“But that’s perfect, then,” she said brightly.“Youcan show me about the place.”
She set off at once, grimacing a bit as her slippers sank into the mud at the edge of the field.Glancing over her shoulder, she frowned at Hal’s impassive, arms-crossed stance.
“Come along,” she said briskly.“Or have you forgotten you promised to help me with my plans?”
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” was his low response, and the air between them suddenly roiled with tension.
Gemma swallowed hard.Bracing her shoulders back and her chin up, she forced herself to look Hal in the eye.He was watching her with the hooded gaze of a predator, missing nothing and giving away nothing, but somehow Gemma knew he was thinking about that kiss.
That kiss, and the terrible things she’d said afterward.
“I’m actually glad we encountered one another,” Gemma told him, remembered shame prickling her scalp and tightening her shoulders.“The truth is, I should have sought you out at once, but I was a bit of a coward and I didn’t.At any rate, fate has intervened and I suppose that means I must take the opportunity to say, well.I’m sorry.”
One brow lifted at a slightly sardonic angle was Hal’s only visible reaction to this admittedly inelegant speech.“What are you sorry for?”
Damnation.He was really going to make her say it.
Gritting her teeth, Gemma said, “For kissing you.For being unforgivably rude.For implying that you couldn’t have honor because you have no title—believe me, I do understand how little honor there is to be found among the highest ranking members of the Ton.”
She paused, feeling the back of her neck and tips of her ears get hot.“I believe that you are a man of honor, and I promise you I’m not here to cause trouble for anyone in this village, or to make anyone’s life harder.I only want to get my mother and sister and me out of here and back to London where we belong.”
Hal stepped closer, coming out from under the shade of the trees to stand with Gemma in the sun-washed field of tall, waving grass.A breeze rippled across the field like a wave rolling in to the shore.Sunlight glinted off the strands of copper, bronze and gold in Hal’s hair and sparked green fire in his eyes.He was so handsome, Gemma felt her breath catch and her blood pound through her veins as if her whole body had been startled awake by his nearness.
“Thank you for that very handsome apology,” Hal said gravely, his deep voice like velvet rubbing along Gemma’s skin.“I appreciate it.But there’s one thing you mentioned that you need never be sorry for.”
“Oh?”She stared up at him, too enthralled to be embarrassed by how breathless she sounded.“What’s that?”
Hal reached out one large, work-roughened hand and gently palmed the side of her throat to pull her in toward his body.Gemma felt every inch of herself yield to him.Her lips parted on a gasp.
When he bent his head low to speak into her ear, Gemma shivered in delight at the brush of his silky, close-cropped beard.His voice was a soft growl when he whispered, “Don’t ever apologize for kissing me.”
With a muffled moan, Gemma lifted up onto her toes, dropped her coat in favor of grasping his broad shoulders, and took him at his word.
ChapterSeven
So much for being a man of honor.
Hal couldn’t believe he was allowing this to happen again.But then Gemma’s velvety tongue swept across his lower lip, eager and questing and sending sharp bolts of desire shooting straight down to his cock, and he couldn’t believe he’d managed to make it through fifteen minutes of conversationwithoutkissing her senseless.
She’d just been so adorably flustered and flushed, in a way that he knew was unusual for the confident, self-possessed lady.Her deliciously impractical dress had done nothing to hide the heaving of her substantial bosom with every agitated breath; he’d been half afraid, half hopeful, that one more deep inhalation would overcome the flimsy bodice entirely.
As her sweet mouth ate hungrily at his, her slim fingers clutching at his shoulders, Hal took a moment to investigate the filmy scrap of lace that revealed more than it concealed of the upper slopes of Gemma’s creamy, round breasts.
His fingertips edged along the square neckline, calluses catching on the fine fabric, and when she gasped into Hal’s mouth he gave in to the need to shape the glorious plump roundness of her breast with his palm.She made another of those soft noises that drove him mad, and he grew half-delirious with the weight and softness of her, the exaggerated curve of her waist that he knew owed more to her natural shape than to the corset lifting her breasts up like an offering.
Gemma clutched at his back and shimmied her hips closer.Hal’s blood heated and surged, pounding in his ears and throbbing in his iron-hard prick.
The way she reacted to him, the open, uninhibited response of her sinfully tempting body, reached deep into Hal.
We London girls know what to do in the dark.
The words beat in his brain and emboldened his hands to explore the sinuous lines of her.He tore his mouth from hers to trail soft, biting kisses down the side of her neck as he delved under the muddy hem of her skirts.
His fingers skimmed her stocking-clad legs, tracing the ribbons of her garters before continuing up to the slit in her drawers with unerring precision while Gemma gasped against his shoulder and made a murmur of assent that set fire to his blood.Without hesitation, Hal honed in on her secrets as though he’d touched her like this a hundred, a thousand times before.
And yet at the same time it was as if he’d never been with a woman in his life, because nothing he’d experienced had prepared him for the soft explosion that detonated in his brain when he traced the seam of her body and found the delicate folds hot and slick with the honey of her desire.
For him.
