Something in her expression dimmed a little and he wrenched his mind away from her bodice. Cleared his throat. “Shall we visit the summer house?” he asked, desperately.
“A summer house! You have one?”
He would do anything for that smile. The certainty of his vulnerability was so dangerous that he just walked beside her, silent as the grave. They walked toward the bottom of the formal gardens. “It’s more of a folly than a true summer house,” he said finally.
They rounded a last turn.
“As you see.”
Her mouth fell open.
“It wasn’t meant to be a ruin,” he told her, deciding honesty was the best policy. “Although I understand that ruins are becoming quite fashionable.” He cocked his head and tried to see it through her eyes. A romantic heap of stone, supposedly a disintegrating medieval castle? Or what he saw: another of his father’s imprudent failures, a building that was to be a proper summer house of stone, fallen to pieces after the builders were left unpaid?
Isidore walked ahead of him. She wasn’t wearing panniers tonight, and her gown followed the curves of her own delectable hips.
“Have you been inside?” she said, turning and looking at him. He could barely focus on what she was saying over the roaring in his blood. She was his, and he had to have her, to own her, to touch her, to kiss her, to…
She leaned back against the fragment of a stone wall and smiled at him. Was that an invitation? Who gave a damn?
With a muttered curse, he strode forward and picked her up, as smoothly as if he carried damsels on a regular basis. “The grass might be wet,” he said, hearing the roughness of his own voice.
She didn’t say anything, but she wasn’t struggling to get away. She just nestled there in his arms, a curvy perfumed bundle. He rounded the building and headed straight for the broken arch. Where the courtyard was supposed to be…
Yes. Tiles gleamed faintly in the moonlight. Fallen walls protected them from view…not that anyone was out wandering his gardens at this hour of night.
He put her down and stripped off his coat. He still couldn’t meet her eyes. She would be horrified if she knew what he was like, how mad in lust he was, mad enough to howl at the moon, to pounce on her like an animal.
“Simeon?” she asked. Her voice didn’t sound frightened. It was husky and caught a little on his name. There was something about it that made his groin clench. And then she combed her fingers through her hair, almost shyly, and he broke, lunged at her and yanked her against him. If he’d thought, he might have considered a gentleman’s kiss, a sweet meeting of mouths that would tempt her into opening her lips…
He ravaged her, took what he wanted, took her sweetness and the taste of her, the smell of her, the way her body swayed under his fingers when he kissed her, the way she murmured something, or perhaps moaned.
But in the back of his mind a voice was shouting for attention. He couldn’t just—he couldn’t just do what—
She was moaning, she was, just a little sound in the back of her throat but it was enough to make him mad. Surely he could just put her down—
Gently, of course.
On the ground? Cold and damp?
His bad angel spoke up again, telling him that his coat was as good as a blanket. For a moment he managed to look down at Isidore with a modicum of logic.
Her eyes were dazed and she had her hand wrapped in his hair. She looked like a woman in the grip of desire. She would…
No.
His good angel screamed so loud that even his most diabolic self shuddered. “I promised,” he said, and had to stop for a moment. She licked his lip, and it sent a stab of desire to his loins that could only be responded to in like manner. He had his hands around her again, lifting her slightly so that she fit snugly against him.