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She opened her mouth to speak, but no words emerged.
She could only gasp into his chest while she clawed at the brocade of his jacket. She breathed quickly, gasping and gasping.
“My God. What if something had happened to you?” Thomas breathed in deeply. “What would I have done?”
Tricia tilted her head back then, met his dark gaze, and in the moonlight he looked like a god of Mount Olympus come to life. Beauty. Such masculine beauty that took her breath away to the point that it got caught in her throat.
Thomas pierced her soul with his eyes. “You are too young and beautiful to be up here. What would you have done if I hadn’t been here? You might have fallen...”
She continued staring at his beautiful face.
“I don’t think that I could have gone on,” he continued. “To have such beauty erased from this earth. What in the world were you doing up here, my lady?”
Back to “my lady” now. He had been calling her Tricia.
But he was a man of honor after all.
Tricia opened her mouth, but several silent seconds passed before she was able to eke a few words out. “I am…quite well, my lord, thank you.”
He met her gaze in earnest. “But what if you had not been? What if I had not been walking past? What if I had not come up here?”
“Indeed, Thomas”—in a breath of longing she used his Christian name—“why did you come up here?”
He pulled her into his chest once more. He brought his nose down to the top of her head, taking in the scent of her hair. “You had disappeared from the ball. I was looking for you. But then I got lost. Lost in the thoughts of my childhood. Of many days spent up here, playing. It’s a good thing I decided to go to the parapet.” He pulled her inside, out of the winds and brisk air. “What were you doing up here?”
“I just needed a respite,” she said. “This is all so daunting, you know?”
“Indeed I do know. Though I suppose it is more so for a young lady during her first season. It certainly is something I cannot understand.”
“I’m very fine.” She awkwardly untangled herself from Thomas’s arms and took a step toward the door back inside. “I think perhaps I’d like to go to my chamber.”
“Of course. I shall escort you.”
They took a few steps away from the broken railing and back inside, to the top of the narrow staircase, and then?—
Thomas’s mouth was on hers, his tongue prying her lips open.
The kiss. The kiss she was so afraid she would never experience again. But this kiss... Granted, she had only one other to compare it to, and it was the same man, but this kiss... It was different. The kiss at his father’s gravesite had been a kiss of loss. A kiss of wanting to prove he was alive when his father was not.
But this kiss…
This kiss was a different animal altogether. This was the kind of kiss that made a woman’s knees weak, set her thighs on fire, transformed that very secret place into an intensity so bold and hot that she could hardly stand it. His tongue. His tongue was velvet, and it stroked hers, and as it did, she became an active participant in the kiss.
She slid her own tongue into his mouth, and as he took from her, she took from him as well. Her entire body quivered with lust. Thank goodness he was holding her, because she wasn’t sure her legs would work otherwise.
She trembled in his arms, yet she wanted to get closer to him. She wanted to shed these restricting clothes, turn, and let him unlace her corset. She wanted to be naked with him. She wanted to see that part of him that she had heard could give her unbounded pleasure.
Against her belly, even against her corset, she could feel his desire for her.
She surely was not at the estate any longer. She must be ascending the spiral staircase to paradise itself.
But a moment later, Thomas’s mouth had been ripped from hers, and he stepped away from her, looked away from her, his breath coming in rapid pants.
“Forgive me,” he said.
Forgive him?
Was he serious?
