“I’m about to kiss a lovely woman.” He strove for a guileless expression. It didn’t come naturally. “Why shouldn’t I be happy?”
“I know you. You’re as cunning as a rat.”
By God, she was a delight. Despite his maneuvering, she wasn’t near defeated. The dance would go on, and if he didn’t concentrate on every step, he’d stumble in a heap. This edgy wooing proved devilish entertaining. The elusive Lady Crewe was a quarry worth the pursuit. “Hardly flattering.”
“But accurate.” Her regard remained wary. “You’ve been a slippery customer since you were in your cradle.”
He spread his hands. “I agree to everything you ask.”
“That’s what worries me.”
“Enough talk.” This time he ignored the message of her raised hand and stepped close enough to catch her smoky scent. “If I don’t kiss you in the next second, I’ll explode.”
She searched his face for signs of deceit. “You’re up to something. I know it.”
He caught the fluttering hands that betrayed how flustered she was. “No more, Helena. It’s time to lay down your guns and surrender. Close your eyes and pucker up.”
“Oh, very well, if I must,” she said, as though fronting up to a punishment.
But she tilted her face with breathtaking sweetness, and when he drew her into his arms, she was soft and warm and pliant.
Chapter Five
How strange to be in West’s arms again. Fleetingly Helena became once more the innocent girl who had been so mad for him.
Except his easy strength was new, and the confidence. This was a man who knew how to touch a woman. Whereas she felt tremulous and untried, as if those poisonous years with Crewe had never existed.
Slowly she ran her palms up his chest, feeling the heat of his skin through his shirt. The mature West was an altogether more substantial figure than his younger self. The body under her hands was firm with muscle, even if he was too thin after his illness.
Remembering how mere days ago, he’d been racked with fever prompted her to steal this chance. In recent years, her only physical pleasure had been a good gallop on a fine horse—and little enough of that. What a tragic waste. West was right. Crewe might be in the grave, but still he blighted her life.
Once she’d loved kissing. West and she had whiled away a whole summer with kisses. Even Crewe had known how to kiss her into a lather of desire, when he could be bothered. It was what came after kissing that left her cringing with frustration and shame.
Tonight she couldn’t bear to be that pathetic creature.
“What’s wrong?” West whispered.
Startled, she emerged from the unhappy past to find the man of the present observing her with concern. His hands sat loosely at her waist.
Once she gave her consent, she’d expected him to leap on her. His last kiss had caught her unprepared. Unprepared and unafraid. The lack of fear had convinced her that despite years of pique, at some instinctual level, she still trusted her first love.
“Why do you ask?”
His tender expression twisted her heart. Even in courtship, Crewe had never given her a scrap of tenderness. To her adolescent self, that had seemed thrilling proof of overmastering passion. Today’s Helena knew better.
“Because you were as supple as a willow wand, and now you’re all tight and wary again.”
To her surprise, she responded honestly. Tonight was unprecedented in so many ways, not least because she abandoned all defenses. Or they abandoned her. “I’m nervous.”
More breathtaking tenderness. “So am I.”
She frowned her disbelief. “Don’t play games, West.”
“You challenged me to show you pleasure. Good God, it’s more responsibility than the government laid on my shoulders when I went to Russia. Then I only had to worry about the fate of empires.”
Something coiled and suspicious inside Helena loosened
as she laughed. “You’re absurd.”