I Adored a Lord by Katharine Ashe

think to say. As in the stable, then again in the drawing room, he felt the most insistent urge to grab her about the waist and kiss her. It was instinctual and animal and thoroughly ignoble and certainly a product of two years of enforced celibacy. It left him tongue-­tied.
    She came to a halt on the step beside him. “Well?” Cheeks flushed lightly pink and eyes sparkling like stars at midnight, she looked directly at him. There was no coquettishness about this girl, no maidenly reticence or superficial niceness, rather, all justified indignation that made her astoundingly pretty. “Well?” she repeated.
    With some effort he unwound his tongue. “I am emboldened by your eloquence, Miss Caulfield, to suggest that you are perhaps as weary as I at the end of this long day—­after a rather uncomfortable night, although perhaps not quite as uncomfortable for you as it was for me.” He allowed himself the slightest smile. “I advise you to continue on to your quarters for a good sleep as I intend to do.”
    â€œOh!” she said brightly. “Such a wit! I am transported.” With a swift perusal of his coat, waistcoat, trousers, and boots—­first down, then up—­that rendered the tension in his abdomen into an aggressive pressure, she took the final step to the landing above. Her starlight eyes came to his level. Not good .
    â€œYou tackled me, then you kissed me,” she said.
    â€œAnd you hit me with a door and then a pitchfork and bit me. It seems we are both outrageously outrés .”
    â€œPerhaps,” she conceded with a twist of soft, full lips the color of summer dusk over the Mediterranean. “But you actually deserved it.”
    â€œI don’t know what came over me.” Celibacy. Two long years of celibacy. And ripe lips. Dusky, tempting lips an inch beneath his. And a soft, curved body, also beneath him. Tonight her curves were concealed by yet another gown of plain fabric and ser­viceable shape, and yet still he could not look away. He didn’t know what sins he had done to deserve this torment, but whatever it was he was willing to do a thousand novenas to escape speaking with her in private ever again.
    She set her hands on her hips, emphasizing their decadent curve. Never mind her homespun gown and unkempt hair, she made his breaths short.
    â€œYou kissed me because you thought I was a servant, which is despicable.”
    â€œI kissed you because you were soft and shapely and at the time under me, which is in fact quite reasonable.”
    â€œI did not exactly put myself there.”
    â€œAnd I did not exactly plan on being attacked by a feral cat in the dark. It was a mistake. Good night, Miss Caulfield.” He continued onto the landing and swiftly down the long, high gallery that his blood-­grandfather had constructed to display the family’s vast collection of medieval armor. To either side, his forebears had arranged suits of steel, some of plain, pounded metal, others elaborately painted and embossed.
    â€œIs that all I am to have?” She followed him. “I suppose you consider an apology beneath you.”
    Rather, he was considering her beneath him, how good she’d felt there, and how he would like that again. He halted. “Madam, I offer my profoundest apology. It shan’t happen again.” As though his feet moved of their own will, he found himself stepping toward her. “Unless you wish it to.”
    She backed up. “Not in this life.” But her eyes were wary.
    Good . He did not wish to frighten her. But keeping her wary could work. And yet the most powerful need to be near her would not leave him. Of course it wouldn’t . After two long years he wanted a woman. Among his brother’s potential brides was not, however, the place to go searching for one.
    â€œThat must be to my advantage, then,” he said.
    She screwed up her brow. “Must