He relished the small gasp she gave as he eased his hands behind her, curving them over the small of her back. He wished he had lit the candles on the sconces; he would have given anything to see her expression. She seemed to vacillate between curiosity and horror, as if she had shocked herself with her easy capitulation.
“A thousand pounds?” Her voice was appalled—with just a sliver of amusement threaded through it. “For fifteen minutes?”
“Thirteen, now.” He bussed his lips across her cheek, eased closer, drew her onto her toes with just a bit of pressure at her perfect, uncorseted waist. But her breath escaped in nervous puffs, and her fingers yet clenched on his shoulders.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” she murmured, as if to herself. “This is how ladies are ruined.”
She was thinking too much—he would lose any progress he had made if he could not ease her out of her encroaching panic. “You won’t be ruined,” he said, pressing a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “I won’t let you be ruined. The Ravenhursts won’t let you be ruined.”
A soft flutter of laughter. “Robert sold me for a horse,” she said.
“Only,” he said, “because he knew you were willing.” He lifted a hand to stroke away the wayward curl that irrepressibly bobbed before her eyes. He couldn’t see it, but he had known it was there. It was always there, taunting him, a tiny bit of wildness in a woman otherwise too self-controlled, too rigid. She kept herself on too tight a rein, unwilling to allow for the possibility of passion.
“He didn’t,” she said, her voice half-mortified.
“Of course he did,” he countered. “If you weren’t, you would have made some excuse to leave as soon as they returned to the box. But you didn’t.” His hand cupped the nape of her neck, drew her closer to press a kiss to the corner of her lips, finding that exquisite place unerringly even in the near-overwhelming darkness. “You didn’t. You stayed. For this.”
She made a startled sound in her throat, but her lips parted beneath the pressure of his without hesitation, and her head tilted to find the perfect angle. He wanted to slide his fingers into her hair, loose the magnificent weight of it to fall over her shoulders, catch up handfuls of it and crush the silky locks between his fingers. But that was madness—he didn’t want her ruined. At least not yet.
Ten minutes. It wasn’t enough time, not nearly enough. She was a gently-bred lady, and even if he managed to tap into all the repressed passion that simmered beneath her carefully-cultivated surface, he might very well frighten her off in the doing of it.
But her fingers sank into his hair, and she drew back just enough to nip at his lower lip, eliciting a groan from him. No, he wouldn’t frighten her off—she wasn’t some timid little girl, fresh from the school room.