Her brow furrowed, “How much more clear must I be? I propositioned you in Hyde Park. I met you outside your office dressed like a…” She hesitated. “Well, like the kind of woman who does those things.”
It occurred to him that she often dressed in such a manner. “I don’t care what you wear.”
When she spoke, the words were dry as sand. “You certainly seemed to like the stockings.”
The memory of black silk with silver piping took over, and what would have been a laugh became a growl. “I like the stockings very much.”
She blushed, and he marveled at it. He leaned forward until he was inches away from her face. Her lips. “I wonder,” he whispered, “Do other bits of you go red when you are embarrassed?”
The flush grew. “I don’t know. I’ve never looked.”
“Well, I am most certainly going to look.”
“In the name of investigative journalism, no doubt.”
He grinned. “I am the best newspaperman in London, love. I simply cannot leave the work at the office.”
She matched his smile for a long moment, until the expression faded into seriousness. She looked down at her hands, clasped in the space between them. “You are making me like you,” she said.
He watched her carefully. “You don’t already like me?”
She spoke softly. “Of course I like you. But now – you’re tempting me with things that I cannot have.”
He knew immediately what she meant, and the words sent a wave of sadness through him. He was not the man for her. He could not give her a title. Could not give Caroline security. At best, he was born into mystery. Bred in the gutter.
And that was before she knew the truth.
Before she knew he was not what he seemed. He was nothing that he claimed to be. Before she knew that he had used and manipulated her to gain access to Tremley’s secrets. Before she knew that he was a criminal. A thief.
Destined for prison or worse if he was found out.
When he was found out.
Because no matter how careful he was, no matter how well he threatened Tremley, as long as the earl drew breath, he was at risk.
And everyone he loved was at risk, as well.
So, even if she weren’t on the hunt for a title, he could not be the man she wanted. And he certainly could not be the man she needed.
But he could be the man she had. Right now. For a brief, fleeting moment before they both had to return to reality.
He reached for her, lifting her off her seat, loving the little squeak she released as he pulled her into his lap to straddle him, silken skirts and petticoats cascading around them both. She rose above him, topping his long frame by several inches because of their position, and he adored it, the way she looked down at him, something like promise in her beautiful amber gaze.
“You can have it all tonight,” he said, his voice harsh and graveled and unfamiliar to him. “Every bit of me. Everything you want.”
She leaned back, the curve of her bottom pressing into his thighs, sending wicked, wonderful ideas through his filthy mind.
She began to roll her gloves down her arms. “I want to feel you.”
Not ideas. Plans.
“I want to touch you,” she added. One length of black silk was lost to the darkness of the other side of the carriage, and her hand was on his face, fingers tracing his cheek, his jaw, tilting his head up as she moved down, her lips skimming over the places where her touch had been. “I want to kiss you.”
If she didn’t kiss him, he was going to lose his mind.
She was seducing him with words and touch and scent, and he loved every goddamn bit of it. He wanted to pull her to him, to take her lips and remove the damn wig, to lift her skirts and make love to her until neither one of them could remember their names, let alone the ridiculous arrangement to which they’d agreed.
But he didn’t move. He wouldn’t. There was something about this woman who dealt in desire and sin and sex, something about the way she looked at him, the way she spoke, the way she touched, that made him wonder if she’d ever in her life taken her own pleasure.
And so he waited for her to do it. She would kiss him that night, or they would never kiss. This was her moment. Her pleasure. Her desire.
Once he got her into his house, it would be his turn to give her every inch of pleasure he could.
But now, it was her turn to take it.
She leaned in, and he thought she was going to kiss him. But at the very last moment she pulled back, making him think she’d devised some new and wonderful form of torture. He said her name, and it came like a curse in the darkness.
“Two weeks,” she said.
“What?”
She smiled. “I do think you are addled, sir.”
“This is what happens when you tease a man.”
She ran her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck, and every inch of him responded to the pretty sensation. “Two weeks. No more. Nothing that would get us into trouble. Two weeks and then we are through.”
The fact that he’d thought nearly the same thing mere minutes ago did not stop him from being slightly irritated that she could think about terms for their arrangement.
He agreed, nonetheless. “Two weeks. Now kiss me, goddammit.”
And, blessedly, she did.
She’d never kissed a man.
Oh, she’d been kissed, certainly. On multiple occasions, both wanted and unwanted. She’d been kissed by this man, and it had been magnificent. But she’d never once taken control of a moment such as this one, and kissed a man. Even with Jonathan, when youth and folly should have made her bold.