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“I already told you, I came to ask you not to go tomorrow night.”
He leaned away from her, his eyes glittering like shards of steel in the darkness. “That is what you told me. It’s even, I wager, what you told yourself. But that doesn’t make it any less of an excuse for therealreason you’re here. The reason you dare not say aloud because if you do, it might reveal that you’re more like the siren in the carriage than you’d care to admit.”
“I don’t–I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I think…I think it’s time that I left.” She glanced behind her at the open doorway. “This was a bad idea.”
“Terrible,” he agreed without hesitation.
“I’m leaving now.”
“I’ll walk you out.”
Neither of them moved.
“Lord Whitmore…”
“Yes, Lady Annabel?”
“I do,” she whispered, biting her lip. “I do want you to kiss me.”
He’d moved quickly to catch her when she began to stumble, and he moved even faster now. With breathtaking speed, he had his fingers in her hair and the hard silhouette of his arousal pressed against her stomach and his mouth on her mouth. Where their first kiss had started off polite and purposeful, the second was passionate chaos straight from the beginning.
Firelight licked hungrily across Annabel’s skin when her cloak dropped to her feet and her pelisse followed. Ezra kicked both garments carelessly aside, abandoning her curls to run his knuckles along the length of her exposed arms, leaving a collection of goose pimples in his wake.
“Soft,” he groaned against her lips. “You’re so damned soft.”
He put his tongue between her lips, introducing her to an entirely new way of kissing that had her shamelessly clinging to his powerful frame, her nails curled into the bulging cords of his neck, her breasts pressed against his chest, her leg pinned in the middle of his granite-like thighs.
It was everything they’d done in the carriage and more, so much more, especially when he carried her closer to the fire and laid her body out with exquisite care onto the cushions, putting the pillow under her head and his own shirt beneath her feet.
Wait.
Hisshirt?
Yes, she registered dazedly when she sat up on her elbows to openly admire his chiseled torso in the flickering glow of the hearth. Yes, he’d taken off his shirt and yes, he was every inch an Adonis. Hard. Muscled. A splendid, spectacular example of male anatomy that belonged in a museum…or in her arms.
“Why, Lady Annabel,” he drawled, his mouth–damp from tasting hers–curling into another insufferable smirk. “I do believe that you’re gazing at my nipples.”
She had the decency to blush and momentarily avert her gaze, but it flashed back when he knelt beside her, and she sucked in a wondering breath when he splayed his hand flat across her abdomen.
“I could stop here,” he mused, stormy gaze unreadable as it raked across her flesh. “Hell, Ishouldstop here. If I was decent, I would.” A smile, half bitter, half amused, stretched the corner of his mouth. “But then, if I was decent, I never would have let you into the lion’s den in the first place.”
“Don’t stop.” The words, so quietly uttered, barely stirred the air. She tried again, louder. “Don’t stop. I want…I want…”
“You don’t know what you want, sweetheart. How could you?” He began to trace a circle around her navel. With every completion of his finger, the circle went lower, and lower, and lower…while Annabel’s heartrate went higher, and higher, and higher. “You’re too innocent. Too pure. You don’t know what wicked is…or how enjoyable it can be.”
He kissed her again, angling his body so that his mouth could remain on hers, tongue delving lazily between her teeth, while his hand continued its pleasurable assault on her senses. Somehow, he got the edge of her skirt, and she trembled when a cool waft of air passed across her legs. Trembled again when he stroked her through the sheer fabric of her undergarments, his circles having made their way down to the garden of curls between her thighs.
“What–what is this?” she asked, her voice pitched an octave too high as a pressure began to build steadily inside of her, stoked by the clever workings of Ezra’s fingers.
“Pleasure,” he told her, and it went on like that for a while.
The kissing.
The slow, languid petting.
She drifted, letting herself melt into the cushions as wave after wave of pleasure rolled over her; surf washing up onto the beach and then falling back into the sea. Again, and again, and again. All the while the pressure continued to climb higher, until she felt him shift beside her, and he replaced his mouth with his thumb, gently inserting it between her lips.
Her eyes flew open, watching him watching her as she tasted salt, and man, and an earthier flavor that she instinctively recognized as herself, which made her feel both unsettled and intrigued.
