A Daring Liaison(57)

He laughed and dropped his entire stack of counters on the table after exchanging a few words with another man. As the play began again, he turned back to her. “You lie so charmingly, my dear. No need. I’ve come to terms with it.”

“Charles, you are the one who walked away from me. One day you were kissing me senseless and the next—”

A cheer erupted from the table, and the man beside Charles clapped him on the back as the croupier pushed the winnings toward him. “Congratulations, Hunter.”

“Blast,” he murmured. He scooped up a handful and passed them to her. “Hold these, will you?”

She cupped her hands and stood quietly while the play continued. The man next to Charles smiled and stepped back from the table to talk to her. “I say, Mrs. Huffington, if you are so lucky for Hunter, perhaps I ought to have you accompany me to a table or two.”

He knew her name, so he had to know that she hadn’t been particularly lucky for other men. She forced a smile. “Lucky? I think I shall do you a favor and not accompany you, sir. Whatever luck Mr. Hunter has had, he has made for himself.”

“You are too modest.”

The play over, Charles turned to them. “Luck is where you find it, Converse, and I do not intend to share mine.” He gave Georgiana a look that made her knees go weak. It was then that she began to understand. His voice, his manners, his heated looks, made it clear that he was making a slow, deliberate love to her. She should have been embarrassed, but she recovered when she recalled that this was his intent—to make society believe that they were lovers, and were, indeed, engaged to be married. She returned his look and was rewarded by a flicker of surprise in his eyes.

They stared at each other in silence until Mr. Converse cleared his throat and moved away. A slow grin bloomed on Charles’s face. “Well played, Mrs. Huffington.”

A footman brought a small basket for the counters, and another footman offered a tray of wine glasses. Charles took a glass for each of them and led Georgiana to one of the alcoves and a tapestry banquette where they could sit. He put the basket and glasses on a small table, and when he sat close enough for her to feel his heat and smell faint traces of his shaving soap, she felt her expectations rising. Would he kiss her? In public? Or would he drop the drapery to give them privacy?

“Now, what is this about me walking away after our kiss?”

She blinked. How could he not know? Before she could stop herself, she blurted the words she’d guarded since their reintroduction. “Do you really not remember that kiss in Lord Russell’s garden? I was so completely taken with you that I’d have allowed you any liberties you wanted. But then you cooled. I would look for you across a room or at a ball, and you were not there. Or, if you were, you would merely glance at me and turn away.” There! She’d brought it into the open and she only felt relief, not shame.

“Me? I would glance away?”

“I was young. I did not know what I’d done. But I came to believe that I’d allowed you too much access to my person. Only cheap things come easily. You must have thought me very cheap, indeed.”

“Cheap? You think our kiss did not cost me? Oh, Georgiana, if you only knew what it cost me.”

“Then why—”

“Hush,” he whispered as he leaned closer, crooking his finger and lifting her chin.

She was on the verge of tears by the time his lips met hers. Softly, worshipfully. When he ran his tongue along the seam of her lips, she moaned as everything inside her loosened. She opened to him and he accepted the invitation, making small licks against her tongue, inviting her to test him—test his resolve, his passion, his determination.

A deep moan rumbled in his chest and resonated in hers. She could feel his tension like a tightly drawn bowstring ready to snap. Just the memory of what he’d done to her the last time they’d been so enraptured caused a burning in her middle and a moistness at her core. He began to stroke her back, pressing her closer and closer. He would not let her break the kiss and catch her breath. Instead she was falling deeper and deeper into that dark swirling mist of desire until she did not want to breathe. Only to feel. To experience his passion. To be joined to him, locked together in body and mind.

He slipped one hand around to touch her breast, then push one side of the deep V of her décolletage aside so that he could find one soft aureole and tease it into a tight aching bud. He pinched it tenderly and a streak of pure primal pleasure shot down her middle to that other, more demanding, bud.