Page 21 of How to Start a Scandal

‘Dance with me,’ he said. ‘The next chance you get.’

If she rejected him again, he would not protest. In truth, even in making it right, he knew better than to dance with her. A dance couldn’t be enough. Even though it ought to be.

He half-hoped she would say no, yet part of him wanted desperately for her to say—

‘Yes.’ She licked her lips. Pillowy soft and pink and wholly tempting.

He nearly groaned his relief in her reply.

God, he wanted to kiss her. To taste the sweetness of her mouth and sample the smoothness of her skin with his tongue. Especially along the length of her graceful neck and over the tops of those beautiful breasts.

He kept his gaze fixed on hers to avoid letting it drop to her bosom again. It was too easy to admit to himself how badly he wanted to cup his hands over the generous swells, to tease at her nipples with the pads of his thumbs until she cried out beneath him. He leaned further still, practically bending over the hedges to close the gap between them. Sharp sticks dug into his thighs and stomach, but he paid them no mind.

He cared of nothing but the woman in front of him.

There was a delicate powdery perfume about her. Violets. She smelled like her namesake and was just as lovely, just as delicate and sweet as the flower.

‘Seth.’ She whispered his Christian name, one she hadn’t spoken since they were children. She said it in a breathy voice, one laced with intimacy and desire.

‘Tell me to walk away,’ he said.

She gave a shaky sigh. ‘I can’t.’

‘Tell me not to kiss you,’ he cautioned.

She licked her lips again, slower this time. ‘I can’t.’

He reached for her face once more, this time tilting it up towards his. Her lashes swept to her cheeks just as his own eyes closed. She was silk under his fingertips and fire in his veins. Had he ever wanted anything more than to kiss this woman?

He lowered his mouth, expecting to encounter warm, sensual lips. But that was not to be.

Before the slight breath of distance between them could be fully closed, a door banged open, Violet was forcefully flung away from him and a high-pitched shriek pierced the air.

Chapter Seven

One moment, Violet was locked in the anticipation of an impending kiss, her heart pounding, head spinning, and the next, she was sitting hard upon the grass in total bewilderment.

There had been a bit in between, of course. When a cat wearing a pink bonnet collided at an impossible speed against her shins with the force of a stone and sent her sprawling backwards. How ungainly.

‘Don’t let him run away,’ Felicity shouted in a most unladylike manner.

Violet wanted to drop her face into her hands and die of the humiliation burning through her. Instead, she sneaked a glance upwards at Lord Dalton.

He stared down at her, his brows furrowed with concern. ‘Good God. Are you quite all right?’ He cast a chagrined glance at the hedge between them.

‘Yes.’ Violet floundered on the ground in an effort to haul herself to her feet as gracefully as possible. There was no grace about it, however. Not when one wore several layers of skirts while attempting to extricate oneself from the grass without allowing any indecent flashes of unmentionables.

Dalton shoved through the small gap between the hedges, the very one they’d used as children. He did remember. It almost brought a smile to her face, except at that very moment he pitched forward and fell as well. Right alongside her.

He landed on his side with an oof.

Violet stopped struggling and immediately turned her attention on him. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I assure you, after the years of fighting and battle, it will not be a gap in a hedge that will best me.’ He righted himself in a far more fluid motion than her fumbled attempts and held his hand out to her. ‘What the devil was that?’

‘Hedgehog.’ Violet put her hand into his and found herself gliding upwards with incredible ease, as though it were no effort on his part whatsoever to lift her to her feet.

‘Found him,’ Felicity cried out in victory somewhere in the garden.