Gareth: Lord of Rakes (19 page)

“Kiss me, Lissy. I want to come against your tummy.”

“This is not talking, Gareth.”

He bunched her nightgown up above her waist. “Hmm. Shall I regale you with a list of names for what I’d rather be doing? Swive, roger, blow the grounsils, at clicket…”

She kissed him to shut him up, and because talking was indeed difficult.

He rocked his hips slowly, and Felicity grew damp as he moved against her. He kissed her more carnally, sealing her mouth with his own, breathing into her and through her. She startled when he dipped his erection against her slick folds, wondering if he was going to attempt penetration. But he was content to rub himself along her flesh until he, too, was slick with her desire. Then he changed the angle so he was once again sliding snugly against her belly.

He held her tightly, and Felicity reveled in his closeness. She wrapped her arms around him and anchored herself under him as he began to thrust against her more rapidly.

“That’s it,” Gareth whispered, sliding his hands down to cup her buttocks. “Hold me tight, love. Don’t let me go.”

The one thing she was bound to do—eventually.

He increased his pace, and Felicity wrapped her arms and legs around him, folding herself tightly to him. When a quiet groan escaped him, she fastened her mouth around his nipple and suckled gently, until he came in a rush of warmth between their bodies.

His thrusts subsided, and yet Felicity held him to her, the urge to weep and the urge to destroy something rioting through her. Gareth kissed her, probably to prevent either of those impulses from finding their way into words. When Felicity let her limbs go slack, he left the bed and retrieved a damp towel from the bowl and pitcher by the fireplace for a moment.

Gareth tended to himself first, while Felicity watched him from the bed. When he’d finished with himself, he rinsed and wrung out the towel, dampened it again, then hung it on the fireplace screen to warm.

He came over to the bed and sat down on the edge to use the towel on her belly.

And still he said nothing.

At least he made no offers to pleasure her, no threats of retribution. He swabbed his seed from her belly, and then sat back and regarded her without covering her up.

“Felicity, I know I said we’d talk, and if it’s any comfort to you, I wish…”

By the light of the fire, he looked weary and haggard, not sated. If she demanded it of him, he’d stay, and he’d listen.

He would not talk.

Without speaking a word, Felicity held out her arms to him, and Gareth brought his body down to rest against hers. She flipped the covers up over them both and offered him in her embrace a silent comfort even he was unable to refuse.

Gareth stole down the dark hallway to his bedroom about an hour before dawn. He sat on the enormous bed for a long time, listening to rain patter against the windows. If the rain kept up like this, there would be no attempting a return to Town today. One washed-out bridge, one strained tendon on a coach horse, and they would be stranded on the road, prey to whatever harm pursued them.

Because the traveling coach had been followed out here. The spies Gareth had set had reported after dinner, and even now, even in this downpour, somebody might be watching his house.

His world had become complicated. Concern for Felicity’s safety consumed him every bit as much as lust for her body. For a man who valued his own comfort highly, he’d arrived to a miserable state of affairs.

He would never forget the way she’d clung to him in bed only hours earlier, pushing him into mindless ecstasy with an instinctive use of her mouth—a trick he’d not shown her, because it worked especially well with him.

Felicity was lovely, and worse than that, she was becoming dear. The longer he dealt with her, the angrier he became over his role in her life, over the dirty trick Callista had played on her.

And for what? Was Callista striking a posthumous blow at the family that had turned her out? It wasn’t Felicity’s fault Callista had been indiscreet with a heartless cad. And it didn’t feel to Gareth as true to Callista’s nature to exact a vengeance so cruel on an innocent party.

Andrew had made the same observation: this scheme did not comport with Callista’s nature. Callista would have been the last person to victimize another woman, much less a woman left without male relatives to intervene on her behalf.

It didn’t make sense, and not for the first time, Gareth drifted off to sleep with the conviction he was missing a piece of the puzzle, a set of facts that would put the whole situation in a more understandable perspective.

***

When Gareth rose a few hours later, the sense of niggling frustration still haunted him, but for all that, he also looked forward to the day. He made his way downstairs to break his fast, hoping to catch Felicity at the table.

To his pleasure, she was there, and there alone. She looked up and smiled when he joined her. The room being otherwise empty, he responded by kissing her cheek lingeringly—lavender was a lovely scent on a damp morning—and taking a seat beside her.

“Good morning, my lord,” she said, pouring him a cup of tea.

“So it’s to be like that?” Gareth replied, serving himself eggs, bacon, toast, and an orange.

“Like what?” Felicity asked, and Gareth realized he liked her this way. Tentative, off-balance, blushing, and… Fetching as hell.

“You’re milording me again, Felicity. Am I such a stranger to you?” he asked, accepting the tea from her.

“You are less of a stranger than ever.” Her delicate little pink and white Sevres teacup apparently fascinated her, perhaps because the pink nearly matched her blush.

“But you are still shy.” Which pleased him.

“You have been patient with me,” she said, topping up her tea, “which I appreciate, and yet I find myself disconcerted by the things we do. You blithely sit down to tea, prepared to discuss the weather or Astrid’s bonnet. I am quite in awe of your sangfroid, Gareth. Disconcerted, but in awe. Are you really so indifferent as you seem?”

She was not angry—he wondered what could anger her—but Gareth detected genuine bewilderment in her tone, and this topic, this business of her consternation, apparently needed addressing—again. She’d brought it up last night, and he’d… dodged. Ducked like a boy who knows he’s earned a proper caning, and takes the long way home to delay it.

“You won’t give this up, will you?” he asked, tucking into a steaming serving of omelet.

“I have
no
one
else whom I may ask, Gareth. And I am quite… troubled by what has transpired between us. These intimacies seem to be no longer strictly in aid of my education, and yet I allow them.”

She pushed a bite of eggs around on her plate, and Gareth realized she’d waited here in the breakfast parlor for him. Waited for him to come and make sense of the notion that he’d not merely had his pleasure of her twice without seeing to her, but he’d stayed in her bed, wrapped around her like a presuming house cat.

While she’d cuddled up the livelong night like an exhausted kitten.

He put his fork down, as the fluffy, delicately spiced eggs turned to so much ashes in his mouth. “You look so damnably pretty at my breakfast table.”

The smile that had taken him so off guard weeks ago reappeared, a ray of feminine benevolence on a gloomy morning.

“Your compliments might be easier to spot, Gareth, if you didn’t scowl so thunderously when you doled them out.”

She looked worse than pretty, she looked
appropriate
across his breakfast table. As he watched her enjoy her tea, it hit him that he’d become the sort of man to take advantage of a guest under his own roof, while his family slept in the very next wing.

He’d
never
spent the night sleeping in a lover’s bed.

Never introduced his casual amours to his mother, and they were
all
casual amours.

He’d never brought a woman he was intimate with to his town house, much less to his favorite country estate.

“More tea, Gareth?”

“Please.”

The picture of her pouring the tea for him, all prim and tidy with a hint of color on her neck where his beard had abraded her skin, would remain with him for the rest of his life.

He had lost his heart to a virgin spinster.

“I do like you, you know.”

She added cream and sugar to his cup and passed him his drink. He more than liked her, and she more than liked him, and it was up to him to avert the disaster looming as a result.

“I like you too, sir. Will the roads dry out enough for us to get back to Town today?”

Did she have to sound so hopeful?

“Very likely, so you needn’t worry that I’ll trouble your slumbers again. That wasn’t well done of me, and you have my apologies.”

She didn’t want his apologies. He could see that in the way her brows drew down. She wanted an
explanation
, which would not be forthcoming, because he bloody didn’t have one.

“I didn’t mind, Gareth. I just… it confuses me. What we do confuses me. We have the terms of the bequest to meet, which I understand, but then there’s this other…”

What she
felt
confused her, and that was his fault, and his responsibility to rectify, though it would make kicking puppies seem endearing by comparison.

“I know you are troubled, and no, I am not completely unaffected, but you must trust me you will find your balance with this. These little pleasures we indulge in are normal, adult behavior when the bodily passions are involved.”

“Passions?” she whispered, clearly not liking that at all. “You are saying I am wanton?”

Kicking puppies
and
kittens, then.

“You are passionate,” Gareth said, and that much was the truth, “but I don’t refer to merely physical passion. You are a woman of… substantial heart. You are not designed in your nature to be frivolous with your affections. Would you like more toast?”

“No, thank you. Are you frivolous with your affections then?”

The question challenged his logic, because the idea that Gareth could be frivolous about anything was ludicrous.

“I am designed to bring a certain detachment to all that I do.” Though last night, that detachment had been sadly absent.

As it had been earlier in the day, as it had been since he’d laid eyes on her.

She studied him from behind her teacup, topaz eyes taking in his expression, then flicking down to the substantial portion of food grown cold on his plate. “You will excuse me, please. If we’re to return to Town, I’d best be letting Astrid know.”

He bowed as she left the room, and then made himself sit back down and stare at something—racing results, the society pages, he could not have said what—for another five minutes before removing himself to the library.

The problem was not that he’d become a man who would accost a guest under his own roof, when his family slept in the very next wing, but rather, that he’d made Felicity into a woman complicit in such behavior.

And yet, Gareth had treated her to that display of obnoxious pontification over tea not only because her reputation was jeopardized by proximity to him, but also because proximity to her could well be the undoing of him, too.

***

In a country where it could rain for days, the heavens obliged for only an afternoon and a night, and thus Felicity found herself beside Gareth in his traveling coach, bouncing and swaying back toward Town, and the inevitable end of her dealings with him.

The more intimate she became with him, the more tightly dread twined around her heart. She would miss him, and as for this detachment he brayed about so insistently, she was going to learn detachment herself at the cost of a broken heart.

Gareth shifted beside her, pushing spectacles up his patrician nose.

“You have been staring at Mr. Brenner’s report for the past half hour. What on earth are you thinking about?”

“I was thinking about Riverton,” he said, taking his glasses off and folding them up.

“I do not know Viscount Riverton well, but I cannot like him, Gareth. He and Father were companions of some sort for a time, though if I knew he was coming around, I made it a point to stay in my room.”

“I didn’t know he was acquainted with your family,” Gareth replied, tucking his glasses away. “How well did your father know him, and do you think he recognized you when our paths crossed on that terrace?”

Felicity glanced out at the damp, drab countryside. Now, the perishing man was happy to talk.

“I do not think he recognized me. Ten years ago, I was a good deal shorter, not putting my hair up, and generally found with my nose in a book. I avoided Riverton if possible, so he might have caught a glimpse of me, but we never spoke.”

“And yet, your father knew him?”

So it was to be an interrogation, and regarding an uncomfortable topic.

“For a short while they were great friends, hail-fellows-well-met, out of an evening in each other’s company most nights. Then less, and then, for some time before Father died, they no longer associated. At least, Riverton no longer came to our house.”

Gareth did not take her hand, and Felicity wished he would. She took her gloves off whenever they were private in a coach in hopes he might.

“Why didn’t you like him?”

Why
don’t you take my hand?

“He never touched me, never said anything directly to me. But when he looked at me a certain way, I felt… unclean. He never gave me that look when Father could see it.” She was quiet for a moment while she found Gareth’s hand with her own. “I could not have borne having to comport myself with Riverton as I have with you. Would not.”

This provoked a frown, but in the vast lexicon of Heathgate’s frowns, it was a thoughtful expression rather than disapproving.

“I have wondered what Callista was about, leaving you with him for an alternative.”

“She was probably forcing me into your company,” Felicity replied. “By comparison, anybody would seem more acceptable than Riverton. My father once alluded to the idea it was Riverton’s lascivious tendencies that had undermined their association. He said the man would keep company with any species if there was sufficient money and drink involved, though I wasn’t supposed to overhear that.”

Gareth brought her knuckles to his lips. “You weren’t. Riverton once screwed a pony on a bet, and there were many witnesses.”

Unease congealed into nauseated dread. “You are not serious.”

“I most certainly am. Reliable witnesses reported that the mare did not leave the mews without knowing Riverton in the biblical sense.”

“That is… diabolically offensive.” Though that Gareth would share such a thing with her was a measure of how far they’d come with each other. “Why would a man do such a thing? And how could others watch?”

“You are so innocent, so good.” His tone carried both affection and despair. “I don’t know what motivates some men. If it’s any comfort, Riverton was barely received after that. Sometimes, boredom can become an enemy that demands excesses of vice and a banishment of decency. Bad company becomes no real company at all, and soon what began as an effort to find pleasure or drown sorrow becomes a cultivation of evil.”

He sounded so bleak, so weary of his own life. Felicity kept hold of his hand and wished she could climb into his lap.

“Why would Riverton have been received at all, Gareth? He abused an animal, he abused the dignity of his acquaintances, he debased what it means to be human—and this was for
sport
?”

She wanted to cry and wanted to destroy the part of Gareth that understood Riverton, even if he didn’t approve of him.

“It was neither for sport nor purely for money, though money changed hands. I can’t explain it, Felicity. Men, particularly inebriated men, do stupid things to prove themselves daring, reckless, virile… I found it disgusting, but some part of me was also shocked at the man’s audacity. What he did made others notice and remember him.”

“For God’s sake, Gareth, you notice offal in the street. I suppose I should be grateful I am not the unwilling successor to an unwilling pony.”

His gaze shifted, sweeping over her with imperial thoroughness. “I would not have let that happen. I will never let that happen.”

She was going to become a madam, a brothel owner, and her reputation would be at risk long after the day Gareth sold the wretched establishment to someone else. He could make all the decrees and speeches he wanted about safeguarding her well-being, but in less than a month—after he’d destroyed the last of her innocence—they’d once again be strangers.

Felicity snuggled against him and remained quiet.

***

Gareth stared at Brenner’s very thorough report on some damned situation or other, glad for the care the coachy had to take on this journey back into Town.