“You’re provoking temptation, Juliet.” His voice was the consistency of crushed velvet.
Her hands began to work the knot. “And temptation leads to…” she trailed. White silk released, and his shirt flopped open, revealing the hard throb of his pulse against the base of his throat. “If this were a poem,” she continued, “what word would rhyme withtemptation?”
Consummation, neither of them needed to say.
She took the two ends of his cravat in one hand and gathered her skirts with the other. She hardly knew herself. Yet…
She couldn’t think of a time when she’d beenmoreherself.
Bundle of contradictions, indeed.
“Would you do more?”
“More?” he rumbled, the syllable naught more than a scrape against his throat.
With measured calculation, she placed one leg, then the other, over his muscled thighs. Of a sudden, the intimate air between their mouths was the only air capable of giving her life. “More,” she whispered, the word brushing across his lips.
They both knew what more. It was there in the word left unspoken.
Consummation.
“After I agreed to be your Cyrano and write a poem for Miss Dalhousie,” she continued, “you asked if there was anything you could do for me.”
“You were to tell me later.”
She’d gone far.
Too far.
Too far to turn back now.
“I’ve thought of the something later.”
“Miss Windermere—”
“Juliet,” she said. “I want you to call me Juliet.”
“Juliet—”
“And I want you to make love to me.”
“No,” he said simply, certainly.
She was only now seeing how his uncomplicated way of viewing the world could present a problem.
“You’re a virgin,” he continued. “You will marry someday.”
She pulled back, but didn’t move off him. And he made no move to make her. In fact, his hands were on her waist, steadying her so she wouldn’t fall.
He would never let her fall.
He’d already proven it once.
But she had him here, finally. “I shall not marry.”
“You certainly shall.”
Her reasons had long been clear in her mind. “I’m an heiress who doesn’t need a husband. I can make my own rules.”