Page 56 of To Seduce a Stranger

“Yes.”

Reluctantly, he withdrew his hands and raised the blanket to cover her again. Her shoulders sloped beneath the woolen fabric, more relaxed than he had ever seen her. “Would you like me to take down your hair so it can dry?”

“Please.”

Tugging loose her hairpins, one by one, he deposited them in an empty teacup. When her dark hair tumbled free, he spread it over her shoulders, a curtain of coffee-colored silk that smelled like spring rain.

“This reminds me of the ride to Ravenswood,” she said.

A huff of laughter escaped him. “Cold and wet?” Then, more serious, he added, “You were frightened then.”

“At first. Then I realized that with you behind me, holding me, I was secure. Safe. Free.” Her chin lifted as she turned her head, not quite looking over her shoulder. “Will you hold me that way again?”

If he pressed tight to her, she would discover how aroused he was. How would she react? Was it possible she already knew?

He drew another ragged breath and eased closer. When he tightened his thighs around hers, he expected to feel her stiffen and pull away.

Instead, she wiggled more securely into the vee of his spread legs. As he had the afternoon of their rainy ride, he snaked his left arm around her waist. Only the sturdy fabric of the blanket, bunched now around her middle, offered a meager barrier between his hand and the soft weight of her breast, between the plump globes of her bottom and his hardness.

Until, that was, she tugged the blanket loose and tossed it aside. “I’m not cold anymore.”

“Indeed not,” he managed to say. She was perilously close to setting him on fire.

A log shifted in the fireplace, sending up a plume of sparks. “What comes next?” she asked.

You do.

He bit down, hard, upon his lower lip to keep himself from speaking that answer aloud. Steady. Until tonight, he had always imagined himself a patient man.

“That’s up to you,” he said instead.

She had told him she wanted him, but could he really be certain what those words meant? Coming from a widow, a woman of experience, who found herself missing the sort of companionship to which her marriage had accustomed her, their meaning had been clear enough. He—and perhaps every other clerk at the shipping warehouse where he had been apprenticed—had known such a widow once, in the buxom person of Mrs. Amelia Tate-Wetheby.

But such words might mean something else entirely from a woman of no experience who seemed wary of desire—her own as well as others’.

While his mind raced, her right hand crept to cover his where it lay spread on his own thigh, the better to keep it from wandering where it ought not. Slowly she entwined her fingers with his, then lifted his hand toward the firelight. With the fingers of her other hand, she traced the breadth of his palm, around his calluses, inscribing a circle on his palm. “I don’t know—”

“I think you do. Trust yourself,” he urged. “Close your eyes. Feel what you need. Breathe . . .”

Carefully, she drew his hand to her breast.

Was she truly ready? He was going to have to trust her, too. Cupping her breast, he allowed himself a moment simply to revel in its fullness before brushing his thumb along the edge of her puckered areola. She sucked in a breath and her chest rose, but she did not pull away.

“Yes?” He hissed the hopeful question into the sharp peak of her shoulder blade before turning it into a kiss.

“Yes.”

Her nipple pebbled against his palm, and remembering how it had felt between his lips, he longed for her to turn around, that he might watch her face while he stroked her, might set his tongue to that firm bud. But their current position had been her request. She felt safe in his arms, she had said. So he held her tighter still, as his fingers fondled and played over the silky fabric of her shift and his lips skated over every inch of her neck and back he could reach.

When her whimper of longing grew almost fretful, he allowed the hand wrapped around her waist to slide lower, over the curve of her belly. “Let me touch you here.” No longer a question. He wanted, needed to feel her shatter in his arms.

An almost imperceptible hesitation. Perhaps not really hesitation at all . . .

He stopped. “No?”

“I—” He saw her lashes flutter down. Had she closed her eyes? Or was she watching his hand, making sure it stayed put? “Are you certain?”

Certain of his desire for her? God, yes. It was a wild thing snapping at the bars of its flimsy cage. He could not remember ever wanting anyone, anything with such intensity.