Free Like No Other Lover by Julie Anne Long

out of sight once again, back into that room full of people with widely varying desires and agendas all disguised by polite conversation, he felt a strange, faint echo of the panic he’d felt when he watched her disappear into the ballroom proper the first time he saw her. As though something in him would be imperiled if he never saw her again.
    He raised his knuckles and pressed them to his lips; they were still hot.
    He’d meant to take her apart with a kiss. How, then, did he wind up in pieces?
    Thoughtful, strangely weary, he remained in the alcove, knuckles against his lips, until every bit of the heat of that kiss had faded.



Chapter 5
    C ynthia drifted back into the salon and paused before a handsome James Ward portrait of a white horse. Her smile felt as immobile and separate from her as a masquerade mask. And still that kiss continued, as no other kiss ever had: in the flush of her skin and the beat of her heart.
    A few deep breaths would take care of that. She studied the horse and took deep breaths.
    Violet looked up curiously, saw Cynthia’s fixed smile, gave her one of her own, returned to her conversation.
    Breathing steady, heart steady, Cynthia directed her peripheral attention to Lord Milthorpe, the Earl of Blenheim, and studied him.
    Lord Milthorpe was composed of stark lines: his shoulders a long vertical shelf, his spine midden-mast tense, his hair lank, steel gray, trained to stay behind his ears. The only soft thing about him was his belly, which was round and sat in his lap as though independent of his torso. His buttocks mistrustfully occupied the very edge of his spindly chair; he was quite sensibly poised to leap to safety should the spidery thing collapse into kindling beneath his bulk. One of his hands twitched atop his knee like a hairless creature in the throes of sleep; the other, curled into a loose cylinder, appeared to be gripping the stock of an invisible musket.
    Cynthia felt certain he felt nude without a dog and a gun, and hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with his hands in the absence of them. She sympathetically imagined it would be difficult to converse casually when one felt nude.
    She wondered what had become of his teacup. It was missing now. Perhaps a footman had taken it away, concerned for its safety.
    Twenty thousand pounds .
    It was time to test Miles Redmond’s stinging, informative list of facts. She took a sustaining breath. Turned ever so slightly.
    And resolutely glowed in Lord Milthorpe’s direction.
    Lord Milthorpe froze as though a hunting horn sounded in the distance. He frowned faintly.
    And then he cautiously rotated his head, scanning the chattering social forest for the source of whatever disturbed his awareness.
    He gave a start when he found himself fixed in Cynthia’s beam of radiant interest.
    Cynthia instantly cast her eyes down. She let a crucial suspense-building second pass before she demurely, oh so tentatively, cast her eyes up again—ah, but not all the way up: instead she aimed her gaze at him through the fluffy lowered awning of her lashes.
    This look alone had in the past inspired three entire poems.
    Lord Milthorpe’s frown vanished and his lips slipped apart.
    He was officially transfixed.
    Good, and good. What next? A blush, she thought quickly. A maidenly wash of color in the cheeks would not go amiss, Redmond had said. How to blush…
    Miles Redmond slipped back into the room just then and showed no sign of noticing her at all. She watched his broad back proceed across the room toward his sister. She felt again Miles Redmond’s mouth hard on hers, the hard swell of his erection pressing against her belly, her nipples just brushing the buttons of his coat—
    Whoosh . Her entire body instantly caught flame. Heat roared along her limbs and into her cheeks. Her eyes actually felt scorched.
    Well, that had obviously been a terrible mistake. No doubt she was scarlet and blotchy, which would more likely terrify Lord Milthorpe than charm