When Harry Met Molly

She nodded. “Do you want to talk about it? I don’t know exactly what happened. Papa’s never told me.”

“Ah. So he’s alluded to it, then.”

Molly lowered her eyes. “Yes.”

Harry’s chest tightened. “He probably told you to stay away from me. Be courteous, but don’t spend too much time with me.”

Molly looked up then. “He never said so directly. And as I’d already made clear my…my disdain for you”—she bit her lip—“I suppose he never felt the need to warn me off.”

“It really doesn’t matter what happened to me in the army.” Harry strove for a light tone. “My father never notices my successes or failures.”

“Then that’s his loss, isn’t it?” Molly said, edging a bit closer. “Families are funny things. I don’t think your father means to overlook you. He might even feel you are overlooking him.”

She smiled, and for some reason, he smiled back. She certainly had an interesting way of looking at things. And if she had any disdain for him, she wasn’t showing it now. Her eyes were alight with an earnestness—a warm intensity—that he found entirely…adorable.

And irresistible.

He girded himself to be strong. Noble. Protective.

She leaned toward him and put a hand on his chest. “Thank me, Harry,” she said in a throaty whisper. “Because if I hadn’t written that lovesick poem implicating you and Penelope while pouring out my undying love for Roderick—”

“No one would ever have known I kissed her mere weeks before their wedding,” he whispered back. “And I never would have joined the army.”

“And fought so well at Waterloo.”

She knew about that? Of course, the gossip implicating him as a disgrace to the army canceled out any stories he had to tell about Waterloo, but still. She knew.

“How did you know?” he asked her.

“Roderick told Penelope. And she mentioned it in a letter to me.”

The clock ticktocked on the mantel, and the wind moaned against the windowpane. Molly’s eyes were wide and the warmest brown he had ever seen—still impish, but sparking with an invitation to—

God help him! Maybe he could simply be strong and noble—and give up on being protective.

“I know we’re like a burr under the other’s saddle,” she said. “But I need the kissing practice, remember?”

“That’s right.” He swallowed. “Practice.”

So he laid her back on the bed and kissed her thoroughly, to the point that he was beginning to take liberties that he really didn’t need to take to prove she and he were together, as it were, at the house party.

But she was sunlight and ambrosia, and she stoked a heat in his veins that he feared would soon consume every ounce of his self-control. He kissed her again, cupping one of her perfect breasts in his palm and caressing its fullness.

“Harry,” she whispered.

“Not Samson?” he murmured back, their lips still joined in deep, seductive play.

She shook her head.

Thank God for that.

He bent his head lower still, his tongue tracing her neckline where it plunged between those amazing breasts. She was intoxicating, and he wasn’t sure why. Of course, he’d always noticed her luxuriant brown tresses, sweet face, and lithe figure, but they hadn’t counted—she was Molly, after all, his neighbor and his nemesis.

When she wove her fingers through his hair and caressed his scalp with her fingers, it felt wickedly good, but not so good as his pushing down one side of her bodice and lavishing her pert and beautiful breast with more kisses.

“You’re gorgeous,” he murmured, and ran his tongue around her rosebud nipple.

“Oh, Harry.” She moaned so loudly that he swiftly moved from her breast to her mouth to keep her quiet. She was driving him wild with her enthusiasm, but for her sake, he wanted no one else to hear her.

She was a lady. And he wouldn’t have the others thinking he and Molly were up to no good in here—

Although that was exactly what he was supposed to want them to think. Wasn’t it?

And they were up to no good, weren’t they?

It was all very confusing.

When they came up for air, Molly’s cheeks were pink and her eyes, a simmering brown. She looked incredibly desirable, Harry thought, more desirable than any mistress he’d ever had. But even through the blinding haze of his lust for her, his head was asking, Why? What was it about Molly that made his blood quicken to a fever pitch the moment his lips touched hers?

In light of their bitter history and the fact that he could very well wind up married to her if all went wrong with this caper, his desire for her made no sense. All she would have to do was tell her father and his about their week at the duke’s hunting box, and Harry was a doomed man.

And she’d fare no better. Even he believed she deserved someone with an unsullied reputation, a husband who could hold his head high and make a fitting partner for her.

All the more reason for the fire between them to be extinguished. If only he could resist her soft lips, he’d put it out right now!

But Molly beat him to it. She pulled away from him and stood, smoothing down her skirt. “It was once again a very good practice,” she said shyly. “I think everyone will believe we’re…a couple, don’t you?”

He struggled to recover from the abrupt end to their lovemaking by appearing completely aloof in expression.

“Yes, I do,” he replied, but his voice was still gruff with unspent desire and a need for something he couldn’t name, a vague something that went beyond a lustful bed ding—although he had no idea what it was.

He stood. “Keep your door locked,” he instructed her in the clipped way he would a foot soldier, “and come get me if you’re frightened.”

Molly looked up at him with trust in her eyes. “I’ll knock on your door if I get scared. I know you’d make me laugh, Harry.”

And for some reason, that look of hers—and those simple words—almost penetrated the invisible armor he wore, the armor that kept him detached and alone. She actually seemed to need him, and no one had ever needed him before.

The army had needed the soldier. His family had needed the second son. But who had ever really needed… Harry? For being Harry?

Not a single person.

At least until now.

Chapter 16

The next morning, Molly woke up when the sun was already slanting across her pillow. She sat up and looked at the clock on the mantel. Nine! That was a late hour for her. But she didn’t care. She felt happy for some reason, and then she remembered why.

Harry.

Well, Harry and Samuel Taylor Coleridge actually.

A smile tugged at her mouth. She’d gotten better acquainted with both of them last night. Her body literally tingled at the memory of Harry’s kisses and caresses—and her heart beat faster thinking about the thrilling “Kubla Khan,” which she’d decided to perform at the dramatic reading competition.

She wondered how Athena and Joan could have possibly overlooked Coleridge’s poem, but when Molly had tiptoed down to the library with a candle in the middle of the night (she’d kept waking up and thinking about Harry), she’d found it on Harry’s desk.

Then she’d realized Athena would no doubt read Shakespeare, and Joan—who knew what she’d read?