“I didn’t think you were,” he said easily. “You wouldn’t ask me to stay here, like this, if you wanted the position of my wife.”
For a heartbeat, her insides felt hollow and charred. “Is that why you touched me in your room the other day,” she murmured, “because you think I’m a strumpet.”
He clenched his jaw. “No. That I did because I forgot myself.”
Because he had been angry.
Something in his undertone compelled her to say: “I don’t think I want to be, or rather, can be, anyone’s wife, Mr. Khoury.”
There was an infinitesimal pause.
“So you only want us to—” He gestured it.
Her arms hung limply by her sides. “All I know is that whenever I think of you leaving, I’m shaking inside,” she said in a low voice. “I’m shaking as though I were falling ill.”
He made a soothing sound and pulled her closer, until his thighs pressed into her skirts between them.
“Sometimes, I don’t know what is inside your head,” he said, his eyes searching hers. “You say outrageous things with the most unassuming face.”
She wasn’t unassuming. She had imagined their naked bodies entwined, sated and gleaming with spent desire.
“Is it truly so outrageous?” she asked.
Elias closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head as if to clear his mind. “If you and I existed in our own world, all alone,” he finally said, “then no.”
She had all but missed their first kiss. The second had been angry, to demonstrate a point. This time, when he lowered his head, his mouth met hers slowly, molding their trembling lips together with deliberate care. Her eyes fell shut. The silky tip of his tongue glided over her sensitive bottom lip, and her breath left her with a sob. He used the moment to slip into her mouth. Yes. A soft groan, and his gloves dropped to the floor, and then he was holding her face in his warm palms. His thumbs were at the corners of her mouth, caressing the delicate skin as he deepened the kiss with gentle pressure. She kept her eyes closed to feel it all in the dark, the rush of his breath over her cheek, the intimate textures of him like the glassy smoothness of his teeth, the warm slickness under his tongue. She was warm and slick between her thighs, too, right where she felt the insistent heat of his arousal through the thickness of her skirt. When her hands clasped restlessly at the knot of his cravat, he broke the kiss.
The room was blurred around her. Elias kept the pad of his thumb against her lips, as if wanting to prolong the sensation of her mouth on him. Drunk on impulse, she licked him. He took a sharp little breath, which made her do it again, and he pushed the tip of his thumb into her mouth. At first, he held still while she explored the salty taste and unfamiliar feel of his skin against her tongue, and then he moved his finger in and out for a bit. She let him.
“Ah,” he said, and pulled back his hand, his gaze fixed on her mouth. “Do you like it when I do that?”
She liked the look of his eyes swimming in molten desire.
“Yes,” she breathed. “I like it.”
He muttered something incomprehensible, then: “I shall think about your proposition.”
Well, that was humiliating.
He took in her lowered head and burning cheeks.
“Heh,” he said softly. “You know it’s a bad idea.”
She eyed him with caution. “But you don’t . . . not want it?”
He thrust his fingers into his hair. “Not want it?” The way he looked at her, as though she were short of a few marbles. “You know that I want it, most any man would. Do you want me to take you on this couch here, or on this chair? I can do that, easily. This, though”—he wagged his fingers back and forth between them—“is not that easy.”
Nothing ever was, with her. “Of course,” she said. “I’m aware.”
He glanced at the clock next to the door. It hadn’t shown the correct time in a while, with no one here to set it regularly, so he looked out the window where the sun stood high over Cadogan Park.
“For now, let’s not be hasty,” he said. “Let me fetch my luggage. Then we will have lunch.”
She nodded and took a step back, back into reality. “I’m afraid I must call on an acquaintance as soon as possible. It’s why I’m here.”
Once they slept together, it would probably rob her of her focus for her cause.
Elias’s brow furrowed. “You want to leave, now—without eating any food.”