“I shouldn’t,” he muttered, and then put the lie to his own words by sliding his hand up, the tiniest movement, to frame her breast. He closed his teeth over her earlobe.
“Don’t—stop on my account,” she managed.
He broke the grip of his teeth to laugh, breathless and ragged, and cup her more fully, taking the weight of her breast into his palm. “All of this is on your account. Everything.”
Somehow it was more heady even than the thick weight of his arousal.
He desired her, yes. And she made him laugh.
He came back up to her mouth and kissed her again, harder. The back of her head bumped the rock, and he swore against her lips, and she didn’t care. Her mind—normally a busy, racing thing—had gone fogged, wine-soaked, blurred beneath the sweet throb of his mouth on hers.
She tried to wrap a leg around him to pull him closer, but her skirts felt cold and heavy. She realized vaguely that the tide had come in; the water was up to her knees and her skirts were sodden.
She didn’t care. It felt right—the ocean tugging at her balance, Malcolm holding her still.
When he pulled back, it was only to press his forehead against hers. He was breathing hard—they both were. His fingers slipped into the spaces between her ribs and held there.
“God,” he said thickly. “Oh hell. The tide... We can’t...”
He broke off and found her eyes with his. He breathed a helpless laugh, as if to say:I told you. Wordless.
She looked down at the water at the level of her knees, rapidly filling the cove as they stood against the rock. And then she looked back up at him. “I believe,” she said, “we may be cut off from the house.”
His mouth curved up. “I hope you know how to swim.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” she said. “We can wade, surely.”
He was still smiling. His eyes were pure sapphire in the fading light, and there was something almost dazed about his expression. Some dazzled shape to his piratical mouth.
A lightning strike, he’d called her. And somewhere in herself—in some deep and unknown place—she found she almost could believe it.
“Wade,” he agreed. And then he dimpled at her, quick and devastating. “I’ll race you.”
Chapter 14
Archer was still holding Ruby’s hand when they reached the front door of Pomeroy House. He ought to have dropped it. He should have let her go—oh hell, an hour ago in the cove. Weeks ago.
But he couldn’t. He didn’t want to. He was glad that, despite his very best attempts, she had not left Pomeroy House.
He couldn’t make himself regret their kiss. In his memory, it was all sunset colors: the slow flush of desire like a red-hot tide inside his body, the peach-and-pink shades of Ruby’s mouth and skin. It had been a struggle at times to overcome his smile in order to fit his mouth to hers. Never, in all his life, could he remember a kiss that had made him so bloody happy.
I want it too, she’d said, and because it was Ruby, he knew it was the truth. She would not dissemble, would not pretend or flatter to get what she wanted.
She wanted him. She knew the truth, and still she wanted him.
Although—the thought came to him with a sudden uneasiness—perhaps she had not uncovered the Quenby scheme. She had not mentioned it. Surely she would not have left it out if she had known.
But his unease refused to unfold into something more powerful. They were at the door, and her hand was in his, and when she looked up at him, she was smiling. Bedraggled and barefoot and soaked to her skin, sand in her hair and on the curve of her ear. And still, she was grinning, pleased with him and with herself.
How many times had she smiled like that at him? Once? Twice?
It wasn’t enough. He thought he could never have enough.
She appeared to ponder the state of his clothing—heavy with water and sand—and then her own, which was possibly worse. “Do you think we ought to sneak in the back?”
“Possibly. Though as I understand it, your ladies have wheedled their way into dining with my crew in the kitchen most nights.”
Her lips quirked in tacit acknowledgment, and it occurred to Archer that it had been some minutes—a month, perhaps—since he’d removed his gaze from her mouth. “They have,” she said, sounding far too smug for a woman garbed mostly in sand. “And I suspect it’s suppertime. The front, then.”
