A Gentleman Undone (33 page)

She fetched her wet fingers back to one nipple, and the slick contact was almost as good as his tongue. Better, when you factored in the heat of his stare. She let her head fall back—why not?—and moaned aloud.

“Lydia.” He near-strangled on her name. His solid hands landed on her hips, where they shaped her movement. Harder. Tipped back ten degrees or so. She’d remember. She was a quick study. Then his thumb was roaming down through her curling hairs, and then it was upon her, stroking nefarious circles. “Lydia,” he said again. “Let me see you come.”

She quivered. But no. Her eyes came to his and she shook her head. “Your pleasure first.” She put his hand away from her.

Give
, he’d said. She could do that. She kept hold of the one hand and reached for the other, lacing her fingers through his, palm to palm. She leaned forward, pushing his hands back down to the pillow, bringing her face nearer to his, thrusting on him all the while.

“Talk to me,” he murmured, in such a voice as the serpent must have used with Eve.

So she told him a few things. Regarding the broadness of his shoulders, and the superiority of his cock, and the way his eyes alone could make her feel naked. And when his hips began to rock roughly under her and his face went grim with concentration, she told him more. How she’d worn the plum-colored sarcenet only for him. How the scent of bay rum would forever bring him to mind. How she’d never slept beside a man until two nights since.

Fraught confidences these were, requiring all her nerve. But how could she regret them, seeing their effect? His hands slipped free of hers and groped for a hold on her waist. His breath came in harsh pants. He was on the doorstep of delirium, and she would push him over the threshold.

She touched herself. He was close enough now that she might risk it. She wouldn’t go ahead of him but she wouldn’t be far behind.

He watched her fingers slip in between her thighs and he swore, thrusting up with furious strength. His teeth showed in all their imperfect glory as his lips pulled back in a grimace. His brows, like inky scrawls on his taut face, drove down and his eyes shut hard. His grip convulsed at her waist.

Climax took him like a lightning strike, all in one bright instant. He arched up from the bed and went rigid, gasping for breath, holding her hard to him that he could stay deep inside. His fingers would leave bruises. She didn’t care. She stroked herself harder, faster, riding the wave of his pleasure, welcoming the bruises, claiming the fierce grasp of his hands right alongside the shudder of his release inside her.
I did this. I gave him what he thought I couldn’t. His seed and his cock and his climax are mine
.

Then she was shuddering too, the back of her free hand pressed to her mouth against a squall of desperate sounds. Everything shuddered: the bedposts faltered in her vision, the wallpaper swam, the walls themselves lurched out and away. Nothing remained but pleasure, and rightness, and then nothing at all. A perfect void cradled her, or cradled what would have been her but that she’d shed her self to fuse with this perfection and now she need never come back.

She did come back, though. She always did. And this time she was lying naked atop one man when within hours she must make account to another. Claret and drowsy waking lust had obscured the outlines of her predicament—of her brash and profitless transgression—during all the hours before. Nothing remained to obscure those outlines now.

H
IS BREATHS
demanded a certain effort still, partly because he’d got out of practice with such exertions and partly on account of a singularly agreeable cause, namely the weight of the woman collapsed over his chest.

Will inhaled, and settled his outspread hands carefully on her back. She’d worn herself out with him. Let her take as long to recover as she liked.

If only there were some way … but he wouldn’t spend these few glorious minutes thinking of that. There wasn’t any way. Beyond this bed lay cold realities woven out of his small means and prior obligations, and her wish to be independent of a gentleman’s protection.

Never mind. Nearly a year he’d waited for such a night and morning, and this moment alone was worth every minute of the wait.

Her ribs expanded against him with a sudden sharp breath. Oh, hell. She was crying.

“Lydia.” One stab of disappointment would not be
denied, but quickly enough solicitude slipped into its place. “What is it, sweetheart? What’s wrong?” He wrapped his arm across her and put his other palm to the back of her head.

For a few awful seconds she couldn’t shape her breath into words, and he must wonder at what thoughts possessed her, in this moment when he’d believed her to be as contented as he. “I don’t want to stay here,” she finally said. “I want to go home to London.” The admission apparently taxed her to the limit: she fell into soft hopeless sobbing, her muscles against him all wracked with misery.

“I’ll take care of it, then.” He could make no other answer in the world. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you home. Today, I will.” A deep, deep breath was needed for the next words. “I promise.”

M
R
. B
LACKSHEAR
proposed to speak to Edward, that she would not have to. “I’ll tell him you fell ill, and that the viscount had already meant to return home today and offered to convey you. I can say your illness prevented anything improper from transpiring here.”

But Edward was not so gullible as to credit such a tale. And even if he could be convinced that she and Mr. Blackshear had failed to consummate matters, he would still hold her guilty of the intent. She had defied him before the company. He would not soon forgive her for that.

Indeed the machinery of her punishment seemed already to be set in motion: when she rang for a maid, and sent her to Mr. Roanoke’s room to fetch her burgundy muslin and a clean chemise, the girl came back empty-handed. Her clothing had all been banished from Mr. Roanoke’s room. She was to dress in yesterday’s gown and wait upon Mr. Roanoke in his study.

Her stomach wrung itself as she made her way to that room. Mr. Blackshear had dressed and gone ahead of her to effect the necessary persuasion on the viscount and then, presumably, to notify Edward of their departure. He might himself be in the study at this moment, ready to brace her up with his own unswerving resolve.

But no. She passed through the open study door to find Edward in consultation with some gentleman who had the appearance of a steward. He glanced up as she crossed the threshold and, without any interruption in his conference, gestured toward a chair where she was presumably to sit and wait her turn.

She moved near the chair, but stayed standing. To sit at his command felt like the action of a penitent woman. And she might be apprehensive, and a bit aghast at her recklessness of the past fifteen hours, and utterly unable to imagine how she and Edward could ever mend matters between them after the betrayals of these few days—but one thing she was not, was penitent.

Some five more minutes he and the steward conferred, and when the man had gone on his way Edward got up from the desk where he’d sat and strode to a window, not sparing her so much as a look. He settled there, hands clasped behind him, feet planted apart. “I trust you had a pleasant evening?” he said in an acid-laced voice.

“Just as pleasant as yours, I hope.” If he expected her to act like the only guilty party in this drama, then he was in for a disappointment.

“My congratulations. Now listen.” His chin lifted slightly. He didn’t turn. “Your things have all been put into your trunk. You have twenty minutes to eat breakfast and make what good-byes you wish. You and your trunk will go in a cart to Witham, where you may catch the mail coach. At the end of this week, when I return to
London, you will have removed yourself from the house in Clarendon Square. Is all that quite clear?”

Half her innards dove downward; the other half twisted themselves in knots. Of course she’d known this might be the price of her indulgence. More than that: she must have known, if she paused to consider, that she could not go to bed with him again regardless his sentiments on the matter. And still, to hear it as an edict both chilled her and sent a warm flush of anger to her face.

“I see.” She clasped her hands behind, like his, and advanced several steps toward him. “I’m a commodity to be wagered and passed about to other men when it suits you, then? But I’m to be chaste otherwise, and silent when you fling your own transgressions in my face?” She would gain nothing from this mutiny—even if he could be made to acknowledge his injustice, she would not go back to him—but the words poured forth nevertheless. “You’re free to amuse yourself with other women as they catch your eye, even on a night you were to take me to the theater, and I must sit and wait and never ask you to account for yourself when I see you next?”

He turned then, and his hazel eyes glowed with the anger he was working to suppress. He’d never hit her, not once. But she’d never been quite sure he wouldn’t. “I am the gentleman. You are the mistress.” A pause of two seconds, the muscle in his cheek twitching as he composed his next words. “I’ve paid all your expenses these seven months. You’ve paid none of mine. You have no more right to dictate my behavior than does a footman or a maid.”

Curse him, he served up his hostility with a dollop of undeniable logic. And he reminded her of a concern she’d neglected to weigh, in her heedless chasing after revenge and gratification. Behind her back her fingers laced themselves tighter. “What will become of Miss
Collier?” Footsteps sounded at a distance: it occurred to her she had still to face the unpleasantness of announcing she was to leave with Mr. Blackshear and his friend, rather than in the decreed cart and mail coach.

“To whom?” His regal brow quirked and his head canted several degrees to the side.

“My maid. Miss Collier.” Her pulse was pounding of a sudden. How could she have been so careless? Who would look after Jane, if she did not? “I should like to take her with me.” Her mind raced. She had nearly four hundred pounds. She might take a modest house, and persuade Will to go back to the hells with her. “You may keep all the jewels, and everything you ever bought for me. I only want to keep my maid.”

Foolish, foolish, foolish of her to say so. A seasoned card player ought to know better. She’d just put a weapon in his hands and shown him where to strike.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” He sent a glance over her shoulder while speaking, and raised his voice. Someone had arrived in the room, someone he was only too pleased to have as a witness to her humbling. “She’s a pretty thing, that maid. She can divert me until I engage a new mistress.”

He’d said it on purpose to wound her, of course; to insult her and to drive home just how little power she had with him. He might really have no such intentions.

It didn’t matter. His words unleashed twin furies in her: rage at her failure to protect the girl, and wrath at every man who’d ever thought a woman existed only for his own diversion. Without thought she lunged forward and slapped him, hard as she could.

His arm moved so quickly. For an instant the whole world was hot pain; only in the next instant did she grasp the cause. Her face. The back of his hand. She stumbled back and sideways into sudden, steadying, unfamiliar arms. There were sounds, and a blur of motion,
and when the swimming stars receded from her vision Edward was down on the Aubusson rug.

Mr. Blackshear, standing over him, swung about and looked past her to the person supporting her, a grim, urgent query in his eyes. He must have had the answer he sought because he swung back to the man he’d knocked down. “You may send your friends to call on Lord Cathcart when you return to London. We’ll meet at your convenience.”

Edward nodded, rubbing his jaw. Her jaw hurt too. Her cheek still stung. He’d hit her.

Her whole body felt like eggshells cracking. He’d hit her, and Mr. Blackshear had hit him, and now they would meet with pistols drawn. “Don’t,” she said. “I don’t want this.”

But nobody answered her. What was done was done, and no words, no acts, no bone-deep, soul-wringing penitence from her could undo any of it now.

W
HAT NOW
, Blackshear?” Lord Cathcart sprawled across the opposite seat, one arm laid along its top, swaying with the coach’s movement. For the first half hour of the journey they’d conversed on innocuous subjects, by tacit agreement keeping up the pretense that nothing extraordinary had led to this early departure from the house party. But gradually Miss Slaughter had dropped into sleep, listing and listing until her head came to rest on Will’s shoulder, and now they might speak on topics they would not broach in her hearing.

“Target practice, I suppose.” Confound Fate and the way it toyed with him. He could have just goaded Roanoke into calling him out that first night at Beecham’s. Save them both a deal of time and all the intervening trouble.

The viscount shook his head. “I’m in no doubt of the
duel. I count that as already won.” Proper thing for a man’s second to say. “I’m asking, rather, what you intend in regard to the lady.”

“I don’t know.” Self-reproach, his most faithful companion, lapped him in its python coils. “I wish I could do something for her, but I haven’t the means to keep a mistress. I oughtn’t to have trifled with her, knowing I could be the cause of her losing her place when I could offer no remedy.”

“Don’t take all the blame upon yourself. She’s no green girl. She knew what were the stakes and she chose to play.”

This was true, of course. True, and no consolation whatsoever. Not when every rose-petal-infused breath tugged his attention back to the slumbering presence at his side. “She was foxed, you know.” He dropped his voice lower. “When I got to the room last night she was half the way through a bottle of claret. I ought to have slept on the floor.”

“Did she reproach you this morning? Was her manner cold?” Cathcart angled his head quizzically and drummed his fingers on the leather squabs.