Page 16 of The Mad Baron's Bride
He turned away. “She died believing I did. Of a certain, I did nothing to help her.”
“Surely you tried.”
“Perhaps I did. But if a man cannot change his situation, or his nature—what could I have done?”
“If you were not cruel to her, but made attempts to secure her happiness, then you did as much as any could expect. The rest is on her to come to peace with her situation.”
He lifted his head. “Did you? Come to peace with your situation?”
Leda refrained from giving an answer. She had murdered her husband and run away. That was how she made her peace.
He moved along the bookshelf with her, casting a penumbra of sensation about her, as when moon swam before the sun.
“Would you come to Norfolk if I asked?”
She breathed in the scent of him and again had a notion of wild creatures on the run, damp forest leaves, spicy pine, an earth rich with dark secrets.
Yes. She wanted nothing more than to burrow against him, wrap herself in his warmth. Let herself be safe in his powerful shadow.
“No.”
For how could she trust herself? She had her own strain of madness. She woke one day holding a knife tipped in blood, with the body of a dead man in the parlor. She couldn’t trust herself in a house with a man, and certainly not an innocent child.
Women were safe. Lady Plume was safe. And if Bath was no longer her bolt hole, if the nephew of the man she’d slain might recognize or, worse yet, had come to find her, then she would not be going to Norfolk or any known land. She would have to disappear.
“There is nothing that would persuade you?”
He was too close. His nearness disordered her brain, sent her thoughts jumping like wood mice. She wanted to anchor him right here next to her, never let him leave, so she might stand indefinitely in this state of awakening, her entire body coming alive.
“I have no experience as a governess. I have no interest in being a wife. Anything else, as you say, is a distraction.”
“Sometimes I think our distractions keep us alive. Keep us from truly going mad at the state of things.”
She cast her eyes about anywhere, to keep from closing her eyelids and losing herself to the seductive spell he cast. She didn’t know what this was, this glow of heat that moved along her skin, as if she were bread set into an oven. She’d never known this. A hollow ache appeared in her core, the longing for something she’d never possessed.
“Ah—found it.”
“An answer?”
“A book of interest.” She couldn’t tell him she needed maps to find a port where she could sail away to far lands. She set the candle on a small table and reached for the title she’d deciphered in the shifting dark, but it sat on a shelf above her head, just beyond her fingertips.
He stepped toward her and lifted his arm. The action brought her face close to his neck, bare without the cravat, a smooth column of skin. If she leaned forward but half an inch, she could bury her nose in the dip between his collarbones. Press her lips to his skin, breathe deeply.
He froze, arm in the air, as if he sensed her thought. The scent of him was maddening, awaking the sly animal that lived inside her, the little fox that had been sleeping for going on ten years.
He stood there, waiting, a hitch in his breath, the weight of his gaze burning into the side of her face. Leda surrendered to the madness. She darted out her tongue and touched it to that skin waiting just beyond her lips, like a delectable trifle served up only for her. His neck was smooth and warm and salty.
He groaned at the contact, as if some sleeping animal were rousing to life within him as well. She lifted her head and hestared into her eyes, his gaze a swirl of shadows. Then he bent his head and she didn’t flinch but met him, took his mouth as it clamped across hers, met his force and heat and instant, hungry need.
She didn’t know what possessed her but it roared life in an instant, flames leaping out from banked coals, and this,this, his mouth on hers, was the thing she’d been craving since that moment she saw him leaning so carelessly on that pillar, as if he held up the room, and she wanted him to hold her up, too.
His lips were firm and sure of their mission, nothing like other lips she’d known. She grasped the lapels of his waistcoat so she didn’t fall over or dissolve at the onslaught of heat. Desire poured through her like mix into a cake mold, thick and sweet and languid, sinking to every corner of her body. The warmth crept to that deep, secret crevice between her legs and she felt a sharp awareness there, like a mouth opening, the way her mouth opened beneath his as he tilted back her head and coaxed apart her lips and plunged his tongue against hers. The room spun and lifted away.
She clung to him, awash in heat, drowning in it, aware of nothing but the press of his mouth, the heat of his body, the delirium of plunder as he sipped from her essence and she felt every part of her body rising to meet him, as if she might crash and melt against him like a wave breaking on a dock.
He broke away first, lifting his head and hauling in air. “Leda.”
He sounded dazed, like a man who’d taken a blow. She felt no less shocked.
