Page 58 of The Lady Makes Her Mark

And still he lifted his other hand to her waist and dragged her down into his darkness, beside him on the chaise where no doubt a hundred other conquests had been made.

“I can’t marry you,” he whispered against her throat.

“I know that too.” A soft groan escaped her as his lips sought and found the delightful pair of freckles above her collarbone. “Please. Don’t stop.”

He had, God help him, no intention of stopping. She sighed with apparent satisfaction when he eased her back onto the raised end of the chaise and rose above her to claim her mouth in a searing kiss.

When had he become the sort of man who seduced the woman he’d sworn to protect? Even Miles in his rakish heyday would have drawn the line at that.

But such philosophical inquiries would have to wait until a time when all his blood was not directed somewhere other than his brain.

Between them her hands moved to slide beneath his coat and curl around his ribs. But he did not immediately accept her invitation to snug their bodies together. Instead, he levered himself onto one knee and one arm, while with the other he smoothed the tangle of red hair away from her eyes so that he could look deep into their gold- and green-flecked depths.

“You’ve been driving me mad for a fortnight, Constantia. No, months,” he corrected. No point in dishonesty now. Her cartoons had irritated and fascinated him in equal turns, and when he had finally seen her in person last spring? Well—suffice it to say, he had never forgotten.

She stared up at him from beneath eyelids already drowsy with desire. But her lips quirked in a crooked smile, not at all chagrined by his chiding. “And I suppose you mean to show me how it feels?”

He cupped her cheek, traced his fingers over her parted lips, bit back a growl when her tongue darted out to taste him. He let his hand slide lower, over her chin, down to her throat, where he could feel her pulse race. “I’m not sure I have the patience for that.”

He felt rather than heard her sigh. “Please?”

It was tacit admission of a truth they both knew. They had an hour—or a handful of them, if they were weak—to explore what might have been between them, if he were not duty bound to marry another and she were not a wild thing determined to fly free.

They had to make the afternoon last.