The Fireside Inn (6 page)

Disappointment tightened Leo’s features, holding him rigid for a moment before he reluctantly began to release her. The moment he’d loosened his hold, Serena took a fortifying breath and shoved at his chest with all her might.

Leo went down on the blanket with a soft
oof
, and Serena scrambled up to straddle his trim waist. Clamping her thighs against abdominal muscles strung tight with surprise, Serena bent over him and smiled into his wide, shocked eyes.

Flushed warm with victory and anticipation, Serena squirmed against Leo’s hardness and savored the pure pleasure that rocketed through her.

“I’ve decided to seduce you, instead,” she told him. “It’s my first seduction attempt. How’m I doing so far?”

***

Leo clasped his hands on the subtle roundness of Serena’s hips and fought the urge to thrust against her softness. If this was truly her first seduction, he didn’t want to do anything to startle her into drawing back.

“Very impressive,” he told her, pleased that the strain he was under barely showed in his tone. “High degree of difficulty in executing your first maneuver. Full marks from the U.K. judge.”

“But now that I have you where I want you, what am I going to do with you?”

Loving the playfulness, Leo grinned up at his amateur seductress and moved his hands from her hips to lace them behind his head. “Whatever you like, love. Consider me utterly and completely seduced.”

Serena’s smile went from naughty to uncertain, her hands on his chest lifting to hover tentatively above the fine Oxford cloth of his shirt. In protest, Leo curled his hips upward in an unmistakably suggestive move that stoked the heat of his passion to a burning flame.

He growled a little at the crush of his most sensitive bits against the yielding globes of her perfect backside, but Serena’s loud moan drowned him out. Her thighs tightened as she rode back against his thrusts, and her hands clamped down on his shoulders for leverage.

She leaned to kiss him, her succulent mouth voracious and bold, without a hint of shyness or hesitance, and Leo understood. Serena would meet heat with heat, she would keep pace with his every passionate impulse, but she went cold at the first hint of his indifference.

As if he could ever truly be indifferent to Serena. But if even playing at it in order to let her take control made her feel unwanted, Leo had the perfect solution.

Tensing his abs, he surged upward to capture her pretty, elfin face between the palms of his hands. And because Leo had always appreciated knowing exactly where he stood, he said, “I want you.”

The click of her throat as she swallowed was audible even over the rush of the waves hitting the rocks below. She shuddered against him as if overcome by the simple statement of desire—or maybe by the incontrovertible evidence of Leo’s desire, which she could now surely feel notched thick and heavy between her thighs.

“Take me, then,” she whispered, her breath brushing sweetly at his lips before she tucked her face into his neck and locked her legs around his hips. “Show me what it’s like to be wanted.”

Leo crushed her close and bore her back onto the blanket, covering her with his body. But before the tide of hunger crashed over them both, he had just enough awareness for a flicker of curiosity: Was he truly the first man ever to make Serena Lightfoot feel desired?

“Whew.” Serena stared up at the blue brilliance of the afternoon sky through the stark, bare branches and savored every new ache and sore muscle. “So that’s what all the fuss is about. I think I finally get it.”

The warm rumble of Leo’s laugh vibrated through her ribcage where they were still pressed together in a damp, sweaty, sated mess, wrapped cozily in the blanket. “Glad to be of service in your pursuit of knowledge.”

Even though Serena knew he didn’t mean anything by it, the comment hit a little too close to the tender bruise of her worst memories. She frowned and pulled away, shivering as the sea breeze chilled her overheated skin. “Don’t say it like that. I wasn’t just using you.”

She could practically hear the way Leo’s eyebrows shot upwards in surprise. “I certainly didn’t mean to imply that. Nothing could be further from my mind, love.”

“Of course.” Serena could kick herself for saying anything. “Sorry, ignore me.”

“Ah, but that’s one thing I can never promise to do.” Leo hitched himself over onto his side, and she felt his eyes on her while she patted around outside the blanket for her hastily discarded clothes. “What are you doing? Come back here.”

Glancing over her shoulder, Serena caught her breath at the heady temptation of his perfect, leanly muscled form basking unashamedly in the dappled sunlight. She swallowed down the lump of emotion in her throat. “Don’t you want to get back to the task at hand? We only have a few weeks to come up with your reading for the wedding.”

“Sod the wedding,” Leo growled, and Serena made an embarrassingly high-pitched noise as she was pounced from behind. The clothes she’d gathered went flying in all directions. “What’s wrong?”

Apparently a single afternoon was enough to condition Serena’s body to respond to Leo’s. She arched under him instinctively, his bare chest searing into her back. Moaning low in her throat, Serena settled with Leo draped over her like a particularly hot, hard-muscled throw rug.

Even so soon after being turned inside out and left panting, Leo’s closeness still had the power to shorten her breath. But the way his body bracketed hers also felt intimate and safe, almost protective. Somehow, it was easier to talk like this than face-to-face and fully clothed.

“Nothing is wrong,” she promised him, hearing the thickness in her own voice. “Absolutely nothing, for once. You told me from the beginning that you wanted me, and I was able to believe you because why else would you come up with such a flimsy pretext to spend time with me?”

Pressed so tightly together, Serena felt the instant Leo went stiff and wary, and she hastened to clarify. “I’m not complaining! It’s one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for me, actually. In my experience, it’s usually the exact opposite.”

“I don’t follow.”

Serena cleared her throat. “Well, as it happens, I was at the top of my class all through school. Let’s just say there was more than one football player who realized if he smiled at me in the cafeteria, I’d fall all over myself to help him with his homework—which usually translated to me doing his homework for him. Until he passed that class and dropped me like a bad habit.”

She could hear the thunderous frown in Leo’s voice. “And this happened more than once?”

“For a supposedly smart person, it took me a ridiculously long time to recognize the pattern.”

There was a moment of heavy, charged silence broken only by the cries of gulls circling overhead. Then Leo said, very calmly, “I should like the name of every single callow youth who used you that way. In alphabetical order, please, to make it easier for me to track them down and destroy them.”

Serena laughed, even as Leo’s staunch support warmed her chest. “Oh, leave them alone. I console myself by imagining them all pumping gas and collecting garbage for a living. Staying stupid and ignorant forever is its own punishment, right?”

Leo hummed and stroked a contemplative hand down her side, fingers pressing just firmly enough not to tickle. “You don’t want revenge, even though these idiot boys clearly left you with an inability to believe in your obvious beauty and desirability.”

“Well, they taught me the first lesson,” Serena admitted, tilting her head until the blanket almost muffled her voice. “But grad school was where I earned my advance degree in romantic idiocy, as well as library science.”

Pressing a kiss to the sensitive skin behind her ear, Leo murmured, “Tell me.”

She couldn’t resist the tender demand. Serena rolled her tense shoulders slightly, loving the way his arms tightened around her in response. As safe and secure as she’d ever felt in her life, she told him the story she hadn’t told anyone in years.

“I didn’t originally plan to be a librarian,” she confessed. “It’s funny how life turns out—I can’t imagine being anything else, now. But when I started grad school, I thought I wanted to be a professor of library science. I did a ton of work and research developing a new reference system—it was an independent study I hoped to turn in as my dissertation.”

“So what happened?”

This was the part that made Serena want to squirm with remembered humiliation. “The man I was dating advised me not to publish my work. He convinced me I’d be better off sticking it under my bed and refocusing my credits toward a degree in librarianship. Which is what I did.”

“Why on earth did you listen to him?”

“Well, he was an expert in the field. In fact—” Serena squeezed her eyes right against the memory of Dr. Saul Obinger’s kind, patient smile “—he was my dissertation advisor. So I sort of had to follow his advice. At least, he presented it that way when he explained why he needed to step down as my advisor before we could be together. At the time, I found it wildly romantic. It was intoxicating to imagine that this renowned, distinguished Ph.D. would want me enough to jeopardize his career by sleeping with me. Even after he stopped being my official advisor, he could’ve gotten in trouble for dating a student—although the rules are different for graduate students.”

“But he wasn’t jeopardizing his career,” Leo guessed darkly. “Was he?”

Serena heaved in a deep breath, mostly to feel the comforting weight of Leo’s torso anchoring her to the ground. “No. He was laying the groundwork to take my research and claim it as his own. He’s the chair of the department now, well on his way to tenure…and I’m a librarian on an island so small it can barely support the public school, much less the library.”

The world dipped and swayed around her as Leo curled his arms under her legs and shoulders to flip her up and into his lap. Serena’s heart thundered against her ribs, dizziness forcing her to clutch at Leo’s neck for balance. Even with all the brainless jocks who’d pretended to be interested in her in high school, she’d never been manhandled so casually before. Maybe it lost her some feminist cred, but she admitted privately that part of her loved knowing that Leo was strong enough to lift and cradle her effortlessly.

Cupping the nape of her neck in his large palm, Leo stared straight into her eyes. “You deserved better, Serena. I’m sorry.”

The strain in his voice magically eased the strain around Serena’s heart from sharing such an embarrassing, emotionally scarring experience. “You don’t have to apologize,” she told him, framing his handsome, aristocratic face between her hands. “I’d given up on ever being truly desired until you came along.”

***

If Leo were a better man, he’d probably have regrets about tumbling his sweet librarian—but luckily he was a scoundrel and always had been. With Serena warm and responsive in his arms, he couldn’t find it in himself to regret a moment of their time together.

Regret, however, wasn’t quite the same as guilt. And after hearing her tale of humiliation and betrayal at the hands of men who’d had ulterior motives for pursuing her, guilt burned at the lining of Leo’s stomach. As much as he hated, instantly and unquestioningly, every man who had burned that shame into Serena’s voice, Leo had to ask himself: Was he truly any different?

“You are perhaps the first woman I’ve met who wanted to be desired for her body rather than her mind,” he observed lightly.

Serena laughed. “I know, it’s kind of backwards. But it’s not really about mind versus body. I’d hate it just as much if someone pretended to be interested in my research skills just so they could get in my pants. It’s more about knowing that everything you want from me is on the table. Your ulterior motives are not ulterior! You told me from the first that you wanted to sleep with me. I like that. I’ve had enough of men hiding their true motives from me.”

Leo suppressed a wince by running his fingers through the silky tendrils of her bright golden hair. “Ought we to think about getting dressed? I’m enjoying being the only man to get into your pants at the moment, and if someone else were to see you in the glorious altogether, I’d probably have to fight them off. Which I’m willing to do, obviously. But it seems a waste of time better spent in more pleasurable pursuits.”

“I love the way you talk. Have you honestly never thought of writing your own poems?” Serena lifted herself off his lap, bracing herself on his shoulders for balance.

This again. Leo let her go reluctantly, his fingertips skimming the bare silk of her tanned skin and memorizing the texture in case he never got the chance to touch her again. “No,” he said, more roughly than he intended. “I believe I can safely promise never to write a single line of verse.”

Startled by his gruff vehemence, Serena glanced over at him as she rifled through the small pile of clothing. “What are you getting so mad about? It’s hardly offensive to say you have a way with words.”

She couldn’t know how near she’d come to the scars at the center of Leo’s psyche. Heart pounding, stomach roiling, he said, “It’s not a compliment, either. At least, not one that I deserve.”

Smiling uncertainly, Serena said, “Ah. Because everyone in England talks like you, right? Do they teach you that at Oxford?”

“Being an earl’s son carries one quite far,” Leo replied, glad of the topic change. His gaze snagged on the reverse strip tease happening before him as Serena shimmied her hips into her cargo shorts. “But not all the way to Oxford, I’m afraid.”

“Cambridge, then.”

The way she cupped her breasts and jiggled to seat them properly inside the stretchy cotton of her bra made Leo’s blood heat. “No, not Cambridge either.”

She frowned. “Then where did you go to college? Or university, I guess y’all call it?”

Snapping to attention, Leo realized the danger too late. There was nothing for it but to tell the truth and try to brush it off. “I didn’t. After I scraped through at boarding school, I never saw the point in further education.”

“You never saw the point?” Serena’s arms dropped before she could manage to get her shirt over her head. Standing above him half nude and wholly appealing, she blinked in dismay.