radiating into her skin and his breath curling across her cheek. But his head dropped to the side, and his mouth skimmed her temple, her ear, the side of her throat. The sensations were so tentative—was he touching her or was that his breath against her skin?
Cascading sensations sent a hum through her blood and a shiver through her body. Her nipples drew taut and tingled in a way she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. Holding her breath, she pressed her breasts into him, dragging them along his ribs. He countered her motion, giving her the stimulation she sought and adding a small, tantalizing undulation of his own…one that confirmed the effect she had on him.
Heat rushed to her breasts and her sex, concentrating and intensifying the sensations so that her sensitive flesh burned with the desire for contact. When his knee probed her skirt, she instinctively let it slide between her own and gradually, savoring the yielding, parted her thighs. Steam billowed through her senses as he fitted himself against her. Breath snagged in her throat as sensation mounted like waves.
More, she wanted more.
She pulled her hands from the wall, seized his face between them, and pressed her lips to his. He went perfectly still, and something in her clicked like the switch of an electric light. She froze as reality fanned away some of the steam in her senses.
Abruptly, he peeled himself from her body, leaving her to stagger slightly as she sank back against the wall. The chilled air that invaded the space between them was a rude shock. She was trembling and felt as if her knees had turned to rubber.
Sweet Heaven. What had happened to her?
Her mind clutched at impressions: his burning stare and his hands clenched at his sides…the throb in her woman’s flesh…the prince’s vigorous snores…the open door only three feet away…
She escaped into the hall and down the steps—having to hang on to the railing to remain upright. She headed through the inn’s darkened kitchen and pulled her cloak from the rack by the door as Carson rose from his chair by the hearth. His son, half awake and protesting being dislodged from his father’s lap, clung to his leg.
“You all right, Miz Eller?” The innkeeper dragged his hands over his face, glancing toward the dim glow from the public room.
“They’re out—the lot of them.”
“Just like you planned, eh?” The innkeeper flashed a weary grin.
“Just li-ike—” her voice cracked “—I planned.”
“Want me to walk ye up to th’ house, miz?”
“No—thank you,” she said, grateful for the darkness that hid her burning face. “Morning will come too early for you as it is.” She settled the cloak around her shoulders and pulled up its hood. “And it wasn’t me that drank a hogshead of rum this night.”
“No, it weren’t.” Carson chuckled. “Ye were somethin,’ miz.”
“Yes. Well.” She paused with her hand on the door latch, before stepping out into the chilled autumn night. “I think we’d both be advised to forget everything that happened here tonight.”
2
MARIAH stewed with dread the next day, even after giving orders to turn away all callers with word that she was indisposed. So when Carson’s boy arrived in the afternoon with word that the prince had received a message that put him in a bad humor, climbed aboard his horse and ridden off to Scotland, she wilted with relief.
She had been delivered from the consequences of her brazen behavior.
She should have felt grateful, but instead she was seized by an unholy restlessness. Stalking down to the inn, she went from room to room, sorting and rearranging, clearing rooms and then moving the furniture back. Nothing pleased her. If she hadn’t feared a servant revolt, she’d have begun scrubbing walls and pounding rugs, spring-cleaning six months early.
At wits’ end, she sent for Old Farley to bring some soothing music up to the house. But she sent the old boy away again shortly after he began to play. Every note evoked the memory of a brooding golden-eyed presence.
Even a week later, the restlessness had not lessened.
Desperate to spend the tension inside her, she put on her oldest clothes and went to work in her garden one morning. The oak trees were bare, the flowers had died back, and the shrubbery—all but the balsam and holly—had surrendered to the cold and shortened days. But even here, on her knees in her beloved garden, she had trouble banishing thoughts of that night.
“Tart,” she said irritably, jamming her spade into the cold, dark earth. The autumn sun was too pale and remote to warm the ground where she was planting bulbs beside the arbor walk. Her gloves were caked with wet soil, her fingers were half frozen, and her back ached from the bending. But she was determined to set these blessed daffodils.
“That’s how you are behaving, you know. Like a tart.” She straightened onto her protesting knees. “I am not.”
Glowering, she stabbed the earth again and snatched up another handful of papery golden bulbs.
“I did nothing wrong. He accosted me.”
Though to be fair, accosted was painting it a bit black. He hadn’t kissed her. Hadn’t set hands on her. There wasn’t even a name for what he’d done to her. But it was intimate and pleasurable and furtive, which, by all decent lights, made it wrong, wrong, wrong.
And just like that, she was immersed in the memory she had tried to keep at bay and reliving those erotic sensations in the prince’s darkened sleeping room. Warmth and breath commingled…bodies pressed hard together, hungry, straining for more…Her throat tightened at the thought and her breath came quicker. It was the strange nature of the encounter, she told herself, that made it so difficult to dismiss.
Curse “Jack B. Nimble” for rousing such desires in her.
After Mason had died she had locked away that part of her. It hadn’t been easy; her worldly older husband had been a remarkable lover who tutored her expertly and boldly cultivated her passions. When he died unexpectedly, she had been blooming into her sexual prime and struggled nightly to subdue the desires he had so deftly roused. But then she learned of the entailment that placed her husband’s land in the hands of distant relatives. Left with no income, only an aging house and a coaching inn in bad repair, she had to scramble to survive and poured the energy of her stubborn desires into the hard work of remaking the inn into an establishment capable of supporting herself and her people.
The result was that the Eller-Stapleton had never looked so fine or received such brisk trade. It seemed, after two grueling years, that her life and her business were on the brink of flourishing—despite the debts she had incurred—and that was satisfaction enough.
Until a week ago.
She shoved bulb after bulb into the damp, pungent earth, each time giving the dirt above it a smack, daring the bulb to show its head until spring.
Thus occupied, she didn’t hear Carson’s boy approach.
“Miz?” She turned so sharply that she fell back on her rear, scattering the bulbs she held across the ground. Young Jamie stood with hands in his pockets and a grin on his round, cold-reddened face. “Ye got callers,
