stroked across her lower lip, and smiled when she playfully nipped at him. “If it means hayloft trysts with you, then I am certainly amenable.”
He regarded her. “On Bond Street, and at the Bazaar, you were in your element. Lady Hawk. I’ve never seen a woman, no, never seen a person so confident and knowledgeable about the world of finance. Surely, I thought, this is where she belongs. This is who she is.”
She said nothing, but her gaze was clear and direct.
“Yet here you are, at this farm, and there’s something about you, something . . . looser.”
“A woman with loose morals?” She lifted a brow.
“The very best kind. But my meaning is that you’ve got a softness out here, a centered calm I didn’t feel in London.” He shook his head. “Pay me no regard. I think the smoke-free air has addled my brain so I can only spout nonsense. Which makes me ideally suited for politics.”
“You would begin a policy of government-mandated carousing.” She squeezed his hand, and an echoing squeeze centered in his chest. “Perhaps I’m Lady Hawk and also the girl from the farm. Perhaps people don’t have to be fully one thing or the other. For example, there’s you.”
“One hundred percent ducal stock, which makes me phenomenally overbred. Unless,” he added thoughtfully, “my mother had a wild affair with the groundskeeper—but I doubt it, given that I have my father’s eyes, nose, and severe reaction to shellfish.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I swell up and itch all over—”
“Noel.” She pressed her lips together as if fighting a smile. “Lord Trask warned me about you.”
“About my sensitivity to shellfish?” He raised a brow.
She stroked a finger along the base of his thumb. “He said you were a dazzling comet—with the underlying message that you were all flash and fire, with little substance.”
“The rotter,” Noel said without rancor. “Thank God I’m too indolent to challenge him to a duel.”
“But there’s deep nuance to you.” She stepped closer to him, the distance between their bodies mere inches. “The way you are with your friends, the way you care for them . . . you have a good heart. A wonderful heart.”
In a whisper, she said, “And it’s softer than you think it is. Perhaps more than you want it to be—but you can’t help yourself. You’re made the way you’re made, and it’s beautiful.”
His eyes grew hot, and his throat tightened. “Damn,” he muttered. “I want to say something, anything, that’s droll or urbane and”—he swallowed—“and safe.”
“You don’t need to,” she murmured.
“Not with you.” He tipped his head forward so that their foreheads touched, as they had last night in the larder. “Because I’m safe with you. I trust you.”
Her eyes squeezed shut. “Oh, Noel.”
He kissed her. A velvety, slow kiss full of desire and gratitude. Because she’d reached into the very core of him. With her, he was simply himself, just as she was herself, and as his tongue stroked against hers and he tasted her flavors of honey and spice, he sank into the place they created together. A place that was theirs alone.
“Want to lay you down in the grass and have you beneath me,” he growled between kisses. “Hot and soft and fierce. I need to be inside you.”
“I want you there.”
“Tonight.”
She pulled back slightly, and a look of pain crossed her face—too quickly for him to be certain that he’d seen it at all. Her eyes opened and he saw focused resolve there. “Midnight. In your bedchamber.”
“You’d prefer my room to yours.”
“I want to see you in your native habitat.”
Ah, she’d kill him with her insight. “It’s a bit of a trek.”
“One I’ll make willingly.”
God, how he loved the way she took what she wanted. “Delightful woman. Go all the way down the main corridor, then left, then turn right at the Chinese vase, and I’m the third door on the left. It’s somewhat confusing.”
“I’ve an excellent sense of direction. Never more so than when I’m motivated.”
They kissed again, mouths open, hearts open. It anchored him and he vowed to himself that this night he would give her everything.
Chapter 22
In the end, Jess could not stop herself. It was a mistake, a terrible mistake, but she had to make it. At midnight, she stepped into a pair of slippers, draped a shawl over her shoulders, and left the Gillyflower Room in search of Noel’s bedchamber.
Cool air swept around her as she walked, navigating the corridors of the old, rambling house. Darkness surrounded her—she hadn’t