She swallowed. Her head had tipped back. Her lips had parted, and now her breathing was ragged.
His fingers traced the pulse in her throat.
He let his breath play over her skin as he whispered, “Imagine how you feel now... and multiply it by a thousand. That’s how it would be.”
He stepped back.
“Because you’llhaveto imagine, you see, as we agreed we shouldn’t do anything about it.”
He left her.
That bastard!
Delilah wasveryimpressed. It was quite a tactic. And it certainly conveniently answered her question about whether Captain Hardy possessed an imagination.
She couldn’t move a hair from that window for a full minute, her body was in such an uproar of pleasure. She wanted to savor every hot, shivering, yearning feeling that he had started up until it faded completely.
Her breathing did not recover for another minute after that.
And then thinking about himthinkingabout her—because clearly that’s what he’d been doing—brought with it a fresh wave of that delicious, unnerving heat.
And it was not so much that she’d thought about nothing else for days since he’d kissed—very well, sincethey’dkissed—in the hallway. It was just that lust now formed the very emotional weather of her days. Every single thing she did occurred against a languorous, thrilling backdrop of it.
And her sleep—though she did sleep—was fitful. It was fair to say she wasjusta little irritable.
She thought aboutoughts, and how she’d vowed to never again let them dictate her decisions.
Sheoughtnot do a thing with him.
And then there were thewants.
My God, did she have wants.
But if it was merely an affair—and surely widows had them all the time—well, why shouldn’t she bethatsort of widow?
The problem lay in the other things he’d said. The things that stole her breath for other reasons entirely.
The one visible star in a night sky.
Any fanciful notions about romance she’d consigned, like her childhood ribbons and christening spoon, to a locked keepsake box. There was no point in taking them out to revisit. But even if she could choose only one perfect thing for a man to say to her in her lifetime, she would not have arrived at something quite as romantic as that.
He was not the sort to resort to words in order to effect seduction. He was stating something he saw as a fact.
And while Captain Hardy claimed his intentions were specific—the satisfaction of an appetite, nothing more—the thing that worried her was that inherent in it, no matter their intentions, was the possibility—even the probability—of hurt.
For both of them.
And could she do it? Could she be someone who partook of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, without feeling like an object again, like a man’s means to an end? It was not so long ago she’d reclaimed her true self. It was still a little fragile, fresh out of the cocoon, as it were.
Would the hurt be worth the pleasure?
Oh, how she wanted to know about the pleasure.
When she could move again from the window, she went downstairs to the kitchen.
And as she’d anticipated, the kitchen was so bustling—Angelique and the two maids-of-all-work and Helga were all chatting, chopping, and peeling—it was temporarily easy to forget that while the rest of the building was emptier than she preferred it to be, one particular man seemed to take up an undue amount of space and air.
Delilah sat down and took up a paring knife and set into the apples.