Stranger in My Arms(63)

“Kiss me,” she said shakily, craving his mouth on hers. “Please, now Hunter lowered his head, but his lips remained a teasing inch away from hers, their panting breaths mingling in swirls of heat. His body was tense and aroused, his skin covered with a fine, hot mist.

“This is your punishinent, Lara,” he whispered.

“To burn as I do.”

Her breath caught as she felt his finger slip away from her trembling body. Gently he reached around his neck and unlocked her taut arms.

Letting go of her, he bent to retrieve his glove from the floor. Lara leaned against the wall and watched him. He was going to leave her.

“No,” she said faintly. “Wait, I. .

He gave her one scorching glance and walked away, leaving her alone in the shadow beneath the stairs. Lara stared after him… angry…

aghast.

“How could you?” she heard herself whisper. “How could you?” After a minute, she fumbled with her clothes in an effort to restore them, but her fingers were strangely clumsy. She couldn’t keep her mind on any subject other than her husband, and the exciting, mortifying things he had just done to her.

Lara never quite knew how she survived the rest of the evening.

Somehow she was able to produce a sociable manner, an agreeable smile, an air of calmness that concealed the chaos within. There was only one moment when she feaeed her facade would crack, when it was time for the dancing to begin. Leading the first dance was a duty she might have found enjoyable if not for the fear that everyone could somehow see what had transpired between them.

“I can’t,” she whispered as Hunter came to her and pulled her hand through the crook of his arm. To her mortification, she felt a tide of red sweep over her chest and face. “Everyone is watching.”

“You were the one who invited my ex-mistress here,” he muttered with an indecipherable expression. “You can’t blame them for being curious as to the state of affairs between us.”

“The gossip will be ten times worse after you and I retire early,” Lara said. “They’ll assume that we’re either arguing on” “Or humping ourselves into exhaustion,” he finished for her, the corners of his mouth lifting in a taunting smile.

“Must you be so crude?” she asked tightly.

Hunter responded by treating her with an exaggerated politeness that was almost worse than crudity. Nodding to the musicians to begin a sprightly quadrille, he led Lara to the middle of the ballroom and waited for the other guests to join them. A multitude of couples fell in rapidly, and soon Lara was whirled into a pattern of sashaying, skipping feet.

She had always loved dancing, and it had been a long time since she had led a quadrille, but there was painfully little enjoyment in this one.

She felt awkward and terribly exposed, unable to escape the memory of what they had just done beneath the stairs.

. She nearly stumbled when she thought of her husband’s gentle hands on her br**sts and between her thighs.

Midnight came, and the minutes crowded upon each other in rapid succession, until the appointed hour was nearly upon her. Lara glanced around the crowded ballroom for her husband, but there was no sign of him. Perhaps he was already upstairs…

waiting. She felt as desperate as a criminal facing the moment of execution. But the moment under the stairs was still with her, the shameful delight lingering like strong perfume.

Nearly one o’clock… Hunter had chosen the time well. The guests were moving in an inebriated, self-entertaining swarm, and her absence would scarcely be noticed. Discreetly she extricated herself from a conversation and slipped from the ballroom.

By the time the longcase clock in the upstairs hall resonated with a single chime, Lara had reached her room. She managed to undress herself, twisting and tugging at the back of her gown, letting it fall to the floor. After adding underclothes and stockings to the heap, Lara opened the armoire and found the black negligee. It settled over her body in a shimmering rustle, light as mist.

Her fingers were unsteady as she removed the pearls from her hair and unpinned the long braid from its neat coil. She ran a brush through the rippling tresses until they were smooth, and glanced at herself in the dressing table mirror. Her eyes were huge and her skin was bloodless. She pinched her cheeks to give them color, and took a breath so deep that her lungs ached from the pressure.

It wouldn’t be as terrible as before, she thought.

She believed that Hunter, in spite of his annoyance, would try to be gentle, and in return she would be as accommodating as possible in the hopes that he would finish quickly. Then it would be over, and on the morrow things would go back to the way they had been. With that thought in mind, she left her bedchamber and padded quickly down the hall to his suite.

Shaking with nerves, Lara entered Hunter’s room without knocking. The lamp had been turned low, a quiet glow of light barely encompassing the huge bed. Hunter sat on the corner of the mattress, still dressed in his evening clothes. His dark head lifted, and a murmur left his throat as he saw her in the black negligee. He was very still as she came to him, his smoldering gaze taking in everything: the white flashes of her bare feet, the roundness of her br**sts encased in black lace, the sable fall of her hair.

“Lara,” he murmured, touching a lock of her unbound hair with unsteady fingers. “You look like an angel in black.”

She shook her head. “My actions of this evening have proved that I’m far from an angel.”