A Rake's Midnight Kiss by Anna Campbell

with him. Especially when he pursued an alluring, sharp-tongued hussy. The night was so still that he heard the soft pad of her feet as she approached. He fought the urge to seize her.
Control, man. Control.
    “Genevieve, you are beyond lovely.” Admiration roughened his voice.
    The downward flicker of her lashes betrayed a bashfulness that touched him as much as her defiance. “It’s a very old dress.”
    That doyen of fashion Sir Richard Harmsworth should scorn the drab garment, but Genevieve’s beauty transformed the worn muslin. He held out a hand, unsurprised to note that it wasn’t steady. A distant warning clanged in his brain thatwith this woman he risked the detachment that protected him from emotion. But how could he heed caution’s call with her standing so close?
    “Come here,” he murmured, taking her hand. Her skin was cool from her swim. Slowly he drew her nearer.
    Hesitantly she advanced. Her shyness quieted the rapacious beast inside him, so gentleness came naturally when he slid his hand around her waist. Her innocence seemed precious and fragile. As precious and fragile as the Harmsworth Jewel. His heavily armored heart cramped with poignant longing and his grip turned coaxing, soft. Touch confirmed what sight had hinted. She wore nothing beneath the flimsy muslin.
    “I’m sure this is a mistake.” Her body lost its stiffness and she curved into his hand.
    “I’m sure it’s not.” Which wasn’t completely true, damn it.
    He was accounted a master of seduction. He couldn’t recall his first kiss. His first fuck had followed too closely upon it. But this tremulous, delicate anticipation made him feel like a boy with his sweetheart. He lifted the hand he held and placed it over his heart. Through his thin cambric shirt, her touch melted all remnants of calculation.
    Experimentally she flexed her hand, spurring his heart into a gallop. “You’re so warm.”
    “Let me warm you,” he whispered.
    Her chin tilted until glittering eyes met his. What he read in her gaze was no surprise. Trepidation. Questions. Courage. And something else. Something he’d longed to see since he’d climbed through her window little more than a week ago.
    Desire.
    He’d imagined when he kissed Genevieve, he’d be eager to stake his claim. That wasn’t how he felt, holding her tall, trembling body in the moonlight and staring into herbeautiful face. Perhaps the night indeed possessed magic. Or, much easier to believe, the woman did.
    Genevieve remained motionless as Mr. Evans’s mouth skimmed hers. The brief contact set her lips tingling. In the second between that kiss and the next, her head swam with a multitude of impressions. His height, his heat, the constrained power in his arms. The satiny texture of his lips. His clean, masculine scent.
    He kissed her with a purpose and fervor that curled her toes against the grass and turned her knees to water. Lost, dazed, she hooked one hand around Mr. Evans’s shoulder to keep her balance. That first tentative kiss had provided little hint of what was to come. Her girlish imaginings even less. This was like a whirlwind.
    Behind closed eyes, the darkness was blacker than a starless night. Hot darkness. Beckoning darkness. Her hand clenched in his shirt, over his frantic heartbeat. She whimpered with longing against his lips.
    He gave another of those low growls that reverberated not just in her ears but in her bones and slid his tongue between her lips. She tensed with surprise and tried to withdraw.
    “Open for me, Genevieve,” he whispered, brushing kisses across her nose and cheeks and forehead. It was the way one kissed a child, except that his determination mocked innocence.
    “We’ve kissed now,” she stammered, hardly aware what she said. “You can let me go.”
    “Devil take that for an idea.” He cradled her face between his strong palms. “That wasn’t a kiss.”
    “It felt like a kiss.” She struggled to sound resolute, but only managed