Wicked Nights With a Lover (The Penwich School for Virtuous Girls #3)(9)

She absorbed his words, an awful heaviness settling into her chest. Her eyes stung and she blinked them fiercely.

Still, a part of her couldn’t back down from him. Perhaps it was his manner, the rough way he handled her and spoke to her—his utter arrogance. “And beating him to death will improve matters? How will that help this woman and her innocent child?”

“Stubborn fool,” he ground out, his grip tightening on the front of her dress. “You know nothing of how things work down here.”

Heat scored her where the backs of his fingers slid down between the valley of her breasts. The first time any man had touched her so intimately …

Her heart hammered, beating like a drum in her too-tight chest. She didn’t resist him, didn’t blink, her eyes wide and aching in her face as he pulled her closer and closer … until no more than an inch separated their faces.

An arrested look came over him then.

She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

He stared at her, truly stared at her for the first time, it seemed. Everything else melted away. It felt like they were alone in the hack, even with half of him still standing in the street.

Street sounds faded, lost to the roaring in her head.

He lifted one hand between them, large and masculine. Not the hand of a gentleman. He brushed her lips with his fingers. “Such a beautiful mouth to spout such drivel,” he mused.

She drew a ragged breath, her belly quivering with a twisting heat.

He eased her back down then. She propped her elbows on the carriage floor to stop herself from descending completely onto her back.

The back of his hand delved lower inside her bodice, knuckles grazing the swell of a breast. She gasped at the foreign sensation, at the sudden tightness of her chest. Her breasts grew heavier, the tips tightening, hardening. Embarrassing heat washed over her face, traveling all the way to the tips of her ears.

He watched her closely, moving his hand again, testing her, it seemed, with each graze of his knuckles against her goose-puckered skin.

“You like that.” It was more a statement of fact than a question, but a denial rose swift and fiery to her lips just the same.

“I do not.”

The look in his eyes told her he didn’t believe her, which only increased her mortification. Mortification she would perhaps not feel so deeply if she did not suspect it to hold a grain of truth. She did like his touch, reveled in the way her belly twisted and clenched, enjoying the way her heart thundered inside her chest, reminding her that she was alive.

She needed this—had to find this magic with another man. A lover of her own. The idea had burrowed and rooted its way inside her already, but now it intensified its hold.

The notion would not go away, and she didn’t want it to. It filled her with purpose. Led her to action she would otherwise have thought brazen and insane under ordinary circumstances. Only her circumstances were no longer ordinary.

“Yes,” he rasped, dipping a single finger deep inside her bodice, beneath her shift, the tip daring to stroke a nipple. Her teeth clenched against the spike of sensation arcing through her. Magic.

A strangled sob escaped her.

His eyes flashed, darkly smug.

He continued, his voice a low rumble, physical, as tangible as that finger against her breast. “You like it,” he declared. “What’s your name?”

“Marguerite,” she breathed before she could consider the wisdom of giving him her name.

His lips turned up slowly, flashing teeth too white for belief. That grin was all-knowing. It galled her, pulled her from whatever feelings and sensations had addled her head. She wanted this, true. Only not with him, a voice whispered, small and unconvincingly inside her head.

“Perhaps, Marguerite, you’ve no wish to return lily-white. Perhaps you came to the rook for a taste of what you can’t get in your clean little world across the river.” He cocked his head, studying her as if he had never seen anything quite of the like. “Is that it?” He brought a hand back to her face and stroked the soft flesh of her jaw.

Then she smelled it—blood. Coppery rich on his knuckles. An inch from her mouth. Her stomach rolled, heaved.

It was all the reminder she needed. He was a savage. Seductive or not. Dark-angel mien and all. She was a fool to let such a scoundrel lull her with his mesmerizing gaze.

Without thinking, she turned her face and bit down on his finger.

He hissed and pulled his hand back, shaking it. She held her breath, waiting, certain he would strike her. Certain he would turn the savagery she had witnessed in him on her.

Instead, he merely glared at her, his glittering gaze furious. And something else. Something that made her belly fill with dancing butterflies.

She thrust out her chin. “Remove yourself from me!”

The driver shouted down. “Eh, we going anywhere or you just going to shag the wench in there, guv’nor? Whatever yer business, I need coin for time in my hack!”

“If you know what’s good for you, you won’t come back to St. Giles. A pretty bit of muslin like you, with that saucy mouth …” He shook his head, frowning. “You’ll only meet with trouble. Run into the sort of man you so gallantly saved from my fists this day.”

“How considerate,” she sneered, certain she would never come face-to-face with a greater threat to her person than he. “I thank you kindly for the advice.”