Chapter 2 #3
He grazed her mouth once, then again. And once more. He was giving her a series of small brushes that seemed more a question than an imposition, and that delicacy, coming from a man who an instant before had been on the verge of dueling to defend her honor…
Strange.
Eveline did not dare to move. She stayed still because she did not understand what was happening inside her.
There was still anger, humiliation too. But each time he reached her lips, the heat began to intensify within her.
She perceived an unfamiliar sensation that made her feel intensely alive and ran through her chest until it came to rest at the very center of her femininity.
What was happening to her? She was sharing an intimacy with the least likely man of all, and she was not prepared for such a thing.
Arden drew back, only enough to look at her. His breathing was as unsettled as her own.
That was the first thing Eveline truly understood. Lord Arden, the most correct man in the world, who kept his feelings locked in a strongbox, was breathing with difficulty over a kiss that had not even been a truly memorable kiss… yet.
‘Open your mouth for me,’ he murmured.
Eveline blinked, bewildered by the order and the tone in which he had spoken it. It sounded, God help her, like a plea disguised as authority.
‘What?’
His hand was still on her wrist, though no longer to hold her there, but to remind himself that he must not lose the last shred of sense remaining to him.
With the other he grazed her cheek, only with his knuckles, and that gesture was so unlike him that Eveline felt the ground open beneath her feet.
‘If you want to know what a kiss is, Queen Eveline,’ he said, his voice lower still, ‘do not close your mouth when I kiss you again. Let me taste your tongue, and taste mine. ’
He gave her no time to ask anything more. His lips settled at once over hers.
Eveline would never come to know whether she yielded out of defiance, curiosity, or because her body had decided before her pride. She would remember only that she parted her lips and that Arden let out a low sound, almost animal, that made her lose her judgment.
And that was how he kissed her in earnest.
The world stopped turning. Everything narrowed to Arden’s mouth, which moved over hers with a skill that had nothing to do with punishment and everything to do with a genuine hunger, carefully hidden until it had at last found a crack through which to escape.
He kissed her slowly, showing her without words that he was capable of giving her what she had demanded, and when she answered with a small gasp, the depth of the kiss changed.
Eveline clung to the lapels of his coat so as not to lose her balance, for she was utterly dizzy.
Euphoric, rather. Her hands had closed over the cloth because she needed to hold on to something, and Lord Arden was the only solid thing within reach.
He went tense beneath her fingers. She felt it, but he did not break the kiss, and she would not be the first to withdraw.
Nathaniel ought to step away. He knew it with a painful clarity.
The woman he was kissing was Oliver’s younger sister.
This was Lady Eveline Hartwell: reckless, exasperating, too young for his hands, and exceedingly dangerous to his peace.
He could not kiss her beside a gazebo, in the middle of a party, after having driven off a decent suitor with the brutality of a territorial animal.
In fact, he could not go on kissing her while his body reacted with a rawness that shamed and consumed him at once.
The desire ached. His arousal ached far more.
He felt a low, urgent pressure straining against his trousers, and that ought to have been reminding him just how far he had lost his reason.
He had to release her.
He had to step back. To be again the man Statony believed he knew.
He did not even recognize himself! Ah. He could not pull away from her.
Eveline was still clutching him, her fingers closed in his lapels, and her mouth opened beneath his every time he caressed her tongue.
Impossible to stop kissing her! Her inexperienced surrender was making him feel something far more dangerous than lust.
Trust.
He knew that she probably did not even understand her own surrender to the kiss, perhaps did not even want it, but in that moment she held him with a sincere need.
And Arden, who had spent years telling himself his duty was to protect her from others, was discovering with fierce shame that he did not know how to protect her from himself.
He had sworn, when Eveline made her début and he realized she had become a woman full of assurance and beauty, that he would never allow himself to lower his guard with her.
He was failing resoundingly in that intention.
He kissed her again.
In a hungrier, deeper way.
Eveline let out a loud moan against his mouth. She had surrendered to him. He had made her yield!
Arden released her wrist to circle her waist, and the lady’s body drew close to his with a naturalness that wiped away all his worries at a stroke.
He did not press her hard; he still kept enough decency for that.
But she felt the heat of him, the firmness of his chest, the uneven breathing beneath the dark cloth, and she was suddenly aware that this man was not kissing her to prove anything.
He desired her.
Arden desired her!
The idea ought to have struck her as absurd. Ridiculous. Impossible. The earl had judged her for years, reprimanded her, and looked at her so many times with severity that Eveline had come to think that, if she ever wrote her memoirs, he would appear in them under the heading of her nemesis.
But men did not kiss the women they despised that way, did they?