He pressed a finger to her lips. “I hope you meant it. It’s what I want to hear. Can I—That is, would you allow me to call on your mother at your home tomorrow?”
“Yes!” she blurted, anticipation soaring. “You can come for supper. There’s already a dinner party planned, and I’ll arrange for my mother to add you to the guest list. But,” she said, “you may only come on two conditions.” Her mind was racing now, with possibility and optimism for the future.
“What conditions, my clever little bargainer?”
She pressed her hand over his, which now cradled her head, his fingers still threaded in her hair. Her heart was pounding, but she plowed ahead, feeling emboldened. “Show me the painting. Surely, it is nearly finished.”
She had asked every day, and he had so far refused her.
“It’s actually done.” A rueful expression came to his face. “I completed it yesterday but didn’t want my time with you to be over.”
That he could worry as she did made her feel so much more relaxed and even bolder. “You can put that worry to rest,” she said. “Do you want to hear my other condition?”
He smirked. “Surely.”
“Kiss me.”
A slow, seductive grin tugged his lips. “As it happens, I feel quite confident I can more than meet that condition, but I worry I won’t stop.”
“Then don’t,” she said, her heart thundering and her mind racing over the things she knew about the wager. “Was the wager not to seduce me? So do so. Do so, and get your land back, and—”
His mouth covered hers hungrily, the kiss turning instantly urgent and exploratory. She gave herself freely to the passion of his kiss, which sent the pit of her stomach into a wild spiral and sparked a desire so great that it felt as if it would consume her. She ran her hands up his back, memorizing and savoring the powerful feel of him under her fingertips, and then she slid her hands over his muscular shoulders, clinging to him, never wanting the kiss to end. His mouth moved over hers, devouring any resistance and dangling the possibility of an extraordinary experience in front of her. She wanted him. She wanted him, and in this moment, she didn’t care about anything else. Not propriety. Not her mother’s plan for her. Not the consequences. As she began to feel drugged by the heady sensations of his mouth on hers, the warmth of him, strength of him, she knew deep down that reaching for something wonderful was much better than settling for something ordinary. Great rewards almost always came with great risks.
His lips left hers, and she started to protest until he kissed his way to the pulsing hollow at the base of her throat. Shivers raced through her, and when he trailed a heavenly path down her neck to her chest and licked slowly at the edge of her gown, she thought she might just become a puddle of heat. His kiss was divine.Hewas divine. But as she pressed onto her tiptoes to urge him to explore her body further, lower, wickedly underneath her bodice, he raised his mouth from her burning flesh and gazed into her eyes. He brought his hands to her shoulders, and she moaned an objection as her body screamed at her. Her breasts had grown heavy to the point of aching, her insides were in a hundred pulsing knots, and she needed something. She very much suspected that something was him.
“Callum.” She leaned into him, but he responded by holding her at an arm’s distance. Hurt crashed over her, as did the worry that maybe he didn’t want her after all, just as her father had told her no man would.
“Don’t,” he said, brushing a kiss to her lips. “I see the worry in your eyes, and that worry is for naught. I want you. Believe me, I do. It’s because I want you as I’ve not wanted another that I won’t take you. Not yet.” She opened her mouth to object, but he continued. “I don’t simply want you in my bed for some brief, sweaty tumble in my sheets, Constantine.”
“But that sounds lovely!” she cried out, curling her fingers into his shoulders.
He grinned at her and then kissed her forehead. When he pulled away, he said, “It does sound lovely. Except for the brief part, which is all I have ever known and ever wanted. But I don’t want brief with you.”
“No?” she whispered, her heart racing. “What do you want?”
The sensual smile he showered upon her made her tingle all the way to her toes. “I want to court you properly, openly, adoringly, so when we wed there will be no doubt in anyone’s mind that neither the wager nor your inheritance had anything at all to do with it.”
She felt her lips part on his words, and then excitement and happiness raced through her. He had not asked her to wed him or declared his love for her, but he had as much as said they would wed, and didn’t what he want tell her how he felt? How was she to argue against that? If only her aching body would listen to reason and not yearn so fiercely to be touched by him now.
Finally, she forced herself to nod and say, “I want that, too.”
He smiled gently and rubbed the pad of his thumb over her lower lip, which only served to inflame her need for him further. She caught his much larger hand in both of hers and glared at him. “If we are going to be chaste while you are courting me, then perhaps you ought not to touch me so, so…enticingly,” she blurted, her face heating with her words. “Honestly,” she muttered as he smirked at her, “I had no idea at all that I was wanton until I met you!”
“I’m so glad.” He slipped his hands around her waist and tugged her close, his hard body against her soft one. She bit her lip on the need to groan when her loins pulsed with a horrible ache, and he chuckled. The devil actually chuckled.
“You,” she snapped, feeling irritable with yearning, “are a rake as everyone says.”
“I was,” he replied, brushing his lips to hers and then pulling back. “I never said I wasn’t. What I said was that I want to change my ways.”
“Wonderful,” she grumbled, which made him frown a bit so she amended her words. “I do mean it is truly wonderful.” She nestled into him as a proper, virtuous lady, as the kind of lady she had always been before him would have done had she ever been remotely intrigued by a man she had met. The new wanton in her, the woman he had awoken, however, wanted to beg him to kiss her, to touch her. She was slightly mollified to feel his desire for her between them, so that when he hooked his finger under her chin and raised her face to his, she offered him a smile instead of the frown from moments ago.
His lush lips bestowed upon her another heart stopping grin, but this time his gray eyes raked her body thoroughly, lingering on her mouth until he once again drew his gaze to hers. “And I never said”—his voice was a rumble from deep in his chest—“that I wanted us to be chaste.” Her eyes widened at his words and their implied meaning. His gaze dropped from her face to her shoulders to her breasts. “There are many ways,” he said, leaning down and running his hot tongue along the edge of her gown, “to be introduced to pleasure without taking one’s innocence.”
She was both ecstatic and unnerved by the underlying insinuation of how many women he had been with. “I suppose,” she said breathlessly, her head tilting back and her eyelids fluttering closed on a deluge of pleasurable sensations, “that you have a great deal of experience with taking a woman’s innocence.”
“Au contraire,” he returned on a low, warm, promising growl. He lifted the edge of her bodice a bit more to slide his tongue lower. She groaned, her grip tightening on his shoulders as her body relaxed into him even more. “I have never allowed myself to be with an inexperienced woman before now. I didn’t want to be hated when I wanted to part ways.”
No man will ever want to stay with you. You’re dull. Obsessed with the moon and politics. Ridiculous.
