he doubted she remembered her own name, let alone his.
‘If I do there will be no going back for either of us,’ he managed to grate out between lips stiff with wanting and needing to do exactly what she demanded.
‘Edmund,’ she whispered and it was an agreement, not a denial.
Triumph roared through him as his body tightened even more painfully. He struggled to leash his own out-of-control instincts and the need he’d kept under such a mighty curb ever since he’d met her in the face of her suddenly so wild, so natural, so truly Kate-like urgency. The lure of lowering her on their host’s fine carpet and thrusting into the warmth and welcome she was innocently laying out for him tempted him until it felt like too much of an effort, too much of a betrayal not to give in and take her to their mutual ecstasy.
He tensed to do as they both wanted and seize her by that ridiculously slender waist of hers and soothe and stoke her passion until neither of them had any choice but to let themselves sink onto the floor of this room in a stranger’s house and rut like a pair of spring-tortured animals. He’d always known she would be matchless and sweet and impulsive and unashamed in her wants and needs, if she ever let herself be the passionate and extraordinary woman she had it in her to become. Now that Kate was free from the restraints the miseries of the past had forced her to curb her true, passionate self with, she was utterly breathtaking as she took fire in his arms and demanded an intense seduction neither of them would ever want to forget.
And here they were, exactly where they should not be, with risk and scandal dogging every step along the way, and all it would take to set it off was someone else feeling the urge to wander as she had wandered and find them out. They were trespassing in the shadows of their host’s private rooms, with an open door at their back and hundreds of curious guests far too eager for any slight scandal that presented itself to their eager ears and eyes a matter of mere yards away. Reluctantly he restrained the ravenous wolf within him bond by painful bond, until he could gasp in a huge breath of cooling air and set his forehead to hers, drawing on an unexpected stock of true tenderness that surely only she could unleash in him at such a time.
‘Not here, lover,’ he murmured, ‘and certainly not now.’
‘Where then, and when?’ she demanded, the tremble in her low-voiced demand threatening to undo all the good he’d managed to do them.
‘In our marriage bed, after all is made right between us in our own eyes.’
‘It was right,’ she protested bitterly, drawing away from him as if his touch repelled her now and he cursed her contrary, headstrong nature, even as he knew very well it was one of the things that made him want her so unbearably that he’d take her on virtually any terms.
He wondered if he’d made a mistake after all by not seducing her as if she meant no more than a quick and lusty roll in the hay to him. Yet every instinct that wasn’t primitively crying out for her and a release from this nigh-overwhelming frustration shouted just as loudly that he’d have lost a crucial part of her if he’d sunk into her and brought them both to a quick and savage climax on the floor in a virtual stranger’s house with so much risk all around them.
‘Not until you know exactly what you want from me and why,’ he told her implacably.
‘I want you, and I want you now,’ she challenged him furiously.
‘But why, Katherine, why do you suddenly want me so much?’
‘Because …’ She almost let something betraying slip out, but stopped herself just in time, as she always had when it came to her feelings for him, whatever they might be, and now he doubted she knew any better than he did.
‘Because I’m irresistible, because I make your world shift and then brighten whenever I come into the room? Or is it just because I’m the first man to get past your ice-queen defences and make you feel the possibilities of being a real woman?’ he made himself ask in a voice husky with wanting to do just as she urged, to forget anything else and let the devil take care of afterwards.
Luckily she was far too innocent, far too confused to read his true state from that gruff enquiry, for if she truly ignored the scruples that had backed them away from the precipice and rubbed her roused body against his, butted her mouth against his and demanded more, he knew he’d be beyond controlling his response to her, beyond fighting this reckless need that tore at his self-control and snapped at the fetters he was trying to put on both their demons.
‘I really can’t imagine,’ she told him with such a superb attempt at frosty dignity he almost applauded, except that would drive her further back behind her defensive ramparts and he couldn’t allow that now they were so close to getting where he’d wanted them to be for so long.
‘Oh, I think you can, Kate,’ he murmured.
‘So you can prove to me I’m just a foolish woman like any other you might care to kiss in the dark? I think you just did that,’ she said quietly and all hope might have drained out of him, if he hadn’t reminded himself that everything about their recent encounter argued the exact opposite, if only she wasn’t so innocent. She didn’t know the difference between mere lust and the nigh-overwhelming passions and heady emotions they’d just lit in each other.
‘If that was all I wanted, I could have done it perfectly well three years ago and got it out of the way,’ he said flatly.
‘Arrogant, boasting braggart that you are?’ she gritted furiously.
‘Adult, realistic man that I am now,’ he corrected and did his best not to grin at her as she sucked in a mighty breath in order to denounce him comprehensively enough to slake her wounded pride. ‘Quiet!’ he ordered abruptly.
All Edmund’s senses were alert again as he remembered the world outside this silent, darkened room and cursed himself. He shouldn’t have taken such a reckless risk with Kate, shouldn’t have got so close to seducing her and himself in this risky, hole-and-corner fashion. His ridiculous susceptibility to her hadn’t withstood the purely tempting fact of her, alone and unguarded and almost sad in the darkness. She’d gone straight to his head like fine wine, just as she had the first time he’d ever set eyes on her, and it tore so painfully at his heart to see her pensive and lonely that he finally accepted Ben was right. He could never turn his back on her and all she meant to him, despite the nearly three years of effort he’d wasted trying to evict her from his heart. He cursed himself for making that discovery in such a place as he heard another whisper of sound from outside his host’s study.
‘Don’t you—’ She never quite managed to counter his abrupt order since he clamped an impatient hand over her mouth and forced himself to at least try to ignore the feel of it, soft and moist under his palm, since he wanted his senses alert for whoever was creeping about outside.
He saw a wicked glint come into Kate’s eyes even through the gloom, as if she knew very well that the connection between them had not been severed and probably never really would be now. She narrowed her gaze and let her sharp and sweet tongue lick his palm, even as she breathed in quite happily through her nose and watched him like a houri. No, he couldn’t succumb to her mischievous allure, the gnawing temptation to kiss and take and to hell with the consequences. Evidently he was as fast under her spell as ever, but he wasn’t going to be discovered here with her, because the decision to marry him or not would then be sidestepped and void as it became inevitable, and that would let her off the hook of having to admit how she felt about him. Marriage of convenience indeed! he scoffed silently. How could she be so wilfully blind to her own passionate nature?
‘Someone’s coming.’ He risked getting even closer to murmur in her ear and felt her senses jar and her mouth tense enough for him to risk taking his hand away.
Casting about him for any avenue of escape, he noted the locks on the long windows into the garden with something like despair. For a moment there seemed nothing for it but to face whoever was coming and announce his immediate engagement to the woman he’d wanted for so long, but he wasn’t inclined to let whoever was coming dictate their fate. Seeing a door into