pretty pink lips parted.
And with one swift tug, she landed across his thighs in a heap of warm, delicious woman.
CHAPTER8
Pamela was in Beast’s lap. He had somehow deftly maneuvered her so that she was sideways. Her hands had found their way to his broad shoulders. This was decidedly not what she’d had in mind when she had been attempting to make him appear less foreboding so that she might sketch him.
Admittedly, inviting him to linger had been a mistake.
So, too, had the notion that she would be capable of sitting in the same room as him in the midst of the night, when the rest of the household was abed, with the warm glow of a brace of candles flickering around them, and not desire him. That she would have been able to stare at his handsome face without longing to trace the slash of his jaw and the finely molded sculpture of his lips with her fingertips. Without wanting to kiss him.
His scent, already familiar, crept over her like a lover’s caress.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, struggling to maintain her fast-fleeing control of the situation.
Of the man.
But that was foolish, wasn’t it? No one could truly control a man like the one on whose lap she was seated.
His cool gaze melted all the ice inside her.
