“Why did you do that?” she demanded, her voice muffled by the screen and the rustle of various fabrics.
“Speak of your breasts? Apologies. It… slipped out.” She’d been standing there in men’s britches and nothing else but the long, white binding circled round her torso, biting into her skin and pressing her flat. Or trying to. The woman wasluscious.
When they’d met as children, he’d thought her a flower in a field—dainty, hardy, pretty as a weed was pretty, in a simple way. Then one summer he’d realized prettiness could multiply, bloom over a handful of nights into stubborn beauty. And a fewyears after that, when she’d asked him to give her a kiss—her first—he’d become something of a connoisseur of beauty with one fastidious rule: any form of it not like Caro’s form simply…. lacked. It had been years, though, since his boyish admiration… adoration. He’d long ago starved it.
But one glimpse of her was like a drop of whisky to a man who had struggled to stop drinking. It reminded him of his obsession, brought it roaring back to life.
At some point over the last decade, she’d acquired the sort of curves a man liked to sink his teeth into.Felixliked to sink his teeth into. Hips perfect for a man’s hand, smooth skin a rough tongue could worship, and breasts… well, he couldn’t quite be sure about those, hidden as they were, but the way his cock had leapt at the sight… if he ever saw them unbound, he might lose his mind.
“I won’t do it again.” He certainly would not. Uninterested in losing his mind. Liked to know where it was at all times. “Speak of your breasts, that is. Though”—he whistled—“someone should likely write sonnets about them.”
She glared.
He held his hands up, palms flat. “Not me, of course.” Though he could. Absolutely he could.
Caroline had ever been his weakness.
And he’d just seen her naked. New information always impacted the understanding of a whole. Seeing her half-dressed like watching a painting unfold; it revealed more of the story, changed the tone entirely.
“Not that,” she snapped. Oh, he knew that tone.Displeasure. Her brows would be storming toward one another, her shoulders shoved back in indignation. “Are you dicked in the nob? You answered the riddle! You were supposed to get itwrong. It’s why I gave you one I thought you would know. So you could answer itincorrectly.”
Ah, that.He’d gotten caught up in the competition, blurted out the correct answer and likely ruined his life in the same exact sentence. “A mistake, I assure you. I didmeanto lose.”
It had been easy to ignore his feelings when he avoided her. Distance gave him a clear advantage. But the gravity of love proved inescapable. It was like he’d been standing in front of a boulder for a decade, his muscles the only thing stopping its weight from giving in to the downward pull. But this marriage… God, he’d have a right to seduce her, a right to love her. It would be the thing to kick his knees in, to set the boulder rolling again.
It would flatten him in a second.
“We simply will not marry.” Her head appeared around the side of the screen, stormy eyebrows and all.
“Of… course not.” He’d joined the game this evening to acquire a wife who did not want children, not a friend he’d lusted overonce.
The rest of her body appeared from behind the screen, her simple blue gown sagging, the bodice empty. She’d not unbound her breasts. His hands twitched. He clasped them behind his back.
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “What are we to do? If you had stayed home, or at your club or the brothel, or wherever you were, I would be engaged to Beckwith right now.”
“Be glad you’re not,” he muttered.
“Would be better than this. I need a house! And a husband. How will I get it now?”
“The usual way, I suppose. What you should have done to begin with, Caro. Put yourself on the market.”
“You may not have noticed, but my reputation is not… wifely.”
Hehadnoticed. Deuced entertaining, it was, too. Caro could be no one but herself. A viscount’s granddaughter who’d been dragged about the world and raised to make that world betterany way she could. A radical’s daughter and a radical in her own right. He’d wondered why she’d been hanging about London this Season. She had little in the way of family, only a newly married older stepsister. And Felix had heard that the current viscount, her uncle, wanted nothing to do with either of them. Sought to distance himself from their ideals.
Caro had ingested Wollstonecraft with her mother’s milk and abolitionist pamphlets with fairy tales. Odd that she should now seem to crave a less radical life. Her father’s death had truly hurt her, then, ripped her open, and she was using whatever she could to sew herself back together.
He understood that. Too well. Fellow feeling didn’t mean he’d marry her, though.
She swung toward him, turning on her toe, and presenting him with her back. “Tie me up, please.”
Had those words ever not made a cock twitch when said with the red, red lips of a pretty woman? The back of her neck was slender and graceful beneath thick, dark hair coiled like a crown atop her head. Little curls danced at her nape, a temptation for fingers that remembered pulling braids and flicking earlobes.
Herearlobes. Little morsels. The newly unfolded painting of Miss Caroline Maxwell—it changed how he saw every bit of her. No girlish flower any longer. Now a luscious fruit he wanted to bite into.
His hands were unclasped before he gave them permission, and they were caressing the edges of her gown just as quickly, tying her up. To get her out of sight, of course.
No gown could hide her scent, however. Soap and… How in hell could a woman smell like wildflowers? Like those little pink and yellow blooms that dotted the field behind his grandfather’s house. The scent of them must have soaked into her skin. They’d laid there for hours. Her telling those silly riddles. Him pretending to read. Sun and soil, the fresh, sweet scent ofwildflowers rising in the summer heat around them; he’d never forget that smell. Did she bathe in pink and yellow petals? Grind them up for her soap?
