The Lady Most Willing

Byron made a sound in the back of his throat that sounded like a hum.

“What are you doing?” Fiona said, stepping back and frowning. Her spectacles had slid down her nose; she pushed them back up. “I have already informed you that I am not an appropriate person with whom to conduct a flirtation, Lord Oakley.”

“And I have already warned you about using my title,” he said, his voice throaty, and just as she remembered his threat of a kiss, his arms came around her and his mouth descended on hers.

It was not her first kiss. In the heady days before her father matched her with Dugald, she had kissed two boys. For years afterward, she had remembered one of those kisses in particular. She could even remember the sharp smell of the pine needles that crackled under their feet as she and Carrick Farquharson stood in the shade of a garden wall. There had been no second kiss. Carrick had left to fight in His Majesty’s army, and never returned; his body lay in a grave somewhere in France.

Byron’s mouth brushed across hers, and she smelled pine needles, like a ghost of a promise. It was awkward. She didn’t know what to do with her arms, or her spectacles.

The only thing she felt was a deep sense of rightness . . . and an equally powerful sense of wrongness. “We mustn’t do this,” she whispered.

He eased back enough to remove her spectacles. Holding her gaze, he carefully put them on the mantelpiece.

That just meant that Fiona could see his face even more closely. Her brows drew together as she tried to make sense of what was happening. “Why are you kissing me?” she said, keeping her back straight, so that she didn’t relax against him like the veriest trollop. And then, fiercely, “Is it because you know of my reputation?”

“Have you kissed a dancing master as well?” His voice was threaded with a lazy sensuality that made her step back, though his face blurred when she did it.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Then what spurred your lost repute? Not that I would believe such a rumor, because any fool could see that you’re not the one in your family handing out kisses like bonbons.”

“My fiance’s name was Dugald,” she began. She took a deep breath, but he interrupted.

“A terrible name.”

Words bubbled up in her chest, but she didn’t open her mouth to blurt out the story of ivy, and windows, and a reputation so blackened that she was infamous throughout the Highlands. The truth was that she longed for another kiss, just one, before he learned the truth and turned his back in disgust.

When she didn’t speak, Byron cupped her face with his long fingers, carefully—as carefully as he did anything else. Yet when he put his mouth to hers, there was nothing sensible about his kiss. She opened her mouth to his without thinking, wrapping her arms around his neck and standing on her tiptoes.

It was a wicked kiss, deep and wild and glad. She could taste it in his mouth, that sudden, vivid delight, as clearly as if he had said so aloud.

The knowledge of his pleasure curled in her stomach, flared into an odd heat that made her shiver against him, and then he was kissing her so fiercely that her head tilted back.

It was dark behind her closed eyelids. She concentrated on the taste of him and the smell of him, and the way one kiss melted into another, kisses that made her ache and breathe as if she were running, but not away—toward him, closer to him.

Her arms curled more tightly around his neck; then his hands slid to her back and he pulled her against his body. As if it mattered to him that she feel all that hardness and strength.

Their tongues tangled and she slid her fingers into his short hair. Part of her was frozen in stark disbelief that an English earl with white-blond hair and a muscled body was kissing her. Making her feel meltingly soft, and impatient. Making her long for more.

That thought was instantly followed by a rush of panic. She—Fiona—didn’t allow herself to long for anything. She never had. That way was madness. She kept herself sane by never wishing for what she could not have, by recognizing that life had sensible boundaries.

Longing would mean acknowledging that she wished that her mother hadn’t died, that her father cared about her more, that she had never met Dugald, that people had believed her . . . It meant the heartbreak and desperation of knowing that she wanted children, that she wanted a husband, that she . . .

Her panic was as chilling and as overwhelming as an ice-cold wave breaking over her head. She pulled back. “I can’t do this,” she said, her voice rising to a squeak when she looked up at Byron and understood that longing wasn’t strong enough to describe what she was feeling. She seemed to have succumbed to a kind of madness, though she hardly knew him.

In an impulse for self-preservation, she reached out, put her hands on his chest, and pushed at him. She felt hard planes of muscle under her fingers as she pushed, which merely increased her alarm. He didn’t even fall back a step.

“I’m not like this,” she said, her breath sounding harsh in her ears. “I don’t do this. I know I have a terrible reputation, but I’m not . . . I’m not a whore.”

“I would never think that!” he said, quick and fast, and some errant part of her saw