Chapter 27 #2
She’d never felt like this before. So needy and wanting and so out of control. Her head was spinning, her body was pulsing, aching, yearning for … for things a Parasol Academy governess shouldn’t want. If she ever needed a Cucumberfy spell, the time was right now.
“Mina.” Phinn groaned her name. He sounded desperate and needy too.
Indeed, as one of his hands grasped her bottom and pulled her hips against his, she couldn’t fail to notice how affected he was.
Even through the layers of her crinoline skirts she could feel him. His body was hard and stiff everywhere.
Mina loved that she’d inflamed this man’s passion to blazing proportions. Her ardent kisses, her body’s enthusiastic responses, her own desire were clearly feeding his.
But somewhere at the back of her brain, her sensible side was whispering, urging her to take care. She should stop this amorous encounter before it went any further. Before they both caught fire and went up in flames. And surely they’d achieved what they’d set out to do.
They’d kissed. Now they needed to see if said kissing had had the desired effect on the marquess’s speech.
Phinn—Lord Kinsale—seemed to be of the same mind too.
He dragged his lips along hers one last time, then his shoulders rose and fell with a heavy sigh.
“We should probably stop here, Mina. The last thing I want to do is take advantage of you. I would never try to coax you into doin’ things that you’ll regret.
Things that have lastin’ consequences. Things that would hurt you.
You don’t need that from me or any man. It wouldn’t be fair or right. ”
Mina nodded and smoothed his rumpled hair away from his furrowed brow.
Guilt squeezed her chest because she couldn’t correct his erroneous belief that she was an unwed mother.
“You’re right,” she said softly, notes of remorse and melancholy creeping into her voice.
“We should stop before this leads us into territory that’s even more dangerous and forbidden than kissing. At least for someone like me.”
He gathered her hands and pressed them against his chest, where his heart lay.
Indeed, Mina could feel it beating, thudding steady and true.
“I want you to know that you mean so very much to me,” he said, his emerald-green eyes holding hers.
“These intimate interludes we’ve shared are not just exercises to teach you to kiss.
Or experiments to see if kisses can fix me stammer for a wee while.
They’re more than that. They’re … they’re special in a way I can’t clearly articulate.
They’re not inconsequential. They’re moments I’ll always cherish, even if we must end things here. ”
Oh … Oh my. Mina’s heart swelled with a different kind of fervent longing and bittersweet ache, and it seemed she was the one momentarily stuck for words.
“You speak sense,” she said when she managed to rein in her surging emotions.
“And it would be sensible for us to refrain from … from meeting like this. You are a marquess who wishes to make a difference in the world. I know you can ill afford any scandal to be attached to your name. As for me … I am but a governess and as much as it pains me to do so, I need to exercise care. This sort of thing—an amorous tryst even in secret—cannot happen again.”
Lord Kinsale nodded. When he spoke, his tone was heavy with disappointment. “I know. You, Hermina Davenport, are nothin’ but sensible. It’s-it’s one of the things I most admire about you.”
Oh, but she wasn’t sensible at all. She was as foolish as could be. She hadn’t guarded her heart like a prudent and oh-so-proper Parasol Academy governess should. She’d lost it entirely to this wonderful, generous man whose kisses made her burn and want and hope for more in this life.
But he was also a man she’d deceived. A man she must somehow distance herself from. If not physically, at least mentally and emotionally.
No doubt it would be an impossible feat.
She was about to take a step away from Lord Kinsale when he reached out and caught her chin with his fingers.
It seemed he was reluctant to let her go too.
“Before you leave, allow me this one last boon, me darlin’ Mina,” he said in a dark-velvet voice.
“Promise me you’ll think of me—how it would feel to still have me lips and me hands on you, bringin’ you pleasure—when … when you go to bed.”
Mina’s whole face, indeed, her entire body from the top of her head to the tips of her toes flooded with wicked warmth.
Could he mean what she thought he meant?
That he wanted her to fantasize about him as she abandoned all notions of what was prim and proper and decorous and ladylike and slide her own hand beneath her nightgown to relieve the pulsing ache in her most private, feminine place?
Of course, she had already done so before, on several occasions (just last night in fact)—she wasn’t a statue made of porcelain or marble.
She was a flesh-and-blood woman of six-and-twenty who was hopelessly, irrevocably in love.
And the man that she loved—the man at the very center of her deepest desires—was now asking her to do it. For him.
“I will, Phinn,” she murmured huskily. She couldn’t, didn’t want to say no.
Lord Kinsale’s answering smile was all things wicked and wolfish. “I’ll be thinkin’ o’ you too when I climb in me own bed. Goodnight, Mina.” He stroked the back of his fingers, ever so gently down her burning cheek. “I wish you the sweetest o’ dreams.” And then he quit the room.
“Good night, Phinn,” Mina whispered after him.
But in the morning, he’ll be Lord Kinsale again. And you will simply be Miss Davenport, the governess, not Phineas O’Connell’s “darlin’ Mina.” That’s what Mina told herself less than a minute later as she shut her bedroom door and leaned her feverish forehead against it.
Because she couldn’t have more than what she’d just had. Not when she hadn’t been honest with the man about what she’d done, and was continuing to do, to protect Lord Fitzwilliam from his guardian and Evil Queen Mab.
Perhaps Emmeline was right. She should seek out Mrs. Temple and tell her everything.
She couldn’t go on like this any longer.
Tomorrow, after they’d been to the Great Exhibition, she’d send a te-ley-gram to the headmistress, asking for an appointment as she urgently needed to seek the headmistress’s counsel.
Whatever happened after that was in the lap of the Fae.