Page 70 of Pride: The Rogue
While he stomped across the courtyard and headed after Livian, he went over that first, fateful exchange with the blasted chit.
“I had the most arduous evening and had to walk some distance in the rain…It was quite bad weath…The weather! I was going to mention the dreadful conditions. Given you also experienced first-hand the state of the weather, you know first-hand…How miserable it is…”
When nearly half a mile later, and he still hadn’t reached Livian, he found his ire shifting away from the bold beauty and turning inward.
While he made the long, slow, slog following her smaller footprints as he went, he considered the elements she’d faced last evening.
He’d all but jeered her over that revelation. He’d taken the lady’s definition of ‘some distance’ to mean she’d had to walk through the courtyard while her servant saw to the team.
But that wasn’t at all what she’d meant, and knowing her a single day now but having spent much of that time in close quarters, he should have taken a moment to realize what she’d, in fact, shared during their first meeting.
The heel of Latimer’s boot sank deep into a particularly muddy puddle. He wrestled his foot free and kept trudging on ahead.
Latimer took in the broken branches and twigs scattered about, and brushes ripped clear from the ground. His self-disgust grew, as did his admiration for Livian.
Any other woman would have sobbed over the conditions she’d endured late last evening. She’d not only survived an interminable walk through a raging tempest, while she’d slept, she’d found herself accosted by a stranger.
At long last, he reached her.
Livian maneuvered and carefully picked her way over an enormous tree trunk. That same fallen debris which had left the big, black barouche stopped and stranded.
He made to call out, but stopped himself, as—bastard, that he was—Livian tugged her skirts up and heaved herself up, so she straddled the big branch.
Oh, all Satan’s sinners.
His cock swelled and his pulse raced as Latimer hungrily drank in the sight of her.
She shifted and scooted to get herself over to the other side, but in his mind’s eye, he envisioned Livian riding him in that same, wanton way. Getting herself off, rubbing her sweet cunny against him.
He groaned.
That low, guttural utterance alerted the lady she was no longer alone.
Livian cried out, and promptly went tumbling over the felled branch.
Christ.
His erection flagging—some—Latimer bolted over to the lady.
“Don’t you know a lady on her own can land herself in any manner of trouble?” he snarled, like the beast the worry for this woman had transformed him into.
“I daresay,” Livian drawled. The lady used the fallen limb to leverage herself back up to standing. “If I hadn’tbefore, given the fact I was knocked square on my backside, I do now.”
Latimer sprinted the rest of the way, bounding over the tree branch to reach her.
“I’m not amused,” he said, his voice ragged and rough from both desire and exertions.
“Oh, you mean you do not find it hilarious that you startled me into falling into a patch of sticky, soupy mud.”
That gave him pause. “Soupy?”
“Like soup,” she elucidated. “Thickly wet.”
“Never heard the saying,” he said.
“Well, consider it something new you’ve learned this day, Lachlan.” Livian smiled; that daffily charming, absurdly ebullient smile that stretched her flushed cheeks and set off a queer sensation in his chest.
All too trusting, she reached for his hand.
