“Cleo?” Thornton’s voice, gently prodding, brought her back to the present. “Are you well?”
“No.” She swallowed, then exhaled. “No, I am not well. If you don’t mind, I think I shall go and lie down.”
As she moved to pass him, he stayed her with a hand on her shoulder. “Wait.”
She stilled, watching him, terrified she would make a cake of herself by pitching into his arms or worse, by sobbing. “What is it?”
“It is…” He faltered, seeming as much at a loss as she. His free hand captured her other shoulder and he pushed her until her back pressed against the cool windowpane. Her full skirt sprang forward into his legs, but he stepped closer, the descent inevitable. “It is this, I’m afraid.”
His lips claimed hers. The effect on her was almost violent. She felt as though gunpowder had been lit and then tossed into her body. As though she would explode with wanting him. Cleo tossed the script to the floor and reached for him, her hands grappling with his broad shoulders. Her fingers sank into his hair.
Thornton’s tongue slid into her mouth, his hand covering her breast as if it belonged there. She was overcome. She pulled her mouth from his and pressed her heated cheek to the cool glass. His lips feasted on her neck. “Thornton, this is madness.”
“It is always thus between us.” He snagged the décolletage of her gown and dragged it down, exposing her breasts. “It will always be so until we have had our fills of one another.”
She was not so convinced it would easily disappear. Cleo didn’t think she could ever have her fill, as he had so crudely phrased it, of Alexander de Vere. “Then let us have it now,” she pleaded, heedless of the consequences.
“Yes,” the word hissed from him, agonized. He sucked a nipple into his hot mouth and tugged.
Liquid heat pooled instantly in her core. “Thornton,” she begged, her pride cast off like an evening mantle.
She wanted to be wicked with him. It had been so many years, but she had never forgotten the thrill of making love with him. She yearned to taste every inch of the muscular man he’d become.
“Say my name,” he commanded.
“Alex,” she whispered. Her hands scrambled down his back, resting on his firm derriere. She squeezed.
“Cleo, what you do to me, woman.” He raised his head to stare down at her, his gaze sweltering and laden with promise.
“Alex?”
The sweet, questioning voice interrupted their interlude abruptly. It was as if a pail of cold water had been tossed upon them. Embarrassment surged through her. “Thornton, ’tis your sister,” she murmured.
“Hell.” He tore his mouth from her breast and stilled. “Tell me she isn’t in this room.”
Dreading the answer, Cleo raised on tiptoes to peer over his shoulder. Bella stared back at her from the threshold of the library, eyes wide, a pale hand clasped to her heart. “I can’t,” she said lamely.
“Jesus.” He tugged her bodice back into place with a rough hand. “Jesus Christ.”
“Yes.” She squirmed. Her dress improver was still beneath her breasts, digging into her rib cage with uncomfortable tenacity. Oh well, no hope for it now. They would have to do their best to convince young Lady Bella that she and Thornton had merely been practicing their lines. “Say something to her.”
“Bollocks.”
Seeing that she would clearly have to attempt to set the matter to rights, she pressed her palms to his shoulders and shoved. Thornton staggered backward. Cleo swept away from the window. “No, Thornton. You’ve got the words all wrong again.” She sank to pick up the script she’d dropped. “It says right here that the line is ‘Did not I dance with you in Brabant once.’”
“I am not a bloody actor,” he said, taking her cue.
“Lady Bella,” Cleo chirped, pretending to have just espied his still gobsmacked-looking sister. “Welcome, my dear. Do come in. You have caught us unawares in a most disastrous moment.”
Bella entered the room, wisely closing the door at her back. She lingered on the periphery of the room, hesitant. Cleo could almost hear her thoughts churning. She would be wondering what she had witnessed. Had it been a rehearsal, or had it been something wicked?
“Good morning again, Lady Scarbrough,” Bella offered, along with a hasty curtsy. “I see you are practicing for Lady Cosgrove’s great affair on the morrow.”
“Indeed.” Cleo sent her a bright, conspiratorial smile. “I look forward to the event, but I am afraid I must despair of your brother.”
“Oh dear.” Bella’s smooth brow knitted. “How so?”
A glance at Thornton revealed he had restored himself. He was once more all icy hauteur. “He is terribly vexing, forever confusing his lines.”
“But Alex always has been possessed of a most formidable memory,” his sister protested demurely.
“I’ve never had a head for drama, I fear,” Thornton offered, sounding almost unaffected by their brief but melting interlude.
“My megrims have returned.” Cleo turned to Bella. “If you will excuse me, my dear? I am off to my chamber. I find a bit of rest to be just the thing for them.”
“Of course, my lady.” Bella dipped into a curtsy again. “I wish you speedy recovery. It must be terrible to suffer from the headache so often.”
Cleo chose to ignore the subtle jibe, startled nonetheless at the girl’s surprising temerity. Self-preservation sounded the urge to evacuate the scene of her crime.
“Forgive me my ill manners and averse memory,” Thornton added.
Cleo scarcely chanced a peek at him before she fled. Her clothing was askew, her breath cut short by both her unsettled undergarments and the aftereffects of Thornton. She was sure she blushed madly and that she looked a guilty fright. Worse, she was sure she had quite lost her mind, acting as impetuously as she had just done with him. Had anyone other than Lady Bella intruded on them, there would have been an uglier scene accompanied by a hailstorm of vicious gossip.
There would be no more rehearsals, she decided as she made her way to her chamber and narrowly avoided a collision with a clumsy footman. He mumbled an apology and disappeared after knocking into a painting and nearly overturning a vase brimming with red roses. She didn’t figure the unfortunate fellow would last long in his position.
An awkward footman was as auspicious as a wife who was fast renewing a grande passion for a man other than her husband. Even for the society ladies with well-orchestrated arrangements between lover and husband, the situation was far from ideal. Cleo had no wish to destroy her life for a fortnight of pleasure.
Chapter Four
He had no wish to destroy his life for a fortnight of pleasure and yet he seemed somehow determined to do just that by mucking up all he’d been working toward ever since he’d mucked up his life the first time seven years before. His world had been utterly perfect before this cursed house party. He’d been about to announce his engagement, to settle down and wed a suitable, biddable girl from the right family.
His career in parliament had never been better, his three pamphlets on reform well-received, his work on Gladstone’s campaign highly regarded. His party and his Prime Minister depended on him.
But he closeted himself with Cleopatra Harrington for ten minutes and nearly ravaged her and destroyed his carefully wrought reputation in the process. He wanted to start a family, beget the proverbial heir and spare, live out his life in boring and respectable fashion while leaving his duty-bound mark upon good old England, damn it.
Thornton had never had more cause to fear he’d lost his bloody mind than the moment his sister walked in as he was about to push up Cleo’s skirts and do what they both wanted so desperately right up against the cold window. It hadn’t been his finest hour, but perhaps that was owed to the fact he’d been hard as a hunk of coal since first kissing Cleo yesterday afternoon. No relief in sight. Yes, he was depraved.
He leaned his back against the window Cleo had just vacated and eyed his sister. She was lovely
in an understated way, rigged out in ridiculous fashion by his mother in a frothy gown with tiers of pale pink and too much lace. Bella seemed small and ornate, like a new doll yet to be removed from its box. Innocent was the word for her. She was the picture of fresh, rosy-cheeked English country girl innocence. He felt doubly the cad.
Bella gazed at him with an inscrutable expression. He wondered if she had the town bronze to even realize what she’d witnessed. But he didn’t need to wonder for long.
“What manner of folly is this, dear brother?” Her voice soft but still nettling, accusatory even.
“Shakespeare.” He adopted a casual air, hoping to avoid confrontation. Damn, but one didn’t want to be upbraided by one’s virginal younger sister.
“Lady Scarbrough does not look in the slightest like the bard to me,” she said shrewdly. “Pray don’t be obtuse. We haven’t been close these last few years, but I am not so naïve nor so ignorant of your past history with her ladyship that I can be swindled by you.”
Shite. “Very well. Clearly, I would appreciate your discretion.”
Bella crossed the room to him, her face pale and earnest. She reached for his hands and clasped them loosely in hers, fine-boned and fragile. “Brother, you have my discretion without asking. However, I must ask you if you think it wise to…behave as you have done with the countess.”
“Christ, Bella.”
“Your language, Alex. You haven’t answered the question.”
“Very well.” He paused. “Of course not. But wisdom has little to do with anything that is worthwhile.”
Her brow creased. “Are you not nearly engaged to Miss Cuthbert?”
“Yes,” he gritted. This interview grew more uncomfortable by the moment. “Bella, we were rehearsing and lost ourselves in the scene. That is all. It shan’t be repeated.”
“But Alex, I saw you with the countess yesterday when Maman and I arrived,” she protested with gentle insistence.
Well, yes, there had been yesterday as well. Curse it, his innocent sister was treading on territory where her dainty slippers decidedly did not belong. “This is not your affair, sister.”
“Alex,” she implored, “it’s not my intention to interfere in your personal matters. Indeed, I know it’s not my place to do so. However, I care for you and while I was but a girl in the nursery seven years ago when Lady Scarbrough jilted you, I know all too well the effect it had upon you. Suddenly, you were mad for the races and cards and fast women. You kept three different ladybirds on the wrong side of the park, actresses with painted faces and colored hair. Until politics had an improving effect, that is.”
“Bella,” he interrupted, scandalized by her knowledge of his misspent youth. “Where have you heard all this?”
“Oh.” She flushed and glanced away. “I eavesdrop upon Maman’s conversations with Aunt Julia. It is reprehensible I know, but the only way I ever get to hear gossip. You would be surprised at how able our mother is to hide every interesting book, scandal sheet and newspaper from me. I’m rarely even allowed to go amongst my own crowd, she is so protective. But that’s neither here nor there.” She gave his hands another emphatic squeeze. “What does matter is that it cannot be wise to carry on an affair with Lady Scarbrough. Now or ever again.”
Had he thought her spoiled? No, a nuisance was a more apt description. Meddlesome. His-mother-with-claws.
He smiled grimly. “You’re right of course, little one. With age, you’ll realize that not all life’s choices are as simple as you would have them. I did care for Cleo as a foolish young man, yes. What I feel for her now, however, is a great deal less valorous. That is all I can or will divulge to you. This conversation is not fit.”
He tugged his hands from hers and brushed past her, stalking across the room. The urge to take another ride, feel the wind slapping against his face and the fury of a well-muscled stallion beneath him, was strong. He needed distance. Escape. Good Christ, after first Cleo’s searing reaction to him and now his sister’s awkward prying, he needed a brandy and soda-water. Perhaps three.
“Alex, don’t be angry with me, please,” she called after him.
“I’m not angry, Bella.” He stopped and turned. “But don’t meddle in my affairs. What I choose to do with Cleo or any other woman here is no one’s concern but mine.”
“Why do you call her by her Christian name?”
“Because she is Cleo to me,” he said, the admission torn from him against his will. “She will always be Cleo.” Cursing and aware he had revealed too much both to his sister and to himself, he spun on his heel and quit the room.
“Who is that man?” Tia murmured in her sauciest voice later that day as the company gathered formally for another of Lady C.’s entertainments. A group of London players was set to perform Romeo & Juliet. Chairs and an impressive, if slightly rustic in appearance, set had been erected in the ballroom where all gathered awaiting the curtain’s rise.
Cleo followed her sister’s gaze to a corner of the room where Thornton sat. “It is the marquis, as you must know,” she replied, irritated. He was debonair, arrogant and perfect as ever. It wasn’t possible, but she swore she still felt his kiss on her mouth.
“Not him, ninny.” Tia made an impatient sound. “The gentleman seated to his right, the fellow with the blond hair and arresting profile.”
Dismay surged through her. She hadn’t even noticed the man at first look. He was rather striking, though not nearly as attractive as Thornton. “I haven’t the slightest,” she drawled in contrived boredom.
“Mr. Jesse Whitney,” Helen added. “An American.”
“Great lot of those circling amongst our ranks these days,” Cleo commented, trying desperately to ignore Thornton’s presence. Drat it, her eyes kept straying to him. They had twice caught one another’s stares already.
“Yes indeed,” Tia said from behind her fan, “and with a face like that, one wishes for more.”
“Are you not taken with Viscount Darlington any longer?” Helen fanned herself.
“Darlington who?” Tia asked sweetly, even though she had been spending time in that handsome fellow’s company earlier in the day.
“Marrying an American is quite the rage these days,” Helen added. “They are invading our shores and marrying our crusty old titles.”
“It’s a shame one of them didn’t snap up Scarbrough’s crusty old title before Cleo could,” Tia lamented too loudly for propriety’s sake.
Cleo was compelled to admonish her, even if she wholeheartedly echoed the sentiment. “Hypatia.”
Tia sniffed. “Cleopatra.”
“How was your rehearsal earlier today, dearest?” Helen asked, attempted, in her familiar way, to defuse the tension between her sisters.
“It would have gone swimmingly had it not been for Thornton’s abysmal ability to read the proper lines.” Cleo’s voice sounded tight as a well-tuned string, even to her ears.
“It’s just as well that Tia and I are partners.” Helen drew her fan across her face and leaned toward Cleo. “Sisters may be a bother, but they certainly do not cause the distraction of a man.”
“Helen, I’m shocked.” Cleo summoned outrage, which would have been a deal easier to find had Thornton not been a distraction. And more.
“Do you think Mr. Whitney might care to distract me?” Tia whispered.
Her eyes strayed across the ballroom and meshed with Thornton’s once more. She jerked them away, her gaze landing on the back of Margot Chilton’s ridiculously complicated hair. No more rehearsals with him, she reminded herself. Avoid Thornton at all costs. Yes, if she could only listen to her conscience, she could pass the remainder of the house party in relative peace.
“Have you seen Margot Chilton’s hair?” She kept her voice low, addressing her sisters.
“That silly cow.” Tia tsked. “How much false hair do you think her lady’s maid put inside that monstrosity?”
“It’s larger than her actual head,” Helen breathed.
&n
bsp; Good heavens, it was. Cleo was saved from making further conversation, however, by the appearance of Lady C. at the front of the rustling curtain. She beamed, lovely in her sea foam colored, French Revolution inspired gown complete with small false panniers. It was a fashion only Lady Cosgrove could wear without appearing excessively ostentatious. “Sans further soliloquy,” she announced to the group at large, “I give you Romeo & Juliet.”
The assemblage applauded politely and Lady C. clapped her hands at the pair of liveried footmen who were to raise the curtain. And so the play began. If the actors misquoted the odd line or the women’s faces bore too much powder and paint, no one spoke of it. Not until the intercession, at least.
Cleo, Helen and Tia were sipping champagne near an alarmingly realistic bust of Eros when Lady C. joined their trio. “I’m sure Juliet is five and thirty if she’s a day,” she grumbled without preamble, much to the delight of Tia, who had just pointed out as much to her sisters. She nearly spat her champagne upon Cleo, who had the misfortune to be standing directly across from her and was thus in grave peril.
“It is a marvelous evening, however,” Cleo hastened to assure their hostess. “Truly, your house party will be, as always, the talk of polite society.”
“Yes, but we do need some matchmaking for it to be a true success.” Lady C. drained her champagne flute. “I have just the thing. My dear Lady Helen, have you met the dashing Mr. Whitney?”
“The American,” Tia added with an unladylike smirk that would have set their mother on her ear.
“I can’t say that I have, my lady,” Helen answered, her voice neutral.
“I shall bring him to heel for you.” Lady C. wandered away before any of the sisters could offer protest.
“Oh dear,” Cleo ventured aloud. Likely, with Mr. Whitney would come the dratted Thornton, whom she had vowed to avoid and ignore for the remainder of the fortnight.
“What is the matter, sister dear?” Tia looked and sounded like the proverbial cat gotten into the cream.
Heart’s Temptation Books 1–3 Page 4