Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Saskia felt herself suspended inside a weightless void.
As if she’d leapt off the edge of a cliff and was waiting to discover if the rope would hold or if she would dash herself against the rocks below.
Behind Liam’s eyes passed the dark and unknowable. “Tonight, we could just be those other selves. You could be Arabella, and I could be Liam Cassidy.”
It took a second for her mind to catch up to his words. “But you are Liam Cassidy.”
Gold-flecked green eyes remained utterly intent upon her. “And aren’t you Arabella?”
They couldn’t go on like this.
She couldn’t go on like this.
Well, Lady Saskia couldn’t go on like this.
Arabella could.
A change of subject was necessary.
She drew herself up, hoping proper posture would influence proper thoughts. “Your ride today was magnificent.”
He shrugged a shoulder that could’ve been interpreted as indifferent. “It was one of those races snatched from the teeth of Fate. They unfold like that sometimes.”
“How do you mean?”
“Morningstar shouldn’t have won.”
“No?”
“But then, you were there.”
Her brow furrowed. “What did my being there have to do with it?”
“Well, I wasn’t about to lose.”
She blinked. “Because I was there?”
Liam drummed long, calloused fingers on the spine of the sofa. “There’s the fact that you’re writing my memoirs.”
A strange sense of relief pulsed through her. Here was a place of relative safety from which they could converse. “Oh, yes, of course.”
“And there’s also the fact that it was you who was there.”
Her heart beat out a hard thud. Here was the conversation tipping back into the unknown. “Aren’t I simply me?”
When he smiled, the charm for the masses was gone.
This smile, intimate and true, was solely for her.
“Not so simply. You wear more than a few hats, don’t you?
There’s the woman writing my memoir, and there’s you.
A Derby win will help sell some books, but that isn’t why I snatched that win from the teeth of Fate. ”
He’d wanted to win because she’d been watching?
A man could quite take a woman’s breath away, speaking to her like that.
She cleared her throat. “No whip lashings to the face today.”
He settled back and took a gulp of whiskey, letting his unmarked face serve as answer.
“Are you as beat-up from the Derby as you were from the Two Thousand and One Thousand Guineas?”
“Every muscle in my body is sore.” He gave an unbothered shrug. “Will that find its way into the memoir?”
She hadn’t realized she was interviewing him, but understood how he would see it so. “Likely.”
He shifted to set his whiskey on the side table. “Then you must see for yourself.” Then he was shrugging off his coat, and his shirt was coming untucked and rising above his ribs.
Saskia gasped and suffered an immediate wash of mortification. It was the sight of his ridged stomach, the center hollow fuzzed with golden hair that trailed down to the waistband of his trousers…and below…
He cleared his throat. Her gaze startled up. She’d been staring at his trousers a mite too long—and the amused glint in his eyes said he knew it.
Saskia, she chided herself, gather your wits, woman.
But he was pointing to a bruised rib grazed an angry red that was already deepening into purple.
“It’s not cracked, is it?”
“Nay.”
“How do you know?”
“I can breathe without pain.”
An incredulous laugh escaped her. “That’s how you gauge whether a rib is broken?”
“It’s the easiest way.”
She felt her equilibrium returning to her. “There’s so much money and beauty in horse racing, but below that glossed surface, it’s an utterly brutal sport, isn’t it?”
“It can be,” he acknowledged. “But everyone in the game knows the rules—or lack thereof.”
“Not the horses.”
A moment beat past while he considered her. “That’s one thing I like about you, Saskia.”
“Just the one?”
He snorted. “Of many.”
Of many.
Oh, she liked that—too much.
But wasn’t it a simple line? A response to her prompt?
Right.
“You always see straight to the main point,” he continued. “The horses are the most important part of the entire enterprise, which makes them vulnerable to those with bad intent. That’s why they must be treated with the utmost care and respect.”
“It’s why you don’t use whip or spur.”
“Aye.”
How she liked this moment with Liam, the two of them conversing with openness and honesty. But it wasn’t simple, was it? Beneath that uncomplicated surface ran attraction and closeness, not of obvious proximity, but of mind and spirit.
And this point was as far as she knew how to navigate.
Retreat felt impossible; to proceed forward equally impossible.
At least, for Saskia, it was impossible.
“Tonight, we could just be these other selves. You could be Arabella, and I could be Liam Cassidy.”
Arabella would know how to navigate the impossible space between them—or if she didn’t, she would improvise.
When he released his shirt, without a staying thought, she shoved forward, erasing most of the distance between them on the sofa as she reached out to stay the garment’s descent.
And that easily, she was touching him…feeling him…
“Liam,” she said, hardly able to recognize her own voice, “we haven’t yet explored the extent of your possible injuries to my satisfaction. ”
His brow lifted subtly. “Is that so? Well…” He let the moment draw out, and she couldn’t breathe as she waited for him to finish, for him to seal her fate. “We can’t leave you unsatisfied, now can we?”
There was permission granted.
She shifted so she could pull his shirt over his head. So close that she was nearly on top of him as his scent enveloped her—salt, citrus, him. She touched light fingertips to a bruise. “Does this hurt?”
“Can’t say it does particularly.”
“I…I’ve been thinking about our conversation from the ball.”
“Have you?”
“You raised an interesting point.”
“Pleased to serve.”
“What are the parameters of a kiss? For example…” She eased forward. “Would it be kissing if I press my mouth here?” Without waiting for an answer, she angled down and touched her mouth lightly to his bruised rib, his skin smooth and warm beneath her lips.
“Saskia.”
Her name a jagged rasp against his throat sent a shiver straight through her. Driven by instinct, she shifted her weight so she moved atop him, her thighs now straddling his. She tilted her head, her hair falling in a curtain around them, her lips brushing his ear. “Arabella.”
He reached up and gently caught her chin in his large hand, guiding her incrementally back so their eyes could meet.
A whirl of emotions stirred within those gold-flecked green depths—intimacy…
connection…desire…wanting…need. She’d always been so deep in and of the mind.
The characters who ran around her brain felt more than she ever had.
Until she’d met Liam Cassidy.
And, really, until this exact moment.
What she felt now—the intimacy, the connection, the desire, the wanting, the need—was the most real, visceral feeling she’d ever experienced.
It pulsed.
It throbbed.
It urged.
It ached.
She was connected to him in a way she didn’t understand—and so, too, was she connected to herself in that very same way.
“Perhaps,” he uttered, close to her lips, “we need to refresh our memory.”
“Perhaps we do.”
He reached up and slid her spectacles off her nose. She’d forgotten them. Then he shifted and, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, pressed his mouth to hers.
This was a kiss.
It was as she remembered and…better.
As his tongue glided across her bottom lip, tangled with hers, this kiss burned with urgency.
He groaned into her mouth as he pushed her robe open, reaching around her waist, pulling her body into his.
Below her, she felt it—his manhood. Instinctively, she lowered so all that separated her quim from his shaft was her night chemise and his trousers.
Of their own accord, her hips moved, his length thick and hard against her soft center.
His hands tightened around her waist, grounding her to him.
Oh, this was pleasure and a fire lit.
But a fire held demands.
A fire ever needed more.
That was her at this moment—a lit fire—and all she wanted was more of Liam.
Between them, she reached until she found his length.
But it wasn’t enough.
She began fumbling with the falls of his trousers. His hand covered hers. “Saskia.”
“Arabella,” she corrected.
A beat of silence, then, “Saskia.”
She understood what he was saying—and what he wasn’t.
They were one and the same. If they were going to cease this madness, now was the time.
For if they were to proceed down this path, at the end of it, she would no longer be a virgin.
And if that was the path she chose, the only way she would be doing so was as Saskia.
The logic held.
Still… “I want this,” she implored…she begged. “I want you.”
He moaned, pain in it. “You’re supposed to be the voice of reason.”
“Me?”
She supposed that was fair. But, tonight, she didn’t want to be the voice of reason. She wanted to be unreasonable. Reason wouldn’t help her get what she wanted—which was him.
And if the price of having him was the loss of her virginal status, what a small price to pay.
“Oh, my sweet,” he groaned, “I’m hopelessly mad for you.”
And he thought those were the words that would convince her to be reasonable?
She grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him long and slow and thorough, breathing him in, feeling his elements combining with hers.
And when her fingers again found the buttons of his trousers, they didn’t fumble.
They understood the objective—to free him…
to feel him. Hard…long…thick. She knew as much.
Oh, she wanted this with an altogether unreasonable singularity of intent. “I need you, Liam,” she pleaded against his mouth, lifting onto her knees so her quim hovered above his exposed length. “I need you inside me.”