He moaned and kissed her harder, every muscle of his body pulled taut. Conscious thought was pitched into the air like a handful of leaves.
His hands left her hair and roamed her back, swooping low until he scooped her bottom and tucked her closer still. With no encouragement, she looped her feet around his thighs, and the new closeness was heaven.
When he broke the kiss to breathe, he dragged his face against her cheek, marking her with the roughness of his emerging beard and kissing his way down her neck. “Willow,” he whispered once, twice.
“Cassin,” she answered, kissing the top of his head, his ear. “Cassin, if we do this, how are we to remain detached and separate? Before I met you, a romantic entanglement never crossed my mind.”
He captured her mouth again, and she kissed him back. He fought for lucidity and lost, dragging in a breath. He had the idle thought that talking took too much away from kissing. He took her bottom lip in his mouth and sucked. So bloody soft.
“If we . . . make love,” she continued, pausing long enough to answer his next kiss, and his next, “will we not become emotionally involved? Will I not be your real wife?” He attacked her neck, and she dropped her head, moaning slightly. She added, “Your wife in earnest?”
“It needn’t be so . . . so serious,” he breathed, sweeping his thumbs up and down her sides, learning the perfect curve where her waist gave way to hip, her ribs gave way to breast.
“What do you mean?” she asked, stretching, raising her arms to give him more access.
Ah, she liked that, did she? He broadened his stance, still trying to get closer, swiping delicious circles from her hip to the ticklish spot beneath her arm.
“Cassin?” she said again, turning her face so her mouth was free.
He moaned, frustrated with the conflicting needs, to kiss her and to answer her at the same time. “We needn’t become emotionally involved to be intimately, physically acquainted, Willow,” he finally managed, speaking around nips to her ear.
He reached behind his hip for her foot, trying to tuck it more tightly around his thigh, but when he returned to her face, her lips were closed and hard and still. She’d gone still all over, in fact. The foot he’d just tucked closer, dropped from his leg and dangled from the workbench.
The change registered somewhere deep in the hibernating recesses of his brain, but his body did not hear. He buried his face in her neck, breathing her in, and said, “Can you not see how right this feels, sweetheart? We could enjoy the . . .rightness—and then walk away. Just as you conceived it, living our own lives. Our hearts need not engage.”
And now she wasn’t simply still; she was cold and stiff, rigid in his arms. He started, his brain scrambling to catch up.
He pulled back to look at her. “Are you—”
“Why am I surprised?” she said softly. Her arms fell from his neck. She leaned away, propping herself on her hands. He was given little choice but to step back. He gave his waistcoat a tug. He blinked at her. He stooped to pick up his coat.
He searched his brain for what, exactly, he’d just said to her. He couldn’t remember the precise words.
But he could guess.
“Willow, I—” He wiped his mouth. “Your inexperience catches me off guard every time.”
“I may be inexperienced, but I know enough about myself to assure you that I will grow attached if I consummate my marriage to a man—that is to say, if I consummate my marriage to you.” She caught herself and stopped talking. She placed a hand lightly on her mouth. “This cannot catch you off guard, surely. I cannot agree to a physical relationship without an emotional bond.” She glanced at him and then quickly away.
He reached out to hand her down, but she leapt of her own accord and then sidestepped him.
“Believe me,” he heard himself say, “it can be done. Many, many people enjoy sexual congress with no . . . other commitment. Women and men alike. This is what I meant when I said that no wife of mine should carry on with paramours behind my back. It happens every day. Right or wrong.”
“Just to be perfectly clear,” she said, “you believe that a detached marriage should also amount to detached lovemaking?” She turned away. “We don’t know each other at all,” she said, a revelation. Her voice was soft. “If you believe this of me, you do not know me.”
“I’ve said this from the beginning.”
She did not respond, and he watched her float around the room. Reality and conscience began to weigh on him. This is not what he wanted. He was many selfish things, but he was not a coercer of virgins.
“Look, Willow, I was—”
“I cannot,” she said, cutting him off. She shook her head. “I don’t claim to know much of the passionate dealings of women and men, but I know myself. And I cannot trade intimacies with you and then walk away, feeling nothing. It’s not what I intended for the arrangement; it will disrupt our rapport, and I . . . I would suffer.” She glanced at him. “You may not know me, but I know myself. I am nothing if not self-preserving. To a fault, perhaps. It’s why I never intended to marry in the first place. We approach the agreement with no expectation of intimacy, or we don’t approach it at all. Strictly business. My dowry for the freedom of being your wife and leaving Surrey with my friends.”
“Fine,” he said. She was correct, of course. It was a pattern with her.
“It’s settled, then,” she said.
“Settled,” he repeated, rasping the word out. It almost hurt to say it. But only a scoundrel would twist her innocent design in order to sate his own need. And anyway, she did not appear open to further discussion. She dropped the hairpins on the workbench and stared out the window. She would not look at him.
