To Wed a Rake(25)

She pulled her legs to the side and pushed at his shoulder gently, and he finally collapsed on his back, smiling a little crooked smile. For all she knew of the male anatomy (mostly gathered at the births of male babies), she could see from the rise in his pantaloons that there was a miraculous transformation that happened between age one hour and age thirty-two.

But he was like a partridge in the wild: if she startled him, he’d fly away. So she knelt to his side, quite as if she didn’t even notice the way his pantaloons were straining, and ran her hands through his hair. His hair was wild, coarser than hers. It sprang back against her fingers and smelled of woodsmoke and some sort of male soap, strong and not perfumed.

He wasn’t protesting, so she let her fingers do the thinking for her.

His forehead was high, the forehead of a thinking man, a man who knew Shakespeare, the Parliament, and the way not to fall out of a moving carriage. And how to make a woman fall in love with him, in all of one evening. His nose was a narrow aristocratic triumph, a nose handed down from the Elizabethans. His mouth…well, his mouth had everything in it. A sardonic laugh, and one of joy. That plump bottom lip knew grief and—unless she was truly mistaken, and Emma had made a practice never to be mistaken—was longing to kiss her breasts.

Men liked kissing a woman’s breasts, for all that Gil had so far only run his hands over her. She edged up closer to him and thought about offering him a breast, but rethought it. For one thought, it felt dismally maternal. For another, his black eyes were so steady and clear that she couldn’t quite find the courage. And for the final thing, it just didn’t sound right. Perhaps she’d misunderstood when village women talked of men supping at their breast, for all they were babes in arms.

She moved back and let her hands run from his lean cheeks to the strong cords of his neck, down to the ridged muscles on his chest. Were all men so muscled? His nipples were flat against his skin, and his mouth opened slightly as she touched them, although he made no sound.

It would be nice to hear him make a sound in his throat. Not looking at his eyes, she ran her fingers over his chest again, but he was silent, just waiting.

His pantaloons fastened themselves at the waist, but she wasn’t certain he would allow her to disrobe him. It wouldn’t suit his Puritan tendencies, that was certain.

She bent over him, and her hair fell forward, creating a little curtain around their faces. Then she licked his bottom lip again. A woman could spend her life tracing that line, feeling the quake low in her stomach at the curve of it, the softness of his lip, the strength of it.

A huge hand came to the back of her head and pulled her mouth down to his, and in that moment she let her right hand sli sighastede from his lean stomach onto the front of his pantaloons. For a moment he went rigid, his mouth warm on hers, in hers, and her fingers curled around him as if of their own volition, and then he groaned into her mouth, a queer, hoarse sound that made her sink from her knees so that she was lying on top of his body, boneless, sinking into him.

His mouth was ravaging her, her hand trapped between their bodies, between the softness of her skin and the fabric of his pantaloons.

And then Emma threw away the idea of winning the challenge. If Gil would just kiss her for another moment, kiss her for another five minutes, let her hand rest on top of that part of him that pushed into her palm, demanding something that she knew little of, but was all too eager to discover…

It was the first time that she had entirely dismissed the thought of winning the challenge. Who cared about the challenge? The only thing that mattered was that he was rocking up against her, pushing her legs apart, his knees going where—his hands touching…

Then he growled something at her.

He said it again. “I give up.”

She closed her eyes, but she heard him all right. In an instant, she began wrestling with the two little rows of buttons on his pantaloons. But a gentleman’s tight evening pantaloons don’t slide off his legs without help.

He gave a bark of laughter and rolled to his feet. She lay there, looking up at him, knowing she was all white skin and a spread of red hair. He was watching, so she did exactly what she wanted to do, which was move her thighs apart, just a little. Just enough so that her cheeks flooded red at the same time the burning heat in her belly flared.

He tossed his trousers to the side, followed by his smalls. His legs were golden dark in the dim light from Jeremy’s lantern, ridged with muscle and dusted with hair. And then, higher—the color grew in her cheeks but she didn’t look away.

She was pretending to be a widow, but she wasn’t going to pretend to be less interested than she was.