Woo'd in Haste by Sabrina Darby Page A

generous trunk of an oak tree. When he could study her lips with his own, draw the taste of her out with his tongue.
    She moaned against his mouth and the sound vibrated through his body. He moved to her ear, breathing in the rose-scented fragrance of her hair as he nibbled at her soft skin.
    He ran his hand down the curve of her back, to the indent of her waist, the thick folds of fabric pushed aside so that he could feel the shape of her beneath. She was exquisite in every way. In his mind, all the disparate images of her body that he had gained came together as an alluring whole. He longed to unfasten the buttons on her dress, slip it down over her shoulders, bare her to his view.
    She moaned again, pressing her body against his, and he sucked in his breath, then seized her face with his other hand and claimed her mouth again, his own desperate and open, seeking a quenching for his thirst that no amount of kissing would ever satisfy.
    At a noise, they broke apart.
    “Thomas knows,” she said quietly.
    “Knows?”
    “That we . . . that we . . .” Her cheeks were red with embarrassment, as if discussing the embrace were so much worse than the actual action.
    “That we kiss?”
    She smiled, eyes downcast. “We shouldn’t do this.”
    He laughed at the familiar words that had become a jest, a way of saying “till tomorrow.” She laughed, too.
    “Kiss me again,” he prodded. “That was just a leaf in the wind and in a matter of days this house will be overrun with guests and events that will keep us apart.”
    Kiss me again , he thought, before I tell you my secret .
    She lifted up on her toes.
    “Bi . . . an . . . ca—”
    They both stepped back at Thomas’s gasping arrival, but then Bianca paled and ran to her brother’s side. “Oh my God, Luc, help me get him back to the house. He’s having an attack.”
    L uc paced in the empty schoolroom. He wasn’t there when the doctor spoke with the family. He didn’t know if the prognosis would change. If the boy would live to an old age or if, during one of the wheezing fits, he would suffocate from lack of air.
    Nonetheless, Thomas was recovering. Weak and tired, but recovering.
    Luc was still shaken. As he’d carried the young boy the half mile back to the house, he’d refused to look down, to focus on his desperate gasps. He could not help him other than to move faster, to eat up the distance with his long legs at a full run.
    He cared for the boy. Somehow in the last weeks he’d begun to think of Thomas as his own younger brother. In truth, that was an easier role to play than tutor.
    Now, it was Bianca’s terrified expression that lingered in his mind. And the gnawing knowledge that his proposal had gone unsaid. His identity remained secret. And all the guests would arrive tomorrow.
    It would just have to wait.
    But maybe tomorrow. If not, he would avoid the guests as best he could. Hope that no one he knew attended.

 

C HAPTER T EN
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    T he afternoon was a cacophony of arrivals that grated on Bianca’s already frayed nerves. But Thomas was recovered enough to be in the schoolroom at his lessons, which meant that Bianca had no excuse to escape keeping her sister, stepmother, and Lottie company in the sitting room as they welcomed each new visitor.
    The last house party the manor had seen was fourteen years ago. Bianca had only one memory of that time, when their nanny at the time had dressed the girls up in their finest and brought them down to be presented to the guests after dinner. Kate had recited a poem and Bianca had sung a song. They’d been feted and then returned to their rooms.
    There were so many new people it was hard to keep track of them all. And that was just those who had already arrived.
    There was a Frederick Graughton, slender, well-dressed, with a knowing smirk and a ready wit. From the first moment of their introduction he reminded her of the sly, amused Sir Clement Wetherby of Evelina .
    A set of twins,