One Night With You (The Derrings #3)(20)

Frowning, he took her arm and escorted her down the long length of corridor, his heels clicking over polished parquet. "So you mean to return, then?"

Stopping in the middle of the corridor, she lifted those damnable hypnotic eyes of hers. "I said as much."

"Forgive me," he murmured. "I find it hard to credit."

"And why is that?" she demanded, her eyes glinting in challenge.

"Ladies of the ton strike me as the busy sort." Too busy for friends like Julianne at any rate.

"I'm not too busy for Julianne," she assured, adding in a softer voice, "nor am I like most ladies of the ton."

"Oh? In what manner?"

Shaking her head, she muttered, "Never mind."

"What?"

Her lips flattened into a line and she shook her head harder.

"I don't remember you being so reticent, Jane."

Her eyes widened and he felt certain it was his use of her name, the first time he had spoken it in many years. It felt good to say it, to hear himself say it. Bloody annoying, that.

"People change," she murmured.

"That they do," he agreed, finding himself staring overly long at her mouth again. At her. In so many ways, he felt he was seeing her for the first time.

Her eyes, neither brown nor green but a strange mixture, reminded him of a wooded glen that he had seen outside Macao. He recalled the sunlight reflecting off a nearby waterfall, gilding the rich browns and greens, and the peace that had filled him then.

Without stopping to think, he brushed his thumb over her lips, testing the softness, wondering if they had always felt like satin, wondering why he had never thought to find out before… and why he wanted to find out now.

He trailed a path down her throat to the wildly thrumming pulse beating against the almost translucent skin of her neck. He drew a lazy circle over the faint pattern of delicate blue veins there.

"What are you doing?" she whispered, inching away until the wall at her back stopped her from farther retreat.

He followed, closing in, pressing his hard length against her softer one. Her curves settled against the hard lines of his body, melting against him like lava sinking into the sea. He bit back a groan at the sensation, longing to sink all of himself into her soft heat. Lowering his head, he pressed his mouth to her throat, where her neck met her shoulder…

driven, compelled by a feeling he could not name, a madness he could not shake. She need only say the word , give the slightest indication of surrenders, and he would take her. With no thought to propriety, to servants that lurked in shadows, he would lift her skirts and put an end to his torment.

Her breath shuddered through her, vibrating against his chest as he opened his mouth over her warm skin, savoring the sweetness of her flesh with the rasp of his tongue. Lifting his mouth, he gazed into her astonished eyes.

A similar astonishment echoed through him, surpassed only by the desire hardening every line of his body.

His gaze dipped to her mouth again, to the pouty lips that obliterated the last of his logic. Jane shook her head, fingers moving to lightly graze her neck, her skin moist and cool where he had kissed her.

Did he do this to every woman he encountered? Overwhelmed them with his magnetism until the only thought in a woman's head was him? His hands on her body? His mouth on her skin? Did others fall victim so weakly? So stupidly? Thinking they were special?

Jealously seized her. For whom, she was not certain. Aurora? Absurd considering she only envied herself.

Mortification spread prickly hotly through her chest, rising up her throat to choke her. "I—I should go," she managed to get out as she shoved past him, stumbling for the door. He snatched hold of her wrist, his fingers a vise about her. His hot look burned with familiar intensity.

"Why so unfriendly, Jane? We were friends once, were we not?" Friends. Had he never realized that she wanted to be more? That he had been more to her?

Everything, in fact. Her fists clenched. Rot him for not seeing, not knowing… for not loving her back.

His fingers tightened and pulled her close. Too close. He stared at her in that consuming way of his, his velvet brown eyes warming her blood. "Have you forgotten?" he demanded. The mad urge to laugh bubbled up in her throat. Forgotten? Swallowing down the thickness in her throat, she replied, grateful for the brusque sound of her voice, "Of course not."

"Good." His touch gentled on her wrist, thumb moving in slow circles over the inside of her wrist. "Because I've thought of you."

She snorted. "Have you?"

He smiled loosely and her belly fluttered. "We had fun together. When I thought of home, yours was the face I saw." His smile faded as though bothered by the realization. She said nothing, too incredulous to formulate a response. Never had she dreamed to linger in his thoughts. Madeline, yes. Her? Never.

"You've changed," he continued. "You're not the little girl frozen in my mind all these years." His eyes slid over her slowly, the seductive movement of his fingers on her wrist radiating heat up her arm.

"You're different, too," she retorted. "The days of stripping to our unmentionables to swim in the pond have long passed."

Fire flared in his eyes. "Pity."

Heat licked her cheeks and she dipped her gaze.

She had thought of him often during the numbing years of her marriage to Marcus. Wondered where he was, how he occupied himself, if he ever thought of her. She had reminisced on the cheerful days of their youth before Julianne's accident. Before he dropped from an apple tree, his love for Madeline emblazoned across his face.