Romancing Lady Cecily by Ashley March Page B

between his palms. The leather now lay cool against her flushed cheeks.
    â€œI won’t tell you not to cry,” he murmured. “I’m entirely too selfish for that. Cry, my little kitten, and let me kiss away your tears.”
    Cecily shook her head and swallowed, fighting the inclination to give in to him, despising how quickly she allowed him to sweep aside her resistance. No musician could have played an instrument better. His voice was like a song of seduction to her senses, the husky invitation of a violin sliding beneath her well-guarded defenses.
    â€œMy darling,” he whispered, and his mouth slid along the crest of her cheek. As if called by his touch, the tears brimming in her eyes overflowed, chasing the path of his kiss.
    â€œYes, that’s it.” He gathered her closer, his arms about her tight, almost crushing. She should have felt suffocated. Or restricted. Perhaps instead comforted by the strength in his arms. But as his lips traced over her face, catching every tear as it fell from her eyes, pulling the moisture to the corner of her mouth and pressing against her lips, her sobs turned to gasps of pleasure. She clutched him frantically, holding him even more tightly than he held her.
    She could not escape him, his ability to turn any thought toward him, any emotion into longing. Her closest friend was not yet dead an entire day, and here she was, panting in his arms.
    No. No.
    Cecily stiffened, preparing to push herself away. But before she could lift her hands from his shoulders he released her, so suddenly that she almost fell to the floor of the carriage—and would have, if not for the light, innocently polite pressure of his fingertips at her back.
    He was black and white before her. His eyes shadowed, discreet pools; his skin pale in contrast; his coal dark hair and the white blade of his smile quickening her breath while the deceptively simple stroke of his fingers branded her as his over and over again. “You must tell me if you feel inclined to cry in the future. I will be more than glad to support you in your time of need.”
    A mockery. He mocked her grief. And the fact that her body yearned to lean into his, that her lips throbbed with greed in wanting him to devour her again, was even more humiliating.
    Cecily whipped her head aside and cast her eyes to the floor. She stared at the water collecting beneath the hem of her dress, then spreading in a thin trickle toward the soles of his boots. She hoped it ruined them. Everything she touched—his trousers and woolen jacket, his waistcoat and the cravat which she’d savaged in her desperation to get near him—she hoped all of it would be ruined.
    She attempted to climb off of his lap, but he held her fast with no more than the points of his fingertips at her back and the flat of his palm over her thigh. Leaning forward, he nuzzled his mouth against the crook of her neck. The fingers at her back were replaced by the iron strength of his arm, the hand at her thigh trailing a sensuous path up her waist, over her stomach, pausing to cup her breast. Never enough to satisfy; only to tantalize.
    â€œCecily.” She shivered when he spoke her name, the heated stroke of his breath against her throat stirring lust and want and every unspeakable sensation she’d prefer to ignore. How many times had she told herself she would no longer be moved by him—by his voice, his gaze, his touch . . . his kiss? He had no right to intimacy with her. And she had no right to give it to him.
    When she tried to turn her head away again, his hand left her breast and touched gently at her chin, drawing her gaze back toward his. “Why are you crying, kitten?”
    She closed her eyes. At the moment she wasn’t strong enough to resist the entrancing pull of his gaze, those black eyes which insinuated with one glance every dark and terribly delicious thing they could do together.
    â€œShall I force you to