Never Resist a Rake (14 page)

When young people find someone whose oddities seem to match with theirs, when their souls' wrinkles fit together with the rightness of fine joinery, they click like magnets and call it true love. It may well be only a case of not enough wrinkle cream. I recommend a thorough dousing with Olympian Dew.

—Phillippa, the Dowager Marchioness of Somerset

John couldn't get enough of her. No matter how long he kissed this girl, it wouldn't be enough. He needed Rebecca like he needed his next breath.

He drew the air from her lungs and replaced it with his own. He was inside her in a way, he a part of her and she a part of him. Their mouths might be the point of contact, but the connection went far deeper.

Lord, she was sweet. She suckled his tongue and shyly offered her own. He'd take it. He'd take all of her. He was someone else when he was with Rebecca, someone he didn't mind being so very badly. He kissed down the satiny column of her neck. Her hitched breaths went straight to his groin.

He'd never been this hard in his life.

John kissed his way under the blankets until he met the turned edge of her bodice. Frustration made him groan. Muslin shouldn't separate them. Buttons? Surely she had some buttons somewhere.

“John?” Her voice sounded distant but tight, as though she were thinking his name at him with clenched teeth.

Not
yet. Don't stop this yet.
He unhooked her top three buttons with his teeth and nuzzled between her breasts, drunk on her scent—a faint whiff of violets—desperate to draw out this loving exploration, desperate to sink into her sweetness and find release.

Please
let
it
go
on.

His lips met a narrow strip of lace on her chemise and he raised up, surprised. “I thought you didn't wear lace.”

“Only a little,” she admitted.

“Then I'll always think of you in only a little lace.” He dove back under the blanket and untied the satin bow holding the chemise drawstring neckline. The next obstacle was her stays. He bumped his jaw on the wooden busk that ran down her breastbone and separated her sweet mounds.

Hooks
this
time
. Buttons, ribbons, and hooks. Why couldn't women settle on one method of fastening their wardrobes? Didn't they realize when a man was in these dire straits, he was easily confused?

He started to work the hooks and was surprised when Rebecca's hands beat him to them.

“Angel woman,” he whispered, raising to meet her gaze.

“Hardly. I've never been more wicked.” She kissed him, a desperate sort of kiss, a kiss that pleaded for more and less at the same time. Rebecca was clearly torn.

She was a quintessential good girl. Obedient to her parents. Faithful to her friends. Needing the shield of her purity because she had little else of value in the world.

He didn't have any business meddling with her.

“If there is wickedness done this night, let it be on my head,” he said and then kissed the sweet hollow at the base of her throat. “I want to love you, Rebecca. I want to give to you, not take. You have nothing to fear from me.”

He bared one of her breasts and the nipple hardened, whether from his touch or the chill, he couldn't be sure. He thrummed it with the pad of his thumb, and she made a needy little noise in the back of her throat. He lowered his head and took her nipple between his lips.

She moaned. She moved in slow undulations. She made him feel like a minor deity.

“My mother always tells me too much knowledge is a bad thing, but there's no safety in ignorance,” Rebecca gasped as she arched herself into his mouth. “What if I…I don't know anything about this?”

“But I do.” He devoured her for a moment, then pulled back when her little moans made his balls tighten in response to her need. “You were a virgin when you set foot on this roof. I swear by…by the stars that you'll still be one when you leave.”

“Oh, John.” She pushed back the shock of his hair that had fallen forward over his forehead. “The way I'm feeling now, I never want to leave.”

“Just keep feeling that.” He struggled to hold her gaze and lost the battle. His eyes wandered down to the swell of her breasts. He hoped the hunger on his face didn't scare her. Her nipples drew tight under his gaze.

Her palms smoothed over his head and around his neck. He covered one of her hands with his, their fingers twining. Then he cupped her cheek, tracing her bottom lip with his thumb.

“Trust me, Rebecca.” He bent and claimed her mouth.

She answered his kiss with more assurance this time. He covered her lips with his for a moment; then he slanted his mouth across hers, tasting her, teasing her lips open. He tongued her while his hand tormented her breasts.

She arched her back, pressing herself into his hand. Then his mouth was at her breasts, suckling her. He nipped her lightly, and she cried out in aching joy.

“What are you doing to me?” she whispered. “I've never…is it supposed to…throb like this?”

“I can make it better. Will you let me?”

“Yes, please, oh yes,” she chanted.

John needed no further prompting. Rebecca closed her eyes as he slid his hand down her body, smoothing over her flat abdomen. He brushed by her crotch and bunched up her gown.

“Spread your legs.”

It was a measure of her trust in him that she did. He found the top of her pantalets and plunged his hand in to cup her sex, holding her while she trembled.

“It will be all right. I promise.” He kissed her temple, her closed eyes, and then her lips. Her tremble stilled. While his tongue made love to her mouth, his fingers slid along her cleft. She was already wet and slick. His fingertip circled her most sensitive spot, which had risen, all swollen, to be teased and petted.

He moved slowly, not in a heated rush, so he could draw out her torment. While he stroked her, he kissed his way down her throat, pausing to suck at the point of her pulse. She was so sweet, he could savor the thin skin of her neck for hours, but he moved on, past her thin clavicle to the soft mounds of her breasts. He drew circles on them with his lips. He feathered his warm breath across them. By the time he finally took her tight little bud in his mouth again, she was writhing beneath him.

He sucked. He set his teeth around her taut nipples and bit down just enough to make her whimper. Her fingers twined in his hair, kneading his scalp.

“What should I…what do you want…me to do?” Rebecca asked raggedly.

He came up for air, surfacing like a pearl diver, dragging in a sweet lungful of her arousal. His hand between her legs continued to drive her forward.

“I don't want you to do anything,” John said as he eased down and nuzzled her navel through the layers of her gown and undergarments. He imagined for a moment how glorious it would be to have her under him without a stitch, skin on skin. He shoved away that wish for another time. If there was a merciful God in the heavens, there would be another time. “For now, I just want you to be. Lie still and let me.”

She raised her arms above her head in a gesture of surrender, one forearm draped across her eyes. It was her artless way of shielding herself from him. Later, he didn't intend to let her hide, but this time, it might be easier for her to let go if she thought she could keep her response from immediate view. With a smile, he laid his head between her breasts.

Her heart pounded beneath his ear. His fingers left her sensitive spot to stroke the tender skin of her inner thigh, to brush by the curling hairs and her hidden folds. She made a noise of frustration, and he returned to the glistening entrance to her deepest secrets and her tender nub, erect and quivering.

He intended to serve her and serve her well—to reveal her to herself in ways she'd not yet discovered.

It was time. He dove farther under the covers.

* * *

Rebecca clenched her teeth and fisted the blankets. She wanted to touch John, to thread her fingers through his hair, but feared if she lost control and grasped his ears, as she had the first time she kissed him, she might twist them off.

She was trying to lie still as he'd asked, but he was making it so difficult. She wanted to move. The short curling hairs between her legs swayed in the hot breeze of his breath. His fingers had driven her to aching fury, and now she supposed he thought this was a respite.

Then another sensation tickled along her thigh. His tongue. Warm. Wet. Just a little rough. He teased the crease of skin at the apex of her leg.

What
on
earth?
She couldn't imagine what might happen next.

He took one of her throbbing folds between his lips.

If she'd had a hundred guesses, she wouldn't have guessed that. But the sensations he awakened guaranteed she wouldn't be able to think clearly enough to guess in any case.

Then the tip of his tongue slid into her cleft, slippery and slickery, moving in slow, deliberate strokes. He circled that spot from which torment and pleasure seemed to flow in equal measure.

Her breath caught. She forced herself to inhale.

He moved his body between her legs. Both his hands cupped her bum, and he lifted her to his mouth. She didn't resist.

It was as if her body didn't belong to her any longer. It was totally his.

His lips closed over that special spot, and he suckled her, ever so gently.

Ache. Throb. Want.

Rebecca felt hollow as a gourd. Longing stretched her out on its rack.

His tongue probed into her, a soft, wet invasion.

Could
this
be
what
“it” is?

No. John promised. She would still be a virgin when the night was done. But if “it” was more pleasurable than this, she wondered how women withheld themselves from it at all.

She was wound tight as a ball of yarn. Then John pressed his teeth against her spot and suddenly Rebecca unraveled.

Deep inside her, an uncoiling overtook her. Her body bucked in tandem with the contractions over which she had no control.

“Stop. Oh, stop,” she pleaded.

John showed her no mercy, driving her to a higher peak. She was dizzy and disoriented, but her insides continued to pump. Joy flooded her veins. Her limbs were not her own. She felt lighter, as if she might rise from the warm blankets and float up to the stars.

When it finally subsided, she lifted the blankets and looked down along her body to where his dark head lay between her legs. Was she imagining it? No, the little bit of her exposed skin actually glowed a little. Then the radiance faded and her heart rate began to subside.

But the flush of pleasure remained. She drew in deep breaths, reveling in the brisk November night and John's sharp, masculine tang.

John moved up to lie beside her, slipping an arm under her to pillow her head. He draped the other over her, splaying his fingers possessively over her belly.

“Did the stars fall?” he asked.

“What stars? Oh, I don't know.” She'd forgotten all about the Leonid meteor shower. “That was…extraordinary.” She turned her head to look at him. “You know a great deal about women.”

“I'd rather know a great deal about you.”

“I think you already do.” A flash of light caught the tail of her eye, and she looked back up at the heavens. “Oh, look. It's starting.”

John snuggled her close, and together they watched the Leonids streak across the sky. For a moment, Rebecca thought she almost heard them singing.

One's family is like fire—exceedingly important, but one never knows if they're going to warm one's hands with a cheery blaze or burn the house down around one's ears.

—Phillippa, the Dowager Marchioness of Somerset

Her head nestled on John's warm shoulder, Rebecca watched the meteor shower with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she was so limp and suffused with pleasure that it was difficult to fret about anything. Still, she kept expecting him to say something. Didn't a gentleman follow such ardent lovemaking with a declaration of some sort?

Freddie would say so. Of course, the sun would rise in the west before Rebecca told Freddie about this night's deeds.

Instead of waxing poetic about his undying adoration for her, John gave the stars the same undivided attention he'd lavished on her a few moments ago.

“I suppose I ought to feel shy in front of you after what you did to me,” she finally said to fill up the silence.

“For you, not to you,” he corrected. “Oh, look! That's a good one.”

A long tail of light bisected the dark sky.

“Aren't we…supposed to do something else now?” she asked.

He looked at her then and hugged her close. “In a perfect world, yes. What we've done together is just the beginning, but I promised you'd retain your purity, so be grateful there's a light show this spectacular to distract me from carrying on.”

This raised more questions than answers. Rebecca suspected she ought to be affronted that anything could turn his attention from her, but all she could feel was bone-deep contentment. She was satisfied to let the world spin beneath her and the stars to fall above without the need to do a blessed thing.

She was untouchable by the world's troubles. Everything would be all right. John was an honorable man at heart. She was certain of it.

In the times between meteors, they kissed and whispered small endearments to each other. Rebecca told him things, things she'd never admit to another soul about her disappointment over what her father's gambling had done to the family. She voiced her fears for her mother's health, something she'd resisted for months, as if not speaking of it would somehow make Lady Kearsey's cough better and cause her blood-spattered handkerchiefs to disappear. Rebecca felt so very hopeless about it sometimes.

Freddie would tell her not to feel that way, as if one could change how one felt as easily as one changed bonnets. John listened without reproof and without trying to minimize her concerns. It was a relief just to let the words flow without needing to check them because the topics weren't the “done thing.” Then when the eastern sky began to lighten from ebony to pale slate, John kissed her once more and rose from their warm bower.

“We need to get you tucked into your own bed or dawn will catch us here.”

“We don't want that. We don't want it quite a lot,” she said. It wouldn't matter a jot that she was still a virgin if anyone stumbled upon them in their rooftop nest. Rebecca scrambled from the blankets quickly. She turned her back to him, retied the ribbon that held her chemise closed, and re-hooked the top of her stays. Somehow in all their entanglements, she'd managed to stay fully clothed, the scheme she and Freddie had hit upon to avoid “ruin.” But only just.

A determined lover didn't let little things like muslin and lace get in his way.

A
lover. I have a lover
. It was the last thing she'd expected when she first met John in the British Museum.

John put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her around. He fastened the buttons on the bodice of her gown. “It's rather past time for modesty between you and me.”

“Allow me a little, if you please.”

“Only a little,” he agreed. “You have a few secrets from me, and I'll let you keep them, but you're mine now, you know.”

“What do you mean?” Was this the prelude to that declaration she hoped for?

“No matter what the future holds for us, Rebecca, I was the first to show you what pleasure you're capable of. You will remember me. And that pleases me more than I can say.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “It makes me part of you forever.”

“What about you?” Was the experience that was so earth-shattering for her so blasé for him it would leave no lasting mark? “Am I not part of you as well?”

“No. I told you I intended to give to you, not take, and I'm a man of my word.” He fished her shawl from the tangle of bedclothes and draped it around her shoulders. “Besides, I could not wish for you to surrender the least sliver of your soul to me. You wouldn't find my heart at all comfortable to be on intimate terms with.”

“Perhaps you should let me be the judge of that.”

John looked away, staring down into the skylight that topped the grand foyer four floors beneath them. A man crossed the space below bearing a single candle. John frowned down at the wandering figure.

“Come.” He grasped her elbow. “We need to hurry.”

* * *

Since there was someone besides them stirring in the great house, John couldn't take Rebecca back to her chamber by the most direct route. They had to stop at every corner and survey the way ahead before he committed them to it. Traveling in silence, they threaded their way through the great house, hand in hand.

When they reached her door, he wished he could say something to her. Words of love were dancing on his tongue, words he didn't have the right to say to someone as fine as she. Besides, he didn't want to chance being overheard by someone in a nearby room. Instead, he kissed her cheek and hurried away, trying to put some distance between them in case there were any other early risers among the occupants of Somerfield Park.

Someone other than that man with the candle.

It had been difficult for John to see the fellow's features from the vantage point of the roof skylight. The man had moved slowly, stopping to examine objets d'art placed on side tables and running his fingertips over the polished horizontal surfaces as if he were trying to acquaint himself with the place by touch. He was dressed in a dark banyan whose silken folds flowed around his form like water as he moved. It was of obvious quality.

Clearly the man roaming the halls was not a servant.

John hastened to the grand staircase and headed down, breathing a sigh of relief. Rebecca was safe. It didn't matter if he were discovered out of his chamber. He was bloody Lord Hartley, after all. If he wanted to dance naked through every parlor in the house, no one would dare say a word against it.

So who else could wander Somerfield Park by night without purpose and without anyone saying them nay?

John slipped through room after room, looking for the man with the candle. He heard some muttering ahead and followed the sound to a long, high-ceilinged gallery. Row upon row of portraits stared down at him from the canvases, some of them dark with age, some in brighter hues of more recent times.

The man with the candle had stopped before one of them, lifting his light to squint up at the painting. He seemed to be in an earnest whispered conversation with the likeness of a double-chinned fellow whose aristocratic head was topped by a full-bottom powdered wig.

“It's not fair,” the man murmured. “You can't expect me to give her up. I can't and I won't.”

John drew closer, and when he was about ten paces away, the polished hardwood beneath his foot creaked. The man jerked his gaze to him, wild-eyed.

Now that he was closer, John saw that the man's hair was the same dark honey color as Lord Richard's, but his temples were shot with silver. Still, the resemblance in coloring was striking and that wasn't where the similarity ended. With his fine, straight nose and expressive brown eyes, the man's face might be Richard's, though his square jaw was weighted by another twenty-five or thirty years. John had rarely seen such an obvious stamp of paternity. The man was undoubtedly Richard's father.

And
his
father, he realized.

“Who's there?” Holding the candle before him, Lord Somerset's eyes were so wide, one would have thought he was seeing a ghost. Then he gave himself a small shake. John suspected the older man had been sleepwalking and had only now awakened.

“What are you doing with her eyes?” Lord Somerset demanded.

“Who's eyes?” John asked in surprise.

“Sadie M— No. Mustn't speak of her.” The marquess put down his candle on a small side table and wrung his hands. “That's done with. No good thinking on it. What can't be mended shouldn't be kept. Toss it out and think on it nevermore.”

John had intended to confront his father, to demand an explanation for his semi-benevolent neglect over the years. Silent rage had been John's companion since his first day at Eton, when one of the boys in a higher form had named him a “penniless bastard” and proceeded to pummel him for something over which he had no control.

Now he wondered if the man he blamed for his troubles could even be made aware of them.

“Are you unwell?” John asked.

“Me? No, I'm fit as a fiddle. I'll live to be a hundred, Dr. Partridge says.” His lordship thumped his chest at this bit of bravado. “I simply fell off the roof, they tell me. It happened because… Confound it! I used to remember how it happened. At least I think I remember that I knew once, but now it's… Well, things sort of retreat from one sometimes, don't they?” Lord Somerset paced in a neat little circle. “I mean, first you think you have a thought in your net and then it slips away. Just like a trout, that little thought shakes off the hook and splashes back into the stream.”

He stopped pacing and stared up at John, who topped him by a couple of inches.

“You remind me of someone,” the marquess said.

“I believe, sir, you were acquainted with my mother.” The irony in John's tone was completely lost on Lord Somerset.

“That must be it. Yes. Lovely woman, your mother. Never forget a face. Forgot plenty of other things though.” He chuckled self-deprecatingly. Then he pointed an accusatory finger at the portrait of the man in the powdered wig. “He never forgot. Never forgave, either. Not a damned thing.”

John came over and stood next to the marquess. “Who is he?”

“Oh, I thought everyone knew. That's my father, Lord Somerset.” The current Lord Somerset's voice took on a curiously childish quality. “You won't tell him I was out of bed, will you? He gets frightfully upset if anyone tampers with the schedule. Must do things right. Everything in its place. Everyone in his place. Promise you won't tell.”

The smoldering resentment John felt toward his sire began to fizzle out. It was impossible to remain angry with someone whose mind was so disheveled.

“No,” John promised solemnly, “I won't tell him.”

“Good.” The marquess's face split into a smile of unabashed pleasure. “If I don't get any demerits this week, I can ride my pony to Somerset-on-the-Sea on Saturday.”

“Perhaps we should see you back to your bed, sir, just to be on the safe side.”

“Oh, yes, quite right. Wouldn't do to be caught out of line, would it?” Lord Somerset took a few steps, then stopped and narrowed his eyes at John. “You must be the new footman. What's your name?”

“I'm…John.”

“No, the new footman's name is Toby. I remember that distinctly. Hightower claims this new chap's quite a goer. But John…there was something about a John.” The marquess thumped the side of his head as if the sudden blow might shake loose a stray memory. “Oh, now I remember. My son's name is John.”

“John Fitzhugh Barrett,” John supplied as he took up the candle and shepherded the marquess out of the gallery, toward the grand staircase.

“Oh, know him, do you? Haven't met him myself. Can't think why not.” Shaking his head, the marquess allowed himself to be led along. “That's a dickens of a thing, not to know one's own son.”

“Quite a dickens of a thing.” John slowed his pace to match his father's halting steps. Lord Somerset sounded regretful over their relationship now. Why had he not taken action when it might have made a difference?

“Takes his middle name from me, you know. Fitzhugh. My Christian name is Hugh, though no one but Helen and
Maman
ever call me that.” He chuckled to himself. “And then only when they're upset with me.”

John couldn't be upset with the shattered remains of the man climbing the staircase beside him, but he was frustrated that his pent-up bitterness no longer had a focus. Who could he blame for his childhood if not his father?

No, wait. There was always the dowager. She had been up to her bony shoulders in the scheme to hide John away in Wiltshire. And no doubt now she had her own reasons for bringing him back.

The marquess stopped at the head of the staircase and looked up and down the long dark corridor. “Say, I don't suppose you know which chamber is mine, do you?”

Yesterday afternoon after he left Rebecca in the garden, John had thoroughly explored the house and learned where everything and everyone was. He had to know, if he was going to spirit her up to the rooftop in secrecy and safety.

“Yes, my lord, I know where your room is.”

“Well, that's capital, Toby. Hightower was right. You are a goer!”

John had been elevated from unclaimed bastard to footman in his father's eyes. It wasn't much of a step up. And there likely wouldn't be any more. He doubted Lord Somerset could be made to understand who he was.

His chest constricted. He'd never hear his father claim him as his son.

But he still might glean some information from Lord Somerset. The man knew more than he was aware of and might be coaxed into answers if John could keep him talking.

“You say your son's name is John. Will we be seeing him here at Somerfield Park?”

“Oh, yes, he's on his way, but he's late. Waited for him on the roof till Helen made me come down. Can't think why she was so upset at me being up there.”