Her head whipped back toward him. Her eyes went wide and alarmed as if he’d caught her in the midst of picking his pocket.
She settled her shoulders resolutely.
“No,” she admitted, on a frayed hush. She sounded resigned, almost sorrowful. Perhaps a little bemused. As if this was some cardinal truth, something which simply could not be helped.
But she didn’t sound sorry.
And for some reason this both amused him and made him powerfully glad.
He leaned forward and suddenly, almost before he knew he was doing it, slowly drew a fingertip along the gleaming, clean line of her jaw. It was a reflex; it seemed necessary to touch the source of his confusion, his fascination, his restless irritation. The way he might attempt to puzzle out any mysterious found treasure.
She went abruptly still. As though her breath had ceased in her lungs.
But she didn’t flinch away.
Her eyes remained fixed on him.
And as his fingertips slowly glided along her skin he felt a jolt in the vicinity of his heart. Like someone had kicked in a rusty door. He was assailed by a strange, sudden rush of emotion. He could not sort out whether it was anger or impatience or yearning; it felt like a blend of all of those. It was pure and brilliant and new to him.
He curved his hand, slid it back until his fingers threaded into her hair.
And because her breath was suddenly swift and warm against his palm, and because she ever so slightly tipped her head to better fit against the cradle of it, he kissed her.
What the bloody hell are you doing,youdaft cove,St. Leger thought.
He truly didn’t know. He knew how to kiss a woman senseless when their mutual goal was to be naked with her legs hooked over his shoulders within minutes.
He’d never kissed a woman in order to express something he did not know how to put into words.
Her lips felt like innocence and decadence. Crushable as petals, seductive as a feather bed. The contradiction did his head in. He felt at once like a common thief. As though this rare pleasure, like so many others before, was not meant for him.
And then her eyes fluttered closed. And at that sweet, primal signal of complicity, of desire, anticipation tensed his every muscle.
Hadn’t his credo always been “take what you can get when you can get it”?
He eased her deeper into that kiss as if it were a bath of honey and cognac. Slow, slow. So she could pull away, if she chose. So he could come to his senses, if he chose.
So that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world when her lips softly parted beneath his. And when his tongue touched hers for the first time, that little sound she made, that helpless catch in her throat—he knew it was lust hitting her blood like a drug.
That sound went straight to his cock.
He kept the pace slow. Punishingly, maddeningly—for him—so. He could not ever before rememberluxuriatingin a kiss, of deliberately teasing his desire to a fine, stiletto point. His cock was soon painfully hard, and this seemed an exquisite torment. They both shifted, restlessly, on the settee, accommodating ramping need. Soon their breaths mingled in swift, rough gusts, as their lips touched, and slid, and nipped and met and parted, met again.
And when her head fell back into his hands and her fingers curled into his shirt he made a thorough, lascivious plunder of the hot, wet satin of her mouth.
She met him with devastating instinct.
Every stroke of their tongues danced him closerto the very ends of his control. Until he found himself at the edge of what he sensed was a deep shocking seam of need.
That’s when his survival instincts burned through the fog of lust. Something told him if they plummeted into that there would be no getting out.
He ended the kiss as he started it: gently.
Pulled his fingers free of the silky net of her hair.
Astounded to realize his hand was trembling a little. Such were the rough tides of his blood.
He sat all the way back against the settee.
