skirts and her hair and her arms curled wantonly around the shoulders of a man who was a complete and total stranger to her.
No, she must be honest: he was not a complete stranger. She might not know his name, but from his speech, dress, and manner, she knew he was an English gentleman. She knew he had a white French bulldog named Fantôme. She knew he was gallant, and amusing, too, and she knew he was wonderfully handsome and that his shoulders beneath her arms were broad and manly and very nice to rest upon. She knew he’d a charming smile, and that she’d wanted to kiss him the first time he’d smiled at her, and ever since, which was part of the reason she was kissing him now.
Most of all, she was kissing him because he wasn’t Lord Crump.
But then, to her surprise, the gentleman began to kiss her in return, a beguiling, seductive kiss that coaxed her to follow his lead. He settled one hand around her waist and another at the small of her back as familiarly as if they’d been there scores of times before, and leaned into her, gently pushing her back against the trunk of the overhanging tree. As he drew her body closer to his, he deepened the kiss, slanting his mouth over her lips until with a little catch in her breath she parted them for him. Instantly the kiss changed into something deeper, hotter, more demanding, and far, far different from the kisses she’d shared with those other half dozen boys and men. It almost made her dizzy, this kiss. It was exhilarating and it was passionate, and it was complete and utter madness.
As swiftly as if she’d been burned, she jerked her mouth away from his and twisted herself free from his embrace, adding an extra, emphatic little shove to his chest that was more from her own mortification than from anything he’d done.
He stared at her, his mouth open with bewilderment and confusion—a confusion that she certainly understood. Then he visibly collected himself, squaring his shoulders and bowing before her.
“I beg your forgiveness, ma’am,” he said. “To take advantage of you as I did is—”
“But you didn’t !” she cried, shamed beyond measure. “I was the one who took unfair advantage of you , forcing my attentions on you like a—a harlot !”
His brows rose with surprise. “I do not believe it is possible, ma’am, for a lady to take unfair advantage of a gentleman. Nor did I ever consider you as a harlot.”
“But I kissed you, sir,” she said. She pressed her palms to her cheeks, striving to calm herself. “If that wasn’t unfair of me—”
“It wasn’t unfair, ma’am,” he protested. He was standing so the moonlight washed across his face, making him so handsome that she could have wept. “You did not see me pushing you away, did you?”
“No.” She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to shut out the memory of the entire appalling scene. “But it is the nature of a man to take whatever is offered, while it’s the lady’s part to refuse, or at least not to kiss him like that. That is, to kiss you. Oh, sir, what I’ve done , and for what? For what?
“Because you liked it,” he said, and grinned. “I did.”
He held his hand out to her, but she shook her head in furious refusal.
“No, sir, no, no !” she said. “I only kissed you because I was angry and frustrated with—with someone else, and with my passions unsettled, I kissed you because I—oh, I do not know why.”
“I understand entirely, ma’am,” he said, as if her explanation were perfectly logical. “Combine a surfeit of passion, a fury, and the moonlight, and there you are. Or rather, there we were.”
“But never again,” she said, desperation making her nearly breathless. If Lord Crump learned of what she’d done here, he’d reject her—she was certain of that. Every other of her little indiscretions would pale beside this. She’d be completely disgraced, and worse, she’d break her mother’s heart. “Never.”
“I don’t believe I care
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