Innocent Courtesan to Adventurer's Bride. Louise Allen

work and her limbs how to struggle, the moment his lips pressed against hers.

      Whatever she had expected from a kiss, it had not been this totally enveloping sensual experience. Ashley’s warm lips moving over hers were disturbing enough in the intimacy of the gesture, but she could taste him as well and she felt the brush of his tongue against the seam of her lips and guessed he wanted her to open her mouth. Stubbornly she managed to keep it closed, even while she inhaled the scent of him mingling with the fresh smells of the spring woodland all around them and the tang of the sea breeze. His body was hot and hard and so much stronger than hers that even struggling seemed pointless. Or was it that his strength was arousing and, shamefully, she did not want to struggle?

      Ashley released his hold on her wrists and put one hand in the middle of her back, the other hand raking deep into her loose hair. He growled, a husky sound of appreciation, as he shifted his stance to turn and get his back against the rail and Celina found herself pressed intimately close as his tongue began its assault on her closed lips once again.

      She felt so strange. She ached and yearned and trembled and the inner voice that cried Stop! was drowned in the roaring of her blood and the hammering of her pulse. Lina parted her lips, felt the thrust of Quinn’s tongue. Heat flooded through her at the intimacy of the intrusion and for a moment she could not react. Her body, though, knew what to do; her own tongue moved, tangled with his, the taste of him filled her senses.

      He was aroused; she felt him hard and urgent pressing against her. A flutter of alarm brushed against her mind and was drowned in the torrent of new sensation. Ashley’s hands moved, one sliding down, urging her against him, the other slipping between their close-pressed bodies to cup her breast.

      Long, knowing fingers found the edge of her bodice, slid beneath it to find the tight-puckered nipple. A stab of fire lanced from his fingertips to her belly, terrifying in its effect.

      She was aware, hazily, that in a moment she would be beyond rational thought, utterly at the mercy of her own untutored sensuality and Ashley’s skilful seduction. We were so innocent…Her aunt’s words seemed to ring in her ears. Innocent, seduced, ruined.

      No, stop this. Now. He thinks I have yielded, she thought, then closed her teeth hard, released them as she felt his recoil, pushed out of his arms and was away down the steps, heedless of the slippery surface and the ancient rail.

      She was almost at the bottom when she lost her footing and pitched down the final six steps, bumping painfully on the sharp wooden edges to land in an undignified, bruised heap on the ground. It hurt enough to bring tears to her eyes, but she was not going to dissolve into sobs in front of him, she thought fiercely, drawing in gasps of breath while she tried to work out if anything was broken.

      Ashley came down the stairs after her with even more reckless haste, two at a time, and vaulted over her huddled body at the bottom, kicking up the deep leaf mould as he landed. ‘Hell, woman, of all the stupid things to do! These stairs are lethal. Don’t move.’ He knelt beside her. ‘Don’t move anything. Where does it hurt?’

      ‘I have been up and down those steps a dozen times,’ Lina retorted, indignation taking her mind off her bruises, and almost off the clamouring demands of her body. He was so close. ‘They are only dangerous if one is running away from a libertine! This is all your fault.’

      ‘There was no need to run—a simple no would have sufficed. Does that hurt?’ He took hold of her right ankle, his big hand gentle as it encircled the slender bones.

      ‘Yes,’ she snapped. ‘Everything hurts. And take your hands off my…my nether limb. You would not take any notice of no,