His aristocratic annoyance melted as he gave a snort of laughter. “Do you, by God?”
“Untie me,” she said, suddenly finding her bonds unbearable. “I can’t jump from a moving carriage.”
“You could scratch my eyes out.”
“My ambitions relate to damaging other parts of you entirely,” she said with relish, although she wasn’t sure she was capable of doing him any real harm. In Whitby, she could have turned his coachman’s pistol on him and shot without hesitation. But now this forced intimacy gnawed at her resolution to make him suffer for what he’d done.
Perhaps he knew that.
She straightened. What sort of mouse was she to let a few halfhearted caresses from a cast-off lover soften her? A cast-off lover determined to assert what he saw as his rights.
Well, she decided who had rights over her. And she denied the Duke of Kylemore the ownership he claimed.
“You’re doing it again,” he said softly.
She blinked. “What?”
“Letting your mind wander.”
She shrugged with a forced show of indifference. “If only I could help it. But nothing here holds my attention.”
Chapter 5
The moment Verity spoke, she recognized her mistake.
She’d meant the challenge to slash and wound. Instead it had emerged as a sexual invitation. And of course, Kylemore didn’t fling away in the offended sulk she’d set out to provoke.
A wolfishly delighted smile lit his face. “I’ll just have to try a bit harder, then, won’t I?”
She closed her eyes and tried not to hear the emphasis he placed on “harder.” “Don’t do this,” she whispered. “Please.”
He gave a soft laugh. “Begging for mercy already, Soraya? I thought you’d last longer against me than this.”
“I’m not Soraya,” she said, the little defiance all she could invoke.
Because he was right. She’d do anything, including sacrificing her pride, to avoid the slow seduction she knew he intended.
“Yes, you are.” He curled his hand around her head, spearing his fingers through her decorous widow’s braids and angling her face up toward his.
She braced herself for assault. But the duke was too subtle for that. With tantalizing slowness, he brushed his mouth across hers. It couldn’t even be called a kiss. Not really. It was like an extension of his gentle nuzzling before. Except now he touched her lips. And he’d kissed her so rarely and never with quite this concentrated purpose.
She tried to pull away, but the hand on the back of her head was implacable. This time when he glanced his mouth across hers, he lingered a second longer, moved his lips into a ghost of a kiss, over before she knew it had begun.
She gave a whimper that held no desire, only fear. “Please stop.”
He raised his other hand and smoothed a few tendrils of hair away from her forehead. “Why? I’m only kissing you. After everything we’ve done with each other, this can hardly signify, can it?”
But of course, he knew it did. She could see that knowledge in his gentian eyes. Knowledge and no real tenderness, although his touch lied and told a different story. He was set on dominating her, and luck or perception meant he’d lighted on the one strategy that would vanquish her.
She could fight force, but her life had been devoid of tenderness since she was fifteen. Even its false likeness had the power to open a rift in her heart.
Somewhere, though, she found the will to resist. “All right. Take me,” she said flatly. She glanced sideways. “If you untie my legs and bring me onto your lap, we should manage something to take the edge off you. At least enough to stop you plaguing me for the moment.” It was deliberately crude, but she was frantic to shatter the tremulous desire hovering between them.
He gave another of those soft laughs that made the hairs on her arms rise. “Perhaps later, madam. Right now I’m quite content with the innocent joys of kissing.”
“But I don’t like to be kissed,” she
said helplessly.