The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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СКАЧАТЬ or kiss you again, you do know that, don’t you?’ Lord Mantaigne said with a feverish glint in his eyes that confirmed it and made her feel a lot better about the brazen course of action she was about to take.

      ‘Be quiet, rattle-pate,’ she chided him gently and took it.

      Well, she would regret it for ever if she didn’t, so she kissed him, since he was being such a gallant marquis they might be in their dotage before he got round to it. Wanting him so badly made her ache in places she hadn’t known a woman could ache for a man and she really had a lot of experience to make up in a hurry. Even so, this was playing with fire and it flashed and roared into a blaze even as he met her kiss for kiss. He tasted of rain and fresh air and himself and it was like all her birthdays as a child piling into a whirlpool of excitement and promise and hope all mixed together.

      Then he took over the kiss and made it deeper; more sensual; unique. She had known, but not known. He was experienced and compelling and he knew how to make that fire slide under her skin and speak to the same force in him as they stood, mouth to mouth. Who needed words when there was such a use to put their tongues to? He slowed the pace, showed her how to enjoy the scenery on the way to a destination she’d never visited or expected to visit. It was subtle and somehow beautiful and how could he think himself isolated and unlovable when he had all this magic in him?

      He gave a soft groan against her lips, and she felt the shake in his mighty body. Despite all that fine control of his, he needed her and that sucked her into another layer of wanting him altogether. He licked the swollen line of her lips with sensuous little darts of his tongue where they almost met, and she sighed with pleasure so he had a way to dart inside. This was so much more than a kiss now—more of a pagan dance he was showing her true, wild inner self as they explored and deepened and fed the heated delight that was taking over every inch of her body.

      Even dancing wasn’t close enough now. Mind and body united; touch and thought all wrapped up in needing this one man as she never would any other. His arousing, worshipping hands explored her narrow waist, down over the lithe curve of her hip and rested on the neat softness of her feminine buttocks, and she wriggled shamelessly until the urgent evidence of his need of her rose emphatically against her hot, wet core even through his gentlemanly breeches. Her soft, clinging and light-as-air skirts were a fragile barrier between them now. She appreciated them as she never dreamed she could when she put them on this morning.

      It would take only one flip of the fine-spun stuff and the gossamer petticoats underneath to leave her open to such pleasure it made her breath catch at the very idea of it. One more fiery impulse and he’d be there, inside her—doing something about the delightful pain that was winding her so tight it hurt not to have him there. Instead of held back and still apart, they could have everything, right now. They could soar into sweet, hot darkness together; dizzying and brilliant as racing up to the moon. It was there; on their tongues, in their reaching, exploring hands, in their lips; as if they had to take all there was to take and love every second.

      A surge of heat and pleasure sang though Polly. She wanted to meld with the pure essence of Thomas Banburgh and forget he was a lord and she was a pauper. She swayed into their kiss to deepen it even further, because she knew he wasn’t going to let that happen and she desperately wanted him to spin beyond thought, beyond restraint with her. He was who he was and she was who she was and she felt him clamp fearsome self-control on the rigid need she could feel through his fine clothes and hers as well.

      ‘Noble idiot,’ she muttered reproachfully.

      ‘If I was that, I’d never have got so close to losing control,’ he said unsteadily, leaning his head against her bowed forehead as if he didn’t want to break contact, but being kissable and not beddable was an agony she wouldn’t share.

      ‘You didn’t, I did,’ she said wearily and heard the jag in her voice as she said goodbye to so much they could have been and faced reality.

      ‘I’d only harm you in the end and I’m not worth it.’

      ‘Don’t try to hide the truth behind your imaginary shortcomings. I am a nobody; less than that even as far as your kind are concerned. I was born a lady, but now I’m less than a beggar because I’ve fallen so far. Tell me I’m not a suitable mistress if you have to, but don’t hide it behind polite lies.’

      ‘How can I when it’s not true? You’re as good as any other woman I’ve ever met and I wouldn’t offer you so little,’ he told her with a fierce frown.

      ‘Damned with faint praise,’ she managed to say as his words sank in and she couldn’t find even a trace of lover-like adoration in them.

      ‘I lose any smooth words and easy compliments I ever had the use of when I’m with you. Maybe I left them at the castle gate the day I arrived and ogled at you like a looby,’ he admitted with a flush of colour across his hard cheekbones that made her hope he had been a little bit besotted with her after all, even if it was only at first glance and seemed to have worn off.

      ‘I’m not sure if I’m delighted or insulted by that lack.’

      ‘Neither am I,’ he said with a wry grin.

      She felt a tug of temptation to smile back at him and pretend it didn’t hurt, but it did. ‘Don’t expect me to interpret your lack of a glib answer, I obviously have no idea what makes you lords of creation tick along to your own tune,’ she said as coolly as she could manage. She wanted to rage at him for rejecting what they could be to one another—and that was little enough, in all conscience—but she wasn’t going to give him an excuse to sidle away from her as if he’d been right not to trust her with much of himself.

      ‘And I really didn’t draw back because I wanted to insult you, but more because I didn’t, you know?’

      ‘Yet somehow you managed to without trying.’

      ‘Aye, well, clearly I’m a rogue of the worst kind.’

      ‘Are you, my lord? I wonder.’

      ‘Don’t, but you do make me wish myself otherwise,’ he said, so perhaps she’d made a small dent in his mighty defences.

      His hand shook when he cupped the back of her head and drew her closer so gently she felt breakable. She looked up to meet his brilliant blue gaze defiantly and saw so many questions in it tears stung her eyes instead. No, she had her pride and made herself gaze back at him with desire bold and brazen and bare for him to see what she might have been with him, and what he could be with her, if he wasn’t denying all that made them right together in defiance of all the wrongs the world would whisper.

      ‘You’re not the man you think you are,’ she told him firmly.

      ‘And you’re not quite who you believe either, have you thought of that?’

      ‘No, but Partridge might be back any moment and the rain is stopping, so it’s clearly time for us to consider other things besides there not being a you and me for anyone to worry about, my lord.’

      ‘I will, if you will,’ he murmured and kissed her so gently it hurt.

      ‘Go away,’ she said unsteadily, the thought of a day spent dancing round each other as if nothing untoward had happened tearing at her like a battle wound.

      ‘Will you be all right?’

      ‘I’m always all right,’ she said, ‘it’s what I do best.’

      ‘There СКАЧАТЬ