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Making a show of lifting her chin and narrowing her eyes on him, she retorted. “Why would he? You are not my guardian or anything.”
Those jet orbs blazed with contrariness. “I am your nearest kin.”
Too near for her threadbare composure, she would point out. She breathed a derisive snort. “Kin is a rather ample concept, is it not?”
“Answer the question, Otilia.” The command came hoarse and final, provoking a scalding shot to cut through her and pool where he never failed to awaken her senses.
Her whole frame turned to him as she crossed her arms with a defiant stance. “I said no,” she emitted clear and definite.
She and Oliver stayed in that corner debating the matter from the time they had met in the drawing room until the overbearing Earl came to decree the end of the discussion. The Viscount had tried to change her mind with every inducement under the sun. He went to the extreme of proposing a contract where her monthly settlement would be worth a phaeton—a costly men’s toy. Not even this convinced her to give up her freedom of choice. The idea of the arrangement held a fickle effect and sowed melancholy in her. She understood her friend’s plight, she really did. And she wished she could help him in this, but to invest the rest of her life in a lie seemed too much.
Edmund’s rugged features crumpled. “You refused a Viscount?”
Why these deuced noblemen regarded their own titles like some sort of promised land escaped her. After how Edmund and the other lords treated an orphaned miss, she was beginning to hate nobility. She wanted employment, any employment to turn up so she might break free from this whole tasteless comedy.
“Yes,” she answered him simply.
“And the title of Viscountess,” his syrupy tone emphasised.
Anger spread inside her. If these self-important aristocrats deemed their rank so irrecusable, it would be their business. That they were arrogant enough to think others did annoyed her. “What the darn am I going to do with a title?” her voice spat the question in the deserted hall.
His inspection zeroed on her as if he sought to rummage her most hidden secrets. “Every woman aims at it.”
Honey eyes sustained his firmly. “But I do not.”
At that, his thumbs loosened and his thick arms fell by his side as he kept his scrutiny on her.
If she did not know better, she would say hours slipped by with them frozen on the marble floor. Their eyes clasped to each other with a river of unspoken conversation running underneath them. But they counted mere seconds during which the temperature of her insides soared to combustion point.
She was about to force herself to turn and leave when his taut frame set into motion. Long, predatory strides reached her as her breath hitched. Big hands caught her face before his mouth nosedived onto hers. A moan arrested in her throat, its meaning spelling ‘at last’ for the way that her own mouth opened and received him eagerly, and with no resistance. Her hands grabbed his large shoulders in a struggle to continue standing. She revelled in those sculpted lips taking her to levels of pleasure even her fantasies never dreamed of. Their tongues knotted, unknotted, re-knotted until she lost all sense of time or place. Or of anything else.
The kiss deepened, creating a need impossible to deny or ignore. Her fingers trailed up to his neck where they found exultation in his sleek hair. He angled his head, draped his hand on her nape, laced his free arm around her waist and took the kiss to explosive heights. Her breasts puckered shamelessly, and that secret spot in her demanded attention. Also, shameless.
Dazed, in a cloud of sensation, she barely registered his clever hand plucking the small tiara from her head, allowing the glossy strands to shimmer down to her hips.
His chiselled face lifted to hers, and his gaze took in her falling waves. “I’ve been wanting to see your hair loose for a long, long time,” he rasped.
Said time stopped with them holding fast in the echoing entrance hall, exposed to anyone who happened upon them. And who cared? Not her, not at that moment.
Not ever.
In an agile movement, his strong arms hauled her from the floor, eliciting a squeak of surprise and, yes, delight, from Otilia. Her hair flew. Her skirts billowed. Her heart fluttered.
And then he kissed her again while bold legs climbed up the winding stairs. She did not know where they headed.
And did not care.
Inside the Earl’s spacious bedchamber, he kicked the door shut, passed by the sitting room to the room where the enormous four-poster sat with a sky of cloud-fluffy covers in the middle of it.
Those arms placed her in the middle and braced over her. Brown-sugar hair spread on the pillows, reflecting the fire roaring in the fireplace. It intensified the heat of him as her nostrils inhaled his clove essence and male scent. His solid frame pressed her to the mattress, their breath mingling between them.
His jet stare imprisoned hers while yearning took over every inch of her. “Say no, Otilia.” The words moved his jaw, and her attention darted to the stubble-darkened squareness of it. “Say no, and I will let you go,” he rumbled with hot urgency.
Her gaze snapped back to his, her foggy mind trying to make sense of his words. If she was going to know a man, if she was going to know a single man in this world, it had to be him. Edmund. The man who populated her youth’s reveries. The man who represented the promise of happiness for a girl that possessed nothing. The bliss of a home, a family, a life lived in full. If she was going to give herself to any man, learn about physical ecstasy, it had to be with Edmund. The man who came back to her life, tall, hard, dark. The man that kissed her with everything opposed to home or family, but overflowed with the promise of steamy moments, maddening caresses, and sensual delectation. It had to be him, the only man she had ever wanted; her body would ever accept, desire, crave. There would never be another—now, or in the future—as there had never been another in her existence.
For all she knew, she was condemned to spinsterhood. She would be no lecherous lord’s mistress, nor would she settle for an empty marriage, or the loss of freedom for a social position. A woman in her circumstances, rejecting those options, would solely find herself a spinster. And, by Jove, she risked ageing bitter, unloved; she risked not experiencing sensuality, the touch of a man, or the special touch of a man for whom she hungered. Without this, him, the future spread like a barren land, dry and forgotten. Worse, a future with countless layers of regret and hollow memories. If she intended to build memories, it had to be with him. If she wanted to be able to smile at old age; if she wished to retain any softness, it had to be with him.
Because it had always been him.
