To Wed a Rake (10 page)

She shook her hair free again; it swirled around her shoulders with a touch like
fire.
A slow blaze eddied in her belly. “Lord Kerr,” she called, “I cannot remove my skirts
without some help. This gown is constructed in two parts, as you can see.”

She looked up, and Gil was leaning against the pink silk screen, laughing silently. She blinked at him. He wasn’t supposed to be laughing at her. He was supposed to be transfixed with lust, driven to the extremities of his self-control, turned to a satyr. Or something akin to it.

“Have I told you that I begin to feel more and more sympathy for that worthy burgher, your future husband?” he asked.

Emma started trying to pull her skirts around to the front so that she could undo all those little buttons herself. Since Gil wasn’t inebriated—and apparently he would never be inebriated again—she was going to have to rely on large expanses of naked female flesh to drive him into a more amenable frame of mind.

Just as she began to unfasten the tiny buttons that held up her skirts, Gil apparently figured out her intent.

There was a distinct note of warning in his voice now. “I must ask you again. Please do not disrobe yourself on the stage of the Hyde Park Theatre.”

“Why not?” she asked. “Naturally I had hoped we would be at Grillon’s. I am partial to starched sheets, but a woman must be prepared for unexpected pleasures when they occur.”

There was something about the set of his jaw that made her think that possibly the village women had underestimated the strength of will of an earl when they talked of naked women. But she’d gone too far to stop now. She unfastened the last button, and the heavy, bejeweled skirts fell to the ground with a swish, taking her petticoats with them.

Now she was wearing nothing more than her little boned corset, the clever bit of undergarment that pressed her stomach in while pushing her breasts up. She raised her head
slowly to look at him, feeling her hair slide down her naked back.

His eyes were black, half lidded, his jaw still set. He leaned there as if she were a circus exhibit that he’d happened upon, a naked woman on the stage, yet another Frenchwoman amongst the hundreds. It wasn’t going to work. She should reach right down and pick up those heavy skirts and pull them on so that she didn’t have to meet his uninterested eyes again. This was profoundly embarrassing. This was beyond humiliation.

But she was a woman with Tudor bloodlines in her, and a fierce enough character that she’d never allowed herself to feel dismal over the neglect of her betrothed. She was
Emma.
She painted stage sets. She had exquisite clothing. She could pick up one of those besotted, fish-lipped boys back at the masquerade and marry him in about twelve minutes, whether she had twenty-four years or thirty-four years.

The tightness in her chest eased a little. After all, the theater was warm, and the light of the gas lamps was flattering. She was a naked Queen Titania, that was all.

Still, disappointment was biting in her hear sg icharactert, welling up with resentment. Perhaps he was eunuched. Perhaps those six months in Paris had worn the man out.

She looked back at Gil again. His eyes were scowling, and his jaw set so tightly that he looked like a night watchman waiting for a thief to descend a ladder. But—but—

“Damn it all,” he growled, and his voice was black with…rage? Resentment? Something else?

She gave him a smile. It wasn’t one of her full-lipped, passionate, I’m-a-Frenchwoman smiles. It was a smile with a bit of joy in it, an invitation, a secret, a laugh.

“Damn it,” he repeated.

“You swear a great deal,” she observed, crossing her legs as she stood and pretending to poke at the ground with
her toes. She wasn’t used to being naked, after all. Of course, she wasn’t
really
naked. She had her corset and her mask. But she was painfully aware of the red curls showing just under the scalloped bottom of her corset.

“I am a conservative man,” he said. “A sober man.”

“I haven’t offered you a brandy.”

“I didn’t mean it in that sense. I don’t veer around corners, with my reins flying in the wind. I don’t gamble my fortune on the throw of the dice. I don’t—” The words apparently strangled in his throat.

Emma raised one leg slightly, meditatively, looking at the way the light cast through pink silk made her skin look even creamier. But when she looked at him, he wasn’t staring at the rosy shadows cast by the dancing silk, but at the curls between her legs.

“Ah well,” she said, sliding back into her French accent as if she’d never dropped it at all. “It is the way of the world, no? I shall have to find someone else to have my last
affaire
with before I marry the burgher.”

“Someone else?” he said.

“Well, of course,” she said, turning away from him and bending down to pick up her bodice. It was so heavy that she remained bent for a moment, trying to find the sleeves before she pulled it from the floor.

And then she felt the heavy, warm curve of a body tucking itself around the curve of hers. For a moment she froze. Gil was dressed, and the feeling of his linen shirt against her back, the rougher wool of his breeches against her bottom…

Her heart started to thud an uneven rhythm, as if a horse had broken from its traces and was veering into the woods.

Large hands swept through her hair, tossing it up and over her head so that it fell to the floor. His body stayed immobile, keeping her tucked in his curve, trapped by his weight, his body, the feel of him.

“You’re a conservative gentleman,” she pointed out, with just the smallest quaver in her voice.

He pushed forward slightly against her bottom, and she almost toppled to the ground, struck by a wave of weakness in her knees.

“Even conservative men lose their minds sometimes,” he growled in her ear. His fingers had stopped running through her hair, and they were wandering more dangerously now, sliding sweetly down her neck, drawing her upright as they slid to her bosom, pulling her slender, naked body back against his clothed self.

For a moment she thought what they must look like from the other side of the screen, blurred by the rosy silk with her white against his black clothing, her slenderness against his muscle, her sweep of red hair against his wild fall of gypsy hair.

It seemed the village women were right about naked women after all; it merely took a gentleman a bit longer to give up t s tor.

The breath caught in her throat as Gil cupped a hand around her breast, brushing her nipple, making her teeth suddenly snap shut so that she didn’t moan aloud.

“Say it,” he commanded. He had her arched against him now, one hand on her breast, the other sliding over her corset, teasing the bottom edge, sinking lower. His lips ravaged her neck, and her lips parted again as his thumb brushed over her nipple, making her wiggle against him, unknowing, uncertain, but—

“Say—” she gasped. “What should I say?”

“Make that sound again, the one you just made, the one you made in the carriage when you tried to seduce me.”

She gasped, trying to get air into her lungs. That hand was inching closer, down, surely he couldn’t mean to—

His finger sank into her sweetness at the same moment his thumb took that rough pass over her breast again. She didn’t make a breathy, sensual sound, but a squeal.

She didn’t care. She didn’t care. Her head fell back against his shoulder, and she let him do as he will, holding her in place with his hands, his lips caressing her cheeks, the corner of her mouth, the curve of her throat, while his hands worked their magic. She hardly noticed when he nudged her legs apart, when his hands took on a harder, surer rhythm, when it became clear that he wasn’t entirely inebriated during his months in Paris. He had apparently learned some important things.

“Of course,” he whispered in her ear, “I would never do something like this to an English lady born and bred. But you
are
a Frenchwoman. I learned in Paris that Frenchwomen are terribly demanding.”

“Yes,” she gasped.

His thumb twisted and rubbed again.

“A properly raised Englishwoman would never allow something so depraved to be done to her,” he said, his voice wicked.

He didn’t have to emphasize that fact quite so much, Emma thought dimly. But what he was doing was making her squirm back against him, gasping, pleading for something that he could—

“I could tell that you are Parisian in a moment. Why if I touched an English lady like this—” He rubbed a thumb over her nipple and then squeezed it. “She would scream with pure indignation.”

Emma wasn’t paying any attention to his foolishness anymore. Instead she just arched into his hand and let those sounds fly from her throat right up into the rafters, that is, until his hand stopped.

That was a mistake on his part. Something had been about to happen, something quite unprecedented. It had felt like a firestorm building and flying higher with every—

“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, in good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon English.

His voice seemed a bit thicker, too, not that it appeased her any. “I thought you might be embarrassed,” he said. “To be standing up and all.”

She wrenched free of him and turned around, hands on her hips, eyes narrowed, suddenly reminded that this was her future husband, and he needed to be taught a few lessons before she took his ring and his baby and all the rest of it.

Her corset was feeling far too tight, so she took a moment and collected her thoughts while she untied the bow on top. He was watching her as closely as a man could, so she took her time unlacing, massaging her poor breasts while she did it. No one could know how hard it was for them to stay jutting up in the air like that for hours, made into an exhibit for every goggle-eyed man for miles around. Finally she tightened the sighwed, suddestrings on her mask, which made her breasts rise into the air in a pleasing fashion.

Then when she thought he’d had enough punishment—and she did notice that he seemed to be breathing quite hard—she turned away from him and bent down to scoop up her pelisse. She heard the scrape of his foot on the boards and straightened, saying imperiously, “Don’t move!”

He stopped, his eyes sending little sparks in her direction.

Emma was a lady born and bred, and so she took her time lying down and arranging her limbs on her bronze pelisse, making sure that her hair showed to its best advantage.

“Now,” she said, looking back up at the man who stood above her. “Allow me to point out that I am a Frenchwoman.”

There was a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

“We are slow to anger but fierce when indignant,” she told him. “In fact, we may be the fiercest race of people alive on the earth. And since everyone knows that females are fiercer by far than males, it stands to reason that
I
, as a woman and representative of my nationality, am someone to be feared.”

He had his arms folded over his chest, and he was grinning, but she wasn’t stupid. He was vibrating like a string of a violin.

“I’ll thank you to extinguish all these lights,” she said. “I believe I shall remove my mask.”

He did so. The only light he left was the very dim glow of Jeremy’s lantern, set far off in the corner and certainly not lending enough illumination so that Gil would recognize her, if indeed, he remembered his fiancée’s features at all. Emma pulled off the heavy, jeweled mask and put it to the side. She could hardly see Gil; he was just a tall, shadowy form, but she could
feel
him: feel his desire reaching toward her, with all the inevitability of a spark hitting dry leaves.

“I’ll grant that you are slow to learn, given
your
nationality,” she told that dark gypsy shape of her future husband severely, “but the time has come for you to mend your ways.”

“Hmmm,” was all he said, but he seemed to be moving toward her right on course and as if he couldn’t help himself, so she let him take his time.

It didn’t take him more than a second to bring her back to that all-important moment, which just goes to show that the man did indeed learn something over in Paris.

And this time, he didn’t stop.

Her body danced to the tune of his fingers, as if she were a puppet on his strings. She gasped, cried out, reached for him….

When she pulled herself back together, she was still lying on her own velvet pelisse, staring up at the dusty rafters far above them. Gil was on his knees over her. And every inch of her body was quivering, as if a forest fire had rushed over her, left her scorched and yet unconsumed, burned and yet desirous.

She took a deep breath and focused on his face. There had to be more to this. In fact, she knew there was more to it. He’d taken off his shirt, but he was still mostly clothed. And even if he was looking at her with naked longing in his eyes, and his hand was shaping her breast in a way that made her press up, in his palm—even so, there was something about him that signaled that he thought he’d won.

Won?

She hadn’t even started to fight.

Slowly, so she didn’t startle him and make him dash back for his shirt and the security of all his vows about not sleeping with women, especially, she was beginning to think, Frenchwomen, she reached out her toes and her arms, and stretched. His strethed eyes were liquid black, watching the arch of her body.

“I gather,” she said, “you are still determined to pay me no favors.”

“Those favors should be reserved for the man you marry.” But his hand was on her breast again, shaping it.

She curled into his palm, making that sound in her throat, the one he liked and the one that seemed to come naturally every time he touched her. Then she nodded, quite as if she understood and didn’t think he was feebleminded which, frankly, she was starting to take as a serious possibility.

“In that case, I would suggest that a gentlemen must allow a lady to reciprocate. Not the
favor
, since you are disinclined to grant my wishes. But…” She caught his eye and held it, “a reciprocation.”

He frowned. “What—”

She pulled her legs to the side and pushed at his shoulder gently, and he finally collapsed on his back, smiling a little crooked smile. For all she knew of the male anatomy (mostly gathered at the births of male babies), she could see from the rise in his pantaloons that there was a miraculous transformation that happened between age one hour and age thirty-two.