Romancing Mister Bridgerton (12 page)

“No, that's quite all right,” Penelope said quickly. “We can manage for ourselves.”

Briarly nodded and, as soon as he'd laid the flatware and filled the two glasses with lemonade, left the room.

“Listen to me,” Colin said, jumping to his feet and moving the door so that it almost rested against the doorframe (but remained technically open, should anyone quibble about proprieties).

“Don't you want something to eat?” Penelope inquired, holding aloft a plate that she'd filled with various small snacks.

He snatched a piece of cheese, ate it in two rather indelicate bites, then continued, “Even if Eloise isn't Lady Whistledown—and mind you, I still think she is—it doesn't matter. Because if
I
suspect that she's Lady Whistledown, then surely someone else will as well.”

“Your point being?”

Colin realized that his arms were reaching forward, and he stopped himself before he reached out to shake her shoulders. “It doesn't matter! Don't you see? If someone points his finger at her, she'll be ruined.”

“But not,” Penelope said, appearing to require a great deal of effort to unclench her teeth, “if she's not Lady Whistledown!”

“How could she prove it?” Colin returned, jumping to his feet. “Once a rumor is started, the damage is done. It develops a life of its own.”

“Colin, you ceased to make sense five minutes ago.”

“No, hear me out.” He whirled to face her, and he was seized by a feeling of such intensity that he couldn't have ripped his eyes from hers if the house were falling down around them. “Suppose I told everyone that I had seduced you.”

Penelope grew very, very still.

“You would be ruined forever,” he continued, crouching down near the edge of the sofa so that they were more on the same level. “It wouldn't matter that we had never even kissed.
That,
my dear Penelope, is the power of the word.”

She looked oddly frozen. And at the same time flushed. “I…I don't know what to say,” she stammered.

And then the most bizarre thing happened. He realized that he didn't know what to say, either. Because he'd forgotten about rumors and the power of the word and all of that rot, and the only thing he could think of was the part about the kissing, and—

And—

And—

Good God in heaven, he wanted to kiss Penelope Featherington.

Penelope Featherington!

He might as well have said he wanted to kiss his sister.

Except—he stole a glance at her; she looked uncommonly fetching, and he wondered how he hadn't noticed that earlier that afternoon—she wasn't his sister.

She definitely wasn't his sister.

“Colin?” His name was a mere whisper on her lips, her eyes were quite adorably blinking and befuddled, and how was it he'd never noticed what an intriguing shade of brown they were? Almost gold near the pupil. He'd never seen anything like it, and yet it wasn't as if he hadn't seen her a hundred times before.

He stood—suddenly, drunkenly. Best if they weren't quite on the same latitude. Harder to see her eyes from up here.

She stood, too.

Damn it.

“Colin?” she asked, her voice barely audible. “Could I ask you a favor?”

Call it male intuition, call it insanity, but a very insistent voice inside of him was screaming that whatever she wanted
had
to be a very bad idea.

He was, however, an idiot.

He had to be, because he felt his lips part and then he heard a voice that sounded an awful lot like his own say, “Of course.”

Her lips puckered, and for a moment he thought she was trying to kiss him, but then he realized that she was just bringing them together to form a word.

“Would—”

Just a word. Nothing but a word beginning with
W. W
always looked like a kiss.

“Would you kiss me?”

H
is life as he knew it was over.

“What?” he asked, aware that he was blinking rapidly.

Her face turned a deeper shade of crimson than he'd thought humanly possible, and she turned away. “Never mind,” she mumbled. “Forget I said anything.”

Colin thought that a
very
good idea.

But then, just when he'd thought that his world might resume
its normal course (or at least that he'd be able to pretend it had), she whirled back around, her eyes alight with a passionate fire that astonished him.

“No, I'm not going to forget it,” she cried out. “I've spent my life forgetting things, not saying them, never telling anyone what I really want.”

Colin tried to say something, but it was clear to him that his throat had begun to close. Any minute now he'd be dead. He was sure of it.

“It won't mean a thing,” she said. “I promise you, it won't mean anything, and I'd never expect anything from you because of it, but I could die tomorrow, and—”

“What?”

Her eyes looked huge, and meltingly dark, and pleading, and…

He could feel his resolve melting away.

“I'm eight-and-twenty,” she said, her voice soft and sad. “I'm an old maid, and I've never been kissed.”

“Gah…gah…gah…” He knew he knew how to speak; he was fairly certain he'd been perfectly articulate just minutes earlier. But now he didn't seem able to form a word.

And Penelope kept talking, her cheeks delightfully pink, and her lips moving so quickly that he couldn't help but wonder what they'd feel like on his skin. On his neck, on his shoulder, on his…other places.

“I'm going to be an old maid at nine-and-twenty,” she said, “and I'll be an old maid at thirty. I could die tomorrow, and—”

“You're not going to die tomorrow!” he somehow managed to get out.

“But I could! I could, and it would kill me, because—”

“You'd already be dead,” he said, thinking his voice sounded rather strange and disembodied.

“I don't want to die without ever having been kissed,” she finally finished.

Colin could think of a hundred reasons why kissing Penelope
Featherington was a very bad idea, the number one being that he actually
wanted
to kiss her.

He opened his mouth, hoping that a sound would emerge and that it might actually be intelligible speech, but there was nothing, just the sound of breath on his lips.

And then Penelope did the one thing that could break his resolve in an instant. She looked up at him, deeply into his eyes, and uttered one, simple word.

“Please.”

He was lost. There was something heartbreaking in the way she was gazing at him, as if she might die if he didn't kiss her. Not from heartbreak, not from embarrassment—it was almost as if she needed him for nourishment, to feed her soul, to fill her heart.

And Colin couldn't remember anyone else ever needing him with such fervor.

It humbled him.

It made him want her with an intensity that nearly buckled his knees. He looked at her, and somehow he didn't see the woman he'd seen so many times before. She was different. She glowed. She was a siren, a goddess, and he wondered how on earth no one had ever noticed this before.

“Colin?” she whispered.

He took a step forward—barely a half a foot, but it was close enough so that when he touched her chin and tipped her face up, her lips were mere inches from his.

Their breath mingled, and the air grew hot and heavy. Penelope was trembling—he could feel that under his fingers—but he wasn't so sure that he wasn't trembling, too.

He assumed he'd say something flip and droll, like the devil-may-care fellow he was reputed to be.
Anything for you,
perhaps, or maybe,
Every woman deserves at least one kiss.
But as he closed the bare distance between them, he realized that there were no words that could capture the intensity of the moment.

No words for the passion. No words for the need.

No words for the sheer epiphany of the moment.

And so, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon, in the heart of Mayfair, in a quiet drawing room on Mount Street, Colin Bridgerton kissed Penelope Featherington.

And it was glorious.

His lips touched hers softly at first, not because he was trying to be gentle, although if he'd had the presence of mind to think about such things, it probably would have occurred to him that this was her first kiss, and it ought to be reverent and beautiful and all the things a girl dreams about as she's lying in bed at night.

But in all truth, none of that was on Colin's mind. In fact, he was thinking of quite little. His kiss was soft and gentle because he was still so surprised that he was kissing her. He'd known her for years, had never even thought about touching his lips to hers. And now he couldn't have let her go if the fires of hell were licking his toes. He could barely believe what he was doing—or that he wanted to do it so damned much.

It wasn't the sort of a kiss one initiates because one is overcome with passion or emotion or anger or desire. It was a slower thing, a learning experience—for Colin just as much as for Penelope.

And he was learning that everything he thought he'd known about kissing was rubbish.

Everything else had been mere lips and tongue and softly murmured but meaningless words.

This
was a kiss.

There was something in the friction, the way he could hear and feel her breath at the same time. Something in the way she held perfectly still, and yet he could feel her heart pounding through her skin.

There was something in the fact that he knew it was
her.

Colin moved his lips slightly to the left, until he was nipping the corner of her mouth, softly tickling the very spot
where her lips joined. His tongue dipped and traced, learning the contours of her mouth, tasting the sweet-salty essence of her.

This was more than a kiss.

His hands, which had been lightly splayed against her back, grew rigid, more tense as they pressed into the fabric of her dress. He could feel the heat of her under his fingertips, seeping up through the muslin, swirling in the delicate muscles of her back.

He drew her to him, pulling her closer, closer, until their bodies were pressed together. He could feel her, the entire length of her, and it set him on fire. He was growing hard, and he wanted her—dear God, how he wanted her.

His mouth grew more insistent, and his tongue darted forward, nudging her until her lips parted. He swallowed her soft moan of acquiescence, then pushed forward to taste her. She was sweet and a little tart from the lemonade, and she was clearly as intoxicating as fine brandy, because Colin was starting to doubt his ability to remain on his feet.

He moved his hands along the length of her—slowly, so as not to frighten her. She was soft, curvy, and lush, just as he'd always thought a woman should be. Her hips flared, and her bottom was perfect, and her breasts…good God, her breasts felt good pressing against his chest. His palms itched to cup them, but he forced his hands to remain where they were (rather enjoyably on her derrière, so it really wasn't that much of a sacrifice.) Beside the fact that he really shouldn't be groping a gently bred lady's breasts in the middle of her drawing room, he had a rather painful suspicion that if he touched her in that way, he would lose himself completely.

“Penelope, Penelope,” he murmured, wondering why her name tasted so good on his lips. He was ravenous for her, heady and drugged by passion, and he wanted desperately for her to feel the same way. She felt perfect in his arms, but thus far, she had made no reaction. Oh, she had swayed in his
arms and opened her mouth to welcome his sweet invasion, but other than that, she had done nothing.

And yet, from the pant of her breath and the beat of her heart, he knew that she was aroused.

He pulled back, just a few inches so that he could touch her chin and tilt her face up toward his. Her eyelids fluttered open, revealing eyes that were dazed with passion, perfectly matching her lips, which were lightly parted, completely soft, and thoroughly swollen from his kisses.

She was beautiful. Utterly, completely, soul-stirringly beautiful. He didn't know how he hadn't noticed it all these years.

Was the world populated with blind men, or merely stupid ones?

“You can kiss me, too,” he whispered, leaning his forehead lightly against hers.

She did nothing but blink.

“A kiss,” he murmured, lowering his lips to hers again, although just for a fleeting moment, “is for two people.”

Her hand stirred at his back. “What do I do?” she whispered.

“Whatever you want to do.”

Slowly, tentatively, she lifted one of her hands to his face. Her fingers trailed lightly over his cheek, skimming along the line of his jaw until they fell away.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Thank you?

He went still.

It was
exactly
the wrong thing to say. He didn't want to be thanked for his kiss.

It made him feel guilty.

And shallow.

As if it had been something done out of pity. And the worst part was he knew that if all this had come to pass only a few months earlier, it
would
have been out of pity.

What the hell did that say about him?

“Don't thank me,” he said gruffly, shoving himself backward until they were no longer touching.

“But—”

“I said
don't,
” he repeated harshly, turning away as if he couldn't bear the sight of her, when the truth was that he couldn't quite bear himself.

And the damnedest thing was—he wasn't sure why. This desperate, gnawing feeling—was it guilt? Because he shouldn't have kissed her? Because he shouldn't have liked it?

“Colin,” she said, “don't be angry with yourself.”

“I'm not,” he snapped.

“I asked you to kiss me. I practically forced you—”

Now, there was a surefire way to make a man feel manly. “You didn't force me,” he bit off.

“No, but—”

“For the love of God, Penelope,
enough
!”

She drew back, her eyes wide. “I'm sorry,” she whispered.

He looked down at her hands. They were shaking. He closed his eyes in agony. Why why
why
was he being such an ass?

“Penelope…” he began.

“No, it's all right,” she said, her words rushed. “You don't have to say anything.”

“No, I should.”

“I really wish you wouldn't.”

And now she looked so quietly dignified. Which made him feel even worse. She was standing there, her hands clasped demurely in front of her, her eyes downward—not quite on the floor, but not on his face.

She thought he'd kissed her out of pity.

And he was a knave because a small part of him wanted her to think that. Because if she thought it, then maybe he could convince himself that it was true, that it was just pity, that it couldn't possibly be more.

“I should go,” he said, the words quiet, and yet still too loud in the silent room.

She didn't try to stop him.

He motioned to the door. “I should go,” he said again, even as his feet refused to move.

She nodded.

“I didn't—” he started to say, and then, horrified by the words that had nearly come out of his mouth, he actually did head toward the door.

But Penelope called out—of
course
she called out—“You didn't what?”

And he didn't know what to say, because what he'd started to say was,
I didn't kiss you out of pity.
If he wanted her to know that, if he wanted to convince himself of that, then that could only mean that he craved her good opinion, which could only mean—

“I have to go,” he blurted out, desperate now, as if leaving the room might be the only way to keep his thoughts from traveling down such a dangerous road. He crossed the remaining distance to the door, waiting for her to say something, to call out his name.

But she didn't.

And he left.

And he'd never hated himself more.

 

Colin was in an exceedingly bad mood before the footman showed up at his front door with a summons from his mother. Afterward, he was beyond repair.

Bloody hell. She was going to start in on him again about getting married. Her summonses were
always
about getting married. And he really wasn't in the mood for it right now.

But she was his mother. And he loved her. And that meant he couldn't very well ignore her. So with considerable grumbling and a fair bit of cursing while he was at it, he yanked on his boots and coat, and headed out the door.

He was living in Bloomsbury, not the most fashionable section of town for a member of the aristocracy, although Bedford Square, where he had taken out a lease on a small but elegant terrace house, was certainly an upscale and respectable address.