How to Woo a Wallflower (Romancing the Rules #3)(81)

With one push at the drapery, she managed a step forward, keeping her chin up and back straight, lest he think her as brazen as the young woman who’d just left his arms.

“My lord, I can explain . . . ”

But she was apparently going to have to plead her case to an empty room. He’d gone, leaving her with nothing but flame-filled cheeks and the knowledge that, in future, she needed to stem her raging curiosity and keep out of scoundrels’ private spaces.

A clock chimed over the mantel and panic set in. She’d been gone too long. Even longer than the silly girl who’d nearly given herself to the earl on his desk.

Starting toward the door, she tripped on the velvet drapery clinging to her ankle.

A vice grip enclosed her wrist to keep her upright. No, not a vice. A hand, large and long fingered, and exceedingly strong, judging by how her own fingers had begun to numb.

“Lord Westby.”

With his dark clothing, the man blended into the room’s shadows. He’d been watching without her sensing him at all. Cursing her flawed powers of observation, Sophia snatched her arm from his grip. He released her and she quickly righted herself, yanking her boot from the drapery and moving toward the center of the room.

“You’re a foolish woman,” he whispered, “but I suppose men forgive that once they get a look at your face.” He stalked toward her until he was close enough for her to see the glint on his obsidian eyes. Moving slowly, he began circling her like a predator, deciding how he wanted to begin consuming his prey. “And those breasts.”

“I must return to your sister’s tea, my lord.”

“You should have considered as much before hiding away in my study.” He drew closer, looming at her back. As his damp breath rushed against her neck, the cloying sweetness of his cologne caught in her throat and burned her eyes.

“I allowed my curiosity to get the better of me, my lord.” Sophia started toward the door. “A mistake I shan’t repeat.”

Westby came around to stand before her, blocking her progress.

Sophia studied the scoundrel for the first time. Dark hair, coal-black eyes, and an arrogant smirk above a strong, squared jaw. Symmetry and sensuality conspired to give the impression of male beauty, as long as one ignored the coldness of his gaze and the cruelty in the set of his mouth.

He seemed to enjoy her perusal. Lifting his arms out at his sides, he urged, “Do your worst. How may I satisfy your curiosity? With a body like that”—he fixed his gaze on the overly ample bosom she’d spent most of her life trying to bind and conceal—“satisfying you would be no burden.”

Sophia took his fixation on her breasts as an opportunity to escape. She started past him, gathering a handful of her skirt to keep from tripping on her hem. By the time she reached the study door, he’d sprung into action, rushing up to slam a palm on the panel above her head and pin her against the wood.

“Don’t you want a taste before you go? One kiss to remember me by?” He drew his fingers across her cheek and chills raced down Sophia’s spine. “I certainly want to taste you,” he whispered, his lips hovering near her ear. “Are you the flavor of honey, like the shade of your hair? Or strawberries, like the flush in those perfect lips?”

Blood raced in her veins, flooding her cheeks, heating her chest and neck and the tips of her ears. Her skin pulled taut, muscles cramped.

She’d never been kissed, but she’d been this close to a dangerous man once before.

Flirtation and seduction meant nothing to Westby’s sort. But to Sophia, her first kiss was more than an item to tick off the list of all that she’d yet to experience in life.

She still hoped for marriage and even had a prospect in mind. Research for her book was not worth forfeiting favors to a blackguard who reeked of oversweet cologne.

“I’ve been gone too long,” Sophia insisted. The rush of blood in her ears wasn’t enough to block the ticking of the clock. Why had no one come to look for her after all this time?

Lord Westby tucked a hand around her waist, twisting her to face him. With one brusque slip of his hand, he palmed her breast, pushed until he’d pressed her back against the door.

“I’ll have a kiss before you go.” Westby hooked a hand around her neck, sliding his fingers into her pinned hair.

She was on the verge of stomping her foot as Miss Honeycutt had done, but forcefully and on his toes, when Westby dipped his head. A current of shock rioted through her when he swept his tongue across the seam of her lips.

She recoiled, pressing at his chest with one hand and lifting the other to swipe across her mouth. Something had to eclipse the soppy wetness of his tongue, like a warm slug slithering across her lips.

“You do taste like honey,” he enthused.

He tasted like cigar smoke and the rose water he’d apparently licked off the lady he’d been kissing moments before.

“Enough of this nonsense, my lord. Let me go.” She twisted her body, pushing at him with her hip to create distance between then.

When she finally had the man at her back and the study door latch in her hand, he gripped her arm and whispered, “Did you hear that?”

Somewhere in the house a woman raised her voice. A man shouted in reply, though Sophia couldn’t make out his words. Heavy footsteps shook the floorboards, louder as they continued, growing closer to the earl’s study.