And he almost knocked his chair down standing. His shoes clipped across the floor, and he stopped right before her, grasped the curtain’s edge, and yanked it across the rod, closing them in.
She couldn’t see his face in the dark, but she could feel his heat, hear his voice, somehow, in the bone and muscle of her body.
“You’re about to find out how wrong you are.” The words a low growl near her ear.
She jumped, squeaked, and turned with him as he moved around her. Her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and she found his outline against the window, sinking toward the seat until it caught him. His hands landed on her hips, and he dragged her forward between his wide-spread legs, the solid muscle of his thighs trapping her, the hot clutch of his hands circling her waist.
“What are you doing?” she whispered through a throat thick as mud.
His eyes seemed to glow in the dark. “I’m showing you. There is no wishing I was different. I am who I am Tessa, and I’m glad for it. Maybe I want you to see me differently.” His fingers cinched her waist. “Yes, I think I do. You kissed the rake back, after all. Should I tell you of the actresses? How I take them in my office backstage after their performance? How the intensity of the stage carries over into the enjoyment of a good fuck.”
“Remmy!” It was too hot. Outside. Inside. Between…
“What about the time I jumped naked into the Serpentine. Do you want to know about that?”
Yes. “No.”
“Would you like to hear?—”
“No.”Yes.
“How I’d give up all of those liaisons and scandals for single touch ofyourbreast, for a stroke of my hand betweenyourlegs?”
She couldn’t breathe. Her nipples had tightened. The same wetness she stroked into existence some nights between her legs had begun to dampen her sex. He groaned, smoothing his hands up her back and cupping her neck.
He tugged her downward so they were nose to nose. “Tell me you do not wish to be kissed.”
He was so close, smelling of some spicy cologne and peppermint, which he kept in his pocket always. He’d been the one to develop her own peppermint habit, had given her gifts of them for every birthday.
“Tell me now, Tessa, or I’ll do it.”
“You won’t.”
“Try me, sweetheart.”
In the light of the party with Tilbury, she’d felt nothing but numbing darkness, and here in the dark with Remmy, she felt nothing but alive. And maybe a kiss could remind him who he was. He didn’t belong to a long series of faceless actresses. He’d always belonged to her.
“Do it,” she said. “Kiss me.” He wouldn’t.
He did.
Remington Ives, the boy who would never let her down, set his lips oh-so gently against her own, as if afraid to ruin the moment. But Remmy the man jerked her hard against his body and caged her in with his legs and bit her bottom lip, demanded her attention, her submission.
The man, the boy, all of him wrapped up into one determined, muscled body, parted her lips and claimed her.
And she let him, letting the torrents take her.
The fine wool of his jacket was soft beneath her fingertips,suddenly sensitive when they’d never been before. But the wool wasn’t him, and she rubbed her hands higher, across his cravat and the rough, new stubble of his jaw and into the hair at his nape. Silky and warm with the slightest dampness of sweat at the scalp. She made fists, trapping the strands between her fingers, and she tugged, pulling his face up and herself closer because her aching breasts felt heavy and needy.
He wanted her closer, too, and he stole the back of her neck with one hand, plundered the small of her back with the other. No space between them now, as their breaths heated, quickened, between slanted kisses. Too many to count.
Still not enough.
But he ripped away, broke the kiss, stared up at her, dazed. She looked the same way. She must, and she raised a shaking hand to her lips. Swollen, wet. No sound beyond the curtain closing them in but the crackle of a dying fire, and through the sliver of space between the curtain and the wall, she could just see the group by the fire. Most had left. The rest were sleeping.
This was wrong.
They could be caught.
