Free To Wed a Rake by Eloisa James Page B

course,” she said, turning away from him and bending down to pick up her bodice. It was so heavy that she remained bent for a moment, trying to find the sleeves before she pulled it from the floor.
    And then she felt the heavy, warm curve of a body tucking itself around the curve of hers. For a moment she froze. Gil was dressed, and the feeling of his linen shirt against her back, the rougher wool of his breeches against her bottom…
    Her heart started to thud an uneven rhythm, as if a horse had broken from its traces and was veering into the woods.
    Large hands swept through her hair, tossing it up and over her head so that it fell to the floor. His body stayed immobile, keeping her tucked in his curve, trapped by his weight, his body, the feel of him.
    “You’re a conservative gentleman,” she pointed out, with just the smallest quaver in her voice.
    He pushed forward slightly against her bottom, and she almost toppled to the ground, struck by a wave of weakness in her knees.
    “Even conservative men lose their minds sometimes,” he growled in her ear. His fingers had stopped running through her hair, and they were wandering more dangerously now, sliding sweetly down her neck, drawing her upright as they slid to her bosom, pulling her slender, naked body back against his clothed self.
    For a moment she thought what they must look like from the other side of the screen, blurred by the rosy silk with her white against his black clothing, her slenderness against his muscle, her sweep of red hair against his wild fall of gypsy hair.
    It seemed the village women were right about naked women after all; it merely took a gentleman a bit longer to give up t s tor.

    The breath caught in her throat as Gil cupped a hand around her breast, brushing her nipple, making her teeth suddenly snap shut so that she didn’t moan aloud.
    “Say it,” he commanded. He had her arched against him now, one hand on her breast, the other sliding over her corset, teasing the bottom edge, sinking lower. His lips ravaged her neck, and her lips parted again as his thumb brushed over her nipple, making her wiggle against him, unknowing, uncertain, but—
    “Say—” she gasped. “What should I say?”
    “Make that sound again, the one you just made, the one you made in the carriage when you tried to seduce me.”
    She gasped, trying to get air into her lungs. That hand was inching closer, down, surely he couldn’t mean to—
    His finger sank into her sweetness at the same moment his thumb took that rough pass over her breast again. She didn’t make a breathy, sensual sound, but a squeal.
    She didn’t care. She didn’t care. Her head fell back against his shoulder, and she let him do as he will, holding her in place with his hands, his lips caressing her cheeks, the corner of her mouth, the curve of her throat, while his hands worked their magic. She hardly noticed when he nudged her legs apart, when his hands took on a harder, surer rhythm, when it became clear that he wasn’t entirely inebriated during his months in Paris. He had apparently learned some important things.
    “Of course,” he whispered in her ear, “I would never do something like this to an English lady born and bred. But you
are
a Frenchwoman. I learned in Paris that Frenchwomen are terribly demanding.”
    “Yes,” she gasped.
    His thumb twisted and rubbed again.
    “A properly raised Englishwoman would never allow something so depraved to be done to her,” he said, his voice wicked.
    He didn’t have to emphasize that fact quite so much, Emma thought dimly. But what he was doing was making her squirm back against him, gasping, pleading for something that he could—
    “I could tell that you are Parisian in a moment. Why if I touched an English lady like this—” He rubbed a thumb over her nipple and then squeezed it. “She would scream with pure indignation.”
    Emma wasn’t paying any attention to his foolishness anymore. Instead she just arched into his hand