The goat looked at him inquiringly and cocked his head.
“He’s never done that before,” Joan said, giggling madly as she made her way off the boat. “I am truly sorry.”
Thaddeus turned around, crossing his arms over his chest. “You know why he did this, don’t you?”
“No idea,” Joan said. “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry about your shoe. Perhaps it can be repaired.” She picked it up. “No, I’m afraid not.” She started giggling again.
“That bloody goat is in love with you,” Thaddeus said bluntly. “He was marking his territory, letting me know that I’m not welcome. Not unlike the belligerent peacock. I suppose I’m lucky the bird didn’t follow us down here and piss on my wig.”
He bent over and picked up his coat from on top of the picnic basket and pulled it on. “You’re his owner; you owe me a forfeit.”
“Fitzy wouldn’t have done that,” Joan protested. But she broke out into giggles again as Thaddeus tugged on one side of the stocking hanging from Gulliver’s mouth. She ended up laughing so hard that she bent over.
“Forfeit,” a voice repeated just in front of her.
She straightened and found herself in Thaddeus’s arms. He was warm and hard, his mouth capturing hers, a sensual hint of pressure telling her to open her mouth to his.
Joan wound her arms around his neck and let his tongue tangle with hers. She felt like a teakettle on the boil, bubbles fizzing through her veins. As soon as they started kissing, it was if they had never left off.
Her attention was entirely on Thaddeus, so much that she stopped smelling Gulliver’s odiferous presence, or feeling late afternoon sunshine slanting onto her neck. The world shrank to Thaddeus’s lavish, passionate kisses.
She didn’t hear a breathy snort that resembled a protest issued by an ancient relative of a minotaur, removed two or three hundred times.
But she certainly felt it when Gulliver’s solid—if elegant—horns butted Thaddeus directly in the rear end. He lurched forward; she fell backward onto the grass. He went down after her, catching himself on his hands before he flattened her.
A thought that sent a stab of lust through her.
“Are you all right?”
She looked up at him, blinking. “Yes.”
Thaddeus turned to his side and pointed at Gulliver, who looked as close to laughing as a goat could look. “You,” he said, in a calm but authoritative tone.
Gulliver cocked his head.
“Drop my stocking.”
To Joan’s shock, Gully’s mouth fell open, and a mangled, wet stocking plopped onto the grass.
“Now go back to your orchard,” Thaddeus said, keeping his eyes on Gulliver.
“I can’t believe it,” Joan exclaimed, propping herself on her elbows to watch Gulliver trot away. “You bested him!”
Thaddeus turned back. He was lying half over her, the weight of his body a heady pleasure.
“Gully isn’t defeated,” he said, a wry smile playing on his mouth. “Did you catch the moment when he dipped his head? He took my other shoe with him.”
“It’s not as if you could wear only one,” Joan whispered, curling one of her hands around the back of his neck. Not to pull him toward her, because that would be frightfully unladylike. Her fingers played along the strong cords of his neck.
“I’ll have to return to the castle with no stockings and no shoes,” Thaddeus said, looking unperturbed by this prospect.
“It doesn’t bother you?” she asked, realizing when she spoke that her voice had dropped to a husky tone that she’d never heard before. “Such a state of disorder isn’t very ducal.”
“I find it does not.”
He was looking down at her, eyes intent.
Damn it. She was going to have to kiss him this time. She moved her head just enough to nip his lower lip.
In response, he dropped to an elbow. One of his hands slid underneath her and cupped her bottom. “These breeches will be my downfall,” Thaddeus said.
A conversational comment, except that if her voice had been husky, his was a rasp.
She wiggled against his hand, grinning at him. “I rather like your . . . breeches as well. Or what’s inside them.”
He went still all over. “Do you?”
“I’ve seen such things on babies and in books,” she said, laughter swelling up inside her again. “Never in the wild, so to speak.”
Only one leg lay over her, but holding her gaze, he shifted just enough so that his warm tool pulsed against her thigh.
“Yes,” Joan said, her mind so fogged with desire that she couldn’t think of anything to say. “That.”
“Yes, that,” Thaddeus said. Leaning his head down, he nipped her lower lip.
But Joan couldn’t play this cat-and-mouse game of desire any longer. She opened her mouth with a soft sound from the back of her throat and whispered, “Thaddeus.”
“God, I love it when you say my name,” he groaned. His mouth came down on hers again, urgent and possessive.
They kissed until the sunlight slanted so low that Thaddeus’s hair turned from barley to gold, until the grass lost its sunlit warmth, until Joan’s whole body was pressing against his, wanting to feel more, know more.
“Time to go,” Thaddeus said in her ear as she caught her breath.
“No.” The word was plaintive, because desire was filling her lungs, and her blood, and every bit of her.
His weight lifted, and she choked back another protest. “Joan,” Thaddeus said, brushing a lock of hair away from her eyes. She had braided it to fit under a man’s wig, but many of the pins holding her braids in place were lost.
The world snapped back into place around him: the sky, the grass, the castle off in the distance, out of sight. The world.
And she, on her back, pleading with a man who couldn’t marry her to ruin her instead.
“I suppose I can’t take your virtue,” she said, sighing, instinctively avoiding anything serious.
She would die before she would let him know that she was in love with him.
Hopelessly, foolishly, completely in love with him.
She’d laughed at Anthony Froude for protesting how much he loved her after they shared a few kisses. Now she wasn’t so sure the man was shallow. Thaddeus’s kisses were potent. She felt as if he spoke to her of love in every kiss. Which he didn’t.
So kisses were lies, which she should have known since her own kisses—those she offered to Anthony Froude, for instance—were false.
“Desire is a potent emotion,” Thaddeus said, his thumb rubbing against her cheek. His eyes looked as if he knew what she was thinking. “Easily mistaken for another.”
The words sent cold water down her spine.
Perhaps he was guessing that she had fallen in love with him. Perhaps he could—a humiliating thought—see a besotted expression in her eyes. She rolled on one side and summoned up the expression that he claimed didn’t affect him.
Ha!
It did affect him.
His eyes darkened just a fraction, and he leaned toward her an infinitesimal amount.
“Don’t worry,” she said, keeping her tone perfectly light. “I told you how many men I’ve kissed, Thaddeus. I think . . .” She paused teasingly and tapped her chin with one finger. “I think that I’ll judge you on the basis of this kiss, rather than the one we shared in the snake tent or those on the island.”