Betina Krahn (29 page)

For one heart-stopping moment his evolving desire met the awakening need in her eyes, and the power of that convergence shook him to the core of his being.

“I was wrong about Cleo,” he murmured, when he could free his desire-seized throat. “She’s not the worst.”

“Oh?” she said in a whisper, closing her eyes to hold
that breathtaking moment of intimacy a bit longer before letting it go.

“You are.”

It was a stunningly sweet accusation. To be the worst thing he could imagine: a woman who defied his prejudices and charmed his fears and coaxed him out of his closely guarded resentments. To be the woman that he couldn’t help looking at with all the tenderness and longing he was capable of feeling. To be the most irresistible woman in Paxton House. She absorbed that charge into her heart, where it freed her feelings and unleashed her responses.

Breathless with excitement, she surprised them both by dragging his mouth back to hers and brazenly capturing the tip of his tongue between her lips, demanding he make full use of it. He complied eagerly with her demands, laving her lips, teasing her tongue, exploring the silken depths of her mouth even as his hands explored her body. Her skirts began a gradual slide up her legs, then bunched and caught somewhere around her knees. He groaned in frustration.

“If it isn’t those wretched ‘crinoline’ cages, it’s these stovepipe skirts. Whoever designs these things must despise both men and lovemaking.” When he raised his head, she could see his aggrieved expression and laughed softly.

Then she took her lip between her teeth, giving him a frankly provocative look that challenged him to do the same thing. With a quiet groan he abandoned all talk in a long, voracious kiss that left them feverish and straining together.

He drew back to watch her response as he released her nipple from her corset and teased it rhythmically. She caught her breath and undulated, pressing against his fingers, seeking a deeper touch, wanting more. He released her other nipple and lavished succulent, drawing kisses on
it, then took it into his mouth, commanding her response, wringing shudders of pleasure from her that produced corresponding tremors in his own loins.

A familiar pressure settled in her woman’s core as his mouth caressed and tantalized her breasts and his hands slid over her bared knees. She somehow understood that this desire had resided, dormant, in every part of her body until the stroke of his hand awakened it. His supple fingers slid between her knees and under the lacy edge of her drawers, rising along the bare skin of her inner thigh, and pleasure trickled from his fingers in quicksilver rivulets up her limbs, pooling in her woman’s flesh.

The stroking went on and on, rising ever so slowly up her thigh until his hand reached the limits of the access her skirts would allow. Digging her fingers into his shoulders, she urged his body on top of hers. Her hips were caught between the thick pad of her bustle and the tantalizing force of his body bearing down on hers behind a hard ridge of flesh. The weight and heat of him drove out the last of her inhibitions, so that when he flexed against her, she responded by tilting her hips to direct that divine pressure downward and inward.

Suddenly there it was—that rasp of sensation that seared through her nerves and flung her aloft on a rising draft of excitement. His kisses deepened, his hands grew more urgent at her breasts, and she could feel the pulse of his desire in the swollen ridge thrust hard against the barrier of her garments. She wanted him to salve this burning ache inside her, to fill the taut, expectant hollow of her body. With a soft groan she rocked her hips, seeking that part of him that she knew lay hot and ready against her.

“Remington.” She whispered the deepest longing of her heart: “Love me.”

For one moment he paused, then raised his head from her mouth to look at her. She was glowing with heat and
her body was fluid with passion beneath him. The sight of her and the feel of her coaxing motions unleashed his reined desires. “I will, sweetheart.”

He captured her lush, swollen lips and bore down, thrusting against her, finding her center, making her shudder deliciously with each stroke. Again and again he raked against her, carrying her higher, pushing her beyond the bounds of control and reason, into realms of pure sensation.

She gave herself up to it, waiting, expectant, suspended on wild rising waves of pleasure. Abruptly, she stilled, and the collected tension exploded in her loins.

Searing bolts of pleasure shot outward from her woman’s center, burning along her nerves, contracting her muscles, driving her against him with a choked cry of pleasure. Her arms convulsed around him as she arched, shuddered, and surrendered. After a long, blinding moment of white-hot intensity, the feeling began to slowly fade, retreating like a wave, lowering her gently back into reality, leaving her limp and trembling against him.

He held her tightly as he felt her tension draining. He was panting, trembling, aroused to the very edge of his being, but he was still lucid enough to understand what had just happened. She had taken her full woman’s pleasure, he was sure of it. Never, in his entire carnal career, had he encountered a woman whose response was so volatile and near the surface that she could find paradise in just the caresses of his body. After a moment he shifted back to look at her.

The soft fringe of her lashes lay against her moist and glowing cheeks. Her lips were parted and the skin of her throat and breast was rosy with the blush of climax. She was sensuality incarnate: female, desire, completion. And when she opened her eyes, the dark mystery, the wonder of the ages was there in their depths.

“Madam?” A querulous voice burst through the heat. “Are you there, madam?”

Antonia squeezed her eyes tight, wishing she could shut her ears as well. But the voice came again, closer this time, and she felt Remington stiffen against her, listening. Over the surge of her blood in her head, she recognized Hoskins’s voice. Annoyance was her first reaction: billowing irritation that someone should interfere with her impulsive pleasure. But then horror was her second.

Hoskins stood just inside the door, scowling as he searched the room for his mistress. The bolsters and feather mattress that were mounded up on the end of the bed prevented him from seeing them, and the old fellow grumbled and shuffled out.

It was a long, prickly moment before Remington pushed up onto his arms and peered over the mountain of feather ticking beside them. The room was empty.

“He’s gone. I don’t think he could see us behind the featherbeds.” He managed a wry, somewhat confused smile. “Why is it whenever I have you in my clutches, he barges in? Do you plan these things? Or does he just have an exceptional nose for sniffing out roused passions—like a moral bloodhound of some sort?”

His words slammed through her senses, driving the embarrassment she felt into her very marrow.
Did she plan this?
Did she plan to lose all control? To take the ultimate pleasure from him? To disgrace herself yet again with her rebellious passions? Her heart and her body both contracted with humiliation.

“I did
not
plan this—” she said in a choked voice, pushing him off her and fumbling with her garments as she sat up and scrambled toward the edge of the bed. Her panicky reaction caught him off guard, and it took a moment for him to reach her. Caught in his grip, she strained
to escape, turning her face as far from him as possible. “Let me go—”

“Antonia—Toni—” Confusion gave way to understanding as he watched her shrinking, trying to escape both him and the fact of what had just happened to her. “Look at me,” he said, his voice husky with both need and compassion. “No, you don’t plan these things,” he said softly. “
I
do. I’m the one who plots and schemes to get you into a compromising position. And I’m not the least bit sorry for it.” He slid to the edge of the bed, beside her, and pressed a soft, evocative kiss on her cheek. “And you mustn’t be sorry for it either.”

Something in his tone, the unexpected softness of his words, reached through her shame. When he reached for her chin this time, she let him turn her face back to him. Her heart gave a painful, arrhythmic thud as she faced the soft glow in his eyes. It wasn’t what she would have expected of him in his moment of conquest. It was a mercy when tears welled in her eyes and blurred the sight of him.

Her shame pulled strings in him that he hadn’t realized had wound around his heart. He dragged her against him and wrapped her in his arms, holding her tightly. She was stiff and resistant to his warmth, but he wouldn’t let her go.

“Was that the first time?” he murmured into her hair. After a moment she pushed back as far as his arms would allow. “It was, wasn’t it?” he prompted.

She shook her head and lowered her eyes, sinking under the humiliation, but clinging to the hope that, this once, the painful truth might protect her from his smug claim of victory over her. “No.”

“No?” He said, his arms loosening around her. “But how could …?”

“I was
married
,” she said with a flare of anger, trying to break free, holding back the shameful fact that her passionate
response had disturbed her old husband so much that he had ceased, from that day, to visit her bed.

“Toni, please—listen to me.” Wrestling her into the featherbeds, pinning her there on her back, he took her face in his hand and made her look at him. “I don’t know what happened in your marriage—I don’t want to know. But I do know I want you, Antonia Paxton. I want your sultry blue eyes and your kiss-me-quick lips, and every squirm and wriggle and moan of pleasure that comes with them.” He feathered his knuckles down the side of her face and along her jaw. “I love the way you kiss, the way you touch me, and the way your eyes go dark and sultry. I love the way your body moves with mine, the way you feel beneath me, and the way you shiver when I touch you.” He drew a ragged breath and confessed from the bottom of his soul: “God, Toni—I’ve never wanted a woman the way I want you.”

She stared up at him, feeling a strange wrenching, shearing sensation in her chest. Then as she held her breath, searching the depths of his eyes, it seemed that a dark husk fell away from her heart. He wanted her. He wanted her response, wanted her passion … wanted
her.

“I want to make love to you, Toni. I want to feel all the things you make me feel. And I believe you want me the same way.”

Where was the point in denying it? she thought. Her eyes, her lips, and her body had just confessed her passion for him in spectacular detail.

“Heaven help me, I do want you,” she said in a thick whisper, making herself look deep into his chocolate eyes and praying she wouldn’t get irretrievably lost in them. “You make me feel alive and full of wonderful new feelings and possibilities. But I don’t know if I
should
want you. I never know what to expect of you, or of myself when I’m
with you. You make me do and feel such things … I can’t wait to see you each day, and yet I dread the way you steal my self-control and take over my senses.”

“I don’t want your control, Toni.” He smiled softly and pressed small, butterflylike kisses on her face. “And I don’t want your pride or your self-respect or your integrity. I don’t want to take anything from you.” He straightened and met her darkened gaze with his. “This is no game, no part of our wager.”

He saw her search his face, yearning and tempted, but uncertain, and he realized he meant what he had just said, with all his heart. He didn’t want to take anything from her. He didn’t want to hurt or embarrass or cause her loss in any way. He only wanted—

The realization struck with the impact of a fist:
hurting and embarrassing her were the very reasons he came here!
Frantically, he fought that thought down inside him and concentrated on Antonia.

“This is not the time or place.” He couldn’t resist one last kiss; then he pulled her up with him. He watched as she tugged her bodice together and shoved her skirts down into place. Her face was crimson as she slid to the edge of the bed and fumbled with her buttons. He smiled, feeling a sweet fullness in his chest, and brushed her trembling hands away to do them for her.

Chagrin and pleasure battled in her as she allowed him to refasten her bodice. She couldn’t bring herself to meet his gaze until he paused and made her look at him. His face was dusky, his chocolate eyes sweet and compelling. Gathering her hands in his, he dropped a kiss on them. More of her defenses crumbled. She had never imagined him like this: so honorable, so tender, so considerate in intimacy.

“I would not force you, Toni. I want you to be sure, to decide of your own free will.” He glanced around her bedchamber. “I think that this place might hold too many
memories.” He smiled. “It certainly holds too many interruptions.”

He helped her to her feet, then pulled her against him, circling her with his arms. “There is my house. It is private and quiet. My staff retire early, all but my butler, Phipps. Will you come tonight, Toni?”

“I—I—” She wanted to say yes, to cast all caution to the wind and follow the yearnings of her body and heart. But the enormity of it all came crashing in on her; the strength of her desires, the storminess of their relationship, the uncertain future. Consequences, there were always consequences—and she hadn’t even begun to think of them. How could she say yes? She trembled in his arms, absorbing his heat, hungry for his strength and certainty. How could she not say yes?

“Please, Remington, I have to be sure.”

He drew her tighter against him, running his hands over her waist and up her back. The softening of her body against him said that he had the power to persuade her. But as he searched her face, he understood that her heart was divided, and that to exert pressure now might be to push her further away. After a moment he nodded, bowing to her need for time and knowing that he had issues of his own to settle.

“Take the time you need,” he said, releasing her with a final squeeze of her hand. When he reached the door, he turned back with a tender but confident smile. “I don’t know how it happened, but I’m crazy about you, Antonia Paxton. I’ll wait … tonight … every night … for as long as it takes.”