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“I asked first.” And now she sounded like a petty child.
He narrowed his eyes and thought for a second. “Twenty-three.”
“None,” she reciprocated in a little voice after a beat of silence and a tilt of his head. Why had she asked this question? He was right. She wished she didn’t know. Now there was a score of faceless women in bed with Emmett in her mind.
“Almost two dozen lovers and you’ve never taken a wife?”
“No. Mostly they were married and had no desire to change that. And I became tired of the lies and their pretense they wanted me or wanted their husbands, when neither was true. They were only interested in a little shallow entertainment. I prefer a woman with her own aspirations, beyond snaring gentlemen.”
“Do you have a lover right now?” She half expected him to say her two questions were used up, but instead he smiled.
“I have you,” he murmured, stroking his thumb down her palm. Pleasure shivered through her. But she wasn’t his lover.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said irritably. “I meant alover. Not a fiancée.”
“But it was what I meant. I’m promised to you. I wouldn’t betray you with anyone else.”
The creature in her chest withdrew its claws and stretched sensuously.
“Very well, Emmett.” His name felt unfamiliar and delicious in her mouth. “You have answered ten questions. Gina. That’s what my friends call me.”
“Gina,” he repeated, and on his lips her name gained a hundred new depths, like tens of church bells in perfect synchronization from across a valley. He nodded with evident satisfaction.
“You now owe me the answer to a question,” he said. “I give you due warning, I will ask tomorrow and want to hear about your every plan for traveling once you have access to your inheritance. It will probably be another month before I have heard half of it.” He turned back the way they’d come.” But the horses have rested enough. How about your mare runs away with you again?”
He was easy to be with, she admitted to herself when he caught up with her again, after the most glorious, if short, gallop. She’d thought she’d been shackled with a fake fiancé, but it seemed she’d actually gained a friend. And she suspected he was well on his way to being her best friend.
Where that left them when she eventually broke off the engagement, she didn’t know.
CHAPTER7
2 November 1817
“How doyou know if you want to kiss a man?” Gina threw the question out to her friends in a slight lull of conversation at Miss Chilson’s parlor, as Lucasta, Sophie and Gina pretended to sew, and Miss Chilson actually did fine work.
There was a moment of shocked silence, during which Miss Chilson blinked.
Then Lucasta demanded, “What are you not telling us?” And Sophie, damn her, laughed.
“I suppose it feels different for each person.” Miss Chilson recovered first.
“You want to kiss Mr. Stanton,” Lucasta leaned over the arm of the settee and put her chin on her hand. “Don’t you?”
“I…” She really didn’t know. “I don’t think so. But I told you that he’s been tempting me. Sometimes I feel… Fluttery. And I wanted to know what it would feel like if I was tempted?”
“How often does this so-called tempting occur? And what does it involve now? He hasn’t changed and started lifting your skirts or removing your fichu has he?” Miss Chilson said in a mild voice.
“It’s every day.” It had been, anyway. He hadn’t done it this morning, and she’d wondered why. It had made her think perhaps she had missed something. “And no. It’s nothing improper. He only ever holds my hand or touches my cheek. Quite often he will bring me close and tip my head and look into my eyes, his face only a few inches from mine.”
“Oooo.” Lucasta’s eyes gleamed.
“And he’ll say sweet things about how pretty I am, or how he admires my courage.” He had this intense look in his eyes as he did, so that she thought was the actual cause of the sensation of butterflies in her tummy. “I haven’t kissed him. And I don’t want to mistake simple curiosity about kissing for something more and mislead him.”
“You didn’t immediately feel a tug toward him when you met?” Sophie asked.
“No, not really,” Gina admitted. “I was too busy disliking him.”
“That’s what it feels like to me,” Sophie said. “A tug.”
