Beguiled
Page 35
Philadelphia was incredulous. ‘You bought them at the auction?”
“I thought you knew that.”
She shook her head, looking down at the pearls once more. “I couldn’t abide knowing which of my father’s detractors bought them so I didn’t watch the bidding. I’m glad it was you.”
He lifted her face with his fingers. “You are making me do all the work, menina. Have you nothing to say?”
She met his black gaze and felt again the fire, and the love, and the joy that she had thought she would never feel again. “You are wondering why I ran away.”
“I know why you ran away.” He brushed the tip of one thumb over the fullness of her lower lip. “But you are done with running. Sim?”
“How—how did you find me?” Why was he watching her mouth like that, like he would like to take a bite out of it?
“You may thank your employer, though she did not choose the most direct route to locate me. She sent private investigators to find me and I, suspecting them to be agents of MacCloud, avoided them quite well. If I had not happened to surprise one of them as he was going through my luggage in Chicago last week, I might not be here even yet.”
He slid his little finger under the curl covering her ear and began rimming its shell. The thrill of his touch made her softly gasp. “Three months is a long time to be without you. I have not slept well at all. How could I, when I can remember how perfectly you fit against me in bed, how your lovely spine curves so sweetly against my belly, and the pressure of your shapely buttocks against my loins makes me eager to awaken?”
He stepped up so close to her so that his lapels touched the rounded curves of her bodice. The fingers beneath her jaw turned her face up so that his breath brushed her lips with his next words. “Tell me what you remember, menina.”
“You. All of you.”
He kissed her then and she thought her heart would stop from the joy of it. He tasted of exotic music and tropical sunshine, of jungle darkness and lush wild fruits bursting with ripened nectar. Dark rich rivers began to flow within her. Deep and life-filled and urgent currents flooded her.
Finally, the gentle hands that had drawn her to him held her a little away. His bittersweet chocolate gaze was so penetrating that her world ceased spinning. “Have you nothing to say to me even now, menina?”
“I love you.”
He played his words against her mouth. “I know that.”
“I will marry you.”
“That is what I came to hear.”
He took the pearls from her hands and set the case on a nearby table. “Now come here, menina.”
She went with him to the sofa without a thought for their circumstances or for propriety, or the chances of being caught. She was astonished at his ability to rid himself of the essentials, and even more surprised that she let him free her of her gown. And then she was in his arms, his glorious warm copper-skinned embrace, and she forgot that she was in the Ormstead mansion parlor, on Fifth Avenue, and even that it was eleven fifteen on a Monday morning in November. There was nothing but the pulse of Brazilian music in the exquisite power of his love to fill her senses.
He took her to dark and passionate places, showed her jewel-filled midnight skies, brushed trade winds over her skin, and dressed her in his earthy scent.
Hedda Ormstead was not a gambling woman. She had known exactly what she would see when she opened the drawing room door. Still, it came as something of a shock to find her best camel-hair sofa being so freely abused. If she had not already been making wedding arrangements for the past week, she would have been thoroughly outdone.
She shut the door discreetly and set herself before it as guardian. It would not do at all for the footman or parlormaid to know that she was permitting such goings-on beneath her roof. She had trouble enough keeping her staff in order.
Age had its privileges, and one of them was the right to be improper, and imprudent, and to revel in it. And to think, she was actually playing cupid at her age!
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