Season For Desire Page 20

  “You liked that, did you? I never guessed at the time. I took off half my clothes in that kitchen and you didn’t seem to turn a hair.”

  “Yes, well—I’m not as proper as I seem.”

  “I am delighted to hear it.” He made a great show of rolling up his sleeves, of rolling his hands to make the muscles of his forearms jump and flex. “Look at that. Do you find yourself overcome by lust? I’m not the slightest bit tempted to put my cuff links back on.”

  “Are you tempted to take your shirt off?”

  He blinked. “I like this improper mood of yours.” Within a minute, he had unbuttoned and removed his waistcoat, then tugged off the braces of his trousers.

  Audrina caught hold of one and tugged it toward her. “Is this a handle for retrieving a Giles?”

  “He is fair and fully caught, my lady.” With an are you ready look, he pulled free the tails of his shirt. Audrina gave a quick, breathless nod, and at last, he bared himself.

  Well. Half bared himself. But it was more of a bare man than she had ever seen before. Her dark fumblings with Llewellyn had been quick, relegated to slivers of time and corners of dark rooms. More pleasurable for the knowledge of their forbiddenness than the intimate acts themselves.

  This felt like a different act entirely, though, with an intimacy never imagined. Facing him, she drank in the sight of his firm, rangy frame: golden hairs dusting the chest; strong lines of collarbone and shoulder, of pectoral and rib. His trousers slipped at the waist, granting a glimpse of a delicious angle of hip.

  In a giant step and swoop, she sprang to wrap her arms around him, tightly, surprising a laugh from him. Oh, he was so big and solid and warm that she felt she could lean on him forever.

  But he was not for leaning on, and she was not for leaning. This time was for being together: the pleasure of the moment, taken and given and shared. Equals, right just as they were.

  “Take off the rest of your clothing,” she murmured against his chest. “Please. I want to look at you.”

  “You said ‘please.’ My, my. The world has tipped on end.”

  She turned to the desk. Locks of hair began to tumble as she plucked free one hairpin, then another and another, laying the metal pins in a neat pile beside his cuff links. “You make me sound so impolite.”

  “Not impolite at all, princess. No, the world tipped when you told me what I’d wanted so long to hear.”

  “That I want to look at you?”

  “That you want anything from me within my power to grant. That you want something from me that can please you. You—for your own sake, because you know I think you are worth pleasing.”

  This, she supposed, was why he would say yes now. Why they could claim one another in intimacy, not a fleshly transaction.

  “I am worth pleasing,” she said, “and so are you.”

  He turned his head away; the muscles of his shoulders bunched and shivered. He would not argue with her at such a moment; he would not refuse pleasure offered and sought. Not now, though she caught him glancing at his hands with some trepidation.

  “You are,” she repeated, and she knew what to do. “Come, sit by me.”

  She crossed to the bed and sat upon the neat white sheet. When she patted the spot next to her, he did as she asked. And she took his hand.

  Not for holding in quiet peace. No. She was going to turn this hand from pain to pleasure. Cradling it palm up in her hands, she sank her thumbs into his palm and pressed. Spread. Stretched the skin and the sinewy muscle beneath.

  His legs shifted, still clad in their trousers. One bare foot twitched.

  “All right?”

  He made an incoherent sound low in his throat. This seemed adequate permission to continue.

  So she pressed again, working her thumbs into the tender heel of his palm. Pressing inward with her own hands, then tugging out, to flex and bend every one of his troublesome joints.

  Pleasure can be found where you least expect it. That was what she wanted him to know; that was what she now believed. Had she not been drugged and tossed in a carriage, she would not be here now, working her fingers between those of a kind man, a great stone who let everyone batter themselves against him and who denied himself the shape he most wanted to carve out.

  Who asked her what she was worth, but put no price on it. Who wanted her to see the moon and stars, not because he gave a damn but because she did.

  She understood him, as though they had known each other a long time ago and only just met again. As though they’d each been waiting for someone to see them—not as better or worse, but as different. Different from how she ever thought she might want to live or be.

  She was coming to love that word, different.

  Or—was it the word she was coming to love? Might it instead be a love for the person who had first seeded her thoughts with that word, where it flowered?

  How could one tell the difference between love and need?

  She shuddered off these thoughts, refocusing her attention on his hands. Lavishing attention on each in turn, she rubbed the fingers, rolling and stretching them one by one, pressing at the skin between fingers and thumb. Each tug and movement pulled a small sound of pleasure from him: a whimper, a moan. Sometimes just a choked-off groan, his eyes shut. “Yes,” he said, and her nipples went tight against the inside of her stays.

  When she found the hollow at the base of his palm and worked at it, up his wrist and into the base of his forearm, his head began to sag. “Audrina. Lord.”

  “Are you all right? Are your hands hurting you?”

  “My hands,” he said in a ragged voice, “could carry the world if they needed to.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Her mouth curled with delight. “Try this instead.” And she placed his hand on her breast.

  He jerked upright in an instant, all languor forgotten. They worked quickly together to strip her bare of gown and stays and shift. She crouched on the bed, nipples hard in the cool air of the room. There was no shyness; not with Giles facing her, his expression warm as he stroked her gently, up and down the sides of her rib cage, as though learning the shape of her by touch.

  But she wanted to touch, too. “I like to make things,” she said. “Paper springs”—she danced her fingers up his inner thighs, still clad—“and terrible drawings”—she clutched at his thighs with a hard, flat palm—“and delicious things.” She stroked the long length of his erection through his trousers.

  “You’re going to make me finish before I even get my clothing off. Is that what you want to make?”

  “The first part, yes. I want you to finish. But I don’t understand why you still have anything on.”

  “I have no idea.” He slid from the bed, yanked off his trousers, and rejoined her within a few seconds. His whole body was large and tight-corded, all solid angles and lean lines, with faint freckles on his skin as if he’d been spattered by sunlight. The copper-gold hair of his chest trailed down, turning dark as bronze about his shaft, long and thick.

  Had she thought the room cool? Her skin felt hot, tight; her folds slippery.

  She remembered what he could do with his hands, how just the gentle plucking of his fingertips on her nipple had cleared her mind of every thought but more. But his mouth—oh, that mouth. Just as it so often teased her with words, now it tormented her with touch. Tasting and pulling, a deep undertow of pleasure that made her wetter, more eager. Somehow she had climbed atop him, rolling her hips against the hard line of his thigh.

  He eased himself back, lying flat on the bed. His other leg nudged between hers, spreading her wide over him. “Is it all right if we do it like this? The view is beautiful. I could not ask for better.”

  “My view is more than fair, too.” Kneeling above him, she eased him into her inch by inch. The pleasure of taking him in, that slow slide of heat and hardness, was made even better by being able to watch his face. By seeing his eyes fall half-shut, an expression of ecstasy over his strong features.

>   Neither of them had words for the moment they were fully joined. It was completion, a togetherness that made Audrina’s heart twist. She was not brave enough to hold his gaze; it was too deep and raw. And so she folded herself over him and began to move.

  She had never felt such sensations: closeness and power and vulnerability at once. The thrust and slide of their bodies, the pressure of his hips against her pleasure spot, and his hardness within—already, this was shockingly intimate. And then he eased her upward on his chest, so his tip worked the entrance to her passage with a greater friction, the sounds of wetness an erotic background to the tight-coiling pleasure.

  In this new position, she was raised over him, her fallen hair making a curtain over them. He brushed it aside, lifting his head to catch one of her nipples in his mouth. Raggedly, she worked herself over his length while he palmed her breasts and tasted and nipped, and she was tightening at both ends, so many points of pleasure at once, until she unraveled with a gasping cry.

  “Oh, my Lord. Oh, Giles.” She sank onto him in a boneless, pleasured heap.

  “Not a lord. Just a commoner,” he teased—and he thrust once, twice, more, then pulled free with a groan. Heat marked her thigh, and she realized he had spared her the risk of a child.

  Had she thought, she would have asked him to do this. But she hadn’t thought; she had only wanted.

  “Thank you,” she murmured against his chest, and she meant it for so many things.

  “Wisest, I thought,” he said, his breath still coming quickly. He stretched down an arm for his fallen trousers and found a handkerchief in a pocket, then reached to clean them off.

  And then they settled: she atop him skin to skin on chest, breasts, belly; his arms wrapped about her. Perspiration had dampened them both, and on her back it dried cool where his touch did not shield her. “I know this can’t happen again,” he said. “I wasn’t strong enough to say no this time.”

  Her thundering heart began to quiet. Yes, she had known this, too. And yet: “Why is no the answer that takes strength?”

  His arms tightened; she welcomed the crush. “Because I wanted you so much. You—Audrina, with the bruised courage and ready laugh. Who bakes things and makes things and . . .”

  Deeply, she breathed him in and let her lids flutter shut. “All I wanted to hear was that you wanted me. That’s reason enough.” A thought struck, and her eyes flew open again. “But why was that not reason enough to say yes?”

  “Because I can’t have you. Between the two of us, you’re the one with more choices. You could live in the country, you could return to London. You could marry.” His embrace about her loosened, one hand stroking her back.

  “If I have so many choices”—she trailed her fingers down the spring of his ribs—“then you must allow that I chose you. Today. And that that means something precious to me, just as any other choice would for a woman with so many.”

  “Today, yes. But I know my own limitations. I know I’m not the sort of man you want for the rest of your life. And so the fact that we have only today is—difficult for me.” The gravel in his voice revealed the truth of these words, though his face turned away.

  A small gesture, but it made her feel as though she were twisting alone in the wind. Bracing her hands on either side of him, she pushed away from his chest and slid to the sheet beside him. “You are more maudlin than I ever imagined.”

  He cut his eyes toward her. “I’m good at hiding it.”

  “And why should you not be the sort of man I want?” She was asking far too many questions, but she was desperate for the answers. She and Giles seemed far more naked now than when their bodies had been joined, and she drew the sheet up over them. Any little shield would help cover the terrible bareness that made each word so difficult, so essential.

  Heedless Giles. His expression told her she had, at last, asked a completely ridiculous question. “Why should you not want me? Because I’m an American with no future.”

  “Is that all? Your mother married one of those. Well—an American with a future different from anything she knew.”

  “You would marry me? You would leave everything you know?”

  She raised herself onto one elbow and studied the stern lines of his face. “Are you asking me to?”

  “No, I don’t have the right.”

  “But if we didn’t come from separate continents, would you ask me to?”

  A deep breath made the sheet rise and fall over his chest. “And if I didn’t have to work for my living, and if my hands were healthy, and—”

  “No. I did not ask you all of that. I asked you if you would want to marry me—if we could.”

  His laugh was short and bitter. “Would I want to marry you? It’s something I want so much that I never even dreamed I could dream it. But I don’t get the things I want, Audrina.”

  “I am not a thing.” The furious heat of a few minutes ago was cooling, leaving rawness behind.

  “Marriage. Marriage is a thing. Not you. You are a marvelous person.” His forearm jerked up to cover his eyes. “If there’s one thing I’ve done right since arriving in England, it was that sentence. Saying that sentence.”

  Oh. Well. “I—like that sentence.”

  He lifted his forearm from his eyes, capturing her with a sapphire stare. “Do you believe it?”

  “I want to.”

  “And why should you not? Who decides what you’re worth?”

  She shook her head to dismiss the heat prickling at the corners of her eyes. “No, Giles. I’m the one to ask the awkward questions.”

  His gaze turned to the ceiling. “There are awkward questions enough for both of us.”

  “What is your own answer to who decides what you’re worth?”

  “Me, I suppose. I decide that.”

  She mulled this over. “Yes, that makes sense. You are the one who has decided you cannot have the things—or the people—that you want. You are the one who has decided that because your future may be crimped, you need not bother with the present.”

  “And you? You have decided to seek pleasure at the expense of the future.”

  Her shoulder was beginning to ache where she had braced her arm, and she let herself sink back to the bed. “I think it is clear neither of us had the future on our minds when we came into this room.”

  “Yes,” he said faintly.

  “And that should be enough. A pleasure, taken and left behind.” Her throat closed. They were side by side, so terribly distant, as though an ocean already lay between them. “When the snow melts, we will go our separate ways.”

  “It was always inevitable.” There was something careful about the hard angles of his voice.

  After this, there was no point in staying together. No point in pretending that resting her head on his shoulder might be a comfort, or that lingering was anything but attenuated agony. No point in pretending that they weren’t both ready for him to dress and leave.

  For such a quiet sound, the closing of the door reverberated through her whole body.

  Because it wasn’t inevitable that they go their separate ways—or at least, not because of circumstance. No, nothing made it inevitable but they themselves. But if Giles could not see himself with a future, how could he treasure the present as building toward it?

  For the first time, Audrina saw her own reckless wanderings not as courage, but as cowardice. If nothing was serious or permanent, then nothing could really matter. No mistake would be lasting, no hurt would strike to her heart.

  But this did. This did.

  She was ashamed; not because of what she had done, or with whom. She was ashamed because of why.

  Who decides what you are worth?

  Everyone. Everyone but me.

  She dashed an impatient palm across her damp lashes and began to dress.

  Once upon a time, Giles had told her that she did not need to change the sort of person she was. But this was wrong. He gave her credit for far more bravery than she felt, and
maybe for more than she possessed.

  She could love him for that alone, if she allowed herself. But they both deserved a love granted on a firmer foundation than gratitude—and fear, relieved fear, that this was the end, and that their snowbound affair could be perfect in memory without dreary reality to ruin the fantasy.

  Chapter Twenty

  Wherein Advice Is Freely Dispensed

  The following morning, Audrina and Kitty stood on the entry porch watching trunks being loaded into carriages. Sunlight, warm on their faces, had continued to gobble snow from the roads, and the heavy slush remaining over frozen mud was thought to be passable.

  “I can hardly believe it’s been less than three days.” Kitty tugged her cloak more tightly about her rounded body. “It feels as though I’ve been gone from my Daniel forever. But if I had to be trapped with someone, my lady, I’m glad it was with your party.”

  “Thank you, Kitty.” Audrina caught her elbow to help her down the steps; the Rutherfords were planning to take Kitty home before continuing their own journey. “It was a pleasure to meet you and to learn with you how one diapers a vegetable marrow. I do hope you will be well. Will you write to me when the baby comes?”

  Kitty bobbed a curtsy, setting both of them to fighting for balance on the steps. “Yes, of course. What would your direction be?”

  Now, that was a good question. Would she want to stay in Alleyneham House with her parents? Would she be banished to one of her father’s country estates? She could not imagine what lay at the end of this journey home, or even if there would be a home at its end.

  “You’d best send the news to Lady Irving,” she decided, giving Kitty the countess’s direction in Grosvenor Square.

  But Kitty wasn’t listening; she was watching a bundled figure trudge toward the inn. Every fiber of her fragile body tensed. “Is that—” Then she uncoiled in a great spring of delight. “Daniel! Daniel!”

  One hand bracing the small of her back, she navigated the final step and the yards between them with surprising speed. “Daniel!” She and the bundled figure embraced one another side to side, Kitty tucking his arm about her shoulders as naturally as though they were made to fit together. A quick flutter of low explanations followed, then Kitty led her husband back to where Audrina stood. “My lady, might I present my husband, Mr. Balthasar? Daniel, this is Lady Audrina.”