A Taste of Desire(47)
But her knees barely brushed the floor when she was hauled to her feet and into Lord Armstrong’s hard embrace. The wet rag fell from her startled hand to the floor.
“What—” She let out a gasp and clutched his shoulders for balance.
“Damn, but you are the most obstinate, willful, exasperating female—” He covered her mouth in a searing kiss. Amelia resisted for the time it took his tongue to penetrate the wall of teeth guarding the inside of her mouth, a task requiring only seconds. With that citadel breeched, her lips parted in helpless wonder, in hunger. She felt completely out of herself, drifting on a plane of pleasure that grew with every slow thrust of his tongue. Then his hands were on her bottom, squeezing and dragging her closer until she could feel his erection nudging her center through the inconvenient bulk of silk and cotton petticoats. Amelia whimpered and strained to get closer.
He abandoned her lips, which elicited a moan of protest. His mouth scored her cheek and then her chin, anointing every spot with a feathery kiss. Her head fell back with a soft groan, and he took advantage of the full access he now had to the long line of her neck. Her nails scraped his scalp, the feel of his hair soft and silky between her fingers as she pulled him closer.
She’d never known the spot behind her ears was so sensitive until his mouth settled there, the surge of his breaths its own caress. Amelia drank in the sounds of his pleasure and the scent of male heat, starched linen, and—coffee.
Reality descended down on her with pride crushing force. Her body immediately became rigid as she jerked her hands from his tousled strands to give his shoulders a hard shove. With a grunt and a bewildered look, he took a step back, his hands falling to his sides.
Good Lord, what was she doing? What was wrong with her? Earlier, she’d thought him mad when in truth she had to be the mad one.
For several moments, neither spoke, her labored breathing the only sound to fill the lengthening silence. If the viscount had been at all affected by the kiss, his expression revealed none of it.
“I need to change.” His gaze flickered down to her skirts. “And so do you.” With that, he strode from the room.
Amelia glanced down, and on her silk skirt, plain for all to see, was a large coffee stain.
Chapter 13
That evening under the light of the tallow candle in her bedchamber, Amelia penned a letter to Lord Clayborough. The pen pierced the paper in several places as if her words weren’t enough to convey her growing sense of urgency. And she despised that feeling of desperation.
Amelia was also tempted to write to Elizabeth, but could not bring herself to burden her with the horror of her circumstances when her friend, the Countess of Creswell, happily awaited the birth of her first child in four months.
After sealing the letter and placing it on the bedside table to give to the footman to post, Amelia crawled into bed doing something she rarely did: she fretted. She’d always thought it was nothing but a wasted bit of emotion signified by heavy sighs and persistent worry, which accomplished little and solved nothing. However, she had to concede that the matter of her physical reaction to Thomas Armstrong did call for something, if not fretting itself, then something close in association.
The truth of it was she couldn’t trust herself around him—alone with him. Nothing seemed to be able to change that. The kiss that morning had punctuated that point quite emphatically and her dress—the coffee stain raising not an eyebrow from Hélène—acted as a glaring reminder. She was no better than the women he’d taken to his bed. In actuality, she was worse, for hers hadn’t been a courting with the expected flowers, pretty words, or gestures of adoration. No, he had her succumbing when only two minutes before she would have gladly seen him hung, drawn, and quartered. Embarrassment didn’t come close to describing her feelings.
If only she could send the letter to Lord Clayborough by messenger as she had done in London. A story of a farmer who’d found two bags of letters near his barn—letters two years old—had circulated through London two months ago. Since then, Amelia hadn’t fully trusted the post. However, this wasn’t her house and these weren’t her servants to utilize at will. Moreover, she’d never be able to manage something like that with the viscount in residence.
The morning following, Amelia had been at her desk a full fifteen minutes before the viscount arrived. With yesterday’s kiss still vivid in her mind, Amelia kept her gaze focused on the papers in front of her, feigning a concentration that had all but abandoned her the moment he’d stepped foot in the study.