Forbidden by Susan Johnson (good books to read for teens .TXT) 📕

"Isabelle?"

"No. Any woman I've ever known. Forgive me." A smile brightened his face. "Since you're so independent, would you like to take care of me?"

Daisy laughed at his expression and the notion she could shoulder responsibility for the very irresponsible Duc. "I don't have the energy to oversee an incorrigible, audacious man who's been raised to consider himself a golden child of the universe."

"Would you have the energy to oversee… perhaps a small portion of my life?" he inquired with a wolfish smile.

"I don't suppose I need inquire which portion?" she replied, her own smile luxurious. He made her feel always as though the sun were shining precisely for her. For them.

"Probably not," he murmured, his fingertips moving up the pale silk of her stockings. "Aren't you warm with these stockings on?"

"I wasn't until now…"

"I can cool you off."

Her eyebrows rose. "Really. That would be different."

He grinned. "I mean I'll take these stockings off."

"How nice of you."

"I've been told I'm very nice."

"By?" Her voice was coquettish.

"My mother, of course."

"Of course. I should have known. My parents too have often complimented me on my—manners."

"Just so long as no other man has ever touched you," he murmured, only half in jest. He had no control over his jealousy when it came to Daisy, begrudging with a lethal kind of resentment any man who'd courted her.

"You can assure me, of course, of a similar monkish existence," she sardonically replied.

"You're a demanding woman." There was a smile in his voice and in his eyes.

"Yes," she said and meant it. She never would have allowed him the license Isabelle did within marriage. She would have rather not been married. And while she tried to understand Isabelle's need to maintain a marriage so bereft of love or affection, in her heart she found it incomprehensible.

"I'm glad," the Duc said, understanding their mutual needs. Pleased perhaps with an innocence alien to his character of late, that after all these years he was truly loved.

For how long, though, would he be glad, she wondered. She was too aware of his past: when he was back from his habitual polo, and back from his casual influencing of Charles, he would effortlessly seduce her with his charm and beauty. Following the patterns of a lifetime… this day no different from the thousands preceding it.

So different from her own life.

"I'm more jealous than Isabelle," she simply said, declaring an element of her feelings, if not the substance. "I could never share you."

"Good." The single word was a promise. "And speaking of sharing, could I persuade you to join me inside? So we don't run the risk of our making love becoming a shared experience with the servants." His smile was apologetic. "There's no privacy in town." When you love a woman, he thought. Under other circumstances in his past, he'd not been so circumspect.

The Duc carried Daisy inside, through the ground floor hallways and up the grand staircase past a dozen smiling servants, whose whispers followed them like small tittering birdsong.

"They know," Daisy whispered, a blush heating her cheeks as they passed an upstairs maid carrying a vase of fresh flowers. Her giggle trilled behind them in the still shadowed hallway.

"People don't make love in America?"

"Well… of course—I mean…"

"Not in front of the servants?"

"Well—" Daisy thought of her brother Trey who subscribed to the same laissez-faire attitude as Etienne. "Well, I never have." A qualified response.

"Someone else, then, is as insensitive as I," he teasingly said.

"My brother—before his marriage," she hastily added. "Oh, dear, I don't mean to be puritanical or censorious…" Her voice trailed off weakly under the Duc's ironic gaze.

"Since you harbor an unblemished record in terms of fornicating in front of the servants, I'll be sure to lock the door." His grin was outrageous.

"Have you really?" She suddenly realized how exemplary her life had been.

"Of course not," he said, perjuring himself with a smile.

"Fraud." But her voice was affectionate.

He kissed her then because he'd thought suddenly of Charles and Isabelle at the sound of the single pejorative word and wished to dismiss such images from his mind.

The kiss was effective in canceling such images. It also spurred the Duc's progress toward his bedroom.

He undressed Daisy on the daybed near the lace-curtained windows, slipping her white kid slippers and pale stockings and lemon-yellow dimity summer frock off with wordless languor. Charles was forgotten. The sun patterned them in lacy arabesques as the summer breeze stirred the curtains.

She helped him then tug his shirt over his head and watched him with the admiring eye of a lover as he leaned over to pull off his riding boots. His broad shoulders charmed her and the muscular grace of his torso; his strong biceps swelled with the effort needed to slide the tall leather boots free. And when he sprawled back across her in sportive play, she stroked the taut firm smoothness of his stomach.

"You're perfect," she murmured, tracing the flowing curve of his powerful pectorals.

"For what?" His brilliant green eyes gazed up at her in frolic.

"For everything." She loved being with him, knowing he was close and content and enamored. Her own content was complete.

"I can't cook—or play bridge with any competence. My manners are appalling, I've been told—actually some have said I have none. And I dance only under duress. Outside of that, I'm available… although we don't have time for everything—speaking in the biblical sense—" he grinned, "because we're promised at Boiselle's play at the Chatelet tonight."

"Salacious man."

"Carnal knowledge is actually high up on my list of 'everything.'"

"How fortunate."

"I adore an intelligent woman." Reaching up, he touched the tip of her nose with a brushing fingertip.

"You may kiss me," she said in her best instructive manner but ruined her haughty pose by giggling at the end.

And he did… along with several other noteworthy additions from his sizable list of "everythings."

At midafternoon the following day, Daisy returned from Adelaide's. Familiar now with Etienne's polo schedule, she knew precisely when he'd walk in… how he'd look, how