Emboldened, Seph started a slow rub with her palm. Her heart pounded with excitement and her breath quickened. The press of bodies, his pushed against hers, his scent filling her lungs. She felt invincible in their clandestine tryst, so daring in public. Somehow, as if the crowd held him constrained, she could sample him without consequence.
His hand tightened on her wrist, “Seraphina.” His voice a warning.
“I would have thought you had more stamina.” She said under her breath, her mouth curled into a smile.
His mouth quirked. “Why don’t you try me and find out,” he whispered back.
“I think I can find out right now.” The power of the moment making her brave.
His hand came over hers and he pressed her palm harder against him, subtly grinding his hips into her palm making her core clench and her sex weep with need.
She squeezed him again and leaned closer, her breasts pressed against his chest and whispered in his ear. “I can almost feel you inside me. Pressing into me. Claiming me heart and soul with each thick, penetrating inch. Breaking me open to lay spread wide, vanquished on your sword.” He groaned against her neck.
Her heart thundered in her chest at her boldness. Elation. Excitement. She hadn’t fully jumped but she hadn’t stepped back. His face all hard, tight lines not hiding his desire or his need…so brave. So raw and honest. Did she have the same courage?
She drew her nails across the tip of him, felt the slight dampness of the fabric announcing his readiness. She felt powerful. Alive. Her skin vibrated with tension, the combustible heat scorching them. If they were alone she would be his, he could take her and she would lambast him if he didn’t.
“I surrender.” He growled and muttered things in Russian. She pressed closer, squeezed that damp head in her fingers. An oath under his breath.
“No more little bird.” His burning gaze locked on her lips.
Just then the throng breathed, and they had space. Cool air rushed around them. The loss of his heat as he stepped away a physical pain in her chest.
He growled something in Russian before turning around, taking a few quick strides that had him clipping the side of the Christmas tree as he ducked into the corridor behind it.
“What are you doing to that poor man?” Marsden asked pressing through the crowd and standing behind her.
Seph turned, lightheaded, body pulsing with need. “Showing him that two can play his parlor games.”
“Good for you.” Marsden looked in the direction Ilya and gone. “It was obviously a double-edged sword.”
“What do you mean?”
He leaned closer and said in a hushed voice. “You are flushed. To a man who knows you or knows women, you are clearly aroused.”
“Pff. It’s just the heat in here.” She took out her fan and fanned herself.
“Bravo,” Marsden said beside her.
“I think I am getting an idea about how this is all played.”
Marsden chuckled. “Well you’ll have your hands full if you don’t watch out.”
He didn’t know how true that was, literally.
Ilya did come for his waltz, but she was already on the floor. He stalked around the edges of the floor, scowling for a few moments before whisking a wallflower onto the floor, proceeding to twirl the poor girl around Seraphina and her partner as if Ilya and the wallflower were doing circumambulations.
It was when she was leaving, as she walked into the large entry hall, that she saw him lean down under the mistletoe and give a chaste kiss to the flushed and starry eyed wallflower before she was led out by her family.
“You are cruel,” she said as she walked up beside him and watched the girl look back over her shoulder, hope painted all over her young face.
“Girls need dreams. Besides, I like women who keep their appointments.”
She laughed. “Dreams…I see.”
Seph stepped closer, the carnal ghost of him under her fingers. “So, you blessed her with future night terrors,” she whispered, pressing her breast against his arm for a moment, awakening all those sensations of earlier.
The man was wicked.
And right now, he looked at her like a wolf, his face full of dark intense eyes promising to consume her. But it was his mouth that made her shiver, a mouth curved in a dangerous smile.
Triumphant at having won that bout, she stepped away.
But his arms slipped around her. An arm as hard as steel that brooked no argument.
He drew her in for a mistletoe kiss that would become infamous in tomorrow’s gossip columns for its inappropriateness.
Chapter 8
The Bond Street Bookshop was one of her favorite places when she needed to get away. The shop front with its gold lettered signage and a terrible bell that, in all the years she’d frequented it, hadn’t been replaced by one with a more pleasant-sounding ring. Inside it smelt like paper and printers’ ink, the warm tones of leather from the bindings a more subtle note. Right now, she needed to be in the familiar place where every book held a world waiting to be found and explored. She needed, even for a few hours, to be removed from this very real and confusing world.
It had been three days since the Fairmont’s Ball. She’d avoided the salons. Didn’t want to face him while her skin still burned and her body pulsed with need that hadn’t yet left her. The truth was, she still teetered on that cliff’s edge.
Seraphina scanned the books lining the shelves of The Romantics: Shelly, Blake, Byron, Keats. Then there was Edger Allen Poe. She pulled the small book out and flipped to The Raven, about a man wanting to remember and wanting to forget. How well she knew the conflicted feeling.
The book slipped from her hand and she bent down to retrieve it. Her body noticed his arrival first when it slipped into a warm hum of awakening. Her peripheral vision saw movement and she needed nothing else to know that it was Ilya. So, she rose, ignored him as he came alongside her, and she opened the book.
“It’s rude to ignore a person you know,” he said then leaned in. “especially if you touched him where you have me.”
She turned her gaze to the bookshelf as if searching for something.
“You don’t strike me as the type who reads,” she said in her most disinterested voice.
“I read all manner of things, Seraphina.” He turned and stood far too close to be polite and there it was again, his byzantine scent wafting about the air in seductive tendrils. “For example. I can read the beat of your heart at your clavicle. A little fast I’d say. You are excited to see me.”
“Nonsense.” But the truth was her heart thundered in her chest and her mouth had gone dry.
“Then there is the fact that you have the book upside down.” He plucked it from her hands and turned it right side up, taking a closer look. His all too handsome face with its devastating lips, screwed up in mock distaste. “I should be offended. I seem to have driven you to the macabre.”
“I am surprised you even know who he is.” She snatched the book back determined to purchase it simply because he didn’t like it. She let herself look at him then. So very Russian in a large brown fur coat, opened now he was inside, with a well-tailored charcoal-grey suit underneath. There was no top hat today, instead a fur hat was pressed into the coat pocket. He was all Baltic beast today, and it made her want to snuggle under that coat and play again with his awfully long and terribly fat member.