Her throat bobbed under my fingers. “We should—we need—focus. Adventures go best when you’re focused.”
“Am I finally to learn the secrets of Lady Davina’s adventures?” I threw the name—her title—out in a desperate attempt to remind my body just how inappropriate our positions were.
It was entirely ineffectual. Instead, my feet, entirely without permission, took a step closer.
We were in the middle of the hall, she could have stepped back, maintained the distance easily. But she stayed precisely where she was, letting me crowd her.
“Not all of them. If you learned all of them you would too easily prevent future adventures.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. My days would be dreadfully dull without them. And you wouldn’t be Davina without your adventures.”
A single finger of her free hand caught the edge of my waistcoat and clung there.
“You hate my adventures.” Her retort wasn’t sharp, but it was less breathy.
“I hate when you put yourself in danger. The rest—do you remember that day? With the pirate whiskey?” At her nod, I continued. “It was barely a fortnight after my father passed.It was a struggle to dress every morning. And that night… I went home and laughed for nearly a quarter of an hour. Your adventures—the ones without threat to life or limb—are my favorite part of any day.”
“You did?”
“Davina… these last days have been, without a doubt, the most ridiculous hours of my life. I haven’t the foggiest idea how I’m going to get you out of this with your reputation unscathed. I’ve lied to my family. I’ve been nauseated nearly the entire way. And on occasion, you would test the patience of a saint. But—and I may owe this to the head injury—there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to reach Scotland. I don’t want to hand you over to your brother. Do you know how ordinary the rest of my life will seem by comparison? You’re extraordinary, Davina.”
For an unending minute, she said nothing. Her amber gaze sought something on my face, in my expression. Finally, her lips parted to speak at the same time that footsteps echoed around the bend we hadn’t yet reached down the hall.
It was instinct that moved me. I caught her upper arm and pulled her into the nearest room and around the corner. That same instinct drove me to press her against the wall behind the open door, to cage her there.
I heard the precise moment the intruder’s feet found the carpet lining the hall on the other side of the door. Through the crack between the door and the frame, the dull skirts of Mrs. Reed swished passed.
And then my eyes found Davina’s. Burning embers in the light of whatever room we’d found ourselves in, they were wide and soft. Her breath fell in sharp pants against my neck, tantalizing. Her scent, earthy, spicy, citrus wrapped around us.
When her perfect plump lips formed the sounds of my name, something inside me broke. My hand found her jaw at the same moment my lips found hers.
Our lips met and the world split in two.
Before. And after.
The Kit before was good and noble and would never kiss a lady. This Kit, the new Kit, was going to ravish Davina against this wall until she was as mad as she made me.
Honor be damned.
Twenty-Two
LEIGHTON HALL—APRIL 12, 1817
DAVINA
Kit’s kisswas entirely unexpected, and entirely inevitable. In some ways, I had been waiting, my breath bated, since we woke that morning, since I proclaimed myself his wife, since I abducted him. Now that he was finally claiming me as his own, I could breathe again.
But I never would have anticipated he would kiss likethis. That it should feel…
This wasn’t the delicate pressing of lips I would have expected from him. A gentle tasting of one lip, then the other.
Nor was it the wild claiming of a man broken—though I sensed I may have broken him just a little.
This kiss was a systematic, methodical, sensual destruction of every last one of my defenses—the very thoughts in my head.
His impossibly full lips were even smoother against mine than I could believe. The brush of his overgrown stubble against my hand that made its way to his jaw was a sharp, erotic contrast. I guided that jaw, pulling him even closer.
And Kit responded by catching both my hands in his own, and pressing them back against the wall, slotting his leg between mine and erasing every whisper of space between us.
