Page 49 of The Duchess Curse

“No.” She kissed him so hard he fell backward onto the bed. Her hands pressed into the mattress on either side of his head, she said, “You wanted to kiss me.”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t. Because I would know.”

He turned his head, gave her his profile.

“Look at me!”

He did.

“Kiss me.”

The bed’s canopy draped them in shadows, and as what remained of his glamour drained away in the dark, she saw two things in his green eyes.

Sorrow.

Lust.

Then she heard the wailing of her own heart. She moved to stand, to command him to leave. But the smallest slide of her body toward the floor jolted him into action.

He kissed her, wrapping his hand around the back of her neck and dragging her back down to him. Being mastered by him was what she’d always thought it would be—heady perfection. But it was tainted too.

He rolled her until her back was on the bed, but he didn’t roll on top of her. He melted to his knees between her legs and laid his head in her lap. “Forgive me.”

She sat upright. “No.”

“Please forgive me.”

“Never.”

He lifted his face to her, and his green eyes had the whole of the ocean in them. “Then let me make amends.”

“You can try,” she sneered, tightening her fist in his hair and jerking his head higher. “I do not think you’ll succeed, though.”

He licked his lips. “I’m an optimistic fellow.”

She released him, crossing her arms over her chest.

And holding her gaze, he wrapped his hands around her hem and lifted.

“What are you doing?”

“Atonement.”

“I don’t think that’s found beneath a petticoat.”

The corner of his lip lifted. “We’ll see.”

His hands found her thighs and settled there like brands. The outline of them would greet her next she took a bath, an eternal reminder of strong fingers digging into soft flesh.

He bent at the neck, as if offering her a chance to guillotine him, but when he placed a chaste kiss on the inside of her thigh, all thought of blades and blood flashed out of existence.

Not just one kiss. A hundred. A thousand little kisses in a hot line up her leg until his breath washed across her sex, washed whatever objections she might have formed away.

With one long, slow lick, she forgot everything but what might come next. She tangled her hands in his hair again, this time needing to urge him closer instead of punishing him.

And he knew exactly what she wanted, running his hands up her outer thighs until they spanned her hips, his thumbs seeking into her curls.