by Tracy Sumner
And his aura, oh, his aura was something to behold.
She’d never imagined desire could destroy. Promises, rules, plans. She now understood why he’d fought so diligent a campaign, putting distance, rationale, heavy furniture when the situation called for it, between them.
She dug her nails in his back just where it sloped to his bottom, scraped his skin as she traveled in an abrasive glide to his shoulder.
“You unman me,” he said, his admission thrilling her to the tips of her toes. Which was not the kind of thing a gently-bred young lady should be thrilled by.
Incorrigible. Like everyone had always said.
Hardly knowing what she was about, she turned her head and caught his thumb between her teeth.
She liked when he used his teeth on her.
His brow dropped to hers as he released a staggered breath. “You’re not helping.”
“Our goals differ,” she whispered and slicked her tongue over his thumb as she sucked the calloused tip. His lashes fluttered against her skin before he recaptured her mouth without finesse or any of the restraint the ninth Viscount Beauchamp was renowned for. Yanking her gown low, he drew her peaked nipple between his lips, and her world spun away. The caress flowed to the outer reaches of her body, to her toes and the pads of her feet.
She felt reborn, appreciated in a way she’d never imagined she would be.
She strained to reach him, crawl inside and gather more, whispered that very word, and surprisingly, he acquiesced. His hand left her breast and skated down her body: belly, hip, thigh. Locating her warm core without hesitation, his finger shot through a slit in her drawers and grazed moist flesh. She groaned and arched, her nipple bumping his teeth.
Pounding on the door brought them apart like a vase smashed against the floor. They scattered, a body-width between them as their eyes locked.
Her heart hammered in her chest. Her hair had come loose from the few pins remaining through the night and it lay in a tangle beneath her. Skirt at her waist, breasts exposed, she was utterly undone. Julian didn’t look much better, breath rushing forth as if he’d dashed from the main house and collapsed atop her. She held up a finger, opened her mouth, then shook her head and flopped to her back. There were no words. She doubted she’d recover, find herself—the woman without him—after this.
“Bloody, Humphrey,” she whispered and pressed her bottom into the planks to keep from tucking into his body.
Julian called out a warning. “Don’t come in! She’s here. Give us a moment.” Then he rolled to his back, arm going over his eyes, chest working beneath blood-stained linen.
“Are you all right?” she asked when she found her voice. He had popped one of her less-than-skillful stitches if the blood streaking his arm was any indication. His hair shot from his head at all angles, a tempting mess. A bead of sweat tracked his jaw; she was compelled to lick it off.
She tried, with minimal success, to avoid staring at the hard ridge tenting his trouser close.
“Brilliant.” He lifted his elbow just enough to train one irate steel-grey eye on her. “I told you to let me go! Instead, you start this? And damned if I wasn’t set on finishing it.”
“I had no other option. I wasn’t going to leave you there.” She worked her bodice in place as it seemed she’d lost him on this side of the world. “Heavens, the real thing is better than any description in any book. And statues, oh, Julian, they have nothing on you.” She saw him stiffen, heard his aggravated snort and felt she should add, “Don’t go ruining it. Not when I can still taste you on my lips.”
He dropped his arm, closing off her view. “I was rough. I’m sorry. The vision. Lack of control.” He wagged his fingers. “Too far, too fast. Need just about…swallowed me whole.”
The steady pulse returned to her nether regions as she imagined those artistic fingers touching her slower, whatever this meant. More and at a longer interval is what it said to her. “We can go slower?” she asked on a breathless whisper.
He shot to his feet, trying to gather himself when she could have told him it was a hopeless endeavor. He looked like he’d been forced through a keyhole, the darling man. A rumpled, bloody, sweaty mess, he cracked the door, spoke to Humphrey in an aggrieved tone, then closed it with a snap.
Jamming his back against the frame, he crossed his arms and regarded her with dismay. “You have to go. I…this…” He shrugged quite forlornly. His aura was a kaleidoscope, a mad churn, worse than the spill of color across his carpet.
He was slipping through her grasp, returning to his place as her protector, one fleeting second at a time. “Go? With Humphrey?”
He dropped his head to his hand and rubbed as if he could wipe out his thoughts. “Minnie’s there, too.”
“Oh, no. You’re going to send me back with both of them?” She scrambled to find a better solution than a cart ride to the house with two disapproving chaperones. “Wait until dark. I’ll sneak back. Use the kitchen entrance and straight up to my bedchamber without stopping.”
“No chance to get you out of here without notice when you look this”—he paused, rubbed his temple harder—“compromised.”
“You don’t look so wonderful yourself, Jules.” Although he did. Good enough to eat, damn him.
He raked his hand through his hair. “What do I tell them? Although I see you object, can you give us until early evening”—his head went against the door with a thump—“as I was about to have my way with Piper.”
She rose on unsteady legs. When she reached him, she laid her hand on his muscled forearm and tried to suppress her intense yearning. Could she help it if the dusting of hair beneath her fingers enticed beyond belief? “Were you about to have your way with me?”
His gaze left its inspection of the ceiling and drilled into her. Beneath her fingers, he trembled. His eyes flashed, the amber flecks competing with his flushed skin.
Taking her by the arms, he turned and crowded her against the door. “What do you think?” Then he bent low and brought her high, allowing his long body to press into hers, as solid as the wood at her back, neither giving mercy as he reclaimed her lips. She fisted her hands in his hair and moaned, the kiss racing back to where they’d left off, tongues tangling, hips beginning to mate. Oh, like what had occurred on the floor but not. Without his weight, this joining felt wonderfully different.
“Send them away,” she whispered.
Those words, spoken without intention, broke the spell.
Julian ended the kiss gradually, skimming her cheek, her ear, a silky whisper. Then his brow settled on hers as he released a sigh and her body, allowing her to do a languid slide down his. When her toes hit the floor, she sought his gaze, but long, dark lashes conveniently hid it. His hands went to the door, braced on either side of her shoulders, fingers splayed.
He appeared a man cataloging the taste of a delicacy he didn’t anticipate consuming again.
After a charged moment, Julian tapped his knuckle on the wall, then peeled himself away until they were no longer touching. Their harsh exhalations were the only sound in the room, aside from the distant call of a woodlark. She wished she could say something to erase the resigned expression from his face, like a hard swipe with one of his rags across canvas. The smell of paint and linseed oil would pose an erotic challenge until the day she died.
“I can see you shutting down, turning away from me, from us, from this. It isn’t a surprise. So Jules Alexander, it pains me.”
“What isn’t a surprise is your arguing with me about this,” he growled, his gaze going hot, his aura flaring around him.
His scorching regard only made her burn as she recalled how skillfully he’d touched her, how he seemed to anticipate precisely what she needed and where, when she’d had no idea how to direct him. She’d never imagined longing this intense, hunger and hopelessness burrowing deep. The combination was horrific, a dreadful masterpiece. “This is my burden. For not letting you go, as you’ve begged me to from practically the
first day we met.”
He had started across the room, sidestepping canvases, brushes, and rags, but her comment stopped him short. The glance he threw at her was as loaded as the pistol she’d seen in his desk drawer. “That is utter rubbish.”
“At least you’re not proposing another trip to Gloucestershire.”
He went to one knee, as dejected as the discarded stockings and muddy boots he knelt before. He toyed with her stocking without looking back, broad shoulders lifting and falling in resignation. “What in the hell do you want from me, Yank?”
She knotted her fingers behind her back. “Can I return the question?”
An emotion she couldn’t decipher crossed his face. “No.”
“I want you to share your knowledge, so I’m better equipped to manage the experience next time.”
“My knowledge.” He expelled a sound somewhere between a laugh and groan. “Like we’re beside the stream on the earl’s estate, discussing essays from one of my textbooks. How do you even—” He flinched, and her stocking slipped from its cradle in his palm. She wondered what vision the thin wisp of silk had pushed into his mind.
“One of your textbooks,” she repeated, the memory of those days distressing when she considered how much had changed. “What chapter?”
His eyes when they met hers shimmered like a rainy mist just before dawn. His hair was longer than she’d ever seen it, dusting his collar in dark twists. And his face…
At this moment, she loathed that she found him so beautiful.
“Chapter?” he asked.
Jealousy scorched a white-hot hole through her belly. “You completed the entire book with Lady Coswell. What chapter did we make it to?”
He went back to his study of her stockings. “I’m as likely to answer that as I am to grab a lit fuse and shove it between my teeth.”
She wrenched the door open and slammed it behind her. It was only when she was to the cart, blasting by a disconcerted Humphrey and a wide-eyed Minnie, that she realized she’d left her boots on Julian’s paint-splattered floor and her stockings like a shamefaced witness in his hand.
Chapter 11
Who walks the fastest, but walks astray, is only furthest from his way.
~Matthew Prior
Julian traversed the uneven footpath leading to the stables, the saddlebag in his hand a sound reminder of his imprudence. His mood was foul, best left to fester alone, although Henry trailed at his heel, sensing his master needed him most this day—the morning after Julian had made a grievous error in judgment and turned his world, his soul, upside down.
The wildflowers edging the trail brought his disposition even lower because he knew Piper would have taken joy in the sight. Joy in the crisp scent of pollen and earth riding the air.
Joy in everything.
He shoved the stable door aside with a grunt, his shoulder wound stretching to an intolerably painful degree.
The stitches were as uneven as expected.
And the scar was never going away, a Piper Scott brand burned in his flesh.
As if his fevered dreams since that kiss on her nineteenth birthday had not been enough, he’d decided making love to her on the floor of his art studio might better the situation.
Bloody, bloody hell.
If only his disgrace would jettison the memory of her teeth marking his neck, her sigh of pleasure as he finally touched her as he’d yearned to. When he’d lowered his body to hers, her eyes had gone this extraordinary bottle-green, blurred and wispy around the edges, just as they would, he imagined, if he slid inside her.
She was an angel in his arms and a determined, independent fury out of them.
With a curse, he tossed the saddlebag to the floor. He was angry that she’d chosen to bring him back from the otherworld in such a manner, but mostly, he was angry with himself for wanting her so desperately.
And for so long.
At its base, greater need than any he had known existed. A primal compulsion to ease his hunger was his only excuse.
He was just a simple, stupid man, after all.
Besides, she’d goaded him. Teasing touches, the daring glint in her eyes. As if he needed encouragement to misbehave. He’d misbehaved with any number of women, and it had not mattered one whit, which Piper had pointed out as bluntly as a man.
As if anything he’d experienced without her compared to anything he’d experienced with.
Piper meant something.
No easy tangling of limbs, this situation.
If he were honest with himself, he’d been fascinated from the start. In his book, no matter the page, Piper was penciled in the margins.
From that first moment on the earl’s drive, when he’d stepped from the carriage delivering him from Seven Dials and noted a golden shimmer by his boot. He’d grasped the locket, and the vision had been clear, compelling, and for the first time, restorative. Her lovely face came to him, yes, but also such a potent sense of her. Loneliness, determination, recklessness, generosity, the characteristics that made Piper so unique.
So damned maddening.
An instant connection unlike any he’d ever experienced, then or now.
She’d joined his family before she ever saw his face.
Before he ever truly saw hers.
They’d become quick friends, his attachment already in place. Those enchanting summers, home from Rugby, and then Oxford, where they’d conversed about numerous topics, forthright conversations unlike any he conducted except with Humphrey. Her wit, her fearlessness, her vitality had utterly riveted, and he’d been hard-pressed to turn away.
This before his desire began to be a hindrance.
She’d been discarded, left to her own maneuvers—which were habitually foolish and impulsive. Desperate cries for attention. When he returned to the earl’s manor each summer, he found her isolated, hungry for knowledge, for companionship. He saw himself in her—lonely and struggling to make sense of a supernatural gift while stranded among those lucky enough to be deemed normal.
This mirror of insight only heightened his feelings.
And, for a while, he’d given her what he’d never given anyone—a view into the mind of the introspective lad. A lad who’d longed for his father’s acceptance and upon receiving the opposite had turned into a very wrathful person indeed. He’d shared what it felt like to be forgotten and abused because she understood as well as anyone he’d ever known.
Then, that final summer, God, he would never forget.
She simply grew up.
He’d stepped from the carriage to find her waiting. The day disagreeable, as he recalled, stormy and dismal, but when she’d thrown her arms around him, there had been an enormous shift. Sunlight flooded his vision, dispelling those wicked clouds. Breasts clearly defined and pressing against his chest, a curious new scent layering her skin. Those details had gained his rapt attention, but the realization of how much he’d missed her, the list of things he had to tell her, collected like treasures, had acted like a mallet to the head.
Standing on that pebbled drive in a misting rain, he’d never felt more accepted for precisely who and what he was.
The conclusion had been clear: this is my person—the other half of my soul.
In the days that followed, to bring some semblance of control, he began to sketch her, bringing her, though she was unaware, into a very intimate space. A space he shared with no one.
Confessions on bits of foolscap.
And then the birthday kiss.
She’d caught him on the back lawn after a drunken night of roughhousing with Humphrey, the broach he’d given her earlier in the evening pinned to her collar. The encounter had been sweetly innocent and impossible to deny, as she was.
He retrieved his saddlebag and hooked it in place atop his horse. The earl had presented a lifetime challenge with his dying breath.
She is not yours.
Perhaps not, but his desire hadn’t abated.
And no matter Harbingdon’s steadf
ast fortifications, there were no guards posted at the entrance to his heart.
“Headed out, are you?”
Julian squinted into the sunlight tumbling through the stable door. Dashed if he wanted to deal with anyone right now, even his best friend.
“Mayfair bound, it looks,” Humphrey said, settling in if the sound of his bulk perching against the door was any indication.
Julian tightened the saddlebag strap and gave it a good jerk. “The Duke of Ashcroft holds a midsummer gala at season’s end. I want to see the room from the vision before we approach him.”
“Fire from his fingertips.” Humphrey dragged his boot across the straw-covered floor. “That’s a new one. Has to be what happened at Scamp’s hotel, both times. Meaning, he can’t control it for shit. Though it looks like, by breaking into your townhouse, he’s trying to.”
The silence lengthened as Julian adjusted his bridle and checked the stirrups. He wished Humphrey would leave him in, well, there was no way to leave him in peace, but there was a way to leave him alone. “Is that it?” he asked, darting a glance over his shoulder.
Humphrey shrugged, gaze rising to the rafters. “I don’t think bolting outta here in a black mood, alone, mind you, is the best idea.”
Julian thumped the saddle. “I’ve taken this route a hundred times.”
Humphrey pushed off the door with a growl. “Not with them on our tail, you haven’t. Finn’s dreaming every night, telling us they’re getting closer. You think to ignore that?”
“I’ll watch my back. It’s not me they’re after. Danger doesn’t place us on ice, Rey, unable to move. The League is always going to be vulnerable, and I need this information.”
“My advice, take some time to think about this.” When Julian failed to respond, Humphrey blew out a tense breath. “I can’t leave today. We have someone arriving from Whitechapel. Blackmon. Clairvoyant. Worked on the docks. Good head for figures and likes children.” He gestured in the direction of the house. “I may have him tutor Simon, the squirmy little bastard.”
“I assume Blackmon can shoot straight?”