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“I still want the singed wings.”
The sun was leaving, and the darkness was falling and with it, his ability to resist her. He shook his head. “I can’t make him want you.”
I won’t.
What a fucking mess he’d made. He’d lost control of all of it. Ceded all his power to this woman, who had no understanding of how she wielded it.
She shook her head. “I don’t want Marwick.”
She was twenty feet away, and the whispered words sounded like gunfire in his ears, but he still didn’t believe he’d heard them correctly. “Say it again.”
Felicity was watching him from her end of the bench, her velvet-brown eyes unwavering. “Marwick isn’t my moth.”
“Who, then?”
“You,” she whispered.
He was already moving toward her, fire already consuming him, knowing he’d never survive it.
Chapter Nineteen
She wanted him.
Not this moment, on the whispering bench in the gardens, though that, too.
She wanted him, forever.
And not only because she didn’t want the strange duke who seemed uninterested in marriage and even less interested in the trappings of it. No, she wanted him because she wanted a man who kissed her like she was everything he would ever want. She wanted a man who teased her and then bewitched her with long-ago stories. She wanted a man who made promises to her that only he could keep.
She wanted this man. Devil.
She didn’t know his name or his past, but she knew his eyes and his touch and the way he saw her and listened to her, and she wanted him. For a partner. For a future.
Here, in the gardens of her family home. In Covent Garden. In Patagonia. Wherever he liked.
And when he went to his knees in front of her, like he’d been there a thousand times before, placing one hand on her hip and the other around her neck to pull her to him and kiss her, she wanted him even more, and not only because his kiss made her want to live here, on this bench, his whispered temptation in her ears, his lips on her skin, for the rest of her life.
“Felicity Faircloth, you shall ruin me,” he whispered, taking her mouth, stealing kisses between his words. “I swore I would come here . . . to tell you to leave me alone . . . to tell you to forget about me.”
Her hands came to his shoulders, clutching the fabric of his shirt as he slid his lips across her cheek, taking the lobe of her ear between his teeth and worrying it. “I don’t want to leave you alone,” she whispered. “I don’t want to forget about you.”
I don’t want to marry another.
He pulled away, putting enough distance between them that he could search her face. “Why?”
How could he ask her that? How could she find the answer?
“Because I want to see all of you,” she replied, the echo of the story he’d just told her. “I want to see your past and your future.”
He shook his head. “I’m not a god, Felicity Faircloth. I’m the very opposite of one. And you’re too good for my past or my future.”
What of your present? she wanted to ask him, desperately. Instead, she pulled him to her and he came, kissing her again, growling low in the back of his throat, licking over her lips until she opened for him and he could tease inside, tempting her. She sighed, and he rewarded the sound by deepening the kiss, one hand scrambling her hairpins as the other found her ankle, smooth and bare beneath her skirts. His warm fingers wrapped around her ankle, strong and firm, then began to tease up the inside of her leg. “Again, no stockings,” he said. “My wicked wallflower.”
“Wait,” she gasped, and he did, his touch stilling instantly when she pulled back from him, wanting to see his eyes—those beautiful amber eyes, ringed in black. “Why do you lie to me?”
“Do I lie to you?”
She searched his face for a long moment before she said, “I think you do, you know. I think you lie every time you look at me.”
“I lie every time I look at anyone.”
“Tell me something true,” she said.
“I want you.” The words were instant, and she saw the honesty in them. Pleasure thrummed through her.
It wasn’t enough. “Something else.”
He shook his head. “There is nothing else. Not right now.”
“Another lie,” she whispered, but she leaned in and kissed him anyway, feeling his desire. Matching it with her own. When the kiss ended, they were both panting. He wrapped a large, firm hand around the back of her neck and pressed his forehead to hers. He closed his eyes and said, achingly soft, “It’s the only truth. I want you. I’ve never in my life even dreamed of wanting something like you. Something pristine and perfect.” His eyes opened, finding hers instantly. “It’s like wanting sunlight.”
This man was going to be the end of her. He was going to ruin her for all others.
“You can’t hold sunlight, though,” he whispered. “No matter how much you wish to touch it, it slips through your fingers, chased away by the dark.”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong. Sunlight is not chased away by dark. It fills it up.” And then she kissed him again, and he took control, tempering her eagerness with his superior skill—making the caress slow and long and deep, his fingers tracing up the inside of her leg.
She let him touch her, let him tease her knee, made room for his touch on that skin that had never been touched before. She gasped as he moved higher, his touch like a whisper, barely there and consuming her nonetheless.
He broke the kiss. “So soft,” he said, pressing warm, full kisses down the column of her neck as she gasped her pleasure. “Like silk.” He stroked up her thigh, leaving fire in his wake until he reached a satin and lace edge. He fingered the ribbon he found there, and she willed it gone. “Are these . . .”
She nodded, knowing she should be more embarrassed. Not caring. “The ones you gave me.”
“If I were to look—” He tugged on the tie, loosening the pant leg, and she closed her eyes at the sensation. “They would be pink?”
She nodded.
“May I?”
Her eyes shot open. “May you what?”
“May I look?”
Only if you promise to touch, as well.
Somehow, she refrained from saying the words. But she could not refrain from nodding, knowing she shouldn’t. Knowing that she wanted everything he promised.
The moment she did, he moved, sitting back to lift her skirts and reveal her. Her cheeks blazed as he reached for the pink silk ribbons. “I will remember these pretty pink ribbons,” he said softly, to himself more than her as his warm fingers slid beneath along her thigh, beneath the fabric, “for the rest of my life.”
She leaned back, giving him more access. “I will remember this.”
His gaze flickered to hers. His hand moving up to her waist, to another pink ribbon, one he could not see but undid effortlessly nonetheless. “This?”
She gasped. “Yes.”
He clasped the waistband. “Shall I give you other memories, love?”
“Yes,” she whispered, and he tugged, removing the undergarment with efficiency. “Please.”
Tossing it to the side, he returned his hands to her legs, now fully bare, draped in the pink silk of her dress. “So much prettier without the ribbons,” he whispered, pressing a soft kiss to her knee, the caress sending heat rioting through her. “Open for me, love.”
Perhaps it was the feel of the command against that skin that no one had ever touched.
Perhaps it was the sound of it—the growl that set her heart to pounding.
But it was very likely the rest that had Felicity opening her thighs to the air and the sun and this magnificent man.
It was the endearment. Love.
He was dangerous indeed.
Because the moment she did as he asked, his strong, warm, work-hewn hands came to the insides of her knees and held her open, his gaze locked to the shadowed space between her thighs, his throat working
as though he were holding himself back from—
She reached for him, her fingers trailing down the side of his face, running over his scar, stark white but for the muscle twitching beneath it. “You look as though . . .” He met her eyes, and what she saw there took her breath. “You look . . .”
“Hungry.” His hands moved then, beautifully, sliding up her thighs, pushing her skirts as far back as they would go. “I am hungry for you, Felicity Faircloth. I am starved for you.” His fingers reached the dark curls that shielded her sex. “I want to touch you, love. And I want more. I want to taste you.”
The words might have shocked her, but he punctuated them with a gentle stroke, a slow slide as he parted her. “I want to know every inch of you. What gives you pleasure.” A movement. A deep, delicious groan. “You’re so wet for me.”
A blush rose on her cheeks, and he shook his head, coming up on his knees to steal a kiss. “No,” he whispered. “Never be embarrassed of that. You want it, don’t you? My touch?”
She closed her eyes. “Yes.” More than anything.
“You want my kiss.”
