many layers, including the most forbidding of all, her corset. Still, her nipple pebbled. Her body hungered for him. She was alive and so very aware of everything. So very aware of him.
Jo sucked on his tongue, kissing him harder, trying to match the way Decker’s lips moved over hers with so much expertise. She was melting, she was sure of it. Her insides were liquid. She was nothing but a quivering lump of need in his arms.
Some distant part of her mind warned her against her attachment to the man upon whose lap she sat. Still, nothing could dim the calamitous, exciting sensations he aroused in her.
His lips left hers to coast down her throat. He kissed, nipped, and sucked a delicious path. She tilted her head back to grant him greater access.
“Decker,” she whispered, her fingers sinking into the thick, wavy strands of his hair. “What are you doing to me?”
“Showing you how much I missed you,” he murmured against her skin.
Innumerable, intelligent, coherent responses rose to her lips. And all she managed was, “Oh.”
Perhaps because his mouth was open, his teeth grazing over a particularly responsive cord in her throat. Perhaps because he was sucking on her flesh. Because his tongue was licking her, finding its way to the sensitive hollow behind her ear, then traveling over the shell. Because his teeth caught her earlobe.
“Yes,” he said into her ear. “I missed you more than you know. And now I shall have to show you just how much.”
He could show her anything as far as Jo was concerned.
“Show me?” she managed.
He sucked her throat again. “How do you feel, darling?”
Darling?
That word alone settled deep inside her, residing in a place she had not previously known existed. Jo swallowed hard.
“I am feeling restless,” she whispered, her arms twining around his neck for purchase as the carriage rattled over a bump in the road and nearly sent her sprawling.
His hands tightened on her waist.
“Mmm. Restless?” he asked. “Where?”
That delicious baritone of his made her feel weak. Made more heat pool between her thighs. Which was one of the places where she felt restless.
“Everywhere,” she told him, nuzzling his hair.
Those silky strands felt so smooth and good against her cheek. She inhaled deeply the scent of him—the shampoo he had used to wash his hair, the delicious scent that was all him. Cologne, musk, Decker, man.
Delicious man.
How had she ever imagined another could help her to fulfill the items on her list?
“Everywhere?” he repeated, his voice a decadent rumble. His fist snagged her skirts, lifting them. “Show me where.”
If she had a modicum of honor, she would leap from his lap and throw herself to the squabs opposite him. But was that not why she was here? Her lack of honor? Her desire to be alone with a man, to be wicked, to complete the items on her fanciful list?
Yes, it was.
But still, Jo found herself opening her legs as Decker’s hand slid beneath her skirts. Up her calf, past her knee. He lingered on the hollow there, teasing her until she gasped, wriggling. She wanted that touch on her thighs. Higher, too.
The words, however—shocking, inappropriate words—gave her pause.
“Here?” he whispered, caressing her knee.
“No,” she told him.
Their faces were close, so close. The striations in his sky-blue eyes were vivid. This was a new intimacy, the sort she had never imagined. The kind she would never have dared.
His fingers skimmed on, daring to trace circles over her inner thighs. “Here?”
Jo was certain she was going to turn into flame. She was desperate for those knowing fingers to find her most intimate flesh.
“Higher,” she dared to say, though she was fairly certain a man as experienced as Decker would know where she wanted his touch and how and why. He was simply toying with her, heightening her need, fanning the flames.
But before he could give her what she wanted, the carriage rocked to a halt.
They had arrived at their destination.
Decker’s hand withdrew from beneath her skirts. He pressed a tender kiss to her lips. “We are—”
Before he could finish what he had been about to say, the carriage door was wrenched open. The imminent rain had finally unleashed itself upon the city. The night was dark, a torrent of water lashing the street.
But it wasn’t the violence of the storm, thunder and lightning booming and flashing overhead, that stole the breath from Jo’s lungs. Rather, it was the figure standing on the street in the midst of the deluge. A figure