“Hiswrongopinions,” she shot back, gaze narrowing. This man was an ever-changing path. One minute sensual and agreeable, and the next, completely infuriating. “Arrogance isn’t so attractive either,Your Grace.” She paused. “And I’m not your lady.”
“Really?”
His superior grin made her wish to break every mirror in the house, quite a feat since there were at least three dozen on this floor alone.
“Tell me,” he said, “do most ladies kiss men without an understanding between them? Or just the ladies you know?”
Danny’s mouth gaped. He didn’t dare assume such things! “Cad!”
He shrugged. “Better a cad than a tease.”
The blow struck true. Danny had heard nothing else from their social circle for years. Lady Daniella, charming and lovely and the worst tease to plague society.Men beware the succubus’s charms.
She’d never accepted such idiotic labeling for truth. Having standards and being unafraid to lower them didn’t make heranything but expectant. And she’d never encouraged a single suitor. Not. A. Blasted. One.
She’d had but three kisses in her life. One a chaste thing by Mr. Pendor that she’d made sure to end quickly and with the understanding made clear a man should wait for an advance to be welcomed. The second and third... they had been anything but chaste and with the same man.Thisman. A man she’d let into her bedchambers, barely clothed.
Anger gave way to shame.
She turned her back, unwilling to show him anything less than a warrior’s face.
He cursed, and she felt the heat of him through her thin nightgown as he neared.
“Forgive me,” he said.
His whisper sent her sizzling.
Never one for girlish outbursts or ridiculous fantasies, she wasn’t the naive seventeen-year-old any longer. She was a woman of twenty and she had no illusions of what her reactions to his nearness meant. She’d been courted by nine men, feeling everything from mild amusement to rigid disgust, sometimes all during the same day with the same person. But Percival Cole made her feel nothing but alive. No one else made her want. Made her ache. In the strangest way, feel safe. The rest of the male population may have thought of her as they would: A lady. A tease. Cold and unfeeling. But it would not be the same withhim.
She knew how this would end. The wayshechose.
His hands came to her shoulders, hot and big. “Please, Daniella, forgive me. I should not have said such a thing.”
She closed her eyes, reveling in the heat and size of him. “No, you shouldn’t have.”
“I didn’t come here to fight.”
She shuddered as his lips skimmed her ear. “No, you came to frighten me.”
“Is it working?”
It was that final note of vulnerability in his question—so slight, she’d known he hadn’t meant to give his insecurity away—that had her twisting around and pressing herself into his hard body. Or was it he who’d twirled her to bring them chest to chest?
When his mouth sought out hers, the who of it ceased to matter. What she’d mistaken as a kindling flame was a raging blaze that had the potential to ruin everyone in its path if not controlled. But there was no stopping the force between them, powered by desire and a blending of iron forged wills that somehow fit perfectly together.
There was no trepidation, only a sense of excitement that should’ve given her pause.
It didn’t.
