That Scandalous Evening by Christina Dodd

Author:Christina Dodd
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 18

“What do you want?” Jane whispered, paralyzed with fear and desire.

“You. You and clear vision and an end to Napoleon and safe streets and…you. If I can have you, that’ll be enough for the moment.” Blackburn kept their bloody palms together, and with the other hand cupped the back of her neck and dragged her face to his.

His kiss. The same lips, the same tongue, the same touch as eleven years ago, yet it was different. Events had come between them, shaped them separately, and now circumstances and his determination had brought them together.

His kiss. No longer greedy. Hungry, instead, with an edgy anger he could not have displayed eleven years ago. Then he’d been infuriated because she’d made him a laughingstock. Now he was incensed because…because…

“Why?” she found herself murmuring against his lips. “Why?”

“Because someone needs to keep a leash on you.”

Holding her close, he tumbled her backward, and she beheld a brief flurry of sky now packed with gray clouds, of hedges seen sideways and ground much too close. Then she came to rest against a hillock of grass that supported her back and head like a settee, and he sank to his knees beside her like a supplicant before his queen.

A foolish image, for this tyrant didn’t beg. He leaned over and, without giving her a chance to regroup, kissed her again. The questions were still there, rampaging through her mind, along with a vast indignation. How dare he think she needed a leash, and what gave him the right to wield it?

But they had exchanged blood. Now they exchanged breath. She had freely given of this intimacy eleven years ago. This time she resisted it, no longer the ninny she had once been. But he exhibited none of the same impatience, either, wooing her with kisses so insubstantial they might have been no more than the breeze—except for his smooth lips, and his enveloping warmth, and her body’s response.

She’d called him mad, but what madness cursed her that she would soften and yearn, and open her lips to him?

A kiss. Only a kiss.

As he slanted his mouth against hers, the taste and wetness made her breath catch, and catch again. He touched her. His fingers molded her shoulders and swept the sides of her body with an urgency that hadn’t changed in eleven years. Now she understood better what it meant, for she had warned Adorna against succumbing. Jane was older, of course, and a woman; surely the passions of the flesh should have subsided.

One thumb, soft as a mink brush, grazed her nipple, and the provocation resonated through her chemise and light wool bodice.

Older women, it seemed, could want as desperately as any randy boy.

And for all his experience and world-weary manner, Lord Blackburn gave a passable imitation of a randy boy who frantically wanted her, Plain Jane Higgenbothem.

Jane didn’t understand him. Not anything about him. At least eleven years before, she had been able to read him, to know what he was thinking…because he’d been so shallow.

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