A Masquerade in the Moonlight(32)
He lifted his arms to her and, against her better judgment, she kicked free of the stirrup and allowed him to help her down, his touch at her waist sending unexpected shivers up her spine, a reaction she was determined to ignore. “We’ll rest the horses for a few minutes,” she said after feeling her feet once more firmly on the ground, “and then you may return me to Portman Square. It is not necessary, however, that we converse at all in the interim. I, for one, have nothing to say to you—and you never say anything of value.”
Thomas stripped off his hacking jacket and spread it on the soft grass with the grace Sir Walter Raleigh must have employed when draping his cape across a mud puddle for his queen, indicating she should join him in the shade, several yards away from the deserted path. Then, once she was seated—for what else could a lady of breeding do but comply?—he went down on his haunches close beside her, his back against a wide tree trunk.
“If you insist, Miss Balfour,” he said at last, “I will remain mute. But I must remind you—you had agreed to hear the sad story of my life. My poor but honest youth in County Clare, where I was orphaned at the tender age of eleven; my voyage to America, stowed away in with the baggage; my apprenticeship to a printer in Philadelphia; my slow but sure rise to considerable wealth and questionable respectability; my appointment as one of my president’s emissaries to the British government. It is such an exhilarating story, and morally uplifting. But if you no longer want to hear it—”
“I believe I just did hear it, Mr. Donovan,” Marguerite pointed out, cutting him off as she stripped off her gloves, laying them down beside her on Thomas’s jacket. But then her interest in what he had revealed got the better of her. “Did you really stow away on a ship? Wasn’t that prodigiously dangerous?”
He pushed himself away from the tree trunk, to sit even closer beside her, and smiled widely, so that she was once more intrigued by the lines that crinkled at the outside corners of his eyes, and captivated by the near living thing that was his full, barely tamed mustache. “Not half so dangerous as sitting here in the shade of this wonderfully concealing stand of trees, Miss Balfour, and looking into your beautiful emerald green eyes. As a matter of fact, I believe I might just drown in their cool depths and go to my death a happy man.”
She lifted her gaze from his mouth to look into his laughing blue eyes, swallowing down hard on a sudden apprehension, a renewed interest, an unladylike curiosity that threatened to betray her. But why was she surprised? Wasn’t this why she had agreed to meet him? Because of this feeling she refused to call by any name other than “curiosity”?
She made an attempt at coyness. “You—you must not speak so intimately, Mr. Donovan. I know I have allowed you liberties I shouldn’t have, but I believe this farce of a courtship has gone far enough. I may be young, but I’m not completely empty-headed—and not without information gleaned from listening well as silly debutantes giggle in withdrawing rooms. That, and the warning I received from Stinky—I mean, Lord Chorley—are enough to have put me firmly on my guard. You are no more than a self-serving flirt, Mr. Donovan, and I refuse to have you amuse yourself any more at my expense.”
“Now I’m hurt, Miss Balfour. I assure you,” he said, his voice rather low, even rough. “I find nothing amusing in our current situation.”
She felt his hand brush the back of hers, his fingers caressing her skin before slipping underneath, where they skimmed light circles on her palm, stroked the sensitive area of her inner wrist, then encircled that wrist, drawing her slowly, but inexorably closer to him.
“I find you fascinating,” he said, his warm breath fanning her heated cheek, his words setting small fires deep inside her chest. “Even frightening.”
Marguerite’s heart began to race, galloping at twice the pace Trickster had set earlier, but still she could not outrun the seductive look in Thomas Donovan’s eyes or the attraction she felt for him, the danger that emanated from him, the insane, illogical, yet compelling need to be closer to him, to feel his mouth on hers.
And he was going to kiss her. She was as sure of that as she was positive she would live to regret this entire morning. She tore her gaze away from his nearly hypnotic stare only to find herself captivated once more by his mouth.
How would his ridiculous mustache be against her skin—rough or soft?
How would it feel to have his strong arms around her, to experience the pressure of the hard wall of his muscular chest against her breasts?