The Librarian's Spell by Patricia Rice (ebook offline reader TXT) 📗

anyway. Why not enjoy this brief affair while it lasted?

“I am likely to haunt you around the world to force you to accept your responsibilities,” she warned, in all fairness.

Carrying his kisses as far as they could go, he began untangling the ribbons and buttons she hid behind. “If haunting is the price I must pay, it’s worth it. Believe me when I say I have never felt like this, I have never attempted to seduce a woman, and I most certainly never ever proposed marriage. You are driving me mad, not my mother. Say yes, Lydia, and do us both a favor.”

She wanted to say Prove lovemaking is worth marriage, but that was no different than falling into his bed like every other woman. Did she have the strength to resist. . . ?

He lifted her to the table and ran his hand under her skirt. Heat flooded her senses when he found the flesh at the top of her garter and beneath the lace edge of her drawers. He untied the ribbons and pulled down her stocking so his bare hand stroked bare skin while he kissed her.

Lydia nearly slid off.

“Say yes, Lydia. Say yes and make us both miserable.” His big, callused hand slid up her thigh as far as her drawers would allow.

“Yes, please,” she murmured, not entirely certain which question she answered, his proposal of misery or his seduction.

“For this one night, I will make you the happiest of women,” he crowed.

Before she had any idea what he was about, he lifted her and carried her out of the parlor, straight to the guest bedchamber she had taken for her own. Carried. Her. As if she were no more than a child. For that alone, she’d forgive him almost anything. Breathless, she clung to his neck and tried to protest, but he simply kissed her senseless.

Max laid her against the turned-down covers, continuing with kisses in places no man should touch. He was so close. . . She inhaled him with the air she breathed, felt his weight more strongly than the bed beneath her.

Only when he stepped back to shed his coat did Lydia dare exhale, and then the vision of raw Max emerging from his civilized clothing swept her breath away again. He cast his waistcoat to join his coat. In shirt sleeves, his cravat untied to reveal the brown bare throat beneath, the linen barely concealing his muscled torso, Max was the image of every Greek god she’d ever imagined.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, insensibly, because she could see what he was doing.

“I have found inexperienced ladies are too slow to figure out a man’s fastenings.” He tugged his shirt from the band of his trousers. “And I want your hands on me sooner rather than later.”

“My hands. . . ?” But now that he said it, that was precisely what she wanted—her hands on him and vice versa. How very odd. She’d never noticed a craving to touch bare flesh before.

He kneeled over her, his bare torso above her, his knees pressing down the mattress on either side. With deft expertise, he began unfastening her bodice. “All ladies should wear their buttons in front. As a husband, am I allowed to decree that?”

Shattered by a vast expanse of bronzed male chest and. . . broad brown nipples, Lydia could only respond in kind. “I have no maid to help me dress. Do husbands do that?”

He untied the ribbons of her corset cover and unknotted her front-tying corset. “This husband would dispense with whalebone entirely, if given a choice. The other pretty lacy things can be enticing. And perhaps gowns I can tug off your shoulders need not fasten in front.” He leaned over and ran kisses over the naked flesh he’d exposed.

Her plain linen shift still covered her breasts, but she could feel the heat of his mouth clear to her soul. And other more physical places. In fact, places she had never thought about began to ache and pulse. If he only came home once a year to do this. . .

His tongue sampled the tip of her breast, wetting the thin cloth. Lydia surrendered any pretense of thought and simply fought swooning from sensation. She ran her hands over his chest, touched his nipples as he did hers, and longed for his lips again. To that end, she slid her hands around his neck and tugged his mouth back to hers.

He obliged, plunging his tongue between her teeth with a demand that echoed lower cravings. Lydia pushed aside her vague knowledge of what happened between a man and a woman and surrendered to desire.

Somehow, his rough hands—those hands that worked so well on worldly problems—removed her bodice, tugging it from her shoulders and arms, allowing her corset to fall open. Her breasts spilled wantonly into those large palms. She shuddered with need as he played her like a fine instrument, dispensing with her final frail garment.

Rolling over, Max placed her astride of him. Lydia gasped and tried to hide her nakedness with her arm. He laughed and pushed her skirt and petticoat past her hips. “You are Juno, goddess of marriage and childbirth, queen of all. Do not conceal your beauty, my goddess. Cast your spell on me.”

He half sat to suckle at her now bare breasts. Lydia clung to his hard shoulders, aware of strong thighs beneath her bottom, and of a pressure. . .

Goddess of childbirth. . . He wanted babies. And babies came from that place that ached with need.

He had her skirts off and her under him again, with only her drawers as protection.

Max thoroughly enjoyed Lydia’s startled, excited responses. He didn’t feel in the least pressured into this act. He was the one eagerly tearing off her clothes, not the other way around. Admittedly, he’d done his fair share of clothes-tearing in the past, but only out of jaded experience, because it had been expected. He’d never enjoyed this heightened degree of lust for one woman, a woman who evidently enjoyed what he was doing and did her