She gave him a sad smile. “The same could be said of you, I think.”
How sweet she was.
Too sweet for the likes of him.
He would have her anyway. Take some of that sweetness for his own.
“I am not young at all, darling.” Indeed, he felt as if he were positively ancient.
He felt as if he were a lecherous satyr presiding over a fairy queen.
“How old are you, Decker?” she asked then, startling him once more with the use of his preferred name.
“Eight-and-twenty in years,” he said softly. “Easily twice that in experience.”
“I like that about you.” Her smile faded, her gold-chocolate eyes searching his with an intensity that scorched him. “Your eyes are very expressive. You are not the man you would have the world believe you to be, are you? You are so much more.”
Bloody hell.
She had robbed him of the ability to speak.
He would show her how much more of him there was. And he would give her all of himself. Decker knew it with a certainty that shook him, despite the hardness of his heart. This slip of a woman, so young and untouched and yet, just as she had said about him, so much more.
He tugged her into him, forgetting his plans. Forgetting everything but the need to cover her mouth with his. And she was every bit as frantic. She felt it too, this precious connection, this melding of their very souls. It was as if he had waited all his life for it, so rare and deep and real.
Ridiculous, scoffed the remaining shreds of his rational mind.
Complete rot. You are thinking with your cock. You want her cunny, and all the blood in your body has gone to your prick, leaving your pitiful brain unable to function properly.
Fuck that voice. He forgot all about it as her arms wound around his neck. As her fingers sank into his hair. As she rose on her toes in the same instant he lowered his head.
Their lips collided.
This was different from the kiss in the carriage. It was more powerful, one part communion of bitter and jagged and disappointing pasts, one part acknowledgment of the fierce desire burning between them. Her teeth rasped against his lower lip. Her unbridled hunger was the most potent aphrodisiac he had ever known. He kissed her harder, slanting his mouth over hers.
He knew he ought to take his time, break her in, initiate her. Show her what he wanted and how he wanted it. Learn what she liked. But he could not control himself any more than he could tear his lips from hers. His tongue sank inside, plundering. He kissed her brutally, licking the satin heat of her mouth, her tongue, plunging deep the way he wanted to do with his cock inside her cunny.
She whimpered, but not from shock, and not in protest. Instead, she clutched him harder. She stepped into him, fitting their bodies together more fully. They were well-matched, her shorter, petite curves melting into him. There was raw need in her voice, in the way her tongue moved against his.
It became a battle for power, her thrusting her tongue into his mouth, and him retaliating in kind. They went on, kissing and kissing. One of his hands had found purchase on the nip of her waist and the other cupped the base of her skull, his fingers skewering the dark, silky strands of her simple chignon.
Hair pins were falling at last. Locks unraveled. He kissed her harder, tasting Jo and chocolate. Sweetness and mystery, that was what she tasted like. He sucked on her tongue, then bit her lower lip. He wanted to devour her the way she had eaten up her dessert earlier.
And then, a most unwanted intrusion: a barrage of louder-than-necessary raps on the door. Decker knew what the knocks meant and who was dealing the blows. Macfie. He had asked his man to provide him with a subtle reminder when the time had come to put an end to his clandestine evening with Lady Jo and return her to her home.
Of course the brute would pound on the bloody door loud enough to wake the dead.
Reluctantly, Decker tore his mouth from Jo’s. What a beautiful sight she was, all flushed, her lips dark and ripe as a cherry. He had conducted a ruinous assault upon her coiffure. She looked as if she had been properly ravished. A fresh bolt of lust pounded through him in time to Macfie’s second round