Page 67 of Duke of Wickedness

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” she said, though nothing about the way her palm was pressed to his chest suggested that she actually wished for him to release her.

“No,” he agreed, letting his arm tighten slightly around her waist. She fit against him perfectly. He wanted to tuck her head under his shoulder, wanted to stroke her soft, golden hair. “We shouldn’t.”

“We should go back inside,” she said. She leaned her head against him, as if she had read his mind. Honestly, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she could peer directly into his thoughts. How else did she always manage to be soperfect?

“We should.” He let his cheek rest atop her head.

“But…”

He smiled.

“But itisa very nice night,” he said mildly.

“And we get so few of them each year,” she added approvingly.

“It’s practically our duty to enjoy them.”

She wrapped her arms around his waist, then tilted her head back up to look at him.

“You’re very agreeable this evening,” she observed, an approving look mixed in there with her teasing smile. He found that he liked that approval more than he ought.

But some things were best kept hidden inside the deep, dark recesses of his mind, so he matched her tone for lightness as he retorted.

“I’m always agreeable.”

She laughed at that, laughed outright—directly into his face. It was brazen and rude, and he was sick with happiness at seeing her joy.

He kissed the laugh right off her face.

He hadn’t realized how much of his effort had gone into holding back from her. Not just tonight, though that, too. But the whole week. Thewholeweek, he’d wanted this.

He’d wantedher.

The idea should have frightened him, and likely it would later, but now, there was only Ariadne—the taste of her, the way she pressed up on her toes to meet his mouth more firmly, the way he could feel the curve of her smile at the same time as the probing curiosity of her tongue.

“You know,” she said, the comment unfolding between kisses—when had she learned that particular trick? It made David feel desperate to pull her tighter against him. “It’s high time that you took proper responsibility.”

“I—what?” he asked. The words themselves should perhaps have been alarming, but the lazy, happy expression on her face curtailed any worry he might have felt.

“You,” she said, then kissed him again, and again. “You make me feel as though I amaflame.”

David felt the way she breathed the word down to his bones, felt it in the echoing chambers of his heart.

“Yes,” he said. “God. Ariadne. You make meburn.”

She looked at him as though she wanted to consume him, and goddamn it all, he had taught her too well, because he feltseduced, felt himself losing his head more and more with every gasping breath.

David was a pleasure-seeker; he’d been so for nigh on a decade now. But he’d always considered himself to be in control of that pleasure. Now, though, the cool head he’d always been so proud of was gone. Ariadne held him perfectly in the palm of her hand.

Damn him if he didn’t like being there.

They were just kissing. Their hands didn’t wander, or at least not very much, and goodness knew there was no chance of things going much further. There wasn’t even a suitable bench in this garden. David had some standards, and laying a woman directly down in the dirt did not meet them.

But even with all that…

Kissing her was just sonice. Because yes, yes, he burned—he always burned when he was with her—but it was a kind of smoldering burn, the kind that burned on and on and on. The kind you could sustain, could bank and then reignite. The kind that endured—that never went out.

The kind, David reminded himself, that led to houses burning down, because nobody ever took the danger seriously.