She sighed into his mouth, which summoned an answering groan from him. She’d thought he was so in control. He’d been kissing her so firmly, so carefully. But that was another thing she must have gotten wrong, for everything that was happening—the movement and pressure of his mouth, and his fingers—grew more intense, almost frantic.
Until he let loose another groan and left her all at once, taking his fingers and his lips and his whole self away in one giant step back. He was stunned, eyes wild and chest back to heaving. TheGothicpart of her earlier description might have been correct, but she could see now thatheroinehad not been. He was tall and imposing, and though he looked like he might have just come inside from being lost on the moors, she was suddenly so very aware of him as aman.
She tested her voice. “We are agreed, then? You will lie with me?” Enough with his misplaced moral objections.
He sighed and began to look less like an untamed Highlander and more like her old Archie. “Not precisely. But close enough, for your purposes.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means”—a slow smile blossomed—“I will show you the pleasure of which we spoke.”
“The pleasure that Theo did not show me.”
The smile slid off his face. “That is correct.”
“Was he withholding it, do you think? Or did he not know how?”
“I would prefer not to speak of Mr. Bull just now.”
“I take your point. Let us speak in generalities, then. Let us speak of the average gentleman. Does the average gentleman know how to show a lady this pleasure of which you speak?”
“I should think so. It isn’t magic. Nearly every man I can think of is equipped with the necessary tools.”
“And what are those?” she asked, startled by his choice of word:tools.
He let go of her with one hand, lifted it, and wiggled his fingers. She could not imagine what he meant. In her admittedly limited experience, fingers hadn’t been involved at all.
Still, something inside her, that part she’d been thinking of as not-intellect, flared. She had a knowing inside her, a creature who moved by instinct rather than by senses. She looked around the room. Archie’s bed was mussed—very mussed, as if he’d been tossing violently. She went over and sat on it. “I don’t want to wait until tomorrow.”
“All right.”
His easy agreement was unexpected, and welcome. Instead of coming to her, though, he turned to a table by the door that was littered with his personal effects.
“What are you doing?”
He struck a match and lit a small lantern. “Lighting this place up.” He moved to a bureau where there was a branch of candles.
“Why?”
“Because I want to see you.” He paused. “Because I want you to see me.”
Yes.
While she waited, while the room glowed up, she began loosening the drawstring at the neckline of her shift. When Archie finished, he came to the edge of the bed and watched. It was the same attention he always paid her, so it was in one sense familiar. But the watching turned the sharp heat between her legs higher, just like the flame in the lamp, and that was new.
Instead of being embarrassed by this heat, she was emboldened by it, as if it were the sun summoning to life the buds of spring. She lifted her hips enough to get her shift over them and pulled it over her head. Or tried to—she got herself tangled in it. Struck by the absurdity of the whole circumstance, she laughed.
He was there, then, laughing, too. Untangling her.
Wasn’t that what Archie always did? Untangled her? From ill-made matches and poorly thought-out rescue missions, and more crucially, from the barbs and brambles of her own mind.
Together, they got the garment off, and the mood shifted.
“Your skin is glowing,” he whispered, and that was exactly how she felt, as if the light and heat from the lamps were inside her somehow.
Archie, by contrast, was fully dressed. The gentlemen often dispensed with the formality of coats here, but he was still attired in a waistcoat, shirt, and breeches. “Will you undress, too? I want to see you.”
Wordlessly, he stepped back and shrugged out of his blue silk waistcoat. He let it fall to the floor. Archie had never been a dandy, but he was always carefully dressed, and to see him treat such a fine garment with such a lack of care was strangely thrilling.
