Page 44 of What a Scot Wants
But then the noise began to filter in again: voices and singing. Stringed music from the orchestra pit spiraled into the box with them, and Ronan went still.
As did she.
The last handful of minutes replayed in her brain. Imogen didn’t know whether to feel relieved or terrified. Relieved that her five senses were utterly drunk on Ronan, or terrified that her body now knew his touch.Intimately.
Ronan’s lips coasted over Imogen’s forehead before setting down her leg and tugging her skirt into place again. His eyes, nearly black, caught the shine of a gas lamp as he moved a step away. “That was unexpected.”
She exhaled. “This was—”
“Dunnae say it,” he growled.
“An error in judgment,” she finished.
Avoiding his stare, she swallowed and stepped away just as the performance resumed. Residual shivers from her orgasm chased through her blood. It’d been an age since she’d let the demands of her body control her actions, and for good reason. And even then, it had been only a party of one.
She still had a job to do. And now she’d just given her opponent a weapon to wield against her. A dangerous, unpredictable weapon. And she had no doubt Ronan would use it, if it meant keeping the livelihood of his clan and his estate safe.
They were at war. And this had been just one move on the battlefield.
Chapter Twelve
Two days later, and Ronan was still in the painful clench of arousal.
There had to be a new medical term for his fevered state. All he could think about was Imogen in that shimmering scrap of a gown, and every time he thought about the box at the opera house, which was too damned often, he felt a tightening in his trousers. He hadn’t felt so uncontrolled since he was a lad.
How had the nattering, pink-loving, rosebud-adoring, nitwitted Imogen Kinley he’d known turned into such a siren? It hadn’t just been the dress, though that had been eye-opening. It’d been her manner. Her maddening scent. The plumpness of her lips. Her greedy, grasping moans. The silken feel of her soft flesh against his fingers that made his mouth water with the desire to taste her.
On cue, his cock lurched awake. Ronan groaned. Sporting an erection in the middle of White’s was enough to get him thrown out on his ear. Hurriedly, he sat in an armchair near a potted fern and tugged the latest newssheets off a nearby table into his lap.
Nothing would satiate it, nothing buther. But she’d deemed their interlude an error in judgment. Perhaps it had been, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t plagued with dozens of fantasies of sliding into the depths of her slick, ready body.
At night, during the day, it didn’t matter—the visions inundated him.
“Are you well, Dunrannoch?” Riverley asked with a smirk. “You look like you’ve eaten the wrong end of an oyster.”
Ronan scowled. “There’s a wrong end?”
“There’s no right end, I’ll tell you that,” his brother-in-law said with an exaggerated shudder. “Can’t abide the things.”
“Ye’re French, Riverley. Dunnae yer people like peculiar foods?”
“Said by a Scotsman who eats haggis—sheep entrails cooked in stomach lining.”
He grinned. “Puts hair on a man’s chest.”
“Your sister isn’t complaining.” He shot Ronan a suggestive wink. “About hair, or anything else for that matter.”
There was nothing like the thought of his sister lying with this annoying prick to take away his unwelcome erection. He supposed he should be grateful. Julien waved a server over for a glass of cognac for himself and a whisky for Ronan.
“Speaking of women, how is your betrothal going?”
“Well enough.” Ronan suppressed a groan, and Julien’s eyebrows shot skyward.
“Don’t tell me you’ve managed to make the goddess of spring run away weeping already? I wassolooking forward to your engagement party. I’ve already commissioned my tailor to sew a marvelous petal-pink waistcoat for the occasion.”
He didn’t know why he’d agreed to dine with the aggravating man, but Imogen had started to avoid him again the past two days, taking her meals in her rooms. And the truth was, Ronan had needed to clear his own head. He’d needed to see a familiar face, even if it was only extended family, to remind him of what was important.
Maclaren. His clan’s future. His family.
