Free Yours Until Dawn by Teresa Medeiros

longing.
    Her eyes slowly fluttered open. Through the casement window, she could see the pinkish golden haze of dawn streaking the eastern horizon. She yawned and stretched her stiff muscles, trying to remember the last time she’d been allowed a full night’s sleep. As she uncurled her tingling foot from beneath her, the quilt draped over her lap slid to the floor.
    Samantha blinked down at the eiderdown quilt, recognizing it as just one of the many luxuriant blankets from the earl’s bed. Perplexed, she instinctively reached up to pull off her spectacles. They were gone.
    Feeling woefully exposed, she groped frantically in the chair around her, thinking they must have slipped off while she slept. But when she leaned forward, she found them folded neatly on the rug beside the chair.
    Suddenly wide awake, Samantha slid them on and peered warily around the sitting room. She barely remembered collapsing in the chair last night, but tantalizing fragments of her dream were returning to her—a man’s warm fingers touching her hair, stroking her skin, caressing the softness of her lips. Closing her eyes, she touched two fingers to her lips, reliving both the exquisite sensation and the yearning his touch had evoked.
    What if it hadn’t been a dream?
    Samantha’s eyes flew open as she shook away the mad notion. She doubted the man sleeping in the next room was even capable of such tenderness. But that still left her with no explanation for who had covered her and removed her spectacles with such care.
    Scooping up the quilt, she rose and slipped silently into the adjoining bedchamber, not sure what she hoped to find. Gabriel was sprawled on his stomach among the rumpled bedclothes, his folded arms cradling his head. The silk sheet had slipped off one thigh—a thigh rippling with muscle and dusted with the same golden hair as his chest. Samantha knew exactly how he had earned those muscles—riding, hunting, swaggering across the deck of a ship, shouting out orders to the men under his command.
    She crept closer to the bed. Despite the months he’d spent cooped up in this house, the taut, smooth skin of his back hadn’t completely lost its sun-kissed glow. Lured by that spill of molten gold, Samantha stretched out her hand. Although her fingertips barely brushed his flesh, a jolt of awareness sizzled through her, heating her own skin.
    Appalled by her brazenness, she snatched back her hand. She tossed the quilt carelessly over him, then went scurrying for the door. She could only imagine what Mrs. Philpot and the other servants would think if they caught her creeping out of the earl’s bedchamber at dawn, her face flushed and her eyes still heavy-lidded from sleep.
    Clutching the banister, she went tiptoeing hastily down the stairs. She’d nearly reached her own landing when a merry jingling drifted down from the floor above. Samantha froze, seized by the sudden horrifying thought that Gabriel might have only been feigning sleep.
    The bell sounded again, its shrill tones even more insistent.
    Shoulders slumping, she slowly turned and went trudging back up the stairs.
     
    By early afternoon, the bell’s hellish echo seemed to have taken up permanent residence in Samantha’s skull. She was on hands and knees on the floor of Gabriel’s dressing room, stretching to retrieve a silk cravat that had slithered just out of her reach, when it started jangling again. She reared up, striking her head sharply on the shelf above. The shelf tilted, raining a dozen beaver hats down on top of her.
    Knocking them away, she muttered, “I can’t imagine why a man with one head would require so many hats.”
    She emerged from the stifling confines of the dressing room with her sweat-dampened hair plastered to her head and a cravat gripped in each hand like a pair of venomous snakes. “Did you ring, my lord?” she growled.
    Although the sunlight filtering through the window cast a Raphaelic halo around his tousled hair, Gabriel’s