Page 69

An hour or so later, when she walked upstairs to visit the ladies’ withdrawing room, feeling forlorn and a bit lonely, she saw her fiancé. “Saw” wasn’t the right word. Giles came up the stairs behind her, his legs eating up the steps.

His expression had changed from austere to hungry.

“Oh,” Yasmin breathed.

He backed her into someone’s bedchamber and shut the door smartly behind them. “Giles!”

“No talking,” he growled. “May I kiss you?”

“Always,” she gasped, her heart speeding up.

He spun her against the door, his mouth descending on her parted lips in a feverish kiss that sent heat coursing through her body.

She pushed back his coat so that she could spread her hands over his chest, her fingers stroking slabs of muscle barely disguised by a linen shirt.

Giles was kissing the side of her neck, making grumbling noises in the back of his throat that made her thighs shake. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” he growled. “The way you smell, and the taste of your mouth and your skin, the way you moan in the back of your throat.”

“Giles.”

He looked up.

Her gown was sophisticated, dissolute, suggestive: the neckline barely skimmed her nipples. Yasmin looked him straight in the eye and yanked her bodice down. She was wearing a French corset, the kind that hoisted her bosom into the air without covering it.

Giles’s lips drifted over her breasts in a display of tenderness that was endearing, but not enough.

Her hands slid under his shirt, and she pulled it free of his waistband.

“More,” she ordered. And then added, “Please.”

“Your wish is my command.” Giles moved back, wrenched off his coat, and pulled off his shirt.

“Thunderation,” Yasmin said blankly. Her eyes drifted over the planes of muscle that narrowed to his waist, the arrow of hair disappearing into his breaches. She reached out, spreading her fingers over his chest. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d been running.

“Touch me,” he commanded, his voice dark and low. “Touch me, Mina. Put your hands on me.”

She felt the sleek point of a nipple under her thumb and his body jerked. She returned to the spot again, listening to his breathing coming harder. Then she pulled back her hands, running them under her breasts so they plumped up. “Kiss me again,” she invited. “Not the sweet kind.”

How could she have thought Giles was composed? His mouth fastened on her nipple, pushing her hand away. That caress wasn’t like anything she’d felt before. The lips that looked carved and disdainful suckled her nipple until she gave a little scream. He nipped her, and laughed low in his throat.

Her round breasts looked small in his hand even though they were larger than most women’s. She could feel herself, her foufoune, growing plump and slick, which would have distracted her, but her body was focused on what he was doing.

A moan came from her throat, a sound she’d never made before, husky and accompanied by a shiver. Her fingernails curled into his chest, pricking.

“I love that sound,” Giles said under his breath. “It makes me think that you want me almost as much as I want you.”

His head lifted from her breast. Breathing hard, his eyes met hers.

“Don’t stop,” she whispered.

“We must. We’ve been here too long.”

Giles pulled up her bodice; Yasmin winced as cloth brushed her nipples. He turned, grabbed his shirt, and pulled it over his head, shoving it into his breeches. With his coat on, and a sweep of his hand through his hair, he looked exactly the same.

She looked below his waistline. Not precisely the same.

“I am planning to pay a visit to Quimby’s Emporium,” Giles said conversationally.

She blinked. “Why?”