His hands splayed across her back, and he urged her nearer yet, and her senses waltzed and sang.
She’d never imagined a simple kiss could be this riveting. This enthralling.
This all-consuming.
Gregory had no idea how long they stood communing in the dark. Her lips were the definition of luscious, promisors of paradise beyond imagining.
He ached with a desire more robust, more intense, than any he’d felt in all his years of sexual indulging. What he shared with her seemed so familiar, so similar—the moves, the positions entirely predictable—yet the result was different.
Leagues apart.
And while that was something he couldn’t explain, he knew he wanted more.
So much more of her.
Their fires were well alight and burning when, on a strangled gasp, he realized how far they’d come. Sensing control slipping through his fingers—something that had never happened to him before—in sudden desperation, he forced himself to think of her cousin, the shaggy mammoth who was not all that far away.
And who, at any moment, might decide to look out into the corridor.
The image was enough to give him the strength to retreat from the kiss, and eventually, after a surprisingly fraught battle, he released her lips and raised his head.
He was breathing too fast, as was she as he stared—quietly stunned—into her upturned face.
He watched as her lashes fluttered, then rose, revealing passion-darkened eyes that nevertheless gleamed and sparked. Her lips were swollen and slick and slightly parted…
The sight ignited a desire like no other, one that gripped and sank its claws deep.
Blindly, he found her hand and raised her fingers to his lips. His gaze locked with hers, he brushed an ardent kiss to her knuckles, then turned her hand and pressed an even more heated kiss to the center of her palm. “I want—”
She silenced him by placing the fingers of her other hand over his lips. Her eyes had flared. She stared at him for several heavy heartbeats, then her lids fell, and she breathed, “I’m not saying no, but can we see what comes over the next weeks? Until Rory settles or leaves?” She drew a deeper breath, her breasts rising and pressing against his chest, then she looked up and met his eyes. “This is my new life—here, at Bellamy Hall—and I don’t want my old life intruding and getting in the way.”
He studied her eyes, her face, and realized she hadn’t—quite—guessed correctly what he’d intended to ask her.
Until the second in which the words had formed on the tip of his tongue, ready to spill from his lips, he hadn’t realized that he’d already reached the point of asking her to marry him.
Rory’s arrival or, more likely, his brush with death that afternoon had catapulted him on, over and past all the usual stages of realization and acceptance that men of his ilk were prone to stumble through.
He’d been about to ask her to be his wife, and rather than recoil from the realization, every iota of his wits and his will wanted to embrace it.
His gaze roved her features, drinking in their delicate beauty.
Now he understood how far he’d traveled down that particular road, he wanted to woo her. To use the interval circumstance had created and offer for her hand with all the romance and ceremony she deserved.
If she wanted to wait a few weeks until the question of Rory and what he would do was resolved, then of course he would agree.
Whatever she wanted—that was how matters between them now stood.
He kissed the fingers that had lingered across his lips, then smiled as she lowered her hand. “Very well. We’ll wait until Rory decides on his way forward.” His smile deepened. “But in the meantime…”
He tightened his arms and drew her close once more.
And when he bent his head and found her lips again, he discovered she was more than willing to follow where he led.
Chapter 9
The following morning, Gregory was lounging in the library, thinking of Caitlin and the pleasures of kissing her, when movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye had him turning his head and looking out of the window.
His chatelaine was walking away from the house, basket on her arm, no doubt embarking on her usual round of the estate’s businesses. From the direction in which she was heading, he assumed today’s excursion would take in the carriage workshop, the forge, the glassblowing studio, the livestock pens, the carpentry workshop, and the kitchen gardens.
