La Roux didn’t seem to mind. He grabbed her hand and led her back to the center of the room for another round of dancing, hand light upon her back. She rested her head against his shoulder, but this time it had little to do with her own exhaustion.
The senator wasn’t a scoundrel after all. He wasn’t a criminal. He was a good man, despite being naïve and misguided. He was also funny, blunt, attentive, ambitious, and dedicated to his work. If she had to take a lover this season, she could have picked far worse.
And she did need to take a lover. She needed to get Tristan out of her head. She’d known it from the first moment they’d started sleeping with one another.
Lila lifted her face, wound her arms around La Roux’s neck, and joined her lips to his.
She felt a brush of skin at her side, felt a tug at her dress’s zipper, heard the pull of each tooth slowly giving way to the next as he worked it down. He didn’t pull it off in a rush. Instead, he slipped his hand inside and traced the planes of her back.
Lila responded in kind. She had always yanked off the clothes of highborn men in a rush, both her and her partners too hungry and too enflamed to waste time with button holes and bra hooks. Something had usually been ripped, bent, or broken. She’d never tried slow before.
Except with Tristan.
She’d learned that slow could be nice.
Apparently La Roux had learned the lesson too. He tugged off his cravat and slipped his button-down off his shoulders, letting it fall to the ground while Lila traced his chest and abdomen. He obviously spent time in the gym, even during his off-seasons, filling out his clothes to their best proportions. He wasn’t so large as to impair the tailoring; he just was large enough to hold a woman in a firm grip and not look brutish.
He had the same sort of frame as Tristan, just a tad more muscular.
La Roux unpinned her bun. Her hair fell to her shoulders, tickling her skin. One strap of her dress slipped off her shoulder as she pulled back the blankets on her bed. A silk negligee peeked out from under the blanket, something that could only have come from Alex. She tossed it onto the floor, losing the remaining strap of her dress.
She let the dress fall, pooling around her feet, watching La Roux as he watched her.
La Roux’s smile faltered, brows twisted. “What happened?” He gingerly touched her hip. Her bruises had already turned a dark red since the motorcycle accident.
It was something Tristan would have asked.
“It’s the consequences of owning a Firefly,” she lied, slightly embarrassed that his first thought after seeing her nude was concern rather than desire.
Perhaps she looked worse than she thought.
“Maybe we shouldn’t tonight.”
Lila looked up. That wasn’t something Tristan would have said.
“The bruises don’t bother me. I’m just worried that you’re unwell.”
Lila stared at the floor. That wasn’t something Tristan would have said, either. He would have been too caught up in the moment, only realizing he’d hurt her when she gave a moan of protest.
Just like the day before.
It wasn’t that he didn’t take care of her. He just took care of someone else, some other Lila she’d never be. He didn’t notice the one beside him—one who lived on a highborn estate.
One he hated, if he could ever be honest with himself.
“You’re not used to someone saying something like that, are you? Perhaps it’s time you spent the night with a different sort of man.” La Roux placed a gentle kiss on her shoulder before returning to her lips.
Lila unbuttoned La Roux’s breeches and slid her hand into the hunter-green boxer briefs, the color of Beaulac. He bit down on her lip gently, groaning at the contact as she traced his cock. It responded, hardening at her touch.
Lila lay back on the bed, watching him.
La Roux’s breeches hit the floor, and he joined her, finding her lips once again, sucking gently while he tugged down one strap of her bra, and then the next. He abandoned her lips for her neck, managing to raise her desire at the first stroke of his tongue, her collarbone, her chest, and finally her breast.
Her body responded to him, and he unclasped her bra and tossed it aside.
The rest of her clothes joined it.
La Roux had not been lying when he claimed expertise in dallying. As he sucked her nipples, he let his hand roam, tracing her neck, her unattended breast, her belly, the inside of her thigh.