Lady Derring Takes a Lover - Julie Anne Long Page 0,63

London weather at most times.

She gave a start. Her face lit, then went uncertain then turned swiftly back toward the window, cheeks a little pink.

“The gentleman who relieved himself against the building certainly thought so.”

“If only he’d had a chamber pot painted in periwinkles, it might have been more picturesque.”

She gave a short laugh. But her expression remained wistful. Her posture was a trifle tense. It was both his presence, he suspected, and the fact that Lady Derring wanted the world to be one way, he suspected, and it wasn’t. A list of rules notwithstanding.

“Have you plans for the day, Captain Hardy?” Her voice had gone lulled and soft. This was what his presence did to her now.

“Oh, yes. Various bits of business about town. I’m to meet a friend for a meal.”

How did it happen that the distance between them all but dissolved in a few seconds? He hadn’t moved and neither had she, not perceptibly. But suddenly he could feel the heat of her body against his. Like water sinking into earth.

But he closed his eyes briefly, and breathed her in.

A strand of hair had slipped from her cap to lie against her cheek. And his fingers, as if of their own accord, went up to delicately lift it away, tucking it behind her ear, then trailing down her throat. Which was as precisely as satiny as he’d dreamed.

Her eyes fluttered closed; her lashes shuddered on her cheeks.

And her breath was coming short.

“Imagine,” he whispered close to her ear, as his finger delicately traced the whorls of it, then skimmed to where her heart swiftly thumped. He watched the gooseflesh rise along her throat. “That my fingers are my tongue, and my lips. Imagine that there is nothing at all between you and me, not nankeen, not muslin. Just my skin against yours. My hands and mouth discovering every part of your body. Imagine me taking you here . . . now . . . where anyone may come upon us.”

She swallowed. Her head had tipped back. Her lips had parted, and now her breathing was ragged.

His fingers traced the pulse in her throat.

He let his breath play over her skin as he whispered, “Imagine how you feel now . . . and multiply it by a thousand. That’s how it would be.”

He stepped back.

“Because you’ll have to imagine, you see, as we agreed we shouldn’t do anything about it.”

He left her.

That Bastard!

Delilah was very impressed. It was quite a tactic. And it certainly conveniently answered her question about whether Captain Hardy possessed an imagination.

She couldn’t move a hair from that window for a full minute, her body was in such an uproar of pleasure. She wanted to savor every hot, shivering, yearning feeling that he had started up until it faded completely.

Her breathing did not recover for another minute after that.

And then thinking about him thinking about her—because clearly that’s what he’d been doing—brought with it a fresh wave of that delicious, unnerving heat.

And it was not so much that she’d thought about nothing else for days since he’d kissed—very well, since they’d kissed—in the hallway. It was just that lust now formed the very emotional weather of her days. Every single thing she did occurred against a languorous, thrilling backdrop of it.

And her sleep—though she did sleep—was fitful. It was fair to say she was just a little irritable.

She thought about oughts, and how she’d vowed to never again let them dictate her decisions.

She ought not do a thing with him.

And then there were the wants.

My God, did she have wants.

But if it was merely an affair—and surely widows had them all the time—well, why shouldn’t she be that sort of widow?

The problem lay in the other things he’d said. The things that stole her breath for other reasons entirely.

The only visible star in a night sky.

Any fanciful notions about romance she’d consigned, like her childhood ribbons and christening spoon, to a locked keepsake box. There was no point in taking them out to revisit. But even if she could choose only one perfect thing for a man to say to her in her lifetime, she would not have arrived at something quite as romantic at that.

He was not the sort to resort to words in order to effect seduction. He was stating something he saw as a fact.

And while Captain Hardy claimed his intentions were specific—the satisfaction of an appetite, nothing more—the thing that worried her was that inherent in it, no matter their intentions,