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“My sistersdoaffect me?—”

She had not been quiet; in a flash, his hand was out of her grasp and back upon her mouth. This time, when she tugged, he was not so easily moved.

“You test my patience,” he whispered angrily. He had to bend down to keep his hold over her mouth.Good, Emily thought. All the better for him to see the fire in her glare. Her back was against the wall, so she couldn’t tilt her head back, but with him bending, she found she didn’t have to move at all in order to meet his eye. It was perhaps the first time she’d ever been grateful for her height.

The Earl, wretched man that he was, pressed his advantage and kept talking.

“All I wanted was to make peace with you. Is that so hard? It is simple. Just peace, nothing more. But no, you could not manage it. You insist on pushing and pushing andpushing?—”

With each repetition of the word, the Earl’s chest heaved with breath, and on the third utterance, the very front of his waistcoat brushed against the very front of Emily’s bodice.

She stopped glaring and her hands, as if of their own accord, stopped trying to remove the Earl’s grasp, instead fluttering down to wait placidly at her side.

His closeness was making her feel…something.

It had to be anger.Surelyit had to be anger. He had manhandled her! He was behaving in an exceedingly ungentlemanly fashion!

It did notfeellike anger.

And maybe whatever the Earl was experiencing did not quite feel like anger, either, because he let his hand drop. She was almost sorry to lose the contact. She didn’t move, barely breathed, as she looked up at him, looked at the tortured expression that flitted across his face.

“I cannot stand,” he whispered, “the way you make me feel.”

The words were like a sigh of air. They clearly signaled the end of his speech, but he did not move back.

She did not tell him to move back, not by word or by deed.

Her heart raced too quickly to mark any normal passage of time.

And then they were kissing.

Emily didn’t know if she’d kissed the Earl or if he’d kissed her, but she couldn’t dwell on it overmuch because she was being kissed for the very first time in her life.

It was, she was astonished to report, extremely nice.

Unlike her friends, Emily had, from her debut, sought a husband. This was for practical reasons, rather than romantic ones though she’d long understood that this would mean submitting to the indignities of her husband’s marital attentions. Lovemaking was, after all, necessary to beget an heir which was why most gentlemen deigned to marry in the first place.

She’d never given much thought to kissing.

She was thinking about it now. Or, no—she was scarcely thinking at all, was merelyfeelingthe softness of the Earl’s lips against hers and the contrast of that softness with the bruising intensity with which he pressed against her. She felt the warmth of his body, the rasp of his face where his whiskers were just starting to grow in again.

She felt the heat of his tongue, probing at her bottom lip. With a gasp, she granted it entrance, and then she felt the lazy, warm caress as it moved against her own tongue.

Her hand clutched in the collar of his jacket, tugging him closer. Her other hand found his, their fingers intertwining as he pressed her wrist back against the wall. The pressure felt curiously good—so good that her knees went weak.

But the Earl was there, the long, hard plane of him; he pressed harder against her, pinning her body between his and the wall behind her so firmly that she could not have fallen even if she’d tried. Andthatfelt so curiously good that it tore a moan—a needy, humiliating sound—from Emily’s throat.

The Earl didn’t seem to mind it, however, not if the way he pressed harder against her and kissed her with renewed vigor was any indication.

Or, rather, he did not mind it for the scant few seconds between when Emily moaned and when there was a soft, shocked “Oh my” from far too close behind them.

The Earl could not have leapt away from her any more quickly if she’d burst into flame. He staggered away from her, putting two long paces between them in an instant, an appalled look on his face.

His movement was not quick enough, however; the damage was already done. For when Emily’s eyes blinked open, she saw the worst thing she could possibly have conjured in thatmoment: half a dozen members of theton, staring at them with expressions ranging from shock to horror to the delight of someone who knows they have just witnessed the greatest gossip of the Season.

CHAPTER 8

“It’s going to be fine,” Emily insisted to her sisters with more calm than she felt.