She leaned back against it. I stepped forward carefully. I didn’t think this was a trap or a hallucination. Then again, she was everything I ever could have wished for and it didn’t seem likely that this could be happening.
But when I reached her, and trailed my fingers along the side of her long tresses, she felt very, very real. I lifted her chin between my fingers and thumb and tipped her head up. “If you think I haven’t been tormented by that kiss simply because Icouldn’t remember it, you don’t understand the power of my imagination.”
She quirked an eyebrow at me and I saw it for what it was. A dare. I lowered my head toward her, that scent of orange overtaking me, this time wrapping around in me in a way I knew would be mine. I paused a breath away from her lips. “You are serious? You aren’t going to dash away at the last minute?”
“John.” She put her lips to my ear, wrapped her hands beneath my arms and pulled me closer. “I’m not leaving.”
My breath shuddered as I inhaled her scent once again, this time with my face in her hair. She couldn’t know how much I’d yearned to belong to someone. “I’m done fighting my feelings for you, Evelyn. I want us to spend the rest of our lives deciding where we should kiss.”
She leaned her head back and her lips quirked into a smile. I shook my head softly and covered that outrageous grin of hers with my opportunistic mouth.
The world snapped into place, all of our repelling and resisting one another succumbing to the magnetic force between us.
I couldn’t remember what her lips felt like in the middle of that stormy night, but their soft eagerness wasn’t a surprise. I’d woken from dreams of this. I’d imagined the two of us together hundreds of times, even when I thought it was the last thing in the world I should imagine.
Every thought, every dream, had driven me to distraction, but it was nothing compared to holding her in my arms, feeling her breath graze my skin and her hands slide up my spine and pull me closer to her.
This was more than a dream.
This was Evelyn.
I smiled against her lips and stepped closer to her, trapping her against the door. Her hand trembled at the nape of my neckand her weight settled against me as if she’d lost the ability to hold herself up. Heavens above, but I hoped so. It was about time she was the lightheaded one.
I abandoned all my reserves and lost the last of my restraint. With a tip of my head, I redoubled my claim upon her lips, tasting her sweetness until she moaned my name again.
I pulled back, needing to look at her, to remind myself she was still here. She raised her lashes with a blink, her eyes hazy and her lips swollen. I bent down, scooped up her legs and gestured toward the red velvet sofa with a tip of my head. “Will that be enough to torment me until I can speak to your father? Or should we continue?”
“John,” she said, wrapping her hands around my neck and tucking her head into my collar bone as if it belonged there. “I’ve been tormented for weeks. Take me to the sofa.”
Like the good soldier I was, I followed her command.
We dropped into the sofa, her legs draped over my knees. Evelyn pulled one hand away from my neck, traced my left eyebrow with the pad of her thumb and then leaned forward and pressed a kiss on my scar. I swallowed hard, and slid my thumb across the brushstroke on her collar bone. Her eyes found mine and there was no mistaking the dare I found in them. I shook my head with a smile. When we were officially engaged, Evelyn willing, I would drag my lips along that mark, but not before.
I would, however, take all the time that I could with her unbound hair. I ran my fingers through the length of it and brought the ends to my mouth with a kiss. “Your hair is going to be the death of me.”
“Only my hair?”
“No. Not only that.” I tucked her firmly against me and pressed another kiss to her mouth. If her cousin had wanted me to wait another full week to propose, she really shouldn’t have arranged a meeting quite this secluded.
With a shaking hand, I traced her cheek and then pulled away, but Evelyn’s lips followed my retreat, unwilling to be parted. A low chuckle escaped my throat. That mouth of hers was going to decimate me long before her hair would.
I spent several more minutes surrendering to her every whim. Her fingers went to the scar on my eyebrow. I lowered my head so she could kiss it. She lifted her chin, giving me full access to her neck. I took advantage of it. I lost myself so deeply in her scent the world narrowed into the small space we occupied on the sofa.
We stopped only when she was the one to pull away, taking with her all of my breath, making me as lightheaded as I’d been when I first stood in the shepherd’s croft. With a pert wink she settled onto my straining chest as if she were going to stay there all night. She wasn’t. But several more minutes wouldn’t hurt.
“Strangely enough,” she said into the lapels of my coat. “You are considerably better at this when you aren’t delirious.”
29
CAPTAIN JOHN CALDER
Light had only just started creepingthrough my window when my eyes opened the next morning. I was out of bed a moment later. I rang for my valet and took less care with my appearance than perhaps I should have. Evelyn had seen me at my worst, and I was more concerned about reaching her quickly than having my cravat tied in the latest fashion.
Was it too much to hope that she and I would be the first in the breakfast room and we might have a few more moments alone together?
Whether or not it was too much to hope, I was doing just that.
I pulled open the breakfast room door to find I was the third person to arrive. General Blackwell and his wife were there, seated at the table with their plates full.
