Truly impeccable.
One of his hands slid into her hair, and she answered by shoving her hands beneath his coat, palms flat and greedy against his shirt, fingers digging into muscle as though she needed to anchor herself against the way he was unraveling her. He felt her heartbeat hammering against his chest, wild and matching his own, and primal possessiveness roared awake in him.
He forced himself to calm down, kissing her slower now but no less desperately; long, drugging pulls that left them both breathless, tongues sliding together in a rhythm that felt older than either of them. Every time she tried to pull back for air, he followed, chasing her lips, swallowing her soft whimpers, refusing to let even an inch of space come between them.
“Oy, lovebirds!”
The voice was loud, slurred, cheerful, and approaching at a trajectory that communicated its source before the figure was visible. “Lovebirds in the dark!”
It was a man of fifty or thereabouts, in a coat of former decades, lurching past the canvas edge with the rolling, affable momentum of someone who had made enthusiastic use of the evening’s refreshments.
Anthony lifted his head, annoyance flashing through him at the uncouth interruption. He wanted to taste her lips still.
Caroline stepped back, fractionally, at the same moment, her eyes blown wide with both desire and surprise. Neither of them moved another inch, as they listened to the drunkard’s irregular footsteps recede into the ambient noise of the field.
It was in the silence that Anthony realized what he had done.
“I owe you an apology,” he began, scrambling to repair the damage he’d just done.
This was Lady Caroline Marfront, the sister of his close friend, and he’d justkissedher. Anthony could swear that he had not planned to do that at all.
She gaped at him, her cheeks flushed and lips wet. “Do you?”
“I overstepped.” He returned his hands to their proper locations, which were at his sides rather than framing her face. “Your list… Even though it was on the list, I should not have…”
“Oh. You mean the kiss,” she said, with the plain, factual precision of a woman completing an administrative notation. “That is the item you meant to satisfy, and... it has now been completed.”
She met his eyes. Her cheeks held the faintest color, and he understood that even though she was doing her best to rebound, as he was, she was just as shaken by their connection.
“So, it may be struck through,” she added as though it were appropriate to finish her thought thoroughly.
He had absolutely no adequate response to that.
She held his gaze for one moment more, and then, with the measured composure of a woman who had made her assessment and found it complete, said, “It was a good kiss.”
The words landed with no performance behind them. Simply the truth, delivered as she delivered most truths: directly, without fuss, as though the alternative had not occurred to her.
His chest immediately tightened at those words and stayed that way. Where, before, any sort of praise regarding his sexual or romantic prowess from women would soothe his ego, hearing Caroline Marfront say that made him want topreen.
She looked away first, toward the lights of the field, and straightened her cloak with the brisk decisiveness of a woman putting things in order.
“I should like to go home now, please.”
“Yes,” he said, and offered his arm.
She took it, without looking at him.
They walked back toward the lanterns, and the carriage beyond, and the city that contained everything else; and neither of them said another word.
The silence between them was not the comfortable kind it had been on the way out, and that, Anthony decided, was more unsettling than hearing the words spoken by the fortune teller.
Chapter Seventeen
“You are remarkably quiet,” Esther observed, her voice carrying lightly over the sound of their boots on the gravel path. “For someone who asked me to accompany her on a stroll.”
Caroline said nothing immediately. She was watching a pair of ducks navigate the Serpentine with the unhurried authority of creatures who had sorted out their priorities and found the rest of the world’s concerns irrelevant.
She wished she were a duck; maybe then, she would have nothing to think about at all.