How To Tempt a Viscount Read Free Page B

been difficult enough to hear from another…words that from his own lips would destroy that last remaining vestige of pride to which she clung. No. She could not risk anything of that. She calmed the frenzied beat of her heart and turned in his arms so that she could look up into his face.
    ‘Right now?’ she said. Her gaze held his before dropping down to his lips—the lips of Adonis. Then boldly, before her courage could desert her, she reached her mouth to his, so close that they shared their breath, so close that she could feel the arc of tension and longing between their lips even though they were not touching.
    ‘Later,’ he whispered as his mouth closed over hers and he kissed her, kissed her with such an expertise that Ellen could never have hoped to have faked. There was nothing reserved about his mouth this time, nothing of a sense of duty and resentment. Marcus’s lips were hot and masterful, his tongue teasing against hers in an invitation to intimacy. It was a kiss that made her head dizzy and set a fire burning low in her belly. Ellen followed where he led, almost forgetting what this was supposed to be about, rocked by the force of overwhelming need exploding between them. She felt the caress of his hands against her back, pressing her to him all the more so that they seemed to merge together, their hearts thudding in unison. She wanted this, needed it. Yet amidst the roar of her blood and the fire in her thighs she heard the cool quiet whisper calling her back from the brink. It took every last ounce of Ellen’s willpower to break off that kiss.
    His gaze held hers, his eyes dark with desire and filled with a hunger that she had not seen in any man. But she did not want him to see her struggle, nor how dazed she felt, reeling from the knowledge that this was what it could have been like all along. She lowered her face, and rested her forehead against his chin, gathering herself as she stood there breathless and with her breasts squashed hard against the muscle of his chest. He had not loved her then. He did not love her now. In her mind she heard again Amanda White’s voice from across the months and that gloating little tinkle of a laugh. And her blood chilled. Unrequited love. Unrequited desire. Both burned a lesson upon a woman’s soul. A lesson that Ellen had learned only too well.
    ‘We should go home,’ he said.
    She slid her hand down lower, brushing it once ever so lightly against the bulge of his manhood in his breeches. ‘To talk?’
    ‘Amongst other things,’ he said. She could hear the slight strain in his voice and she was glad of it.
    ‘Not yet, Marcus.’ She gave him the slow seductive smile she had been months in the practising. ‘We have only just started our lesson.’ Then she tucked her hand into the crook of his arm, as a respectable wife might do to her husband, and led him farther down the gallery to study a stone head of Hercules. And as a party of ladies had just entered into the gallery, the tall, powerful, aroused man by her side could do nothing other than acquiesce.

     
    Marcus sat in the carriage opposite Ellen the next day and thought over last night’s political dinner. He had not expected Ellen to accept his invitation to accompany him, but she had done so, and been very quiet ever since. Their return to Dover Street had been too late for discussion or anything else. And now he was here in his town coach to accompany her on her shopping trip.
    ‘I hope last night’s dinner did not bore you too much.’
    His words made her draw her gaze from the coach’s window. Her mind seemed elsewhere, as if she were seeing nothing of the passing streets. ‘I was not bored,’ she said and glanced towards the window again, her expression still brooding. ‘I did not know what you did at Westminster. I did not even know that you work for the Alien Office.’
    ‘Bullford should not have spoken of such matters at the dinner table. Not only was it bad manners in front of