Yes.
But how to say it without sounding positively desperate for him.
The fact was she’d risk anything for him in this moment of absolute, achingneed.
Even forever.
She pressed her mouth against his ear. “No one will ever know,” she cooed into the intimate space. “It’ll just be this one night.”
His jaw clenched as if he were waging silent battle with himself.
No matter.
She would win the war.
And the part of herself that had nothing to do with the mind, but only withfeelingintuited exactly how.
Chapter Nine
Juliet replaced her lips with her tongue and stroked along the whorl of Rory’s ear, dragging a long, ragged groan from him.
That groan made her toes curl inside her borrowed slippers.
Of a sudden, his arms tightened around her and he stood. “If we’re going to do this?—”
“Oh, we most certainly are,” she assured him.
“Then we shall do it properly,” he finished. “In a bed.”
And with that, he marched with her in his arms straight through the dining room and down corridors blessedly empty of servants, until he was pushing open a door with his shoulder and depositing her to her feet on a worn wool rug before a low fire in the hearth.
“The bed is over there.” She indicated the rather imposing four-poster draped in heavy, satchel-brown velvet draperies from the same century as her dress.
“I didn’t want to be presumptuous.”
“I quite insist you presume.”
“This is your last chance.”
She shook her head. “This isyourlast chance.”
As they stood facing one another, her gaze dipped to the outline of his cockstand clearly illuminated by the flickering light of the fire. A shiver of desire rippled through her.
Perhaps it was her last chance.
Her last chance to have exactly what she wanted.
This man.
On what could only have been characterized as a low growl, he reached out and caressed her cheek before running his fingers along the nape of her neck. With a few quick movements, her hair was tumbling about her shoulders and down her back.
The dark intention in his eyes… Gone was the light-hearted Rory and in his place was a man whose utter command of the moment sent lightning to hidden places only he could touch.
If his gaze could do all that, what more could his body do?
His hand continued to trail down the column of her neck…along the line of her clavicle…lower still to the small mound of a breast, fingertips grazing a hardened nipple through fabric. She gasped.
A wicked smile tipped at his mouth. “You like that, do you?”
