Haunted by the Earl's Touch - By Ann Lethbridge Page 0,79

did not resist, but she kept her gaze on her hands now lightly clasped in her lap.

‘Look at me, Mary,’ he whispered.

She forced her gaze up to his face. He dipped his head and took her mouth, sweetly, gently, his tightly controlled passion vibrating in the inch of air between their bodies.

He tasted of cinnamon and sweet oranges and night-time snow. A heady combination, when she was already feeling a little dizzy. His hand linked with hers in her lap, a strangely intrusive sensation, his wide fingers pushing hers apart, touching the sensitive skin in between her fingers. It made her breathe faster. It made her feel languid. Or was it the drink?

Did she care?

She was tired of running. Tired of being pulled hither and yon by her desires warring with her mind. Just once she wanted to experience the delights between a man and a woman.

It didn’t mean anything, she knew it in her heart. He was simply seducing her into staying. He wanted to use her for his own purposes. Why should she not do the same? She had no doubt as to his experience as a lover. His touch told her he knew exactly how to make a woman’s body hum with delight. She would never marry. So what did it really matter, this virtue, this strict adherence to the rules?

And if she was going to die, perish the thought, should she not have experienced something of the delights between a man and a woman? Discover for herself the joys lauded by poets and romance novels. Not that there was love involved on his part, but there could be great pleasure, according to Sally. He had given her pleasure, already. And she knew, instinctively, there had to be more.

She turned her body, to enable her better access to his mouth, to return his kiss, to twine her free hand around his neck, and kissed him back with all the art she had learned these past few days. The warm slide of tongue against tongue. The movement of lips that stirred her blood and tightened her core and made a rumble of approval rise up from deep in his chest. She liked that she had the power to move him as he moved her, that he was not completely unaffected by her touch. When she speared her fingers through his silky hair, he hissed in a breath. When she withdrew her tongue from his mouth and he followed with his, she captured it with her teeth and he groaned in the back of his throat.

She was also aware of his hand leaving hers and trailing a path up her arm to her shoulder. Aware of its stealthy path to the edge of the robe. Aware of the way he slowly eased it off her shoulder.

Aware with a sense of heart-pounding anticipation.

Each velvet stroke of his fingertips set a new inch of skin on fire. It felt delicious. Wicked. Wanton. And right. So very right. And when he pushed her back into the corner of the sofa, his chest pressing down on hers, his fingers teasing the rise of her breast, she closed her eyes and let the thrills ripple through her body.

Slowly, he broke their kiss, but his mouth didn’t stop working its magic. He blazed a path of hot wet kisses across her cheek. His moist warm breath in her ear sent prickles of pleasure racing across her skin. Painful and delightful at one and the same time. She gasped.

He swirled his tongue around the edge of her ear, then nibbled her earlobe. When had her ear become such a centre of delight? Dazed by the sheer unexpectedness of the sensations searing through her body with each touch of his tongue, she lay immobile, breathing hard, waiting for what would come next.

He kissed his way down her throat, lingering to trace the hollow of her throat before moving on to the flesh at the edge of her robe, the swell of her breast.

Shocked to her very soul, she put up a hand to cover herself. He caught her fingers with his and kissed them one by one, until he reached her middle finger and closed his mouth around it, sucking on it.

Darkness edged her vision as something pulled tight inside her. An ache of unbearable sweetness.

‘Bane,’ she gasped, terrified and fascinated all at once.

Releasing her finger from its hot wet prison, he looked up at her, his eyes alight with fire and a sort of softness she