The Importance of Being Wanton - Christi Caldwell Page 0,96

palm along the small of her back, just over the curve of her buttocks, rubbing in a delicious, soothing circle.

Emma propped her chin atop his chest. “Very much so.”

They shared a smile, which eased back reality’s inevitable arrival.

“We’ll marry,” he said quietly.

And with that, the cold rush of the present she’d been avoiding found its way into this stolen interlude. Emma swung her legs over the side of the bed. “What is that? An offer? A statement?” And a sharp ache needled her chest at what his words were.

Or rather, what they were not.

He frowned. “Of course we’ll marry, Emma.”

“Because of what we’ve done here?”

Color rose in his cheeks. “Yes,” he said tightly. “And because . . .” Her ears pricked up as she waited for him to say more. “It is the right thing for us to do. And I want to marry you.”

There it was. Only as tacked on as she’d always been to him and his life. An afterthought.

The mattress groaned, indicating he’d moved. From the corner of her eye, she caught him removing the sheath from his shaft and tossing it aside as he hastily cleaned himself.

“You needn’t marry me, and I needn’t marry you,” she said calmly, as she might deliver a lecture to the Mismatch Society. “I am a grown woman, and you are a grown man, and we are both entirely capable of . . . of . . .”

“Making love?” he supplied.

Her cheeks went warm. “Yes . . . that.” Somehow, despite everything she’d done with this man, a blush was still possible. “Making love,” she made herself say. “And there needn’t be anything more.”

“You’d deny how very compatible we are, love?” He folded an arm around her waist and drew her close so that Emma’s back rested against his chest. Charles kissed the place just behind the shell of her ear, his breath fanning her skin. Her eyes grew heavy from the desire his touch always roused, and she resisted melting against him and pleading for him to make love to her—again.

“Not in the ways that matter, Charles,” she said tiredly, and with a strength she didn’t know she possessed, she stepped out of his arms. Except that wasn’t true . . . She’d since discovered his affection for his son, and their shared love of political philosophy . . . and now they shared joint ventures. Her society. His club. Avoiding his eyes, she rescued her garments littering his floor.

Charles stopped her, resting a hand lightly upon her arm. “There is nothing I can say to convince you of this.”

There were any manner of things he might say . . . if he felt them. “I do not want your words summoned because I require convincing.” Emma sifted through the tangle of garments, searching for her dress—and then froze.

With numb fingers, she bypassed her dress for the white lawn shirt.

That was, white in all but one particular spot.

The crimson rouge of a woman’s lips upon his shirt, the red stark and vivid as sin upon white—a shade of innocence at odds with a man whose name and every deed and act were synonymous with sin. And it proved more sobering than when her sister had flipped their boat and knocked Emma into the crisp Kent waters.

The thick scent of jasmine that clung to his shirt. The rumpled quality of his garments when he’d entered his rooms.

Tears clogged her throat and blinded her eyes, and she cursed herself for that weakness. “Ah, how easily you scoundrels move from the bed of one woman to another.” She hated that her voice emerged as a whisper.

Confusion lent Charles’s brow several wrinkles, and then he followed her stare. His eyes bulged. He hastily yanked the garment from her fingers and stuffed it behind his back, as if that might somehow undo what she’d seen. “It is not what it looks like.” Shockingly, he had the good grace to blush.

Emma began frantically drawing on her undergarments. “Or smells like?” Because the scent of whomever had been in his arms lingered on those articles, too.

“I wasn’t with a woman. I was . . . but not . . . as you’re thinking. I was at one of my clubs.”

She forced a laugh, a cynical, sharp bark of humorless mirth. “I take it White’s and Brooke’s are still not permitting women members?”

His flush deepened, and he dragged a hand through his hair. “Not that manner of club.”

Emma paused mid-dressing. “Ah,” she said, feigning a dawned understanding. “A