‘And you discount the benefits of marriage to a woman then?’ Quin frowned. ‘Respectability, protection, financial security...’
‘Children, sex?’
‘Cleo! A lady does not speak of sex.’
‘Exactly my point. Or one of them. I would like to make love with you, but I must not mention it. You, on the other hand, may.’
‘Not to an unmarried lady—’
‘A widow. Have you never had an affaire with a widow?’ Quin’s lips set in a hard line. ‘Yes, I can see that you have.’
‘But not one under my protection, that would not be honourable.’
‘So, in fact, this is all about your honour, not about the woman’s thoughts, needs, wants,’ Cleo stated. ‘I think you were accusing me of being selfish just now.’
‘Checkmate,’ Quin said. ‘But if I were to be perfectly ungentlemanly and said I did not wish for a liaison, that I did not desire you, then you would be angry with me.’
Cleo realised that she was enjoying herself. This was like verbal chess and, maddening as Quin was, he was at least prepared to play. ‘It would be hypocritical of me to be angry,’ she told him. ‘Unless I thought you were lying, of course. And you are, aren’t you, my lord?’
For a moment she wondered if she had pushed him too far. Then the corner of his mouth twitched, producing that almost dimple that she was beginning to find dangerously endearing.
‘You are a witch, Augusta Cleopatra Agrippina Woodward. Yes, I desire you. No, I am not going to have an affaire with you because I am simply an old-fashioned gentleman, hypocritical attitudes and all.’
She found she was smiling back at him, charmed by what, for once, she guessed was the pure, unvarnished truth, not some clever twisting of the words. ‘Oh, Quin.’ They were close enough for her to be able to put her palms flat against his chest as she stood on tiptoes to reach his mouth and that dimple.
He accepted the brush of her lips, which she expected, but his arms came around her and he pulled her close, found her mouth with his own and kissed her, his tongue sliding between her lips, open on a gasp of surprise. The kiss was thorough, confident, and his arms held her very firmly. When Quin freed her mouth she said, ‘You said you were not going to have an affaire with me!’
‘I know. I said nothing about not making love to you, though.’ He stooped, swept her up in his arms, ducked his head under the low deck beams and went to the door where he slid the bolt across. ‘Now then, Cleo. You said something about you desiring me and me desiring you, if I recall.’
‘Yes, but—’ The words escaped her as he placed her on the bunk.
‘You have changed your mind? A lady’s privilege.’
‘No! But you play with words—’
‘It is my profession. I have to be good with them.’ His fingers were busy with the strings of her shoes and then his hands slid up her calves to her garters. ‘Lie back, Cleo, I am quite good at this as well.’
‘Braggart,’ she muttered and collapsed back on to the pillow. ‘Oh, what are you doing?’
‘Making love.’ He lifted her and caressed her and somehow—magic, perhaps?—her gown had gone, and her chemise, and he was saying something appreciative about a lack of stays and then his mouth was on her breast and Cleo lost the will to think, only to feel.
She twisted, whimpering under the onslaught of lips and tongue and teeth, clutching at Quin’s shoulders as she arched up to him. Then in a fleeting moment of sanity as he moved from one nipple to another, she realised that her hands were gripping the cotton of his shirt, not the bare skin of his arms.
‘Quin, let me...’ She pulled at his shirt, tried to find the fastening of his breeches.
‘Oh, no.’
‘Oh, yes! You are wearing altogether too many clothes and I am wearing none at all. Ah.’ He silenced her by the simple expedient of kissing her and stopped her roving hands by catching both wrists together in one strong-fingered hand that trapped her arms above her head. Cleo arched against the restraint, aroused by his strength.
His free hand slid down, over the curve of her stomach, over the aching mound, and her legs parted wantonly, even as she tried to free her hands so she could caress him. She was wet and wanting and desperate. In a minute, she told herself. In a minute he will let me make love to him... And then he slid two fingers into the desperate heat and his thumb moved with devastating accuracy and Cleo screamed, the sound caught by his kiss.
She surfaced—for surely she had been drowned in a hurricane—and found her hands free and Quin’s warmth gone from her side. And then she felt his hands on her thighs and the heat of his mouth where his fingers had been and she reached, desperate, to touch his hair. Anything else was beyond her. ‘I can’t...’ she whispered, but the coiling, tightening pleasure–pain was possessing her, fast, deadly, overwhelming.