Page 55 of The Truth About Love and Dukes

“All the difference in the world. One is stable, lasting, sane. The other is wild, ungovernable, mad—”

He stopped, struck by the innocence that shone in her laughing, upturned face. She did not know what he was talking about. He wanted her with a fierceness that took his breath away, a woman he’d known five days. Hell, he’d wanted her when he’d known her five seconds. But she knew nothing of that sort of feeling. The hunger, the desperation, the aching need—these were sensations she had not yet experienced.

“You want to know the difference between passion and love?” He wrapped an arm around her waist, pulled her hard against him, and bent his head. “This is passion,” he said, and kissed her.

Chapter 13

Having been kissed once, at the tender age of thirteen, Irene would have thought she’d be somewhat prepared for her second such experience. That tentative press of lips with the boy next door, interrupted almost at once by the approaching footsteps of her governess, had been tender, sweet, and, truth be told, vaguely disappointing.

Torquil’s kiss was nothing like that.

It was neither sweet nor tender. Instead, it was hard and hot, not tentative at all, and it brought a thrill she’d never felt in her life before.

She closed her eyes, and the moment she did, he overwhelmed her senses. There was nothing else in the world but him. His scent—castile soap, bay rum, and something deeper. His taste—port and fruit. His arm like a steel band around her waist. His clothes, soft velvet and crisp linen against her palm, and beneath them, his heart, thudding hard in his chest.

His lips parted, urging hers to part as well, but when she complied, his tongue entered her mouth, and she jerked in shock, breaking the kiss. At once, he went still, his mouth a fraction from hers, his quick breaths mingling with hers. He was waiting, she realized. Waiting for what?

She didn’t know, but she did know she didn’t want this to stop, so she slid her arm up around his neck, and rose on her toes to touch her lips to his.

He groaned against her mouth, and as if that was what he’d been waiting for, his arm tightened around her waist again, and he pushed her backward, following her into the corner of the room.

Her shoulders hit the shelves behind her, and books toppled out of the bookcase as his other arm came around her back to hold her tight. He deepened the kiss again, his hand tangling in her hair and his tongue in her mouth.

Pleasure began spreading throughout Irene’s body as he tasted deeply of her, a dark, heavy wave of it. She wrapped her other arm around his neck, wanting him closer. She stirred, pressing against him, relishing the feel of his hard, masculine form. The feelings within her grew hotter, stronger, and yet, she still yearned for more. She wrapped her leg around his, wanting him even closer, and as she rubbed her foot along the back of his calf, the feel of his trousers against her bare skin somehow heightened her pleasure and made it even more acute. She moaned against his mouth, wanting this to go on forever.

Without warning, he tore his lips from hers, an abrupt, almost violent withdrawal that forced her to open her eyes.

“Good God,” he rasped, his breathing harsh and quick. “This needs to stop.”

He grasped her arms, pulling them down from around his neck, but despite his words, he did not let her go. “For both our sakes, this needs to stop. Surely, Miss Deverill, you think so, too.”

Irene couldn’t think at all. Her head was reeling, her heart was pounding, and her body was on fire, and yet, despite all that, she felt absolutely glorious. The last thing on her mind was calling a halt to this wondrous experience and returning to sanity, so she shook her head, closed the scrap of distance he had put between them, and slid her arms back up around his neck again.

“Given what just happened,” she said, breathless and laughing, “I think you should probably call me Irene.”

A shadow crossed his face—guilt, perhaps, or regret—and Irene’s blissful euphoria began to evaporate. He stepped back, out of her embrace, shaking his head. “I cannot do that,” he said. “It would be . . .”

His voice trailed into silence, and he came to a stop several feet away. He rubbed his hands over his face as if trying to think. “It would be an unpardonable liberty. And far too intimate.”

His sense of right and wrong and what was proper was something Irene had never found more baffling than she did at this moment. “Too intimate?” she echoed, not quite believing she’d heard him right. “You were kissing me, Henry.”

He grimaced, clasping his hands behind his back, tilting his head to look at the ceiling. “Yes.”

“You were holding me in your arms,” she went on, blushing as she said it, her words fanning the erotic flame he’d started. “Your tongue was in my—”

“Yes,” he cut her off, and though he seemed to lose his fascination with the ceiling, when he tilted his chin down, he did not quite look at her. His face, usually so implacable, was twisted a bit, as if he was in pain. “I must beg you to forgive me, for I have subjected you to masculine attentions which any young lady would find unwelcome.”

Her blush deepened and spread as she recalled those thrilling masculine attentions, and her opinion was reinforced that the life of a young lady must be terribly dull. “I wouldn’t necessarily say that—”

“By doing so,” he went on as if she hadn’t spoken, “I have also exposed to you an unsavory facet of my character, one I would have preferred to keep hidden.” Taking a deep breath, he raked his hands through his hair and met her bewildered gaze head-on. His light eyes seemed to darken, becoming a deeper, more turbulent gray. “The truth, Miss Deverill, is that, though I am a gentleman, I am also a man possessed of deep carnal appetites.”

Irene’s toes curled into the carpet beneath her feet. “Yes,” she said faintly. “So it would seem.”

“I have had, from the moment we met, an ardent desire for you, one which I am finding nearly impossible to contain.”

She stared, beginning to feel as if she was in some strange and crazy dream. He was the last man she’d ever have expected to possess carnal appetites, though with his kiss still burning her lips, she could hardly deny it. He spoke of passion, and after what he had just done, she knew he must feel it, yet he looked as if he welcomed that feeling as much as he might welcome tooth drawing. And she was the object of all this? She still couldn’t seem to take it in.

But in this series of shocking happenings this evening, the notion that he had felt these things for her from that first moment in her office was perhaps the most astonishing of all. “Wait,” she pleaded, desperate for a moment to think. “You have felt this way about me from the beginning?”

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