Page 17 of The Wayward Duke
She rose on her toes and pressed her lips to his in a featherlight kiss. It lasted only the space of a heartbeat, but it jolted his world off its axis. When she started to pull away, some raw, primal need seized him. Julian clutched her waist and brought his mouth back to hers. Caroline made a faint, desperate sound low in her throat. She tasted of champagne and something sweeter, warmer – sunlight on bare skin.
Some distant shred of reason screamed this was madness. One stolen embrace would ruin them. But then her fingers twisted in his lapels as she pulled him closer, and Julian was lost. Beyond thought. Not when Caroline was soft and pliant in his arms, her lips parting so sweetly beneath his.
Not after every fantasy for months had been with this woman in his bed.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” she murmured against his lips, even as her fingers speared through his hair.
“We absolutely should not. And yet here we stand, and I can’t stop kissing you.” He nipped down the slender column of her throat. She whimpered, nails biting into his shoulders. “Can’t stop wanting you. Can’t ever stop.”
She was oxygen. He was suffocating. Nothing existed beyond the sweetness of her lips. Closer. He wanted her closer – always closer. Until need roared so loud it drowned out sanity.
Too late, Julian registered the approaching footsteps.
“Hastings?” A slurred, incredulous voice, then soft laughter. “Good God, man.”
Caroline jerked as if scalded. Julian blinked away lust’s haze to find two young lords gawping at them from the garden path, faces flushed with drink. Dorset and Hayes. Grasping gossipmongers.
They’d stumbled on prime fodder tonight.
With monumental effort, Julian wrenched himself under control. He gentled his voice, adopting his usual tone of bored condescension. “Dorset. Hayes. Do run along, please. The ballroom has shortage enough of wits without you adding to its deficit, and my fiancée and I would appreciate the moment of privacy.”
Caroline sucked in a sharp breath at the significance of what he’d just done. With one impromptu declaration, he had bound them together.
Too late now.
“Fiancée, you say? Well, hang me, I hadn’t heard. Our apologies. Congratulations to you both.” Dorset grabbed his companion’s arm. “Come along, Hayes. Back to the punch.”
The drunken lords retreated down the garden path on unsteady feet.
Caroline stared at him wide-eyed, one hand pressed to her kiss-swollen mouth. “Oh God,” she whispered. “You told them I’m your fiancée.”
He offered a half smile. “A reasonable understanding, given recent activities. Unless you’d rather I withdraw my offer and deliver you to the first respectable cit who asks?”
“How can you possibly be so calm? You wanted to marryGracejust months ago. You were planning to propose to her at the end of the Season. Everyone will believe—”
“Who cares? Let them think what they want.”
“I was going to say,” she said very softly, “that everyone will believe I’m a calculating, destitute harlot who seduced a duke in a garden to get at his money.”
She still didn’t understand. Didn’t understand thatshewas the only woman who had occupied his thoughts for months, andthey were not friends.
“And when you’re my duchess,” he told her, “you have my enthusiastic permission to freeze them from across a ballroom with one chilly glance.”
Emotion roughened her voice. “You’re mad.”
“No more mad than you marrying some cit to save yourself from poverty.” He shifted closer, lips grazing her ear. “Tell me, Miss Winslow – how many times now have you watched me disrobe before your easel?” His hand at her waist tightened. “Studied every inch of my cock while you committed my form to memory?”
A shiver moved through her. But she didn’t pull away.
“How often have you loosened your bodice when you returned home on those long, lonely nights?” he continued. “Parted your pretty thighs and imagined it was me stroking you there in the dark? Me fucking you until you screamed my name?”
Her lips parted. A visible tremble took hold of her.
“Well?” he prompted.
A soft sound. Then – “Too often for propriety.”
Triumph roared through him. Yes. He was hers since she first put charcoal to paper and sketched the lines of yearning connecting them.
