Pleasuring the Lady (The Pleasure Wars) Read Free Page B

then lifted her hand to cover her mouth.  
    “Who are you?” he asked, covering the distance she had placed between them and then a little more, so that he crowded her closer to the wall behind her.  
    “Please,” she whispered, and he narrowed his eyes.  
    Her voice—though she masked it by making her tone lower, huskier—bordered on the familiar, but he couldn’t place her no matter how hard he tried.  
    “Who are you?” he repeated.
    She moved, but he caught her elbow and drew her closer. She staggered against him, and the length of her body molded to his. He stared down into dark brown eyes, wide with fear, lips parted in surprise. She was warm in his arms and her shallow breath echoed in his ears and blocked out anything else in the busy room.
    He should have asked her again who she was. Or slid a finger beneath her cheap mask and pulled it away from her face to reveal her identity then and there. He did neither. Instead, he lowered his face, covered her mouth with his and kissed her.
    For a moment, she was stiff and shocked in his embrace. But then her mouth softened and she relaxed against him, surrendering to what he was taking.  
    He parted his mouth over her, darting his tongue to trace the crease of her full lips. They parted on a surprise gasp and he delved inside, tasting mint, a hint of sherry, the beginnings of desire as their molded bodies tangled.
    Then, just as suddenly as she had offered a sample of surrender, she pulled back. He was too surprised by the abruptness of her departure to grasp her arm, and she slipped from his embrace, turned on her heel and bolted from the room and out the door into the street.
    He watched the hem of her dress disappear into the night and felt like time had slowed. There was a pit low in his belly, something he recognized all too well, though he hadn’t felt it for a long time.  
    He wanted this woman with a power that thrummed with his heartbeat and made his cock rock hard and achy. He would have her.  
    But first he had to find out who she was.
     
     
    Portia could scarcely catch her breath as the carriage turned through the busy London streets toward her home.  
    “What was I thinking?” she moaned out loud, reliving every moment of the ill-advised trip to the Donville Masquerade with stunning clarity.
    Why had she gone there?
    To find Liam and help Ava was the answer she would have given if provoked beyond the place where she could deny the truth. And that was part of why she’d gone, of course. Ava was her best friend, Liam was…well, he was someone she had long cared about. If she could help them, she would do anything in the world to do it.
    But there was more to her reasoning than that. Her conversation with Ava had stung her. Ava spoke of her having fun, being wicked, and Portia knew that wasn’t possible. And yet she had dressed, fashioned a sad little mask and found herself in her carriage riding to a part of London where she most decidedly did not belong.
    What she had found there was even more than she had ever imagined. She had seen men and women groping each other, half-naked for the world to see. Passion and pleasure had been in every corner of the room, stealing the air, stealing her breath.  
    She had been told her entire life that such things were wrong, but seeing them…watching them as they made love so passionately and publicly…while their bodies merged with what was so obviously pleasure…well, she hadn’t felt wrong. She had felt…achy and strange and a lot of other things she didn’t completely understand even though they made her want to touch herself so desperately.
    And then Miles had suddenly been there.
    Miles, her brother’s friend… former friend. A man she had known since she was a girl, even before she met Ava. A man who still occasionally tossed her the crumbs of a dance with him at a ball. Out of pity, she was certain.
    But tonight it hadn’t been pity in his eyes or his touch or his…his kiss when he was