When the Duke Returns(84)

Honeydew poured lemonade for Godfrey. No wine, even though he threw Simeon an imploring glance.

Simeon found himself grinding his teeth.

Couldn’t Godfrey have been housed in the barn? Did Isidore have to be so kind to his little brother? He had—

He had plans for this evening.

He shifted in his seat. Surely this was just what Valamksepa talked about. Lust as a poison in the blood, a wild, insurgent storm carrying reason before it. He had no reason. He just wanted her.

It wasn’t the Middle Way. God knows what kind of way it was. A bad way. He drank his wine and brooded about her breasts. The whole Middle Way concept ignored the fact that a man’s blood went on fire around his wife.

And Isidore was his wife.

Surely…

No.

At the end of supper he rose, ready to go somewhere. He seemed to have no bed, so he would presumably be housed in the barn with Honeydew.

But then it became clear that Isidore had different ideas. The meal was over, and before he knew exactly what was happening, she was in front of him, like a little whirlwind of silk and the sweet smell of her skin, saying this, saying that. She put everyone in their place, ordered Honeydew around in the sweetest of ways, directed Godfrey into his bed and he, it seemed, was to accompany her on a stroll through the gardens.

“It’s a lovely night,” she said, smiling up at him. “The moon is out.”

She had long eyelashes that curled upward so delicately that they distracted him. “Hmmm,” he said, unable to formulate even a simple sentence.

A moment later they were strolling down a path. It was actually quite warm in an early spring sort of way.

“Where shall we go?” Isidore asked. Her voice was bubbling, like a child at a party.

“For a walk?” he suggested. His mind felt like marmalade. All he wanted to do was drag her behind a tree and cup his hands around her bottom. How could he have made love to her and not spent an hour on each breast? It felt as if those lost moments were mocking him now.

Something in her expression dimmed a little and he wrenched his mind away from her bodice. Cleared his throat. “Shall we visit the summer house?” he asked, desperately.

“A summer house! You have one?”

He would do anything for that smile. The certainty of his vulnerability was so dangerous that he just walked beside her, silent as the grave. They walked toward the bottom of the formal gardens. “It’s more of a folly than a true summer house,” he said finally.

They rounded a last turn.

“As you see.”

Her mouth fell open.

“It wasn’t meant to be a ruin,” he told her, deciding honesty was the best policy. “Although I understand that ruins are becoming quite fashionable.” He cocked his head and tried to see it through her eyes. A romantic heap of stone, supposedly a disintegrating medieval castle? Or what he saw: another of his father’s imprudent failures, a building that was to be a proper summer house of stone, fallen to pieces after the builders were left unpaid?

Isidore walked ahead of him. She wasn’t wearing panniers tonight, and her gown followed the curves of her own delectable hips.

“Have you been inside?” she said, turning and looking at him. He could barely focus on what she was saying over the roaring in his blood. She was his, and he had to have her, to own her, to touch her, to kiss her, to…

She leaned back against the fragment of a stone wall and smiled at him. Was that an invitation? Who gave a damn?

With a muttered curse, he strode forward and picked her up, as smoothly as if he carried damsels on a regular basis. “The grass might be wet,” he said, hearing the roughness of his own voice.

She didn’t say anything, but she wasn’t struggling to get away. She just nestled there in his arms, a curvy perfumed bundle. He rounded the building and headed straight for the broken arch. Where the courtyard was supposed to be…

Yes. Tiles gleamed faintly in the moonlight. Fallen walls protected them from view…not that anyone was out wandering his gardens at this hour of night.

He put her down and stripped off his coat. He still couldn’t meet her eyes. She would be horrified if she knew what he was like, how mad in lust he was, mad enough to howl at the moon, to pounce on her like an animal.

“Simeon?” she asked. Her voice didn’t sound frightened. It was husky and caught a little on his name. There was something about it that made his groin clench. And then she combed her fingers through her hair, almost shyly, and he broke, lunged at her and yanked her against him. If he’d thought, he might have considered a gentleman’s kiss, a sweet meeting of mouths that would tempt her into opening her lips…

He ravaged her, took what he wanted, took her sweetness and the taste of her, the smell of her, the way her body swayed under his fingers when he kissed her, the way she murmured something, or perhaps moaned.