Ren answered this with an incline of his head. He didn’t trust his mouth to speak. His mother neatly cut Harriette out of thegroup, and the butler stepped up beside her to block her from the rest of the room.
“Miss Smythe,” Lady Renwick said, disdain lacing her voice, “perhaps you will come with Dunstan and identify the rather disturbing persons who are currently occupying our mews. I’m afraid I will have to call the watch on them if they don’t depart soon.”
Harriette’s shoulders stiffened, her chin lifting. Ren recognized what his mother was doing: casting the unwelcome guest out on her ear.
Fight, he urged Harriette, wanting to see that small avenging goddess with her slingshot emerge. He wanted confirmation that beneath the gloss and sophistication she was still his Harriette, a tiny warrior who neglected to comb her hair.
“Those will be my friends,” Harriette said. “Employees of the Countess of Calenberg. Men of impeccable character. They are waiting to take me home.”
“They have informed me they are ready to take you now,” Lady Renwick said, with nothing pleasant in her tone. Lady Bess floated away, looking above their heads to study the artwork as if she heard nothing of the exchange. “Dunstan?”
What was he doing?Hewas the one who had to fight for Harriette. “I w-w-w-wish for Rhette to st-stay, M-mother,” Ren stammered.
“You’ll never meet someone suitable with her hanging about your neck,” Lady Renwick said sharply. “See to your guests, Renwick, and tell your friend goodbye.”
“I’ll see myself out,” Harriette said defiantly.
“I’ll take you.” Ren slipped a hand about Harriette’s arm. She was as slim and strong as he remembered. He limped beside her as Dunstan, without appearing to crowd her, steered Harriette toward one of the open double doors.
“You may go, Dunstan,” Ren said once they were at the top of the broad marble stairs swirling down to the ground floor. “Attend your mistress.”
It had not escaped him that the servants in Renwick House obeyed his mother, not him. In fact he suspected they ran all his orders by the countess for confirmation and approval.
“If you wish, your lordship.” The butler gave Ren a stiff bow, ignoring Harriette altogether.
Ren sensed the burning fury in her, but she kept it bridled, matching her steps to his gait as they made their way down the stairs and through the long hallway that ran toward the back of the house and the mews. The garden was cloaked in darkness, and Ren led them out into the scented air, following the graveled path to the back gate and the stables. The streetlamp shone over the tall iron fence, turning Harriette’s powdered hair to silver.
“You needn’t leave because my mother wishes it,” Ren said, thinking of his earlier plan to whisk her away to his room and spend the night with her. Ply her with wine. See behind that crisp, cool calm she projected to the rest of the world. Discover her secrets, and what her mature woman’s body looked like beneath that gown. Didn’t she want to spend time with him?
“I don’t want to cause talk. You don’t need that cloud about your head.” She didn’t stroll but walked briskly to the rear of the garden. Ren opened the gate, and she whistled to the man seated in the driver’s perch of a small, fashionable cabriolet. She was truly leaving him.
“Where can I find you?” he asked desperately.
She paused to look into his face. Her scent drifted beneath his nose. “Did you get my card?”
“I didn’t get anything.”
She lifted a slender hand and traced the bones of his face, following the line of his brow, his cheekbone, his jaw. Curls of warmth spread from the path of her fingers, slightly callused.
“It’s best I don’t tar you with my brush, Ren. I would so like to paint you. You always were beautiful, but now—there’s something about you that I would love to capture. I wonder if I could.”
His throat closed as once more she gave him that searching, considering look. She thought him beautiful? No one had ever, in his life, used that word in association with him.
He couldn’t let her walk away. “You told me before to give you a kiss, and I didn’t,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
“I’ll take it now,” she said without hesitation, and stepped into his arms.
He froze in astonishment and momentary panic. The women he’d kissed—the mere handful of them—had all, in his mind’s eye, worn Harriette’s face. The women he’d taken to bed in his fantasies had all, rather unimaginatively on his part, been different versions of Harriette Smythe. But the reality of her was so exquisite, so potent, that he barely trusted what his senses were telling him. It might be a fantasy Harriette slipping her gloved hands around his neck and lifting her lips to his.
The softness, the heat, the delicious scent of her hit him with the force of a collision. For a moment he couldn’t breathe. There was no place he would rather expire than in the arms of this woman, but he didn’t want to miss a moment of finally,finallykissing Harriette Smythe, for real this time, not in his dreams.
Her lips were soft and moist and supple and moved against his like a dance. Her hair tickled his temple. Her skirts swallowed his legs. He dimly comprehended the breasts pressed against his chest as she leaned into him—oh God, the very thought of her breasts made him hard—and then her tongue slipped into his mouth to dab against his, and his cock sprang to attention with such a bolt of pleasure that he groaned.
Part of his mind was paralyzed with fear that he would do something wrong, or become so overwhelmed with sensationthat he would spend right here in his breeches. Too eager, too fumbling, grabbing like an untried boy—that’s what the Italian courtesan had said when he paid for a night of her company. What if he did something wrong with Harriette and turned her off him forever?
But she kissed him with ever deeper intensity, her tongue tangling with his, leading, teasing, probing, and she shifted slightly so that he pressed not into her skirts but againsther, some part of her, he wasn’t sure what because his head was a mass of stunned sensation, and he wouldn’t be ashamed if he did climax simply from kissing Harriette Smythe, because her mouth on his, her body against his, the scent of her desire in his nostrils was the most intensely erotic thing he had ever experienced in his life.
With a small moan from the back of her throat—a moan that made a pulse go through his already enflamed body—she pulled away, disentangling tongue, hands, skirts and putting a cool, sobering space between them.
