She levered her head up to stare at Lorcan.
Whose eyelids were lowered like a wolf contemplating a meal.
She said nothing.
With leisurely, casual grace, he swept the sticks into his hand, stacked them, and installed them in their tin.
With equally unhurried efficiency, he lifted and slid the little game table aside so that the two of them could easily lunge at each other.
He did all of this as though he had all the time in the world.
While she waited, suspended in silent torment and unbearable excitement.
But then when he turned to her, she understood he was merely heightening anticipation.
Perhaps, improbably, he was nervous, too.
He turned to her.
The swift drum of her heart was nearly painful.
Finally his hand reached out, and he collected a strand of hair spiraling from her temple with his fingertip.
He gently smoothed it behind her ear.
He leaned forward very, very slowly, until his lips were against her ear. “Tell me you’re sorry you lost,” he whispered.
Wicked, wicked man.
She nearly laughed at his audacity.
But when the heat of his arms stole about her waist her eyes drifted closed. At last his mouth softly landed against hers; her sigh of relief was unashamed.
And with a sensual precision he undid her, as surely as the point of his knife had spiraled the peel from her orange.
His lips were at first so gentle, so shockingly, lingeringly tender, a low keen of raw yearning hummed from somewhere within her. It shocked her. His hand softly slid up from her waist to cradle her head. She curled her fingers into his shirt and clung for dear life as little by little the kiss became deeper, more demanding, more searchingly, teasingly carnal. The sweet, dark taste of him made her wild, then wilder still. She met him with equal hunger. She pulsed with a restless, frantic need. Her hands slid up, latched around his neck.
“Lorcan.” Her voice was desperate and shredded.
His arms tightened around her. She took his ragged groan of desire in her mouth; she could feel it vibrate in his chest. She could no longer feel the confines of her body; she was composed only of the places he touched her, and the places she longed to be touched.
She crashed to earth when he ended the kiss abruptly, with a low muttered oath.
And for a moment he rested his forehead against hers. His breath came in ragged gusts.
Still, he held her. As if he’d just been washed up on shore after being bashed about in the waves.
To stir such a man as this.
The way his back heaved with his breath made her feel powerful. And exhilarated. And frightened, indeed. He could lay her flat on the settee right now, and have his way with her. If he were that sort of man, there would be nothing she could do to stop him.
But what he chose to do instead was to hold her as if she were something he’d rescued at great peril to himself.
Finally he lifted his arms away from her.
She uncurled her fingers from his shirt.
She opened her eyes.
To find his eyes were hazed.
It was a moment before either could speak.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “Now you have a choice to make. Will your next kiss be in the shadow of your cleavage, where your lovely breasts meet?”
His eyes fell to the swell of her breasts and lingered. She felt that gaze as surely as if he’d dragged a finger across them.
He returned his eyes to her face.
“Or high on the tenderest inside of your thigh, as I earlier described.”
Shock was like a lightning strike in her mind. She went briefly faint from it.
But the moment he’d said it she knew this was what she wanted.
She wanted to flirt with danger, with vulnerability. She wanted to test the limits of her own control and his.
She hadn’t known this madness lived in her.
But when would she ever again have this kind of opportunity?
“The second,” she whispered.
Primal satisfaction surged in his expression. His eyes were very dark indeed.
“Very well. If you would be so kind as to lift your skirts, Daphne.”
He said it quietly. His tone suggested he’d just asked her to pass the salt. And somehow this made it more illicitly thrilling.
Blood rushed to her head and pooled between her legs.
She hesitated, to tease him. To tease herself.
Their gazes locked. The two of them were balanced, breathlessly, on the knife edge of anticipation.
But they both knew she would do as he asked.
Her hands shaking, she gathered her dress in her fists, and furled it slowly upward.
Until the air of the room rushed over her exposed skin.
Until her skirt lay ruched across her lap.
He watched the entire process unabashedly. His face taut, his eyes dark.
“Now spread your legs for me, Lady Worth.”
Every step of the way he ensured she understood her complicity. Every step of the way he made sure she was choosing this.
No longer did a voice in her head suggest to her she could stop at any time.
She could not listen to lies.
This was who she was.
This was what she wanted.
And so she did, like the veriest wanton. Slowly, she opened her legs until she could feel the air of the room caressing her thighs.
When he knelt between her knees, she closed her eyes.
Her breath rushed between her parted lips.
She nearly jumped at the first featherlight touch of his fingertips on her ankle.
He traced with the pad of his finger, a slow, complicated, feathering little shape over it. And from everywhere his fingertip touched, silvery, shivering sensations fanned in tributaries, tiny trails of flame, that reached every point in her body. She shifted to accommodate the simmer in her blood as all roads, as he seemed to promise, led to right between her legs, where she ached.
His single fingertip became a squadron of fingertips, and together they glided up the curve of her calf to the hollow behind her knee. And there his lips and tongue joined the siege.
She sighed, and pressed her hands against the seat of the settee.
And then, to her desperate rejoicing and uneasiness, his lips were on the silky inside of her thigh.
He took his time.
Delicate brushes of his lips, following by delicate brushes of his fingertips, evolved into hot, lingering, openmouthed caresses, and she was on fire with want.
“God,” he whispered.
His lips, his tongue, his fingertips against skin she’d never dreamed harbored such secrets. Or yielded such extraordinary sensation.
Her breath was like bellows now. She stirred, fingers gripping the edge of the settee.
“Christ. I can feel the heat of you,” he murmured. He sounded drugged.
He sounded tormented.
When he exhaled a long, soft, hot breath over her damp curls between her legs, her head fell back on a muffled sob of surprised pleasure at the pulse of sensation.
More. It wasn’t enough. She needed more. She could sense the bliss that lay in store for her.
But he stopped.
And just like that, he was no longer touching her.
Hideously bereft, she covered her face in her hands. Her shoulders heaved with her breathing.
She was stunned. Overwhelmed. Abashed suddenly, and angrily wanting, though she knew not what specifically she wanted.
She’d had no notion that such gradations of pleasure hid in her own body. That such secrets of sensation could be unleashed.
Some of her fury was over the realization that it was possible she might never have known.
Some of her fury was over the realization that she now knew, but could never dare discover more.
For that way lay absolute ruin.
She was furious that she’d brought it on herself.
“I am sorry to leave you like this.” Lorcan’s voice was graveled, somber with real regret. His words halting. “Our wager was only for a kiss. As much as I want to . . .” He took a breath. “I shall not transgress. The rest of what you now want involves . . . a good deal more. Perhaps you would like to consider the wisdom of whether you want more . . . when again you can think.”
She felt a surge of irrational hatred for him and his sense of honor.
For what he knew how to give her, and what he knew she was feeling, and was not offering now.
For how right he was to stop.
For what should never be.
That she should be in thrall to this madness to the point where she was willing to be taken.
That he should have such control that he could refuse it.
When he stood, she was nearly eye level with the erection straining against the fall of his trousers.
She stared up at him. One hand still pressed against her hot face. Her skirts still hiked to her waist.
He regarded her a moment, his face enigmatic. His eyes were dark with emotion that looked a lot like anger, and a little like wonder. Tension pulled his features taut.
He gently lifted her hand from her face, and placed a chaste kiss in her palm. And then he loosely grasped her wrist and guided her hand to that throbbing place between her legs. There he released it.
“Touch yourself, luv,” he urged on a whisper, like the devil himself, with maddening sympathy. “That’s what I’m off to do, before I go stark. Raving. Mad.”
Seconds later his bedroom door emphatically shut.
Any other woman.
Any other woman would be on her back now, digging her nails into his shoulders and moaning his name with pleasure while he pounded her into his mattress. In the same circumstances, he could have, would have, taken any other woman.
Any other woman.
It was a plea to a deity he wasn’t convinced had ever taken much of an interest in him: Let me want any other woman. Not this one. Not with a fever I’ve never before felt. Not with a hunger that makes me feel both savage and almost uncertain as a boy, and panicked, as if I’ve been abandoned on a ship I do not know how to sail.
He didn’t want any other woman.
And in this moment, after he’d taken care of his aching cock with the help of his old friend, his right hand, he could not remember ever before wanting any other woman, and he could not imagine ever again wanting any other woman. Which was probably pure melodrama. It was just that he’d gone and trapped himself in this sensual net through the measured, calculated, teasing out of pleasure. Through a wicked little triangle comprised of her innocence and his jadedness and Spillikins, of all bloody things. In the excitement of revealing to her the depth of her own sensual nature. And through constant proximity in the sensual den their suite had become.
Because he could not and would not ravish a virgin. Especially one who had almost nothing else but her virtue to bring to the marriage she was obviously destined for.
Especially one who trusted him.
What a gift it was, her trust.
His chest ached.
He laid an arm over his eyes, but even if he closed them, he saw her face as he’d left her, flushed and yearning, confused and angry.
He had taken selfish pleasure in bringing her gifts: an orange, an astrolabe, the secrets of her body.
The greatest gift he could give her now was to never touch her again.
