Page 73 of As the Devil Dares

He grinned and nuzzled her bare shoulder. “You lit a bonfire, minx.”

“Robert!” A hot blush of embarrassment colored her cheeks. Then she giggled and smiled happily against his mouth when he kissed her.

“I’ll light a fire, then, shall I?” he offered.

She stared up at him through lowered lashes in a look of wanton innocence that stole his breath away. “Please do.”

With a playful growl at her innuendo, he kissed her again, hot and open-mouthed, plundering her lips until she moaned.

Then he slid off her and out from beneath the scratchy blanket. He reached for the tinderbox on the shelf over the little stove in the corner. In a few minutes, he had a fire going, small but enough to keep her warm.

“Robert?”

“Hmm?” He jabbed the poker into the stove at the coals.

She sat up, clutching the wool blanket to her breasts to cover herself. A pang of regret stabbed him that she’d lost her innocence in that poor excuse for a bed, with wool and straw scratching at her soft skin, when she should have had satin, velvet, and down. Yet she would have looked like a goddess even wrapped in burlap.

“You courted Diana Morgan last season,” she said quietly. A strange quality filled her voice that he couldn’t quite place. “Did you and she ever spend time together…like this?”

Understanding fell through him, and he realized that what he’d heard in her was insecurity, something he’d not witnessed in her before. It had never occurred to him until right then that the Hellion might have been just as jealous of Diana as he was of Whitby.

“Nothing happened between us,” he assured her gently. He set down the poker and admitted with a heavy sigh, “In fact, I never should have courted her at all.” He shook his head. Looking back now, he realized just how wrong he’d been. “I thought I needed to put a stop to all the wildness of my younger days and settle down. Diana seemed a good way to do that, but I was wrong. Thank God we both realized it in time.”

“Stop your wildness?” She dubiously arched a brow. “Didn’t you rent an elephant for a party last May?”

He grinned and flipped closed the stove door. “I was easing into it.”

When he stood and turned around to rejoin her in bed, she gasped. Her eyes flared wide with surprise, and her red lips pulled into a round O.

He stopped. And frowned. What on earth…?

Then her gaze slowly sank down his front, and the realization hit him that she was seeing him clearly for the first time. All of him. From her surprised reaction, she was taking her first-ever glimpses of a naked man. And if she kept staring at him like that, with her gaze fixed on his cock and her curiosity filling him with immense pleasure, she’d also have her first glimpse of a fully aroused naked man.

When she nervously licked her lips, he groaned and lost the battle to stay flaccid beneath her gaze. He stalked toward her, then crawled onto the mattress and up the length of her on hands and knees, until she lay completely on her back beneath him. Her hands still clutched the blanket shyly to her chest.

But she persisted with their conversation, as if it were perfectly normal to have a naked man poised over her on all fours. “But Diana is so lovely and you—”

He silenced her with a kiss. “I came to realize that Diana isn’t the type of woman I want in a wife,” he concluded with finality. The last thing he wanted to think about tonight was a past courtship, not when he had Mariah naked in bed and the rest of the night ahead of them. He hooked a finger beneath the edge of the blanket and tugged it down until he’d exposed a single full breast.

She closed her eyes, and her breath came ragged as he circled his fingertip around her dusky nipple. It drew up taut. Like magic.

She arched her back and panted out, “Then what…do you want…in a wife?”

He grinned. “I want—”

You.

He froze, stunned at the slip he’d almost made.

Good God, where had that come from? True, if she were anyone other than Winslow’s daughter, he would offer marriage to her without hesitation. Because he wanted to protect her reputation and his honor. Because she challenged him intellectually while also stirring his passions. Because he’d come to care about her, more than any other woman.

But to want her for a wife implied a lasting devotion he couldn’t yet bring himself to acknowledge. No matter his growing affections for her.

“An Italian opera singer,” he replied instead, forcing a teasing tone as he placed a kiss to her breast.

She slapped lightly at his shoulder. “Be serious.”

“I am.” He tongued her nipple and drew a shiver from her that made his heart skip. “I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.”