An Heiress to Remember (The Gilded Age Girls Club #3) - Maya Rodale Page 0,55

something,” he said.

“The store still isn’t for sale,” she said.

“You know that’s not why I’m here.”

“Is it?”

“Let me prove it to you.”

“Well, if you insist,” she murmured. Then she turned and sauntered off with an inviting glance. He followed her as she weaved her way through tables and displays of all the secret delicate things women wore next to their bare skin. He didn’t miss the inviting glance she gave him.

What was she wearing under that dress?

He would soon find out.

It was just her and him, alone in this great big department store after hours. There was nothing like having an empty public palace to oneself at night. They might have been the only two people in New York who knew the feeling.

He found her in the fitting rooms, in a small chamber enclosed with thick plum-colored velvet curtains that shut out the low hum of closing sounds in the store. Electric lights glowed softly above. And out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glance of her and him in a full-length mirror.

“Of all the places in Manhattan and this is where you abscond with me?”

“Maybe it’s a particular fantasy of mine,” she murmured, and he remembered the younger version of themselves taking this particular risk, sneaking off to steal a kiss in whichever darkened corner was available. Unfinished business. But then Beatrice pulled him close and tilted her lips up to meet his.

They were not wasting time, then.

His mouth found hers and in an instant, all the events of the day melted away. The conversations and problems and matters of business that usually drained him were just forgotten. There was only her and him—her tall, luscious body pressing against his.

There was only this kiss.

And more.

He watched with darkened eyes as she shrugged out of her jacket and he was mesmerized by the arch of her back and the way her breasts strained against her shirt. That little action, like something she might do alone at the end of the day, excited him. Because it was the sort of little intimate action that he’d never gotten to witness with her. And it was one that suggested certain things were about to happen.

He wanted those things.

His heart was racing for those things.

And then the shirt. God, she was undoing the buttons on her crisp white shirt.

“Beatrice, are you sure?”

His heart was pounding now. Blood roaring and rushing and there was nothing else in the world, nothing else at all except for this moment that once upon a time was all he had ever wanted. Beatrice, free and offering herself up to him.

He’d thought he would die when he’d learned she’d said yes to the duke. He still remembered the blackness and bleakness that had settled over his existence when he’d lost her because he hadn’t been enough. But now here she was. Her arms around him, her lips teasing his, leading him unto temptation. There was no question of resistance.

“What part of sixteen years of a cold, loveless marriage—” But he didn’t hear the rest, because he was transfixed by the sight of her standing with her shirt half-unbuttoned, revealing a peach pink silk corset. Her breasts swelled above it.

“I’m very, very sure,” she said.

And then all his restraint was gone.

His mouth crashed down on hers for a kiss that was all pent-up frustration and years of longing. She pressed her body up against his, and he sank against her, and the wall. A tangle of skirt and shirts and velvet curtains and damask wallpaper. His eyes were closed, his body on high alert to her every writhe and moan, and they just . . . kissed.

Her lips.

The exposed hollow of her throat.

He drank her in. Breathed her in.

“Yes,” she sighed. “Yes.”

A few more buttons were let go. But that was slow, fumbled going.

“Just rip it off,” she murmured. So he did the thing, the rakish impetuous thing of just ripping her shirtwaist apart. It was no feat of strength, all that delicate cotton and little pearl buttons shredded like paper and littered the dressing room floor.

“Terribly sorry about your shirt,” he said softly and he only somewhat meant it. He drank in the gorgeous image of her exposed skin and pale corset and the swell of her breasts.

That faint peachy pink got to him. It was so almost white, so virginal and missish and shy and it hardly seemed right for the woman passionately kissing him in the dressing room of a department store that she owned