“Perhaps,” she admitted, wondering how he knew.
“My sisters are too excited about the idea of each of them having a well-financed Season,” he t
old her then, “and my mother is only anxious that the marriage take place before you can realize you’ve been cold-bloodedly wooed for your fortune.”
“And now perhaps too honest,” Alana told him. “But thank you. Shall we make a pact to never speak about any of this again?”
“Or think about it?” he asked her as a turning in the path revealed the gazebo in all its isolated glory, surrounded by tall yew trees, completely invisible from the house.
She decided to be daring. At least she hoped he would consider her daring and teasing, and not quarrelsome. “As long as you don’t believe I said yes to your proposal in order to one day be a countess.”
Bailey stopped on the path, so that she had to as well. “That never occurred to me,” he said in some shock. “I never thought of our marriage as some sort of trade. I should have, shouldn’t I? I certainly thought about it almost constantly when I was wooing Sylvia’s fortune. But not with you. Never with you. Perhaps that’s why your question took me so by surprise.”
He turned her toward him and put his hands on her waist. “When I think of you, and I always think of you, I think of how wonderful you are, how good, how sweet and gentle and—”
“I’m not sweet and gentle!” Alana burst out, actually stamping one small foot on the cobblestone path. She lowered her voice, shocked at her own outburst. “I’m not, Bailey. Really. I may not have realized that until that awful woman showed up here, but it’s true. I’m not nice.”
He tipped up her chin with his fingertip and smiled down into her face. “Of course you are. Why else do you think I fell in love with you? I couldn’t help myself. You’re everything precious I could ever hope for. Your goodness all but beams from you.”
“Well, I don’t want it to,” Alana said mulishly, knowing she was fairly close to making an utter fool of herself, yet unable to stem her words. “Most of all, I’m heartily sick of being good. I want to be bad, Bailey. I want to be adventuresome, and…and dangerous…and…and shocking. Yes, that’s it, shocking. I want to shock you.”
“Me?” Bailey couldn’t have looked more surprised if she’d just reached into her pocket and pulled out a fat white rabbit. “You want to shock me? How? Why?”
Her burst of bravado, or hysterics, faded as quickly as it had bloomed. “I don’t know,” she admitted in a quiet voice. “I…I have these thoughts…these feelings. About…things…about you. And when I saw Sylvia Wise in the drawing room, leering up at you that way, I wanted to go over to her and tear her hair straight off her head. I did, Bailey, I really did. But…but that wouldn’t have been sweet, or gentle, or ladylike. Or good. You would have been appalled!”
“Once I got done applauding, yes, probably. Alana, I don’t mean to be dense, but what are you trying to say to me?”
“I don’t know! Can’t you understand that, Bailey? I don’t know exactly what I’m saying. Everybody thinks I do, or at least Kate does. But I don’t. Nobody ever really told me how to go about what I’m desperately trying to go about—and, yes, I know I’m making no sense at all. I just know that I’m not what everybody thinks I am. I’m not what you think I am, and if I am, then I’m heartily sick of being who you think I am, but you should know that now because then maybe I won’t be the person you thought I was and you won’t love me because I’m really not this…this paragon you keep rattling on about as if it was wonderful to be so sickeningly nice. I just…I just—oh, here!”
She grabbed at his wrists and pressed his hands against her breasts.
Alana had once read somewhere—probably in one of those marble-backed novels Kate scoffed at—that there are moments when time stands still. It stops, just stops for several moments. And then it moves on… .
Bailey cupped his palms around her softness. Slowly. Gently.
She watched his chest rise and fall, her own breaths equally shallow, her heart—part of the world that had stopped—beginning to beat at an alarmingly rapid rate.
She felt something seem to tighten between her legs, and not in an uncomfortable way. It felt rather good, actually. Not good as in how the world thought she was good, but good in a way that might be deliciously bad. Better than good ever was or could be.
“Alana,” Bailey breathed softly, not moving his hands. Except for his thumbs, which now were for some unknown reason stroking back and forth across her nipples that, for reasons of their own, she supposed, began to feel tight and hard. And quite good.
There was that word again. Good. Perhaps good wasn’t so bad.
But now they were just standing there. Like statues. With Bailey’s hands still on her.
Oh, dear. Wasn’t that awkward?
Wasn’t he going to do anything else? At the very least, say something?
“Alana…I didn’t know,” he said at last, his voice rather thick. “I’d hoped…but when you’ve got the sun and the moon, as I have in you, it would be greedy to ask for the stars as well.”
His hands left her breasts, and she had to fight back a moan of protest, but he’d only moved them so that he could draw her closer, so he could raise up her chin, so he could press his mouth against hers.
Their betrothal kiss had been nice. Good. But now he was urging her lips apart and insinuating his tongue between them, and he was probing at her, drawing sensation from her, somehow making the tightening between her legs turn to a warm tingling void that seemed to be asking for something, some sort of attention to be paid to it.
She slid her hands up the front of his coat, and then wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her breasts against his chest. She didn’t know why she was doing any of these things; she simply let her body do what it seemed to know to do on its own.
He moaned low in his throat and then insinuated his thigh between hers, pressing up against her as if he’d known about the tingle. That was good; he seemed to know about a lot of things, things he could teach her. Dare she tell him she thought she would make a very apt pupil?