And she was alone with him, with full-grown, fully potent Garrick Lockram, Lord Warin. Her errors were compounding by the minute.
He didn’t look away. “You always were a terrible liar, Mad. Must I seduce the answer out of you?”
“Oh, please refrain.”
“But I owe you a kiss.”
Confusion strangled her. She was eighteen again, standing not in this study but in the parlor of the Old Rectory Farm, burning for him with all the incendiary passion of a foolish first love. She wasnotthat girl any longer.
“There is no such debt. The kissing bough was not finished, nor yet hung.”
“I was not thinking of the kissing bough,” he said softly. “But of what I promised you before.”
Oh, God in heaven. She was thinking of it, too. She had thought for three years of nothingbutthat sultry promise, whispered against her ear before he brushed the faintest kiss on her cheek.
A touch that had made her heart stop its beating. A promise that had filled her maiden bed with feverish thoughts and yearning dreams, too, too many nights.
“I…”
Words failed her. There wasn’t a shred of her that couldn’t pretend she didn’t want this, him stalking close with the scent of summer and sin, his heat reaching out like a cloud that fumed her head and drove out every sensible thought that she tried so hard, and so fruitlessly, to live by. Once. Just once, she wanted what he gave so freely to all those other women, those legions he left in his train who were able to taste him, then able to think of nothing but him thereafter.
Not yet, Mad. But someday.
She was doomed, either way. She might as well enjoy the pleasure when God knew she had already paid the price in pain.
“I cannot recall what you might have promised me.” She reached behind her as she backed away, hoping to find something to hold onto. Something strong to support her as the tide of madness rose to sweep her away.
“You asked me to marry you,” he said.
***
She stared at him with those vivid blue eyes, her pupils dark and wide. Garrick felt as if the top of his head had been pried open and cold air swirled into his brain box, freezing his capacity forrational thought. It had happened the moment he caught her on the kitchen stairs.
Madelina Moisenay, all grown up.
She hadn’t been the last time he saw her, when she was just turned eighteen. She’d been a young lady with her hair up and her skirts down, but still so young and innocent, so unformed. She’d made the most marvelous request without any notion, really, of what it meant. What she asked of him.
He wondered if she knew better now. She still looked untouched, so virginal in her prim white gown with its sprigs of red apples that promised luscious sweetness to the man who dared taste. He dreamed of wrapping around his hands around those masses of dark hair as he pulled her face up for his kiss. But the rest of her was no longer that slim, coltish girl who had made what she claimed was a rational request, all while she trembled with the hope he would touch her. She would never know what it had cost him to walk away, to buy them both the time they needed.
Garrick suspected he would not be able to walk away now.
Her brows, dark and delicately arched, met over that long, narrow nose as she frowned at him. “I did not ask you to—”
“Wed you? Yes, you did. You made quite a convincing case. Explained how a marriage would please both our families and cease their plaguing us about finding a match. How marriage would give you a home of your own, and me a shred of respectability.”
He stalked toward her, rounding the desk. She skirted the heavy leather-upholstered chair in her retreat, but the cabinets behind her blocked escape. Her scent reached out toward him, sweet and clean and sharp, like lingonberries in a bed of cream. Her lips were that same red, plush and inviting. All the features that had been too bold or large on her girlish face had,in maturity, come into the most pleasing proportion. She was mesmerizingly beautiful.
And she still retained that fearless, stubborn spirit he had always admired in her. She lifted her chin.
“I seem to have forgotten that conversation entirely.”
“There’s still something I don’t understand,” he said softly. He paused in his pursuit when her derriere—as nicely curved as the rest of her—backed up against a low shelf. “You told me at the time I could carry on with my ways, and you would look aside. Mad.” He scanned her face, wanting to discover those thoughts and emotions that had once been so visible on her countenance. He wanted to know her as he had all those years ago.
“Why would you allow that? Why wouldn’t you demand more?”
“Rakes don’t reform. Everyone knows that.”
“Macheath inThe Beggar’s Opera. Doesn’t he reform?”
