Mistress to the Marquis. Margaret McPhee

that,’ Razeby murmured huskily and pressed her inkstained fingers to the warmth of his lips.

      ‘You know I’m happy. Very happy…’ She paused before adding softly, ‘And not because of the things you buy for me.’ It was the truth.

      He smiled a strange, almost poignant, smile, stroked his fingers against her cheek and stared into her eyes.

      And it did not matter that she had been his mistress for six months, sleeping with him nearly every one of those nights. When he looked at her with that look in his eyes she felt that same flare of desire that had sparked between them the very first moment they met in the Green Room of the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. Indeed, familiarity had not diminished the passion, or all that had grown alongside, between them, only sharpened and heated it. Her stomach turned cartwheels, her skin tingled all over and her thighs seemed to burn. He glanced away, over towards the window, a pensive, sombre expression upon his face. ‘Alice…’

      But whatever he meant to say was lost as she gently took hold of his face, turned it to hers and kissed away the worry that she saw there.

      Razeby retaliated in kind, his mouth passionate and warm and irresistible as the night he had first kissed her in the moonlight outside the theatre stage door.

      Breaking the kiss, she watched him as she smiled, a mischievous smile this time, and let her hand stroke lightly over the hard bulge in his breeches. He swallowed and she felt the shiver that rippled through his body, felt the way it strained to meet her and heard the slight catch of the breath in his throat.

      He caught her hand in his own and moved it away from temptation, his eyes darkening to that familiar smoulder that made the fire of desire twist and curl and dance all the more, low in her belly. ‘Alice, you are a wicked woman,’ he breathed in a velvet voice that tickled against her ear and sent a shiver tingling across her skin.

      ‘Very wicked, indeed, Razeby.’ Her top teeth caught at her bottom lip. ‘So wicked that you might need to put me across your knee and spank me.’

      ‘I would be remiss in my duty to you if I did not do so.’ She could hear the low stroke of desire beneath his words.

      ‘And the one thing about you, Razeby, is that you’re never remiss in your duty.’ Again she thought she saw the shift of a shadow in his eyes so she teased her skirts higher to flash him a glimpse of a stockinged ankle, wanting to make him forget whatever was troubling him. And it worked.

      ‘Be careful, Miss Alice Sweetly,’ he cautioned.

      ‘I prefer to be reckless, James Brundell, Marquis of Razeby. But isn’t that the truth of why you like me?’ She arched an eyebrow and playfully unfastened the buttons at the top of her bodice, allowing the dress to gape and reveal the bulge of her breasts over the transparent linen of her shift.

      Razeby’s eyes darkened. His focus narrowed and sharpened upon her. He swallowed, then wetted his lips. ‘Alice, you are a temptation I cannot resist.’

      ‘I hope so.’ She laughed, and one by one she plucked the pins from her hair, until the neatly coiled length of fair hair loosened and tumbled long and wanton over her shoulders.

      Razeby discarded the neatly fitted dark tailcoat on the sofa behind him. His fingers moved to the buttons of his pale waistcoat, unfastening it and shrugging it off. Around his neck his white cravat was still neatly tied in a fashionable knot. She reached and tugged an end of it, pulling it free and draping it over the back of the sofa. Through the fine white lawn of his shirt she could see a hint of his flesh and the dark peppering of hair that covered it. Her eyes swept lower to the tight buckskin of his breeches that did little to disguise the extent of his arousal or the long muscular thighs beneath. And lower still to the glossy black riding boots that were coated with dust from his having ridden from his own town house in Leicester Square to the one he kept for her here in Hart Street.

      She knew the body beneath those clothes, intimately, every inch of honey-coloured skin, every hard taut muscle. She knew the sweep of his tight buttocks and the breadth of his chest, the feel of his skin beneath her fingertips and the way his heart beat fast and hard after he had loved her. She knew the scent of him, the feel of him, the taste of him and the way he made her heart blossom with such warm tenderness. It just made her want him all the more.

      She turned round and, sticking out her bottom, wiggled it to taunt him.

      ‘You are playing dangerously, Alice.’

      ‘Are you close to yielding?’ she asked over her shoulder.

      He stepped towards her.

      She skirted around the other side of the sofa so that they faced one another as opponents across that barricade.

      ‘When I catch you, Alice…’

      ‘If you catch me…’ She smiled and arched an eyebrow. ‘What are you going to do to me?’ she asked, as excited by the game she had instigated as he was.

      ‘I am going to pull up your skirts.’

      ‘Yes.’ she breathed.

      ‘And bend you over my knee.’

      ‘And then…?’ She felt breathless at the thought.

      He stepped closer to the sofa, lowering his voice to little more than a husky whisper as he did so. ‘You know there is only one way this can end, Alice.’

      ‘Really? How might that be, my lord?’

      He lunged over the sofa for her.

      Alice dodged clear, making a run for the door of the drawing room. ‘You’ll have to be faster than that, Razeby!’

      She made it to the first landing of the staircase before he caught her, his arm fastening around her waist and pulling her to him.

      She gave a yelp and a giggle.

      ‘Minx,’ he whispered in her ear as he kissed the side of her neck, where the blood pulsed strong and wild.

      He scooped her up as if she weighed nothing at all. Her breathing was loud and ragged while Razeby’s was barely changed at all. For all her squeals he threw her over his shoulder like some marauder from olden times abducting his woman and strode up the rest of the stairs.

      ‘Razeby!’ she protested and gave a wriggle, but all she got in return was a slap on the bottom before he kicked open the door to their bedchamber and threw her down upon the bed.

      ‘Now, woman of mine,’ he said. ‘We have a score to settle—a matter of some spanking, I believe.’

      ‘Oh, you think so?’ She laughed and, rolling on to her stomach, began to quickly crawl across the bed to evade him.

      ‘I will not let you escape me,’ he said in a strict voice as his fingers fastened around her ankle and hauled her back across the bed towards him, catching her skirts on the bedcovers and hitching them up her legs in the process. She was still lying on her stomach, her stockings revealed. He pushed her skirts higher to expose her naked thighs and bottom in full.

      ‘Now there is a sight to behold,’ he murmured and she caught her breath as his fingers traced down the curve of her hip.

      The mattress dipped as he sat down upon it and she gasped as she felt herself hauled to lie across his thighs, her skirts twisted high around her hips, her buttocks bared for whatever he chose to inflict upon them.

      ‘Mercy, my lord Razeby, I beg of you,’ she pleaded, but she was smiling and the words were breathless with anticipation.

      ‘I swear, my love, that when it comes to you I have no mercy… or resistance.’ His hand stroked against the fullness of her buttocks, then he spanked her bare bottom, several small light slaps that were little more than cupped caresses.

      She laughed again, as did he, as he turned her in his arms, cradling her to him and kissing her mouth. She wound her arms around his neck, kissing him with all the passion that was burning within her. He rolled her flat on to the mattress and she pulled