Instead, he drew his thumb across her palm, musingly, gently. A caress. Tentative. As if seeing how she felt to him now that he knew what he knew, and now that she knew what she knew.
It was the strangest, most confounding thing. He might as well have lit a fuse. That little touch burned through his body and now he was alight with a restless need and he could feel hers thrumming in her, too.
“Like this,” he said softly.
“Like this,” she agreed, her voice lulled. “It isn’t gentle. It isn’t easy. It isn’t safe.”
“No.”
“It isn’t love.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t love. But it is... it has been... forgetting.”
“Is it wrong?” she whispered. Her voice was lulled, as his fingers trailed up the satin road of her forearm. He wanted to thank her for the rare pleasure of touching her. For the triumph andthrill of hearing her breath shorten, feeling her body soften, and knowing his touch had brought her that pleasure.
“I can’t imagine...” his voice sounded drugged, too “...why we were given these senses if we aren’t to use them. It seems a sin to squander that gift.”
“That’s precisely what I would say if I intended to seduce someone,” she said wryly.
He laughed, very softly. “And who are we hurting right now in this moment?”
It was as good a criterion as any.
“I wonder,” she said, her words lulled, “what it would feel like to lie with my bare back against the grass, and stare up at the stars.”
He closed his eyes. The image was glorious.
She wondered so many things. How many of them would she ever experience?
“There are more stars in America than there are here. I daresay naked, on a meadow of dark grass, beneath the stars, you would glow like the moon.”
She gave a stunned laugh.
His fingers traced the crease of her elbow, gently. Followed the road of the pale vein in her arm. Dragged, so lightly, just above the velvet ribbon trimming her bodice, scarcely softer than the skin above it. They snagged in the little valley between her breasts, hovered there, where her heart beat. She sighed softly, accepting the pleasure.
“I’ve always wondered how night air would feel on the parts of my skin that... never feel the night air.”
His fingers were on her laces, and light-fingered as a pickpocket, he had them undone.
“Lillias,” he said softly, and it was all he neededto say. The longing in it, the promise, was like a call she had no choice but to heed.
She turned her head. He dragged his lips across her forehead. He kissed her brows. He claimed her lips. The kiss was gentle, almost tentative. Because this was new, too.
And it was at once intoxicating.
Her trust and surrender did him in. He’d been careful of it for so long, for the sake of her honor and his. Mindful of the danger.
Now, for some reason, it seemed unnervingly precious.
And as he kissed her, he spread the laces of her dress gently and slowly, slowly dragged the delicate little fairy-wing sleeves of her dress down, down, until more of her back was bare to the night, so that she could feel the air, the breeze on her skin. His fingers played at the little short hairs at the nape of her neck, traced the little bumps of her spine as though they were prayer beads, and felt beneath them the quickening tempo of her breath, the shuddering rise and fall of it. And into the gap of her loosened dress he stealthily slipped his hands and grazed, with just his fingertips, the silky curve of her breasts.
She sighed and stirred and arched. Her body instinctively asking for more.
His cock was already hard. And growing harder.
And then, with the same featherlight touch, he grazed the hard beads of her nipples. Just so she would know.
Her head fell back on a gasp.
