The Courtship by Grace Burrowes

Author:Grace Burrowes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: love_history
ISBN: 9781402278945
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Published: 2012-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Three

Percival fell silent for a moment, and then Esther felt warm male fingers closing around her hand. He brought her knuckles to his lips and pressed a kiss there, then did not let go of her hand.

“How would you describe that kiss, Miss Himmelfarb?”

He wanted to talk about kissing? With Miss Himmelfarb? “I’d describe it as brief and uninteresting. Proper.”

She put as much disgust into her description as she dared, and the dratted man chuckled. When Esther would have wrenched her hand free, he tightened his grip on her fingers. “Tell me about the kisses you’d like to receive, Esther. I must have some sense of my goal, for I am very intent on reaching it.”

He had an odd way of showing his intentions.

“I want kisses I’ll never forget,” Esther began, speaking slowly because this topic—the exact nature of the kisses she sought—was not one she’d considered.

Not one she’d been bold enough to consider, and certainly not one she’d ever been encouraged to consider.

“I want kisses that I can feel through my whole body, through my heart and soul. I want kisses that render me speechless and helpless with longing for more kisses just like them. From you, I want kisses so… profound that every time I catch the scent of cedar and spices, my knees go a little weak and I smile in a way that makes all the gentlemen around me, even the old men, take notice and smile a little too.”

He was rubbing his thumb slowly across her knuckles, as if waiting for her to go on.

“More than that,” Esther said, “I suppose I want kisses that defy description.”

“Passionate kisses?” Oh, how casual he sounded.

“Not only passion. I’ve been mauled and slobbered over. A man’s passion strikes me as an undignified, selfish thing.”

“Then you want kisses to inspire your own passion?”

She had the sense he was toying with her, trying to verbally back her into some corner where her dignity and her wits could not join her. Before common sense or some equally inconvenient virtue could stop her, Esther pushed him back so he sat on the headstone, and situated herself with a knee on either side of his hips—a somewhat athletic undertaking, given her riding skirts.

“Enough talk, Percival Windham.” She fisted a hand in the hair at his nape. “I’m tired of talk, and you promised, and I will not be put off by your lectures and interrogations. All day long I step and fetch and smile and pretend, and just this once, I want somebody to attend me. The other girls know to make the men toady to them, but all I get is—”

He kissed her, a fleeting press of warm, soft lips to her mouth. “Do hush, love. You’ll bring Tony with the grooms, and at the very least, for such kisses as you describe, we deserve privacy.”

Esther felt his arm encircle her waist, snugging her to his larger frame, and then a series of little tugs to her scalp.

“You are destroying my coiffure, Percival.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.