Read Online Cheryl Holt by Too Tempting to Touch - Free Book Online Page B

be her response?
    She’d faint, so he wouldn’t knock. He’d simply enter and discover what had happened. It wasn’t as if she could protest to anyone, and if she was brave enough to tattle, who would listen? He was lord of the manor, and the staff comprehended that he could act however he pleased.
    Gad, but he was being an ass! This was madness, this was lunacy, this was danger and stupidity and every other cautionary word he could conjure, yet he couldn’t desist. He felt as if a magnet were leading him to her.
    Memories kept creeping in, as he recalled how she’dlooked, how she’d tasted, when he’d kissed her senseless a few nights earlier. He’d done it to teach her a lesson, to knock her off her lofty moral pedestal, but
he
was the one who had been unsettled.
    Since that ignominious meeting, he hadn’t seen her, though not for lack of trying. He’d dawdled at home, spending many tedious hours waiting—in vain!—for Miss Drake to appear, but she’d been markedly absent.
    Most likely, she was embarrassed at how her preaching had backfired, which was precisely the emotional state he’d been hoping to inspire. Yet he was fretting over how she’d weathered the ordeal and, if he was candid, craving the chance to do much the same with her again.
    Somehow, the aggravating female had slipped under his defenses, had flustered him until he was no longer sure of what he’d meant to achieve. By trifling with her he’d unleashed an odd reservoir of want and need that he hadn’t grasped he’d been harboring.
    Miss Drake had put her whole heart and soul into their embrace, had joined in as if they were the last couple on earth. Her enthusiasm had jangled loose a desire to return to the heady days when sex had mattered. How had the joy been lost? Why couldn’t it be resurrected?
    In some deeply buried, disregarded part of him, he was positive that if he kissed Miss Drake a few more times, he might find something for which he’d been searching without even realizing he was.
    He arrived at her door, and without delay—where he might have taken a moment to reconsider—he spun the knob, tiptoed in, and . . .
    She was mostly naked.
    Her back was to him, her fabulous golden hair downand brushed out, her feet bare, and she was dressed only in a petticoat. She was washing, dipping a cloth in a bowl and stroking it across her body.
    In all his fantasizing about how he’d barge in, it had never occurred to him to wonder what
she
might be doing. He was stunned, elated at having stumbled upon the erotic sight, and too uncouth to slink out as he ought. Like the worst voyeur, he watched.
    Without planning to, he must have made a noise, because she gasped and whipped around. Her cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes glittering like diamonds in the dim candlelight. Clutching the cloth to her bosom, she tried to shield what he shouldn’t be allowed to view, but with scant success. She was sensuous and adorable, and the most marvelous impression of anticipation swept over him. Any spectacular thing might transpire and it would be all right.
    “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
    “Probably not,” he agreed.
    “Go away.”
    “No.”
    He approached until they were toe-to-toe, and she gazed up at him, refusing to recoil, refusing to cower.
    “What do you want?” she asked.
    “I had to see you.”
    “Well, now you have.”
    “You’ve ceased hounding me”—he grinned, anxious to ease the awkwardness of the encounter—“so I thought I’d better check on you.”
    “I don’t care where you go or what you do,” she claimed. “It’s none of my business.”
    “But your harassment was beginning to grow on me. Why quit when you’re having such incredible results?”
    “I shouldn’t have pestered you. As you so elegantly pointed out, I’m in no condition to chastise over the weaknesses of others. I have plenty of my own flaws about which to worry.”
    “You’re a veritable slattern,” he joked.
    “Don’t make fun