Page 94 of The Texan Duke
She didn’t speak, merely turned and held out her hand this time.
He didn’t hesitate but grabbed her fingers, letting her lead him wherever she wanted to go.
Hopefully, to her bed.
No man had ever been in her suite. Not many people had been invited inside. She had never considered that she would lead Connor into her sitting room, turn, and face him in front of the fire.
She wasn’t just being improper; she was turning propriety on its ear. She was being shocking, unlike herself. She might, if she were given to lying, claim that the duchess had given her the idea. By suggesting seduction, Rhona had broken down the barrier of Elsbeth’s morality.
That was foolishness, wasn’t it? She’d wanted to kiss Connor long before the duchess said a word to her.
She might never marry. Tomorrow she’d leave for Inverness to arrange for a home. Somewhere away from Bealadair, the place she’d known for most of her life.
The future would be different. The responsibility would be gone, but so would the sense of belonging. She would answer to no one but herself, and perhaps that’s what she felt at this moment, the beginnings of that self-determination.
She tossed her shawl to a nearby chair, faced Connor with everything she felt showing on her face. Confusion, a little fear, excitement, enthusiasm, need, and desire.Desire, a word she had never considered part of her character. Not once had she thought she was a woman who might give herself to a man freely and without thought of commitment.
Her entire life, she’d been shoehorned into a role. More than once, she wondered who she might be if her parents had lived, if she’d been surrounded by people who loved her unconditionally. Who would she have been? How would she have acted? Would she have been as restrained as she felt now, living a borrowed life in a borrowed room in a borrowed house?
This, then, might be her true self. She was not acting as someone else wished her to act. If she engaged in seduction, it was for her own sake and not for the McCraights.
She took another step toward him, extending her hand. He didn’t reach out to grab it. Instead, Connor stood there watching her silently. She had the sudden thought that she might truly have to seduce him. He would not be guilty of overwhelming her with passion.
She would never be able to claim that he waylaid her or kissed her into submission. Or did anything other than what she truly wanted. He was, with his silence and his immobility, forcing her to go to him.
How did she seduce him? Oh, there were a few sweethearts among the staff, and she’d seen them laughing and engaging in a kiss behind a door or in the butler’s pantry.
But she and Connor weren’t sweethearts, were they? Yet there was something between them, something that made the air feel as though it had sparks. The same kind of feeling she got when she walked across the carpet in the winter, and then touched a door latch.
However much she’d tried to avoid Connor this past week, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking of him. Being in the same room with him changed her, made her feel foolish and young.
Yet the words to banish him would be so easy to say.
Go away, Connor.He would go; she knew that. He would turn without another word spoken, perhaps smile at her or not. But there would be a look in his eyes that she would understand. An acknowledgment, perhaps, of her inexperience.
She wasn’t a duke’s daughter. She wasn’t a McCraight. Tomorrow, she would go off to Inverness to make arrangements for a lonely future. Why should she save herself?
If she did marry—and that possibility was so remote as to be laughable—then her future husband would simply have to understand that she came to him with a past. She wouldn’t be the first woman to do so.
She walked away from Connor, heading for her bedroom. Only once did she turn and look at him, wanting to bridge the distance between them. Would he know that with that look she was granting him admittance into her bed?
Would he refuse the invitation?
He followed her slowly, and she wanted to stop and watch him move. She liked everything about this man, including the way he commanded a room, even her small sitting room. She liked the way he walked as if energy was coiled inside him.
She opened the bedroom door. A screen was erected in the corner, near the bathing room. She went to it now and with shaking fingers began to unbutton her bodice.
She had never had a maid. Gavin had asked her, more than once, if she wanted one. She had always answerednobecause of her privacy. She wasn’t for parading around in her unmentionables in front of another person. Yet that’s exactly what she was intending to do now, wasn’t it?
The screen moved and suddenly he was there, overwhelmingly male.
“Elsbeth,” he said, his voice deep, a baritone that skittered along her nerve endings.
She looked up at him. Where had she gotten her courage? Where had her momentary daring come from? She wanted more of his kisses. She wanted to be held. She wanted to know what passion was like—if it was a cousin to this startling feeling she had whenever she was around Connor. She was never more alive than when he was near. As if something in her responded to him.
“This isn’t wise,” he said.
Of course it wasn’t, but she didn’t want to hear that from him. Why must he suddenly be the voice of reason?
