“Is your given name Alice?”
She sighed loudly, so he could hear her vexation with him. “Yes.”
“Mine is Adam.”
Since she hadn’t asked, she had no comment. But it was a good name — solid, masculine, friendly.
“My sister has a maid named Alice,” he said.
She frowned at him. “That is of no import. A name doesn’t signify one’s station.”
“I didn’t say that it did,” he pointed out.
They stared at one another. Then she recalled another Adam.
“My father had a groom named Adam.”Tit-for-tat,she thought. Yet Lord Diamond didn’t appear the least set down.
“When I think of you as Alice, you seem entirely different from who you are as Mrs. Malcolm, the governess.” He took a step closer.
“Do I?” she asked. That night, standing in the darkness with a handsome man, she felt very different from Mrs. Malcolm, the governess. She was her old self,Lady Alice. A flighty, shallow ninny. She hoped not but feared it might be true.
“Yes,” he said. “You are a different woman entirely.”
She wanted to ask him what difference he saw in her when, to her amazement, he leaned in close and claimed her lips in a heated yet tender kiss.
Just as she hadn’t been able to help the strong current of sorrow that swept through her from the music, now she couldn’t beat back the wave of desire that pulsed in her veins, bringing her body back to vibrant life.
At once yearning for intimacy and craving his touch.
When his tongue touched her lips, he drew back. “Your cheek and lips are salty wet. Were you crying?”
He didn’t move away. Instead, he wrapped his arms around the back of her, and she leaned her head on his chest.
“I confess I was. That piece by Handel got the better of me.” No need to tell him it felt as though her whole disaster of a life had been represented by the funeral anthem.
“I thought it extraordinarily beautiful,” Adam admitted.
“Soulful,” she agreed.
“Sublime,” he said.
Then they remained quiet a second until she looked up at him. When their gazes met again, he groaned. Their mouths fused hungrily together once more. Alice wanted to strip off her inexpensive gloves and dive her fingers into his dark hair. She wanted to strip off his clothing and do more than that. It had been a long time, and it had never felt like this.
Up until the moment Adam had kissed her in a strip of land behind the assembly rooms, her body had remained obediently dormant. Three and a half years earlier, after a painful deflowering and a disappointingly brief first time with Richard, she’d then experienced a series of her husband’s hurried, selfish, oft-inebriated, and sometimes painful joinings in the marital bed.
Nothing had been remotely satisfying, but she had felt a feathering of need awaken. She hoped there was something more to experience. The few times she’d tried to make Richard slow down or touch her a certain way, he’d brushed aside her request, caring nothing for her feelings.
Luckily for her, he’d moved on to mistresses and deep bottles of gin.
Now beside the oak, flames of raw desire engulfed her, dampening the place between her legs. At the same time, her senses were assaulted by Adam’s sensuous kiss and his damnably delightful scent and the way he gently kneaded the flesh at her hip before his hands slid lower to cradle her rear end.
He tilted her hips against him, and her knees wobbled.
Shamelessly, she held on to him, both her hands clasping the front of his jacket. Reveling in the moments of pure pleasure, Alice moaned when he bit her lower lip, rasping it between his teeth before sucking it into his mouth.
She’d never been kissed like this before. It was a revelation, intoxicating, heady — she could barely recall her own name.
“Mrs. Malcolm!” It was yelled out loudly by Lady Susanne, who was a mere few yards away.
