Free The Earl is Mine by Kieran Kramer Page B

put the tip of a thumbnail up to her mouth. “Yes.”
    Her toes still weren’t the color they should be, so he lifted both her feet and laid them flat against his shirt, then wrapped his coat around them.
    “You can’t do that!” she squeaked.
    He shrugged a shoulder. “Just warming them up.” He looked at the roof of the carriage. Gave a little whistle, then gazed out a window for some thirty seconds.
    “This must be uncomfortable for you,” she said, still sounding anxious.
    “Yes, it’s like having two blocks of ice against my chest, but they’re warming up, little by little, aren’t they?”
    “Yes,” she whispered. “But really, you shouldn’t. You really, really shouldn’t.”
    With every passing second, the encounter was getting cozier and cozier, especially when she burrowed her toes deeper into the linen fabric, inadvertently massaging his nipples. The minx. She had no idea how those two blocks of ice were turning into instruments of torture of a different kind.
    “I’ll endure,” he said, his eyes on a lonely outcrop of rocks on a distant portion of the moor.
    “I should be sorry for you, I know, but this is heaven, ” she exclaimed. “Much better than a warm brick.”
    He turned to see that she wore a blissful look on her face. If she thought this was heaven, she knew little of men and women and the things that happened between them.
    Low on her seat, utterly relaxed, her wet hair curling about her face, she might have spoken with all the pure sincerity of an angel, but she was beginning to look too much like a hoyden for her own good.
    “Right, then. They’re warm now.” He opened his coat for entirely selfish reasons. He had to get rid of her—the sooner, the better. Lady Pippa Harrington was far more dangerous than he was, if only she knew.
    As if to prove his point, she removed her feet from his chest only with a great deal of reluctance and a long, feminine sigh.
    “And now”—he reached beneath the seat again and took a long swig of Father’s whiskey to numb the fire building in his groin—“you’ll change out of your pantaloons.”

 
    Chapter Five
    “No,” Pippa told Gregory firmly. She drew the line at pantaloons.
    “You must.”
    He’d never looked quite like this before. Was he feverish? In pain? Surely he wasn’t sleepy. He looked as though someone had given him a witch’s potion that was either going to make him very sleepy or very naughty .
    “Don’t even think of it,” she warned him, even as her heart beat faster remembering their kiss in the garden.
    “Of what?” He suddenly looked perfectly sane again.
    “We’re done with changing clothes.” She enunciated clearly to remind herself that she was strong-willed and no one could stop her from going to Paris, especially not Gregory.
    He shook his head. “You need to be dry.”
    “I can’t. I—I really can’t take off these pantaloons. So please. Don’t ask.”
    He stared at her a moment, and then a knowing look passed over his face, disappearing so swiftly, she could have imagined it. “I understand,” he murmured. “If we wrap the blanket around your legs, that should help warm you.”
    And then it dawned on her. He thought—he thought she had her courses! How would he know about those? She supposed unmarried men did, but where did they find out? No one had told her anything about hers, not even Mother. She’d told Pippa she’d be visited by a special fairy each month when she got older, and it had been terribly disappointing to find out what that fairy was.
    “It’s not what you think,” she blurted out.
    “I don’t think anything.” His face was placid. The perfect gentleman’s face.
    “Yes you do! But you’re wrong. The truth is”—she was avid to confess; anything was better than the embarrassing assumption he’d made now—“I’m not wearing drawers. We don’t do that in the country. You city people might—I hear they’re quite fashionable, but why make more