“Ki-it—”
He got to his feet, brushed his hands together, and turned a laughing face to her. She rubbed harder with the towel.
“And just look at you now,” he said.
She looked downward and saw in some embarrassment that her damp dress had molded itself to her body. She laughed.
“We cannot have you catching a chill,” he said, glancing through the open doorway into the small bedchamber within, “and coughing and sneezing your way through our wedding. It would just not be romantic.” He strode off into the bedchamber and came back with a blanket. “Come here by the fire.”
She came and stood meekly before him while he stripped off her clothes, looking at her frankly and appreciatively as he did so and before he wrapped the blanket about her. He talked to her all the while.
“Portfrey was clutching an infant,” he said. “They cannot afford a nurse?”
She chuckled. “The baby is absolutely adorable,” she said, “and is shamelessly spoiled by us all. I have never seen Elizabeth happier or his grace so relaxed. And Lily can never have enough of her new half-brother.”
“Are you now in charity with the countess, then?” he asked.
“I have always recognized that under other circumstances I would have liked her enormously,” she said. “She is sunny-natured and unaffected and loving. She has always been unfailingly kind and sympathetic to me. Now I can love her.”
“And Kilbourne?”
He drew her against him, opening back the edges of the blanket as he did so. She could feel his superfine coat, his riding breeches, his leather boots against her naked flesh and felt a rush of awareness more intense than if he had been unclothed.
“I love him too, Kit,” she said. “I always have and always will. If we had married on that day, I believe we would have had a good marriage. I believe I would have been content and would have thought myself happy. I would never have realized that my love for him was that of a devoted sister. I would never have wondered why I could feel no—no passion for him. I would simply have thought that was my nature.”
“But it is not?” She had tipped her face up, and he was bent over it, his eyes roaming it.
“No.” She shook her head.
“Lord help me,” he said. “You don’t feel a passion for me, do you, Lauren? And expect me to act on it?”
She laughed. And she did something quite outrageous—she rubbed herself against him and gazed at him through half-closed eyes. Desire stabbed down along her inner thighs.
“Devil take that rain,” he said. “It has trapped me in a deserted cottage with a woman who has conceived a passion for me. And no one is going to come riding to my rescue either. I distinctly remember someone up at the house telling someone else that you had asked not to be disturbed down here. And then someone telling me that I would have all the privacy I needed to say what I had to say to you. Now what do I do?”
She loved the way he could hold his features solemn, even alarmed, while his eyes danced with laughter.
“Absolutely nothing at all,” she told him. She lowered her voice as her hands found the top buttonhole of his coat. “Yet.”
He shivered elaborately and his eyes danced.
“I begin to think,” he said, “that I could grow to like women who are free to love.”
“And I begin to think,” she said, still in her low, velvet voice, “that you are about to be driven to the brink of madness by one of them, my lord.”
“Oh, goody,” he murmured agreeably.
She opened back his coat and pushed it off his shoulders and down his arms while he stood relaxed and unmoving. Waistcoats, she discovered then, had far too many buttons, all of them small, each with an accompanying buttonhole that seemed smaller yet. She did not hurry. She occupied herself while her hands worked by feathering kisses over his throat and neck above his cravat. She ran her tongue along the seam of the long scar beneath his jaw and surprised an epithet from him that was definitely not suitable for the ears of a lady. She kissed his mouth, which he held relaxed. She prodded her tongue beyond his lips, exploring the soft, moist inner flesh with its tip. She stretched her tongue deep into his mouth.
“I have won praise and commendation from high places,” he said conversationally when his mouth was free, her eyes being needed to discover the secrets of the front flap of his breeches, “for military feats that required only half the courage and discipline I am displaying this afternoon. I hope you realize that you are in the presence of extraordinary heroism.”
Sometime during the last ten minutes or so, she had lost her blanket, Lauren realized. It did not matter. The fire had burned up and taken the damp chill from the air. In fact the cottage felt almost uncomfortably warm.
“A word of advice,” he said, “from a man who has been undressing me for almost thirty years. Tackle the boots first. Would you like me to be a participant yet? Shall I haul them off for you?”
“No.” She kneeled down on the floor.
“An erotically submissive posture,” he commented with a sigh, raising one foot. “Entirely deceptive, of course. Yes, you have to tug hard. You are not about to break my ankle, I assure you. I feel inclined to urge you to hurry so that we can reach the good part. But alas, you are turning all my preconceptions on their head, Lauren. This tortoiselike seduction feels excruciatingly good.”
“And this is only the beginning,” she promised, looking up at him from beneath her lashes before pulling off the second boot and standing up again.
“Witch!” he said. “I strolled into Lady Mannering’s ballroom that night all unsuspecting, poor innocent that I was. You looked like a perfectly harmless lady. Respectable, prim.”
“Prudish,” she said.
“Precisely.”
“I should be calling for the hartshorn now, then,” she said. “You look neither innocent nor harmless, Kit.” She had pulled off first his breeches and then his drawers.
He looked down at himself and she touched him at the same moment, cupping him lightly in both hands, amazed at her own brazenness, half crazed with suppressed desire. He looked up and their eyes met.
“You can continue this game all afternoon and all evening if you wish, love,” he said. “Sex games are delicious. I look forward to playing an infinite variety of them with you for the rest of our lives. But unless you have a definite preference for prolonging this, I think we might be better occupied on the bed in there. I would very much like to put that inside you.”
The greatest surprise of all was the discovery that not being touched could be every bit as arousing as having his hands and mouth all over her. He was still standing motionless, his arms loose at his sides, his eyes, heavy-lidded, devoid of laughter, gazing into her own. But his words were her undoing. She was suddenly weak-kneed.
“I thought,” she said, “you would never ask. A lady never invites a gentleman to bed.”
His hands did not touch her until she had pulled back the blankets and lain down on her back on the bed and reached up for him. They touched her then only at her hips and beneath her buttocks as she spread her legs wide. He came down on top of her and mounted her with one deep, hard, satisfying thrust.
She drew a few slow breaths.
“We can do this the easy way,” he said, raising his head and grinning down at her, all the old roguery back in his eyes, “or I can aim at the highest medal of honor and ride the long, hard route home. Very long and very hard. Which shall it be?”
“Which is the road to near madness?” she asked, hooking her legs snugly about his and tilting herself slightly so that she could receive him more deeply.