This Perfect Kiss Read Free

his heart. Or was that hers sending the blood rushing through her veins?
    Then, as if in slow motion, he lowered his head and his mouth covered hers.
    The kiss did not scream passion as much as it whispered pleasure. Feather light at first, like the softest touch of moonlight brushing her lips. She made a sound in the back of her throat, then lifted on her toes to better drink in the strange and wondrous sensations, only to feel him pull away as if he was slowly, deliberately testing her response.
    His warm breath brushed over her lower cheek. “You taste like strawberries.”
    Where his formidable authority had lent him only certitude moments ago, she now heard something else in his voice.
    The pads of his thumbs pressed into the curves just beneath her jaw. Her lashes fluttered open and she stared into eyes that were dark and dangerous. “You have never kissed a man before,” he murmured.
    That much about her was true. Men that she actually cared to meet were in short supply.
    â€œI apologize if I have offended you with my wagers and games,” he said against her mask.
    He wasn’t sorry. She could tell by the satisfied look in his eyes that he was pleased with her response. Her lips felt thick and hot. Unfamiliar. “You have not offended me,” she said, and there was a rusty catch in her voice.
    A subtle shift and he brought his mouth down on hers with a tender savagery that tightened his hand around her nape.
    Then he was deepening the contact, dragging her headfirst into a sensual tide so primal that any sense of will to protest was swept away by the roaring in her veins. His tongue slid past her parted lips, filling her with the taste of his heat and whiskey, the piercing intimacy of it igniting a hunger from deep inside her. Her half groan of surrender teetered on the brink of gasp, and lost beneath the sensuous assault, she arched instinctively against him. He seemed to want to inhale her. When he came up to breathe, she pulled air into her lungs, too.
    She wrapped her clumsy arms around his neck, sinking deeper into the sea of wondrous sensations. She could feel the corded muscles of his arms and shoulders delineated against his coat. His thumbs splayed the sensitive undersides of her breast. An intense tremor shook her. The shock of his touch sent shivers knifing through the length of her body, and she turned her head away.
    â€œWho are you?” he asked. “I know nothing about you.”
    I am no one, she realized.
    But the wet sea air caressed her moist lips like a drug, loosening the words from her heart. “I like the sunset over the sea after a storm and the way the air smells in spring,” she said, wanting him to know a minute piece of her self that had nothing to do with the magic of a golden night. “I love cold milk with warm bread. Roses and summertime. The smell of watercolors on canvas. I do not own a horse, but if I did, I would name him after a constellation.”
    I love you, her young heart said.
    Her eyes had not moved from his, her uncertain gaze lowering without will to his lips. She could feel a strange heat run through her veins and into the pit of her stomach, before his gaze lowered to her mouth. She leaned into him to fill her senses with him and sensed caution, as if he recognized he was wading into dangerous waters.
    â€œWhich constellation?” The words vibrated against her cheek.
    â€œOrion.”
    â€œAhh, poor Orion,” he chuckled against her lips, “he had the misfortune of falling in love with the virgin huntress Diana, the archer goddess who discharged the fatal arrow that killed him.”
    â€œ ’Twas in her grief that she placed him among the stars and made him the brightest constellation in the sky. The one that guides all seafarers home.”
    She returned her mouth to his. His palms slid to the curvature of her corseted waist, and he pulled her fully against him. “What do you want, Madam