Betina Krahn (24 page)

His kisses drifted down her throat to her breast, leaving a trail of liquid fire behind. She gasped and shivered beneath him as he slid a finger under the edge of her corset and gently pried her tightly budded nipple above the edge of it. With agonizing tenderness, he kissed and tantalized that aching point with his tongue. Whimpering with pleasure, she arched toward his mouth, instinctively seeking a firmer possession, a deeper pleasure. Eager to oblige, he took her taut nipple into his mouth, suckling, conjuring erotic undulations in her body as it lay beneath his.

Half of her was on fire and the other half ached to be consumed by that same exquisite flame. Her fingers fumbled hopelessly with the buttons on the other side of her bodice before he raised above her and brushed her hand away. An instant later the scissors reappeared and more buttons began dropping like her inhibitions, scattering on the floor around them. With eyes like burning coals, he finally seized the front panel of her bodice and yanked. Cloth groaned, stitches popped, and she groaned with soft satisfaction as his mouth closed over the tip of her other breast.

Heat welled within her, responding to the weight of his body on hers, and her hands began to move, seeking the shapes and textures of him. His hair was silky, his cheeks raspy, and his neck was corded beneath his starched collar. Beneath his coat, inside his vest, beyond the cool barrier of his shirt, he was firm and sleek against her hands. His back was layered with bands of muscles that shifted and bulged as he molded himself against her.

Each kiss, each motion, pushed her higher along a broadening plane of excitation. Of its own will her body began to gather and tighten, bracing for an approaching
storm. She parted her legs as much as her restrictive skirt would allow and felt him pressing down through her clothes. Unerringly he found that singular burning point around which her desires were somehow gathered. Her hips angled and rocked slowly against his, finding his weight now focused behind the swollen ridge that was the counterpart of the heat and pressure building in her loins. She strained closer as once, twice, that luscious hardness raked her.

More, she wanted more. His body flexed and thrust, providing it, pushing the tension wildly, precipitously higher within her. She gasped for breath as turbulent waves of pleasure crashed over her, one after another, wrenching all sense of control from her. One instant she was floating, exultant, the next she was drowning under those powerful deluges of sensation. Her heart beat erratically, and her body seemed to be turning molten.

Then a sharp flash of panic erupted through her feverish excitement.

It was too much! One last desperate flare of reason illuminated the dim corners of her awareness, and she understood what was happening … sensed the approaching limit of excitation … realized where this wild, impulsive pleasure was pushing her. It was a forbidden limit, a shattering apocalypse of self.

She stilled abruptly, drew a tortured breath, and began to push back from that sensual boundary with everything in her, desperately battling the seduction of her senses.

As her head cleared, she found herself on her back on the settee with Remington wedged intimately against her body. The front of her bodice was gone and her damp nipples tingled decadently above the edge of her corset. He braced above her, staring down at her with eyes like burning coals, his passion unslaked and raging visibly.

The sense of it shocked her to the ends of her soul. She
was lying with him, entwined, exposed, and aching with unspent pleasure. A chilling draft of horror began to invade the steamy expectation that suffused her body and limbs. When he reached for her mouth with his, she turned her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

Denied her mouth, he kissed the edge of her jaw instead, then bent to aim his kisses toward more appreciative targets.

Frantic to escape, she gave him a shove that caught him off guard and sent him rolling off the settee. She scrambled up and staggered back with her knees trembling, her skin on fire, and a humiliating wet heat in her woman’s core. Wrapping her arms over her exposed breasts, she searched frantically for the missing placket of her bodice.

“Antonia, wait—” he ordered as she located the missing part of her dress and started for the door. She wouldn’t look at him, but whatever self-possession she had just managed to salvage fled as her heel struck one of the round buttons littering the floor. She slid with a cry of surprise and barely kept herself from hitting the floor. That delay gave him time to reach her.

“Antonia, I—” He seized her shoulders and stared in frustration at her anguished eyes and kiss-swollen lips. “Look at me,” was all he could say, sensing that looks might reach an understanding that would elude mere words.

Her head came up with a snap and he caught a sharp breath. Her eyes were deep wells of emotion, open, vulnerable. In them he could read every shred of confusion, every impulse of longing and self-loathing she was suffering. The impact hit him like a fist in the gut.

When she wrenched from his hands and slipped out the door, he didn’t try to stop her. Wobbling back to the settee, he sank down on it and rubbed his face. His body was overheated, his blood was pounding viciously in his
head, and his loins felt as if they were going to burst. He gave the aching ridge in his trousers a pacifying stroke that only sent a wild rush of heat through his loins and made him writhe with unexpected misery. With no immediate relief to be had, he shot to his feet, threw open the window, and gulped breath after breath of fresh air.

Several moments later he was marginally in control again, and he forced himself to think about what had happened.

Antonia. She astonished him. He leaned a shoulder against the window frame and closed his eyes, seeing her as she had lain beneath him: her bodice cut away, her long, velvety nipples peeping over the erotic constraint of her corset, her expressive eyes glistening pools of desire, her passion-stung lips parted invitingly. And he felt again the way she had moved: hesitant at first, then yielding and fluid beneath him, around him. She was sensuality personified. He’d never had a woman respond to him the way she did … fully, genuinely, with every part of her.

Then reality descended; the distress in her face, her shock at her own response. What did she know of such things? Had she ever felt pleasure before? She was a widow; she had known a man’s passion. But had any man ever known hers? The sight of her as she stood by the door rose in his mind: her eyes were luminous with desire and confusion. Antonia Paxton without defenses. Antonia Paxton as a woman, a lover.

Suddenly his body was vibrating, his chest was tight, and his breath was coming hard and fast. Pressure surged in his loins. He wanted her … God, how he wanted her.

He started for the door, but his heel also struck a stray button, which threw him off stride. Recovering, he snatched up the offending sphere. As he stared at it, his irritation slowly transformed into a smile. He closed his fingers around it, and when he stepped out of the room
later, there was a handful of buttons in his pocket and a hum of expectation in his blood.

Down the hall, at that very moment, Antonia sat on the bench before her dressing table, staring at her mussed hair, swollen lips, and guilt-darkened eyes. She rounded her shoulders and clasped her hands together between her knees. Her wild and uncontrolled response to his lovemaking shocked her to the very ends of her being.

Maybe he hadn’t noticed. Maybe he couldn’t tell how close she had come to …

How would she ever face him again? How could she possibly sit at the supper table with him that evening and hold her head up? She glanced at the mirror, and it seemed to her that the illicit pleasure she had taken in their encounter was written all over her face. He would see it and take loathsome satisfaction in it and …

And what? Shame her?

Good Lord, wouldn’t he love that? To seduce her and then torment her with her surrender … to reduce her to a shamefaced little shrinking violet before his awesome male prowess and potency. Wouldn’t he love to claim her response as his victory?

That was what he had come to do, after all: seduce her. And on one level he had just succeeded—
with her help
. But, she made herself think more rationally, there was still a vast difference between what had happened and a full sexual encounter. The joining of bodies, of course. And completion. Technically it couldn’t be considered intercourse if he didn’t …
finish
… could it?

A cool draft of relief wafted through her as she recalled the unslaked need visible in his face and body, and realized that he couldn’t have taken the satisfaction he probably expected from that licentious encounter. Close on the heels of that thought came another rather surprising one: just as
he couldn’t seduce her without her cooperation, he could not shame her unless she allowed him to do it.

It was nothing short of a revelation to her.
Shame was an internal thing … a punishment a person inflicted upon herself
. She thought about it for a moment, then relief poured through her like a cool, cleansing balm. He might smirk and wink and make tawdry, suggestive remarks, but she hadn’t done anything truly dishonorable or immoral. She didn’t have to feel dirtied or disgraced. She didn’t have to let him win that way.

Her shoulders squared, her chin rose, and when she met her eyes in the mirror this time, they were bright with fresh insight and resolve. In her mind she conjured an image of him strutting into the dining room, full of triumph and condescension. If his devious lordship expected her to be cowed and contrite, he was in for a rather nasty surprise.

But apparently even the memory of his aristocratic features had the power to send a shiver through her. The tips of her breasts tingled and drew taut, and she looked down at the rosy edges of her nipples, still visible above her corset. With a huff of disgust she began stuffing them back into place.

“That will be quite enough of that.”

That evening Antonia sailed into the dining room like a naval frigate, bristling with visible defenses. She smoothed and adjusted her severe charcoal-gray jacket, checking every one of its thirty-four buttons, and tugged upward on her lace-rimmed standing collar, the stiffness of which was a continual reminder to keep her head up. But all the sartorial and emotional armor in the world couldn’t have prepared her for what happened when Remington strode into the room.

She watched in mounting confusion as he went straight to Aunt Hermione, who was already seated, greeted her, and kissed her hand. Her disbelief turned to dismay as he personally escorted to the table Eleanor, Pollyanna, and Florence, and every other lady still standing. When he finally turned to her and extended his hand, it was impossible to refuse without being inexplicably rude.

“You look lovely this evening, as usual, Lady Antonia,” he said with a smile that was irresistibly polite. Before he released her hand, he brushed it with his lips.

She stiffened and clasped her hands in her lap as he pushed her chair in, feeling the spot he had kissed glowing in heated contrast to the chill of her fingers. For the rest of the meal he was the most gracious and entertaining table guest she could have imagined. He made it a point to speak
to each woman present and to tease and flirt within the bounds of good taste … until it came to her.

For her he reserved looks and comments carrying an understated warmth that made a shambles of her hostile expectations of him. Smirks and leers and smug male arrogance she had expected, and was prepared to handle with cool, vengeful grace. But this warmth, this genuineness, this wretched charm of his—she didn’t know what to make of that, or how to deal with it.

Why wasn’t he gloating and preening?

He was either far more decent than she had given him credit for, or far more devious. And she hadn’t a clue which.

By the end of supper, when she escorted him to the front doors, she was reeling inside from vacillating between those two extremes. He took his hat and cane from Hoskins and stood a moment, looking at her with an intimacy that disarmed and unsettled her. When he reached for her hand, she couldn’t bring herself to deny him.