Page 58 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

He stepped closer, ostensibly to return the glass to the table behind her. “I might have skimmed over that part.” His body pressed against hers. “Care to refresh my memory?”

“I won’t claim it was love at first sight,” she warned teasingly. “But I did rather like the man I found myself married to. And I’m falling in love with the man I see before me now, the man you’ve become.”

“Caro.” Her name was the merest breath of sound. This time, when she rose up on her toes to kiss him, he didn’t protest but lowered his mouth to hers.

Ah, but she’d forgotten—well, forbidden herself from thinking about—how marvelous his kisses were. How those wryly curved lips and sometimes cruel tongue could turn soft and wicked all at once. His large hands came up on either side of her head, his fingertips driving into her coiffure, scattering her hairpins. Perhaps he imagined himself holding her prisoner to his kiss, but she had no intention of trying to escape.

When she parted her lips, his tongue surged to fill her, and she tasted the wine, bold and earthy. An answering pang of desire throbbed at the joining of her thighs. Pressing her breasts against his chest, straining her calves to lift herself to his mouth, she gave herself over entirely to the kiss, to the passion that had flared between them from the start, and now to the promise of something more besides.

He devoured her, moving across her mouth to her cheek, her jaw, her throat. Aware that her touch might discomfit him, she was careful to do nothing more than steady herself with the hand on his coat. He must choose when, or even whether, to remove the remaining layers between them—wool and silk and linen, yes, but not only those.

At last, her knees grew so wobbly she had no choice but to sink back onto the soles of her feet if she hoped to stay upright. “I’d forgotten how tall you are.” Her self-deprecating laugh was breathless, made more so by his lips pressing against the hollow beneath her ear. “And…before, we—we weren’t standing up when we kissed.”

“We weren’t,” he agreed. His hot breath striking her skin made her shiver. Dropping his hands to her hips, he turned her away from him—to undress her, she assumed. But he merely lowered his mouth to the top of her shoulder and began to kiss her there, moving up her neck in a nibbling progression that had her squeezing shut her eyes and scrabbling to grasp the table’s edge for support.

Then his left arm came around her, his hand at her breast. With the pad of his thumb, he slid the silk back and forth across her nipple, barely concealed by the low neckline of her gown. When it peaked insistently against his touch, he rewarded her with a light pinch, and even that slight compression made her whimper with need.

At that sound, his right hand, which had been resting on her hip, drew her more snugly against him, his arousal nestled against the small of her back. The heat of his palm seeped through her skirts and petticoats as his hand moved to cup her sex, teasing her through the fabric, urging her to part her legs. Fisting his hand in her skirts, he inched them higher, and the cool air whispered daringly over her calves, her knees, her thighs.

“Look,” he demanded, and she blinked open her eyes to discover that the moonlight, both inside the chamber and without, had silvered the window, transforming the glass into a sort of translucent mirror. The reflection of their bodies was superimposed over the view of the water, an image at once ethereal and erotic. Beneath, behind, around them, waves rolled and crashed as the tide neared its highest point.

His questing hand at last bared her mound. She caught no more than a shadowy glimpse of her private curls before her skirts slipped forward around his wrist and hid everything from view again. At the same moment, his fingertips slid over her damp flesh, between her folds, and into her. She looked like a wild, wanton thing, riding his hand, her hair tumbling loose, her heaving breasts threatening every moment to spill over the top of her bodice. And he was the devil himself at her shoulder, his dark head bent over her as he kissed her neck.

“Yes,” he urged against her ear as a low keen rose in her throat. “Come for me. Just like this.”

In those words, however commanding, she heard a plea for her to trust him, this time with her heart as well as her body—as if those were easily separable things.

“If you’ll watch,” she said, though in truth she hadn’t the strength to resist either his touch or his voice.

Raising his eyes to the window, he met her reflected gaze just as she surrendered to him and shattered.

Boneless, she slumped forward over the table when he released her, her skirts swishing down into their usual place. The hand that had been at her breast now skated soothingly over her back. Trembling fingers fumbled with the fastenings of her gown. “Let me take you to bed, Caro.”

With the merest shrug of her shoulders, the silk slithered to a pile at her feet, and she went willingly as he led her away from the window. The bed linens still glowed pale in the moonlight, though not as brightly as they had done, for the moon had risen higher, casting the corners of the room in shadow.

As they approached the side of the bed, he fell behind her. She listened to his footsteps, their slight unevenness muffled by the carpet, and heard the soft whump of his coat settling to the floor. When his touch came again—the press of his lips against the nape of her neck, the curl of his fingers in her shift, preparing to strip it from her—she drew a sharp breath.

“Maxim,” she whispered, “do you trust me?”

He said nothing, but his sudden release of her shift freed her to turn and face him. Even in the dim light, she could read the panic in his eyes. Not an unwillingness to trust, per se. More an uncertainty, as if no one had ever asked such a thing of him before.

“I want to see you,” she said.

“You saw me yesterday.” His voice was cool, careful. “In the bath.”

“I did. But I don’t mean…” In spite of what they’d just done—standing in front of the bow window, no less, putting themselves on display for all of Brighton—embarrassment flared up her chest and across her cheekbones. “Before, when we first married and you came to me, it was always dark and you were…” She twisted her hips slightly, turning her bottom half toward him. “You positioned yourself…behind me.”

He grew increasingly stone faced as she spoke. “As I remember, you enjoyed it well enough.”

“I did. I will again, I’m sure. It’s just that tonight I…I want…” She sucked in another breath and pushed the words out in a rush. “Tonight, when you’re inside me, I want to be able to look in your eyes.”

“Ah.” If she’d thought her explanation would allow him to relax a bit, she’d been wrong. “But that would also involve seeing…”

“Seeing the rest of you, yes. Which, as you just pointed out, I’ve already done. It’s all right, my dear. And I won’t—I promise I won’t touch you, if you don’t wish me to. I’m sorry if my doing so this morning caused you pain.” He’d been hurt enough already.

He caught her hands, which had begun to flutter nervously as she spoke, and stroked his thumbs over her palms, skating around the nearly healed scrapes. “It doesn’t hurt me to be touched,” he said, laying her hands against his chest and covering them with his own. The silk of his waistcoat was cool, and beneath it she could feel the steady thrum of his heartbeat. “At least, not in the way I suppose you imagine. It’s more that I…I fear you’ll be repulsed.”

“I’m not repulsed by you. Does it help for me to say that aloud? Because I hope, deep down, you already know.”