Page 99 of A Lady of Means
After dinner.
* * *
She hadto see him again, for herself.Before she embarked entirely in the opposite direction, she had to know if it was real.Ifhewas real.
And now she was in a cloak, in a moon-shrouded mews behind Clairville’s London house, heartbeat racing two steps ahead of her horse’s four hooves and her own common sense.
Devyn’s firm hands settled like taut ropes about her waist as she slid down from her horse.She watched the flexing angles of his arms and shoulders, feeling her mouth go dry.She licked her lips to wet them before remembering to look away.
He had her now on firm footing and grabbed her, pulling her into his arms as he moved the horse out of their way.Devyn buried his head next to her hair as he pulled her in so tight she felt his skin, his sweat, mixing with her own.
He was supposed to be dead.She was supposed to marry another man.A Duke.A good man.They weren’t supposed to be clinging to each other outside the mews of his brother’s London house like time had stopped moving around them.
“My god, Moria,” Devyn breathed as he pulled away.“Every damn time, it’s like I just remembered how to breathe at the sight of you.”
“Kiss me so I can breathe again, too.”
He crushed her to him, marking her with a kiss that revived her and shattered her at once.She heard all the words he couldn’t say, she was speaking them back with every lathe of her tongue against his.His hands tightened, flattening her against him.
“I should go,” he broke the kiss to say, but he didn’t move a solitary corpuscle.She was the first to move, keeping hold of his hand as she stepped toward a stone edifice.
“No, please come with me,” she said, motioning toward the small cottage behind the mews.
For a moment, she thought he was going to deny her again; but finally, he relented.Nodding, he let her take his hand and followed a step behind her.
The dark, lively world of London at night during the season obscured the sound of her skirts over stones, two pairs of boots over pea gravel, one gold-tipped cane to steady his steps, as he followed her into the small cottage beside the stables.He’d followed her into a willow tree, a library, to her family’s chapel, her bedchamber, an alcove at a masquerade.
“Devyn,” she breathed, his name synonymous with prayer upon her lips as she closed the wooden door behind her.As soon as she latched the bolt, he was on her like a scent.
He was at her back, removing her hood with the most reverent touch despite his large hands, then trailing one of those large hands down her thick blonde plait, down her back.Over his shoulder, she took in the room around them.It was neat, there was at least a decent sized bed that looked clean and there were thick curtains pulled over the windows.There was no fire in the grate, but he’d make her one if she’d asked.
Hell, he doesn’t need a fire to keep me warm.
His breath, heavy and full of heat at her back, was already warming her, from the space where his breath fell on her skin, to her insides.She stole his hands and wrapped them around her breasts.She instantly felt the answering sensation lower down, his shaft pressing against the folds of his buckskin breeches, against her back.
He was solid, not the preening and self-indulgent aristocrat she’d taken as a lover once; he was a beautiful specimen of a man who ached for her.
“What do you want from me, Moria?”His hands gripped her waist.He planted a kiss in the space where neck met shoulder.His lips traced over bare bits of skin, dropping kisses lush and soft as a man reacquainting himself with a lost idol.
She wheeled around to face him.“Devyn, I need you.”
The words undid him.She could see the way they hit him, causing him to step backward, his gorgeously lashed eyelids a flutter, his lips without words.
“You’re promised to someone else, Moria.”
The scar along his face added credibility to the pain that lashed across his features.
Moria reached for him, the way she’d never been able to stop herself from doing.
“I lost you, and that very night, I had an impossible choice to make.Devyn, I chose myself that night.And I made a promise.I made my bed and now, I must lie in it.”
He took another step back.“You torture me.”
“I torture myself, Devyn!”
At the emotion in her words, he came to her.His hands gripped her by the hips and ground her against him.It was coarse and not full of any of the tenderness from before, but she leaned into it.She wanted his anger and his harsh, crude words.That she could bear, not knee-crumbling tenderness.
“You say my name while you intend to take that of another man.No, Moria.It is you who tortures all of us.”
