The Pleasure of Your Kiss by Teresa Medeiros Read Free Book Online Page B

won’t give us his blessing, then we shall elope. You just turned one-and-twenty, and I’ll be eighteen next month—old enough to decide whom I want to wed. We can run away to London or Paris and live in a garret. Why, I’ll take in ironing if I have to!”
    “Do you even know how to iron?”
    Her smooth brow puckered in a scowl. “No, but if I can play Bach’s Fantasia in A minor on the clavichord and conjugate Latin verbs in the first-person singular of the perfect indicative active, I’m certain I could learn. We shall sup on bread and cheese every night and read Byron and Molière together by candlelight.” Her voice deepened a husky octave, granting him an enticing glimpse of the woman she would soon become, the woman she believed she already was. “And after the candles burn down, you can make mad, passionate love to me until dawn.”
    During her ardent declaration, she had clutched his arm and risen up on tiptoe until her lips were only a fragrant breath away from his. Their parted pink petals were so tempting, so tantalizing, so utterly unwavering in their idyllic—if naïve—vision of the life they could never share, that he was tempted to make mad, passionate love to her at that very moment. But if he succumbed to the temptation, if he lowered her to the damp grass and took her in the folds of her ermine-trimmed cloak, he knew he would never find the strength to tear himself away from her arms. He would spend the rest of his days despising himself for being the selfish bastard who had ruined her life.
    He seized her by the shoulders, causing hope to flare in her eyes. But his next words dimmed it. “How long would it be before you would hate me? For taking you away”—he swept a hand toward the beautifully manicured grounds of her father’s estate, the graceful columns and chimneys of the Greek Revival mansion peeping over the top of the hill behind her in the distance—“from all this?”
    She captured his hand and pressed her warm lips fervently to the back of it. “I could never hate you. I shall always adore you!”
    Gently tugging his hand from her grasp, he took her by the shoulders once again, this time to firmly set her away from him. “I’m afraid it’s too late anyway. I’ve already enlisted in the army of the East India Company. The Burke titles may not be worth much more than the paper they’re printed on at the moment, but they still have enough influence to purchase me a commission. I’m to sail from Greenwich to Bombay on the morrow. Unless you want to make a deserter of me and see me hanged, you have to let me go.”
    Clarinda stood gazing up at him as if he’d struck her, at a loss for words for the first time in their long acquaintance.
    Ash forced himself to take up his horse’s lead, turn his back, and walk away from her.
    He had never seen her shed a tear over anything, not even when she was nine and he was twelve and she had tumbled off her pony when trying to follow him over a difficult jump. Muttering an oath he wasn’t supposed to know, Ash had scooped her up in his arms and carried her all the way back to her father’s house. She had bitten her bottom lip bloody but had never uttered so much as a whimper. It had been Ash who had been forced to watch through stinging eyes as her distraught father ordered two footmen to sit on her so the doctor could set her broken arm.
    She was crying in earnest now—great, gulping sobs that made Ash feel as if his own heart were being ripped from his chest. But when her voice finally rang out behind him, it wasn’t sadness that reverberated through it, but fury. “If you go, Ashton Burke, don’t bother coming back! I won’t have you! I’ll take your precious fortune and throw every coin of it right back in your proud, insufferable face!”
    Ash hesitated, tempted to march right back and try to shake some sense into her. Or at least to kiss her more insensible than she was already being. But he squared his shoulders and