He paused, not wishing to sound like a needy young buck infatuated with his maid. “For the experiment to work, I needto believe you want me. You must say arousing things you might ordinarily keep to yourself.”
Would she blush and stammer?
Or approach the matter like a skilled academic?
“I see. I shall do my best.”
He heard the nervous thread beneath her resolve.
“Shall I begin?” he said as they passed his mother’s portrait. Those painted eyes would mock his lapse in restraint. Yet she would never understand the distinction. This was not indulgence but education. He would never permit another man to bed his wife.
“Please do.”
He braced himself, expecting the truth to shock her. “When I shielded you from the shooter tonight, it wasn’t death that set my pulse racing. It was your warmth, your softness, that made me hold you tightly against the carriage door.”
He could still feel it now, the press of her body, the swell of her breasts beneath his hands. The danger had passed, but the memory remained.
The seconds of silence stretched before she said, “And I wasn’t panting because I thought we might be shot. It was the feel of you, hard against me.”
Bloody hell.
He should stop there, but his mind refused to obey.
“You have the most marvellous breasts, Olivia.” He should know. He’d studied every curve during those poetry recitals. “I didn’t pack your corset because I wanted to admire you without restriction.”
The words had slipped out more boldly than intended, but there was no calling them back now. And he wasn’t sorry. Not when her lips parted on a sigh.
A blush rose to her cheeks, but her voice held firm as they mounted the stairs. “And I find myself thinking about your chest, and wondering if you’re just as magnificent beneath that towel.”
Heat coiled in his abdomen. The image her words conjured—her eyes on him, her curiosity unguarded—struck like a blow. He’d been half-hard since the first kiss. Now, every step was an act of endurance.
“You should know your nightgown does little to protect your modesty when you’re cold. And the shadow between your thighs is an exquisite kind of torture.”
She inhaled sharply.
Perhaps he’d gone too far. Yet the sight of her flustered and breathless was its own reward.
“I’ve always longed for independence, yet the thought of your strong hands on my skin draws me perilously close to surrender.”
Oh, she excelled at this game, as he’d known she would. It didn’t feel like a game at all, but the first steps of lovers on their wedding night.
“Then know I mean to touch you without apology.”
“That is what you promised.”
He quickened his pace, the ache in his loins a siren’s call luring him into dangerous waters. “And I’m a man of my word.”
They stopped outside her bedchamber. Candlelight flickered over the carved panels, catching the copper in her hair. He reached to smooth a loose strand behind her ear, his fingers brushing porcelain skin.
“Your hair is extraordinary.” It was the contradiction that fascinated him, her love of morbid verse at odds with thebrightness within. “Like fire subdued, waiting for the right breath to wake it.”
She looked up at him, her lips curving in a faint smile. “And there’s something compelling about a man so dark he seems to carry the night with him.”
“You make temptation sound poetic.”
“Perhaps there’s poetry in two people being honest for once.”
It’s an illusion, he wanted to say, yet every word he’d spoken rang true. “You have the allure of Aphrodite, a beauty that tempts a man to sin.”
