Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

S ebastian's mouth came down on hers and Marianne was immediately drowning. There was nothing cruel in the kiss, despite the heated, emotional exchange that had somehow led to it, but there was nothing gentle either. It was…claiming. His lips were firm and warm, and when she gasped in surprise, he traced the entrance to her mouth with his tongue.

It should have felt strange, wrong, but it didn't. It was like sinking into a warm bath after a long day or finally getting to have dessert after a boring supper party. Something she had been anticipating even if she'd thought otherwise and now it was here and it was everything.

She opened to him, she had no other choice, for she was being swept out to sea by an expert sailor. He tasted her, there was no other way to describe it and she shivered even though the way his tongue swirled around hers made her hot, not cold. He tilted his head, angling for more of her, like he wanted to devour her, like he needed her as much as he needed his next breath.

Certainly, she needed him. Her thoughts, her fears…they all faded away and she was left with only sensation. His heated mouth, his talented tongue, the way the fingers of one hand stroked her jawline so gently while the other hand shifted away from their grip on her arm and slid around her waist to hold her even more firmly against his chest. It seemed he knew she was being lost and he wanted to anchor her.

Her body shook, heat flowed from the place where they kissed, spread through her body like tendrils that touched every nerve, every limb, every place that could throb or tingle or tense with pleasure. She wanted more. She didn't care that they were on a terrace at a ball filled with people. She didn't care that her brother was only feet away. She didn't care that this was Sebastian, a man who flirted and teased but never meant anything he ever said.

She wanted everything. She wanted the things married ladies stopped talking about when women like her entered a room. She wanted scandal and heat and passion like it was her birthright.

It was as if Sebastian read her mind, because in that moment he pulled away. He continued to hold her, but his mouth parted from hers and he stared down at her in the dim light, their panting breaths matching.

He said nothing, his expression revealed nothing. At last, he stepped back, steadying her carefully before he removed his hands from her trembling body.

"Forgive me," he murmured, and then he pivoted and staggered to the door back into the ballroom, leaving her alone on the terrace once more.

She spun back around to look at the garden again, her hands shaking so hard that she had to press them into the uneven stone of the terrace wall to ground herself. Sebastian had kissed her. Kissed her like he was worshipping her, like he needed her.

That wasn't true, of course. The heat of the moment, the argument, had caused him to lose his senses. When those senses returned, of course he had walked away in regret. But he'd still kissed her. And now she would never not know what his lips tasted like, what his hands felt like clenching against her back as he tugged her what felt like impossibly close.

Would it change whatever was between them? The friendship she always doubted and yet depended on, almost as much as she had depended on Claudia? Tears filled her eyes at the thought. She'd already lost one of them.

"Lady Marianne?"

She drew a breath. It was a gentleman's voice at the door, but not Sebastian's. She turned and found Lord Beckington standing at the terrace door. He had a friendly smile and she forced herself to return the expression, if only so he wouldn't see her true, tangled feelings.

"Lord Beckington, good evening."

"I'm so glad to have found you," he said. "Do you have space left on your dance card, by chance?"

She swallowed. She'd come out here to avoid all that, but now the idea of distracting herself was tempting. "I…I do, my lord. The next, in fact."

He held out a hand and she moved toward him, back to the ballroom, back to reality. A reality that could never be the same again.

S ebastian fought for breath as sat in his carriage, gripping the edge of the seat as it rattled along the cobblestone streets toward his home. He had said goodbye to no one after leaving the terrace, but had gone straight for the escape of his carriage. He'd not found his hosts, not Delacourt, certainly not Marianne.

God's teeth, Marianne. What had he been thinking kissing her? On a terrace. At a ball. Where anyone could have seen them.

Actually, he knew what he'd been thinking. That only made it worse. He'd wanted her. The thwarted kiss at his home a week before had haunted him ever since, even when he tried to pretend it away. He'd wanted her and that want had become so loud in his mind that he couldn't deny it anymore.

Now he could taste her on his tongue, he could feel the way she'd trembled against his fingers, he could hear the soft sound of pleasure she'd made in her throat, one she probably didn't even realize she'd sighed into the dark, into him like a breath of life.

It all ricocheted through him and he pulsed with the power of his need for her. For Marianne . The last woman in the world he should want for so many reasons they could hardly be counted. The chief amongst them being that he'd been forbidden to pursue her by a man he cared about like a brother.

One didn't sport with a woman like Marianne. And since Sebastian was not interested in anything but sport, what he had done was… wrong wasn't a strong enough word. He despised himself for it. For his lack of control, for his lack of forethought. He could lose a friend for this. Two friends, for regardless of what she thought, he did view Marianne as that. In fact, sometimes he looked forward to seeing her even more than he did Delacourt.

Only one didn't go around kissing friends like that, did they? They didn't picture doing even more, like pushing her into the dark corner of the terrace and dropping to his knees to taste her far more intimately until she panted his name while she shook with release against his tongue.

"Fuck," he grunted, trying to push those thoughts from his head. They wouldn't go and he was happy the carriage was pulling into his drive.

He exited the vehicle as soon as it stopped, waving off the servants who came to greet him, his butler at the door. Nothing mattered now except the pulse of need that wouldn't be denied. He strode straight upstairs to his chamber, locked the door behind himself and unfastened the fall front of his trousers.

His cock was half-hard already. It hadn't been anything less since he took Marianne in his arms. It took one stroke to go to full hardness and he sank into the settee before the fire, slouching as he began to tug with purpose.

And his betrayer of a mind took him once more to Marianne. Back on that terrace, but in the dark corner like his fantasies in the carriage. Would she taste sweet when…no, not when . This wasn't going to happen. It had to stop.

Still, he had to believe her gorgeous smell would permeate his entire being. He would find it just as intoxicating, more intoxicating, if he lifted her skirts and rubbed his cheek against her bare thighs. Her fingers would go into his hair, clenching there like she'd clenched them against his chest the last two times he'd held her.

And he would devour her like some kind of wicked wolf in a fairytale. He would taste every inch of her quivering flesh until she convulsed against him and left his chin covered in the proof of her pleasure. Only then would he cup her against him and take her. Hard and fast against the wall of a house while he kissed her so that her moans wouldn't be heard by all the very proper people just through the window around the bend of the terrace.

He came with such sudden power that his back curved off the settee. His heart was pounding, his hands shaking as his body came down from the high of fantasy and pleasure.

When was the last time he'd been so lost? He couldn't recall it. Clearly, he needed to fuck someone just so that this madness would stop. He needed to go back to the Donville Masquerade or a brothel or a former mistress and just let himself have what he clearly couldn't control.

Only he didn't want that. Impossibly, the idea was actually repellent. And so he sat there on his settee, staring into the fire as his heart rate finally slowed to normal, and hated himself instead. Because he deserved that. And because he had no idea how to change it now that the wheels of this runaway desire had been set fully into motion.

M arianne sat in her night-rail at the small table by her window, a candle burning low beside her and casting a small circle of light onto the list Claudia had left her. It was far too late at night to be doing this, but after the ball earlier, she hadn't been able to stop her busy mind and there was no way sleep could possibly come now.

She stared at the list, dipped a quill in ink and slowly scratched off Experience a Perfect Kiss. She had certainly done that in spades tonight. A perfect, perfect kiss that continued to haunt her mind and soul.

But no, she had pondered that enough. She wouldn't continue to do so, at least not right now. She looked at the rest of the list. She'd almost completed another item there, quite unexpectedly: Fill My Dance Card.

It was odd that doing no more than wearing a more revealing dress and fixing her hair fashionably had allowed all the same people who ignored her to suddenly see her. She just had to be something different and then she was interesting, which was disappointing.

It also put her to mind of what Sebastian had said to her on the terrace before he…

No, she wasn't going to think about the kiss, damn it.

He'd said she was being what she wasn't. Was he right? She thought about it, thought about all she'd done for Claudia's list. Often she'd actually felt more like herself when she was doing those things. Like she'd found some part of herself that she had buried or lost or forgotten.

Not when she was dancing tonight, perhaps, pursued by a gaggle of popinjays who didn't really care about knowing her, only taking their turn with someone who was popular for a moment. But when she was sitting in her parlor with Sebastian and giggling with him over naughty words, or swinging her fists in his transformed parlor, she had.

When she'd been kissed by him, she had. It hadn't felt wrong at all, or performative. It had felt magical, almost like she'd been asleep for all her life and he'd woken her up with just a touch.

She shook her head. It was entirely unfair that something that felt so right could very well ruin everything between them that she so cherished. That he might stay away from her. That he clearly thought he'd done something wrong if his words of apology before he left her alone in the darkness had been any indication. That he'd stop helping her with Claudia's list, even if he didn't know he was her secret partner in living her life more fully.

She blinked at sudden tears in her eyes. She'd already lost one friend, and she had few enough of them that she couldn't bear the idea of losing another.

But how could she stop it? In just two weeks' time he was supposed to join her brother and her for a week at their estate just outside of London for a small gathering. If she didn't do something quickly, what had happened between them would ruin that, too. Perhaps he wouldn't even come at all, and he was the only thing about that gathering that made it even the slightest bit bearable.

"I must talk to him," she said out loud, getting up from her table and pacing her chamber as she wrung her hands. "I must air this out in a place where we won't be interrupted and he cannot run away. But where?"

She returned to her table and stared once more at the list in Claudia's neat, even hand. One of the items stood out, almost glowed at her like a beacon that would somehow be the answer to her prayers.

Sneak Into a Gentleman's Home.

She caught her breath at the idea. If she did so, if she dared to sneak into his estate, he would have to listen to her, wouldn't he? She could refuse to leave until he did, if nothing else. They could hash out this madness between them and as a bonus, she could cross another item off her list.

"Thank you, Claudia," she murmured as she folded the list carefully and returned it to its safe spot in the jewelry box in the corner of her dressing table.

Then she blew out the candle and got into bed. She didn't think she had any better chance of sleeping than she'd had earlier, but at least she could lie in the softness of her pillows and try to figure out how to break into Sebastian's lair.

And what she could possibly say to him once she had.