Free Cheryl Holt by Too Tempting to Touch

of me.”
    “I’m not.”
    “You can’t stay. Be gone! At once!”
    He ignored her edict and yanked the cloth away. She squealed with affront and struggled to fold her arms across her chest, but he wouldn’t let her hide herself. He gripped her wrists and pulled them away so that he could study her.
    Her breasts were perfectly formed, neither too big nor too little, and the appropriate size to fill a man’s hands. She was breathing fast, terrified by what he intended, and the elevated respiration had hardened her nipples so that they jutted out.
    “You’re very beautiful,” he murmured, and he reached out and caressed one of the soft mounds.
    “Please don’t,” she implored.
    “I won’t hurt you,” he vowed.
    “I can’t imagine you’ll do anything else.”
    As he leaned down to kiss her, she turned away, so he grazed her cheek instead. Continuing on, he nuzzled down her neck, to her cleavage, across her breast, and he toyed with the inflamed tip, licking it over and over.
    He couldn’t believe what he’d started, couldn’t understand his strange urge to be with her. The cost of seducing a chaste female was much too high, so he never dabbled with innocents. There were many wicked, amenable trollops who would execute any deed for a price, so he couldn’t figure out what was motivating him.
    She was a maiden, a spinster—Rebecca’s companion, for God’s sake—and he wasn’t some violent roué who would force himself on a woman. Yet none of it signified.
    He’d leapt across any acceptable boundary of propriety, but his behavior didn’t seem wrong. His feelings for her were convoluted and perplexing, and he couldn’t sort them out. Though he barely knew her and they hadn’t spoken more than a few words, he felt as if she belonged to him, and thus his conduct was permissible, an extension of what had gone before and what would come after.
    He trailed up her bosom, to her chin, to her mouth. His lips teased hers, but she was trying not to react. He could perceive her confusion, her uncertainty as to whether she should participate. She desperately wanted to—he could sense her eagerness, her yearning—but she was conflicted over her lusty nature and resisting it with all her might.
    “Kiss me back, Ellen.”
    “No, I can’t.”
    “Yes, you can.”
    Ultimately, she relented, and cad that he was, he took full advantage. She tasted so sweet, so dear. He nibbled across her skin. It was moist and warm from her ablutions, and she smelled like soap and flowers. The invigorating aroma called to his primitive side, which was begging to have her for his own.
    He clasped her buttocks, drawing her loins to his, his cock needing him to press, needing him to flex. Though mentally she didn’t comprehend what the gesture indicated, her body recognized what was required, and her hips responded, meeting his in a slow rhythm.
    There was no predicting what might have transpired, but footsteps sounded in the hall, and they froze. He held her close, her face wedged to his chest, her pulse hammering with fear like a captured bird’s.
    They listened, as the strides neared, then passed by and into the stairwell.
    “It was merely a servant,” he whispered.
    “And you think that makes it all right?”
    They tarried a few seconds more, but the intimate spell was shattered, and the fiendishness of his actions swept over them like a poisonous cloud. He was chagrined, while she was shocked and appalled, and she lurched away to grab her robe from the end of the bed. With trembling hands, she jerked it on and tied the belt; then she went to the window and stared out at the stars. It was obvious she was hoping he’d leave without humiliating either of them further, but when he was around her he couldn’t behave rationally.
    He walked up behind her and rested his palms on her shoulders.
    “I won’t say I’m sorry,” he told her.
    “I will then. Just go.”
    “I can’t. Not yet.”
    He played with her hair, sifting