That wasn’t true, of course. The heat of the moment, the argument, had caused him to lose his senses. When those senses returned, of course he had walked away in regret. But he’d still kissed her. And now she would never not know what his lips tasted like, what his hands felt like clenching against her back as he tugged her what felt like impossibly close.
Would it change whatever was between them? The friendship she always doubted and yet depended on, almost as much as she had depended on Claudia? Tears filled her eyes at the thought. She’d already lost one of them.
“Lady Marianne?”
She drew a breath. It was a gentleman’s voice at the door, but not Sebastian’s. She turned and found Lord Beckington standing at the terrace door. He had a friendly smile and she forced herself to return the expression, if only so he wouldn’t see her true, tangled feelings.
“Lord Beckington, good evening.”
“I’m so glad to have found you,” he said. “Do you have space left on your dance card, by chance?”
She swallowed. She’d come out here to avoid all that, but now the idea of distracting herself was tempting. “I…I do, my lord. The next, in fact.”
He held out a hand and she moved toward him, back to the ballroom, back to reality. A reality that could never be the same again.
Sebastian fought for breath as sat in his carriage, gripping the edge of the seat as it rattled along the cobblestone streets toward his home. He had said goodbye to no one after leaving the terrace, but had gone straight for the escape of his carriage. He’d not found his hosts, not Delacourt, certainly not Marianne.
God’s teeth, Marianne. What had he been thinking kissing her? On a terrace. At a ball. Where anyone could have seen them.
Actually, he knew what he’d been thinking. That only made it worse. He’d wanted her. The thwarted kiss at his home a week before had haunted him ever since, even when he tried to pretend it away. He’d wanted her and that want had become so loud in his mind that he couldn’t deny it anymore.
Now he could taste her on his tongue, he could feel the way she’d trembled against his fingers, he could hear the soft sound of pleasure she’d made in her throat, one she probably didn’t even realize she’d sighed into the dark, into him like a breath of life.
It all ricocheted through him and he pulsed with the power of his need for her. ForMarianne. The last woman in the world he should want for so many reasons they could hardly be counted. The chief amongst them being that he’d been forbidden to pursue her by a man he cared about like a brother.
One didn’t sport with a woman like Marianne. And since Sebastian was not interested in anything but sport, what he had done was…wrongwasn’t a strong enough word. He despised himself for it. For his lack of control, for his lack of forethought. He could lose a friend for this. Two friends, for regardless of what she thought, hedidview Marianne as that. In fact, sometimes he looked forward to seeing her even more than he did Delacourt.
Only one didn’t go around kissing friends like that, did they? They didn’t picture doing even more, like pushing her into the dark corner of the terrace and dropping to his knees to taste her far more intimately until she panted his name while she shook with release against his tongue.
“Fuck,” he grunted, trying to push those thoughts from his head. They wouldn’t go and he was happy the carriage was pulling into his drive.
He exited the vehicle as soon as it stopped, waving off the servants who came to greet him, his butler at the door. Nothing mattered now except the pulse of need that wouldn’t be denied. He strode straight upstairs to his chamber, locked the door behind himself and unfastened the fall front of his trousers.
His cock was half-hard already. It hadn’t been anything less since he took Marianne in his arms. It took one stroke to go to full hardness and he sank into the settee before the fire, slouching as he began to tug with purpose.
And his betrayer of a mind took him once more to Marianne. Back on that terrace, but in the dark corner like his fantasies in the carriage. Would she taste sweet when…no, notwhen. This wasn’t going to happen. It had to stop.
Still, he had to believe her gorgeous smell would permeate his entire being. He would find it just as intoxicating,moreintoxicating, if he lifted her skirts and rubbed his cheek against her bare thighs. Her fingers would go into his hair, clenching there like she’d clenched them against his chest the last two times he’d held her.
And he would devour her like some kind of wicked wolf in a fairytale. He would taste every inch of her quivering flesh until she convulsed against him and left his chin covered in the proof of her pleasure. Only then would he cup her against him and take her. Hard and fast against the wall of a house while he kissed her so that her moans wouldn’t be heard by all the very proper people just through the window around the bend of the terrace.
He came with such sudden power that his back curved off the settee. His heart was pounding, his hands shaking as his body came down from the high of fantasy and pleasure.
When was the last time he’d been so lost? He couldn’t recall it. Clearly, he needed to fuck someone just so that this madness would stop. He needed to go back to the Donville Masquerade or a brothel or a former mistress and just let himself have what he clearly couldn’t control.
Only he didn’t want that. Impossibly, the idea was actually repellent. And so he sat there on his settee, staring into the fire as his heart rate finally slowed to normal, and hated himself instead. Because he deserved that. And because he had no idea how to change it now that the wheels of this runaway desire had been set fully into motion.
Marianne sat in her night-rail at the small table by her window, a candle burning low beside her and casting a small circle of light onto the list Claudia had left her. It was far too late at night to be doing this, but after the ball earlier, she hadn’t been able to stop her busy mind and there was no way sleep could possibly come now.
She stared at the list, dipped a quill in ink and slowly scratched offExperience a Perfect Kiss.She had certainly done that in spades tonight. A perfect,perfectkiss that continued to haunt her mind and soul.
But no, she had pondered that enough. She wouldn’t continue to do so, at least not right now. She looked at the rest of the list. She’d almost completed another item there, quite unexpectedly:Fill My Dance Card.
It was odd that doing no more than wearing a more revealing dress and fixing her hair fashionably had allowed all the same people who ignored her to suddenly see her. She just had to be something different and then she was interesting, which was disappointing.
It also put her to mind of what Sebastian had said to her on the terrace before he…
No, she wasn’t going to think about the kiss, damn it.
