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‘No,’ she whispered back. ‘Come … come with me.’ She turned and headed for the staircase, acutely aware of him behind her—her heart pounding as she led him into her room. Briefly, she saw him glance round in surprise and she thought that the fairly featureless little bedroom must look so very different from his own, back in the great house.
Outside, their lives were so different, she thought. But in this anonymous little room, those differences didn’t matter. He might be a Duke and she might be a singer who’d fallen on hard times, but in this one very fundamental act, at least, they were equals.
‘Is this better?’ she questioned as she went into his waiting arms.
‘Much. And this is better still.’ His mouth brush
ed over hers with featherlight tease. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered but the unexpected tenderness was tantalising. He began to kiss her again and suddenly Roxy understood why women sometimes said it made them feel faint when a man kissed them. She felt like that now. As if she might have slid to the ground in some helpless kind of swoon if Titus hadn’t been holding her. And that feeling was dangerous.
But danger was easy to ignore—especially when he was undressing her in a way which was making her body shudder. Her velvet skirt whispered to the ground, closely followed by the cashmere sweater. With a smooth dexterity he disposed of her bra and slithered her knickers off, and she found herself revelling in the speculative gleam of his eyes.
‘You are very, very beautiful but I think you’d better get into bed,’ he instructed shakily. ‘You’re shivering.’
But Roxy’s shivering didn’t stop once she was covered by the duvet. If anything it increased, because he had pulled his sweater off and was unzipping his jeans and the slow and complicit way he smiled at her when his erection sprang free actually made her blush.
‘Oh, Roxanne,’ he murmured as he climbed into bed beside her and pulled her into his arms. ‘I can’t believe you’re blushing.’
Neither could she—but there was something about Titus which was making her feel about sixteen. As if this had never happened before. As if the briefest of butterfly touches could start off a whole chain-reaction of feelings which could make her heart clench with wistful longing. And she had better keep those rather pitiful thoughts to herself, she told herself fiercely. Just imagine how much that would inflate his already inflated ego if he knew she could be so instantly smitten.
‘Just shut up and kiss me,’ she said and he was laughing softly as she pulled his tawny head down towards her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE delicate stroking of fingertips over his rib cage roused Titus from the comfortable half-world between waking and sleeping. Slitting open his eyes, he saw from the flickering light which danced shadows around the room that the candle had burned low.
‘Titus? Are you awake?’
The voice was soft. Melodic. Like sweet balm on his senses. He gave a lazy yawn before rolling over to survey Roxanne’s blue eyes, which were fixed on him, thinking how spectacular she looked in the half-light. Like some kind of wanton goddess. Her fair hair spilled down over her shoulders and her skin was so white it might have been carved from marble. The whiteness was broken by her nipples, which were thrusting towards him in silent invitation.
If he hadn’t spent two of the last three hours making love to her, he might have been tempted to lean forward and lick one. Or maybe to kiss her instead. He seemed to have spent an inordinate amount of time kissing her during these snatched and highly erotic interludes at her cottage. He seemed to be walking around his estate in a constant state of arousal. Like a teenager who had just discovered sex. He frowned. Every time he saw her, he wanted to drag her off into the nearest darkened alcove and make love to her—a feat not easily achieved when she was usually wielding a feather duster, with the ever-vigilant Vanessa hovering close by. But sometimes they succeeded, like yesterday—when he had found her alone in the boot-room and he had taken one look at her shining blue eyes and had locked the door.
‘Titus? Are you awake?’ she repeated.
He yawned again. ‘I am now.’
Roxy levered herself up onto her elbow to look at him. Not that there was a lot of room for manoeuvre in this narrow single bed—and certainly not when a man of Titus’s stature was sharing it with you.
She drifted her fingertips down over his hard torso, tracing little circles over his flat belly and feeling his hips circle automatically in response. For three weeks now, they’d been lovers and he was the best lover she’d ever had. No, scrub that. Titus seemed like the only lover she’d ever had. It was as if she’d come to his bed an innocent and discovered sex through him, and him alone.
How he did that remained something of a mystery—or maybe that was because he was still something of a mystery. She knew his body so well. She knew how to reduce him to boneless longing with just the tiptoeing of her fingers—it was getting to know the real man which was harder. No matter how great the intimacy which existed when they were in bed together, he always managed to keep something of himself back. His coolly aristocratic air always seemed to kick in and change the subject, just when it was getting interesting.
She supposed that his reluctance to talk about anything other than the superficial was all to do with his upbringing, because everyone knew that the upper classes didn’t ‘do’ feelings. They kept them buttoned up inside and froze out anyone who dared to enquire. It was just that lately this attitude had begun to frustrate her. She wasn’t stupid enough to read anything permanent into what was happening between them—but knowing so little about him sometimes made her feel as if she were in bed with a ghost.
She drew in a deep breath. ‘Tell me what it was like, growing up in Scotland.’
Titus narrowed his eyes and he might have been tempted to bat the question away if he hadn’t been momentarily distracted by the downward movement of her hand. ‘I didn’t grow up in Scotland.’
‘But you said that your mother lived in Scotland—after your parents divorced. When you were a little boy.’
He swallowed as he felt her fingertips brush against his growing erection. ‘And she did. But I stayed here.’
‘You stayed here? What, with your father and your stepmother?’
‘Right again,’ he groaned as he felt the trickle of her hand over his aching shaft.
‘But I thought you said you hated your stepmother.’
