This Perfect Kiss (10 page)

He could still remember the first time he had met Saundra. She had been wearing a bright yellow muslin sprigged with cherries and a bonnet tied with red ribbons in a pretty bow at her chin, and looking lovely and serene as a portrait, sitting in a spot of dappled sunshine.

She had been nineteen, beautiful and gay, and so sure of her ability to charm that he had suspected at the time that it was taken for granted by her family that all men who met her fell in love with her. And he had.

And Christel Douglas had watched him court Saundra, never saying a single word.

Now, as the wind sweeping off the bay pulled at her cloak and tossed her hair around her face, he found she stirred his dormant senses in a way he had not expected.

He'd never thought Christel as beautiful as Saundra, yet the memory of her, like her laughter, was a portrait of color as bright as a Caribbean sunrise imprinted in his thoughts. For all her youthful annoyances, simplicity and imperfections, Christel Douglas was unforgettable, and it was as if she had just stepped through a window from his past to pick up exactly at the point where they had left off. Someone was responsible for bringing Christel home, and he wanted to know who and why.

Behind him, his grandmother heaved an audible sigh. “I have no wont to rehash the past when I want only to heal our family, Camden,” he heard her say. “Blackthorn Castle belongs to you. Just tell me you will stay through Christmastide this year.”

Letting the curtain drop, he turned back into the room. “I will stay into the new year, Grandmamma.” He kissed her on the cheek. “And Grandmamma . . .”
if I ever learn that you lied to me about that letter, I will never forgive you.

But he did not utter the words. If she said she did not write the letter, then he needed to believe her.

Instead of giving voice to his thoughts, he said, “I expect you will be well rested when Anna visits you tomorrow. She has missed you.”

C
hristel was waiting forever for Lord Carrick to finally appear at the end of the corridor just off the gallery. He turned the corner and stopped. She barely noted his hesitation, if that was indeed what she glimpsed.

She pulled her cloak tight. “Why am I a prisoner?” she demanded.

His path brought her in front of him. Everything about him was sinfully dark from his neatly combed hair tied back at his nape to his clothing—everything except his eyes, which were like moonlight against a velvet sky.

“I thought you would have had better sense than to try and leave this estate at night. The landscape has changed since you were here last. The cliffs and beach are dangerous at night. Are you hungry? Come.”

“Do you feed all your captives before imprisoning them?”

“Only the ones I find roaming my corridors at night.”

He walked past her, leaving her no choice but to follow him down the stairs or stand there staring like a befuddled schoolgirl. “Are British nobles always so accessible to the common masses, my lord?”

He didn't answer. Nor did he betray any inkling of his mood. She followed him down another corridor into the dining room, stopping when her gaze fell on a tray laden with warm bread, cheese, and a glass of chilled milk. She could not contain a gasp of delight.

She picked up the glass as if it had been the food of the gods. “You have no idea how long since I have had a glass of chilled milk.” The milk slid down her throat and left a mustache when she was finished. Peering up at him, she licked the white stuff off her mouth. “How did you know?”

“That you were hungry or that you like cold cow's milk?”

She picked up the bread and slipped it in her mouth. The slice melted on her tongue. She had been so nervous all day that she had not realized she was starved. “Both,” she said over a mouthful, plucking a slice of peach from the plate and savoring it as well.

She took notice of the wavering shadows in the room. The empty chairs at attention around the long cherrywood table. Looking around at the oil paintings, the unlit crystal chandelier tinkling in the draft, she couldn't help but be impressed by the wealth displayed or how alone they were at this end of the house.

He leaned a hip against the table, watching her eat and survey her surroundings. Light from the candelabra washed over his face. “I knew that you had not eaten supper because I asked Smolich when I left Grandmother's chambers and sent him to the kitchen. As for the rest, if I remember your words correctly, you like the sunset over the sea after a storm and the way the air smells in spring. A glass of cold milk with warm bread. Roses and summertime. The smell of watercolors on canvas. And if you ever owned a horse, you would name him after the constellation Orion. You also like dressing up and attending masquerades and kissing strangers in dark, ivy-laden corners.”

She swallowed the mouthful of bread. “You were not a stranger. I had been following you about like a puppy dog from the first moment I saw you riding your horse on the beach that summer. You were just too blind to notice.”

The sudden mercenary flicker in his quicksilver eyes quelled her heart and sharpened her awareness of him. “Is that right?”

She picked at the bread. “Is my dog being cared for?”

“Stabled and fed.”

She wrapped the warm bread in her napkin, aware of the lengthening silence. “Did you find out who sent the letter? Was it your grandmother?”

“She denied it. I am apt to believe her.”

Christel paused her hands. “Why? Did she say anything else?”

He cocked a brow. “Anything else?”

“What I mean . . . did your grandmother mention Lady Harriet?”

“She thought I should warn your grandmother you were back.”

Christel was not fooled. “And you are being generous to one of us, my lord. The dowager is not fond of me.” She spread her hand over the napkin. “How
does
your grandmother fare? Mrs. Gables said that her ladyship was recovering from pneumonia.”

“The physician thinks she will outlive us all.”

Christel studied the crease around his lips. “You do not share his optimism? Are you concerned?”

The question appeared to give him pause, but she suspected not for the reasons it should. “Does no one ever ask how you feel about a matter, my lord?”

“No one but you knows me well enough to presume my feelings should be their concern.”

She laughed, a full-throated sound, which she caught abruptly by sucking hard on her lower lip when she realized he seemed surprised by her reaction. Still, she could not contain her amusement at his expense. “I had forgotten how you British
toffs
cherish protocol. Stiff upper lip and all in front of the serfs.” She leaned nearer. “Your upper lip was not always so stiff, my lord. I remember that it used to bend upward, ever so nicely into a smile.”

Realizing at once the slip, she froze.
Good heavens!
Was she flirting with the man?

From the lazy-lidded look in his eyes, he was not entirely annoyed. He continued to behave every bit the gentleman, but there was an intensity about him now that belied his refinement and only seemed to make the candlelight more intimate.

Then the corners of his mouth curved. “You like my smile.”

She glimpsed his interest, a mutual awareness that sent a rush of heat through her veins. “ 'Tis pleasing when anyone smiles,” she said on a more sober note.

“Indeed.”

She smiled benignly. “I know what you are trying to do, my lord. I am not the naïve girl I used to be. She is all grown up now.”

She turned to leave. He blocked her as he pushed away from the table. Her eyes chased up to his. Her breasts brushed his arm and, without his sweater, she felt the hard muscles beneath his sleeve.

“A pity,” he said. “I liked her the way she was. She was not so suspicious of the world.”

“She could say the same of you.”

He laughed and everything about him changed. He became familiar to her again as the sound softened the sharp edges of his voice. “I have always been suspicious of the world. 'Tis my nature to question. It was yours to see goodness in everything around you, even when it was difficult to see.” Cupping her chin with his palm, he tilted her face into the light. “You may think that girl is dead, but she is not.”

She jerked her face away from the gentleness of his touch. Hunger and doubt warred with resentment. He seemed to recognize something inside her that she had purposefully destroyed because it had made her weak and vulnerable.

He removed the napkin from her hand. “Have you been kissed so very little, Christel?”

“Have you not been kissed enough?”

His lips quirked upward in what might have been seen as amusement in a less guarded man. “Hmm.”

Her eyes dropped from his, her uncertain gaze lowering without will to his lips. Then his finger beneath her chin tilted her face and, as if in slow motion, his lips covered hers. The breath froze her lungs.

He loved her mouth with exquisite tenderness even as he touched no other part of her. She raised her hands to ward him away, her conscience crying foul, but instead her palm pressed against the rapid beat of his heart.

She had not allowed herself to touch him since her return. She now knew why. Merely touching him felt as sensual an act as she had ever performed with a man.

The pads of his thumbs pressed gently against the corners of her lips. “Christel . . .”

He had pulled away slightly, but not so far that she couldn't taste him on her lips or breathe the air that he pulled into his lungs. Their breath mingled in a kiss that gave as much as it explored. He had made no other sound but her name. Brushing her hair from her face, he brought both hands to her cheeks.

Then he was deepening the kiss. She was cold, then hot and shaky. She was dead. Then she was alive and breathing for them both.

His heat bonded to the length of her body. Too long denied affection, she slipped her arms around his neck and leaned into his body. Her bosom crushed against his chest. And just that fast something elemental exploded between them. A moan formed in the back of her throat, a sound he swallowed. And she opened her mouth to kiss him back as deeply and as hard as she could, slightly desperate, but no longer innocent or untried, no longer caring if this might be a foolish mistake.

His tongue made a sweep of her mouth, dipping along the sensitive underside of her lips. Inside her, a new and silent storm raged past barriers and shattered memories.

Standing so close to him, she found she no longer cared one way or the other what had gone before. What she did care about suddenly seemed infinitely more gratifying.

Too soon, his lips retreated, and his hungry gaze passed over her mouth in a way that made her feel ravished and naked. The predator inside him clearly recognized her desire for what it was, and she knew he was not opposed to taking advantage of it.

“Bloody hell.” He buried his face in her hair.

She rose on the balls of her feet to kiss him again, to bring his mouth back down on hers and taste him. But he resisted. Still in a daze, she opened her eyes to find his gaze on her face.

His breath came rapidly. He braced both hands against the chair behind her. “What do you want, Christel?”

She swallowed the ball of fear that suddenly clogged her throat.

Losing Daniel had taken so much of her heart.

Now she and Lord Carrick were both free, and suddenly she did not feel the slightest guilt that she had kissed him, suddently felt that not only would she let him touch her but she would welcome the contact. Nay, drown in it.

But what kind of person was she to want to forget Daniel? To wipe the last few years from her life as if they had never existed? “I want to go back to a simpler time.”

When my emotions were pure, even if my thoughts were not.

He moved his lips to the shell of her ear. “If you are seeking oblivion, Christel, you will not find it from me.
This
will not be impersonal. It will be
my
eyes you are looking into when you come.”

The crass words shocked her. And still she did not care. “Maybe 'tis you who is seeking oblivion.”

He made a sound and turned his face into her hair. “Aye, there is that to consider, love.”

She stayed in his arms, aware of his breath against the soft shell of her ear, the warmth from his body surrounding her.

She knew the implications of this moment if she continued. It was incredibly dishonorable of her to pretend otherwise, and she desperately tried to examine the emotions flooding her.

But in the darkness and without color, it was easy to fade into the shadows to become the chameleon, where one's differences blended into an homogenous swirling mist, where she did not stand apart. And if she clawed through the layers of shadows piled atop her, she might find the bright spirit of the girl she used to be. Here was her conduit.

Yet it was an eloquent demonstration of his knowledge of this hidden part of her that he did not seem willing to allow her entrance for the sake of her own deliverance or enlightenment.

“The hour grows late,” he said quietly. “I suggest you go before I will not allow it.”

Touching a hand to her swollen lips, she raised her eyes. “Why did you kiss me?”

“Why did you really leave Scotland?”

“I . . . I did not belong here.”

“You are so full of blarney, Christel. What will you ever do with yourself when you can no longer play the martyr?”

Incapable of action or any thought, she stuttered, “I f-followed you around that summer like an adoring puppy,” she said, pushing against the tightness in her chest. “And you never even guessed I was in love with you . . .” She no longer cared if he knew the truth of her child's heart. “You never saw me once you met her.”

“You put me on a pedestal. You had no right. You set yourself up for everything that happened.”