A Sense of Sin by Elizabeth Essex

and an English girl. But you’ve also got something else, something of the exotic East wafting about you. Incense and spices.”
    “How can you tell all that?”
    “Because I can. That’s how it is with you. I can find you in a garden full of fragrant, blossoming flowers, and I can find you in the midst of a pungent yew hedge. I could find you with my eyes blindfolded. In the dark.”
    Her claret red lips formed that lovely, entirely kissable, silent oh of surprise.
    He closed his eyes to the sight of her pillow-soft lips and took another deep, satisfying breath. Turning away, he leaned his head into the hedge. He felt slightly dizzy, as if he were on an edge, teetering at the brink of some precipice. At the mythical perpetual, roaring waterfall at the edge of the world, dropping off into infinity. The infinity, the endless possibility of her.
    “Just soap. From your bath. It’s heavenly. You’re heavenly. I’d like nothing more than to lay my cheek across the back of your neck and find that spot just behind your ear where the scent is strongest. But then I would be compelled to taste the warmth of your skin along the side of your neck, to press kisses down to your exquisite collarbone and the little hollow, right there. That sweet hollow, just waiting for me.”
    He opened his eyes to the sight of her in the moonlight, staring at him with dark eyes, enthralled by his words. Her mouth was open a tantalizing fraction that made him long to slip his tongue into her warmth. Her bitten lips were the dark color of Bordeaux and just as intoxicating.
    “But then, once I had had that first taste of your flesh, I would need to know the feel of your lips beneath mine. To see if they could possibly feel as infinitely soft as they look. And I would need to fit my lips over yours and exert just enough pressure to feel the warmth of your flesh beneath mine.”
    Her breath left her body on a soft gasp and she was so still, pressing back into the hedge, he feared she had forgotten how to breathe. But her breasts were rising and falling with a rapidity that spoke of arousal. And she was not alone. His own breath was locking up tight in his chest, making him ache from the duality of what he was doing—arousing and denying all at the same time. It was having a decidedly erotic but chaotic effect upon his unruly body.
    “I . . .” she whispered, and then tried again. “You seem to know my own thoughts before I do. I’ve never . . . My hands are tingling with the need to touch you. I want to touch your lips, to trace them with my fingers.” She looked down at her hands as if they were foreign to her, and then rubbed them together. “It does no good. Still they tingle. And still I want to touch your lips.”
    She reached out and would have stroked along his bottom lip with one trembling finger. He felt himself leaning towards her, as desperate for the contact as she, when he stepped back. No. He was the one who was supposed to be seducing her. How could she, this untried, naive virgin have him aching and yearning for her simple touch?
    “No.” He filled his lungs with the moist night air. “We cannot. I dare not. Because if you touched me, Miss Burke, it would only be the beginning. It would give me license to take your mouth with mine.” He closed his eyes, lost in the vision of his imagining. “Once I had kissed you, had tasted your lips and delved into the warmth of your unfathomably soft mouth, I would not be satisfied. I would not be happy until I peeled those silk clothes from your body and feasted my eyes upon your gloriously naked flesh. I would not be satisfied until I touched you. And once I had my hands upon the silk of your skin, I would not rest until I could bury my body in yours and feel the exquisite bliss of being inside you.”
    His breath was sawing in and out of his lungs as if he had run a great distance. He shook his head to clear the image of her sprawled out beneath him, her skin pink against the white of