Page 8 of The Meaning of Love
Shocked, stunned, Melissa stood stock-still for a heartbeat, then her hands rose, fisted in his lapels, and she hauled him to her and kissed him back.
A ragged sound escaped him. One of his hands cupped her nape, and crowding closer, he changed the angle of the exchange.
Instinctively, she parted her lips and was shocked anew—beyond thrilled—when he thrust his tongue into her mouth and claimed.
This. Oh yes. This.
This was what she’d craved for over eight years. What she’d dreamed of experiencing, times beyond counting.
Others had kissed her, and she’d felt nothing—none of this fizzing and sparking, nothing remotely like this rising hunger.
She followed his lead, mimicked his actions, and sensed his ardor rise to meet hers. Giddy, beyond breathless, she held him to her and savored.
His hands shoved into his pockets, his gaze on the gravel, Gordon trudged along the path toward the terrace.
“Damn it all,” he muttered. “Why couldn’t Carsely mind his own business?”
Two paces later, he grumbled, “Anyway, what’s it to him if I persuade Miss North to accept my proposal?”
No answers came.
Disgruntled, aggravated, and still stinging from some of Julian’s all-too-perceptive rebukes, Gordon was halfway to the house when, abruptly, he halted and raised his head. Drawing his hands from his pockets, he frowned. “Should I call off the troops?” He tipped his head. “Or not?”
He debated for several seconds, but the image of his exalted cousin having to explain himself after being found alone with Miss North—a sharp-tongued shrew if there ever was one—decided him.
“Serve Julian right. Let him talk his way out of that.”
Gordon grinned and, in a much better mood, continued to the house.
Inside the gazebo, Julian broke from the kiss purely to haul in a much-needed breath.
Dazed, his wits reeling, his arms trapping Melissa’s slender form against his harder frame, he focused on her Madonna-like face, lit by the faint, filtered moonlight.
Her long lashes fluttered, then rose to reveal dark eyes shining like stars.
“I’ve waited eight years for that.” He barely recognized his own voice, so gravelly and deep had it become—how affected.
Her lightly swollen lips faintly curved. “So have I.” Deliberately, with clear intent, she slid her hands to his nape and drew him inexorably to her.
His gaze fixed on her lips—soft, succulent, parted, and oh-so-tempting—and on a groan, he complied and dove back into the kiss, desperately craving more of the magic.
He couldn’t get enough.
Like a man who’d been starved for decades and more, who’d hungered every day for this unknown sweetness, now he’d tasted her and savored the glory of her response, he couldn’t force himself to stop.
Through the increasingly heated exchange, they communed; there was no other word for it. She welcomed him, encouraged him, lured him deeper, until they were spiraling through layers of sensation, lost to the moment, to the building passion.
All that he felt, she felt, too; that much reached him clearly. That much he registered and relished.
She—this—was more than just the appeasement of a craving. She was who he needed; he’d known that eight years ago and, patently, nothing had changed.
Need—his and hers—thrummed in the heat of the engagement.
Tittering—tittering?—jerked him to awareness, back to the gazebo in Lady Connaught’s garden.
Melissa had heard it, too. As their lips parted and he raised his head, her eyes sprang open, the same consternation that he felt flooding her expression.
Even before he turned, he suspected what he would find. No one tittered quite like a certain breed of older lady.
