The Deadliest Sin

by Caroline Richards

  “What has that to do with us?”

  “You admit to an us.” The words were so quiet they barely reached her across the small distance separating them.

  “I admit to nothing.” Julia twisted in her seat, reaching out to unlatch the window curtain. The fine brocade shade rolled up with a snap. “Take me back. I leave for Paris tomorrow.”

  “Impossible. You are coming with me.”

  She pulled the shade back down because she had no adequate reply at the ready, aware that she could hardly turn the carriage around by herself.

  “You are coming with me because I care for you, Julia,” he said, his eyes darkening with emotion. “Why else do you think I would risk everything to find your sister? Risk everything to come back to you?”

  Julia slowly turned to face him, pulling the rough blanket to her chin in self protection. She was afraid, feeling her anger and some of her grief drain away, all too aware that he meant too much to her already.

  “What else are you not telling me?” His gaze was suddenly assessing.

  That you look like Montagu Faron. And I don’t know what to do about it. She didn’t know what to say. “What about your plan—regarding the Nile and finding its source,” she said, deciding it was a good enough feint. “You are willing to sacrifice your ambitions for me?” Her voice was disbelieving.

  “My concern, not yours,” Strathmore said decisively.

  “But I am to share everything with you.”

  He shrugged, meeting her gaze directly. “Haven’t you already?”

  A flush of pleasure ran through her. She would never forget how his hard body felt under her hands, how he moved with a seductive sureness and skill to bring her such exquisite sensation. Strathmore had stormed her body and penetrated her mind. A cloud of guilt hovered at the margins of her conscience, guilt at the thought she could feel that way while her sister lay dead. The tendrils of her nightmare clung to the corners of her soul, the heaviness in her heart a constant companion.

  He leaned across the aisle and lifted her onto his lap without effort. “I know,” he said completing her thoughts. “Perhaps not the details, but enough to realize that you are haunted by your childhood. The details will come,” he said reassuringly. He held her tightly in his arms, the blanket around her shoulders the only barrier between the heated warmth of their bodies.

  “How can we explain this…this tangle of emotions?” she murmured. Her palms slid a small distance across his shoulders. “It frightens me that you can do this to me. I don’t know if I like it.” When it came to Strathmore, the ground beneath her feet kept shifting, at one moment secure and dependable and the next moment unbearably shaky.

  He smiled in understanding of how courageous her admission had been. Her dark lashes lowered as her mind came to terms with the fact that he had come back for her and had been willing to save her life at the Birdoswald fort, even though it had cost her Rowena.

  Tipping her face to his, he said softly, “We can’t order everything in life. From that first night at Eccles House, I now realize that I was lost. Lost to you. While logic, reason, and ambition fought to maintain the upper hand, something else won the day.”

  Something else. The innocuous phrase hovered in the air between them. Strathmore smiled into her eyes. “For what it’s worth, because I really have no way of judging, I believe it to be love,” he added. “I’ve never said that to anyone before.”

  His statement fell into the heated atmosphere of her doubts and resentment with stunning impact. “Love?” Her hands fell away from his shoulder and she shook her head, shivering as a premonition of ruin overtook her. “That’s not possible.” And yet against every modicum of good sense and caution, she knew it to be true.

  “How else do I explain my actions? To you or to myself?”

  Shattered by the honesty of his words, Julia reached up to touch his mouth gently with her finger to stop him before he said anything more, before ugly reality intruded, robbing her of a gift that seemed impossible. His face was inches from hers, his dark hair brushing her cheek. Her pulse accelerated with the touch of his lips, her eyes shutting against the surging flood of sensation already racing through her body.

  “You taste,” he said against the softness of her lips, “sweet. So sweet.” His breath caressed her body and a flush of arousal heated her flesh. Moments later, the blanket dropped from her shoulders as she lay back on the carriage seat, shoving her skirts and petticoats out of the way with an intemperance that should have shocked her.

  It was as though she was ravenous, famished, liberated in such a way she didn’t hesitate with the buttons on his trousers or linger to watch him shrug out of his jacket. The breadth of his shoulders under the white linen shirt was miraculous in the close confines of the carriage and her hands traveled over the hard muscles as though they were hers alone.

  In counterpoint to her urgency, he kissed her with a slowness that deliberately stoked fires already burning out of control. His mouth was delicious temptation to her, possessive and demanding, moving across her lips with enough pressure she felt an answering heat spread deep inside her. His mouth slowly parted hers, his tongue sliding into her mouth in seductive suggestion. She felt the hardness of his arousal on top of her, finding herself hungry for that same slow penetration.

  She reached up to touch his hair, thick, black, and silky, always worn too long for fashion. His skin beneath her fingers was bursting with vigor, bronze and taut over high cheekbones, strong nose, and powerful chin. His eyes, so gray and unreadable, melted her resistance. She reveled in the muscled body, the wide shoulders and strong, perfect torso, wondering how she had ever lived without the feel of his skin next to hers, suddenly as necessary to her as breathing. She wanted to dissolve into him, always—for the rest of her life.

  The carriage rolled on. Continuing to play with her lips, her tongue, Strathmore deftly moved her back to his lap. As if by magic, he pulled the thin shift from her body and over her head, rocking her gently, savoring the movement of her breasts against him.

  “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” There was a hardness in his voice that had not been present moments before. He was transfixed by her nakedness, caressing her flesh, taking her nipples between his fingers and then tantalizing her with his tongue upon them.

  Julia could say nothing, her body speaking for her. She moved from the waist down, slowly back and forth, in sensuous, barely perceptible movements that seemed inborn. With the same velvet undulations, his hands made her skirt and petticoats disappear into a shimmer on the carriage floor. Unable to wait any longer, she pushed her breasts onto his chest, the lower half of her body enticing him with its rhythm as her hand found his rampant erection.

  Raising herself enough so she could straddle his thighs, she lowered herself, eyes shut, slowly onto his hardness.

  “This is right, no matter what,” he said softly as she clung to him, waves of pleasure suffusing her body. He thrust upward at the same time as he exerted a downward pressure on her hips with his palms. His hard rigid length filled her, the only sensation that mattered, obliterating everything else in the universe.

  He licked her lips and lightly caressed her nipples as he forced her wider with a slow upward movement, his legs flexing as he lifted her weight. Julia moaned, her head flung back, lifting herself so that she glided with his erection, controlling the rhythm of withdrawal and penetration. With panting breaths, she laced her fingers into the silk of his hair, on the precipice of explosion when his fingers sought the sweetness between her thighs.

  He circled her pulsing core as though he had all the time in the world, and Julia thought she would expire, muffling her throaty sobs of pleasure until the sensual patterns of his fingers increased with each of her sighing exhalations. She raised herself one last time, breasts outthrust to his seeking tongue, before she lowered herself on her knees, dissolving on a held breath.

  Her pleasure sounded deep in her throat and rose from her parted lip
s in a sighing moan but Strathmore began the rhythm again just as another climax threatened. His hard length robbed her of breath as he drove in deeply and then withdrew, with a slow friction so exquisite she knew she would die. She clutched his shoulders for balance as he withdrew, leisurely, from her body once more. The pattern continued, the measured penetration, the easy withdrawal. Then the tempo built in tandem with the growing tension in the muscles of his shoulders, until at last his hips drummed against her. Julia urged him on with mad words of pleading and pleasure.

  The orgasm crested and crashed down over her body while his hips rose to meet hers, pulsing inside her with a ferocity that was exquisite until he suddenly lifted her from him and exploded, calling her name in a voice raw with passion.

  Their harsh breathing drowned out the rolling of the cobblestones beneath the carriage. With heads resting on the back of the cushioned seats, they turned to look at one another. His hand reached up to push her hair out of her eyes.

  Julia inched closer to him, nestling her head against his chest, one arm reaching around his waist. It was a simple gesture but freighted with more meaning than she wanted to admit. It spoke of intimacy, of trust and, horrifyingly, of love.

  She loved Strathmore, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  He gathered her more tightly into his arms, drawing the blanket from the carriage floor to wrap around her. He kissed her throat, her lips, her eyelids, and her forehead, finally returning to her mouth. In silence, they sped toward London together.

  Chapter 15

  Julia was happier than she had any right to be. Strathmore carried her into his town house through the carriage house, although they were both in a state of undress. Baxter looked on imperviously, standing aside as his master, with his exotic peculiarities, requested bathwater and luncheon served in his rooms within the hour.

  With her flushed cheeks warm against Strathmore’s shoulder, Julia felt suddenly at home, as far away from her grief and fears as she could be. In the cocoon of the fortress that was Strathmore’s town house, the daguerreotype, her sister’s death, and Faron seemed as far away as a remote continent. While a dark cloud darkened the horizon, it remained in the distance.

  The days that followed were magical. Although Julia doubted she would ever learn everything about Alexander Strathmore, there was a growing but fragile understanding between them. Their never quiescent desire hung over them like a sensual fog, trapping them in its thrall. In only three days, they had coupled in virtually every room of the town house, disinclined to restrict their passion to the night. In the library she had shamelessly enticed him to sweep aside her skirts and take her bent over the settee. In the salon, while she was trying to demonstrate her lamentable music skills, he had spun her around on the piano bench and driven her to the edge of madness with his mouth as he knelt between her legs. And the evening before, they had not survived the first dinner course before dismissing the footmen and—Julia flushed at the memory.

  Unbidden, she remembered how Strathmore had undressed her on the daybed that morning, stopping her laughing protestations by slipping her blue kid slippers and pale stockings from her legs with languorous ease. Everything was forgotten as the watery London sun warmed the room. Julia had helped him tug his shirt over his head and watched with the admiring eyes of a lover as he leaned over to pull off his riding boots. His broad shoulders and long torso were bronzed from exotic climes and, when he playfully sprawled across her lap, she stroked the tautness of his stomach.

  “You are the one who is beautiful,” she murmured, her fingers tracing the hardness of his biceps and pectorals. There was still a hint of doubt in her voice, that a man like Strathmore would find her intriguing.

  His gray eyes gazed up at her intently. “Hardly”—he grinned—“when compared to your loveliness, which, for whatever mysterious reason, you continue to deny.”

  Julia blushed. She adored being with him, and didn’t bother to hide her delight in basking in his attention.

  “Let me enumerate the ways, in case I’ve been remiss.” He reached up to caress her bare arm. “Your eyes are the blue of a tropical pool, your lips as soft as that pillow over there,” he pointed carelessly in the direction of the down-stuffed settee. “And your form, well, where do I begin?” he said with a salacious glint in his gaze.

  Julia shook her head. “Mercifully, you decided to spend your life as a traveler and explorer because, dear Strathmore, you would never make a poet. I give you leave to stop trying before you embarrass both of us further.”

  “Did I mention that you are formidably intelligent as well as inexpressibly lovely?” he asked, continuing to grin up at her, well aware of her discomfort but disinclined to leave off. Julia Woolcott was beautiful—and she was his.

  She stroked the hardness of his chest, with a small frown. I thought you detested women who spent their time with their heads in books.”

  He caught her wrist in his hand. “But most bluestockings of my acquaintance don’t look like you.”

  “Terrible man!” She wondered exactly what most of the women of Strathmore’s acquaintance did look like. “Were there many?” she blurted out.

  Strathmore pretended not to understand. “Many what?” His thumb stroked her wrist enticingly.

  “Women.” Watching his face closely, it struck her anew that his experience would be vast, given his demonstrable skill at lovemaking, his knowledge of her body—women’s bodies to be more exact—prodigious. The previous night had produced an exemplary lesson in diverse sexual positions, culled from the translation she had found in Strathmore’s private library, the compendium to which Felicity Clarence had referred with such appetite that night at Eccles House. A procession of dusky beauties, harem slaves, and bored expatriate wives paraded before Julia’s eyes. “I shouldn’t be so naïve, should I?” she amended in self-defense. “Your recent translation of the ancient Sanskrit text, for example,” she murmured, still blushing at the memory of what they had done.

  “I am merely the translator and in no way lay claim to having actually tried all of the variations suggested by the original text.” He gave her an open smile. “Last night we were merely improvising.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” she said, a flicker of doubt in her gaze.

  “But pleasurable?”

  “Need you even ask?” Julia trailed a hand down his chest. “I expect that I shall simply have to accept your rather adventuresome past.”

  “I spend much of my time at work.” Strathmore’s response was scrupulously honest; the women, and there had been enough on several continents, were suddenly a faceless, numberless pageant. “As a younger son, I was fortunate not to have been led into the marriage mart. My brother had the honor and duty to marry well and produce the requisite heirs, which he has done quite splendidly.”

  “Fortunate man,” she said drily.

  His gaze swept her form, lingering on her breasts and slender waist covered in the wisp of silk that he had left her. “You did not marry,” he said.

  “I already explained why.” She felt his hand still on her wrist. “In truth, I never felt the urge, having been curiously content at Montfort.” The image of Montfort appeared and as quickly disappeared. “And so here we are,” she said, dropping a quick kiss on his nose, wishing to change the subject. Strathmore did not require much prodding, drawing her face close to his before finishing what he had started with his usual profligate and irresistible enticements.

  The recollection sent a flush through her body from her head to her toes. Sitting off the small balcony to the back of Strathmore’s private rooms, she lounged on a chaise, a book on her lap, as he entered the intimate enclosure. Her eyebrows rose in inquiry when he dropped into a chair with unself-conscious grace.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he said with a grin, crossing his arms beneath his head and looking at her with a benign expression. She closed the book on her lap. Worry flickered to life at his choice of words. The unexpected, she had rec
ently learned, was rarely a good thing. For the past four days they had been keeping reality at bay, selfishly using the time together to build a world of their own creation, one in which grief, fear, and the past had no place. The exigencies of their situation hung in abeyance for the moment.

  “Please let me thank you in advance,” she responded lightly, keeping the anxiety from her voice.

  “There is a special delivery for you. I’ve had Baxter put the parcels in the salon—where there is a maximum of light from the bow windows,” he continued enigmatically. “Intrigued?”

  Eager to maintain the air of lightheartedness, Julia sprang from her seat and sped through the double doors. Aware that Strathmore sauntered behind her, she burst into the salon. The familiar mountain of boxes greeted her, incongruous amidst the tender green and soft pinks of the room. She clapped her hands in delight and twirled around to fling herself into Strathmore’s arms.

  “My camera apparatus,” she said. “How can I ever thank you?”

  Strathmore kissed the top of her head. “Don’t get me started,” he said roguishly.

  “Maybe I will,” she said, reveling in the security of having Strathmore take care of her although she knew it was imprudent of her to do so. One day, the house of cards they were so happily constructing would be pulled down by the force of Faron’s evil will. As it was, they were simply waiting until the time was ripe to engage the devil himself. Julia buried her head in Strathmore’s shirt front, inhaling his scent, willing the daguerreotype image she had secreted in her trunks to disappear, banishing it from her mind’s eye.