He halted and faced her with a serious expression. “I’m all yours, Diana. Do as you will with me.”
“Don’t tempt me,” she said with a laugh. “I hardly think dancing lessons require such devotion. But you will have to be the judge of that. Is there a specific step you wish to learn, or is it all beyond your abilities?”
“I should like to learn the trotting step,” he said, and when she eyed him in confusion, he added, “Of course it’s ‘all beyond my abilities’! If I can’t dance, that means, by its very definition, that I don’t know any of it, or even what the steps are called!”
“All right, all right,” she grumbled. “You don’t have to be snippy about it.” So she began the same way her own dancing master had begun. “Have you ever learned to skip?”
He looked perplexed. “Can you demonstrate what you mean?”
So she did, hoping he could see well enough in the moonlight and the light of the Argand lamps in the drawing room to pick up what she was doing. “Now you try it,” she said.
“I actually do know this from when I was a boy,” he said as he skipped back and forth. “I just never knew what it was called.”
“Wonderful! So now we’ll join hands and skip together.”
That went well, so she started expanding on the skipping to turn it into a chassé step. Then she made him practice it several times. She could almost see his engineer’s brain taking apart what she did and applying it to himself.
She’d been right about his ability to balance beautifully, not to mention his agility. He definitely was not an elephant in any way, except that he wasn’t terribly aware of his own strength or even his own weight. If he ever trod on her foot, he would probably break it.
So she would simply have to make sure that never happened.
The music had changed inside, signaling that the dance was changing as well. They ought to go in, just in case someone had noticed they were both missing, but she didn’t suggest that and neither did he.
Then came the moment when she tried to teach him how to join their right hands above their heads while they slowly turned. Somewhere they lost track of the turning.
Someone initiated the kiss—probably him. Later she couldn’t say whether it had been the moonlight or the close proximity or even the scent of jasmine in the air. All she knew was that when he kissed her, it seemed utterly natural.
This time she wasn’t surprised by how he thrust his tongue into her mouth to advance and retreat, much as they had done in the dance. With flagrant abandon, she gave herself up to the act of intimate kissing. Before long, they had stopped moving their feet, so they could move their hands, their heads, their mouths. So they could concentrate on the excitement building between them.
The way he kissed was glorious. Taking her by surprise, he backed her up against the low terrace wall, not even stopping his kissing of her, and lifted her up onto it. She’d thought she’d imagined how good it felt to be with a man, sharing an intimate moment like this, but no. It was him. He made her want . . . and yearn . . . and burn. All day, they’d been avoiding this moment, so it felt incredible to be kissing again at last. She loved that they were . . . they could finally . . .
Heaven help her. She’d never known kisses like these. The lazy sweeps of his tongue. The taste of port on his lips. The very scent of him, bergamot and musk. The way he made her feel, so . . . so like a woman . . . as he delved over and over inside her mouth.
As his kisses grew more needy, more frenzied, he cupped her head in his hands, enticing her into doing the same to him. Then he swept his large hands down to her shoulders and trailed kisses from her mouth to her neck and throat, then lower to nuzzle the tops of her breasts.
“Ohhh, yes,” she whispered as he ran his lips along the edge of her bodice. She craved his hands on her, caressing her breasts, kissing them and kneading them the way she’d imagined in her dreams. “Touch me,” she said, then froze when she realized she’d said it aloud and not in her head.
He pulled back just enough to cover her clothed breast with one hand as if he’d read her mind. “Here?” he rasped.
“Yes. Please.”
“Whatever the lady wants,” he murmured, his eyes shining in the moonlight as he filled his hands with her breasts.
She closed her eyes and clung to his shoulders, letting the exotic sensations wash over her. For a man of his strength, he was oddly gentle with her. Knowing he was being careful excited her beyond measure.
And when he thumbed her nipples through her gown, she nearly leaped out of her skin. She’d had no idea that a man could make . . . could do something so . . . so . . .
“Can I suck them?” he asked hoarsely.
“Heavens, yes,” she said, before realizing he meant to bare them. “But won’t . . . someone see?”
A harsh laugh escaped him. “Not unless they can see through me.” He pulled her cap sleeves from her shoulders and down her arms. That enabled him to drag down her bodice and the top of her corset enough to free one breast, then the other.
He made some guttural sound, befitting of a wild beast, then knelt on one knee to take her breast in his mouth. This time the lashings of his tongue roused something deeper, fiercer in her. Like a boat at sea, she’d lost her moorings. Because nothing like this had ever happened to her before.
“Geoffrey . . . oh, Geoffrey, that feels . . . that’s so . . .”
“Yes. And you, my dear goddess, taste like heaven.”