Page 17 of The Mad Baron's Bride
“Dear heavens,” she whispered.
He stared into her eyes, his gaze searching out every line of her face, and she feared what she revealed in the light of the flickering candles. Her need and hunger, immodest, insistent.The way he’d spun her like a child’s top and she could scarcely stand on her feet.
He dropped his forehead to her shoulder and she reveled in the weight of him, in the sign that he too was overset. His hands rested on the backs of her shoulders but he slid them down her back, gathering her close, an embrace and a caress. She molded herself to his body, to his hard chest and powerful thighs, then felt it between them—hisman’spart, thick and hard. She froze.
“Leda.” His fingers curled into her soft skin, his voice a ragged gasp. “Will you?—”
“No.”
She wrenched away. He was attractively built, indeed beautifully sculpted, but she had fallen under his ensorcelling spell and forgotten: he was a man, possessed of the traditional parts of a man, and the ways to inflict pain on a woman.
“Forgive me. I forgot myself,” she whispered.
He drew back. He didn’t scold, or rage, or beg. How unusual. He merely sucked in air, his nostrils flaring, and squared his shoulders.
“I forgot myself as well. I beg your pardon.”
“Don’t,” she said swiftly, then held her fingers to her lips, abashed.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t regret this.” This kiss. This magic that had fallen over both of them for a moment. The pleasure that danced in her veins even now, waltzing with her horror and fear.
“My only regret, Mrs. Wroth, is that you are not leading me directly to your bed.”
Insolentman, to leave her with the images that conjured. Of him leaning back in her widow’s bed, his body gleaming as she peeled off those gorgeous fabrics to inspect the muscle and warm skin beneath. More of those drugging kisses, and what he might taste like if she put her mouth elsewhere upon him.
But she knew what came after, and it wasn’t worth the rest.
He held out her candlestick and the book, and she took them. His brow lifted.
“The Blazing World,by the Duchess of Newcastle? I am not familiar with that title.”
“It is a strange fantasy, written over a hundred years ago, about a woman kidnapped to another world where she is made an empress. Written by a woman, Margaret Cavendish. She called it one part romance, one part philosophy, and one part fantastic.” Exactly what Leda wished her life could be, in that same balance.
His other brow rose to meet the first. He was being so blasted calm.
“I am not sure you are in for a quiet sleep,” he said.
“I never am.” Leda curled the book to her chest, where her heart still raced like a runaway colt, and left the room before she did something utterly mad. Like pull his mouth to hers again and beg him to kiss her senseless, or worse yet, bring him to her room.
CHAPTER SIX
She hadn’t had the nightmares in a while.
She was locked in his wine cellar again, too cold for comfort, not cold enough to kill her, knowing that if she raged and smashed the bottles, she would be as mad as he said.
She stepped through his dark house on a dark night, knowing something watched her, something with inimical intentions. White, thin hands that might reach out at any moment and touch where they had no business to be.
She walked through a misty dawn in a frozen garden, knowing she’d left something terrible locked in the house, but not knowingwhat. And when it might rise and follow.
She plunged a knife into his chest and withdrew the triumphant, bloody blade to see that she had stabbed Brancaster, and she watched as the warm flush left his face and the light left his brilliant eyes, leaving him a corpse before her. Terror like she’d never known.
She screamed for help, so many times, and her voice was a whisper, the scratch of one bare branch on another on a winter afternoon.
“You look quite knocked up,” Lady Plume said sympathetically when Leda joined her in the breakfast room inher plainest morning dress, a cotton round gown with hand-painted red buds patterning the fabric. Her hand mirror told her the bright gown did not detract from the violet shadows beneath her eyes.
“We did not entertain all that late last evening,” Lady Plume added, her gaze wandering to Brancaster, who tapped a rim around a soft-boiled egg.
