naked, sweating bodies…her-self impaled and shrieking with pleasure.
Without breaking the kiss but deepening it instead, her tongue thrusting against his, she lifted herself up and turned to straddle him. In the closed space of the carriage, her skirt’s and petticoats’ rustling sounded like thunder.
He moved his hands over her shoulders, tugging down the dress. She heard—or felt—the silk rip. She didn’t care. He dragged the dress down, and pushed down the top of her corset. She felt the air on her exposed breasts before he broke the kiss to bring his mouth there. His tongue grazed her nipple and she groaned, and when he suckled, she gasped, and threw her head back, and laughed, and caught her hands in his hair and kissed the top of his head, again and again. But the tug on her breast tugged deep inside as well, low in her belly, making her impatient, squirming.
She let go of him to grasp her skirts and petticoats. She pulled them up, and his big hand slid over her thigh—
Light exploded, filling the carriage’s interior. It lasted only an instant, but it was an instant’s too-bright daylight, and it shocked and woke her from the mad dream she’d fallen into, even before the deafening crack shook the carriage.
She pushed his hand away, pushed down her skirt, and pulled up her bodice. She climbed down from his lap.
“Damnation,” he said thickly. “Just when it was getting interesting.”
Another blinding flash of light. A pause. More thunder.
She returned to her seat and tried to put her dress to rights. “It wasn’t supposed to get interesting, devil take me. I knew I oughtn’t to get into a vehicle with you, not when we were so wrought up. Stop the carriage. You must let me out.”
Lightning crackled again. And again. Thunder boomed, and it sounded like a war.
“You’re not going out in that,” he said.
“I most certainly am,” she said. She got up to wrestle with the window. She had to get it down to reach the door handle outside. Before she could do so, the carriage lurched to a stop, and she stumbled. He caught her, but she dug her nails into his hands.
He didn’t let go. “It was only a kiss,” he said.
“It was more than only,” she said. “If not for the lightning, we should have done exactly what I told you I absolutely will not, must not, cannot do.”
“That isn’t what you told me.”
“Were you even listening?”
“You didn’t say you would not must not cannot do it,” he said. “Not precisely. What you said, in so many words, was that your prospective London patrons mustn’t get wind of it.”
She wrenched away from him, and the carriage lurched into motion at the same time. This time she fell onto him. She wanted to stay, oh, how she wanted to stay. She wanted to climb onto his lap and wallow in his warmth and his strength and his touch. She made herself scramble away, pushing away his hands, and she flung herself onto her seat. It was the work of a few seconds, but it felt like a lifetime’s labor to her.
Resisting temptation was horrible.
“You split your hairs exceedingly fine,” she said breathlessly.
“And you thought I wasn’t listening,” he said.
“You chose to hear what a man would choose to hear,” she said.
“I’m a man,” he said.
That ought not to strike her as the understatement of the decade, but it did.
A man, only a man, she told herself—but look at what he’d done, what she’d done.
Nothing ought to have happened as it had: the incendiary kiss, the speed with which reason and self-control had disintegrated—even for her, that was extreme. She had underestimated him or overestimated herself, and now she wanted to kill somebody because she couldn’t think of a way to have him without ruining everything.
If she hadn’t done that already.
Think. Think. Think.
The carriage stopped and she wanted to scream. Would this journey never end?
The door opened. An umbrella appeared, attached to the gloved hand of a drenched footman.
Clevedon started up from his seat.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I’m not accustomed to tossing women from the carriage and allowing them to make their own way to their doors.”
“I don’t doubt there’s a good deal you’re not accustomed to,” she said.
But he was already moving down the steps, and arguing with him wouldn’t make the footman any drier.
Ignoring the hand Clevedon offered, she stepped down quickly from the carriage and ran through the rain for the haven of the hotel’s portico. He ran after her. His legs were longer. He caught up in no time, and threw a sheltering arm about her for the last few feet.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“Not now,” she said. “Your footmen will catch their death.”
He glanced back, and there was enough light at the hotel entrance for her to make out the puzzled look on his handsome face.
“You can’t leave them standing in a downpour while we argue,” she said.
No doubt he did it all the time. To him, servants were merely animated furniture.
“I wasn’t intending to argue,” he said, “but I forgot. Talking with you is most usually an argument.”
“We can talk on Sunday,” she said.
“Later today,” he said.
“I’m engaged with Sylvie,” she said.
“Break the engagement.”
“I’m not free until Sunday,” she said. “You may take me riding in the Bois de Boulogne when it isn’t teeming with aristocrats showing off their finery. After Long-champ, the place will be relatively quiet.”
“I was thinking of a place not so public,” he said.
“I wasn’t,” she said. “But let’s not debate now. Send me a message on Saturday, and I’ll meet you on Sunday, wherever you choose, as long as it isn’t too disreputable. There are places even a lowly dressmaker shuns.”
“Wherever I choose,” he repeated.
“To talk,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “We have business to discuss.”
She was well aware that the business he wanted to discuss was not her shop and Lady Clara’s patronage thereof. She’d been a fool to imagine she could manage this man. She should have realized that a duke is used to getting his own way, to a degree common folk could scarcely imagine. She should have realized that getting his way all his life would affect his brain and make him not altogether like other men.
In short, she would have done better to keep out of his way and send Sophy after his bride-to-be.
But she hadn’t realized, and now she had to salvage the situation as best she could. She knew only one way to do that.
“I know your footmen are mere mechanical devices to you,” she said. “But I can only think that one or both of them is sure to take a chill, and develop a putrid sore throat or affection of the lungs. So bourgeois of me, I know, but I can’t help it.”
Again he glanced back. One footman stood at a discreet distance, holding the umbrella, awaiting his grace’s pleasure. The other stood on his perch at the back of the carriage. They’d both donned cloaks, which by now must be soaked through, in spite of their umbrellas.