“I understand,” she said, and he knew that she did. “But Philip, you have to let him be a boy. Be a child. You cannot protect him from all the ills of this world. Or even the next. But that’s why I’m here.”
His throat dried at her words, and as he stood there gazing into those bottomless eyes, the scales fell from Philip’s eyes.
He couldn’t deny it any longer.
The pull he felt, the attraction – it wasn’t just that he was grateful to her. It wasn’t just that he believed she would help Timothy.
He wanted her. With a desire that, if he were being brutally honest with himself, was unlike any he’d felt before.
And the knowledge that he wanted her this much, more than he’d ever desired his timid wife, was enough to make him feel thoroughly ashamed.
But not enough to stem the flood of attraction that was threatening to drown him.
Slowly, he reached out a hand and smoothed his thumb over her satin-soft cheek, revelling in the hitch of breath it induced. The tell-tale widening of her eyes.
Closing the space between them so nothing but clothing and the last remnants of his sanity separated them, Philip inhaled the lilac scent that he would forever associate with her.
He shouldn’t, but he bent forward, tantalisingly close to those lips, all the while knowing she should push him away, and desperately hoping that she wouldn’t.
He hesitated at the last second, knowing that this shouldn’t be happening, torn between doing what he knew was wrong but what felt so damned right.
But while he stood there struggling with his conscience, Selina made the decision for him.
Leaning forward, she closed the last torturous distance between them and pressed her lips to his own.
And the wave of desire that had been threating crashed over them both.
Chapter 10
“You’ll be late down to dinner if you keep dallying.”
Agnes’s voice sounded behind Selina, jolting her from her wool-gathering.
Jumping from the stool on which she’d been sitting, she spun to face Agnes. To her horror, she felt her cheeks heat under the older woman’s scrutiny.
“I’m just thinking,” she said defensively. “About – about Timmy.”
Agnes raised a brow.
“I am,” Selina repeated firmly.
“I saw the lad a while back. Sat with him while he rabbited on about his adventures in the tree.”
“That’s good,” Selina said, unsure as to where Agnes was going with her tale.
“Hmm. Said his father arrived and ye sent him back to the house to wash up.”
“Well, he was dirty from the tree.”
Selina felt as though the room were heating up by the second.
“Said you were coming right behind him. Only I sat with the lad for a full thirty minutes and you never arrived.”
Oh, God.
She knew.
Selina damped down the panic that flared at Agnes’s words.
So what if she knew, in any case? Selina was a woman grown, and she could kiss whomever she pleased.
Even thinking the word kiss brought back a flood of memory, of sensation, of a need the likes of which she’d never experienced. Not that the memories were far from the forefront of her mind. In point of fact, she’d done nothing but float around her rooms all evening replaying that kiss over and over.
But she couldn’t show that in front of Agnes.
“We’re going to be late,” she said now, repeating Agnes’s words of only moments ago.
“What were you doing?” Agnes asked bluntly, clearly deciding not to skirt around the issue any longer.
“Philip – that is, Lord Breton, was worried about the boy climbing trees. So, we had a quick discussion in the garden. By the time I got back, I needed to get ready.”
They stared at each other for an age.
Agnes knew she was lying, of course. And Selina knew that she couldn’t tell the truth, even as it sat in the room between them.
“I thought you said you weren’t your mother,” Agnes finally said and shame, anger, and worry that she was, in fact, exactly like her mother bombarded Selina.
But so, too, did the memory of that kiss.
Of his lips demanding against her own, his tongue teasing her mouth until a groan was ripped from her, until it plunged inside her mouth and turned her knees to liquid.
And of his arms, pulling her impossibly close, crushing her body against the rigid muscle of his own.
She’d never experienced anything like it. And she’d craved more with an animalistic need that should have scared her but only excited her.
If her mother had experienced half of what Selina had during that kiss, it was