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At her nod, Darby jumped out and walked around to Henrietta’s side of the curricle. He reached up his arms. “May I?”

That was a devilish smile he had, to Henrietta’s mind. He stood in a patch of sunlight, golden brown hair tumbling around his face, and the look in his eyes!

But there was nothing for it; she certainly couldn’t scramble down from the high perch herself. Jem or some other man must lift her down.

She leaned forward and put her hands lightly on his shoulders. “This is very kind of you, sir,” she said. His face was just before hers now. He put his large hands on her waist and Henrietta shivered. There was something intoxicating about the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he grinned at her.

“What do you mean by it?” she asked involuntarily. The second she said it, she longed to have the question back, but a lifetime’s practice saying precisely what she was thinking had tripped her up.

He let her down to the ground rather slowly, but his hands didn’t move. They lingered in an appallingly brash fashion. Even through her pelisse she could feel his fingers shaping the curve of her waist.

“Mean by what?” he asked.

“Mean by the way you look at me.”

“I suppose,” he said, and his voice was husky and dark, Fool for Love

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“that I am considering your prowess at physical sports, Lady Henrietta.”

“Oh,” Henrietta gasped. His remark was well out of her usual conversational bounds. And moreover, she’d figured out exactly how he was looking at her.

As if he were hungry.

Starving, in fact.

She saw his head coming toward hers, and by all rights she should have moved away. But she simply stood there, still as a stone, and let his lips touch hers again. This time it was a little harder to think clearly. His hands were still on her waist for one thing. They seemed to have settled at the curve where her hip flared, as if she were his possession.

And his mouth was harder than it had been earlier, less gentle, less respectful. And his tongue! She was definitely thinking about protesting, just as soon as her head cleared a little.

Darby never bothered to formulate thoughts or words when he was in the grip of desire, and so he suffered no such confusion. God knows why he was compelled to kiss a rackety female who drove like a fiend down the country roads and uttered whatever unsuitable comment jumped into her head. But there you are. The compulsion was damn near unconquerable. She was small, confused, and smelled like meadow flowers. And innocence. He pressed his hard mouth to her soft one as if he could plunder that innocence and replace it with his cynicism.

Her lower lip was plump and sweetly curved. He licked it, and she shuddered. Darby felt the tiny ripple move through her body. So he pulled her closer and licked that lip again, pulled her so close that he could feel her breasts pressing against his chest.

The thought drifted into his head that Lady Henrietta 124 Eloisa

James

Maclellan had a body that was made for sport. The hell she wasn’t good at physical games.

It was true that she was an impressively bad kisser. Her lips were clamped together like a steel gate. He ran his tongue along her lips again, tempting her—nay, begging her—to open up. He tried teasing. He tried caressing. He tried slanting his lips across hers in a hard caress that had made previous companions melt at the knees and sag into his arms. The only person his techniques seemed to affect was he himself. His heart was pounding and his groin—well, that would scandalize Henrietta, were she to glance down.

“Henrietta,” he said, chagrined to find that his voice was a husky whisper.

“Yes, Mr. Darby?”

He opened his eyes to find her looking cheerfully into his face, seemingly not a whit affected.

The only thing that gave him a glimmer of hope was the wild rose blush high on her cheeks. That, and the fact he had felt a tremor move through her slender body.

“Did you enjoy your second kiss?”

“Oh, yes,” she said readily, “I certainly did because—”

That was just what he was waiting for. Simon Darby wasn’t above using nefarious tactics to get what he wanted. He bent his head, captured her words, and drank the innocence from her mouth. He forgot that Jem was standing twenty yards away holding Parsnip and Parsley, forgot the fact that he was making an exhibition of the two of them on the side of the public road.

He forgot everything. She gasped as he plundered her mouth and wonder of wonders, her rigid body relaxed a trifle. A few moments later, one slender arm crept around his neck. As it turned out, Henrietta Maclellan took to kissing like a duck to water. Far from holding her mouth closed as if to protect the crown jewels, her tongue began tangling with his in a slow dance that made the blood burn through Darby’s veins. Fool for Love