Page 48

Jonah tipped up her chin and brushed his lips over hers. “I will protect you from Regina.”

“I know, but she’s a member of your family. More to the point, why is she like that, Jonah?”

“Like what?”

“Mean,” Bea said. “ ‘Mean as a worm,’ my grandfather would have said.”

Jonah turned over her hand and examined her palm before putting a swift kiss in the middle of it. “She was born that way.”

“No one is born that way,” Bea protested.

“Yes, they are.” Shadows accented his lips and his cheekbones: sharp-cut, beautifully shaped. Aristocratic to the bone.

Bea instinctively put her free hand to her lips. They were as puffy as the rest of her. He was all hard angles and aristocracy. She was … Well, she was a country banker’s daughter, never mind her mother’s claims to blue blood.

“You really shouldn’t touch your mouth like that,” Jonah said conversationally.

She instantly dropped her hand. Was that a society edict? One of the rules that Lady Alcon had meted out sprang to mind: Don’t eat in public, in fact, don’t eat at all.

“Your lips are too damned beautiful,” Jonah growled, learning forward so the sound barely stirred the air between them. “If you draw my attention to them, I won’t be responsible, chaperone or no.”

“Oh,” Bea said. She smiled at him, but still: “Your sister.”

He shifted restlessly. “There’s no revelation I can give you, Bea. I can’t point to the moment when my sister decided she was an arbiter of society and began passing judgment on those who didn’t meet her standards. It just happened. That silly girl, Martha, didn’t help. Her mother is one of the patronesses of Almack’s.”

“Regina tells lies,” Bea said flatly. “It isn’t true that you seduced me in the library. Someone who tells lies like that, about her own brother, wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. That’s dangerous, Jonah.”

“Only if one listens to her.” He caught up her hand again and bent his head, his lips dusting hers. “And we shan’t. We’ll live in the country as much as we can. You’ll like the estate, Bea. There’s a nice hodgepodge of buildings, with an old stream running through the meadow at the bottom of the back gardens.”

“That sounds lovely,” Bea said.

“I’ve a house here in London too. Bigger than Paget House, and in better shape, since we renovated it for Regina’s debut. I put in water closets.”

It occurred to Bea that perhaps Jonah’s report that he wasn’t prosperous might have been exaggerated.

“Would you mind if I kissed you, Bea?” His voice was casual, as if he were suggesting a cup of tea. When she didn’t say no, he dipped his head and licked her bottom lip. His hands went to her shoulders and pushed the domino cloak away.

Bea’s mind clouded, and she leaned toward him, wrapping her arms around his neck. “More,” she whispered in his ear.

“My lady’s wish is my command.” He picked her up and placed her in his lap.

Bea’s blood was on fire with longing. She shifted against him and felt …

Hmmm.

Jonah’s lips parted, and he groaned. Before she could say anything, he began kissing her, holding her tightly while his tongue swept through her mouth, firing her blood.

She wound her arms around his neck and leaned in, letting her breasts rub against his chest.

“Damn it, Bea,” Jonah said, his voice needy and dark.

She came to some sort of dim understanding in the purplish twilight of the carriage, with no sounds other than Elsie’s deep breathing and the clatter of carriage wheels.

Regina wasn’t important.

Jonah was.

Yet there was still time to step back, to take a breath, to say no. A logical, insistent voice in the back of her head kept making that point over and over. She had never had the ambition to be a duchess. She certainly never wanted a sister-in-law whose own brother described her as “feral.”