It had started out so soft, so gentle—a girl’s dream of a first kiss.
And then it had become something else entirely.
Lydia was no sheltered miss. Between her friends, her four older brothers, and the entire erotic catalogue of Belvoir’s Library, she was perfectly well acquainted with the full range of what might happen in the bedchamber between consenting adults.
But she had not dreamed—
Well. She had not dreamed it would feel like that. His mouth all over her, licking and sucking andbiting—oh God, she had especially liked the biting. She’d felt wild with wanting, her body unmoored, searching for pressure and touch and satisfaction. And then, when hehadtouched her, she’d felt hot, desperate shocks of bliss everywhere his fingers had passed.
Her body—so ungovernable, so bloody tuned to her emotions—had become not something that shamed her, but something wonderful, something that spilled pleasure by the handful. Her own pleasure—and his as well.
She wanted it again. She wantedmore.
She was six-and-twenty years old. She had been on the Marriage Mart for seven Seasons; she had told herself she was content with a passionless life.
But she had not known what was possible. She had not known about this rough-tender blacksmith of an earl. She had not known that her heart could wrench when he said her name, or that his hands on her waist would feel like an anchor when the world spun free around her.
Now she knew. And she could no longer be satisfied with what she’d had before. It ought to have terrified her—itdidterrify her.
But she felt strangely, stubbornly determined as well. She was tired of waiting for her life to change. Had she not resolved already that she would change things for herself?
So she would do it. She would grab on to him with both hands, and if it ended in her own heartache, damn it, she would at least go to her grave knowing the sharp, shocking pleasure of Arthur’s skin touching her own.
“Are you ready to go down?” Georgiana asked. “I suspect it’s time.”
Lydia swallowed hard and shoved her feet into the aforementioned slippers. They made her several inches taller, and if she turned too fast, her silk-stockinged ankles were visible beneath her hem.
For luck, she told herself.
Heavens, she was going to need it.
She made her way down the stairs and to the drawing room, where the guests had gathered before dinner. She spotted Arthur immediately and was on the point of sauntering over to him when Lord de Younge caught her by the elbow.
“Lady Strathrannoch,” he said happily, “what a beauty you are. I hope your rooms are to your liking. Come, I shall introduce you to one of your own people—a visitor we have from England who’s just arrived.”
He steered her to a small group of chattering guests. Lydia spotted Claudine Thibodeaux—who was showing vastly more bosom than she had been that morning at breakfast—and her bespectacled husband. Both were talking avidly to a tall man with a thick head of wavy blond hair, a man who looked remarkably like—
“This is Mr. Eagermont,” said Lord de Younge, “newly arrived from afascinatinginvestment tour of the Midlands, is that not right?”
But Lydia was not listening. Her mouth opened, and nothing came out.
Mr. Eagermont?
“How do you do?” the man said in a rich, mellifluous voice. He bowed over Lydia’s numb fingers, pressed a kiss to the back of her hand, and then looked to her face with an expression of graceful charisma.
And then the expression dropped right off his face as he recognized her.
“Lydia?” he demanded.
His regular voice was just the slightest bit different from the rich one he’d used a moment ago. Rougher, a little care-worn. A voice she knew almost as well as she knew the shape of his shoulders or the precise shade of his eyes.
Because the voice belonged to her brother Jasper.
She blinked. She swallowed. And then she managed, “I am not sure we’ve been introduced,Mr. Eagermont.”
Jasper, to his credit, did not blush—her other brothers certainly would have—only looked from Lydia to Lord de Younge and murmured, “I beg your pardon, my lord.”
Then he bent to Lydia’s ear and said, in a voice like ice, “The hallway. Now.”
