To Love and to Loathe (The Regency Vows #2)(61)

Jeremy, staring after her, began to laugh.

“What, precisely, is so amusing?” Diana asked, narrowing her eyes at him.

Jeremy turned slightly to face her head-on, still laughing. His face was alight with humor, his blue eyes dancing, and Diana averted her gaze slightly, much as one would when faced with the direct glare of the sun. Oh, this was dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.

“Well,” he said, “you rather twisted yourself into knots trying to ensure that I would be left alone with the lady in a compromising situation, and yet I find myself alone with you instead.”

“How do you know that wasn’t my true aim all along?” Diana asked without thinking, and could she have willed those words back into her mouth a moment later, she would have done so. Flirting came so naturally to her that it was like breathing sometimes—a way to continue the conversation without really saying anything at all.

Except, of course, she had forgotten to whom she was speaking, and the fact that he would not hesitate to take this as an invitation. In an instant, his eyes darkened and he took a step toward her. Diana resisted the instinctive urge to take a step back, as one would from a predator, and instead raised her chin. She had said the thing, so she might as well brazen it out.

She made a mental note to have that motto engraved upon her tombstone, but that was her last coherent thought before Jeremy’s hands slid into her hair, pulling her face toward his own. Her eyes fluttered shut, but he did not kiss her at once. Instead, he rested his forehead upon hers, and she allowed her eyes to open once again, staring into his own from such close proximity that she could see nothing else.

“Diana,” he murmured, his breath warm against her skin. Something deep within her heated at the sound of her name uttered in his deep voice, slightly ragged at the edges in a way that was not all in keeping with his usual smooth demeanor. She had the fleeting thought that she wanted to hear him say her name like that every day for the rest of her life.

She tilted her chin up and captured his lips with her own, and immediately she was drowning in sensation: in the heat of his mouth and the taste of him—the black tea he had been drinking earlier, mixed with something else entirely his own. One of his hands cupped the nape of her neck, then slid upward to cradle her cheek. He made no further move to claim her, did not attempt to draw them closer together, and yet she felt warmth course through her body at his touch. His tongue teased her lips apart and explored her mouth in a leisurely fashion, and she reached up to grip him by the shoulders to ensure that she kept her balance, given the sudden weakening of her knees.

He took a step forward then, and then another, and she backed up until her knees hit the edge of the bench. Without relinquishing her grip on him, she sank down onto it, drawing him down with her. And while he had seemed content a moment before to kiss her in a slow, unhurried fashion, something changed the instant they were seated, and his mouth began to move with greater force, creating a slowly intensifying heat between them that she was helpless to resist flinging herself into. He drew her closer toward him, as close as the frustrating volume of her skirts would allow, and he wrapped his free arm around her waist, pressing their chests together and letting her feel the rapid, staccato beat of his heart, racing in time with her own.

Time seemed to slow, and she lost all sense of the world around them—the warmth of the August sunlight peeking out from behind the clouds, the lazy buzzing of bees at a nearby flower.… She felt slow and languid and as though her entire body had been weighted down. She moved her arms from his shoulders to twine around his neck and pressed herself even closer—close enough that she could feel him stiffening against her hip, and a primal, feminine part of her thrilled at this power, even as the sensation brought her reluctantly back to earth.

She pulled away from him. “We can’t do this here,” she said breathlessly, though her arms remained in place around his neck, and his face was still so close to hers that she could see the faint laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. They would deepen with time, she thought, and he would be all the more handsome for it. She had never given a moment’s thought to Jeremy as an older man—in her mind, he was so much the youthful rake that she almost had difficulty imagining it—and yet in that instant she could see it all too clearly. He would settle down and marry a beautiful woman and—this she knew with a sudden, clenching certainty—be a devoted father. He could not see this future, she knew, but she could. And the thought made her feel oddly lonely all of a sudden.

“You’re right,” he admitted, his tone reluctant, and then his brow furrowed at whatever he saw in her expression. “Are you all right?”

“Fine, fine,” she said in as breezy a tone as she could manage, drawing back farther to put some much-needed space between them. “Just distracted.”

“Just what every chap wants to hear from the lady he’s been kissing,” Jeremy muttered.

Without thinking—why did she never think?—she replied, “Your kisses are not your problem, my lord. Indeed, if you were any more proficient at them, I should find it a bit dangerous.”

He preened. “Dangerous?” She could practically see his chest expanding with pride, like a balloon, and she quickly summoned a verbal needle.

“Yes, well, as we have discussed, there are other parts of your repertoire that leave room for improvement.” He deflated. “But I am willing to work on those with you.”