Free The Lady Who Broke the Rules by Marguerite Kaye Page B

beautifully shaped. His body was so solid. So very different from hers. So very different from…
    She closed her mind on that thought. The scent of him was so different too. She leaned in to him, nipping his ear in imitation of what he had done to her. He shuddered in response. She wanted more. She wanted to know more too. Why was he out of practice? How long had it been? Why her? She opened her mouth to ask him, but something stopped her. A warning in his eyes? His hold on her slackened. Unable to bear it, Kate stood on tiptoe and kissed him.
    He was startled into stillness. His lips were cool with the morning air. He tasted of the coffee he’d had at breakfast. It was not so much his intriguing abstinence or her own far from satisfactory experience, but a simple desire to merge and to mingle with another, to be no longer alone, which made Kate move her lips more insistently against his. His body was so big compared to hers, so powerful, yet it was a potent contrast, exciting and reassuring rather than intimidating. She felt infinitely female against his blatant maleness, then he gave a little groan and his arms went round her like a cooper’s hoops around a barrel, yanking her almost off her feet, and she stopped thinking about anything at all.
    He was not gentle. His kiss was neither untutored nor timid. It was a harsh kiss, his mouth hungry, ravaging hers in a way completely unlike their kiss of yesterday. Heat flared between them. Kate felt as if she could not breathe and did not want to breathe, squeezed tight and breathless, lightheaded with it. His lips pressed against hers, his tongue licking its way inside her mouth in a shockingly intimate way, his teeth nipping and biting, the pressure too much and yet not nearly enough.
    Her back was pressed against the stone of the bridge. Her breasts were pressed against Virgil’s chest. Her nipples were tingling. The solid length of his manhood pressed between her thighs. She had forgotten. She had not quite forgotten, though she did not remember this…this urgent need, ache and throb. Her hands clutched at his head, his shoulders, his coat. A strange guttural sound came from deep in her throat.
    And then she was free, panting, staring up at Virgil, who was staring out across the bridge towards the house, his eyes narrowed. ‘What…?’
    ‘I don’t know. A gardener. A groom, perhaps,’ Virgil said, moving away from her.
    Kate peered across the lake. The figure was some distance away. She could just about make out that it was male. ‘Do you think he saw?’
    Virgil shook his head. ‘I doubt it.’ He blinked and looked down at Kate. She was flushed. Her lips looked like crushed berries. He was uncomfortably aware of his erection, and was relieved that he was wearing buckskins and not those ridiculously tight-knitted pantaloons. Though Kate must be perfectly aware—he swore under his breath.
    ‘You must have very keen hearing. Or eyesight.’ Kate’s own eyes had been closed. Hadn’t Virgil, then, been as carried away as she? ‘Which was it?’ she asked, striving and completely failing to sound light, as if kissing a man on Robert Adam’s bridge was an everyday occurrence for her.
    ‘Both. Neither. I don’t know.’ Virgil realised he was rubbing his forearm, caught himself and self-consciously tugged the starched cuff of his shirt. ‘Instinct, I suppose,’ he said. ‘It was a stupid thing to do.’ Here, he meant. Or anywhere, he should have meant, though he was too coiled, tense, wound up with the soaring heat of that kiss, to wish it had not happened, quite yet.
    ‘Yes, it was,’ Kate said, mortified.
    Her eyes were overbright and Virgil, who had made his own opaqueness of character a trademark over the past eleven years, found he did not wish this particular woman to misunderstand him. ‘Kate, I don’t care who sees us, but you ought to. This is your country, your home. People will talk.’
    ‘I doubt it,’ Kate said drily. ‘They will think