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But could he, in all conscience, think of touching Lily that way when she was a peer to his own daughter?
That was not quite accurate, he consoled himself, Lily being fully a year older than Chloe.
As if a year mattered.
Perhaps it didn’t when he knew this young lady had entered into an alliance, one which included his own daughter, to shun and refuse any gentleman she knew did not love her and whom she did not love either, if he should offer her marriage.
Gabriel and Mariah’s marriage had been such an arrangement, but they had been lucky enough to fall in love with each other after they were married. So that Chloe had indeed been born as the result of a “shared love and passion.”
Having known the opposite, Gabriel fully recognized the limitations offered in a loveless marriage.
But these six young ladies, one of them his own daughter, were making a decision, a wrong one, he believed, which could affect the rest of their lives.
And he, Gabriel realized self-derisively, was mentally trying to justify his attraction to the forthright Lily Tremayne.
“I believe I should like you to call me Gabriel,” he murmured.
Her eyes widened. “You would?”
Gabriel smiled slightly at her wariness. “I believe it would be inappropriate for you to continue calling me Your Grace once I have kissed you.”
Her eyes were huge in the pallor of her face. “You intend to kiss me?”
“I think if I did, it would help you to see how true physical pleasure is to be savored and enjoyed.” Good Lord, was he now trying to justify his desire to kiss Lily by using such pompous rhetoric?
It seemed that he was.
“Careful!” He stepped forward to take a firm grasp of Lily’s arm as she seemed to sway on her feet, before he then gave in to the temptation of pulling her fully into his arms.
Gabriel drew a sharp breath at the feel of her heat and softness resting against the hardness of his chest and abdomen. That indrawn breath brought with it the light but heady floral scent of Lily’s hair.
“What if I do not wish to be kissed?” Lily’s words were whispered into his chest.
“How can you possibly know that until you have first tried the experience?”
She raised her head to look at him searchingly. Whatever she saw in his face or read in his eyes caused her breathing to falter and the pupils of her eyes to once again dilate.
Which was when Gabriel took the opportunity to lower his head so that his mouth could take possession of hers.
A single taste of her luscious lips and Gabriel lost his battle to keep the kiss on the right side of his usual rigid control, even in the most intimate of circumstances.
Instead, he kissed Lily hungrily. Demanded her response as his lips devoured hers and his tongue thrust deeply into the warmth of her mouth.
She tasted delicious and responded with a heat that matched Gabriel’s own.
Quite how far he would have taken those hungry kisses, Gabriel had no idea, because minutes later, the sound of the bell ringing to announce a visitor infiltrated what was rapidly becoming an overwhelming tide of passion which he felt absolutely no desire to call a halt to.
It actually pained him to break the kiss before lifting his head to stare down into the face of the young woman whose understated beauty and fire were, he knew, the sole reason for the reawakening of his long-silent libido.
Lily looked slightly dazed as she stared back at him, her eyes now having a feverish glow, her cheeks flushed, and those already pouting lips slightly swollen from the overwhelming force of his passion.
Gabriel could taste her still as he swept his tongue across his own slightly moist bottom lip. “This conversation is not over,” he told her softly, aware of his butler’s increasingly audible steps as he approached the library down the flagstone hallway. “Lily?” he prompted when she made no reply.
She continued to look up at him with lust-drunk eyes, but, for the moment, seemed incapable of answering him.
“We will continue this another time,” he vowed even as he stepped a polite distance away from her.
Just in time, as his butler knocked briefly before entering. “His Grace, the Duke of Hellsmere, is here to see you, Your Grace,” Cramer announced.