Chapter 9 #2
This was wrong. This was madness. She dug her fingers in his cravat, holding him.
He swept his mouth over hers like a painter preparing a canvas, and the shivers racing down her spine exploded into little fireworks that tumbled all through her.
His mouth. Such a contrast of textures, rough and soft and silken, and he smelled so delicious.
She wanted to run away and hide her face in shame at her brazenness.
She wanted to press herself against every inch of his body. She wanted—
He stroked her cheek, lightly, as if he were discovering the texture of her.
The pressure of his mouth increased, and she met him willingly, seeking more.
More of this. Dante, kissing her, forever.
He tilted his head over hers and the kiss became deeper somehow, more of a possession, and then he licked her lower lip with this tongue and Cerys sank her fingers into his shoulders, holding on for dear life, because dear Lord, the thrill of it made her knees weak, so much new sensation bursting everywhere.
She parted her lips to pull in air and he slid his tongue inside and then she did collapse, her knees simply folding, but he caught her and held her to him and Cerys knew she was going to drown in his arms, be devoured by this strange fire lighting its way through her.
She clung to him, her devourer, her savior, glad at least that before she died from her heart bursting, she could have this.
Kissing Dante Manelli. On and on and on and—
A moan escaped her, a sound of abandon that she had never made in her life, and her body sagged toward him, as if she were a cheesecloth trying to wrap itself to a pudding.
Every thread in her body wanted to twine around him.
Yet even as she bent toward him in surrender, her body pliable as the stem of a flower, he broke the kiss and surfaced.
She swam up for air to find him staring at her again, but this time there was an expression she’d never seen from him, his habitual frown marred with wariness, alarm, and something else.
He took a step back, just enough that she had to stand on her own two feet again, but she dug her fingers into the lapel of his coat.
“Don’t you dare.”
“Dare what?” His voice was a low rasp, like the bees in the garden on a summer day, and she felt the same drenching warmth, as if she stood in sunlight.
“Apologize.” Not for her first kiss. Not when it was like that. “I won’t,” she added.
A smile—she thought it was a smile—tugged at one corner of his mouth.
She wanted to kiss it. She wanted that mouth on hers again, for hours.
Days and nights. He conquered the humor, and there was his scowl again, though something of alarm in it still.
He looked at her in a new way, and his expression wasn’t entirely suffused with the same thrilling awe that she felt.
“This cannot happen again,” he said, all formality and correctness. That stiffness was back, when she thought she’d melted him out of it. She wanted to wrap his neckcloth around her hand and throttle him. She wanted to kiss that scowl away.
“It should happen again,” she said. “If you want to keep Lady Baeccon away.”
The scowl, deeper. “Don’t make this about Bathsheba.”
She drew a sharp breath around the shard that lodged in her.
The ease with which her name rose to his lips, long familiar, uttered so many times in reverence, no doubt.
The thought was a blade and her heart beat against the edge of it, painfully, that jealousy again.
Bathsheba of the Bible had been a woman so seductive, so beautiful, she waked the passion of a king and made him kill to have her.
A woman who became queen and then mother of an empire.
And what was a Cerys? A puff in the wind compared to that. A kiss in the moonlight at the turn of a darkened stair, fleeting and forgettable beside the woman who had driven a stake through his heart.
She refused to be a puff. A hiss rose in her, that snarling cat that always came out when someone told Cerys no.
Her mother lamented her stubborn streak and warned it would carry her off one day.
She’d been right. But the surest way to make Cerys set her heart on something was to tell her she could not have it.
“So you do not wish for my protection,” she said, keeping her voice low. Sweet, not accusatory.
An eyelid twitched. Then his mouth. He was battling some emotion he wouldn’t let her see. “I do not need protecting.”
“Shall I tell your Bathsheba I lied about us?”
The confession would make her look ridiculous, at best a coquette, a role Cerys had often played.
At worst, it would make her a simpering fool—something she had never been in her life.
It would humiliate her to have Dante reject her after what she had bragged to Lady Baeccon, and as if he knew that, his mouth softened its stern press. Then the scowl again.
“We will simply go on as if none of this happened.”
He stepped back, and cool air from the window swirled around her, nipping the bare skin of her arms and neck, clearing her head. He was in retreat.
He was in retreat and putting up hurdles. Walls, so she would not pursue him.
How interesting. Cerys pulled her shawl around her shoulders.
“Very well,” she said, but it was not agreement.
He stood aside to let her proceed up the stairs.
She made sure to put a small sway to her hips, small enough that it would seem unconscious.
Cool air nipped at her ankles. She hoped she looked regal and enchanting, like Tatiana at the feast in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and not poor Helena stranded in the forest, forced to watch the man she loved battle another for the hand of her rival.
Lady Baeccon had been wrong about one thing, she thought as she found the door to her room. Dante Manelli was not dead inside.
And somehow, Cerys was going to make him look at her with more than a scowl.