He was devilish, experienced-unused to being denied. He had more weapons in his arsenal than she’d dreamed of, yet even while she realized he hadn’t been anywhere as near losing control as he’d let her believe, she also sensed, and his reluctance to engage those more potent weapons he possessed confirmed, that he was walking as fine a line as she-the line between conquest and surrender, not to himself, or to her, but to passion.
She pressed her hands up, framed his face, clung as she kissed him, as she met the next thrust of his tongue and with reckless abandon drew him deep.
His control shook, wavered.
Abruptly she discovered she’d waltzed them to the edge of a sexual precipice, and they were suddenly teetering on the brink.
She didn’t have strength enough left to haul them back.
Neither, it seemed, did he.
His hands, on her body, firmed, his grip suddenly more demanding.
“Yes, Mildred-I do assure you it’s
Lady Kershaw’s haughty tones achieved what neither of them could. Jerked back to sanity, they both froze. Both rediscovered their reins and pulled back. Quietly, barely moving, they broke the kiss, hesitated for a moment, their breaths mingling, then they carefully lifted their heads and looked around.
“It’s this way-right at the back near the windows.”
Neither of them moved. They were in an aisle off the central walkway bisecting the conservatory. The brisk
Pris held her breath, felt his hands tighten about her waist, tensing as if to whisk her behind him, but the ladies-Lady Kershaw and Mrs. Elcott-engaged in a heated argument about a particular bloom, swept past the open end of the aisle without noticing them.
She glanced at Caxton-Dillon. They were surely on first-name terms now. He caught her eye, held a finger across his lips.
Then he bent and retrieved her shawl.
She took it, bunched it in one hand as he pointed farther down the aisle. Taking her hand, he drew her with him; she tiptoed so her heels didn’t clack on the tiles.
He turned right at the end of the aisle, into another that followed the outer glass wall back toward the house. Before they reached the front of the room, the glass changed to brick. He halted by a door in the wall. Easing it open, he looked through, then stepped out, whisking her with him, then turned and shut the door.
They were in a small foyer connecting an external door with the corridor to the ballroom; Pris told herself she was glad the door hadn’t led into some other private room.
Her pulse was still racing, her skin still warm. Far safer to retreat, regardless of the compulsion of her traitorous desires.
Shaking out her shawl, she draped it over her shoulders and tied the ends once more between her breasts, concealing her dashingly dramatic bodice.
Glancing up, she surprised a disgusted look on Dillon Caxton’s face.
Meeting her gaze, he held it for a moment, then shook his head. “Never mind.”
He waved her back into the corridor. Without another word, they returned to the ballroom.
Just before they stepped across the threshold, he closed his hand about her elbow and halted her.
Brows rising, she looked back and up at him.
He trapped her gaze, quietly said, “Tell me why you need to know, and I’ll answer every question you have.”
She held his gaze for a corresponding moment, then equally quietly replied, “I’ll think about it.”
Facing forward, she stepped into the ballroom.
On her bay mare, crossing the Heath in the wispy fog of early morning, Pris skirted veiled riders from various strings out exercising in the chill. Disguised again as a lad, hat low, head down, her muffler about her chin, she cantered steadily toward the area favored by the Cromarty string.
The Heath, she’d learned, was the property of the Jockey Club and made available to the stables with race horses registered to run at the Newmarket track. While watchers were discouraged from viewing any trials, the early-morning gallops were another matter; she glimpsed the odd figure cloaked in mist studying the horses as they were put through their paces.
She rode on, praying that Rus would take advantage of the cover of the filmy fog to spy on Harkness and Lord Cromarty’s horses.
Her problems were compounding. When Dillon Caxton had offered to answer every question if she told him why she needed to know, while she’d known he’d been referring to the register, for one instant, she’d wished he’d been speaking of other things. Things of a more private nature.
“The last thing I need is to grow infatuated with a damned Englishman, especially one who’s more handsome than I am.”
Especially given he harbored the clear aim of interrogating her under the influence of passion.
People got others drunk in order to question them. He’d tried to make her drunk on desire, intoxicated with sensual plea sure. The bastard. He’d added significantly to her worries. She had no idea why she was so susceptible to his “persuasion”; his dramatic, overtly sensual good looks should have inured her to his charm-mere attractiveness invariably bored her. Instead…
She was increasingly anxious that if he sought to more definitely tempt her, she wouldn’t be able to resist, to hold against him, or her own too-impulsive desires.
The next time…
Her nerves tightened. The longer she remained in Newmarket, the longer she took to locate Rus, made a “next time” increasingly inevitable. Then Caxton would press her further, and further, until she stopped resisting his questions. And him.
She wasn’t so inexperienced she didn’t know that the lust he wielded to fog her mind was perfectly real.
Her senses skittered, whether in fevered anticipation or anticipated fright, she didn’t like to think. Muttering another curse, she shut her mind to such unproductive thoughts and peered ahead. She was nearing the right spot.
Through drifting mists, she detected the outline of another string exercising, the thud of hooves reverberating oddly through the damp air. Breathy snorts mingled with instructions and quick replies, distorted by the fog; reining in a sufficient distance away not to draw attention, she tuned her ears to the chatter, instantly distinguishing the soft burr of her mother tongue.
Instead of easing, her nerves coiled tighter. Lifting the mare’s reins, she soundlessly urged the horse into a slow walk, traveling a wide circle around the area where Cromarty’s horses trotted and galloped.
She rode slowly to avoid detection, the clop of the mare’s hooves submerged beneath the race horses’ relentless pounding. The fog was both an aid and a disadvantage; at one point when it thinned she realized she’d ventured too close to the parading horses. Keeping her head down, she adjusted her route to arc around a large copse.
Rounding it, she looked ahead.
On the far side of the copse, wreathed in fog, a lone figure sat ahorse. Black hair, good seat. He was staring intently into the copse-perhaps through the copse at the horses?
He was too far away; she couldn’t judge his height and build, yet…
In the instant her heart lifted in hope, the man turned his head and saw her.
Horror speared icelike through her veins.
The man cursed, lifted one arm.
Swallowing a yelp, she ducked, simultaneously clapping her heels to the mare’s flanks. A ball whistled over her head, whining eerily through the fog; a split second later, the report of the pistol crashed over her.
Spooked by the sound, by her fear and her urging, the mare shot off, streaking across the green, parallel to the copse.
Past the man, but separated by sufficient distance for Pris to see him as nothing more than a blurred shape through the billowing fog. A blurred shape drawing forth another saddle pistol.
