well.”
“Not very heroic. I don’t want you to leave.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
A long silence, while her senses swam with him: the scent of his skin and a faint trace of cologne or soap mingling with the starch of his neckcloth . . . the fine linen shirt that was no more than a veil over his shoulders and arms and chest. She brought her hand up to trace the muscles of his arm, and he sucked in his breath.
“Dammit, Cassandra.” He tipped two fingers against the hat brim and tipped it off, onto the carpet.
“That’s no way to treat a good beaver hat,” she said.
“I’ll buy you another. After we’re married. You can wear it sometimes. It’ll be fun.”
“After we’re married? You haven’t asked yet.”
“Only a hundred times.”
“That wasn’t asking. That was—”
He kissed her.
Chapter 15
The floor dissolved under Cassandra’s feet, and she seemed to be in a whirlpool, spinning and sinking in sparkling waters. She grasped his shoulders, catching hold of him as she’d been wanting to do for most of her life, it seemed. He’d always been out of her reach. This was because he was unreachable, beyond help or hope—or so she’d eventually persuaded herself.
But he wasn’t, not in the way she’d supposed. She had hopes for him now, and he’d given her reason to trust him, but she trusted herself, and that was most important.
Trusting, she took the moment as it came.
She was in his arms, where it seemed she’d always been meant to be, and once in his arms, she didn’t know how to hold back. She didn’t try. She answered his kiss in the way she’d learnt from him, a soft, insistent, intensifying pressure of the lips.
Later she’d wonder how it could be: How could mouth slanted over mouth create starbursts of sensation, happiness, longing, and a thousand more feelings, a galaxy? But now she simply felt and acted, giving in to her senses.
She gave in to the taste of him, cool and sweet as a stream in springtime, and heating to become warm and fiery, like brandy. She drank him in, the kiss deepening while the world spun and glittered.
Magic.
That was what it was. That was what she’d always seen in him. As beautiful, unreasonable, and untamable as any mythical deity, he simply dazzled her.
He broke the kiss and cupped her face in his hands. “Marry me.”
“Are you incapable of asking?”
He stroked her jaw with his thumbs, and she felt herself dissolving.
She gripped his shoulders to keep on her feet. “You don’t play fair. Where are my knees? I had them a moment ago.”
He gave a short laugh, and slid his fingers to the back of her head, slipping them into her hair. “What is this?”
She’d pulled her hair toward the front of her head and piled it there, in a style she’d seen on fashionable Frenchmen and the occasional English dandy. The hat helped subdue its volume. It would pass as a man’s coiffure if one didn’t inspect it too closely.
“In case I had to take off my hat. I couldn’t wear a woman’s coiffure. Don’t spoil it. So many pins. And a cartload of pomatum to keep it from springing loose.”
“Why is this so exciting?” he said. “You, in trousers and neckcloth?”
“Because you’re perverse?”
He pressed his temple to hers, one hand cupping the back of her neck. “Because you’re you,” he said softly. “My beautiful, wild girl, will you marry me?”
Because you’re you.
Her heart seemed to shatter then, into diamond shards. “Yes.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.” He kissed her ear and trailed kisses along her jaw. He loosened the neckcloth, and she should have protested. Tying the blasted thing was an exercise in physics and higher mathematics. But there was his mouth on her skin, grazing her throat, and the sweetest warmth was spilling from somewhere within, from her fast-beating heart. The heat spread downward, to settle in the pit of her belly and make her ache.
He unbuttoned the coat and waistcoat and slid his hands over her breasts. She wore no chemise. The shirt was her chemise, and it might as well have been made of mist. She shivered, her skin prickling under his touch, her breasts tightening. She forgot how to breathe.
She dragged her hands over his back and down to his taut waist and down farther. He made a choked sound, then, “We really must stop,” he said.
“I know. Oh, but Lucius.” She could not get enough of touching him, of wondering at him. Warm muscle tensed under her