Christmas Betrothals. Sophia James

the wrong turn as soon as he stood, the polite façade of a moment ago submerged beneath anger.

      Panic made her careless. ‘I want to buy a kiss from you.’ Blurted out with all the finesse of a ten-year-old.

      ‘You what …?’

      ‘Buy a kiss from you …’ Her hands shook as she rummaged through her bag, trying to extricate the notes she had got from the bank that very morning.

      When she finally managed it he swore, and not quietly.

      ‘Shh, they might hear.’

      ‘Who might hear? Your father? Your cousin? Someone has already had one go at me this week and I would be loathe to let them have another one.’

      ‘Someone did that to you?’ Goodness, she had lost hold of the whole conversation and could not even think how to retrieve it.

      With honesty!

      Taking a breath, she buried vanity. ‘I am a twenty-five-year-old spinster, Mr Clairmont, and a woman who has been kissed only once, yesterday, by Lord Wilcox-Rice. And I need to know if what I felt was … normal.’

      ‘What the hell did you feel?’

      She drew herself up to her tallest height, a feat that was not so intimidating given that she stood at merely five foot two, even in her shoes.

      ‘I felt nothing!’

      The words reverberated in the ensuing silence, his anger evaporating in an instant to be replaced by laughter.

      ‘I realise to you that the whole thing may seem like a joke, but …’

      He breathed out. Hard.

      ‘Nay, it is not that, Lilly, it is not that.’ She felt his hand against her cheek, a single finger stroking down the bone, a careful feather-touch with all the weight of air.

      A touch that made her shiver and want, a touch that made her move towards this thing she wished for, and then vanishing as a sound came from outside in the corridor.

      Luc Clairmont moved back too, towards the window, his body faced away from hers and his hand adjusting the fit of his trousers. Perhaps he was angry again? Perhaps on reflection he saw the complete and utter disregard of convention that her request had subjected him to?

      She smiled wanly as a young maid entered the room and bade her leave the tea for them to pour. Question shadowed the girl’s eyes and Lillian knew that she was fast running out of minutes. It was simply not done for an unmarried lady to be sequestered alone for any length of time with a man.

      At twenty-five some leeway might have been allowed, but she knew that he would need to leave before too many more seconds had passed.

      Consequently when the door shut behind the servant she walked across to him.

      ‘I do not wish to hurry you, but—’

      He did not let her finish. The hard ardour of his lips slanted across her own, opening her mouth. Rough hands framed her cheeks as the length of his body pressed against hers, asking, needing, allowing no mealy response, but the one given from the place she had hidden for so, so long.

      Feeling exploded, the sharp beat of her heart, the growing warmth in her stomach, the throb of lust that ached in a region lower. As she pressed closer her hands threaded through his hair, and into the nape of his neck, moving without her volition, with a complete lack of control.

      He was not gentle, not careful, the feel of his lips on her mouth, on her cheek and on the sensitive skin at her neck unrestrained.

      And then stopped!

      She tried to keep it going, tipping her mouth to his, but he pulled her head against his chest and held her there, against a heartbeat that sped in heavy rhythm.

      ‘This is not the place, Lilly …’

      Reality returned, the yellow salon once again around her, the sound of servants outside, the tea on the table with its small plume of steam waiting to be drunk.

      She pushed away, a new danger now in the room and much more potent than the one that had bothered her before.

      Before she had been worried about his actions and now she was worried about her own, for in that kiss something had been unleashed, some wild freedom that could now not be contained.

      Lucas Clairmont placed her letter on the table and gathered his hat. ‘Miss Davenport,’ he said and walked from the room.

      Lord, he thought on the journey between Pall Mall and his lodgings. He should not have kissed her, not allowed her confession of feeling ‘nothing’ with Wilcox-Rice to sway his resolve.

      And now where did it leave him? With a hankering for more and a woman who would hate him.

      He should have stayed, should have reassured her, should have at least had the decency to admit the whole thing as his fault before he had walked out.

      But she had captivated him with her pale elegance and honesty and with the fumbled bank notes pushed uncertainly at him.

      To even think that she would pay him?

      Absolute incredulity replaced irritation and that in turn was replaced by something … more akin to respect.

      She was the one all others aspired to be like, the pinnacle of manners and deportment and it could not have been easy for her to have even asked him what she did. Hell, she had a hundred times more to lose than he, with his passage to Virginia looming near and a reputation that no amount of bad behaviour could lower.

      Why on earth, then, had she picked him? She must have weighed up the odds as to what he could do with such information, the pressures of society here like a sledgehammer against any deviation from the strict codes of manners.

      Why had she risked it?

      The answer came easily. She did so because she was desperate, desperate to discover if what she felt for Wilcox-Rice was normal and hopeful that it was not.

      Well, he thought, with the first glimmer of humour coming back. At least she had found out that!

      Lillian threw herself on her bed and took the breath she had hardly taken since Lucas Clairmont had left the house.

      He had been angry, the notes she had tried to give him in her fist, a coarse message of intent and failure. She rolled over and peeled each one away from the other.

      Two hundred pounds! And if he had taken them it would have been worth every single penny. Turning, she looked at the ceiling, reliving each second of that kiss, her fingers reaching for the places his had been and then falling lower.

      What if he had not stopped? What if he had not pulled back when he did? Would she have come to her senses? Honesty forced her to admit she would not have and the admission cost her much.

      ‘If you aren’t careful you will be your mother all over again, Lillian.’ Her father’s voice from the past, a warning to her as her mother lay dying, the words uttered in a despair of melancholy and sorrow. She had been thirteen and the fashions of the day had begun to be appealing, the chance to experiment and change. She blinked.

      Had such advice altered the person she might have become? Was she changing back?

      She shook her head and lay still, closing her eyes against the light.

      The knock on the door woke her and for a second she could not work out quite where she was, for seldom did she doze in the afternoon.

      Her bedroom. Lucas Clairmont. The kiss. Reality surfaced and with it a rising dread.

      ‘You have some flowers, Miss.’

      A maid came in with a large unruly bunch of orange flowers and her breath was caught. ‘Is there a card?’

      ‘Indeed, miss, there is.’ The maid broke the envelope away from a string that kept it joined to the bouquet, speculation unhidden in the lines of her face.

      ‘That