A Wedding For The Scandalous Heiress. Elizabeth Beacon

and it was a shock that echoed through them both.

      Yes, there was the shake of novelty and wonder in his fingers as he danced them across her cheekbone and down to outline her chin as if he was learning her with every sense he had. Never before had she been tempted to burrow into a man’s arms, to try to become a part of him by melding her heat with his, her mouth with his. For a minute reality threatened to pull her back and her mind told her body to flinch away, but the alluring stranger snatched all her attention back by sliding his wickedly exploring tongue over her lower lip, deepening the kiss.

      She shifted even closer and copied his exploration. His cheek and jaw felt so firm under her touch and her fingers were intrigued by the contrast between her own softer features and his hawkish ones. She could feel the suggestion of his beard despite a careful shave and she spared a moment to scent the clean, sharp smell of soap and something tangy used to take the sting of the blade away when a gentleman was making himself civilised and smooth for the company of ladies.

      Real life threatened to jump in again, but she told it to go away and muttered something encouraging instead. Nothing in reality could beat a meeting outside time and all the rules of polite society. Her heart beat so fast and her breath demanded air while pleasure and hope and a big, wide yes to life and this stranger and all he could be opened up inside her. She was shivering like a thoroughbred and rode a tide of heat more intense and deep and demanding than anything she’d ever felt before. There were no words to describe how right it felt when he pulled her closer to show her what she was doing to him. She felt the tension of deep desire in his rigidly muscular form. This was the carnal, primal need that carried men and women to places they’d never intended to go to when they started an evening not even knowing one another.

      Instead of flinching back and telling him, no, they couldn’t go any further down that road when they didn’t even know one another’s real names, she pushed her curious hands under his unbuttoned evening coat and gave a pleased little grunt at the feel of a hot, needy and intriguingly muscular male under her exploring touch. Her fingers soothed the tight muscles at the base of his spine, whispered inquisitively downwards, desperate to know the difference between his spare male flanks and her own sleekly feminine curves. He gasped as if she’d stung him, then sucked in breath as if he might need more if she was going to carry on, so she did. She could feel his muscles shift and soothe, then tense again as she explored the sparseness of his buttocks and the honed, pared-down line where they met long, strong legs. Her own legs wobbled and almost let her down as their stance thrust his unmistakably eager manhood emphatically against her.

      This was what uncontrollable desire felt like. This was how a woman felt when she was desperate for the man she loved to take her somewhere magical. That old taboo, that stark little four-lettered word sounded like a death knell in a corner of her mind, but she was moon-mad and curious enough to ignore it for a little longer. It put a hiccup in her sigh, though, a caveat in her exploration even as she buried a gasp of awe and need against his shoulder, then stood on tiptoe so that every bit of her felt it knew every bit of him.

      But they didn’t, they couldn’t; not with so many sharp eyes and curious minds dangerously close by. She felt him stand a little straighter, pulling back his leanly powerful shoulders so he stood more sceptically apart from her as she burrowed against the warmth and strength and certainty of him and tried to hold on to this moment for a little while longer. If she let go, she’d have to see what she’d done and what she ought to have been doing instead. Ever since she’d given in to impulse for once and stepped outside the stuffy ballroom behind them, the way her life was planned out from now on was weightless in the balance against this rebellious encounter under the stars. Let him go and that weight would tumble back and she would end up more wrong than she had ever been in her life.

      As she stood in the stronghold of his arms, trying to hold the real world at bay for as long as she could, voices started to disturb the fog of her mind.

      ‘Isabella can’t be out here,’ she heard Magnus Haile’s voice say in the vast, close distance between his world and the one she and the stranger and the moon inhabited.

      Now just a few yards away his voice sounded pacifying with forced casualness. She stiffened and felt her fellow moon-led simpleton do the same. Magnus must be with his father for him to sound like that. The Earl of Carrowe was a despot with his family, but so sleekly charming in the polite world the stark difference between public and private man still took Isabella’s breath away.

      ‘Where is she, then? Get your engagement puffed off so I don’t end up in the sponging house or have duns to breakfast. You have shilly-shallied for far too long, so you find her before her upstart brother-in-law withdraws his consent or I’ll spill your secrets.’

      ‘She’s of age and so am I. We need no consent,’ the Honourable Magnus Haile asserted uncomfortably, as if he was trying to remind himself that he and Isabella were two free and unencumbered adults.

      Even as she stood in another man’s arms and felt him go rigid before he let her go as if she’d suddenly grown horns and a tail, Isabella frowned at the flatness in Magnus’s usually pleasant tenor voice. He had spent last Season courting her so half-heartedly it took her until the end of it to notice. Then he had asked his fateful question and it shocked her even now to recall she had agreed. They were friends, she reassured herself. They would run in harness well together and she had never met anyone who made her heart race or her inner wanton melt with greed and heady desire. Until tonight. When it was too late.

      Isabella stepped cautiously away from her stranger; stiff as he was now reason had rushed back in. A sluggish breeze stirred the sticky heat and fluttered her pale gown as space opened up between them.

      The Earl of Carrowe pushed his protesting second son aside and stepped away from the pool of candlelight. Still as a statue now, Isabella froze and held her breath. This familiar stranger standing so stiffly next to her felt remote and withdrawn as an iron statue. She desperately hoped the night was deep enough for the Earl not to see them standing here like guilty lovers. Who would have thought a man she never laid eyes on until tonight could show her Isabella the Undone? All in the space between the ballroom and here and now.

      ‘You don’t need consent, you need a pitchfork up your...’ the Earl said in the coarse manner he saved for his family. Or at least those who depended on him for a leaky roof over their heads. Here at Haile Carr he had to hide his true self or risk the fury of his wealthy daughter-in-law and her even wealthier father.

      ‘You’ll keep a still tongue in your head about my future wife if you want me to go through with this marriage.’ Magnus sounded as austere as a monk and halted his father’s trail of obscenities in their tracks.

      Isabella stifled a hum of sympathy as she felt the weight of real life settling back on her shoulders. It felt even more of a burden now than when she had first decided to share Magnus’s responsibilities. They weren’t in love, but she never wanted to be in love anyway. Love was a trap and an illusion, nothing like the fairy-tale emotion three-decker romances portrayed. Isabella had agreed to Magnus’s proposal for one reason—to get him and his sisters out from under the Earl’s thumb—to give her best male friend outside her family a chance to be free of the monster she had heard bully and even beat his children. She had had no idea until a visit to the Haile ladies showed her the insults and foul language of the real man under the Earl of Carrowe’s urbane outer shell. The Countess had hidden Isabella’s presence and even took her out down the backstairs so the Earl wouldn’t know she had been there. From that moment on she was filled with a passionate desire to help the Earl’s daughters and Magnus had given her a chance to do it, so she took it and him and told herself all would be well because she didn’t want to be in love with her husband anyway.

      Except it felt as if they had missed something vital out. Isabella had been restless and hot and uncomfortable in her own skin in the ballroom and bolted outside to get away from what she’d done with her eyes wide open. And look where that had got her; she’d taken light in the arms of a stranger and now had to live with the memory of it on her conscience while she pretended to be Magnus’s glowingly happy bride-to-be.

      ‘Renege on our deal and I’ll tell the world what you did last year and