His hard, muscled body against hers, his arms crushing her into him. The feel of his lips. So warm and pressing as the kiss grew more possessive, more demanding. She felt his tongue probing at her lips.
She did not know what to do. So many sensations, one of them fear that she would do something wrong and he would laugh at her. Or walk away.
She knew so little.
His tongue grew more insistent. She gasped as he pulled her head back with his large hand on her golden Grecian knot, his fingers laced into her hair. As she gasped, her lips parted and his tongue entered her mouth. Such intimacy, such closeness. Warm and wet and powerful, he lapped at the inside of her mouth and she wondered what his mouth might do to other parts of her body.
Like her neck.
She could feel something hard pressing into her abdomen as he backed her against a tree. It was his phallus, she knew. Her sister Mary had explained that part to her, and her own mother had had a “talk” with her a year ago but she could not abide to listen to her mother discuss the details of such things.
Oh, why had she not paid more attention? Why had she not asked more questions?
One of his large hands was on one of her breasts, just for a moment, and then he pushed himself away.
“I must see you again, Arabella. Meet me here tomorrow at the same time. But now, I must go.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and walked away quickly with a strange stiff-legged walk, quite unlike the swagger with which he had approached her.
She looked all over the ground but she never found her other glove.
She went home and wanted only to be by herself, in her room, so that she could think on her first kiss. It had happened. It was here. Love. And he was the picture-perfect hero for her. Big, dark, and brooding. And so passionate, so wanting. He would not stand on propriety and introductions. He saw her and wanted her and kissed her. That was how it should be.
The next day was quite different.
Again, she lied to her mother and found a way to leave the house alone and go to Hyde Park. How fortunate that she had been so guileless with her mother in the past. No one would suspect Arabella of lying in order to go and meet a man.
Giles was already in the little grove of trees and had spread a blanket on the ground.
“I have prepared a picnic,” he said and smiled.
He had prepared a picnic. For her.
Giles helped Arabella to sit on the blanket and then came to recline on his side next to her, up on his elbow. The picnic turned out to be some wine in a jug. Arabella drank a little to be polite—he had gone to such trouble to bring some glasses—but she did not usually drink wine in the middle of the day.
“You mentioned an estate, Mr. Fortescue,” she said. “Where is it?”
“Giles,” he said sternly.
“Giles,” she said softly and ducked her head.
“When you do that, Arabella, when you whisper and look away from me, I long to kiss you.”
He was going to kiss her again, she thought.
But he didn’t.
“It’s in Northumberland,” he said and drank more wine.
“So far away.”
“You see why I am not often in London.”
“Yes, I see.”
Giles sighed now and brushed a dark lock of his hair behind his ear. “I have been through so many difficulties of late, I dreamed of escape. So I came to London, hoping to lose myself in the diversions of the city.”
There it was again—that wounded look in his eyes that contrasted so strongly with his broad shoulders, his towering size, his strong jaw.
