She startled but didn’t draw away. He examined her fingers in the glow cast by the lantern. They were stained with ink. When his fingertips ran over the ink stains, she laughed and tried to pull her hand away. In doing so, she twisted closer to him, brushing up against him. He felt himself go hard at the contact, the softness of her body making all of him stiffen.
“My best ideas always come to me right before I dash out the door.”
“And what was your idea tonight?” He imagined some note for her maid, or a shopping list, or a postscript to a letter.
“You will laugh.” She paused, her expression uncertain. She looked once more into his face and then away again. “This is not my first time examining ruins. I am writing a book on the landmarks of England. Or, truly, the stories about them. I remembered how an old cottager once said that Corfe Castle looked like a single tooth poking up from a baby’s gum. I thought it might make a pretty opening.”
He looked down at her in disbelief. Who was she? What daughter of the gentry was writing a history of old stones? And yet he couldn’t concentrate on the question.
“And do you find it inconvenient to have ink-stained fingers?”
“Only when I remove my gloves. Fortunately, a ball supper is usually conducted in near darkness. I am seldom revealed.”
“So now you have been unmasked.”
She gave him that radiant, mischievous smile again, the smooth apples of her cheeks catching the lantern light.
He reached down and softly kissed her. She returned his kiss with a pressure of her own. Her mouth, her taste, enveloped him, so sweet it threatened to undo him, but he fought to keep his kiss gentle, teasing her lips with his tongue and drawing out from her a mewl of pleasure. Every bit of him tensed as she pressed herself into him and she opened her mouth to let him in further. He felt a groan escape his own lips. He would have been embarrassed by the sound—how she reduced him—but she felt too exquisite for him to care.
She broke away from him. He held still. He didn’t want to take anything that wasn’t freely given. That was, after all, the whole purpose of this evening, of his ruse, of being Mr. Overton. He wanted a woman to give herself to him and him alone, not a title or the idea of a man.
“I hardly know you.” She said the words so softly he would have missed them if he hadn’t been starving for her voice.
“We can return to the manor.” He put all the sincerity he could into this statement but he was careful not to sound eager. He wasn’t that much of a gentleman.
She said nothing in response.
John wanted more than anything to stay here with her. Still he held back his arts of persuasion. She needed to choose what came next.
Her fingers began tracing underneath his waistcoat, roving from the planes of his chest downwards. He stifled his reaction, still waiting for her to fully commit, but her fingers through the fabric tantalized him, making his breath come fast and shallow. He closed his eyes, the sight of her combined with her touch too much to take. Then, he felt her mouth on his again, teasing his open, sending shivers of desire from his lips to his groin.
“God, you’re perfect,” he said, breaking the kiss. It was a reflex he couldn’t suppress, just as he couldn’t stop himself from reaching forward and wrenching down her tight bodice as he had wanted to since he had first laid eyes on her.
Exposed, her breasts were even more beautiful than he had imagined, her hardened nipples a pale raspberry that looked almost painfully sweet, just like her mouth. He cupped their soft fullness in his palms before reaching down and taking the pebbled peaks into his mouth, glorying in the moans that he drew from her with each stroke of his tongue.
From within his arousal, he felt the urge to speak, to say again how she was perfection itself, but he found that it would kill him to form words. He had to completely surrender to this sensation. To her.
Because, with her against him, his mouth on her breasts, his hands exploring the peaks and hollows of her body, he knew the truth. He would marry her tomorrow if she wanted. He would marry her for only a few minutes more right now. He would make her his marchioness if it meant he could have her now and then again and again. He would have thought she was a witch, if she wasn’t beyond loveliness, beyond perfection, beyond life as he had ever known it. Her body, her mischievous smile, her grace, and the way she had told that story. That story which seemed, in a way that he didn’t understand, something like the story of his own life.
He couldn’t say that right now, though, because he had to fill his senses with her. He lifted her up towards him and her legs clasped around him. Through the fabric of her dress, she pressed her heat to his cock, which strained against his breeches with an insistence previously unknown to him.
If you had asked him that morning if he found the Tremberley Ruins erotic, he would have laughed. Yet, if she would let him, he knew that he would not be able to stop. His shame at his abandon, at his ruining a gently bred woman on a pile of rocks, would only be a drop in the sea of his pleasure.
Carefully, he pushed her back on one of the long, tablet-like stones. He kissed her again, drinking her in, and into this fierce, wanting kiss, he put all his hunger for her, and she responded in kind.
Just as he had completely given himself over to this kiss, to the certainty of what would soon follow, he heard shouting. John ignored it and she did the same, not startling beneath him.
Instead, she reached for the falls of his breeches. Intoxicating sensation throttled through him as her hand rubbed his pulsing cock through the fabric. She looked up at him, that same beguiling smile playing across her face, but this time it sent a complete riot through his blood. More than anything, he wanted to plunge himself inside of her, to escape into the ecstasy that he knew awaited him there.
The shouting grew louder. He heard his name, hisrealname,Forster, and he realized that the shouting was for him.
Still he couldn’t tear himself away. He hoped that whoever wanted to find him wouldn’t. She was still stroking him through his breeches and, half mad, he found her skirts and began to push them upwards.
Light washed over them on their slab of ruin. She pulled back, looking in the direction of the shouting.
He turned towards the noise and the light. When his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he saw Tremberley standing over him, lantern in hand. Seconds later, Miss Plinty appeared at his shoulder.
“What the devil, Trem?”
