lap.
Shamingly, Kylemore was the one who eventually pulled back.
He lifted himself slightly away from her. She lay on the bench. Somewhere in that tempestuous kiss, he’d brought her beneath him. A few moments more and he’d have been inside her. The weight of him, hard and hot against her belly, even through her skirts, indicated that was still a possibility.
Even this wasn’t enough to return her to reality. Without a squeak of protest, she lay beneath him lost in delight.
“If I don’t stop now, I won’t,” Kylemore said tautly. His expression was strained. The arms he supported himself upon imprisoned her in a cage she could summon no great eagerness to escape. “Unless that’s what you want.”
“Want?” she repeated stupidly, blinking up at him. Her mouth felt swollen and her heart pounded as though she’d run from him instead of surrendered mindlessly to his importunity.
“Shall I take this embrace to its natural conclusion?” Briefly, he was the courtly lover she’d known in London.
She sucked in a shaky breath to steady her rioting responses. The creaking of the coach was loud in her ears as she scrambled to gather her scattered thoughts and, even more importantly, her scattered defenses. Fleetingly, she remembered the duke describing his kiss as innocent. It had been about as innocent as Lucifer overseeing an orgy in hell.
“Madam?” he asked, then very deliberately pressed his erection into her stomach.
The crude gesture brought her back to herself as nothing else could have. All the lovely bonelessness drained away from her body as she stiffened in unspoken rejection.
“No,” she managed to croak out. Then, on a note of desperately sought recklessness, “but I believe my sterling efforts have earned the end of my bondage.”
He looked at her strangely. “I untied your hands while you kissed me.”
“What?” she asked uncertainly, then realized it was true. Worse, her arms encircled him and she caressed his back.
She was only a breath away from drawing him down for more of those devastating kisses. She vaguely remembered him tugging at her hands during their tempestuous embrace. He must have released her then.
A different heat clawed its way up her face. Of all the humiliations her abduction involved, she’d hated those bonds the most. Yet she’d been so lost in the whirlwind of his kiss that she hadn’t even noticed she was no longer constrained.
“Get off me,” she snarled, snatching her hands away from him.
He didn’t budge. She should have known he wouldn’t respond to an order. “I’ve never had sex in a carriage before,” he said thoughtfully.
Neither had she, but she refused to admit it. “I prefer a bed.”
A slow smile crossed his face as the vehicle’s movements evocatively jostled her against him. For a moment, he looked almost approachable. “Does that mean you’ve reconciled yourself to returning to me?”
Oh, curse her for blurting out these suggestive comments. Soraya would never be so easy to catch out. Verity was badly rattled and likely to plunge herself deeper into trouble with every word.
In overdue self-protection, she spoke ironically, just as Soraya would have. “Do I have any option, Your Grace?”
That couldn’t be disappointment in his eyes, could it? The fleeting expression vanished when he rolled off her and returned to his own seat. “No, you don’t,” he said.
She sat up shakily, at last able to brace herself against the swaying vehicle, and began to straighten her clothing. Surprisingly, apart from a few buttons undone at her collar, everything was in place. She left her hair loose. Without pins or hairbrush, it was impossible to bring it into anything approaching order.
He leaned forward to raise the blinds. After the gloomy intimacy, even the brightness of the rainy evening jarred her. She narrowed her eyes and looked across at the duke.
He was a study in rumpled elegance. How could such a hell spawn be so beautiful?
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