An Unforgettable Lady

He put his mouth on her stomach, just below her belly button, and prayed for self control. As his hands moved ever closer to her core, his mouth followed, kissing her skin through the silk. He had every intention of learning her intimately. With his fingers. His tongue. His body.

Smith's excitement grew to such heights that at first he didn't notice when her hands began to push against his shoulders. She started to thrash around but he assumed it was from the same passion he was feeling.

He was wrong.

"No! Stop!" Grace said, with alarm, jack knifing up straight.

She began to struggle with the nightgown and then gave up, pulling over a pillow to cover her breasts. She was shaking and pale.

Smith shifted to the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands. He was fighting to slow down the raging hunger in his body, cursing himself with every ragged breath.

"I'm—I'm sorry," she said softly. She reached out to him, touched his arm.

He yanked back. The last thing he needed was her hand on him. Not while he was trying to convince his inner caveman to get civilized.

"It's not that I don't want to..."

"But the wrong side of the tracks was tougher to visit than you'd thought?" His voice was hoarse.

"Good God, no. It's not that at all. It's just that... my husband—"

"I don't really want to hear about him right now, if you don't mind." Smith got to his feet. He needed to get the hell away from her. "Good night, Countess."

He left in a rush, walking back to his room in long, angry strides. He wanted to close all of the doors between them.

Lock them tight, for Chrissakes. He felt like,he needed something a hell of a lot more sturdy than his will to keep them apart.

chapter

11

The next morning, Grace fumbled to shut off the alarm. Her hand flapped around the bedside table, running into her diary, the lamp, everything except the clock. She opened her eyes, slapped the thing into silence, and collapsed back onto her pillows.

Outside it was storming and rain lashed against the windows.

She looked down and saw the shirt Smith had wrenched from his body. A flush went through her as she remembered what had happened next. She could still feel his mouth, hungry on hers, and his hands traveling across her skin. It had been a blur, going from his anger to their kisses, from the edge of reason to beyond control. She'd felt as if she was being possessed by him.

Pulling back, stopping him, had been an act of self-preservation.

Sometime after he'd laid her down, as he was kissing her belly and stroking her legs, taking her higher and higher into some kind of frenzy she'd never experienced before, she'd become overwhelmed and a little frightened. He wasn't hurting her but things had been moving so fast that she hadn't been able to process what bubbled up into her consciousness. Insecurities, insipid and disturbing, had cut through the passion and brought up memories she couldn't escape.

By the end of her marriage, her sex life with Ranulf had disintegrated into a painful exercise in humiliation for her. As he became more and more disenchanted with his wife, he grew rougher as a lover until she learned to dread the feel of the bed dipping down when he slid in next to her at night. What had previously been a pleasant enough experience became something she endured and her cool response to him only made the situation worse. He became impotent and laid the blame for his sexual dysfunction on her. With every failure, he railed against her, telling her she was frigid and hardly a woman. She had stood up to him once, explaining that a woman needed more than just rough hands spreading her legs to enjoy sex, and that had been the only time in her life she feared a man would strike her.

Although she knew Ranulf taunted her to be cruel, because he was humiliated as well as disillusioned with her and the marriage, a part of her wondered if he wasn't a little right. She'd had one lover before her husband and wouldn't have described her attraction to either of them as overwhelming. Between her past experience and Ranulf's vivid and disparaging vocabulary, she had doubts whether she could satisfy a man. And whether she herself could be satisfied.

Until John Smith had come along.

Her reaction to him blew the doors off the notion she was frigid. But it did nothing to dispel the other side of her self-doubts. If there was one man on the planet she wanted to satisfy, it was Smith. She just wasn't sure she could.

Knowing the basics of sex was no guarantee you could make all that thrusting anything more than a mild cardiovascular workout. Hell, she learned that from Ranulf— before he got mean.

When the doubts in her mind had cut through the desire in her body, she'd only wanted to slow down what was happening between them. She'd needed a moment to catch her breath, prepare to make the leap into unknown territory.