First kisses on WIP Wednesday

Today, I’m featuring first kisses. With four works-in-progress underway at the same time, I have a few to choose from. Two of them are not at all far along, but I was in a party on Facebook where kisses were the theme of the day, so I wrote a kiss scene for each.

Below is the first kiss between Alex Redepenning and Ella Melville, hero and heroine of A Raging Madness, the second Golden Redepenning book. How about showing me yours?

In A Raging Madness, Alex Redepenning is rescuing the widow Eleanor Melville from her scheming relatives. Alex and Ella are fighting the attraction between them. I haven’t yet written as far as their first kiss, but I’m guessing it is going to go something like this:

“How is your leg?” she said, doing a creditable job of keeping her voice steady. Alex could not be so calm. He had nearly lost her!

She knelt beside him looking anxiously at the pernicious limb. To hell with the leg. “Ella!” She turned her head to meet his eyes. He said it again, his voice breaking. “Ella.”

Her eyes full of wonder, she lifted her hand to touch his face, and he noticed the holes in the crown of her hat.

“Your hat!” he managed. She untied and unpinned it; removed it and poked a finger into one hole and then the other.

“The bullet went through my hat!” She sounded surprised, but not alarmed.

“Too close.” Unable to bear the distance, he tugged her into his arms. “Too close, Ella.” He folded her close and tucked his face into her hair.

She pulled back, warning him, “Alex, be careful of your leg!” Her face turned up to him tempted him beyond measure, and he covered her mouth with his, the thwarted desire of a decade or more released by the fear of the last half hour.

Damn the leg, he would have said, but her mouth had risen to meet his, and he had no breath for speech; no mind with which to think. In all the universe, there was only Ella.