His hand was firm in the hollow of her back, their lower bodies pressed intimately together. The water splashed cold around them, but where their bodies touched and clung together he could, suddenly and surprisingly, feel the heat in her. Her breasts were resting against his chest and through his soaking shirt and her drenched clothes he could feel her nipples tight and hard, pressing against him. Despite the cold water and the extreme discomfort of their situation, he felt his body start to stir as he remembered that other occasion on which she had been clasped close in his arms, naked, warm and enticing.
Dexter had not anticipated this happening to him when—if—he ever met Laura Cole again. Certainly it was not his usual response to a soaking-wet female. But now the memories of his night with Laura swelled like a dam that was about to burst and in combination with her wet and seminaked state made his erection swell in proportion. He felt simultaneously hugely aroused and furiously angry with himself for that instant and very inappropriate arousal. He tried to think of icy winds and how chilly the water was, but his body felt like a furnace. He could not control it. And the more he tried to exert self-control the more excited his errant body seemed to become, as though it were asserting its independence and its right to find Laura attractive if it chose. Dex was enraged.
Laura could evidently feel his response, as well. She raised a hand and dashed the wet strands of honey-brown hair back from her face. Her hazel eyes snapped with anger and discomposure. A hint of color touched her cheekbones. She looked as though she was as uncomfortable with his proximity as he was with hers. It was the reaction of the perfect, respectable duchess that he had always imagined her to be. And indeed she had been utterly perfect in his bed and nowhere near as virtuous as she pretended to be out of it…
“Mr. Anstruther! What are you doing?” Laura hit exactly the right note for an outraged dowager duchess and Dexter admired the apparent ease with which she could assume the role. No one hearing her now would ever guess that she had taken him into her bed and made mad, ecstatic, explosive love to him for an entire afternoon, evening and night. It might be something that, with hindsight, he deplored ever happening, but it seemed he could not forget it.
“I am saving you from drowning, your grace,” Dexter said politely. “However, if you object I can let you go.” He suited actions to words by loosening his grip on her.
Laura gave a muffled squeak and clung to him all the more tightly, her fingers digging into the muscles of his upper arms. Dexter was immediately reminded of the sensation of her fingernails scoring his back as she had moved in sensual abandonment beneath him. He tried to ignore the thought and erase the memory—and failed dismally. His body hardened still further until he felt as though he might burst—or throw her down on the riverbank and make love to her. He struggled for some rationality but his body still felt as though it was under independent ownership, hot, tight and desperate for satisfaction. He almost groaned aloud. It was a long time since he had had a woman—since his fall from grace and subsequent recovery he had avoided casual affaires—and none of the women he had known had ever affected him in the stunningly physical way that Laura did. That had been part of the problem. The awareness between them was unwanted, it was infuriating, but it was undeniable.
“Mr. Anstruther, do you always find situations such as this so arousing?” Laura’s tone was frigid enough to turn the most ardent man limp.
“Always,” Dexter said grimly. He bent, slid an arm beneath her knees and swept her off her feet and up into his arms. Judging by the startled look on Laura’s face, he guessed that no one had ever done that to her before. Perhaps it was not surprising for she was a tall woman. He stood at over six feet and she was a bare few inches shorter than him. Many men, he was aware, would find that intimidating.
Buffeted by the current, he strode toward the bank and deposited her gently on the ground. She was still wearing one shoe, the match for the one that had floated off down the river. He noticed that her other foot, in its soaked silk stocking, was large for a woman, but nevertheless delicately shaped with an elegantly high instep. For some reason Dexter found the fact that Laura had big feet to be rather endearing. He wished now that the contrast between her size and her apparent fragility did not appeal to him so much. He did not like her and he did not want to be attracted to her any more but reason, the mainspring of his life, seemed to desert him when Laura was around. It was most inconvenient and quite inexplicable.
“Thank you for your assistance.” Laura’s tone was still arctic. “You may leave me now.”
Dexter had had every intention of doing precisely that, but her dismissal grated on him. He stood watching as she wrung the water from her skirts. It was a fairly pointless exercise. Her entire gown was soaking, damp, he was quick to appreciate, in ways that went far beyond the practice followed by fashionable whores. The drenched muslin clung to every one of her curves—and those who declared Laura Cole to have no figure were clearly mistaken for she had the most entrancingly small, rounded, tip-tilted breasts and a deliciously arched line to her hips.
But Dexter knew that already.
He had seen those curves.
He had traced every last one of them with his hands and his lips and his tongue. He had worshipped her with his body…
Suddenly the mild autumn day seemed sweltering. Dexter’s brain ceased to function at any coherent level as his mind finally gave up the resistance and was swamped with erotic images of Laura lying naked on her tumbled bed at Cole Court whilst he followed every lush, tempting line of her body with his lips. The memories seemed indelibly imprinted on his mind. No attempt at erasure ever seemed to work, no matter how he had tried, or how he had pretended to forget her.
He had wondered what would happen if and when he met Laura Cole again. It was a natural enough matter to speculate about. In the encounters he had envisaged, he had variously been civil, cold, contemptuous and indifferent. In none of them had his throat dried with lust and his eyes been riveted to her slender figure as she stood dripping wet and unbearably seductive before him. Another hot wave of desire surged through him even as he shivered as the breeze flattened his wet trousers against his thighs. There was no concealing his enormous erection now.
And Laura had stopped wringing out her skirts, the material falling from her hands as she straightened up, and was looking at him with a mixture of shock and outrage.
“Mr. Anstruther, a gentleman does not stare at a lady in that frank and boorish manner. Nor does he demonstrate such a strong reaction…” She stopped, making a vague flapping gesture with her hands toward his groin.
Dexter could have put her right on that. No matter how much he fought it, no matter how much he wished to suppress his desires, he was obliged to admit that any man with a pulse would be staring when a figure straight from his most heated fantasies was standing before him. That same man would, as Laura herself had put it, develop a strong and well-nigh irresistible reaction to what he saw. From the confrontational tilt of her chin, however, he suspected that Laura would not take kindly to being corrected. She had started to shiver and looked both upset and defiant. Whilst he had no time for her false protestations of respectability—not with the things that he knew about her—he could see that this might not be the moment to discuss the matter.
With one stride Dexter had reached her side and swung her up in his arms again. She went absolutely rigid as soon as he touched her.
“Where are you staying?” he inquired.
“I live at The Old Palace,” Laura said, “but there is absolutely no need for you to carry me home in this fashion. Unhand me at once, Mr. Anstruther. I insist!” She was at her most peremptory. Most people, Dexter was aware, would obey such a command from a dowager duchess. He ignored it and did not even break his stride as he marched purposefully across the water meadow toward the gate that led to The Old Palace.
Laura’s hair was starting to dry now in honey-brown wisps about her face. She had had it cut since Dexter had first known her and the cluster of curls in the nape of her neck was extremely becoming. One of them brushed his cheek like a feather across his bare skin. Dexter felt the shiver down to his toes. It was so light a touch to have so profound an effect on him. But it seemed impossible not