When she smiled and reached to brush a lock of hair away from his forehead, the worry in his chest eased away. “But it’s cold,” she explained. “Which is all your fault.”
He grinned. Typical Mariah, to blame him for the winter. “How is that my fault?”
“You had me undressed and in bed before I could light a fire.”
He grinned and nuzzled her bare shoulder. “You lit a bonfire, minx.”
“Robert!” A hot blush of embarrassment colored her cheeks. Then she giggled and smiled happily against his mouth when he kissed her.
“I’ll light a fire, then, shall I?” he offered.
She stared up at him through lowered lashes in a look of wanton innocence that stole his breath away. “Please do.”
With a playful growl at her innuendo, he kissed her again, hot and open-mouthed, plundering her lips until she moaned.
Then he slid off her and out from beneath the scratchy blanket. He reached for the tinderbox on the shelf over the little stove in the corner. In a few minutes, he had a fire going, small but enough to keep her warm.
“Robert?”
“Hmm?” He jabbed the poker into the stove at the coals.
She sat up, clutching the wool blanket to her breasts to cover herself. A pang of regret stabbed him that she’d lost her innocence in that poor excuse for a bed, with wool and straw scratching at her soft skin, when she should have had satin, velvet, and down. Yet she would have looked like a goddess even wrapped in burlap.
“You courted Diana Morgan last season,” she said quietly. A strange quality filled her voice that he couldn’t quite place. “Did you and she ever spend time together…like this?”
Understanding fell through him, and he realized that what he’d heard in her was insecurity, something he’d not witnessed in her before. It had never occurred to him until right then that the Hellion might have been just as jealous of Diana as he was of Whitby.
“Nothing happened between us,” he assured her gently. He set down the poker and admitted with a heavy sigh, “In fact, I never should have courted her at all.” He shook his head. Looking back now, he realized just how wrong he’d been. “I thought I needed to put a stop to all the wildness of my younger days and settle down. Diana seemed a good way to do that, but I was wrong. Thank God we both realized it in time.”
“Stop your wildness?” She dubiously arched a brow. “Didn’t you rent an elephant for a party last May?”
He grinned and flipped closed the stove door. “I was easing into it.”
When he stood and turned around to rejoin her in bed, she gasped. Her eyes flared wide with surprise, and her red lips pulled into a round O.
He stopped. And frowned. What on earth…?
Then her gaze slowly sank down his front, and the realization hit him that she was seeing him clearly for the first time. All of him. From her surprised reaction, she was taking her first-ever glimpses of a naked man. And if she kept staring at him like that, with her gaze fixed on his cock and her curiosity filling him with immense pleasure, she’d also have her first glimpse of a fully aroused naked man.
When she nervously licked her lips, he groaned and lost the battle to stay flaccid beneath her gaze. He stalked toward her, then crawled onto the mattress and up the length of her on hands and knees, until she lay completely on her back beneath him. Her hands still clutched the blanket shyly to her chest.
But she persisted with their conversation, as if it were perfectly normal to have a naked man poised over her on all fours. “But Diana is so lovely and you—”
He silenced her with a kiss. “I came to realize that Diana isn’t the type of woman I want in a wife,” he concluded with finality. The last thing he wanted to think about tonight was a past courtship, not when he had Mariah naked in bed and the rest of the night ahead of them. He hooked a finger beneath the edge of the blanket and tugged it down until he’d exposed a single full breast.
She closed her eyes, and her breath came ragged as he circled his fingertip around her dusky nipple. It drew up taut. Like magic.
She arched her back and panted out, “Then what…do you want…in a wife?”
He grinned. “I want—”
You.
He froze, stunned at the slip he’d almost made.
Good God, where had that come from? True, if she were anyone other than Winslow’s daughter, he would offer marriage to her without hesitation. Because he wanted to protect her reputation and his honor. Because she challenged him intellectually while also stirring his passions. Because he’d come to care about her, more than any other woman.
But to want her for a wife implied a lasting devotion he couldn’t yet bring himself to acknowledge. No matter his growing affections for her.
“An Italian opera singer,” he replied instead, forcing a teasing tone as he placed a kiss to her breast.
She slapped lightly at his shoulder. “Be serious.”
“I am.” He tongued her nipple and drew a shiver from her that made his heart skip. “I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.”
“An Italian opera singer?” she challenged and ran her fingers appreciatively through his hair as he took her nipple fully into his mouth and suckled at her.
“Nothing puts more fire into a man’s blood than hearing all those high notes fall from a woman’s lips.” As he laved her left nipple, his other hand moved up to caress her right one. His thumb strummed across the taut bud as he teased, “You can’t expect to ask a man to give that up for something as inconsequential as marriage.”
“Of course not,” she agreed with mock solemnity. “That would be like asking the tide not to rise or the sun not to set.”
He grinned against her breast. “An act of futility?”
“An act against nature.” When he shifted to worship the other breast, she sighed and wrapped her arms around his neck to keep him close, then whispered sincerely, “I wouldn’t change a single thing about you.”
Stunned by that, he stilled as the simple compliment warmed his insides. Perhaps she held an affection for him after all. And at that, his heart skipped for an altogether new reason.
He buried his face in her shoulder. He felt satiated and relaxed. No. So much more than that—he felt happier than he’d been in a very long time. The fact that Mariah, of all women, was responsible for it made his head spin.
She drew a deep breath, then admitted softly, “I think Diana was in love with you.”
At the somber tone of her voice, he raised his head and gazed down at her. Then frowned. Because it wasn’t insecure jealousy that he saw in her now, but something else…something warm and affectionate that made him tremble. “What makes you so certain?”
She stared into his eyes, so intensely that she stole his breath away. “Because I—” She cut herself off. Whatever she was about to say was lost as she amended with a smile, “Because I’ve heard all your mother’s stories about you and—”
He kissed her to silence her, then lingered with his mouth against hers, drinking in the spicy-sweetness of her kiss until he went light-headed with arousal. “Please don’t mention my mother when you’re naked with me.”
She laughed, then wiggled wantonly and elicited a groan from him. “You expect this to happen again, then?”
He grinned down at her. “Sweet Lucifer, I hope so.”
She inhaled sharply as he tenderly traced his fingertips across her nipples, then closed her eyes and whispered, “So we’ve become lovers, then.”
“We have.” He lowered his head to dance kisses across her bared breasts, unable to get enough of her. Lovers…his lover. A satisfying sense of masculine possession flamed inside him.
“Good,” she whispered, and he thrilled at that single word, reveling in her uninhibited boldness with him.
This was what attracted him to her, that the same beautiful woman who could be so prickly and distant held within her a fierce passion waiting to be unlocked and a vulnerable heart that she’d now placed into his care. So many facets to her that every moment brought a new discovery about the woman beneath.