Delicate brows arched. “I was about to pen a note and you interrupted.”
“A note to our parents.”
A heavy fringe of sooty lashes framed her golden-brown eyes enchantingly. Those lashes now fluttered innocently at him. “Of course not.”
“Liar,” he said with some amusement, irritated with himself to find anything humorous in her reactions. “You were going to send some message that would have them scrambling like puppets to meet each other in some secret place.”
Her face flushed so becomingly. “I’ll never own that was my intention.”
Something suspiciously like amusement colored her tone.
Graham scoffed. “Of course not.” Would she ever stop her meddling ways?
“Your mother remains indifferent to my father, why do you persist in playing the matchmaker?”
“You do not know her like I do. She…mama is not indifferent, I assure you. She has guarded her heart very well after papa’s death, but it comes alive for Lord Deerwood.”
His heart jolted. “You are a romantic.”
“Unapologetically,” she said with a sweet smile.
“Would you honor me with a dance, Miss Middleton?”
The request startled them both.
One hand pressed against her chest, and the more she stared at him the wider her lovely eyes got. “Here?”
“No.”
Amusement softened her lips. “Then where?” she asked softly, looking at him as if she were trying to decipher a puzzle.
“In the ballroom.”
She gave him an assessing glance, then lifted her chin a notch. “There will be much speculation should we return together.”
Suddenly hating the distance between them, he pushed from the door and in three strides he was right there. Close enough where he could touch her.
Her lips parted as she stared up at him, her breath hitching with a noisy inhale.
“Perhaps at the next soiree then.”
“Yes,” she said on a swallow. “At the next one.”
“Callie?”
She blushed at the intimate use of her name.
“Yes?”
“I am on to you and for the rest of the house party…I will not let you and your mischief out of my sight. Whatever you are planning, you can forget about it now.”
She gasped her outrage and he dipped his head and caught it with his mouth. With a muffled groan, she tipped onto her toes and arched into him, opening her mouth for the demanding sweep of his tongue against the seam of her lips. He groaned at the sweet taste of her.
The kiss ended as suddenly as it began when she wrenched her mouth free of his with a startled yet very aroused gasp. Her fingers came up to her lips, which were reddened and swollen from his kiss. He couldn’t apologize for it, not when kissing her had been in his thoughts for several hours, not when her lips had haunted him all of last night. The memory of the feel of her body against him, the taste of her, the little sounds she’d made when he had scandalously touched his tongue to her lips. That hot whimper had tormented him even his dreams.
“I should apologize but it would make me a hypocrite.”
“What are your intentions?” she asked with a voice that trembled. “Why…why do you kiss me?”