At Your Pleasure (32 page)

The odd, poetic thought unnerved him. Too late he remembered the one item in this room that he did not entirely wish her to see.

Her steps faltered as she spotted it. Slowly, with a hand that looked to tremble, she opened the door of the small glass-fronted cabinet that sat beside his dressing table.

The silver pomander, worked in delicate filigree, no longer smelled of her. Or perhaps she no longer smelled of the herbs that she had stored in it, once upon a time, when she had worn it daily, next to her heart.

She turned to him, the pomander clasped in her fist, her mouth thin and white, her eyes shining. “You . . . kept this?”

He could not endure her tears. “Not for sentiment,” he said with deliberate honesty. “I spake curses to it more often than not.” He had told himself, these many years, that he kept it as a reminder of the cost of weakness.

He wondered now if it had not taught him, instead, how to lie to himself with conviction.

She shook her head, looking as though she did not believe him, or had not heard him right. Very carefully, she replaced the pomander in the cabinet, then gazed upon it a moment longer before she whispered, “Adrian . . . why did you bring me here?”

He took a breath. There were plain answers to give: it was meet that a new wife should see her holdings; that she should know her husband’s family, though those in residence be yet in the schoolroom.

But the truth was not so plain.

In order to know her, one must know Hodderby. So, too, with him and this place.

He wanted her to know him here.

To speak such words was impossible. The very prospect stopped his throat. He was not a boy to beg her to know him, or to forgive him for forcing her hand. He had bullied her into marriage to protect her life, and he would not bargain with her now in the hopes of gaining a greater reward than her health. He was no self-deluding fool: never had he imagined that stripping her of choices would win him her love.

He was at peace with this, was he not? He had practice in surrendering love: he had let go of any number of people in his life. The losses had scarred him, but they had never rearranged his innards.

Only now, here, in this moment, did he understand that it would not be the same, should she be lost again.

So what, then? Would he play the jailer for the rest of his natural life? Would he lock the bird in its cage until it forgot how to sing? What use, then, for the cage, once the song had gone?

She watched him very closely. “I am glad to see this place,” she said. “Do not mistake my meaning. It . . . to be amongst everything that is you . . .” She lifted her fist to her chest. “Here, it almost . . . hurts me.” She tried for a smile. “I see all I lost. Or rather . . . the full nature of what I never could have had, long ago.”

“But it was not to taunt you that I brought you here,” he answered slowly. “Only that it seems to me—” He cleared his throat. Explanation went against his grain, but for her, he would try. “It seems that you look upon my intentions toward your brother as willful persecution. But each of us has people of our own, Nora, and places worth protection.”

She looked at him uncertainly for a moment, and then comprehension whitened her face. “But who have you to fear?” She took a quick step toward him. “You are Rivenham! Surely no one could touch
you
!”

Her hand was reaching for his. He took it, squeezing hard. “None of us is without enemies. You of all people know this. Your father was no small figure, but he was careless, and rested too comfortably on his laurels. What keeps a man powerful is his dissuasion of his enemies’ aims. This task which was set me with regard to your brother—my failure is one of their aims. How would it look if I failed? I, a former recusant?”

“But—” She looked dazed, as though it truly had never occurred to her that to set a former Catholic on the trail of a Jacobite might be a task as politically perilous to the former as the latter. “There must be another way to rout them!”

“There are many ways to defend oneself.” That was only the truth. “Do not mistake me: I do not speak to you from a place of fear. I merely ask you to understand that I did not conceive your brother’s downfall as a piece of private malice. It was ever part of a larger contest, which I have little choice but to wage.”

To his surprise, she put her arms around him, digging her head into his chest as she said in a muffled voice, “I had never thought . . .” In the pause that opened, her swallow was audible. “I was selfish. All my care was . . . for what I must give up. I never thought you had aught to lose.”

But his ears had latched onto one notion in particular, and it fixated his predatory instincts. “What you must give up,” he repeated softly. “Would that be me?”

Her head lifted. She reached up to cup his face, and the touch of her cool, soft hands was sweeter perhaps than any words she might have spoken. “Oh, Adrian.” Her voice seemed clogged with unshed tears. But then she pulled his head down to hers, pressing her lips to his fiercely, and her kiss spoke nothing of grief. The hot hunger in it instantly kindled him.

He caught her by the waist, holding her steady as he returned like force with like. She pressed her body into his, sliding her hand into his hair with stinging violence. “Take me to bed,” she said into his mouth.

This forwardness was new. He meant to encourage it. He swung her into his arms and kissed her again, using his shoulder to knock open the door to the next chamber, carrying her to the bed and setting her upon it.

He meant to follow her down, but the vision she made arrested him: hair tousled, slipping from its pins; sober dark skirts knocked over her knees to reveal embroidered stockings and slim legs. As he gazed upon them, they opened in a wanton invitation that made his entire body tighten to steel.

He exhaled. Here on this bed he had lain through so many open-eyed nights, forbidding himself thoughts of her. And here she now lay, like a sultry vision designed to lure saints from their pedestals.

“You are beautiful,” he said slowly. What an insufficient word.

The smile that curved her mouth raised the hairs on his nape. When she lifted a hand to him, she might have been beckoning an army, gesturing for the destruction of cities and the embarkation of war ships, or the lowering of the moon: such was the uncanny, hot power she radiated.

“Come,” she said, her gray eyes slumberous.

Hesitantly, almost fearing himself—for this was no gentle desire that roared in him—he sat on the bed. But she was not content for patience: seizing his elbow, she pulled him down atop her. Reclaiming his mouth, she wrapped her leg around his and anchored him to her.

Her confidence silenced his hesitation. He drove his hands through her hair, plundering what she offered—nay,
what she insisted that he take. Beneath him she was sinuous, wild and hot as a flame as she arched against him, her hips goading him on. In her boldness now she took him back to the time when neither of them had known caution—for he had not seduced her, six years ago, but they had seduced each other. Together, equally, they had burned.

Nora opened her mouth on Adrian’s throat, tasting the salt of his skin, digging her nails into his flesh. Some wild hunger drove her, wanting a brutal satisfaction. The pomander—it had been that pomander which shattered her . . . Oh, to see it again, which she had given so long ago, and guessed destroyed. To see this place, and him within it, finally, when those many years ago, all she’d had of him were stolen hours in the wood . . .

Until she had seen him here, now, it had not struck home to her what he risked by marrying her. And yet, he had risked this enchanted place once before, too—had risked his right to it, and his welcome in it, when he had defied his family to come for her.

The risk had profited him nothing. Yet he had taken it once again when he’d wed her.

She kissed him fiercely, willing her tongue and lips to communicate what words could not. This desperation felt almost panicked. How had she not seen him more clearly? What god would not punish a woman for failing to see this man’s worth? She felt seized by the strange conviction that somewhere, in some sibyl’s cave on a distant
shore, an hourglass with their names was trickling its last grains of sand.

She was grateful when he growled and drove his hands through her hair, grateful for the slight pain of his grip and the aggression of his mouth; it bespoke a mood to match her own. The unyielding press of his body, the unhesitant strength with which he directed her head to a more opportune angle, took her away from herself, breaking the reign of mind over flesh. Her bodily need ruled her now; her troubled thoughts fell away.

She clasped him to her, nipping his throat, the flavor of his warm skin inspiring an animal strategy. Pushing his hand away, she gripped him by the shoulders and forced him ungently beneath her. Then, shifting herself atop his body, she placed her feet on his and flexed her toes to lift herself higher. Shamelessly she rubbed against him, against the thick, hot length of his cock, but it was not enough. Twining her calf around his thigh, hooking her arms around his neck, she laid herself along him and clung like a vine. Vines were soft and easily cut, but when they set deep roots and wrapped tightly enough, they could topple even the tallest stone walls.

I am not letting you go
.

He placed his leg between hers and lifted her with his thigh, but the bulk of her skirts concealed the feel of his shifting muscle. These clothes seemed suddenly to be unbearable impediments, requiring patience where none remained. Even his hand gripping her clothed waist seemed an insult to the skin beneath, which wanted only his nakedness against hers.

When she clawed at the fastenings of his shirt, he caught her hand in a hard grip and went still. She met his eyes, growing aware all at once of the rasp of her own breath, ragged as an animal’s. Her face turned hot. But he looked arrested, not appalled; a slow smile took his mouth as his green eyes traced over her face. “Such hurry,” he murmured.

His voice was more beautiful to her than music, low and husky, rich with promises. What a picture he made beneath her, his silver hair mussed from her hands, his white shirt disarranged, half-open at his tanned throat. “Indulge me,” she said, and the throaty tenor of her words intrigued her and made her feel hotter. “Indulge me,” she said again, and turned her head to flick her tongue over his wrist where he gripped her.

He made a sound like a choked gasp. “Thoroughly, Lady Rivenham.”

But despite his promise, the kiss he gave her when he pulled her head down was slow and deep, a leisurely address that reached into her like the whisper of music. His fingertips trailed down the profile of her body, then slid up beneath her skirts, coaxing each part of her, each bone and joint and muscle and span of skin, as though they were new to any touch, objects of enchantment, to be wooed into waking.

His wooing lulled her. He divested her of skirts so gracefully that the movement of her hips beneath his direction felt like part of their dance. When he turned her in his arms, rolling her beneath him again, she felt as though she moved through water, deliciously weighted,
surrounded everywhere by his touch, by his smell, his warmth and his eyes. He helped her to bare his chest, and the feel of it beneath her mouth as she rained kisses along his flat belly made her ache.

She knocked aside his hand when he would have helped to remove his breeches. She wanted to reveal him herself. His hips were slim, his thighs thick with muscle. Nature had designed him in long, muscular lines. She smoothed her hands up the sinewy breadth of his calves, using her nails on his thighs, and then grasped his cock, gratified by the oath she heard him bite out.

She could wait no longer, and it came to her how she might satisfy herself.

She crawled up over him and settled astride his thighs. Leaning forward to kiss him, she felt his smile as she directed his cock, and then his sigh as she lowered herself slowly onto him.

He was large, and despite her desire, it took care to accept him fully. Once penetrated, anchored to the hilt by his thick flesh, she leaned forward to kiss him. His eyelashes fluttered against hers; he took her bare hip in a steady, callous grip and urged her to rock against him, making a low noise as she began to move.

She sighed into his mouth. These noises they made were songs upon songs, music created between them. With her mouth she traced his jaw, then shaped the solid breadth of his shoulder with her lips, gasping again when he lifted his hips to thrust more forcefully.

Nothing had ever felt so right to her as this moment. The designs of his mouth along her throat amazed her;
they were full of love. Somehow he saw no flaw in anything he had done for her, and God save them both, but she finally understood why: when he spoke of
home
, he included her within it.

The pleasure built in her in fleeting sensations as he worked in and out of her. His eyes locked onto hers, and her heart swelled; she laid her hand along his cheek, riveted by this shared gaze, feeling now finally as though she saw the full truth of him, all he had done for her, the whys and wherefores of it. From now forward, anger could never again be her shield against him. She had never stopped loving him. Only now she loved him with her eyes open to all the impossibilities: to how easily and brutally she might lose him; to how neatly fate and politics had designed their romance to become, soon enough, a tragedy.

Love was no solution here. It only brought her dilemmas into a more terrible focus. But in this bed there were no dilemmas. There was only him, and she could have him now—and afterward, again—and after that, again.

Her climax came all at once: a greedy, almost painful seizing, violent, euphoric. As it released her, she clutched his shoulders and put her head into his throat. His hands ran over her back and then tightened; he rolled her over beneath him, making three deep, hard strokes before he, too, shuddered and finished.

When she slipped from bed afterward to dress, Adrian checked the impulse to restrain her. He watched her busy herself in the retrieval of clothing; mustered some sane
reply when she excused herself to use the bath the servants had arranged. The door shut behind her and he lay still, trying to reason with himself.