When a Scot Loves a Lady by Katharine Ashe Page B

not.”
    â€œNae.” Beneath hooded lids, he was staring at her mouth again. Kitty could not halt herself; her hand moved seemingly of its own accord to his chest, as though she were allowed to do such a thing, as though ladies touched gentlemen in rear foyers beneath staircases every other day.
    It felt right to do so. Frighteningly right.
    As the night before when she had been about to kiss him, he remained perfectly still. She spread her fingers and sank her palm against his ribs. His heartbeat thumped quick and hard. A coil of anticipation shimmied up from her core to her very fingertips. She released a little breath.
    â€œYou are a man of few words, aren’t you?” Her voice was crackly.
    â€œAye.” His was deeper than she had heard it yet. His breaths were uneven beneath her hand.
    â€œI—” She whispered over the lump of constricted anticipation in her throat. “I—I—”
    â€œYe whit, lass?” He barely spoke aloud.
    She shifted her hand, sliding her fingertips beneath his waistcoat. With a sharp exhalation he grasped her shoulders and pulled her to him.
    Kitty sighed. She’d wondered whether her drunken imagination invented the sensations she’d felt pressed to the firm wall of his body. Now she was sober and heady with them. She could barely form the words she’d been thinking since he had released her on the stair ten hours earlier.
    â€œI—I wish to ask you a question.”
    She was slender and delicate in his hands, all curved lusciousness against his chest. Leam hadn’t held a woman in too long, except the night before, when he’d held this woman far too long for his own good. Her eyes were feverishly bright now, spots of crimson high on her cheeks, so far from the pristinely elegant Londonite she was to society. In this inn, over the course of mere hours, she was coming apart, piece by piece, before his eyes. In his hands . The exquisite shell was breaking into tiny shards.
    By God, he wanted no part of it.
    Release her .
    He bent his head. Her fragrance tangled in his senses. “Whit’s that, lass?”
    Release her, fool .
    â€œWill you kiss me again?” She hadn’t even the presence of mind to look into his eyes. “I want you … to.” Her hot gaze upon his mouth nearly unmanned him. Nearly.
    Nearly…
    Entirely.
    His hand slid over her shoulder, up the silken curve of her throat to cup her head.
    â€œDae ye nou?” His voice was husky. No surprise there. After that kiss last night he’d stood outside in the snow for an hour to relieve the tension in his body. It had not sufficed. Now she pressed herself up against him and as a woman of experience she must know perfectly well how he wanted considerably more than her kiss.
    She nodded, her breasts rising heavily against his chest. “Quite dreadfully a lot.”
    There was still time to release her.
    She did not look like a woman of experience. She looked like a girl, trembling and wide-eyed and not truly knowing what she asked. For years now Leam believed such a face of innocent desire could not be real. He had discovered at great cost to himself and a man he loved dearly that it was not real.
    It seemed real upon this woman. She lifted her storm-cloud gaze to his and he got caught in its brilliant candor. He lowered his head, her mouth beckoning, full and shapely and all feminine beauty. The scents of wood smoke and cherries breathed through her parted lips, straight to his foolish poet’s head and rigid man’s groin. God, but she was perfection—as perfect as in the stairwell when it had taken every ounce of his considerable self-control to put her off—as perfect as that night three years ago when he first heard her speak, silken-smooth and quick-witted, and saw the cur’s possessive hand at her elbow, Poole’s proprietary eye.
    â€œJust do it.” Her voice was a mere utterance. “Just kiss me again.