Betina Krahn (6 page)

“I want—” His mouth was watering so profusely that he had to swallow in order to speak. “I want to know what happened with Bickering.”

She popped the rest of the piece into her mouth and closed her eyes, radiating such indecent pleasure that two men passing by slowed to leer at them. It was all he could do to keep from shaking her. Or licking her. Odds were even on which.

“A-are you marrying him or not?” He tried to keep his voice down.

“Not.” She dabbed the corners of her mouth with the crumpled candy paper, gave an enormous sigh, and headed toward the hotel.

“Not?” The news struck him like a blast of fresh air. His
whole body relaxed. Annoyed by his relief, he hurried after her. “Why not?”

The look she gave him from the corner of her eye was infuriating. She was tormenting him and, from every indication, enjoying it.

“The hotel man indicated that there were dressmakers and milliners in the next street,” she said with a wave in that direction. “I really should have a look before we leave tomorrow morning. Their work may not be quite London quality, but I imagine they’ll have some things of interest.”

“We’re not going anywhere until I have a straight answer from you.” Glancing around and finding the street around them mostly empty, he snagged her arm as they approached the hotel. “Why did you reject him?”

“Does it matter? We simply go on to the next candidate.”

“Not until I know why you refuse to wed this one,” he demanded.

“Very well.” She tugged her arm free. “He was genial, gentlemanly, intelligent, mannerly…perfect in all respects but one.”

“And that was?” He could think of only one criterion just now, staring at her chocolate-tainted lips and imagining her using them on the accommodating lawyer.

“He’s being married this Saturday to the daughter of the head of his firm.” Her face sobered. “Which I believe makes him ineligible as a husband for me. I don’t know where you got his name, but he’s been betrothed for more than a month now. And to a young woman he dearly…well, he seems to be quite smitten with her.”

Cutting off further discussion, she quickened her pace to the hotel, past the doorman and through the lobby. With the box of chocolates dangling from one hand and her skirts held primly in the other, she swept up the stairs. He had to take the steps two at a time to catch up with her on the second-floor landing.

“Did you find out he was to be married before or after you kissed him?” he demanded with an urgency that should have embarrassed him. But his heart was pounding, his vision narrowing and his head was filling with the scent of the chocolate on her breath.

“A moot point, I believe.” There was a trace of something like regret in her voice as she sidestepped him to continue to her room.

Determined to have an answer, he bounded up the stairs and down the hall to plant himself in her path yet again. What was it about the woman that incited him to such extremes? He’d never behaved like this with a female in his life—brash, irritable, impulsive.
Get hold of yourself, man!

Standing over her, he clenched his hands and made himself swallow.

“Well?”

For a moment she stared straight ahead, visually scorching his shirtfront, then raised her face to him.

“Did you kiss him?” he demanded.

“What do you care?” Her eyes, dark-centered in the dim hallway, sought his. Whatever she saw in him caused her to smile in a way that melted the bones in his knees. “Unless, of course, you would prefer to be kissing me yourself.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners. Lights in their depths twinkled. “Which would be perfectly understandable, after this morning. I’m a delectable kisser.”

His gaze dropped to her lips and his mouth opened and then closed soundlessly. With her words ringing in his head like a bell, he managed to make himself take a step backward and allow her to pass.

It was a mistake to watch her walk away, he knew, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the sway of her hips, the curve of her spine, and the errant curls at the nape of her neck. He
was suddenly galvanized by the memory of the feel and the taste of her.

Like a spectator inside his own head, he saw himself go after her, turn her and swoop down on her mouth.

T
HERE WAS
no squeal, no gasp, not so much as a breath of resistance as he bore her back into the shelter of the nearest door frame. Her lack of shock hinted that she had expected this. The way her arms lapped around his neck said she had wanted it, too.

Plunging into the taste of chocolate, the velvet of her mouth, and the responsiveness of her tongue, he found himself instantly detached from the moorings of his life…adrift…suspended in time and place. Suddenly there was no
before
or
after;
this contact, these sensations were all that existed. His body caught fire and unbidden, he wrapped both arms around her, lifting her, holding her fiercely against him, kissing her with a hunger he had forgotten he possessed.

The door behind her opened unexpectedly, and his embrace was all that kept her from falling backward through it. A man’s shocked face appeared briefly through the haze in his vision, and then the door closed with a resounding thud. Operating with only a fraction of his faculties, he managed to turn her, shift them both across the narrow hall and work the knob of another door. When it opened, he carried her into the room with him, stifling the question of whose room they’d entered, and pressed her back against the wall, kicking the door shut.

Her body molded to his as he leaned into her, and her hands cupped the back of his head to pull him closer. Her
mouth was alternately tender and yielding, then firm and demanding as she sought new combinations of position and pressure against his. The play of her tongue inside his lips, and the way she raked his lips with her teeth sent voluptuous sensations spiraling through him. Her words were no boast; she
was
a delectable kisser.

He could have stayed there for hours, immersed in kissing, licking and tasting her, feeling as if together they had just invented that oral entree into pleasure, but there was so much more of her to experience. He trailed his lips down the side of her face to her throat, kissing, nibbling and registering that her head sank to the side to give him access. The sight of her tongue laving her lips, compensating for the absence of his, sent a bolt of electricity through him.

His arousal was full-blown and urgent and his hands burned with the need to feel her bare skin.

T
HIS
was what she wanted, Mariah thought, pushing aside all other thought as she leaned into Jack’s body and luxuriated in the pleasure spreading along the underside of her skin. This was what he’d denied her that first night…this erotic resonance…this tingling in her lips, drawing hunger in her breasts and gathering fullness in her sex.

His hands slid over her hungrily, tracing the rim of her corset and the mounds above it. She stretched, hoping to give him access to the nipples tucked into the edge of the boning, but found herself too respectably wedged inside it. With a moan of frustration, she slipped her hands between them and he inched back—without abandoning her lips—to give her room.

“Buttons,” she whimpered as she worked them with trembling fingers, “too many buttons.” When her jacket opened, she realized there was another whole rank of them at her back and looked over her shoulder with a groan.

With a wicked laugh against her throat, he peeled the jacket down her arms and tossed it to the side. Before she could catch his hands and direct them to the rest of her buttons, he slid them down her hips and thighs and began reeling up her skirt and petticoat. He dipped so that his fingers could find the tops of her garters, then glide up her sensitive thighs to the frothy silk of her knickers. He muttered something vehemently appreciative.

The feel of her legs bared to the cool air was deliciously erotic. His hands, hot on her naked thighs, set off fireworks in her that shot sparks along forgotten sensory paths. Her nerves were awakening, her muscles warming with memory, her nipples and sex tingling to awareness. Her skin was aching for touch. Closer, she needed to be closer. She pressed against him, meeting his kiss, offering—demanding—more.

Reading her desire, he cupped the backs of her thighs and lifted her, holding her to him as he thrust his body against hers. She felt the ridge of his arousal against her and, with a soul-deep sigh, parted her legs.

He moved again, this time pressing more tightly, arching with uncanny precision. Vibrations from that bone-melting contact spread outward along her nerves, causing her to tilt her pelvis to a better fit. His next movement sent shudders of pleasure through them both. He knew exactly how to move his sex across hers to produce those intense, heart-stopping sensations.

“Again,” she breathed against his lips. When he thrust against her, she said on a groan, “Again.”

Each stroke built her excitation higher and soon she felt a quickening rush building in her. Again…again…she shuddered with pleasure…almost…almost…
almost
…

Release broke over her like an avalanche. She stiffened and gasped as the boundaries of her senses dissolved, her arms clamped fiercely around his ribs, and her muscles seized. For a
long, scintillating moment she was unable to breathe, move or respond further. Then as aftershocks of pleasure shook her, she wrenched the rear of his shirt out of his trousers and ran her hands up his bare back, savoring the lean bands of muscle she found.

Something banged into the door beside them; the sound was like a rifle shot in the charged air around them. Holding her breath, she looked up into his dusky features and need-darkened eyes, then around them at the room they’d invaded. It looked familiar, but there was no sign of luggage and many of the sleeping rooms were similarly shaped and furnished. The knob rattled impatiently and there was a metallic scraping at the lock—at which he jolted aside to block the door with a shoulder and left her sliding down the wall like soggy wallpaper.

“Miz?” A knock sounded on the door. “You there, Miz Mariah? That’s odd. I thought I left it open.”

Mercy.
Mariah frantically smoothed her rumpled skirts and rushed across the room to the mirror over the washstand, where she tidied her hair and stared in shock at her kiss-swollen lips. Jack’s reflection in the mirror showed him red-faced and grim, with his hand on the doorknob. With a glance at her, he stepped back to admit Mercy bearing a mischievous smile and a dented box of chocolates.

“Lookit, miz, at what I found while I wus comin’ back from the necessary.” She held up the box, pried open one corner, and inhaled the heady aroma of the confections. “Jus’ laying in the hall, it was.”

“There it is.” Mariah had hastily poured a basin of cool water and splashed her face. Now she turned with a towel in her hand, dabbing her damp, rosy cheeks. “We bought those earlier and I—I must have dropped them in my hurry to—get to the room.”

Mercy caught Mariah’s sidelong glance and the unmistakable sound of a shoe connecting with a piece of furniture. She hitched around to find Jack stalking toward the door. She glanced with exaggerated innocence from her mistress to their escort, then attacked the ribbons on the candy box.

“Well, then. It were a good thing I come along when I did.”

B
LAST
M
ERCY
for having the worst timing in all of humanity. Or bless her for having the best. Mariah watched the door close behind Jack and found herself torn between a tantalizing satisfaction and a sizzling hunger for more. Her knees were weak and her sex smoldered with a viscous, slow-burning heat that she had thought she’d never feel again.

Her overwhelming reaction to Jack St. Lawrence, she told herself, had to be part sexual drought-relief and part reaction to having her marital hopes dashed just when they were starting to rise.

The tenderness in Bickering’s eyes, the husky reverence in his voice as he spoke of his bride had generated a longing in her. And that dangerous yearning had roused a fear that her vulnerability to Jack St. Lawrence might not be as simple as mere lust.

She had experienced enough lust in her life—as both recipient and initiator—to know that it had never generated this intensely personal sort of pleasure, this level of
emotion
in her. She wanted to be with Jack physically, to experience her whole repertoire of delights with him, but she also wanted to tease him and watch the way he flushed in response, and to make him smile the way he had yesterday.

By the next morning, when she saw him pause in the doorway of the hotel restaurant, she knew that she was in trouble. Her heart began to pound as he crossed the room with that long, potent stride, immaculately groomed but hollow-
eyed, clearly suffering the aftermath of an evening ill spent.
If only she could have ill-spent it with him.

It was all she could do to keep from pulling him down for a blistering kiss. She pressed her lips against her teacup instead.

Now in the coach, on the way to her next matrimonial prospect, she couldn’t keep her eyes off his long legs and struggled to avoid looking at the tantalizing bulge in his trousers. It was going to be a very, very long ride.

I
T WAS
indeed a good thing the old woman had returned to the room when she did, Jack had thought as he stalked out of the room, out of the hotel and into the nearest pub, where he sat in a darkened corner and consumed three enormous belts of Scotch in succession. He thought the same thing the next morning in the hotel breakfast room when his heart beat a regimental quick-time at the sight of Mariah Eller’s nubile lips pressed against a china cup. And he thought it yet again when he was forced to accompany her and her old servant on a tour of female haberdasheries, and she insisted on having his opinion of the scent applied to a pair of black twenty-button gloves.

Infernal female. He’d barely got out of the shop before his John Thomas grew into a full-blown Jonathan Thomasville.

After shopping, she insisted on accompanying him to Barclays Bank to pay off her mortgage. By the time they climbed into the carriage and started for Grantham, he was feeling surly and put upon and irritated by his own impulses. He was stuck with her, couldn’t keep his eyes off her and wanted nothing more than to snatch her up and carry her off and—And what kind of woman responded the way she did to a man’s touch? She was sexually incendiary; she practically exploded in his damned arms!

It was a good thing that he hadn’t had time yesterday to do more than ravish her up against a wall. Again. Lord knew
what sort of conflagration might occur if he ever managed to get
horizontal
with her.

Marry her off, man, and be done with it,
his pragmatic side demanded.
Then get on with finding your “advantageous” bride. Forget connection and pedigree…just go for money. Lots of it. So the family will leave you alone.

An odd burning sensation made him reach up covertly to massage his chest above his heart. The special marriage license in his coat pocket rustled as his hand brushed it. He jerked away with alarm. It was like carrying a live snake in his damned pocket.