In the Dark with the Duke by Christi Caldwell Page 0,53
whatever lesson he’d intended escaped him. He palmed the curve of her hip in an unwitting caress.
Her breath rasped . . . was it desire? Her exertions?
Or mayhap that was his own raggedly drawn breath?
He should release her, but even if the fine lord who lived here had come upon them, Hugh still wouldn’t have been able to let Lila go. To break this connection.
Lila had been wrong.
She couldn’t handle lessons with Hugh Savage.
Only, it wasn’t for the reasons she’d initially believed. Reasons that had stemmed from her own weakness and the demons that held her in chains.
Rather, it was him, Hugh Savage, the man.
Her pulse knocked around wildly.
“It’s your hips that give you power,” he said, his voice slightly hoarsened, and the feminine part of her that reveled in her womanhood thrilled at the discovery that he was as moved as she was by their nearness. That this desire that flared to life wasn’t one-sided. That triumph proved short lived as Hugh guided her leg up and out so that it was stretched but not overextended. And the only things keeping her balanced in this unsettled moment were the hands he had on her.
He was once more all business, so that she might have imagined that evidence of his passion.
“When you stomp, you have to think of your power coming from your hips and not your legs. Kick,” he instructed, and then as she did, as if to hammer home his point, he tipped her hips. She bit the inside of her cheek. “That’s just one way to take your opponent down with a kick.”
Lila glanced back over at him. “And the o-others?”
Hugh did a search of their space. “You wouldn’t use them in here . . . or any close quarters such as these. Adapting to your space is a key element of fighting.” He returned his gaze to hers, and the air came alive. His fingers curved almost reflexively into her hips, sinking into the flesh.
She briefly closed her eyes. She wanted his hands elsewhere. Everywhere.
Lila felt his breath, a cool sough against her neck, and leaned into him, laying her back against his chest. Angling her neck, she lifted her mouth to his.
With a guttural groan, Hugh claimed her lips, and she melted against him.
He was there to catch her. Turning her violently about so they faced one another, Hugh guided her against the wall, anchoring her there.
Their mouths met in a fiery explosion of desire, and she turned herself happily over to it, surrendering to him.
There was nothing tender about this kiss. He parted her lips, and she eagerly let him in. They engaged in a dance with their tongues so primitive it bordered on violence. But it was a violence of the greatest kind. One that left her feeling alive and sizzling inside.
Hugh wedged a leg between hers. She moaned into his mouth and moved against the solid muscle of his thigh. There was a delicious friction, and Lila rocked against him in time to the thrust and parry of his tongue. The pressure at her core built to an agonizing degree, and she increased that scandalous undulating.
They were wicked little gyrations that should have shocked or horrified her, but not with Hugh. Everything with him, every moment before and up to this very one now, was free of censure or shame or regret.
He shifted his mouth from hers, and she whimpered at the loss . . . But he placed his lips against her neck, suckling and teasing at the place where her pulse hammered.
Lila cried out.
Hugh softly cursed and covered her mouth lightly with his fingers.
But it was too late.
“What was that?”
And just like that, Lila’s heart pounded for altogether different reasons. That distant but distinct voice of one of the maids rent through the moment.
Lila and Hugh both went motionless.
Removing his hand from her mouth, Hugh raised a fingertip to his lips, urging her to silence, and she struggled to rein in the rasp of her breath.
“Every morning, you insist you hear something in there,” one of the parlor maids was saying.
Lila searched her mind, and placed that voice: Ava.
“Ain’t natural, it is,” the other girl . . . Mary . . . said defensively. “Closing in those halls. Keeping something in there, they are.”
“Ghosts, they be,” the other girl teased, and then dissolved into a flurry of laughter.
“Well, if you’re so certain they ain’t, Ava,” Mary insisted, “you go have a look and find out for yourself.”