The Corrupt Comte by Edie Harris

Embarrassed heat burned her face, her ears, her neck, but before she could draw the blankets over her head, the bed dipped, and the coverlet was ripped away.
    Cool air hit her like a slap as she stared up at the man braced over her on hands and knees, his bigger frame bracketing her, caging her with his sturdy limbs. “Do not hide.”
    She froze, not in fear but in shock. Bathed in firelight, his face was stunning. She drank in the harsh planes that made up his features. His upper lip was shaped like a bow, dipping deeply in the groove beneath his nose, but to her mind it was more reminiscent of a hunter’s weapon than Cupid’s.
    She remembered the feel of his teeth on her top lip from their closet interlude. She remembered the slight tingle as he sucked the swollen flesh and the pins-and-needles sensation as he lifted his mouth from hers.
    She wanted to do the same to him, right now, though trepidation tripled the rate of her speeding heart. A strange man loomed over her, his stormy gaze filled with beastly intent, yet her mind had gone blank but for the vivid memory of the unwilling pleasure he’d so recently wrought from her body. She should be terrified, and yet…
    “What are you d-doing here?”
    “Continuing your education.” But he didn’t move, simply held himself over her in predatory readiness.
    Supine beneath him, desire curled to life again, low in her abdomen. Smoky wisps of renewed arousal, tickling her senses as it thickened, darkened, until her lungs grew tight. It was worse than when her tongue refused to work as it ought to—which until this moment she had believed to be the most frustrating feeling in the world. If she wriggled now, if she reached for him, what would the comte do?
    What would he do ?
    “You shouldn’t b-be here.” It was what she was supposed to say, as a proper, well-mannered, commonsensical woman. But propriety and that lot weren’t getting Claudia any closer to finding a husband and leaving her parents’ house, so perhaps it was time to bend the rules a bit.
    The comte had already proven he was a man with whom she could bend those rules.
    “What were you thinking?”
    “What?”
    His head dipped, stopping when his lips hovered only an inch over hers. “When you touched yourself. What was in your mind?”
    Hot breaths puffed against her parted lips, and she couldn’t help squirming where she lay, arms trapped at her sides by his. He was so close, surrounding her, bombarding her senses. She tried to breathe in his scent, and as before its definition eluded her—there was iron in the air around him, fire and sparks embedded in the salt of his skin and the harsh lye of his soap. He needed one of the specialty bars her father’s shop crafted…but then this strange, sharp scent would be masked by bergamot or sandalwood or some other popular male fragrance.
    She might not know his scent but she recognized it as his, and the perfumer’s daughter knew it would be a tragedy to cloak that honest scent in lies.
    His brows drew together. “Answer me. What was in your mind when I interrupted?”
    If she told him, she would indeed be bending the rules. She’d been a passive player in their closet game, allowing him to take from her and thus avoiding any blame or responsibility for the outcome of that game. But if she opened her mouth and spoke—a trying action even on the best of days—her purposefulness could not be denied. If she spoke, the words would mark her first foray into an affair.
    If she spoke, it would prove she was in control of her own destiny.
    “You.” Her lips felt dry, her tongue thick, her throat parched. “You were in m-my m—” She needed to choose different words, words that wouldn’t hobble her on her dash for freedom. Because now that she was running, so tempted by the possibility of control, the thought of shrinking back in on herself nauseated her. She could do this. She could speak. “I was thinking of you.”
    His breath caught and his eyes