“Very well,” Susannah said with a sigh. “But when you tire of it, you may return to calling me by my Christian name.”
“Not to worry,” Lucy said, “we’re still best friends.”
Susannah smiled. Lucy helped her into her robe, which was made of a filmy white material, trimmed with French lace. Susannah slipped her arms into the sleeves, then tied the soft satin bow that closed it at the front.
The two friends beamed at each other. Lucy gave her a wink, then curtsied to her and slipped out of the room. Susannah’s heart raced as she turned and looked at her reflection in the mirror. Excited anticipation brought a bright blush to her cheeks.
Adam entered, and she watched as he walked near to her. He was wearing his white shirt and black breeches. He walked up behind her, leaning down to kiss her on the cheek. He placed his hands on her shoulders.
His caresses caused a bright flame to ignite within her blood. Her pulse raced as she stood up. He placed a hand on her stomach, pulling her closer to him. He ran soft kisses along her neck. She angled her head, so that he had the freedom to do as he pleased.
His arms wrapped around her. Hard and muscular, they held her as tightly as iron bands. With a finger, he slipped her hair over her shoulder. Her neck bared, he trailed soft kisses from the nape of her neck, down and in between her shoulders. A chill rose across her skin. Warm pleasure flashed in the pit of her belly as he began to slip the robe downward. She let him remove it, and then he slipped her chemise down over her shoulders, baring her breasts. He held her. She felt adored, worshipped.
“It’s just like I dreamed,” he murmured.
“Hmmm?”
“Of your skin in the firelight.” He cupped her breasts in his hands, using his thumbs to toy with her nipples until they were erect. She had never felt so alive before. He knew exactly what to do, as he had promised.
His hands moved downward slipping the chemise down over her hips. She turned toward him, raising her hands to cover herself.
He took her hands in his, pulling them away. His lion’s eyes traveled the expanse of her skin, gazing at her, hungrily.
He leaned in, to whisper in her ear, his breath warm against her flesh. “Go lay down on the bed.”
She smiled and did as he said. She watched him as he removed his shirt. In the firelight, his skin was golden. He had broad, muscular shoulders, and his chest was wide and hard with a soft layer of dark hair covering it. He unbuttoned his breeches, pulling them downward. She loved the sharp V of his hips. As she looked at him, it was with a delicious recognition—all of this—all of him, was hers.
He knelt down in front of her, as though she were the goddess that he was going to give homage to. He ran his palms over the outsides of her thighs, then leaned over her. He kissed her, with a burning passion. He gently trailed kisses down over her sternum, in between her breasts, pausing to give them his full attention. Susannah could hardly stand it. She moaned softly and licked her lips. He continued down, over her belly, then he parted her legs.
“Oh,” she said, as she began to feel pleasure, unlike anything that she’d ever experienced before.
He paused. “Do you like it?”
“Yes, it’s—”
“Scandalous?”
“Positively.”
“Keep going?”
“Yes.”
He was using his tongue to softly caress her. It was tender, and she wondered who had ever realized that this was possible. She felt butterflies, lazily winging their way in the pit of her stomach. The feeling crested, washing through her in waves.
She cried out softly, surprised at the feelings. Her back arched, her hips bucked upward. So this was what maids allowed themselves to be ruined for. It was positively delicious. To think that this was what she would enjoy for the rest of her life seemed almost unfair.
He had his hand on her stomach, holding down her bucking hips. She smiled at him. He was watching her, desire spread all across his face.
“Now what?” she asked, eager for more.
He moved slowly, placing himself at her entrance. He gently thrust inside of her. For a moment, there was pain, but then it was gone. It was replaced by new sensations of pleasure. He rocked himself against her, his hips grazing hers.
He flipped them both so that she was sitting astride him. He guided her with his hands. In this position, she felt powerful. It was like she had conquered him. She moved her hips, feeling that frenzied wave of butterflies building in her stomach.
He moaned, his hands cupping her breasts. He looked up at her, and she knew that he was coming to his own climax. He moaned, hardening inside of her. Then he was still. She leaned down, pressing her lips to his.
He kissed her eagerly. His fingers wrapped in her hair. She pulled away, looking down at him. He stared up at her, his fingers playing with the ends of her hair.
She snuggled up beside him. He wrapped his arm around her, pressing his lips to hers.
“Lord Malmore,” she murmured.
“Lady Malmore?”
They both grinned at each other. Susannah was excited to learn this side of him—this version of him, in private. The version of him that was hers, and hers alone.
The End?
Extended Epilogue
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Preview: A Seductive Lady for the Scarred Earl
Chapter 1
A lone shaft of milky moonlight cut through the bedroom, slashing across the drowsy face of Lady Barbara Cluett as she turned over in her bed. Though she was only partly awake, some distant part of her was aware of the large grandfather clock downstairs tolling midnight. Twelve somber tolls, announcing to no one that a new day had begun.
Barbara had been in bed by nine, as she always was. Her father, the Duke of Delistown, insisted upon it and her maid, Rosie, enforced the Duke’s edicts with loyal zeal. Her father was always warning her that she was too busy, that she spread herself too thin, and that if she did not get enough rest, her health would suffer for it.
He did not know that Barbara had been plagued by disturbed sleep since she was a child. She wriggled deeper into her blankets. Her fire was dying down to embers and she tucked her nose into the warmth of her covers, clinging desperately to the shimmering hope of sleep. She had been hovering in that odd state between waking and dreaming for some time now. Not quite awake enough to think coherently, but not asleep enough to succumb completely to dreams. Images flashed through her mind, meaningless phrases, memories, fears, all mixed together.
Finally, she felt herself slipping into a dream. A quiet sigh could have been heard through the room as her breathing grew deep and slow.
Before her there stretched a great wide countryside. The landscape was a colorless gray, with rolling hills dotted with jagged rocks and outcroppings. Trees blasted by a constant wind bent unnaturally toward the ground like anguished women. Barbara’s hair was unbound, falling in a tangled heap of unkempt curls that itched at the back of her neck as the wind whipped it around her head.
She was alone.
In the distance she saw a building, squat and dilapidated, hunched against the horizon. She walked toward it, her feet dragging heavily. The grasses below seemed to snap at her ankles, and her progress was unnaturally slow. With every step she took toward the house, it seemed to take a step away from her.
She began to run. Something about the house beckoned to her. It was familiar, somehow, though she knew that she had never lived there. She felt as though she knew what was waiting for her inside the house.
A person. A man. Her heart began to pound, and she ran faster, her skirts clinging to
her legs as a murky fog rolled over the hills.
Finally, she appeared at the steps of the house. It loomed above her, seeming to lean toward her in anticipation. Its door swung open, looking like a gaping maw set to devour her. Beyond the threshold she could see nothing but inky blackness, but, despite her fears, something compelled her to step inside.
The contrast between the moors outside and the air in the house was marked. Inside it was dry and warm. The wooden beams of the floor crackled like firewood as the darkness dissipated around her and she stepped inside.
“Yes?” she called.
The house was supernaturally quiet, and she tiptoed through a thick layer of dust that rose up in puffs around her feet as she walked deeper into the house. She knew that she was not alone, but only in that dream-like way of knowing that needs no sound or sight of the Thing to know that It was there.
She passed through a parlor and caught movement on the far wall. A jolt of fear went through her, but when she turned toward the movement she caught only her own reflection in an old, cloudy mirror. She walked toward it and reached her hand out to swipe it across the gritty surface, wiping away an arc of dust to see herself more clearly. Something about her reflection was foreign to her and she leaned forward, inspecting her pores and the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
She looked…young.
Unnerved by the strange reflection, she abandoned the mirror and continued her search for whoever was waiting for her in the house. She called out again, but was met only with a faint scurrying of mouse’s feet. In the hallway, though, she caught the sight of a flickering light at the top of the stairs. She followed it.
The stairs creaked and groaned under her weight as she climbed them. The banister under her hand wobbled, and she felt that if she put any weight on it at all it would fall clean off, exposing the side of the stairs and herself to the danger of toppling over the edge to the floor below.
At the top of the stairs, there was a room with the door ajar. The room flickered as though there was a fire burning inside, but when she pushed the door open more, she found that the source of the light was merely an oil lamp, left burning in the middle of a dusty table.
The lamp was full, but the dust in the room was utterly undisturbed.
How long have you been burning?
She touched the lamp, the warmth of it traveling up her arm. Lifting it up, she peered around the room. The sense that she was not alone intensified so that the short hairs along the backs of her arms stood on end.
“Who is there?” she whispered. “What do you want?”
Suddenly there was a clatter at the window. Barbara jumped, nearly dropping the oil lamp. A fiery red crossbill dashed itself against the grainy pane of glass. Again, and again, the frantic bird smashed its gnarled beak and tiny, fragile body against the window so that Barbara thought the animal would kill itself.
She put the oil lamp back down on the table and ran to the window, throwing it open. Immediately, the bird plummeted to the ground with a lifeless thud, and as her eyes followed its descent she saw the man standing outside.
She jumped again, a shiver of dread, fear, and wavering recognition shaking her to her toes. His form was indistinct, the colors of his clothes seeming to meld into the brownish gray of the landscape as the wind swirled around him. His hair, a dark, dirty blond, moved around his head in a way reminiscent of the grasses moving in undulating waves across the windy moor.
He stared up at her. Silent. Unmoving.
He looked young, no older than seventeen. His body was angular and thin, but strong with the sinewy strength of recently outgrown boyhood. His jaw, his cheekbones, his shoulders, were sharp.
There was something animal about him. Something elemental. She didn’t expect him to speak any more than she would expect a lone fox crossing her path to stop and say good morning. And yet she was certain that it was he who had sent for her. He was the force that had drawn her to this house.
After a timeless moment that passed in the way that dream-time passes— possibly a second, possibly an hour— he moved. He stepped forward, his hands reaching out for the side of the house, and he began to climb.
Barbara leaned over the windowsill, breathless, watching him scale the side of the house. His long fingers managed to work their way into unseen knots in the wooden slats and she could see his muscles straining through the thin, wind-swept linen of his shirtsleeves. He stared up at her as he climbed, his eyes seeming to grow larger and more intense as he approached.
When he was nearly to the window, she reached down. His hand grasped hers. It was rough and calloused. Slivers pricked through his skin. But most remarkable of all was the terrible heat that radiated from him. His hand was as hot as the side of a steaming teapot. She gripped his long fingers tighter and used all of her strength to help him through the window.
When he straightened up, she was surprised by his height. He seemed to unfold himself in stages until he stood a full foot taller than she.
“Did you light the lamp?” she asked in a low voice. At least she thought she asked it in a low voice. Perhaps she had not said anything at all. He stared down at her with that penetrating gaze that betrayed nothing. There was emotion behind those eyes, they were practically brimming over with it, but she could not understand what it was or what he was thinking.
Her heart and her body were stirred for him. Although his edges still felt strangely indistinct and distant, as he stood there before her, he looked more physical than before. She could measure the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. His breath stirred the air around them, and she was drawn toward him, until she was so close that she could feel the heat of his body warming her skin through her clothing.
“Did you light the lamp?” she inquired silently, her hands coming up to rest on his chest. He was burning up. Suddenly she felt very cold and, instinctively, she folded herself against him, pressing herself against the radiating heat that seemed to find its source in his heart, which she could feel beating against her cheek as she rested her head against him.
“You lit the lamp.” The reply was not spoken but felt. She heard it only in her own mind though she was sure that he had been its source.
“Why did you call me here?” she asked, wrapping her arms around him. He was so warm, so warm. He combed his fingers through her hair, wrapping her in his heat.
“You called me.”
She knew that it was true. Somehow. Her body ached for him, for his hands which roamed over her, leaving trails of heat over her skin. The force of her desire for him seemed to tilt the room onto its side and back again. She must have wanted him before she even saw him. He must have felt her need from across the moors.
He answered her unspoken plea, tilting her face up to kiss her. Heat poured from his mouth and pooled low in her stomach at the apex of her legs. His tongue licked her lips, slow and hot and obedient to every unspoken, lustful thought that fluttered through her mind. He grasped at her, pawed at her flesh, until she was utterly overwhelmed.
He seemed to grow hotter and hotter, the blaze inside of him threatening to burn out of control. When he broke away from her she looked into his eyes and was startled by the change in them. They were no longer a cool, steely blue. There was flickering behind them, a golden glow that obliterated any sign of pupil or iris.
“What have you done?” his voice was clear in her mind.
Black swirls of smoke began to pour out of his mouth and ears. Her desire crossed the threshold into fear as her own panic was reflected back to her in his eyes.
“What have you done?” he asked again.
When she turned to flee, she found that the room was engulfed in flames. Fire licked at the peeling wallpaper and swirling trails of flame danced around their feet. Barbara tried to scream, but smoke caught in her throat and filled her lungs, burning and making her sputter into uncontrollable coughs.
She fell to the ground, flames licking at the hem of her skirt. When she
looked up at him, he was being consumed by the fire. He was shrieking, but he made no sound.
Barbara woke with a start, sitting upright in her bed. She was covered in a sheen of sweat, her sheets twisted around her body and clinging to her skin. Her body tingled with fear and arousal as she sought to catch her breath.
That blasted nightmare again.
Chapter 2
Barbara pushed her hair out of her face. The sweat on her brow made her hair stick to her forehead and neck in a way that made her itchy and uncomfortable. With some difficulty, she untangled herself from the twist of sheets about her legs and got out of the large, plush bed.
As she tumbled toward the basin, she could only be thankful that she had awoken before her maid had come in to rouse her. Rosie was the only living soul who knew about Barbara’s recurring nightmare, and Barbara hated the look of concern in the woman’s eyes when she was shaken awake from it by her.
She poured the cool water from the pitcher into the basin and dipped her hands in, splashing her face. The cold washed away the sweat and, with it, the distressing pounding of her heart.
The dream, which she had been having periodically for years, felt like something very private and important to her, in a way. It felt wrong for anyone else to know about it. As much as the dream disturbed her, a part of her enjoyed harboring this little secret. She straightened up and loosed the thick braid that hung over her shoulder. Using her fingers, she combed through the messy curls.
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