He was still smiling. How she wished he wouldn’t. “Stop desiring you? Never.”
His gaze conducted a leisurely exploration of her body. Without touching her, he set every inch tingling. Slow heat shimmered inside her, turned her blood thick and sluggish. Her stomach quivered with longing. She shifted to relieve the heaviness between her legs.
He read her reaction. His smile broadened, became wolfish. She blushed to think what ran through his mind.
“Desire is no basis for marriage.” Her sharpness targeted her own susceptibility rather than James.
“It’s a start,” he said patiently.
“You’re just worried that as your mistress, I’ll be all reluctance and propriety.”
Amusement lit his eyes. “Tonight doesn’t bode well.”
She dared to step toward him. “I need a little time to accept my place in your bed.”
They stood face to face like adversaries. She was torn between running away and clinging to him like the ivy clung to the ancient walls of Alloway Chase. When he took her hand, she jumped as if burned.
“I don’t argue with your place in my bed.” His thumb stroked her palm, stirring her restlessness.
“You can’t forsake the plans of a lifetime.”
James drew her to an oak settle, black with age, near the fire. He sat beside her, keeping her hand. “I’ve changed since I met you.”
Despite being so overwrought, a wry smile curved her lips. “These days you’re not always convinced that you’re right.”
“Ouch,” he said amiably, laying his arm along the back of the long seat. They must look like two sweethearts, instead of a nobleman and the lowborn woman he’d lured into an illicit affair. “I’m right about making you my wife.”
“No, you’re not.”
“And of course, you never think you’re right,” he said drily, toying with tendrils of hair escaping her knot. “Don’t you want to know how I’ve changed?”
“I don’t think so.” She stared fixedly into the fire.
“Coward.”
“Definitely.”
He tugged gently at her hair until she faced him. “When my political allies told me to avoid London until the family name smelled a little sweeter, I thought I’d been banished to the lowest circle of hell. I’ve always enjoyed the hurly-burly of power. Now I had nothing to look forward to except cattle and crops and early nights.”
She didn’t interrupt. She was no fool. There was a “but” in this tale.
His voice lowered until the baritone stroked her skin like warm silk. “Instead I discovered a woman who lodged herself in my soul and wouldn’t shift, no matter how often I reminded myself that I never bother the servants.”
She couldn’t help smiling. “You bothered this particular servant quite a lot.”
He didn’t smile back. “And while I’d been a diligent landlord, my estates always came second to my political hopes.” He paused. “Then I found that living at Alloway Chase, managing my lands, arguing with that intriguing woman, proved a thousand times more fulfilling than anything I’d known before.”
“You’ve only been home a few months,” she said acidly. It was so difficult to shore up her defenses when he said everything she hungered to hear.
He frowned. “I’m not a changeable man.”
“Which is why I know that your political ambitions aren’t dead. Chin up, James. You won’t be in the cold forever. You’re too exceptional.”
He stretched out his legs and contemplated the toes of his boots. “That’s kind of you to say so.”
She made a dismissive gesture. “It’s the truth.”
“These weeks at Alloway Chase have given me so much.” He shifted from fiddling with her hair to massaging her nape. Pleasure rippled through her.