“You’re a conservative gentleman,” she pointed out, with just the smallest quaver in her voice.
He pushed forward slightly against her bottom, and she almost toppled to the ground, struck by a wave of weakness in her knees.
“Even conservative men lose their minds sometimes,” he growled in her ear. His fingers had stopped running through her hair, and they were wandering more dangerously now, sliding sweetly down her neck, drawing her upright as they slid to her bosom, pulling her slender, naked body back against his clothed self.
For a moment she thought what they must look like from the other side of the screen, blurred by the rosy silk with her white against his black clothing, her slenderness against his muscle, her sweep of red hair against his wild fall of gypsy hair.
It seemed the village women were right about naked women after all; it merely took a gentleman a bit longer to give up the shreds of his control.
The breath caught in her throat as Gil cupped a hand around her breast, brushing her nipple, making her teeth suddenly snap shut so that she didn’t moan aloud.
“Say it,” he commanded. He had her arched against him now, one hand on her breast, the other sliding over her corset, teasing the bottom edge, sinking lower. His lips ravaged her neck, and her lips parted again as his thumb brushed over her nipple, making her wiggle against him, unknowing, uncertain, but—
“Say—” she gasped. “What should I say?”
“Make that sound again, the one you just made, the one you made in the carriage when you tried to seduce me.”
She gasped, trying to get air into her lungs. That hand was inching closer, down, surely he couldn’t mean to—
His finger sank into her sweetness at the same moment his thumb took that rough pass over her breast again. She didn’t make a breathy, sensual sound, but a squeal.
She didn’t care. She didn’t care. Her head fell back against his shoulder, and she let him do as he will, holding her in place with his hands, his lips caressing her cheeks, the corner of her mouth, the curve of her throat, while his hands worked their magic. She hardly noticed when he nudged her legs apart, when his hands took on a harder, surer rhythm, when it became clear that he wasn’t entirely inebriated during his months in Paris. He had apparently learned some important things.
“Of course,” he whispered in her ear, “I would never do something like this to an English lady born and bred. But you are a Frenchwoman. I learned in Paris that Frenchwomen are terribly demanding.”
“Yes,” she gasped.
His thumb twisted and rubbed again.
“A properly raised Englishwoman would never allow something so depraved to be done to her,” he said, his voice wicked.
He didn’t have to emphasize that fact quite so much, Emma thought dimly. But what he was doing was making her squirm back against him, gasping, pleading for something that he could—
“I could tell that you are Parisian in a moment. Why if I touched an English lady like this—” He rubbed a thumb over her nipple and then squeezed it. “She would scream with pure indignation.”
Emma wasn’t paying any attention to his foolishness anymore. Instead she just arched into his hand and let those sounds fly from her throat right up into the rafters, that is, until his hand stopped.
That was a mistake on his part. Something had been about to happen, something quite unprecedented. It had felt like a firestorm building and flying higher with every—
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, in good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon English.
His voice seemed a bit thicker, too, not that it appeased her any. “I thought you might be embarrassed,” he said. “To be standing up and all.”
She wrenched free of him and turned around, hands on her hips, eyes narrowed, suddenly reminded that this was her future husband, and he needed to be taught a few lessons before she took his ring and his baby and all the rest of it.
Her corset was feeling far too tight, so she took a moment and collected her thoughts while she untied the bow on top. He was watching her as closely as a man could, so she took her time unlacing, massaging her poor breasts while she did it. No one could know how hard it was for them to stay jutting up in the air like that for hours, made into an exhibit for every goggle-eyed man for miles around. Finally she tightened the strings on her mask, which made her breasts rise into the air in a pleasing fashion.
Then when she thought he’d had enough punishment—and she did notice that he seemed to be breathing quite hard—she turned away from him and bent down to scoop up her pelisse. She heard the scrape of his foot on the boards and straightened, saying imperiously, “Don’t move!”
He stopped, his eyes sending little sparks in her direction.
Emma was a lady born and bred, and so she took her time lying down and arranging her limbs on her bronze pelisse, making sure that her hair showed to its best advantage.
“Now,” she said, looking back up at the man who stood above her. “Allow me to point out that I am a Frenchwoman.”
There was a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“We are slow to anger but fierce when indignant,” she told him. “In fact, we may be the fiercest race of people alive on the earth. And since everyone knows that females are fiercer by far than males, it stands to reason that I, as a woman and representative of my nationality, am someone to be feared.”