Page 124 of The Ladies Least Likely

It had not escaped him that the servants in Renwick House obeyed his mother, not him. In fact he suspected they ran all his orders by the countess for confirmation and approval.

“If you wish, your lordship.” The butler gave Ren a stiff bow, ignoring Harriette altogether.

Ren sensed the burning fury in her, but she kept it bridled, matching her steps to his gait as they made their way down the stairs and through the long hallway that ran toward the back of the house and the mews.

The garden was cloaked in darkness, and Ren led them out into the scented air, following the graveled path to the back gate and the stables.

The streetlamp shone over the tall iron fence, turning Harriette’s powdered hair to silver.

“You needn’t leave because my mother wishes it,” Ren said, thinking of his earlier plan to whisk her away to his room and spend the night with her.

Ply her with wine. See behind that crisp, cool calm she projected to the rest of the world.

Discover her secrets, and what her mature woman’s body looked like beneath that gown. Didn’t she want to spend time with him?

“I don’t want to cause talk. You don’t need that cloud about your head.” She didn’t stroll but walked briskly to the rear of the garden. Ren opened the gate, and she whistled to the man seated in the driver’s perch of a small, fashionable cabriolet. She was truly leaving him.

“Where can I find you?” he asked desperately.

She paused to look into his face. Her scent drifted beneath his nose. “Did you get my card?”

“I didn’t get anything.”

She lifted a slender hand and traced the bones of his face, following the line of his brow, his cheekbone, his jaw. Curls of warmth spread from the path of her fingers, slightly callused.

“It’s best I don’t tar you with my brush, Ren. I would so like to paint you. You always were beautiful, but now—there’s something about you that I would love to capture. I wonder if I could.”

His throat closed as once more she gave him that searching, considering look. She thought him beautiful? No one had ever, in his life, used that word in association with him.

He couldn’t let her walk away. “You told me before to give you a kiss, and I didn’t,” he said, his voice a low rumble.

“I’ll take it now,” she said without hesitation, and stepped into his arms.

He froze in astonishment and momentary panic.

The women he’d kissed—the mere handful of them—had all, in his mind’s eye, worn Harriette’s face.

The women he’d taken to bed in his fantasies had all, rather unimaginatively on his part, been different versions of Harriette Smythe.

But the reality of her was so exquisite, so potent, that he barely trusted what his senses were telling him.

It might be a fantasy Harriette slipping her gloved hands around his neck and lifting her lips to his.

The softness, the heat, the delicious scent of her hit him with the force of a collision.

For a moment he couldn’t breathe. There was no place he would rather expire than in the arms of this woman, but he didn’t want to miss a moment of finally, finally kissing Harriette Smythe, for real this time, not in his dreams.

Her lips were soft and moist and supple and moved against his like a dance.

Her hair tickled his temple. Her skirts swallowed his legs.

He dimly comprehended the breasts pressed against his chest as she leaned into him—oh God, the very thought of her breasts made him hard—and then her tongue slipped into his mouth to dab against his, and his cock sprang to attention with such a bolt of pleasure that he groaned.

Part of his mind was paralyzed with fear that he would do something wrong, or become so overwhelmed with sensation that he would spend right here in his breeches.

Too eager, too fumbling, grabbing like an untried boy—that’s what the Italian courtesan had said when he paid for a night of her company.

What if he did something wrong with Harriette and turned her off him forever?

But she kissed him with ever deeper intensity, her tongue tangling with his, leading, teasing, probing, and she shifted slightly so that he pressed not into her skirts but against her , some part of her, he wasn’t sure what because his head was a mass of stunned sensation, and he wouldn’t be ashamed if he did climax simply from kissing Harriette Smythe, because her mouth on his, her body against his, the scent of her desire in his nostrils was the most intensely erotic thing he had ever experienced in his life.

With a small moan from the back of her throat—a moan that made a pulse go through his already enflamed body—she pulled away, disentangling tongue, hands, skirts and putting a cool, sobering space between them.

“Well,” she said. “Someone taught you how to kiss proper, milord Renwick.”

No one had taught him. The courtesan had laughed and said he slobbered.

The prostitute in Paris hadn’t let him kiss her at all.

But Harriette didn’t make him feel like a buffoon.

She made him feel strong, confident, in charge, bold enough to press her against the fence and pull up those infernally enormous skirts and?—

“If ye wanted a tup, liefer ye’d done it inside, where’s we didna have to watch ye,” grumbled a man’s voice.

He had forgotten that her carriage stood in the mews just beyond them.

A hulking form leaned against the step and a smaller, bent shape perched atop the huge horse waiting patiently in its traces.

Ren squinted through the shadows and was shocked to find the rider was not a boy but a man, his shoulders set at uneven angles, his legs hanging crookedly along the horse’s sides.

But his striped livery hugged a chest and arms covered with wiry muscle, and his expression was sharp and mocking as he regarded Ren.

Harriette’s groom was a cripple like he was.

Worse, actually. Ren stared, too many questions fogging his mind for him to voice just one.

As he stuttered for breath, Harriette took the hand of the footman—a huge man, twice Ren’s size, though something about the shadows on his face seemed wrong—and climbed into the smart vehicle. The groom picked up the ribbons.

She was going to leave just like that? Without a word?

“I want to see you again,” Ren blurted, putting a hand on the side of the carriage.

She reached out gently, squeezed his fingers. He couldn’t see her face in the shadows, but he heard the sadness in her whisper. “It’s best if you don’t. For your sake. Goodbye, Ren. Be well. Be—happy.”

Her voice wavered on the last words. The groom tossed her the ribbons and the huge footman hauled himself onto the platform at the back. Harriette flicked the ribbons, and the vehicle rolled away.

Ren’s hand fell to his side. She was leaving him this time, going away to worlds unknown, leaving him stranded in a place he didn’t want to be.

The parting didn’t feel like a sweet sorrow. It felt like a hammer to his chest.