He strode past her, trailing his fingertips in a caress across Michael’s stone as he went.
Marchand’s stride was a little too long and swift as they followed the path that meandered through the cemetery back to the street. Almost punishingly so. She struggled to keep up.
One would have thought he was trying to flee her.
Or fleesomething.
She trailed him, deeply regretful that she hadn’t buttoned up her pelisse. A gust of wind yanked at her hem and flipped it out behind her like the tail on a kite. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be airborne in a moment.
She gasped when she almost collided with him.
He’d stopped abruptly and turned.
In a single smooth, decisive motion, he looped an arm around her waist, pulled her up against his body, and cradled her head with his other hand.
His mouth came down on hers.
A small, wild sound hummed in her throat.
He kissed her like a lover, not like a virgin who had never been kissed. It was tender yet ruthlessly carnal and almost frighteningly hungry. Her entire being at once surged to meet him, greedily. She opened to him and the taste of him at once went to her head like a drug. Molten need poured through her. She reveled in his textures, the velvet heat of his tongue, the scrape of his chin against her cheek, the drum of his heart against her hands. He held her against his body as though he’d recaptured something once stolen from him. And she could feel vibrating in him everything he kept leashed.
He fanned his hand at her back and slid it down, down to the base of her spine, along the curve of her arse, dragging one finger right along the seam of it, and it was so lasciviously, devastatingly erotic her knees nearly buckled. He pressed her up against the hard jut of his cock, and pleasure bolted through her body.
When the tenor of the kiss gradually became deeper, became slower, became an expression of things they didn’t dareadmit to themselves let alone to each other, she could feel herself unraveling. Her eyes began to burn with tears.
She was suddenly scared to death.
He sensed it.
He lifted his mouth from hers.
His heart drummed beneath her hands. She savored it wonderingly.
Around her, the world spun.
“Just as I suspected.” Her voice was shockingly kiss-scorched. She whispered just an inch or two away from his lips, “You kiss like a granny.”
His eyes were starry, kiss-hazed, and amused.
He traced the arc of her bottom lip with his fingertip. Magical, that. That caress set tiny bonfires everywhere in her body.
“That’sveryfunny, Ginny,” he murmured. “Given that it’s you who needs a stick to walk now.”
He lowered his arms from her and stepped back just a few inches.
She nearly buckled.
She attempted to take a step.
She wobbled drunkenly.
He had kissed the bones right out of her legs. She was fairly certain he had ruined her equilibrium forever.
She righted herself. For a moment they stared across at each other.
His expression evolved from raw wonder to closed and guarded as she watched him.
She wondered if it merely reflected hers.