Always a Scoundrel by Suzanne Enoch Page A

get still closer to him.
    Bram deepened the kiss, his tongue flicking against hers. He pressed her backward until she came up against a bookcase, teasing and nipping at her lips until she couldn’t breathe. Nothing was supposed to feel so very good. Certainly nothing from anyone of Bram Johns’s reputation.
    One hand left her face to skim down her side. Everywhere he touched her, even through the material of her gown, felt heated. Molten, almost. When his fingers closed over her bottom and pulled her forward against his lean, hard body, she groaned.
    Blinking, blood roaring through his ears and downward to his cock, Bram stepped back. He couldn’t disguise the jutting evidence of his arousal, because he felt utterly blindsided. Rosamund’s stunned gaze seemed locked to his face, thank Lucifer, though she must have felt him. He’d practically torn her clothes off, after all. In his mind, he had. His own eyes became abruptly fascinated by the scarlet flush of her soft cheeks and the damp beckoning of her swollen, slightly parted lips. Good God .
    Taking a breath, he turned his back. His reaction to her troubled him for so many different reasons that he couldn’t settle on any one as being worse—or better—than the others.
    Say something, damn it all , he ordered himself. “Now you’ve been kissed,” he ground out.
    “I think I need to sit down for a moment,” she breathed, her own voice unsteady.
    “Yes,” he said over his shoulder, taking another breath and madly trying to conjure a procession of old, sagging, warty females—men, even—anything to reduce the pressure in his groin. “Take a minute. And don’t forget to select one of those books my brother recommended.”
    He heard her sit. “Bram?”
    Her soft voice stopped him with his hand on the door. Damnation . “What?”
    She cleared her throat. “That was a good lesson. But I don’t think he means to stop with kissing me.”
    The sudden anger her words caused in his chest helped him to pull himself back under control. Bram faced her again. “No, I don’t expect that he will.”
    “You aren’t…finished then, are you?” she asked, folding her hands primly in her lap so that he almostdidn’t notice them shaking. “With assisting me, I mean.”
    He scowled. “In all honesty, Rosamund, telling you how much it will hurt to be punched doesn’t make the pain less when you are hit.”
    Rose stood and walked up to him. He half thought she meant to kiss him again, but without warning her hand flashed out, toward his face. Instinctively Bram blocked the blow with his wrist before it could connect. “If I knew what to expect,” she said, lowering her hand again, “I might know how to avoid being hit in the first place. Though I do hope you were speaking metaphorically.”
    Not necessarily . “So you still won’t listen to reason?”
    “I still won’t abandon my family to ruin. Will you still assist me?”
    “I—Yes. Of course. But this isn’t the place.” He gazed at her face again, but he felt himself sinking into her meadow green eyes. “A few faro lessons come first,” he said, and made his escape.
    Lucifer’s ballocks . He hadn’t felt that aroused and awkward since he’d first bedded a female at age sixteen. Thankfully in that instance she’d both known what she was doing and been a consummate actress. Lillian Maybury’s performance as Ophelia on stage had been nothing compared to her skills in her rather cramped dressing room.
    “Shut up,” he growled at himself as he stalked back down the hallway. Why in Lucifer’s name had a kiss with the virginal Lady Rosamund sent him back thirteen years to his first sexual encounter?
    Probably because he’d felt so…alive that night. Aware of everything—every touch, every breath, everysound. And that was precisely how he’d felt kissing Rosamund. Alive.
    Considering that for better than the past two years the most overwhelming emotion in his life had been boredom, this was