Quite when that became clear, Patience couldn't have said, but she'd accepted it as truth when the gong for lunch sounded. Distantly.
She ignored it; so did Vane. At first. Then, with obvious reluctance, he drew back from their kiss.
"They'll notice if we miss lunch." He murmured the words against her lips-then resumed kissing them.
"Hmm," was all Patience cared to say.
Three minutes later, he lifted his head. And looked down at her.
Patience studied his eyes, his face. Not the smallest hint of apology, of triumph, even of satisfaction, showed in the grey, in the hard, angular planes. Hunger was the dominant emotion-in him and in her. She could feel it deep within her, a primal craving stirred to life by their kiss but as yet unappeased. His hunger showed in the tension holding him, the control he'd never once eased.
His lips twisted wryly. "We'll have to go." Reluctantly, he released her.
Equally reluctant, Patience drew back, instantly regretting the loss of his heat and the sense of intimacy that, for the last uncounted moments, they'd shared.
There was, she discovered, nothing she wished to say. Vane offered his arm and she took it, and allowed him to lead her to the door.
Chapter 11
After his afternoon gallop with Gerrard, Vane strode determinedly back to the house.
He couldn't get Patience out of his mind. The taste of her, the feel of her, the evocatively heady scent of her wreathed his senses and preyed on his attention. He hadn't been this obsessed since he'd first lifted a woman's skirts, yet he recognized the symptoms. He wasn't going to be able to concentrate on anything else until he'd succeeded in putting Patience Debbington in her rightful place-on her back beneath him.
And he couldn't do that until he'd said the words, asked the question he'd known had been inevitable since she'd first landed in his arms.
In the front hall, he encountered Masters. Purposefully, Vane stripped off his gloves. "Where's Miss Debbington, Masters?"
"In the mistress's parlor, sir. She usually sits with the mistress and Mrs. Timms most afternoons."
One boot on the lowest stair, Vane considered the various excuses he could use to extract Patience from under Minnie's wing. Not one was sufficient to escape attracting Minnie's instant attention. Let alone Timms's. "Hmm." Lips setting, he swung about. "I'll be in the billiard room."
"Indeed, sir."
Contrary to Masters's belief, Patience wasn't in Minnie's parlor. Excusing herself from their usual sewing session, she'd taken refuge in the parlor on the floor below, where the daybed, now no longer needed, sat swathed in Holland covers.
So she could pace unrestricted, frowning, muttering distractedly, while she attempted to understand, to accurately comprehend, to justify and reconcile all that had happened in the music room that morning.
Her world had tilted. Abruptly. Without warning.
"That much," she waspishly informed an imperturbable Myst, curled comfortably on a chair, "is impossible to deny." That heated yet masterfully controlled kiss she and Vane had shared had been a revelation on more than one front.
Swinging about, Patience halted before the window. Folding her arms, she stared out, unseeing. The physical revelations, while unnerving enough, had been no real shock-they were, indeed, no more than her curiosity demanded. She wanted to know-he'd consented to teach her. That kiss had been her first lesson; that much was clear.
As for the rest-therein lay her problem.
"There was something else there." An emotion she'd never thought to feel, never expected to feel. "At least"-grimacing, she resumed her restless pacing-"I think there was."
The acute sense of loss she'd felt when they'd moved apart had not been simply a physical reaction-the separation had affected her on some other plane. And the compulsion to intimacy-to satisfy the hunger she sensed in him-that did not stem from curiosity.
"This is getting complicated." Rubbing a finger across her forehead in a vain attempt to erase her frown, Patience struggled to come to grips with her emotions, to clarify what she truly felt. If her feelings for Vane went beyond the physical, did that mean what she thought it meant?
"How on earth can I tell?" Spreading her hands, she appealed to Myst. "I've never felt this way before."
The thought suggested another possibility. Halting, Patience lifted her head, then, with returning confidence, drew herself up and glanced hopefully at Myst. "Perhaps I'm just imagining it?"
Myst stared, unblinking, through big blue eyes, then yawned, stretched, jumped down, and led the way to the door.
Patience sighed. And followed.