Page 57 of Moon Awakening

He glared at her. "Liking my kisses does not make you a whore."

"It does when I am promised to another."

"No, it does not."

"There are those in the Church who teach woman is evil, a temptress. I feel like a temptress now." She blinked up at him, her lips parted, her breasts rising and falling with each rapid breath she took, their turgid peaks pressing against her bodice. "I want you to kiss me again. Surely that means I am depraved."

"It means I have roused your passion, 'Tis good to know." He placed his fingertip over the quickly beating pulse in her neck. Her blood was rushing for him and for no other. That did not make her a wanton; it made her more alluring than any other woman he had known. "I am tempted by your sweet innocence, but that does not make you a temptress. I kissed you, English, not the other way around."

"That is true. Does that mean you are the seducer?"

"You have not yet been seduced."

"I haven't?"

"Am I buried between your thighs?"

She gasped. "No!"

"Then you have not been seduced."

"Oh…" She chewed on her bottom lip.

"You would not respond so easily to another man."

"Are you certain of that?"

"Yes."

"You are very arrogant," she said speculatively. "Perhaps it is only that arrogance speaking now."

She had no idea what the drought of her being attracted to another man did to him, how angry it made him. But he could tell from the way she spoke that she was not trying to make him jealous. She was genuinely worried about her morals.

It would have been bloody amusing if she didn't look so upset.

"Did you ever want to touch one of your father's soldiers?" he asked, convinced the answer had to be a negative for her to be as wholly innocent as she was.

"No." She clasped her hands, as if pleased by that reminder. "And they were not all surly men. Some were quite pleasing to look at, but I did not feel the things I do when I am near you." Then her expression took on a worried cast again. "Of course I did not spend much time with them. It would not have been proper."

"You rode on Angus's horse with him. Did his nearness affect you the way mine does? You smiled at him," he reminded her. It rankled, that smile. For she'd given his soldiers many such looks while ignoring him completely the evening before.

"That was to confuse him, but no… I did not want to get nearer to him as I did when I rode with you."

Everything she did confused Lachlan, but he wasn't about to admit that sorry truth. The woman was a puzzle, but an appealing one. "Are you sure you had no desire to have Ulf kiss you, or one of my other soldiers?" he teased, knowing the answer to that question with certainty.

She grimaced, distaste at the idea written all over her expressive features. "Of course not."

"Then how can you believe yourself to be a woman of misplaced morals?"

"It is not my morals I'm concerned with, but my urges. It is you," she stated with conviction. "I must stay away from you. You bring out the worst in me."

He did not agree. "I bring out the woman in you."

"I am supposed to be a lady, but you give me impure thoughts. It is wrong."

He pulled her close into his body so she could feel the evidence of his desire, the result of his own thoughts where she was concerned. "It is hot."

"Hot?" she asked, her voice squeaking with alarm.