Chapter 28
CAPTAIN JOHN CALDER
At least five minutes had passed. If anyone saw Evelyn leaving the library they would be long gone by now. I reached out to grab the door handle only to have the door swing open.
I stepped back in surprise, preparing all manner of excuses in my mind, but it was Evelyn.
Moonlight bounced off her dark irises as she slipped in the room and then closed the door behind her back. Her hair was loose, cascading down from the crown of her head in soft waves. I took my time looking at her. She couldn’t have spoken to Miss Pryor already. Everyone in the house was in bed.
“If you’ve come here to toy with me and test my resolve as a gentleman, I—” I broke off. I didn’t know what I would do if that were the case. She had won. Toy with me, love me, kick me out of her home and hate me, I had no control over what she would do next. I was utterly at her mercy.
“No, John, I’ve come here to tell you that you were right.”
I let out a shaky breath. “I could get used to you saying that.”
“Your name?”
“That too.”
“I spoke to Hattie.”
She hadn’t waited until morning? The room grew so quiet, it was as if we were not just alone in this room, but that we were the only two people in all of England. “And?”
“I was the one mistaken.”
She stepped toward me. “But that isn’t what I came here to tell you. I could have waited for tomorrow for that. There’s one more thing you’re right about.”
I took a step back and narrowed my eyes at her. “Who is this agreeable woman, and what have you done with Evelyn Blackwell?”
She only smiled and, by the heavens, that smile made me feel as if I was a rich wine and she was going to pour me into a goblet and drink me.
I returned her smile with my own. I liked this—the two of us smiling at one another. “What else was I correct about?”
“It isn’t fair.”
I swallowed hard, my hands suddenly very aware of how close Evelyn was. It would only take the smallest of efforts to reach out and pull her to me. But I was done making assumptions where women were concerned. “What exactly isn’t fair?”
“It isn’t fair that I remember our kiss and you are free from that torment. It has been excruciating. Utter torture. Do you know how much the memory of your lips has haunted me?”
Heaven help me, did she expect me to apologize for that? I could apologize for the kiss perhaps, but knowing she relived it over and over again? I couldn’t regret that. “I assume that's a rhetorical question. However, I wouldn't complain if you told me the answer.” Hopefully in great detail.
She shook her head. “No. That’s not how we are solving this problem. You have thirty seconds to decide the best location to kiss me before I take matters into my own hands. Either way, we aren’t leaving this library until both of us know what it feels like to have your lips on mine.”
I slid my shaking hands into my pockets. “I think I might be hallucinating again.”
She stepped toward me and this time I didn’t back away. Her hand came up to my face and when her fingertips touched the light stubble on my cheek she closed her eyes. “Does that feel like a hallucination to you?”
I nodded and the movement dragged those fingers of hers up and down my cheek. “Yes. Absolutely.”
“Good. Now where are you going to kiss me?”
“On the mouth?”
She put her forehead on mine and laughed. “I meant which location?”
I nodded. Of course that was what she meant, but my brain was still processing the fact that she’d returned to this room with her hair down.
Logical conversation was impossible to follow.
I glanced around the room and tried to piece together enough rational thought to decide where Evelyn would want to be kissed.
But it was no use. My brain was solely focused on the woman in front of me.
We could be in an empty shepherd’s croft for all I knew.
But we hadn’t made it more than a few feet from the door.
“I think I should start by leaning you against that door. It is the closest thing and I don’t have enough seconds or wherewithal to choose anything else. ”
She leaned back against it. I stepped forward carefully. I didn’t think this was a trap or a hallucination. Then again, she was everything I ever could have wished for and it didn’t seem likely that this could be happening.
But when I reached her, and trailed my fingers along the side of her long tresses, she felt very, very real.
I lifted her chin between my fingers and thumb and tipped her head up.
“If you think I haven’t been tormented by that kiss simply because I couldn’t remember it, you don’t understand the power of my imagination. ”
She quirked an eyebrow at me and I saw it for what it was.
A dare. I lowered my head toward her, that scent of orange overtaking me, this time wrapping around in me in a way I knew would be mine.
I paused a breath away from her lips. “You are serious? You aren’t going to dash away at the last minute? ”
“John.” She put her lips to my ear, wrapped her hands beneath my arms and pulled me closer. “I’m not leaving.”
My breath shuddered as I inhaled her scent once again, this time with my face in her hair. She couldn’t know how much I’d yearned to belong to someone. “I’m done fighting my feelings for you, Evelyn. I want us to spend the rest of our lives deciding where we should kiss.”
She leaned her head back and her lips quirked into a smile. I shook my head softly and covered that outrageous grin of hers with my opportunistic mouth.
The world snapped into place, all of our repelling and resisting one another succumbing to the magnetic force between us.
I couldn’t remember what her lips felt like in the middle of that stormy night, but their soft eagerness wasn’t a surprise. I’d woken from dreams of this. I’d imagined the two of us together hundreds of times, even when I thought it was the last thing in the world I should imagine.
Every thought, every dream, had driven me to distraction, but it was nothing compared to holding her in my arms, feeling her breath graze my skin and her hands slide up my spine and pull me closer to her.
This was more than a dream.
This was Evelyn.
I smiled against her lips and stepped closer to her, trapping her against the door. Her hand trembled at the nape of my neck and her weight settled against me as if she’d lost the ability to hold herself up. Heavens above, but I hoped so. It was about time she was the lightheaded one.
I abandoned all my reserves and lost the last of my restraint. With a tip of my head, I redoubled my claim upon her lips, tasting her sweetness until she moaned my name again.
I pulled back, needing to look at her, to remind myself she was still here.
She raised her lashes with a blink, her eyes hazy and her lips swollen.
I bent down, scooped up her legs and gestured toward the red velvet sofa with a tip of my head.
“Will that be enough to torment me until I can speak to your father? Or should we continue?”
“John,” she said, wrapping her hands around my neck and tucking her head into my collar bone as if it belonged there. “I’ve been tormented for weeks. Take me to the sofa.”
Like the good soldier I was, I followed her command.
We dropped into the sofa, her legs draped over my knees.
Evelyn pulled one hand away from my neck, traced my left eyebrow with the pad of her thumb and then leaned forward and pressed a kiss on my scar.
I swallowed hard, and slid my thumb across the brushstroke on her collar bone.
Her eyes found mine and there was no mistaking the dare I found in them.
I shook my head with a smile. When we were officially engaged, Evelyn willing, I would drag my lips along that mark, but not before.
I would, however, take all the time that I could with her unbound hair. I ran my fingers through the length of it and brought the ends to my mouth with a kiss. “Your hair is going to be the death of me.”
“Only my hair?”
“No. Not only that.” I tucked her firmly against me and pressed another kiss to her mouth. If her cousin had wanted me to wait another full week to propose, she really shouldn’t have arranged a meeting quite this secluded.
With a shaking hand, I traced her cheek and then pulled away, but Evelyn’s lips followed my retreat, unwilling to be parted. A low chuckle escaped my throat. That mouth of hers was going to decimate me long before her hair would.
I spent several more minutes surrendering to her every whim.
Her fingers went to the scar on my eyebrow.
I lowered my head so she could kiss it. She lifted her chin, giving me full access to her neck.
I took advantage of it. I lost myself so deeply in her scent the world narrowed into the small space we occupied on the sofa.
We stopped only when she was the one to pull away, taking with her all of my breath, making me as lightheaded as I’d been when I first stood in the shepherd’s croft.
With a pert wink she settled onto my straining chest as if she were going to stay there all night.
She wasn’t. But several more minutes wouldn’t hurt.
“Strangely enough,” she said into the lapels of my coat. “You are considerably better at this when you aren’t delirious.”