“Why is it that every time I am near you,” her mouth continued to say, never mind it hadn’t consulted her, “it ends in my utter humiliation?”
He paused. “Humiliation? I’m just removing your shoe, Cavendish. Is your foot so unsightly?”
She closed her eyes and decided to continue to talk to distract herself from the pain.
“Cavendish. You would call a lady by her surname—like a man?”
“Only if she were domineering and obstinate, like a man,” he said, not without a distinct note of appreciation.
“Then I shall call you Westmead.”
“My name,” he said affably, “is Archer.”
“Do you know, Archer, that in the four days I have known you, I have been injured and embarrassed more times than in the previous year of my life?”
“Is that so?” he asked, all innocence, removing the lace from her boot.
“Indeed. First you falsely accused me of committing fraud. And being betrothed. To an oaf.”
He very gently pulled the shoe from her foot. “A lying oaf,” he clarified. “But I was wrong. Surely that was my embarrassment, not yours.”
She scoffed. His fingers edged beneath the hem of her breeches for her garter and flicked efficiently at the tie.
He lifted the thin fabric of her stocking and carefully began to roll it down her calf. The sensation of him slowly pulling the stocking down her leg made her eyes shoot open. Not with pain—he was being delicate with her ankle—but with awareness of his fingers on her bare leg.
“Then Constance forced you into giving me a dancing lesson.”
“You weren’t bad at all for a beginner. At any rate you certainly proved better at dancing than you did riding.”
“Exactly! And now I have managed to be thrown from my horse.” She laughed in dismay. She rather liked saying what was on her mind. It was highly relaxing. Perhaps she should always drink brandy and invite men with kind eyes to undress her.
“Well, yes, that was rather badly done of you,” he allowed. “Hold still.” He propped her ankle back on the mountain of pillows and began to fashion little squares of ice wrapped in muslin.
“And then of course you kissed me,” she heard herself say.
She could actually feel herself turning red—the heat pricking first at her hairline, descending to her face, then flooding down her neck. The relaxing qualities of honesty had their limits, it seemed.
Westmead froze. For a second he paused in his ministrations to look at her. His eyes were dark. “And that was … humiliating?” he asked slowly.
There was a touch of something in his voice she couldn’t read—not anger, but far from the light, teasing tone he had used before.
She squeezed her eyes shut. She had gotten herself this far with the truth, so she might as well blunder ahead. “It was not exactly humiliating,” she admitted. “That is, until you stopped.”
It was madness, to speak to him this way. Anathema. She had not spent two decades learning how to outmatch every man in spitting distance only to shamelessly flirt with the Duke of Westmead as she reclined on his sofa with his hands on her bare leg.
He was silent as he arranged the packets of ice around her ankle and gently wrapped them in another layer of muslin to keep them in place.
Then he stood and removed the tumbler from her hand. He neatly downed the liquid that remained in the glass.
“Did you think,” he finally asked, “that I stopped because I wanted to?”
A man with more talent for self-preservation would have removed himself from the vicinity of Poppy Cavendish immediately. He would have noted the sight of her on his sofa in front of his fire and the effect it was having on him and discovered a sudden urgent need to balance the estate accounts or rekindle his boyhood love for conjugating Latin.
He would not have moved a pile of books so he could look directly into her eyes as he said: “Cavendish, what I wanted was a very different type of kiss.”
He would not have leaned into her ear and whispered: “And if you don’t want to be embarrassed, I’ll spare you what I wanted when your thighs were wrapped around me on my horse.”
A man who did not want to drown would have gotten up the second she had whispered back: “And what do you want right now?”
He would not have answered: “This.” And put his mouth on hers with the force of all the hunger he had been fighting since the moment he first saved her from the blasted plumeria in her bloody greenhouse.
If there was any doubt she wanted him back, it was lost in her lips, those soft, pink, pliable lips, which trembled, then opened for him. And in her hair, that long, dark mass that was forever tempting him with its wildness, exactly as soft and fragrant as he had imagined. In her mouth, sultry with brandy, allowing his tongue to dart inside, turning up at the corners as he took her lower lip in his and ever so gently pulled, teasing her with his teeth.
When she bit him back, and he was lost to sensation entirely, his jawbone chafing against her slender neck, his ear catching her sigh as his hands traced, unbelieving, the contours of her shoulders, her beautiful, delicate collarbone, the hollows of her throat.
He pulled her close to him, wanting to envelop her, to inhale her. Her hands reached out to run her fingers through his hair, to caress his face. Only when she yelped and reeled back was he able to find the strength of mind to break his lips from hers.
Ever so belatedly, he recalled her ankle.
“Codding hell. I hurt you.”
Her eyes were filled with lightness. “I didn’t mean to stop you. It’s only that I knocked my ankle against the sofa. Add that to my list of humiliations.”
She was relaxed, recumbent, and glowing in the firelight, her lips swollen from his kisses. He wanted to pick her up and carry her directly to his bedchamber and unwind her from her clever breeches. He wanted more of her skin on his. It had been so long since he’d allowed himself to be touched in such a way that he now perceived he was starved for it.
And that was dangerous for her.
But unacceptable for him.
He let out a ragged sigh and stood.
“Oh no,” she whispered. “There you go, again.”
To his tremendous relief, a knock sounded on the door.
“Archer,” his sister cried. “What has happened to Miss Cavendish?”
Chapter 8
It was like a fairy tale: with a knock at the door, the spell was broken.
Westmead was on his feet, the vulnerable expression wiped clean from his face.
Poppy felt the change in herself as well. As if by some act of sorcery, the sensuous, curious woman in the firelight straightened and stiffened until once again she shrank into the contours of the tightly coiled nurserywoman with the rigid timetables and the ever-present ledger.
The door opened and Constance came rushing in.
“Oh, I was so worried about you,” she cried. “Is it thoroughly broken?”
Poppy shook her head quickly. “It’s only a sprain. I would have gone home, but His Grace insisted we return here for ice.”
Constance shot Westmead a look that Poppy couldn’t read. “Of course you should be here,” she murmured. “We will take such good care of you that you’ll never want to leave us. Todd has prepared a room for you. Archer, you’ll carry Poppy? She mustn’t walk.”