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He moved his hands over her shoulders, tugging down the dress. She heard—or felt—the silk rip. She didn’t care. He dragged the dress down, and pushed down the top of her corset. She felt the air on her exposed breasts before he broke the kiss to bring his mouth there. His tongue grazed her nipple and she groaned, and when he suckled, she gasped, and threw her head back, and laughed, and caught her hands in his hair and kissed the top of his head, again and again. But the tug on her breast tugged deep inside as well, low in her belly, making her impatient, squirming.
She let go of him to grasp her skirts and petticoats. She pulled them up, and his big hand slid over her thigh—
Light exploded, filling the carriage’s interior. It lasted only an instant, but it was an instant’s too-bright daylight, and it shocked and woke her from the mad dream she’d fallen into, even before the deafening crack shook the carriage.
She pushed his hand away, pushed down her skirt, and pulled up her bodice. She climbed down from his lap.
“Damnation,” he said thickly. “Just when it was getting interesting.”
Another blinding flash of light. A pause. More thunder.
She returned to her seat and tried to put her dress to rights. “It wasn’t supposed to get interesting, devil take me. I knew I oughtn’t to get into a vehicle with you, not when we were so wrought up. Stop the carriage. You must let me out.”
Lightning crackled again. And again. Thunder boomed, and it sounded like a war.
“You’re not going out in that,” he said.
“I most certainly am,” she said. She got up to wrestle with the window. She had to get it down to reach the door handle outside. Before she could do so, the carriage lurched to a stop, and she stumbled. He caught her, but she dug her nails into his hands.
He didn’t let go. “It was only a kiss,” he said.
“It was more than only,” she said. “If not for the lightning, we should have done exactly what I told you I absolutely will not, must not, cannot do.”
“That isn’t what you told me.”
“Were you even listening?”
“You didn’t say you would not must not cannot do it,” he said. “Not precisely. What you said, in so many words, was that your prospective London patrons mustn’t get wind of it.”
She wrenched away from him, and the carriage lurched into motion at the same time. This time she fell onto him. She wanted to stay, oh, how she wanted to stay. She wanted to climb onto his lap and wallow in his warmth and his strength and his touch. She made herself scramble away, pushing away his hands, and she flung herself onto her seat. It was the work of a few seconds, but it felt like a lifetime’s labor to her.
Resisting temptation was horrible.
“You split your hairs exceedingly fine,” she said breathlessly.
“And you thought I wasn’t listening,” he said.
“You chose to hear what a man would choose to hear,” she said.
“I’m a man,” he said.
That ought not to strike her as the understatement of the decade, but it did.
A man, only a man, she told herself—but look at what he’d done, what she’d done.
Nothing ought to have happened as it had: the incendiary kiss, the speed with which reason and self-control had disintegrated—even for her, that was extreme. She had underestimated him or overestimated herself, and now she wanted to kill somebody because she couldn’t think of a way to have him without ruining everything.
If she hadn’t done that already.
Think. Think. Think.
The carriage stopped and she wanted to scream. Would this journey never end?
The door opened. An umbrella appeared, attached to the gloved hand of a drenched footman.
Clevedon started up from his seat.
“Don’t,” she said.
