Her tongue stroked into his mouth, agile and quick, and Thorne thrust his hands into her hair and tugged her into the shadows of the lane behind the hotel that housed the mews.
She stilled for a moment when he kissed her back, and Thorne nearly let her go, but then she was kissing him again.
People hurried past them, heads down against the wind, hands holding bonnets and hats to keep them from blowing away.Everyone was in a hurry to get indoors before the storm hit, sensing the rain on the air with the infallible instinct inherent to all who lived in London.
No one took any noticed of Thorne and Lucy wrapped in each other’s arms as the first fat drops fell from the sky and splattered on the pavement around them.
Thorne felt as though steam should be rising from him, as though the rain must evaporate the instant it touched his heated body.She made him desperate, hungry and aching after nothing—nothing!A mere kiss!He, who had performed every lascivious act imaginable and plumbed the depths of every sin he could think of.
Undone by a mere slip of a girl and a single kiss.
A feeling rose in his chest, even as he clutched her closer and tilted his head for a deeper connection between their slick, open mouths.A feeling he’d had before.
Trapped.Not by her physical arms wrapped around his neck, but by the intensity of his own need for her.
Tearing his head away, Thorne panted down at her.He knew his eyes were wild in the darkness of the rain-soaked night.
You have no idea what I want, she’d said.
Didn’t he, though?He’d made quite the study of Lady Lucy Lively.He knew that she loved her family, but didn’t always feel accepted by them.He knew she wanted to carve out her own place in the world, even as she longed for someone to share it with.He knew her secret, romantic heart that she shielded with her barbed wit, and he knew that her outward confidence hid a core of self-doubt that she struggled to contain.
He knew her.And if he wasn’t careful, she was going to come to know him in return.
That, he could not allow.
So he did the only thing he could think of to free himself, and her.He forced himself to smile down at her.And he said, “Perhaps I have time for a quick one before I return to Mrs.Forrest.I must say, I’m surprised you’re still up for it after finding out I’ve only been toying with you this whole time.I do like you Lively girls.Such good sports.”
Ripping herself from his embrace as though his touch suddenly burned, Lucy stared at him through the driving storm.Her lashes were clumped and wet, her cheeks tracked with raindrops or teardrops; he would never know which.
His heart squeezed as though she’d reached a hand into his rib cage to strangle it in her fist.
“I hate you,” she said, so quietly it should have been inaudible in the downpour, but Thorne felt every syllable like a separate blow.
Then she turned, gathered up her heavy, wet skirts, and walked out of the alley.
“I know,” he murmured to the empty darkness, eyes unseeing, hands still tingling where they’d held her to him only moments ago.“You forgot, for a bit, that’s all.”
So he’d reminded her.He’d peeled back the ribbons and lace he’d used to pretty the thing up over the last two weeks, to reveal the ugly truth at the core of it all.
She hated him.And she was right to.
But as Thorne walked back inside The Grand to settle his account and check that Mrs.Forrest wasn’t still sitting in the dining room waiting for him—of course she wasn’t; a woman like Susannah Forrest never sat alone in any room containing red-blooded men for longer than two minutes—he couldn’t stop picturing Lucy’s eyes when she said it.
I hate you.
Except her eyes weren’t full of hatred; they were dark with pain.
He’d hurt her.And despite all his schemes and stratagems, he hadn’t meant to do that.
He hadn’t truly thought he could touch her deeply enough to cause her pain.
Another sin for the tally sheet, which was growing long and unwieldy and wearisome at this point.
Thorne paid his bill and accepted the hotel manager’s effusive apologies for Lucy’s intrusion upon his meal, and went home to his elegant, impersonal suite of bachelor apartments on Piccadilly, and the vision of Lucy’s blue, hurt-shadowed eyes never left him.
He greeted his valet, Avery, absently and submitted without complaint to the man’s remonstrations upon the sodden state of his clothes.His mind was far away—or at least a mile away in Grosvenor Square, at Ashbourn House.
What if there was a way to take some of the pain from Lucy’s eyes, so that he could remember them glowing with warmth and light and life and pleasure?And what if he could do it all without risking falling into the same exact trap he’d just wriggled free of?
