Barely a Lady (25 page)

She lifted a hand to stroke his dear face. He hadn’t shaved in six days, so he looked rough, especially with that cruel scar down his temple. She thought she could grow to love the look. “We can talk about it later,” she assured him. “I’m just glad you believe me now.”

“Of course I do. You’d never lie to me. I know that. After all these years, it’s what I’ve held on to.”

She held her breath.
All these years.
Should she press? Her body was telling her to ignore everything but his hands, where they rested on her waist, his lips, which had begun to trace her ear. A shower of chills was racing along her nerve endings and demanding attention.

“I’m glad,” she finally whispered, ashamed of her cowardice.

His life could depend on these returning memories. She should help him pry them loose. But if he remembered too soon, she would never have another chance to win him.

“Take me, Jack,” she begged, lifting her face to see the hunger in his sweet, sea-deep eyes. “Be my husband again.”

And, as if she had never known regret, she reached up to undo her dress and let it slide to her feet.

He didn’t bother with words. Lifting his hands to cup her face, he bent his open mouth over hers. She melted with the first taste of him, with the first invasion of his tongue, rasping against the sensitive roof of her mouth. She held on as he plundered well-remembered territory, and her mind, usually so careful, so protective, could focus on nothing but her need for him to hurry.

Hurry, I need you. Hurry, I can’t live another moment without your hands on me, with you inside me.

Want
me again. Please.

He noticed her tears but thought they were of joy. He sipped them away, dipping his tongue into that little hollow at the base of her throat and sending a cascade of chills through her. He bestowed his old smile on her, the one that closed them off from the world, that promised a union that would lift them beyond life. She helped him slip out of his shirt and trousers and then knelt, her heart caught in her throat as she untied his smalls and eased them away.

He waited hard and ready for her, jutting from that nest of dark curls and pearled with a drop of juice. She wept over the tip of him, because he was so lovely to her. So long remembered, deep in the darkest reaches of nightwhere no one could blame her for her yearning.

She touched him and was savagely glad at his gasp. She bent to taste him and heard him growl deep in his throat. She drew a breath, just to fill herself with the night-and-sea scent of him, and began to hum in the back of her throat.

“Oh, God, Liv, I do love you.”

She closed her eyes, trying so hard not to be stricken by those words. There might be no love left once he remembered. There might be recriminations and abandonment and, if she allowed it, the final death of her heart, that sore, sad organ that had survived so much only to be tossed at his feet yet again.

But kneeling there before him, where her choice should have been obvious, where she should have spurned him as he’d spurned her, if only for the ragged remnants of her self-respect, she knew she wouldn’t. She would take what she could now and hold her trust for those who deserved it.

“Livvie?”

She drew an unsteady breath. With slow, deliberate movements, she rose to meet him as the wife she’d once been. As the lover he’d once hungered for. And blinking back tears, she opened her arms to receive him.

Chapter 18

Y
ou’re still dressed,” he rasped, his eyes dark, his hands clenched at his side.

He had a point. He stood before her splendidly naked, his magnificent body just a bit leaner, more honed. More mature than the mostly formed lad she had so loved. This was a man’s body, but she still knew every inch of it: touched, tasted, and savored. She noted the new scars and thought that they only enhanced his formidable beauty. A beauty that had once belonged to her alone.

Another box to put away, right now before it could stop her. Mimi had no place in her bedroom.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked him.

His smile was pure deviltry. “That doesn’t look like a very good chemise.”

Her skin skittered before the heat in his eyes, swirls and eddies of excitement spilling through her. “It has seen better days.”

Beneath it, her nipples tightened. Her stomach clenched with anticipation. Her heart started to race. She bent to take the hem of her chemise in her hands and began to draw it up. Slowly enough that he growled with impatience, she raised it, revealing her knees, then the long line of her thighs, and then, with deliberately lazy movements, the first peek of that triangle of blond curls he had once worshiped.

He let her get no farther. With a strangled curse, he wrapped his hands around the embroidered neckline of her chemise and tore. The old lawn ripped as easily as paper, leaving her panting and ready before him, her only ornament the simple locket he had given her so many years ago.

She froze. Would he recognize it? Would he reach out and say,
Oh, look, Liv. It’s the locket I got you for our engagement. Is my picture still there? The lock of hair I gave you?

And if he did, what would she say?

He nuzzled her throat as if the locket wasn’t even there. “I suppose you expect me to carry you to bed,” he murmured with a dry smile. “Lazy creature.”

And she was laughing, his words bubbling in her like champagne. She climbed onto the bed and turned on her knees to receive him. She thought how brave she was, exposing herself to him this way, even her secret sex open and vulnerable. She saw his naked body and thought again how his new scars stood out to taunt her with the secrets he carried to her.

Slowly he slid a hand up from the ankle she’d tucked beneath her to her calf, to her knee, never once taking his gaze from hers, smiling like a voyager returning home. He slipped his finger beneath her garter, and her body shuddered with need. She knew then that if only for now, she belonged here in his cherished hands.

“Come here,” she begged, and he did. “Love me,” she pleaded, and he laughed down into her eyes, his face suddenly, belovedly familiar. He was young and happy and carefree again as he settled them both back on the bed, skin to skin, nose to nose, his scent filling her nostrils and melting her insides. She was wet for him. Her heart was skipping, her skin on fire. She felt the languor of desire seep through her and steal her will.

“Remember the time we made love on the moor?” he asked, dipping down to kiss her, a long, slow union of lips and tongues and teeth that incited more than memory.

“I remember the rash I got from the nettles,” she protested, cupping his face in her hands and tangling her fingers into his thick mahogany hair.

He allowed her to pull him down for another kiss. “You were sunburned in the most interesting places.”

She arched to receive his touch and groaned when she finally felt it. He cupped her breasts in his hands, the pads of his fingers abrading her sensitive skin and sparking lightning. She ached so deeply for him that she thought she would never find ease. She hungered like a mad thing, her body moving without her will to meet him. She quested with her own hands and tongue and lips to rediscover every inch of his beautiful body.

“This is new,” she murmured as she kissed a puckered scar on his shoulder. “And this.” She bent to the ragged line where they’d stitched his thigh that terrible night of Waterloo.

“This isn’t,” he assured her, nudging his magnificent cock against her. “Wherever else I’ve been, I’ve always wanted you.”

Again she fought the urge to pull away.
No words,
she wanted to beg.
Don’t ruin the only moments of pleasure I might have left with you.
Instead she focused on the feel of his hands on her, the rasp of his breathing.

It was as if he heard her. From that moment, he spoke only with his hands, with his tenderness and hunger and joy. He nuzzled and nipped and stroked every inch of her, even turning her at one point so he could drop kisses down the curve of her spine and playfully slap the hills of her bottom. He left love bites everywhere he passed, from her thighs to her throat to the tender skin on the inside of her elbows. He suckled her breasts as if she could restore his life.

He was inciting madness. No matter how wonderful his touch and attention, it wasn’t enough. She wanted him in her. She
needed
him in her, where she could hold the feel of him to her after he was gone.

She whimpered as he dipped his fingers into her. She heard the slip of her own juices on his fingers and thought she would go mad.

“Now, Jack,” she begged, twisting under the torture of his relentless touch.
“Now.”

He licked the rim of her ear and chuckled. “No,” he said. “Not yet. Not ’til you’re a puddle.”

“I’m a pool,” she pleaded, pulling at him. “An ocean.
Please
…”

He slipped his finger into her sheath and stroked until she thought she would simply fly apart. “All right, Liv,” he rasped against her ear. “Open for me, sweetheart. Let me see those lovely pink lips.”

She let her knees fall apart. She opened her eyes to see him smiling down at the sight of his fingers plunging deep between her netherlips, his eyes almost black with arousal. “Ah, yes,” he murmured, still stroking, still driving her wild. “This is what I’ve missed.”

She gasped and bucked against his hand. “Not me?” she was barely able to demand.

She was so close now, the pleasure spiraling to explosion. She was grasping at him, her body arched in an impossible bow. She pleaded, she whimpered. She wept. And then, bending to kiss her, slipping his tongue into her mouth, he raised himself over her and, without another word, plunged deep.

Crying out, she came off the bed. It hurt. He was too full to fit. It was unbearably sweet. He pulled back and drove home again, his body slick with sweat, his mouth fused to hers, his eyes open to her, as they had always been when they met this way. Urging her on, daring her to be more than she thought she could be.

And she took him, all of him, squirming to fit better, wrapping her hands around his buttocks to pull him deeper. She lifted as he cupped her to him, as he drove into her and drove into her until she couldn’t think, couldn’t see, couldn’t imagine anything but this pounding, coursing pleasure. Until, yes, there,
yes
, the hard invasion of him sparked the conflagration, fanned it, fueled it into a wild, keening disintegration, and she wept and pleaded and laughed. Until she milked him to his own climax and he shuddered with a harsh growl, the sound of her name like a benediction to his lips.

Finally, spent and sweat-sheened, they fell into exhausted silence, tangled around each other like old vines, panting and laughing and weeping. And then, as if afraid of what would happen if they let go of each other, they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

All that night and well into the next morning, they exhausted each other, rediscovering old pleasures, familiar patterns, cherished harmonies. Olivia slept a while tucked beneath Jack’s shoulder in the place she’d always thought would protect her from the world. Twice he woke her during the night to make love, once by the expediency of simply slipping into her while she slept.

She woke with a smile, already moving, her hands instinctively seeking the sleek lines of his arms, his shoulder, his back, her body exploding so quickly she could have dreamed it.

Except she no longer had dreams like this. When she needed to, when tension rose too high and loneliness wore too hard, she took care of her own release, curled into her lonely bed without so much as a word to soothe her. But since she’d seen Jack, her body had remembered how to want a man’s touch. After this night, she knew it would remember too well.

Eventually they had breakfast. Exhausted, replete, they finally remembered that there were other hungers that needed to be satisfied. As if she’d heard them trying to gather the energy to descend the stairs, Mrs. Willett knocked on the door, holding a tray loaded with eggs and rolls and gammon.

Jack answered the door in nothing but his inexpressibles, which made Mrs. Willett giggle. She assured Olivia that she wouldn’t have let such a strapping man go to waste either, which made Olivia blush furiously and Jack chuckle.

“We should get up,” Jack said as he licked strawberry jam from her breast a while later. “Figure out what we should do before we’re overrun with well-meaning friends.”

Olivia closed her eyes and hummed. “I thought at least Kit would be here.”

Jack chuckled against her belly. “A man of discretion.”

She laughed back, because she couldn’t seem to stop. “He’ll be here. If nothing else, he’d never desert Grace. She seems to have secured the devotion of every man who served under her father.”

Jack laid his head on her stomach and continued nibbling on his scone. “From the little time I’ve spent in her company, I imagine she’s quite a formidable woman.”

Olivia blinked. “Grace? Formidable?”

“Like water against rock. She doesn’t batter against opposition. I imagine she just quietly wears it away. Do you know where she goes from here? If she doesn’t want to stay with the duchess, maybe she’d like to come with us.”

Olivia frowned a bit, impressed by Jack’s perception. “She said something about a home she hadn’t seen in too long. I imagine that after things settle, she’ll move on.”

“Ah, too bad. I think she might have made an excellent governess for our children.” He was grinning. “Just think of what she could teach them. Riding, shooting, foraging.”

Olivia stared at him to see that he was only half joking. He was talking about a future: a home, children, a family. There was a curious longing in his eyes, and his smile carried a hint of wistfulness that curled right around Olivia’s heart.

“I wish we already had a child, Liv,” he said, picking up her hand. “I think I’ve been wishing I could see you big with my babe, to lay my head against your belly and tell him what a beautiful mother he has.”

He wanted her to assure him that it was possible. That she wanted it as much as he. What she wanted clogged up in her throat and choked her.

Olivia’s idyll lasted only three days, but they were days filled with laughter and passion and companionship. They were days that seduced her as certainly as a rake with an eye for a virgin.

She knew better. She had spent days like this once before, and it had come to naught. But Jack was so different this time. Quieter, more considered, more thoughtful.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t been considerate before. But his acts had always seemed to have been born of whim rather than deliberation. A flower picked from a field they passed through, a kitten caught in a barn loft. Kisses when he saw her and roses when he left. But in between, she’d always had a sneaking suspicion that the memory of her had disappeared beyond the matter of the moment.

Much later, when she had regained the presence of mind to be able to reflect on Jack’s quick defection, she’d come to believe that he had abandoned her as recklessly as he’d loved her, as he’d done everything in his life. Impulsively, all of his emotions engaged and none of his intellect.

Maybe now it would be different. Maybe now when she left him, she would no longer simply disappear from his mind to be recovered later, like a knapsack. Maybe this time when he finally retrieved his past, he would take the time to turn those terrible days over in his mind and realize how wrong he’d been.

More and more, she toyed with the idea of permanence. Of trust. More than once, she caught herself fingering her locket and thinking that it might be time to tell Jack everything.

But hadn’t she made that wish too often already? It was like a litany in her head:
Trust him. He won’t leave. He won’t hurt you.

The cautious side of her fought the urge to believe. She fought against anticipation and expectation. She fought against expecting miracles. Mostly she fought against hope.

But hope, she found, was an insidious foe.

When the end came, it came fast. Lady Kate had been home all of twenty-four hours, still settling her retinue into the house. Upon arrival, she’d taken one look at Olivia and broken into whoops of laughter. Then she’d hugged her as if she’d produced flowers out of the air. She’d said nothing about the fact that Olivia was still sleeping in the same room with Jack. She didn’t have to. Bea just patted Olivia on the cheek and whispered, “Orange blossoms.”

Olivia didn’t know what to do but continue as she had been. She helped Lady Kate’s household, and Jack helped Harper and Finney, their first order of business being to secure the property against surprises. Their second order of business was to send Thrasher to listen on the wind for rumors and surprises. The fact that he came up empty-handed eased no one’s nerves. In the meantime, sequestered away from visitors, Jack spent his time sending missives to anyone he knew in hopes of getting an appointment at Whitehall.