She heard him inhale.
Slowly, deliberately, he put his lips to the pulse of her throat.
It felt warm and feathery. Soothing.
“Do you like that?” he said softly, into her neck.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Me too,” he said, almost to himself.
He ventured higher, dragging an airy line up to a place below her ear. Something crackled inside her, like he had dragged a flint across a fire steel and elicited a bloom of sparks.
His hand came to rest behind her, on the small of her back. “That’s all right? Me touching you?”
“Yes.”
His other hand caressed along her rib cage, just above her waist. “And that?”
“Yes,” she made herself say. She felt at war with herself: very much inclined to like his touch but very reluctant to admit it to him.
His hand rested on her side and did not draw her forward toward his chest nor move up to her breasts. She wished it would do one or the other. Or both.
His mouth, too, remained just so, nuzzling her neck as his fingers stroked that dreadful, lovely spot along her nape. It felt safe, soft, like she was dissolving into light. Then he brought his lips to hers and took her lower lip. It was similar to his first attempt to kiss her and now she understood it.
It wasn’t nibbling.
It was dancing.
Flirting.
Promising something else.
He let out a soft sigh, one that made her think perhaps the same feelings that were rising up in her were rising up in him.
“I would like it,” he whispered against the corner of her mouth as his fingers rubbed small, molten circles over the fabric of her dress, “if you would kiss me back.”
She hesitated, certain she would somehow do it wrong again and ruin this delicate, exquisite demonstration. But when his tongue resumed its passage near her lips, she brought her own mouth to his, lightly. And just like that, it clicked. She didn’t need to think.
Her body told her what to do.
Her body told her that if she tasted him, he would like it, return it, let out another sigh of pleasure.
That he would hold her closer.
That she would kiss him back as earnestly as he was kissing her.
And just like that, she was kissing him exactly like a lover.
And she was not pretending that she liked it.
He’d never expected her to be so innocent.
Given her boldness in kissing him in the garden maze, and what he’d so excruciatingly happened upon in Devon, he’d assumed she had enjoyed flirtations since. When, in weak moments, he’d imagined making love to her, he had assumed she would not come to him a virgin.
Which was fine. He was not a virgin either.
Far from it.
But the woman in his arms was no experienced temptress.
She had been so apprehensive she was shaking.
But now, holding her just so, he felt the shift. The moment when she realized she liked his hands on her. When she discovered that place where one noticed little beyond skin and heat. When she realized one could separate from one’s mind and became a creature of one’s body.
He would never forget what it was like to hold Constance Stonewell as she realized what it felt like to want someone.
It changed everything.
What had started as a game to call her bluff was now too altogether real. He was kissing her in a powdering closet and he wanted very badly to do so much more than kiss her.
He tried to hold himself in a gentlemanly way, so that the telltale hardness rising at his groin would not frighten or embarrass her.
But when she leaned against him and stroked his cheek and let out a little moan, it was so honest that he abandoned his precepts of virtue and grazed against her, just for a fraction of a second. Long enough for her to feel him. Long enough for him to feel her.
He wanted her to feel him and know that he was not pretending either.
Because, damn it, they might never be this close again, and after all the years of wanting her, he wanted her to know.
He needed her to know.
Her eyes shot open and looked up into his.
He stared back, letting her see it in his eyes. Telling her that if she could read his mind, she was welcome to the confession pouring out of him.
The years and years of longing.
She held his gaze. Then she cocked her hip and rubbed against him and he was lost to understanding.
She paused uncertainly, and observing that he had not moved away—for how could he bring himself to move away?—she brought her lips back down and kissed him sweetly.
Fuck.
He fell on her like a wave, pulled her up against him so she was molded directly to all the places where he was hard, and put his mouth on hers while his body made a woman of her. He gave her the kind of filthy, erotic kiss that began in the hips and ended somewhere in the brain, a kiss that was not so much a kiss as a way of making love with all one’s clothes on. The kind of kiss he had told her new lovers did not exchange before they knew each other’s bodies.
Well, he’d been lying. He had wanted her for too many years to pretend that he did not want to fuck her filthily and well and in such a way that she would never want another—
The closet filled with light.
Hands came down on his collar and yanked him into the corridor.
A fist slammed into his jaw.
“I see we don’t have to wait for dawn,” the Duke of Westmead growled. “I’m going to murder you right now.”
Oh, don’t take him just quite yet, Constance wanted to protest as her brother peeled Apthorp off her body by his neck. I was enjoying him immensely.
She sighed as Archer shoved poor Apthorp against a wall and yanked his fussy wig right off his gorgeous head.
He looked so much better without it.
“Have you no respect?” Archer was shouting. “Do you want me to call you out?”
She bit back a smile. There was nothing like the sound of one’s brother threatening to dismember one’s faux fiancé to make a girl feel smug. The force of the duke’s rage could only mean one thing: her plan was working.
She stepped forward and pried her brother’s hands away from Apthorp’s neck. “Stop it, Archer. You’re going to hurt him.”
“Yes, Constance, that is exactly my intention.”
She shoved her way between them, separating them with her shoulders.
“Don’t injure him. He was only comforting me.”
“He was doing quite a bit more than that.”
Indeed, he had been. She still felt as if she were made of jelly that hadn’t quite set up. Who knew Apthorp was capable of turning a woman into a quivering dessert?
Not that pointing out this shocking fact would mollify her brother’s anger.
“You needn’t act like an innocent kiss between two people about to be married is cause for execution,” she said. “Need I remind you the way you conducted yourself with Poppy when you were engaged? If she’d had a brother, you’d have been dead long before the wedding.”
Archer turned on his heel. “Come with me. Both of you. Now.”
He strode down the hall.
She took Apthorp’s hand. “Are you all right?” she whispered.
“Never better,” he said, licking away a bit of blood where his lip had caught a tooth.
A wave of tenderness for him rose up in her chest, surprising her.