Page 60 of Ladies in Hating
Damn it.Damnthis woman, with her big wounded eyes and her unsteady breaths and all that barely concealed vulnerability.
How could Georgiana believe, even for an instant, that Cat did not want all of this?
Cat wanted nothingbutthis. She wanted bare skin on bare skin; she wanted candlelight pooled across Georgiana’s long, lithe body while she traced each rise and fall of flesh with her mouth.
Except she knew herself. She would not be content with one night of pleasure—not if, when the morning dawned, Georgiana’s face would be shuttered and her body held tight with shame.
“I can’t do this,” Cat said. “Not again.”
Georgiana did not move. Her fingers were locked in her skirts, her mouth a tight guarded line.
“I can’t kiss you again,” Cat said, “if the moment we stop, you mean to act as though you never wanted me.”
Georgiana’s lips parted. She took a single, shaky breath. “I want you.”
“I believe that you do, but—”
Georgiana’s eyes were damp and blazing, and she pushed off the wall and strode toward Cat. “I have always wanted you.”
Cat couldn’t look away from Georgiana’s face, not even as Georgiana stepped closer still and she had to tip her head up to meet Georgiana’s gaze. “I don’t understand.”
Georgiana was close enough to touch now, and she did. Her fingers brushed Cat’s cheek, the line of her jaw. Her lips: the top and then the bottom.
“You can’t know,” Georgiana whispered. “You cannot possibly imagine how long and how desperately I have wanted you.”
Chapter 20
Thus did Augusta set out to cross the chasm: empty-handed and yet driven on by hope.
—fromORPHAN OF MIDNIGHTby Geneva Desrosiers
Georgiana heard the words as they crossed her lips and wondered if she’d gone mad.
She couldn’t stop talking. She couldn’t stop rubbing her thumb across Cat’s lush mouth, savoring the damp heat she found there.
She wanted to breathe Cat in. She wanted to slide her tongue down the valley between Cat’s breasts. She wanted to taste Cat again, drown herself in the heady spiced flavor of Cat’s lips and tongue. She wanted todevourCat.
But first she wanted to make Cat understand.
She’d waited downstairs for as long as the innkeeper had permitted her to remain in the kitchen. Her mind had been thick and dazzled by fantasies of Cat in the bedchamber, Cat wet and naked in the bath. But she could not go up—she could not let herself getclose to Cat again. She wanted Cat fervently—ferociously—but she had to stayawayfrom her.
She tried to remember what her father had done to Cat’s family. She tried to remember the way she herself had wronged Cat—the way she had, inadvertently, hurt Cat herself.
She’d expected to come into the room and find Cat curled up in the bed, her back to the door, and nothing but silence between them. Distance was what Georgiana knew. Coldness. That was what wassafe.
But then she’d come up, and Cat had been there, still awake, half-dressed and furious with Georgiana. And she had not been silent or cold. She’d been honest, her lashes wet and her voice thready with need and hurt and all that mad, invulnerable bravery.
Only she wasn’t invulnerable, was she? Georgiana knew that now.
She ran one fingertip across the shell of Cat’s ear, then down her neck and across the valley of her collarbone. Cat’s skin was unbearably soft, and Georgiana could feel the flutter of her pulse.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Georgiana whispered. But her fingers told a different story, moving along the edge of Cat’s shift, dipping under to stroke her skin. “I can’t hurt you again.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.” Frustration was thick in Cat’s voice. Her eyes were dark. “I don’t think you know what you want.”
“Just you. Always you. Since I was fifteen. Since the moment I saw you, bright and brave and so damned vivid I could not look away.” Her fingers curved around the back of Cat’s neck, and God, it would be so simple to put her mouth on Cat’s again. To taste her. To lose herself in desire, as deep and dizzying as the sea. She could feel it already—pooling in her lower belly, looseningher thighs. Her gaze dropped to Cat’s mouth, red from kissing and mulled wine, and lingered there.
Cat’s lips trembled, then firmed before she spoke. “I want you. God, Georgiana, you know I want you too. But you cannot—” She swallowed, and looked Georgiana in the eye. “You cannot do what you did before. You cannot be with me now and then pretend tomorrow that none of this ever happened.”
