Page 58 of Rejected
“To my proposal? To my… to my love? To my…?”
“To everything,” Jo said. “Yes.”
“I am getting light-headed.”
“Sit down and put your head between your knees,” Jo said quickly, fearing a repeat of the incident in the foyer. She put his hands on her shoulders, trying to steady him.
“I don’t want to put my head between my knees,” he said. She could feel him shaking slightly. His grip on her shoulders increased, as if he were clutching her for dear life.
“Then where do you want to put your—”
His response cut her words short.
He lowered his head over hers and fit his mouth to her lips with a sigh so deep and desperate, it resembled the moan of a drowning man who is taking his first breath.
Dear Beth,
It happened.
-Jo
twenty-four
Jo had thought herself so much more level-headed than those book heroines who were swept off their feet by a handsome suitor. But now that her suitor was her Teddy, and he was not merely handsome but the finest specimen of man that had ever walked the earth, she found herself floating on air.
And when he easily picked her in his arms, their lips not parting for a second, and carried her to the couch, she quite literally lost her head.
This kiss was nothing like the other kisses, back in London.
Those had been tentative, shy, half-fear half-hunger, their first attempts at tasting each other as they had longed to do for years. This kiss was different. Laurie moved his jaw, deepening the kiss with the hunger of years of restraint finally unleashed.
His long fingers cradled her face as though she were something precious, breakable; her fingers twisted into the folds of his cravat, slightly trembling, burning-hot. Their mouths moved together in such perfect accord she felt she might shatter as the intensity grew and grew, stealing her breath, her sanity. All sense of reason.
She was lost in the kiss, lost in him, abandoning herself to his taste, his touch.Finally, she thought as his left hand travelled to her back, sending waves ofheat down the sensitive skin at the nape of her neck.Finally, this is what it means to let go, to fall.
And as before, he is here to catch me.
She allowed herself to sink deeper and deeper into his kiss. Intohim.
He was cradling her on his chest, her feet on the couch, his long, tapered body coiled tightly around hers. Because of her. She did not know where she ended and he began. She did not have room or time for breath, for thought, for anything at all but him.
Teddy lowered her slowly onto the couch, his palm resting at the small of her back, steadying her; and it was a good thing he was holding on to her so tightly, because she thought she might vanish. He moaned softly against her lips, his chest shuddering with the release of all this pent-up longings, and she barely existed. Her bones turned into honey; she was barely breathing.
Don’t let me fall, she thought at him, as she opened her lips more for him to explore her.
“Is this real?” he murmured against her lips. “I am surely dreaming. Or I have died and gone to heaven. Yes, that’s definitely it.”
She blinked up at him, dazed and breathless, the tips of her fingers on the hard line of his jaw. When had her hands begun exploring his face? She had not realized it. His own hands were tangled in her curls, and by the looks of him, he appeared to be having a floating experience like hers.
He had his eyes closed, as if he did not want to wake up.
“Oh, it is real,” Jo murmured. “Trust me, this is not the kind of thing that seems possible even in dreams. And I should know; I have been reliving your kisses in my dreams for months now.”
Laurie froze in surprise. He pulled away to survey her face in wonder.
“You have been dreaming?” he asked in that reverent tone she was beginning to become an addict to. “Of me?”
Jo nodded, hiding her reddening cheeks against his waistcoat.
