“
Oh, God, Jane, why did I let you go?” he asked in an aching voice that resonated to her very soul. “I’ve been lost ever since.”
The words melted the last corner of ice in her heart, and when he lowered his head to hers, she rose to him like a shoot stretching for the sun.
Moaning low in his throat, he devoured her mouth, his kiss pure hot passion, so all-consuming that within moments she had to pull free just to breathe. Then he shifted his kisses to her cheek and ear and jaw, branding everything as his.
“I need you,” he said against her throat. “God help me for it, but I do. All these years without you have been hell.” Kissing her neck, he fisted his hands in her sleeves. “I want to strip this gown from you. I want to lay you down in that straw over there and have my way with you.”
The words made her exult. “Then do it,” she murmured against his hair. “Now. Tonight. Have your way with me, and I’ll have mine with you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said darkly, but he seized her mouth again with such ferocity that it took her aback…then fed some feral part of her that had never felt like this with anyone but him. She couldn’t get her fill of his mouth…or his hands, which roamed her most familiarly.
Wanting to touch him, too, she reached for the buttons of his waistcoat.
He broke their kiss to stare at her, a sudden sobering awareness in his eyes. “We shouldn’t do this here.”
There was no question what “this” meant. There was also no question that he was having second thoughts, pulling away from her. She refused to let him. “Why not? The grooms and the coachman have all gone to bed. And you did say you meant to marry me.”
“Yes, but you’re a lady,” he said fiercely. “You deserve better than to be tumbled in a stable.”
That was the trouble with Dom. Some part of him still saw her as the poor maiden needing his protection, not as a full-grown woman who had the same needs as he had. Who wanted and yearned just the same as he did.
He’d sent her away last night to protect her innocence, and then had avoided her for the next day. She wasn’t giving him the chance to do that again, not now that he’d allowed her a glimpse into his soul.
Dragging her hands free of his grip, she went to shut the door to the harness room. “Twelve years ago you decided what I deserved, and I ended up alone. So this time I will decide what I deserve.” Ignoring a twinge of self-consciousness, she faced him and began to undo the front fastenings of her pelisse-robe. “And I deserve this. I deserve you.
”
”