A rogue, irrational emotion surged through him: he wanted it to be him.
In fact, if he’d been given his choice of additional powers in that moment—flight, or invisibility, or the ability to turn back time so that he’d never been thrown into the Thames—for just that moment, he’d choose the power to put that expression on her face.
He remained motionless, one glove off, one on, one foot on the landing, one on the stairs. His breath was held. The part of him still convinced everything of beauty or grace would be whisked from him froze him in place.
“Mrs. Breedlove,” he said quietly.
She dropped the curtain and whirled about.
She couldn’t quite manage to get her guard up in time and he saw what was beneath her reserve: a sort of wild joy and heat.
He couldn’t help it: he moved toward it as he would toward a chink of light in a cell.
He was grateful he’d gotten that one glove off, because the next moments were filled with shocking little pleasures: her satiny cheek against his bare hand, the warmth of her head tipping into his palm, the silk of her hair as he threaded his fingers through it and tugged gently back. She was rigid with surprise for about a heartbeat.
In the next he saw her eyes go hazy and dark just before they closed, just before his mouth touched hers.
Oh God. That first taste of her hit his bloodstream like opium and his breath left him. The give of her lips opening beneath his, the sweetness and satiny heat, the hunger the equal of his, the soft surrender of her body melting against his. He groaned low in his throat.
Her arms looped around him and he rotated the two of them until her back was at the wall and they fell against it. He slid his hands down to cup her arse and pressed her up against his hardening cock, and the sound she made in her throat, a tiny cracked, nearly stunned moan of pleasure, made him wild. She shifted to move against him; she threaded her fingers up through his hair, and just like that, for moments or drugging, glorious eons, that kiss went dangerously carnal.
He kissed her as though her bare legs were already hooked over his shoulders and a mattress was squeaking beneath them. He was tempted to furl her dress and yank open his trouser buttons, and he thought for an instant,Yes, yes, we can do this in twenty seconds. So what if someone comes upon us.
It needed to stop.
And as if she’d had the same thought at the same time, somehow, tacitly, through some effort of will he didn’t know he possessed, stop was what they did. He lifted his mouth from hers. It felt like a sundering. His senses were furious at the end of this riot of pleasure. His every cell seemed to protest.
He was torn between leaving his eyes closed, just to linger in the spinning world of that kiss, and opening them to see what kissing him had done to her.
He opened them.
She cleared her throat.
“You should not have done that.”
For an instant the words almost didn’t register. For it seemed the only logical sentence after that kiss was “My room or yours?”
Her voice was frayed velvet. Her tone was even. Almost regretful.
She looked up at him. Warily. Curiously. Perhaps wondering what her kiss had done to him. Her eyes were still hazy.
He hesitated. He wasn’t quite certain what he wanted to do with those words.
“But it was good.” He said it carefully. It was both a statement and a question. He was startled to hear his own voice was husky. As if he was waking from a long, long sleep. A wholly inadequate word. “Good.”
There was a little silence.
She slipped out of his arms and away from him to a distance just beyond reach.
It was fairly clear there was no safe distance for either of them.
At last she drew in a long, shuddering breath. Which was gratifying answer enough. But then her chin dipped twice in a rueful nod. And that was even better.
“Nevertheless.”
And it was all she said.
“Nevertheless” was not a reason.