Not Quite a Husband Read Online Free PDF Page B

perhaps a dozen heartbeats to understand that he’d been teasing her. That none of it had meant anything
.
    “Come.” He offered her his arm. “Your sister was looking for you. I told her I’d locate you and take you back.”
    She rose and pushed past him. “It was not funny.”
    “I apologize. I didn’t mean to take it as far as I did. But you were so delectably innocent—”
    “I am not. What’s making love but a penis penetrating a vagina, discharging semen in the process?”
    He was taken aback. Then he smiled lopsidedly. “That is most edifying. And here I thought it was all about valentines and sonnets.”
    “Well, I’m glad
one
of us is amused,” she said huffily
.
    She made for the door, but he reached it before she did
.
    “You are angry. Was I truly reprehensible?”
    “Yes, you were.” Here she was, following in the wake of this beautiful young man like a devoted dog, while for him
she was but an elderly virgin—almost twenty-eight, oh the horror—and any thoughts of intimacy with her must begin and end in farce. “I will have you know I do not lack for masculine admiration. And I know exactly how to sin to keep my virtue intact. There is frottage. There is manual manipulation. There is oral stimulation. Not to mention good old bugg—”
    He kissed her. She had no idea how it happened. One moment she was in the middle of her irate speech and he had his back against the door. The next moment
her
back was against the door, he was kissing her, and she was frozen in shock
.
    He pulled back slightly. “My God,” he murmured. “Did I just do that?”
    The door seemed to vibrate behind her back; the Gs and Fs and D flats from the drawing room sent hot little pings along her vertebrae. Leo Marsden kissed her. She didn’t know what it meant. Did young people kiss for amusement nowadays? Should she demand an apology? Did women still slap men for such unauthorized incursions?
    “You had me convinced for a moment …” His voice trailed off
.
    Of course she meant to convince him. She wanted him to think that beneath her elderly virgin exterior was a Messalina who hosted wild orgies at dispensaries across the city. But what did that have to do with anything?
    “I might as well kiss you properly now,” he murmured
.
    “I suppose you might as well,” she heard herself answer, still indignant
.
    His lips came very close to hers. “What kind of soap do you use?”
    “I don’t know. The strongest.”
    “You don’t smell like any other woman I know.”
    “What do they smell like?”
    “Flowers. Spice. Musk, sometimes. You, on the other hand, make me think of industrial-strength solvents.”
    She stared at his mouth. “Do you like industrial-strength solvents?”
    His lips curved a little. And then he kissed her again, a curious but unhurried kiss, as light as a butterfly’s landing, as patient as the tides. A kiss almost innocent enough for public viewing—he touched her nowhere else, except for his fingers under her chin. A kiss that felt oddly like falling, and oddly like flying
.
    So this was why people did it, she thought faintly, despite the act of kissing being one of the surest vectors of disease transmittal. How strangely pleasurable it was. And breathtaking. And electrifying—currents must have been generated by the locking of their lips, because every nerve in her sizzled, every cell sang
.
    She wasn’t sure when the kiss ended. She emerged from a daze and had to blink for everything around her to come back into focus
.
    “Promise me you won’t kiss me again,” he said. “Or you will ruin me for all other women.”
    Likely he delivered the same line to every woman he’d ever kissed—it was too perfect to be spontaneous. But it made her dizzy all the same. She nodded slowly
.
    “Good. Because I would never forgive you, were you to break my heart.” He smiled, the very image of gilded youth, beloved of the gods. “Now shall we go before Callista comes looking for