Fucking Isabella Anstruther-Colbrook silly was, in its way, a strategy.
She likely planned to do the same to him.
And,bloody hell, he wanted her to.
It was not merely her body, though that was no small thing, but the quickness of her mind, the spark in her eyes, the way she met him without flinching. Yearning settled low, a pull threaded through every careful thought. He wanted herlaughing beneath him, dazed beside him, trusting him until the rest followed as naturally as breath.
He wanted a new life with her in it.
Which was how he found himself pacing his bedchamber after midnight, wondering if his dream was about to arrive.
The knock was light, barely there—easy to miss if he hadn’t been waiting for it.
Isabella entered before he reached the other side of the chamber. She was a vision in a pale blue sleeping gown edged with lace, silk clinging softly, her hair unbound and her tawny eyes steady on him. It strained belief that she had crossed the halls at this hour dressed in almost nothing, though this wing of the house stood deserted.
Closing the door, she leaned against it. “Ever,” she whispered.
He halted in the middle of the room, unsure of his next step. “Isa.”
It was a strange sensation when the seducer became the seduced.
She glanced about, taking inventory, gathering what she could about him. He followed her gaze, curious despite himself. Books piled atop his nightstand, a shirt tossed across an armchair, a marble-topped vanity marked by the quiet evidence of masculine habit. The things he sought to hide were in a metal box beneath a plank in the floor. Other items lay buried in a secure drawer of his escritoire.
Parts of a life he was trying to leave behind.
Parts he grew more willing to share with every instant spent in her presence.
Smiling wickedly, she shoved off the door and closed in on him. No hint of nerves showed, only a calm resolve that tightened his breath. For someone so young, she possessed remarkablesteadiness.
“You brought wine,” she said when she stood before him, nodding to the bottle and glasses on the table.
He twisted a length of her golden hair around his finger as she stood before him. It wrapped like spun silk, ensnaring him. “And food. In the event…” He let the words trail away as he dragged his fingertip down the sleek line of her throat. “I might not let you go until dawn.”
She tilted her head, her jaw grazing his hand. “I might stay for days.”
They were aligned in that moment, perhaps the last in which neither would hold the upper hand. As the night air flowed through the open window and the hiss and pop of the hearthfire settled around them, they stood and stared, unmoving.
Her eyes were wide, her breasts unbound, covered by nothing but a slip of silk that did little to disguise their shape, her hair tumbling loose around her. Her shoulders were delicate, her arms slender, her hips rounded, a study in contrasts that stirred him.
Her gaze flicked over him. “Is that as far as you got on your own?”
“I was waiting for you to do the rest,” he whispered. He’d removed his coat, boots, and cravat, unbuttoned his shirt. His feet were bare. He wanted her to see at a glance, the moment she stepped inside, that if she stayed this would be unlike anything that had occurred before—and that if she wished to turn away, now was the time.
Ever would not be her host, or even her pretend fiancé.
Here, he would be her lover.
She laughed softly, mirroring his move, trailing her finger down his chest until she reached his trousers. Hooking it into the nankeen waistband, she tugged him closer. “I want to do to you what you did to me. I want totasteyou.”
An image of her on her knees before him stormed his senses. “Sprite, I?—”
Struggling to marshal his thoughts, he cupped her jaw and tilted her lips to his. They were open, welcoming, her tongue grazing his first, telling him,go there, go deeper.He lacked the will to deny her, or the words to explain that the intimacies she imagined were not the sort a man walked away from.
Not when his heart rested in her hands.
But Isabella was fearless, courageous where he faltered. She walked him back into the bedpost and fought for control. It wasn’t seamless, their joining—bumped teeth, mouths crooked in their urgency to connect—until itwas.
It hit him then, a rush of longing so sharp his knees nearly buckled.
