Page 75 of Barbarous

“I am not shivering because I am cold. I am shivering for Malcolm and how close this came to being his last day.”

“That would have been a great loss to you?” The disbelief in his voice was unmistakable.

“It would be a great loss if you were forced to flee England to avoid a murder charge.”

A sly look flashed across his changeable face. “You would miss me, would you?”

She opened her mouth but he chuckled and drew her close, burying his face in her neck and inhaling her as if she were a flower.

“You would,” he murmured in between trailing kisses over her pulse, her throat, across her jaw. “You’d miss me terribly. And I would go mad without you.”

His words left her light-headed and he wove his fingers into her hair and pulled her head back until their eyes met. “I want to make love to you, Daphne.”

She blinked up at him, her body humming with a wildness she’d not felt since the last time he touched her. “Here? Now?”

Chapter Eighteen

It took a moment for Hugh’s brain to accept what his ears had heard. He shook his head in wonder. “My God, you are a gift!”

Hooded blue eyes flared with a need that matched his own.

“I have wanted to do this since the moment I saw you this evening, you temptress.” He lowered his mouth to the exposed, rounded swell of one breast and she shuddered beneath his lips and pushed closer. He traced the gentle curves with the tip of his tongue, teasing the thin silk barrier that molded to her lithe body. As he’d suspected—a million years ago at the wretched dinner—her nipples were less than an inch below the tissue-thin fabric of her gown.

Daphne shifted and arched as he suckled her through the silk, bringing the tip to tantalizing hardness before moving to the other, working her until the noises coming from deep in her throat were so hungry he had to see her.

He held her at arm’s length, staring into her sleepy eyes. “You are so beautiful,” he said, his hands moving to the damp, stretched fabric that barely covered her. He pushed his thumbs beneath the silk and eased it down until she was exposed.

“Good God.” He stretched the fabric even lower, until it was beneath her breasts, the taut silk forcing them high. He drank in her beauty while spanning her delicate rib cage, his fingers forming a double prison with her corset. Her head fell back, a long sigh escaping her, and her spine arched as she offered herself to him. Hugh lowered his mouth to the area between her breasts and briefly closed his eyes.

His ever fertile imagination flogged him with arousing images: Daphne against a wall of books, her long, slim legs around his hips while he buried himself hilt-deep; Daphne bent over the big library desk, skirts bunched at her waist, his fists tangled in her blond curls, his—

Hugh tugged the now ruined fabric back over the rosy mounds and pulled her to her feet.

“Come.”

Sultry blue eyes, dazed and hungry, gazed up at him and, once again, Hugh was tempted to take her over the desk. But she deserved more tenderness for what was essentially her first bedding. The desk would come later.

He scooped her swaying body into his arms.

“Hugh. What—”

“Hush,” he ordered. “Get the door.”

She blinked up at him, but found the handle without looking and flung it open.

“Good girl.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she remained unresisting while he strode down the hall and took the stairs two at a time to get to her bedchamber.

He was wheezing like a punctured bellows by the time he reached her door. He lowered her feet to the floor and reached for the handle. And then stopped.

Daphne raised her shapely brows and gave him a look of cool hauteur that made his erect cock throb.

“She’s not in there, is she?”

“She?”

“Your maid.”