Free Razzmatazz-DDL by Patricia Burroughs

senses reeling faster than before.
    “Kennie, I’m going to kiss you.”
    Even her pulse stopped.
    His lips found not her mouth but the base of her throat. She gasped softly as his lips brushed lightly across a pulse that now skittered wildly. His hand closed around the back of her neck, his fingers twining into the soft, feathery curls and nudging her head back. Her mouth was still opened on an intake of air when his lips found hers, and she succumbed to the onslaught of kiss, of memory.
    It had been like this, so intense, so sweet. Even now, as his tongue traced her lips, dampened them, then withdrew to allow his mouth to continue his ravishment, even now she heard echoes of “I now pronounce you....”
    She remembered each scent, each texture, each feeling, recaptured them in vivid reality for her to explore, this time with full control of her faculties. This time there was no ambrosial haze, no off-center dreaminess.
    This time was real. This kiss was now. These feelings were honest and all too real.
    And in being so, the emotion was ten times more devastating.
    She found the taut muscles contouring his back and followed them with her hands, then sent one to his luxurious hair, the other to his waist. She clung to him like a person drowning, for she was. Dear sweet Jehoshaphat, she was.
    He eased away; she gasped for breath. Before she could think, his mouth captured hers with renewed vigor. She lost all reason, all sense of anything but this man, who controlled the very air she breathed and the throb of the blood flowing through her body.
    What was happening to her? Dear mercy, what was happening? A moth within her soul fluttered frantically, though for the life of her she couldn’t tell whether it fought to free her from, or to plunge her into, his devouring flame. No matter, she had neither the will nor the desire to stop it.
    An insistent knocking at the door failed to break the bond between them; it was only a weak echo of her heartbeat. But then that tiny, fluttering part of her mind recognized and seized the distraction like a life raft on a stormswept sea. She broke away, gasping, “The door.”
    “The door,” Alex echoed, and she could feel his reluctance to let go as his fingers lingered, grazing down her arms before finally breaking the contact. And again he rasped, as if for reinforcement, “The door.”
    Did he feel as relieved, as stunned, as she? Thank goodness for the dark. Thank goodness she didn’t have to look him in the eye....
    He snapped the light on, and she covered her mouth with a trembling hand. Alex thrust a handkerchief in her hand and brushed her cheek lightly with his knuckles. “You’ve got chocolate on your chin.”
    “You’ve got lipstick on your jaw,” she responded huskily.
    The knocking continued. “Alex, let me in!”
    An overwhelming sense of relief warred with Kennie’s impulse to take Christopher Abbott by his aristocratic neck and shake him as Alex wearily opened the door and stepped aside. “What is it, Chris?”
    “Alex! Alex!” Chris sprang into the room, his face wreathed in frantic excitement. “How could we forget? Do you realize? Do you realize what you’ve done?”
    “I don’t have the foggiest inkling what you’re blithering about.” Alex’s response was close to a snarl.
    Chris spun toward him, grabbed him by the shirt, and pulled him close. He whispered with demanding urgency, “Your Aunt Minerva!”
    Alex stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign language, then his face paled. “Aunt Minerva.”
    Kennie shrank into the corner of the sofa. “Did she...did she die?”
    “Yes!” Chris exploded. “Yes, she’s dead!”
    “I’m so sorry,” Kennie said. “How dreadful!”
    Alex’s gaze drilled holes into Chris’s. But, apparently oblivious, Chris continued. “But it’s not! She’s been dead for years.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Of course you don’t. Let me explain. It’s her will,” Chris started, but Alex clapped a