Page 4 of Kiss the Duke Goodbye
She shook her head, hoping she wasn’t carrying this maneuver too far. Men had very fragile natures, she’d come to understand. “You can bow out and leave him to it.”
“Like hell, I will,” he whispered, the heat in his voice melting her where she stood. Then he grinned, utterly the scoundrel who’d paraded into her shop for months rabble-rousing with his brothers.
Before she could say another word, he was standing before her.
His touch was sure, his hand at her jaw, beneath her ear, before finally settling at the nape of her neck. He’d ripped off his glove on the way over and his skin against hers was sizzling. She could feel calluses on his fingertips, the slight scrape of his thumbnail. She went willingly when he urged her, meeting his hard body with an intimate press of her own.
His head lowered; hers rose.
Where they met in the glorious middle.
The kiss was twenty seconds of tender caresses before it roared away from them. She didn’t wish to play coy, she wanted tolearn. Tobe. Sincere and courageous, she dove in.
When he opened his lips atop hers, she followed, mimicking his moves. He groaned brokenly, more erotic than any sound he’d made in her dreams. His hand curved around her waist, his fingertips digging into her skin. Yanking her to him, before pushing them against the counter when it wasn’t enough. His tongue touched hers, lightly, then…ah, magic. A blaze of heat, an erasure of reason, instinct taking over. They tangled, fought, and battled with nothing more than their bodies. She’d never realized she could experience this much from an act that seemed so straightforward in theory.
A simple kiss, when it wasn’t simple at all.
Later, Clarissa couldn’t have said exactly what her adoring duke did to her—or what she did tohim. Only that they were, for a brief moment, joined in erotic fervor.
Bodies bumping, twisting, heads slanting for deeper contact. Her teeth nipped his bottom lip and the taut underside of his jaw. His mouth danced along her cheek before finding a vulnerable spot beneath her ear that made her moan low in her throat. His reaction to her was not insubstantial. She could feel his hard length pressing against her hip as he stepped into the warm crevice between her legs. The image of him thrusting inside her blossomed until the picture roared through her mind.
The kiss was constant movement. And hunger. Her fingers twisted in his lapels, then rose to curl in the silken strands at his nape. She wanted this to go on forever. She needed the Duke of Herschel in a way she’d never needed a man.
That she wasn’t frightened of this truth stunned her.
As it was, he pulled away first. With a whispered oath and a gasping exhalation, set her back. His eyes were glazed, so dark a green they were mired in shades of mossy black. She understoodfrom his confounded expression that the experiment had gone in a direction he’d not planned.
She was wholly gratified to see he’d lost control.
The man had control of far too many situations.
“Quit smiling,” he ground out between lips she’d plumped with her own. “Unless you’d like me to move you atop this workspace and have you right bloody here.”
Laughing, she sucked in a much-needed breath that allowed his scent into her nose, while holding on to the counter he’d threatened to place her atop to keep herself from sliding to the floor. She wondered if his sheets smelled of sandalwood and hoped she would soon find out. “Thank you, Your Grace. This was a very enlightening interview. I will consider your candidacy.”
She pressed her palm to his chest, recording his heartbeat tapping beneath the heel of her hand before giving him a little shove.
He stumbled but righted himself instantly, his scowl growing. “You’re not kissing the other one.” He gestured between them with the glove he’d somehow hung on to during their ride. “This was enough of a test. A goddamned fire when we only needed a trifling blaze to prove anything.”
She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “I think that’s hardly cricket. Clarence asked first, and since I’ve never kissed him, I hardly know how to judge without it.”
He set his jaw. “Clarence?”
“He’s very nice. A cobbler.”
The duke drew a fast breath through his nose. “Cobbler.”
She shook out her skirt, looking down to conceal her amusement. “Good with his hands.”
“Brilliant,” he grumbled in a hot tone and wiggled his glove on one delicious finger at a time. Then he was off, across the room, where he snatched up his posh hat and jammed it on hishead. It sat at a horridly crooked angle Clarissa had no intention of correcting. “I suppose I’ll wait with bated breath to hear your verdict.”
Leaning against the counter, she took in the full picture of the Duke of Herschel in high dudgeon.Heavens, he was stunning, no matter how much she wished he weren’t. Not to mention the bulge beneath his trouser closure her gaze kept straying to. His body was a marvel. “You’re merely vexed because no one, I suspect, has ever told His Grace no.”
He speared her with a leaden look that sent a quiver right through her. She was obviously attracted to the sulky ones. “You’re right, they haven’t. Unless you mean my father, a dreadful man who enjoyed telling me no in all kinds of hateful ways.”
Oh, she thought. If he continued exposing fragments of himself, she feared tumbling down a slope she had no wish to traverse.
He made it to the door before his gaze sought out hers again. “And it’s Knox DeWitt, Clarissa Marlowe. No more Your Grace, not one more utterance of that damned honorific. After such a blinding kiss, I think we’re owed.”