Page 106 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“Hush, my darling.”

In three strides, I carried her to the settee and went down with her into the cushions. As I lay half over her luscious body, her arms came up around my neck and pulled me down to her mouth again. This kiss was slower. Deeper. She was kissing me and I was kissing her. When her tongue touched mine, the whole world went away except for her and me and us.

Her fingers tangled in my hair. Mine found the bare skin at the side of her throat, where a pulse beat hard and fast against my thumb. I kissed the spot, and she made a small broken sound.

She maneuvered her legs wide enough to cradle me and then with a wicked glint in her eye, she said, “Show me.”

I glanced at the closed door. “Someone may interrupt us.” One of us had to keep a sense of decorum.

“No one will.” She wriggled her lower extremities against me.

“You are a wicked temptress, my love.”

By way of answer, she wriggled some more.

I lifted her skirts, pressed my need against her softness, and she let out a sigh of contentment.

“Better?”

Her gaze turned liquid. “Not enough. Not nearly enough.”

I caught her wrist, brought her palm to my mouth, and kissed it—the heel, the soft center, each finger in turn. “The rest will have to wait for our wedding night.”

“Warwick,” she whispered.

"Yes."

“We must marry quickly."

"Yes."

“This week!”

“I’ll obtain a special license.”

She sighed softly, curled her arms around my neck, and then, witch that she was, she tempted me some more.

“What the devil⁠—”

We did not move. The voice had not yet resolved into a person.

"Unhand my sister this instant."

Rosalynd went still beneath me. Her eyes focused, slowly, on something past my shoulder, and then she said, in a voice gone strange with disbelief⁠—

"William?"

I lifted my head.

A young man stood just inside the morning room door. Travel-stained. Dust on his boots, dust on the shoulders of his coat, a valise abandoned on the carpet behind him as though he had dropped it the moment the tableau in front of him had registered. He was tall, blue-eyed, and copper-haired—unmistakably a Rosehaven—and he was staring at me with the outrage of a brother who has been on a packet boat for a week and has come home to find a duke on top of his sister.

I removed myself from the settee with what dignity I could assemble and held a hand to Rosalynd. She stood, settled her skirts, put one hand to her hair. She shouldn’t have bothered. The situation was past saving.

"William," she said again. "You're⁠—"

"Home. Obviously. What is happening here?”

"This is the Duke of Steele."