A Masquerade in the Moonlight - By Kasey Michaels Page 0,70

was intoxicating, inciting him to recklessness. Even the thought of possible exposure only served to heighten his passions. “Although I’m open to suggestions if you have a better idea. After all, we have to do something to pass the time.”

“You are insane,” she whispered in a fierce undertone. “You’ve done nothing but make untoward advances to me since the moment I first had the misfortune to meet you. You prate on and on about love and kisses and being alike as two peas in a pod, when all the world could see that we have nothing, absolutely nothing in comm—”

He shut off her protests with his mouth, swooping down to capture her lips in a kiss even as both his arms found their way around her body, pressing her softness against him as he toppled back onto the dewy grass.

In a heartbeat they were melded together from chest to knee, their hands reaching, squeezing, molding, stroking, their mouths feeding hungrily, greedily, as if they might devour each other in the sudden burst of passion that could not be denied.

Marguerite was right. He was insane. They were both insane. Harewood could stumble over them at any moment. And he didn’t care. He just didn’t care.

Marguerite’s lips opened beneath his assault and he slipped his tongue inside, where it met and immediately engaged in a duel with hers that shot white-hot lightning bolts throughout his body. God! She was everything he had imagined, everything he’d been looking for all these years, for an eternity of making his way through an endless string of meaningless, forgettable women.

And she was unattainable. A lady, with the heart and soul of a wanton. From a class far above his own. From a country soon to be at war with his. From a life he would never understand, even if he had found wealth and position in Philadelphia. They were separated by more than an ocean, but by a world of differences that would be impossible to breach.

But he wanted her. God, how he wanted her. How he needed her.

He slid his hands down her spine and low over her buttocks, pressing his fingers into the curve between her legs, his movements hampered by the folds of her cloak, his frustrations mounting as she moved against him, the weight of her body against his arousal driving him past thought and totally into the world of physical sensation.

And then, through a haze of passion, he felt Marguerite’s body begin to shake and realized she was no longer kissing him, but had lifted her head and was gazing down at him, her grin more devilish than any leprechaun about to steal off with his pot of gold. She wasn’t just grinning. She was giggling; like a child savoring a delicious joke.

“What?” he questioned her, lifting his head to nip at her chin with his teeth.

“Nothing, Donovan,” she said, bracing her hands on either side of his head, her gorgeous dark copper hair falling down on either side of her face like a living curtain, sealing him away from anything but the sight of her lovely face. “I was just thinking how Ralph would most probably suffer an apoplexy if he decided to go hunting in the shrubbery. That would complicate your plans while suiting mine to a cow’s thumb. Ah, Donovan—what a sad pair we are.”

“Minx,” Thomas growled, unceremoniously pushing her over onto her back and making his way back to the break in the shrubbery on his hands and knees to see if Harewood had finally given up and headed for home. The alleyway was empty.

He turned around, to tell Marguerite, and cursed under his breath.

She too was gone, leaving him alone to regain his equilibrium and to wonder what in the name of all that Paddy Dooley called holy to do next.

CHAPTER 10

As the saying is, I have got a wolf by the ears.

— Terence

It never ceases to amaze me, the lengths to which a man who publicly purports his intelligence might travel to establish his inborn stupidity. I agreed to the scheme, for the money it would bring my dearest Victoria and Marguerite. No—strike that. At least let this pitiful fool be honest one last time, if only with himself.

I did it for the solace it would bring my accursed vanity to be able, at last, to care for my wife and child as I would like rather than be the indigent husband living on his wife’s father. W.R. swore the investment was sound, and I