She settled back, smiled into the pages of her book, and began reading aloud.
Two
Her mouth.
Kittredge groaned silently as his cock stiffened in his mud-spattered trousers.
Her mouth was an invitation to sin. Rosy red. A plump lower lip and a cupid’s bow on top. And when she smiled, her lips parted and displayed an adorable gap between her two front upper teeth.
His eyes dropped. Nice, round breasts he hadn’t noticed earlier. Were her nipples red to match her mouth? In his imagination, they were.
If he were anywhere else besides a moving carriage, he would have long since disappeared. Found privacy behind a locked door and obtained some relief. But hewasin a carriage and would have to maintain his barely-civilized veneer.
And he came to be grateful he could not flee because he would have missed the unparalleled experience of listening to this woman with the gap-toothed smile and the sensual lips and the widely-spaced dark eyes reading hackneyed quips from what must be an ancient edition ofJoe Miller’s Jests.
He couldn’t remember a better afternoon in his life.
And the best bits were when she could not read because she was so overcome with laughter, so choked with mirth at the foolishness coming in the next line. And even though nobody in the coach could understand the words that erupted around her helpless spasms of merriment, everyone laughed anyway.
Everyone but himself.
The Duke of Kittredge did not laugh. It was well-known he had no sense of humor.
He did eat his pie, however. To refuse it would be the act of a churl and might hurt the laughing woman’s feelings. Although he had no earthly idea why he should care about her feelings.
Besides, he was hungry, having last eaten yesterday, just before they had left the hunting box and gone their separate ways—Dagenham and Bevel to London in one private post-chaise and himself toward Little Flicking-Green in another. His intestines had been churning over the sure-to-be-catastrophic Christmas house party looming in his future and he had not been able to fathom eating.
But he had escaped that horrible fate, hadn’t he? Postponed it, anyway, since there was no shortage of invitations for an unmarried duke, no matter how much arseholery was attached to him.
But, for the moment, he was safe. And ravenous.
He tore the wax paper, lifted the pie, and sank his teeth into it. It was good. Very good. His pie disappeared down his gullet with unseemly haste.
Could he find a similar pie in London tonight? He would not get one at his club. He would be served a chop or a fowl or a joint. How lamentable when what he wanted was another pie. Or three. And to keep listening to the voice and the laugh of this dark-haired Scheherazade in old boots.
But despite his craving, he wouldn’t eat the pie in his other hand. He’d put it in his pocket for safe-keeping. It belonged to the extraordinary woman seated opposite him.
At the next stop, the matron next to the laughing woman started to stand. Kittredge got out of the carriage to help the older woman down, but the pretty Scheherazade stepped out after him and Kittredge had a terrible moment when he thought she, too, was ending her journey.
But she didn’t have her book or her reticule. She was just making it easier for the other woman to disembark.
A sweet anguish washed through him. Relief mixed with damnably irksome hope.
After assisting the matron down, Kittredge offered his hand to the Scheherazade and she flashed her gap-toothed smile at him as she took his hand and mounted the step.
A smile.
He couldn’t recall a woman besides his mother ever smiling at him. Really smiling. Unabashedly, unreservedly, with no fear, no nervous desire to please.
And he had an exemplary view of her arse as she stepped up into the coach. Lovely and ample and delectable, proudly straining the gathers of her pelisse.
Kittredge was a man with few weaknesses. But one was for a shapely, generous bottom whose curves filled his large hands. He flexed his fingers at his sides as his cock once again turned into a pulsing length of iron.
Now I can sit beside her if I wish.
But it wasn’t immediately clear to him if he would prefer to be next to her or across from her so he could continue to look at her.
Next to her. Yes. He’d already sat across from her. Definitely next to her. Maybe the side of her perfect arse would accidentally nudge against him. A meaningless contact to her, but a Christmas gift of a caress for him.
