“If I did not know better, I would suspect you of trying to compromise me, Camellia,” he said, softly teasing. “Wearing that ribbon. Luring me here. Were you hoping to save your cousin by exposing me for a rogue? I can assure you, everyone already knows.” One hand rose to sweep a lock of her hair out of her eyes. The same wayward curl that Felicity had tried to restrain, perhaps. But the brush of his fingers behind her ear, the warmth of his palm beside her cheek were not at all the same. “You should be considerably more worried that I will compromise you.”
Her mouth was dry, too parched for speech. She longed for a glass of the ice-cold champagne that had been flowing so freely in the other room, though she feared if one were in her grasp now, she would have tossed it back like a trollop.
“Y-you couldn’t,” she managed to say at last, all the while a prisoner to his heated gaze.
“Is that a challenge?” His hand slid forward and he traced the curves and dips of her upper lip with the pad of his thumb, then dragged it across the fullness of the lower. Inexplicably, her tongue longed to dart out and chase the sensation of his touch. Not the first time, certainly, that her Irish tongue had got her in trouble. She did not part her lips until she could be certain it was under her control.
“You cannot compromise me,” she declared. And she meant it. “No one gives a fig about my reputation. I am a woman of mature years—almost eight and twenty of them, if you must know—no green girl whose innocence must be carefully guarded. And most important of all, I am a lady’s companion, not a lady.”
He took in her words without blinking, without releasing her, without reacting in any way. As if he expected them, or accepted them in any case. Until she reached the end of her litany.
“You are a niece of the Earl of Merrick.” His voice was firm, correcting her error. “A granddaughter of the late earl, if my understanding of your family tree is not faulty. Therefore, by birth, a lady.”
If he had not been touching her, she would have shaken her head in denial. But the gesture would only have nestled her cheek into his palm. “I am the daughter of a noblewoman, it is true, but one severed from her family with the neatness and completeness that ordinarily requires a surgeon’s scalpel. I am also the daughter of a Dublin solicitor,” she reminded him. “Not a gentleman, in the common usage of the term. I cherish no hope of rising to a rank to which I have never belonged.”
“Why then did you come to London?”
“Partly for my mother. My uncle expressed a desire to heal the rift in their family.”
“But you are skeptical of his success?”
“At present, he is in no position even to help himself. As you well know.”
Those words did produce some reaction. For the briefest of moments, his eyes slid away from hers. But almost before she had noticed their movement, they were once more focused sharply on her face. “If not only for your family, then why?”
It was her turn to shift her gaze, to let it drift over his lips to settle in the vicinity of his cravat. “I have reasons of my own.”
“Which are not to be divulged…”
“Not at present.”
“And never to me.” Once more, she heard disappointment in his voice. Along with a note of certainty that he deserved to be disappointed.
She longed to smooth a cool hand over his brow, to wipe away the cynicism etched there. But how foolish, really, to imagine that she of all people—sharp tongued, skeptical—had such a gift. If he could be soothed, improved, sweet Felicity would be far better suited to the task, would she not? “I came here to speak with you about the fate of my cousin,” she insisted. “Her brother and her parents have behaved shockingly. And I do not wish to see her hurt.” That, at least, was the truth. Certainly Cami did not want to be the one causing her pain.
“Lady Felicity will be perfectly safe,” he vowed. His thumb now traced the edge of her jaw, then slipped lower to brush back and forth across the silk ribbon encircling her throat. Reflexively, she swallowed, though she knew he would feel that proof of her nervousness, could not miss the flutter of her pulse. A wicked smile curved his lips, and the pressure of his hand increased. He was drawing her closer, lowering his mouth to hers. “You, on the other hand…”
Awareness of what was to come hovered like a freshly dipped quill suspended above a blank page. Her fingertips, the ones he had once kissed, tingled. When she laid that hand against his chest and slid her palm upward to his shoulder, anticipation gathered and grew, trembled at the edge for a moment, then tumbled headlong, chasing through every vein, every fiber of her being, the way a droplet of ink fell from a pen, seeped into the very fibers of the paper, and could never be erased.
The slightest movement—she would not even have to stretch onto her tiptoes—and she would be kissing him.
Instinct told her to close her eyes but the writer in her resisted, determined to absorb every detail of this moment: the unexpected softening of his expression, the sparkle in his heavy-lidded eyes, the grain of beard peppering his skin.
“You should go.” His breath whispered across her lips. “Now.”
But she was not even wise enough to heed the warning in his voice.
Did he move, or did she? In that moment, all that mattered was the meeting of their lips, gentler than she had expected. Gentler than she needed. Sliding her hand higher, around his neck, she pressed closer to him and was rewarded with the hard length of his body, fitted perfectly against her softness. His
