“Whatever milady wishes,” he said easily.
He was accustomed to being alone with her. To being his most naughty, bringing color to her cheeks. This—playing the gentleman—was new and strange.
“Thank you,” she told him quietly as they made their promenade along the edge of the revelers, traveling in the opposite direction from her irate auntie.
“Gratitude?” He raised a brow at her. “For what? Showing you what a good kiss feels like so you have the benefit of knowing Lord Chilton’s could never compare?”
Damn.He had promised himself he would not refer to the kiss he suspected had occurred. And there went his promise.
The hand on his arm stiffened. “How do you know Lord Chilton kissed me?”
Goddamn it.Now he was going to have to kill Viscount Chilton. At a Christmastide country house party. Quite untidy and awkward, that.
He summoned all the restraint he possessed. “You disappeared from the ballroom, and when you returned, your lips were the color of crushed berries.”
That had been rather more poetic than he had intended. It was not as if he made a habit of studying her lips or the varying shades of color they possessed. Nor was it as if he spent any time at all thinking about her mouth…
Who was he attempting to fool? Of course he studied her lips, and of course he thought about her mouth. Every hour of every bloody day.
“I did not like it,” she surprised him by confessing. “He was not…”
“Me,” Blade finished for her, hoping to hell it was the truth.
The lone word she had been reluctant to utter.
“You,” she whispered, so softly he almost missed it.
“Come to me tonight.” The invitation left his lips swiftly. Old Blade at work, he was sure. The seducer, the rakehell. The man who took what he wanted and to the devil with anyone and anything else.
He should rescind those words. Call them back. He should not mean them. Should not long for them. He told himself she was an innocent. A bloody virgin. A lady. Their worlds could not collide. He was never going to marry her. All he wanted to do was deflower her.
But was that true? The emotion coursing through him now seemed stronger, brighter, bolder. Different than mere lust.
“Mr. Winter,” she said, color blossoming in her cheeks. “You know I cannot do that.”
“Why not?” he countered, being his daring self. And stupid. And reckless.
And like there was nothing he wanted more than the woman at his side in his arms, in his bed. He had not learned his lesson, had he?
“You know why not,” she returned quietly. “I cannot be ruined. I have a duty to my sisters.”
“How shall you be ruined if no one else knows?” He glanced toward her, searching her face. “I am discreet. The business with…”
He had been about to mention Penhurst and the duel as an aberration, but he could see the wisdom of refraining from reminding her of his troubles.
“Lord and Lady Penhurst,” she prompted, raising a dark brow.
Hell.She had remembered.
“Aye.” He nodded, feeling deuced awkward.
That was also unlike him. He had never spent so much time struggling over his words, trying to communicate. Every other set of petticoats he had wanted had been his, quite easily. But this woman—Lady Felicity—she was not like any of the others who had come before her. He knew that instinctively. Knew it in the same, breastbone-deep way he had known she was trouble that first day, when he had spotted her delectable rump sticking out from beneath his bed.
“I daresay discretion does not lead to duels.”
She was not wrong about that. But there had been no need to protect Lady Penhurst. He was not the first man who was not her husband to have warmed her bed, and he knew he was far from the last. Also, he had not cared about Lady Penhurst the way he cared about Lady Felicity.
There it was—the raw, real, terrifying truth.
