by Tracy Sumner
“Will you…leave me, please.” The gasping halt in the plea let him know precisely what shape she was in. “Go.”
He rocked back on his heels, striking the doorframe. “Have I hurt your feelings?” he asked, stunned. His hand went in and out of the light as he dragged his fingers through his hair.
Anger sliced through her, bringing with it a slight degree of control. “You don’t think I have any? Is that it?”
“No, Piper, Jesus.” He slid, too, until he rested against the doorframe. Silence hung like a specter between them. “I’ve just rarely seen you cry. And I didn’t…I didn’t mean to hurt you. I would never intentionally hurt you. I’m running from myself. Don’t you see that? A mad scramble.”
She swiped a knuckle beneath each eye and drew a shaky breath. “I’m on the outside looking in, Jules. That’s what occurred to me when I walked in your study. I should have known, figured it out by being pressed into service with an aging aunt in Gloucestershire for three years, that you were never going to let me into the League or your heart. You’ve told me often enough. Been very honest and typically honorable. I have been warned. Repeatedly.”
He jerked, his knee bumping hers. “You’re mistaken. You’ve always been—”
“Don’t make promises on top of promises you can’t keep.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing? Making a promise I won’t keep?” he grit out, his censure lobbing around the closet like a ball.
When he reached, she shoved him back. “I allowed myself the luxury of taking what I wanted instead of what was prudent. So like Scandalous Scott, am I correct? Now I’m paying the price. Tomorrow, I will hold my head high and march on. But right now, right this minute, silly female that I am, I want to feel incensed and, yes, hurt.” She dropped her head to her knees, drawing in air overwhelmed with the scent of him. “Truthfully, I want to feel nothing. For you—for the League. For all of it.”
“Come here,” he said, his appeal and the confined space leaving little room to refuse. “Fine, then I’ll come there.” He rose to a squat and braced his arms on the wall on either side of her. When she looked up, he was there, breath sweeping her cheek, broad shoulders blocking out the meager light streaming through the door. “I’m usually quite good at this—”
“Julian, you’re not good at this.”
His hand went to her jaw as he balanced before her. She tried to edge away, but she was firmly trapped. Her mind began to chant a powerful appeal, nipples pebbling, the area between her thighs pulsing in time to her heartbeat. Oh, traitorous body. The inability to see his reaction only made her arousal flare brighter.
“I don’t know what to do with this, Piper. With you.” His fingers quivered against her cheek. “Finn’s dreams are slicing a hole in our security, as he’s giving away as much information as he’s getting. It’s torturing him, part of the reason he’s shadowing you like a hound, afraid to let you out of his sight. And here we are, us, in the midst of this mess, involved as I’ve always suspected we someday would be, my fixation with you tearing me in two. My desires sit at the opposite ends of the galaxy. I want to shield you from danger while I spread you like butter over my body. And I can’t find a way to combine those two with any judiciousness.”
“Judiciousness, of course.” She released a soft huff. “The League is my destiny as well as yours. I’m coming to realize I need it more than I thought possible. It’s finally providing a sense of place, of belonging. Providing a future. Healing others is healing me.”
“I know that.”
“Then why exclude me?”
“Sweetheart, men often need a moment to work things out in their sluggish brains. I’m not as quick on my feet as you are. Will it anger you if I admit I’m still thinking?”
She searched for his gaze in the darkness. “So, I’m to be included going forward, no matter the danger? This is your judicious pledge?”
“You underestimate the danger. When my fears are valid. Finn and Humphrey’s fears—” She cut off his words with a crude kiss that landed on the side of his mouth. He groaned, his hands tangling in her hair as he corrected the fit. Her body spilled light from within. She hadn’t touched him in two days, but it felt like weeks.
Months. Years.
“Piper,” he whispered against her lips, “wait.” He shifted, allowing just enough space between them to pass a sheet of parchment through. “If I agree to this, the League, complete involvement, you must promise me. You must give me your solemn vow.” Giving her a gentle shake as if he sought to anchor his plea in her mind, he said, “If they come for you, for once in your life, play along. I’ll need time to find you, and your gift will provide it. Do you understand? No rebellion.”
She nodded as his fingertips dug into her shoulders, and he gave her another shake. “You are mine to protect. Deny me this, and you deny who I am, who I cannot help being.”
“I belong to no one,” she whispered, wishing it were so.
With a hissing rebuttal, he tugged her to her feet. An unsteady glide along cool plaster, breath tangling, skin heating. “You belong to me.” Keeping one hand on her, he turned, kicking the door shut and throwing them into delicious blackness. “You always have.”
That’s true, she agreed, but you aren’t going to keep me.
Concern vanished as he crowded into her, his hands crafting her like clay until fantasy and reality merged. Pulse points of pleasure and blind longing in the shadowed bliss. She bounced on the balls of her feet to get closer while whispering rough commands against his lips. In response, he caught her bottom and slid her high using the wall as a guide. Then he settled in, drawing her legs around his waist, the perfect solution to their height challenge. She moaned as his rigid shaft claimed it’s favored spot between her thighs, where he began stroking until thought vaporized like fog hit by a sunbeam.
“I’m ready,” she whispered against his neck, then bit him gently beneath the ear to put an exclamation point on the announcement.
Testing her assertion, he worked his hand beneath her skirt, tunneling past the slit in her drawers, a swift entry into her moist, warm reach. Jamming his knee against the wall for leverage, he captured her lips beneath his as his fingers and tongue began to move in time. Not the easiest task, but she got a hand to his trouser close and started to flip buttons. He not only shifted to help, the sounds coming from him were wildly encouraging. What little restraint he had seemed lost.
While she’d never had any in the first place.
Buttons released, his cock sprang into her hand. She passed a thumb over the bulbous head, once, twice, as he broke the kiss and pressed his brow to hers, his breath a steady cadence across her cheek.
Heavens, she loved witnessing Julian Alexander going up in flames.
He caught her lips again as he worked her legs higher on his hip. Amazingly, he had her weight held entirely between his arm and the wall.
“I’m too…heavy,” she whispered, head falling back as he inched the tip of his cock inside her. The feeling was so different than their previous encounters, a profound invasion, abrasive. She felt an animal caught in a trap, and the powerlessness was incredibly arousing.
He rocked into her, his hair catching between the damp press of their cheeks. “You’re”—he groaned as he embedded himself fully, then with a twist of his hips, somehow gained deeper entry—“you’re a dream.”
Tilting her pelvis, he fell into a steady, pounding rhythm. Thoroughly entrenched, his hand rose to cradle her head as he thrust. Protective Julian. She fisted her fingers in his hair, drawing him to her. She wanted him closer when he could be no closer.
Julian palmed the wall, the muscles in his arms clenching. “Sweetheart, I can’t…last much longer.”
Again, he angled her hips, and she gasped. A brilliant burst exploded behind her lids, fireworks in a night sky. Words were impossible; she could only emit broken sounds of pleasure.
“Anyone could find us,” he offered, his breath a molten wash. “My sl
iding into you. You dripping wet all over me.”
His erotic words and the thrill of what they were doing and where they were doing it sent her over the abyss, her climax arriving so forcefully that for an instant, she felt faint. Spots colored her vision as she convulsed around him, her head dropping to his shoulder in defeat, her moan muffled against his lapel.
The final pulses shimmered through her as Julian stroked harder, persuading her body to give of itself fully, leaving nothing untold. Capturing her lips, his groan filled her throat as he crested. With a final stroke, he disengaged, releasing in a handkerchief she’d had no idea he held.
In the hallway, a clock struck a quarter-hour tone, which should have startled them, but they barely reacted. Finally, with a press of his lips to her brow, Julian slid her down his body. Leaning, he kissed her, his hands coming up to frame her face as if he couldn’t—not quite yet—release her.
When skin was cool and breathing restored, they separated, arranging clothing without speaking.
Frankly, she had no clue what to say.
Again, please.
Standing up is as stimulating as lying down.
Julian turned, then turned back, threading his fingers through hers. Lifting their linked hands to his lips in a gesture of silence, he cracked the door and peeked into the hallway. A band of light splashed his face and one broad shoulder. Her gaze took him in hungrily. Hair disheveled, cravat a disaster. His cheeks held a detailed narrative of what had occurred behind a closed, but not locked, door. And his aura. Ah. She took a step back, her hand falling to her belly to calm her racing pulse.
Streaks of blue and bold bursts of lavender. Contentment and hope, though she suspected Julian would question the latter. Trust your instincts, she wanted to tell him.
However, with this man and this situation, patience was her friend.
If she were patient enough to let it be.
“It’s clear,” she said when she wanted to smooth the curl jutting past his ear. Place her mouth over the patch of stubble his morning shave had missed.
Ask him how many ways of making love he planned to show her. Or if this was the end of them. The end of us.
He glanced over his shoulder, and she got the first look at his eyes she’d had since he entered the closet. Pale, the hue of fog sliding over cobblestones. He raised a brow in question.
“Sometimes, I can feel auras, faintly.” Lifting their links hands, she sketched a trivializing circle. “There’s no one in the hallway.”
Exiting the room, he pressed a swift kiss to her wrist and dropped her hand. He directed her to the front of the house while he started toward the back.
She only made it two steps before she turned to find he had halted before the bay window, sunlight a glorious waterfall over him. A flash of indecision crossed his face, so swift an alteration she almost missed it. He brought his hand to his temple, rubbing at either wanton thought or headache. Then he shook his head, hair falling in his face, a smile she felt sure he didn’t want her to see tilting his lips. In four long strides, he made it back to her.
The kiss was impulsive and impassioned, right there in the open, so unlike Julian, her heart missed a beat. “Back door. Midnight,” he whispered, then he was gone.
She climbed the stairs to her bedchamber with half a mind on the steps she took. She stumbled on a wrinkle in the hallway runner she had meant to smooth out this morning.
Julian’s aura had made the decision to deceive him much easier.
She was good for him. She was. His aura and the changes held within it when he was with her were proof.
He needed her, even if he didn’t know it. Piper wondered if he even loved her, not the familial love he’d always carried, but passionate love a man felt for a woman. Love that made one forget idiotic promises made long ago, forget fear, forget logic. His accountability for her had twisted him up inside until he wasn’t sure where he belonged in her life.
Lover, friend, protector.
While she had always known.
If he did love her, it was going to take another of their raging battles to expose it. Unless she made love to him so often and so well, he gave up.
She flopped to her bed, her arms falling wide. She was not as honorable as Julian. No one was as honorable as Julian.
As he’d told her on more than one occasion, she would make an excellent thief.
So, she’d steal his heart if he would not readily give it to her.
They touched at every opportunity in the days that followed.
Even as Julian gave himself to her, strategically managing many of the encounters, she, serenely and unexpectedly, seduced. Whispered suggestions at the most inopportune times—I think this might be fun to try—when his hands were otherwise occupied but his mind all hers. At dinner, while passing in the village, across a lawn strewn with people, he had no time to fortify himself against her impassioned assault. From the simple brush of her hand when he reached for a breakfast scone to leading him into a shadowed nook for a heated kiss that stripped away thought, she kept him maddeningly off-balance as no woman ever had.
When she got that naughty, amused look on her face, he was lost.
The taste of her lived on his tongue, the feel of her on his fingertips. She laughed so easily, with a wicked wit he found not only utterly charming but bloody dangerous. He didn’t understand her luminosity, considering the burden she carried. He couldn’t create a painting with a hundredth of the intensity of her smile, let alone her being when the weight on his shoulders came out in dark slashes.
Julian had found a partner who matched him in agility, enthusiasm, and pluck. No location was off-limits for their trysts. The conservatory, which allowed for a beautiful view of the stars beneath the glass rooftop. The potter’s shed, which had garnered Julian a splinter in a rather delicate location, one Piper had—with tears of hilarity streaming from her eyes—removed. They’d walked the estate before sunrise and made love on the dewy grass of the back lawn. Swam in the lake with moonlight shimmering across the surface of the water and their skin.
Darkness was their champion and their cloak.
Piper was pushing every other experience from his mind until she alone was his world. All he wanted or needed. But his trepidation remained. How could he trust his instincts when a blistering rush of desire took him down like a punch every time he saw the girl?
They had begun working on mastering control of his visions, although the images contained within continued to carve him up like daggers. Brought low, she stepped in and led him home.
Indeed, he feared their connection as he’d feared nothing in his life.
He was sharing parts of himself that had nothing to do with her luscious mouth and tantalizing body. He had even asked her opinion about a painting being shown at the next Royal Exhibition, something no one, not even Humphrey, knew about.
Cataloging her place in his life—healer, lover, friend—was a challenge with his promise to her grandfather held over his head like an ax set to swing. Marriage was not an option if he stuck to that promise; however, concern over her reputation, already dreadfully damaged due to her past escapades, was a thorn beneath his skin. He had never dishonored anyone in his life, and he didn’t want to start with Piper.
Making things worse, like a lovesick fool, he’d outfitted the lodge with all the personal items she needed to stay there. Clothing, hairbrush, toothbrush. He was clearly intoxicated. Besotted. How to make rational choices when his heart was engaged, when she had become such an integral part of his life?
How could he protect her when the notion of not seeing her, touching her, made his heart stutter?
The answer to what he felt was clear if one spent but a moment considering the evidence. He let this morose certainty circle his mind for a full heartbeat before sending it away.
“You’re getting that look again.”
Startled, he glanced over, his paintbrush leaving an inadvertent streak on the canvas. Piper rested in her favorite
spot before the settee, her research papers spread on the floor around her. He worked as close to her as he could without touching because touching brought more touching, and then all plans were mislaid, though he did find it necessary to brush his foot against hers occasionally. Remove a stray lock of hair from her cheek. Dab paint on her wrist, then promise to kiss it away later.
She was dressed in nothing but her shift, he in his paint trousers. The open windows of the lodge allowed for a ripping cross-breeze powered by an approaching storm. The night was peaceful, the call of an owl beyond the only sound. The evening sheltered them, once again. They had turned the hours of the day upside down, working into the night, returning her to the house before dawn, where they then showed up later than anyone for breakfast. Except for Finn, who’d slipped into the role of bastard son like he slipped on his drawers, one easy, elegant leg at a time. When, for the first time in Julian’s life, he was keeping the indolent hours befitting a viscount.
“What look?” he asked, which was senseless when he knew what look.
Her gaze sparked at the edges, tinting the jade green that meant her mind was traveling to a place his body would soon follow. From his chest to his feet and back, he burned as she studied him. She enjoyed examination as much as he did, this coming from an artist who examined form as a matter of course.
She pressed her lips together, doing a little arse jiggle his cock recognized. His gaze fell to the dusky pink nipples hardening beneath her cotton shift. Couldn’t hide his response, either, as he wore nothing but trousers—thin ones at that.
Laughing softly, she glanced at the sheet in her hand as she shook her head to clear it.
Julian leaned, righting the paper where she could properly read it. He loved that he seemed to confound her as much as she confounded him. Even though this time, he suspected she’d planned her attack. Weak fool that he was, he let her play her game.