by Shana Galen
“You don’t care about my life.”
Lorrie stared at him. “Yes, I do.”
“No. I am a diversion for you. Like a flower show or a home for ruined women is for other upper-class women. I give you something to do until you can either gain your father’s permission to marry my cousin or until you find a way to elope with him. And if there’s the chance I might kiss you, that adds the element of danger. I don’t blame you for seeking out a thrill here and there. Your life must be tedious if all you ever do is look pretty and chat about the weather.”
Lorrie stared at him for a long, long moment. She hadn’t expected him to speak to her so. She hadn’t expected him to say such awful things.
“And that is what you think of me?” she whispered when she could speak past the lump in her throat. “That I use people—that I used you—to stave off boredom?”
He met her gaze, his eyes very blue in their intensity.
She looked away, unfortunately toward the bed. Seeing her discarded clothing, she snatched it up again. “I came here to be honest with you, and before I leave I’ll say what I came to.” She struggled to position one of her gloves so she might pull it over her shaking fingers. “If I am brutally honest, as you have been”—she glanced up at him—“I admit there is some truth in what you say. Perhaps reading to you did begin as a diversion.” She dropped the glove and had to bend over to retrieve it. “But reading to you, spending time with you, has become all I look forward to all day and all night. I think about you all the time. That is no mere diversion.” Tears stung her eyes, and she couldn’t see the damn glove.
“And each time I learn something new about you, I am more and more impressed not only with your bravery, but with your intelligence and your wit.”
He tilted his head as though he thought this a trick.
“Yes, wit! You can be amusing in your own way. You make me smile. I know I talk too much.” She was talking too much at the moment. She couldn’t seem to talk and pull her gloves on. “But you always listen to me. No one listens to me. No one cares what I have to say, but you make me feel important.”
“What are you saying?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I only know I have to say it to you because—because I saw your face at the Dewhursts’. When Francis kissed me. I saw the way you looked, and I couldn’t stand knowing that I had hurt you.”
He lunged toward her, and she almost scurried back. “You did not hurt me,” he barked. He bent, swiped the veil she had dropped, and held it out to her.
“But your face—”
“Kiss whomever you like. It’s nothing to me.”
“I see.” She’d ceased trying to don the gloves and now passed them from hand to hand. “I confess that was not what I was hoping to hear. You see, I realized something at the Dewhursts’ ball that night. It was when Francis kissed me.”
She glanced at him, but he didn’t give any of his thoughts away.
“I don’t love him. You were right. You told me that weeks ago, but I didn’t listen. And he doesn’t love me either. I don’t know if he has deluded himself as I had or if he just wants my dowry, but if he loved me there would be more between us.”
“More?”
She nodded, still passing the gloves from hand to hand. “He’s never shared anything of himself with me. Never opened up. Never written me a letter telling me his feelings for me. Never made himself vulnerable. And when he kissed me, all of that became quite clear to me.”
“If you had time to think all that, he was not doing it correctly.”
Her hands stilled, the gloves clenched between them. “That was the other thing. When he kissed me, I didn’t feel anything. Not like…not like when you kiss me.”
There. She’d said what she’d wanted to say and what she’d feared saying as well.
Ewan didn’t speak—which was nothing new—and what did she think he would say, anyway? I told you so?
He held out his hand to her, and she looked down at the gloves she clenched. Slowly, she placed them in his hand. Now he’d help her pull them on and send her on her way.
And she should be on her way. Before she said too much.
“There’s more,” she whispered. Oh, why did she not shut up?
He nodded at her as though he knew she had not finished. He probably thought she never finished speaking.
“I came to another realization.”
“When you were kissing my cousin.”
She shook her head. “Before that.” She cleared her throat. It was too tight, too dry. How she wished she had a glass of water. “I’m in love with you.”
His eyes widened.
Lorrie held up a hand, surprised to see it shook slightly. “Don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. This time I do. You see, I love you despite my every intention of not loving you. I know we aren’t suited. You are silent, and I speak all the time. You’re a younger son with no fortune or title, and I’m the daughter of a duke. You are a brave war hero, and I’ve never done anything of any note. But I cannot seem to help how I feel when we are together. I don’t want you to come to the library because you are a diversion. I want you to come to the library because you are the only true thing in my life. Don’t you see? It’s everything else that’s a diversion.”
“Lorraine.”
“I know what you will say—”
“Stubble it,” he said quietly.
She closed her mouth. No one had ever told her to shut up before. She’d said too much. He would send her away and tell her father he could not work for him any longer. She’d never see him again. Perhaps she should have just taken the little bit of him he offered. She could have gone on loving him in silence.
Oh, very well. Perhaps not in silence but without telling him everything she felt.
“If you don’t want me to kiss you, leave now.”
Lorrie stared at him. Now she must be imagining things. But, no. He moved toward her, reached for her.
“But you said, in the library, you would not kiss me.”
“I said I would not kiss you under your father’s roof.”
“Or at all. You said ‘That’s not why we’re here.’”
His hands, warm and solid, landed on her shoulders. “We’re not there at the moment, are we?”
She shook her head.
One of his hands slid up her neck and cupped the back of her head, the other skated down her arm to grasp her waist and pull her against him. Her bare arms went around his torso, his hot flesh making her own skin heat with desire and anticipation. Everything inside her seemed to shake and tremble and at the same time she strained toward him, needing him more than air itself.
He tilted her head back and lowered his mouth to hers slowly. Lorrie closed her eyes and clenched at his strong back, attempting to hold on before the world fell away. But there was no preparing for his kiss. The moment his lips grazed hers, she saw fireworks brighter than any she’d ever viewed at Vauxhall. There was nothing tentative about his kiss, nothing soft or sweet. He took her mouth, claiming it with an intensity that left her breathless and wanting more. His lips slanted over hers, again and again, until she could only cling to him. But there was no safety in his body. She loved the feel of his skin under hers, the way his muscles corded and bunched, the way his hot, hard flesh seemed to heat even more as she explored it.
His hand moved from her waist to her rump, cupping it and drawing her forward so she was pressed even more tightly against him. And she could feel the hard length of him where their bodies met.
He had not said he loved her, but if he did not at least want her, he would not have had this reaction. And she wondered what would happen if she met his fire with her own. It was a question she had turned about in her mind countless times for the last year or so. She’d ached for the touch of a man and then shoved the need down becaus
e women were not supposed to have such feelings and such needs, especially not unmarried virgins.
When she’d kissed Francis or the small handful of other men who had stolen moments with her, she had always felt as though she must hold herself back. She sensed there was more, and yet she could not ask for it, could not even be certain what it was. With Ewan she felt the more. She did not have to ask or content herself with chaste embraces. There was nothing at all sweet or fumbling about the way he held her or kissed her. And she kissed him back with all the passion she had always been afraid to unleash. And the more she gave in to the desire raging within her, the more she wanted.
Her hands slid down his back to pass over his taut buttocks. The growl in his throat let her know he liked her boldness, liked her touch. When his lips moved to her jaw and the sensitive skin just below, she slid her hands around and up his chest. His skin was firm, the muscles beneath honed from hard use. How different his body was from hers. She was curves and softness, while he had not an inch of extra flesh anywhere.
One hand meandered down his chest to pass over his navel and then to pause at the waistband of his trousers. The most deliciously wicked idea occurred to her, and before she could think better of it, she brought her hand down to cup his hard rod through the wool of his clothing.
He groaned.
The low sound in the back of his throat did strange things to her body. The heat she’d felt in her cheeks and under her fingers now traveled lower to settle in her belly. She was conscious of a deep throbbing and pressed her legs together in an effort to constrain it, but that only made it worse.
Her hand slid up and down the hot length of him before he finally grasped her wrist and stopped her.
“You don’t like it?” she asked.
“I do. But you make me forget that I must behave.”
Lorrie looked into his eyes, which were a shade darker than the summer sky she was used to. “Oh, don’t behave. I am so weary of always behaving.”
“Good.”
Lorrie did not know what he meant by that comment, and she didn’t suppose he would elaborate, especially not when his mouth claimed hers again. When she would have touched his chest again, he slid her hands up around his neck and lifted her. A moment later, he deposited her on the bed.
Lorrie stared up at him, reminded of the time he had come in her room and she had ended up in this very same position. Now the Viking was bent over her again, and the look in his eye was far more dangerous. He would not leave her untouched this time, and she did not want him to. She wanted him to kiss her and touch her and show her exactly how badly he could behave. She would think about the consequences later, and there might well be consequences. But she wasn’t afraid of them. Her quest for passion had led her to attempt to elope with Francis and to sneak into a gambling hell in St. James’s Street. She couldn’t turn back now.
His mouth took hers again, but this time he only stoked the need in her with his lips and his tongue before trailing kisses down her neck and parting the V of the fichu she had tucked at the last minute into the bodice of her modest day dress. He pulled the light fichu away, and then his lips were on bare flesh. The tips of her breasts hardened and pushed against the thin chemise she wore under her corset. Her breasts ached, and she wanted to arch to encourage him to touch her there.
But he seemed to have his own ideas, for his lips grazed the edge of the muslin bodice and traced it from one swell of her breast to the other. Lorrie’s hands fisted in his short hair. How she wished she wore an evening dress, then it would be nothing for him to push the material down and bare her to his hands and lips.
His hands moved up from her waist, and he molded her with them, making her draw in a sharp breath and the prickle of sensation. And then before she could tear at the material separating them in frustration, he put his hands back on her waist and flipped her over. It happened so quickly, Lorrie hardly knew what had happened. One moment she was staring up at him and the next her cheek was pressed against the coverlet of his bed. The bed smelled like him, like evergreen and spruce and the indefinable scent she would always associate only with him. One of his hands cupped the back of her neck and then she felt the tug of the strings holding the dress closed.
She was both exhilarated and terrified that he loosened her bodice, untying strings and unfastening hooks and eyes. When he rolled her back over again, he had no trouble lowering the material, and then it was a simple matter to loosen the tie of her stays and push the material of stays and chemise out of the way.
No one, save Nell, had ever seen Lorrie in such a state, and she had the urge to cover herself, but it lasted only an instant. One look at his face showed he clearly liked what he saw. His eyes were half-lidded and his hands touched her with a gentle reverence.
One hand slid over her bare breast, and when he rolled one hard nipple between thumb and forefinger, she almost moaned.
When she opened her eyes again, he had a small smile on his lips. And then, his gaze locked with hers, he bent and took that hard bud into his mouth. Lorrie did moan then. She arched and moaned and pulled him closer.
His mouth on her breast was the most exquisite sensation she had ever encountered. She did not want him to ever stop what he was doing—the gentle sucking and teasing and even a quick nip. He lifted his head, and she cried out. “No. Please.”
He raised a brow, and then lowered his mouth to minister to her other breast.
“Oh, thank God. Yes,” she said cupping his head. “Your mouth is brilliantly wicked.”
His hands slid from the heated flesh of her chest down her body, pausing at her hips and taking their time as they caressed her thighs. And then his mouth left her too, and she tried to pull him back. But his hands were full of the muslin of her dress and his gaze seemed to follow the hem as he lifted it higher. She supposed she should be embarrassed. A man was not to look upon a lady’s ankles, and he had lifted the dress to her knees now. But Lorrie could only stare at Ewan’s face.
He did not speak much, but he did not have to. His eyes showed his appreciation and desire. When the hem was at her waist, he licked his lips and then his gaze met hers. “Still want to misbehave?”
She nodded, at a rare loss for words.
His hands touched her knees, slid up to toy with the ties of her garters and then inched higher still. The throbbing in her belly had moved lower, to the place between her legs. It seemed to coalesce there, pumping like a small heart, making her want to squirm and press her hand there to quell the ache.
Gently, Ewan parted her legs, and Lorrie had a moment to wonder if he would deflower her. She both wanted him and feared the consequences.
And then she could think no more because he pressed one hand against her center, and one of his large, long fingers slid inside her.
She bucked against him, against the sweet invasion and the myriad of sensations it brought.
“Shh,” he said, and she realized she’d been all but mewing. And then he pressed the palm of his hand up, and that was exactly where she needed him to touch her. The pressure was there and gone and there again as he slid in and out of her, his finger slick with her arousal. Lorrie felt she might be embarrassed by all of this later, but at the moment she was too desperate with need to think of anything but his hand and the sensations he caused.
His gaze swept over her, her cheeks, then her breasts, and whatever he saw seemed to tell him something, for he slid another finger inside her.
“Oh yes!” she cried, unable to stop. For now he filled her, his fingers sliding against the walls of her sex and making her hips pivot. His thumb—for that must be his thumb—parted her lips and pressed against the center of the throbbing. He massaged the small nub, circling and circling until she was panting and biting her lip to keep from screaming with need.
And then she could contain her cries no longer because the world went blindingly white. Her legs shut
and she took the pleasure she needed, grinding against his hand like the wanton she had always feared was inside.
And in the midst of the ecstasy, she looked up at him, dreading the reprisal in his gaze. Instead, what she saw in his eyes was the same hot lust coursing through her, and she knew then, this was only the beginning.
Sixteen
She came hard and fast against his hand. He hadn’t expected her to climax so quickly or with so little effort on his part, but the first time he’d met her, dashing across St. James’s after her silly puppy, he’d seen she had a passionate nature. He couldn’t help but be pleased that carried over into this aspect of her personality as well.
He was far from done with her. He’d wanted her for too long, and watching her orgasm had only made him want to see more. His aching shaft reminded him it too wanted relief, but Ewan still had some standards of behavior—even if he held on to them by their very last shreds.
When she finally relaxed, her body unclenching from his fingers, he slid out of her tight, wet sheath. He splayed his hands on her bare thighs and bent to kiss her again. Her mouth was a marvel to him. The more he kissed it, the more he wanted to kiss it, the more he wanted to taste her.
He could smell her arousal now. It was on his hands, and he wanted to taste that desire too. He wanted much more than that, but he could not take what he really wanted, and so he would have to content himself with the feel of her silky skin under his fingers, the flick of her sweet tongue in his mouth, and the sound of her breathing as it once again came short and fast.
He broke the kiss and glanced at her nipples. They were hard again—thick, dark red points straining upward. He took one then the other in his mouth, and she arched her back. She had large, firm breasts, and those thick nipples made him want to sit her on top of his shaft and make her ride him while he suckled her.
Most ladies of her class would probably faint at the very idea, but Ewan had the feeling Lady Lorraine had a more adventurous spirit. It was no wonder now that she had been so eager to marry his cousin. It was bedsport she wanted, and she could not have it without marriage.
