rest explicitly on the secret centre of her and she had to fight not to press her legs together and visibly, physically clamp down on the fiery demand suddenly all too alive and wildly curious for more under his outrageous scrutiny. Kit and Ben hadn’t fought battle after battle to preserve her honour in their youth so she could be secretly tempted to throw it away on a ne’er-do-well like this.
Yet that fully-formed temptation stopped her thundering scold and sharp exit in its tracks. If she let him take her virginity, then she’d lose all her value on the marriage mart the instant he did so. Not even a Charlton Hawberry would take another man’s leavings, so deeply ingrained as it was in a gentleman’s psyche that he must marry a virgin, or at the very least a virtuous widow—she would certainly be neither after a night in the ungallant captain’s bed. It might be a desperate idea, almost as reckless as climbing out of a second-floor window at midnight, but she wasn’t in a position to discard any possibility just now.
‘So I see,’ he said with a pantomime leer she almost applauded, but there was something deeper and darker than simple lust in his eyes as well. It suddenly occurred to her that the real Captain Darke, whoever he might be under all this dark and dangerous front he faced the world behind, could break her heart if she had one. Luckily she didn’t and stared boldly back at him.
‘That could change,’ she warned, ‘if you don’t stop staring at me.’
‘Me, Miss Rockisle?’ he said, and his silvery-blue eyes were beginning to lose the haze of brandy and world-weariness that had clouded them until now. She dare not look lower to find out if his body was as blatantly aroused as his cocky smile and intent gaze argued it must be.
‘Yes, you—we were discussing your total lack of ambition and self-respect rather than my height and frame, if you remember?’ she said coldly.
‘You can talk as much as you like, my lovely, if you have the breath left for it after I’ve finished with you,’ he mocked as he sauntered confidently towards her.
‘I know when a man is determined to shut me up at any price,’ she blustered.
Suddenly it was very quiet in the house, echoingly empty but for the unconscious Coste, who she would have to swear to keep her identity from Hugh Darke, and two almost-adversaries, each determined to give no quarter. Louisa was too much a child of the streets to yield an inch in the eternal battle to make every choice her own, however wrongheaded and contrary it might be, and stood her ground while she wondered what that next choice would be.
‘And I know just as surely when a woman wants me as much as I do her, my dear,’ he said and stepped closer, silvery-blue eyes full of sensual challenge.
‘I’m not your dear,’ she argued and tried to tell herself it didn’t matter.
‘And if you’re not, what do you care? In a profession where “affection” is traded for expensive jewellery, fine gowns and a rich man’s protection, you can’t afford emotions, can you?’
Temper had always been her undoing, Louisa decided as she lost it spectacularly and did her best to punch him in the gut. The wretched, ungentlemanly Captain Darke countered her onslaught by engulfing her in such a tight hold there wasn’t even a tissue of air to shield them from each other and it sparked a heat set burning weeks ago, when they had first laid eyes on each other and wondered ‘what if?’. It was like a force of nature, fuelled by some terrible need she hadn’t known could come so urgent it might tear into her very soul in order to make them indivisible.
She moaned at the shock of wanting more so desperately and should have been shaken instead of fascinated by the novel hardness of his rampant male member nudging explicitly, demandingly against her very core. Logic, scruples, reality—they could all wait. She needed to indulge, to learn, to luxuriate. His mouth took hers in an open-mouthed kiss that stole her breath and sent her straight into sensual arousal no real lady would feel for a lover, at least until he’d chipped away at her scruples and guarded heart for weeks, or maybe even months.
Louisa’s heart kicked with a shameless thrill at being so easily seduced, so starkly introduced to rampant sexual hunger, to the merciless drive of one achingly aroused body for another. She was all too ready to lose herself in the heat and novelty, and didn’t that prove her uncle and aunt had been right all along and she’d never make a proper lady?
Unable to resist the urge to explore him with every sense as he amply demonstrated his skills as a lover of passionate women, she lazily let the tips of her fingers take a census of his features. His chin felt as firm as if he chewed nails for a pastime, when not seducing very unlikely maidens, and it was intriguingly shadowed with fine, dark whiskers.
‘I’d have barbered myself if I’d known you were coming,’ he told her wryly in a brief moment of respite, then ran his index finger over her tingling lips as if they fascinated him as much as his did her, before kissing her again as if he couldn’t help himself test their softness and their welcome.
The small part of her brain not occupied with kissing him back went on with her sensual exploration of his intriguing features. He’d broken his nose once upon a time, as she felt a slight twist in his regally aquiline nose, and she decided it made his wickedly handsome face more human. His mouth was all sensuality just now; his firm lips on her softer ones were a balm, the impudent exploration of his tongue an arousing, teasing echo of something deeper and darker at the core of her that throbbed and ground with need in shameless response.
Her breath sobbed when he raised his mouth enough to lick along the cushiony softness he’d made of her lush lips, to tease and tantalise their moist arousal with his tongue as if he couldn’t get enough of her. Then it was his turn to groan as she darted her tongue inside his mouth, to chase and tease and put into practice all he’d just taught her.
Now wouldn’t he be surprised if he knew I was only as adept in the amorous arts as he’s just shown me how to be? she mocked herself silently.
He was a drunkard, a hardened cynic, and now she could add accomplished seducer of women to the slate against him. And he thought her barely one step away from a doxy touting for custom in the Haymarket. Even under the addictive spell of his kiss, Louisa managed to sigh. To him she was a willing mouth and an eager body and suddenly that was insulting everything there should be between lovers. If she were what he thought, she’d still have a heart and soul, however broken and damaged, and she wanted to be more than a reluctant itch to be scratched then added to a list of women he’d taken, then all but forgotten. He was more than that as well, for all he looked as if he didn’t care to be.
There was a depth of sadness under all that to hell-with-you manner, what suddenly seemed almost a wasteland of loss behind his cynical self-mockery. If letting him take her to their mutual satisfaction meant no more than a quick tumble in the hay, then she couldn’t do it even to evade a legion of Charltons. No, a mocking internal voice said, because you want too much from this conundrum of a man for that, don’t you, Louisa?
The question taunted her as his large hands cupped her shamefully aroused breasts and threatened to incinerate other wants with the sheer sensual need for more. Her eager nipples pebbled under the wicked stimulation of his suddenly very sensitive fingers and she felt as if she might burst into spontaneous flames. Temptation tore into her at the very thought of learning more, of letting him take her and render her unmarriageable between one moment and the next, but she fought it. Those who loved her might hope she wavered because of proper, belated, maidenly shrinking at the irrevocable step between virgin and woman, but
