‘Ooohhhh,’ she moaned breathily. The skin of his face was slightly bristly, although he’d looked clean shaven. It rasped in contrast to his tongue, which lapped, and his lips, which brushed petal soft.
‘Mmmhhm,’ he growled into her neck just below her ear. The sound sent vibrations through every nerve ending in her body, sending a message to the juncture of her thighs, where a completely delicious sensation was building. It was getting harder and harder to keep still. Her hips seemed to have developed a mind of their own.
She shuddered. And squirmed. And wondered what to do with her hands. If she let them have their way they would tear off her gloves so her greedy fingers could plunge into the thickness of Lord Deben’s black curls. Then she would push his head back down to her breasts, which were getting desperate for the attentions of that clever, wicked mouth.
Mouth. So far he had not gone anywhere near her mouth. He was teasing her. Tormenting her. Goading her to grab him by the ears and pull his face to hers so that she could know, at last, what it would feel like to be kissed by an experienced man.
So she clenched her hands into fists and rammed them into the sofa cushions, lest she gave way to this sensual torment and reveal how very desperate he was making her.
‘Miss Gibson.’
‘Hmmhh?’
‘Here endeth the first lesson.’
‘Wh-what?’ She opened her eyes, to find him looking down at her.
A horridly satisfied, smug look on his face.
Somehow she managed to sit up and push him away, though it took a few more seconds before she could gather her scattered wits enough to speak.
‘Thank you.’ Was that her voice? It sounded so hoarse and breathy at the same time. As though she had been running. Gracious heavens. Her legs most definitely felt as though she’d been running. All weak and trembly. Like a newborn lamb’s.
‘That was most...edifying,’ she croaked.
‘Indeed it was. And now for the second lesson.’
‘The second?’ Oh, no. She was not ready for any more of that sort of thing. Whatever had she been thinking, to ask a rake to teach her about seduction? What was it she’d thought about Miss Waverley—that she’d done the equivalent of poking her hand through the bars of a lion’s cage? Well, she had just opened the gate, walked right in and practically offered herself up to him for dinner.
And just look at him! All cool and calm and collected. Not a hair out of place. Not a wrinkle in his coat.
The contrast between them brought her quite suddenly, and bewilderingly, close to the brink of tears.
‘When you leave this room,’ he said quite sternly, ‘I want you to think about your waist, as you walk.’
‘My waist?’
‘Yes. If you think about your waist, as you walk, you will find your hips will sway, naturally. And men will watch you with interest. If you see one you like the look of, catch his eye.’
Oh, how very lowering. But at least his brutal reminder that he was only doing this to give her the ability to attract other men dealt with her fleeting emotional lapse. Had she not warned herself not to read anything romantic into this...this episode on the sofa?
‘Then look at his mouth,’ he said. ‘You know the potential for pleasure a man’s mouth can bring to your body now. Consider, will the touch of this man’s lips make your breasts tingle? Will the heat of his breath on your cheek send shivers of desire down your spine? Will his hands work your reins with skill, or will he fumble?’
Dear God, he’d known she felt like that?
Of course he did. He’d been with dozens of women. Scores of them, probably. And she had been making little mewing noises, and gyrating about, so it must have been obvious that his lips had been every bit as potent as he’d boasted. Chagrined, she averted her face.
He took her chin in his strong fingers and turned her back, so that she had no choice but to meet his dark and penetrating gaze.
‘Your face is so open,’ he said more gently. ‘No man could help but respond, without even perhaps knowing why. And then, Miss Gibson, you must lower your gaze and blush. Which you are doing very prettily, by the way.’
She tossed her head, freeing herself from his grip.
‘Hmmm,’ he mused. ‘That look won’t do. You ought rather to flick open your fan and cool your heated cheeks. Then look back at your prey over your shoulder as you walk away. I guarantee you will catch him watching your neat little behind.’
Dammit, but the fellow would have his tongue hanging out. Might she succumb to what she thought were real advances from some other man who would be bound to want her once he saw past the rather unprepossessing exterior?
What the hell had he started?
Hot jealousy at the thought of her responding to this faceless rival, as she’d just responded to him, scalded his guts and made them twist into a tortured knot. He should have been prepared for this. This, after all, was what had poisoned his parents’ marriage and made him so determined to avoid the unholy institution. He’d had his suspicions that he would be like his father, unable to tolerate a ‘fashionable’ marriage.
He got up and strode to the door, unlocking it with swift, impatient movements. He’d chosen Miss Gibson precisely because he did not believe she was capable of being ‘fashionable’ in the way that his mother had been. She placed too high a value on loyalty. On keeping her word. If she vowed in a church, before God, to keep only to one man so long as she lived, then that was exactly what she would do.
The fact that she’d just responded to him so sweetly, with such an intoxicating blend of passion and surprise, did not mean she was ready to experiment with another man. That display of chagrin, afterwards, was proof of it. She was such a little Puritan, she’d felt guilty.
He must concentrate on feeling flattered that he’d made such rapid progress with her seduction, rather than allowing groundless fears to spoil this marriage before he’d even embarked on it. Henrietta Gibson, he repeated to himself under his breath, would not permit any other man the same liberties he’d just taken with her.
But in any case, he wasn’t going to give any other man the chance to cut him out.
‘If you would be so good as to furnish me with a list of your engagements,’ he bit out, ‘I shall endeavour to find you, within the next day or so, and you can report your progress.’
Pride demanded that he mention their next meeting as though the timing of it was a matter of indifference to him. But in his heart he already knew he would find her tomorrow, wherever she was, and move the seduction on swiftly. Before she knew what was happening, she would be so deeply enmeshed in the sensual web he would weave around her that there would be no escape.
* * *
Once she’d told him of as many of her engagements as she could bring to mind, Henrietta peered past him into the corridor, making absolutely sure the coast was clear before leaving.
Think about her waist? How could she think about her waist, and swaying her hips, when all that filled her brain was the sudden coldness with which he’d dismissed her? One moment she could almost have imagined tenderness in his eyes. The next it was as though he couldn’t wait to be rid of her.
Yet, as she made her way back to the drawing room where she’d left her aunt and Mildred, she realised that she did not have to make any effort whatever to think about her body. It was still thrumming with the after-effects of her encounter with Lord Deben. She was drifting along the corridors in a kind of daze. She’d never drifted anywhere in her life. She was more likely to walk briskly, since she was generally so busy. There was always so much to occupy both her time, and her mind, in running Shoebury Manor for her father and seeing to the needs of all four of her brothers, that it would be a sinful waste of both to just drift.
However, it would be a useful accomplishment to cultivate while she was in town. I
t was probably a prerequisite to joining the ranks of the sort of women men found fascinating.
But the moment she tried to pin down exactly what it was that was making her legs incapable of proceeding in a business-like manner, they went all gangly and awkward.
Oh, bother it. She felt like a child trying to capture a bubble. The moment she touched upon the truth it disappeared in a disappointing spray of its component parts. She could classify her present state of being, by comparing herself to a harp-string, recently plucked, and still vibrating from the touch of the musician’s hand, but she could not, by effort of will, replicate the condition.
Though it was not entirely accurate to compare herself to a harp-string, anyway, because it had not been Lord Deben’s hands that had reduced her to this state, but his mouth. And that little sound he’d made, just beneath her ear.
Oh, heavens, but just the thought of that utterly masculine growl of pleasure made her legs go all languid again.
She drifted the rest of the way to her destination where she dropped down gratefully on to the sofa next to Aunt Ledbetter. She unfurled her fan. And as she waved it languidly before her heated cheeks, her mind began to clear a little.
That growl Lord Deben had made—it had been a sound of pleasure. She had not imagined it.
A sound of pleasure. No, more than that. He’d sounded like a man about to feast on some delicious confection, after having been deprived of any sustenance at all for some considerable time.
She fanned herself more briskly as it occurred to her that though he might have appeared cool and calm and collected, he had not been completely unmoved by their encounter.
A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. Even if it had been for only one fleeting moment, Lord Deben, a man renowned for only deigning to take the most beautiful women as lovers, had really been enjoying himself. With her.
Take that, Miss Waverley! He never kissed you. Nor wanted to, no matter how hard you tried to entice him.
Oh dear. It was very ignoble of her, but she just couldn’t help feeling positively jubilant. It wouldn’t matter if she never became the toast of the ton, now. Just knowing that she’d made an impact on a man who looked so hard that nothing could melt him was her own, personal and very secret triumph. Something she could hug to herself and examine at leisure.
Richard might not think she had what it took to survive in sophisticated society, but she had just had an intimate encounter with a notorious rake and emerged unscathed. If you didn’t count the wobbly legs.
Not only that, but she’d also, somehow, managed to make just the tiniest impact on him. Oh, she knew she could not possibly leave a lasting impression on a man that hard and world-weary. But for one moment, that moment when he’d made that very revealing little sound, she had most definitely found a chink in the cynicism which he wore like a coat of chainmail.
* * *
When her aunt decided it was time to leave she made a valiant attempt to drift to the waiting carriage. But a girl cannot drift when she’s on the verge of a fit of the giggles. And the harder she tried to apply Lord Deben’s admonition to think about her waist, the more ridiculous it became to think of herself as a siren. She was just plain, practical, rather tomboyish Miss Gibson. The possibility of her being able to lure some poor unsuspecting man to his doom with one sway of her hips struck her as being so absurd it was all she could do not to laugh out loud.
* * *
The trouble with becoming entangled with a rake, Henrietta discovered the next night as she was getting ready to go out, was that he planted such outrageous notions in her head that she could not help dwelling on them.
All that day, while out shopping, or paying social calls with her aunt and cousin, she had found herself watching the way men watched women and discovering to her shock that Lord Deben had been quite correct. A large number of them did, indeed, study a lady’s behind if he thought he could get away with doing so.
She twisted her upper body to peer at her own behind in the mirror. She had never been all that bothered about her behind before. She relied on a maid to make sure everything was correctly fastened up and tidy back there. But now it seemed she had neglected an aspect of her appearance that not even her aunt had deemed all that important.
He’d told her it was ‘neat’. She tugged the material of her gown so that it outlined her meagre curves, trying to see why he should describe it in such terms. There was not, she reflected, all that much of it. Perhaps that was what he had meant.
When he’d said it, she’d taken it as a compliment, but now she was not so sure. The men she had surreptitiously studied today had appeared to appreciate the behinds that had wobbled rather like silk-covered blancmanges just as much as the firmer ones.
No, she sighed, letting go of the folds of silk and gauze so that they draped naturally, there was no advantage in having a neat behind. He had merely been describing it, not complimenting it.
She studied her reflection in the normal way, face on, her spirits unaccountably depressed. She had begun to think that since Aunt Ledbetter had given her a hint about which styles and colours became her, she could claim to look...
She whirled away from the mirror in annoyance. Not even Richard had been tricked by her London finery. Just because she’d had a fleeting effect on Lord Deben, it did not mean she had suddenly become alluring. She was not a beauty and she never would be.
But at least tonight, at the Lutterworths’ soirée, there would be nobody present she particularly wished to impress. The Lutterworths would not presume to invite Lord Deben into their home, palatial though it was.
And it was ridiculous to attempt to impress a man like Lord Deben anyway. She was honest enough with herself to admit that it had been he she’d been thinking about as she’d preened and posed in front of the mirror. And intelligent enough to know that any attempt she might make to impress him would only make him laugh at her.
Though she shied away from considering why she should care if he did laugh at her.
Instead, she concentrated on feeling grateful that she would have at least one evening free from him. Even if she could not stop thinking about him, at least she would not have to deal with his person—and the effect he had on her.
* * *
But even telling herself quite sternly to put him out of her mind had not quite worked, because the moment she spotted a sofa amongst the furniture gracing the Lutterworths’ palatial dwelling, the entire episode with Lord Deben upon just such a useful article came flooding back with such force that her legs went all languid, her insides turned to mush and her progress across the room slowed to a sensuous drift.
At which point— ‘Well done, Miss Gibson. You have the walk down pat already.’
‘Lord Deben!’ Henrietta could not believe he was standing in front of her just as she’d been remembering the incredible sensations that he’d produced by nibbling all the way down the entire length of her neck.
Nor could she believe that his first words to her should be those of a schoolmaster praising a pupil.
‘Wh-what are you doing here?’
‘Seeking you out, naturally,’ he said, sweeping her a mocking bow.
Her face was burning. She felt as though he’d caught her doing something reprehensible.
‘No. No, I meant—that is, I never imagined when I told you I should be here tonight that the Lutterworths would have sent you an invitation.’
‘Why should they not?’
‘Well, because it just isn’t done to invite a member of the peerage into your home when you’ve made your fortune from pickles.’
‘You shall not slander Mr Lutterworth,’ he replied gravely. ‘He did not commit the social solecism of sending me an invitation.’
‘You mean you just...walked in?’
He laid his hand over his heart. ‘Ala
s, I fear I care nothing for the conventions. I have shamelessly used my rank as a kind of passport. Upon whichever door an earl knocks, you know, he will nearly always gain admittance.’
She’d managed to flick open her fan by now, with fingers that felt all thumbs, but no matter how diligently she employed it, it seemed only to drive the heat to other parts of her body. Which made her even more embarrassed.
Just then, a man whose face looked vaguely familiar approached them.
‘Excuse me, Miss Gibson, but we are engaged for the first dance.’
He held out his hand expectantly.
When she made as though to go to him, Lord Deben took hold of her hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm. She was startled to see that his face, which had looked so relaxed only moments earlier, was now set in a cold harsh mask.
‘I think you will find you are mistaken. Miss Gibson is engaged to me for the duration of the first set.’
Whatever protest the young man might have wanted to make was never uttered. With one last frustrated glance at Henrietta, her dance partner turned and scuttled away.
‘Do you know, I rather think I had agreed to dance with him,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I most definitely had not made any arrangement whatsoever with you for any part of tonight. I had not expected to see you for days.’
‘Whenever I am at any event you attend,’ he returned coldly, ‘you will make yourself available to me whenever I say so.’
‘That’s very high-handed of you. Besides, how am I supposed to dazzle dozens of men if you frighten them all off with one of those ferocious scowls of yours?’
‘Was it ferocious?’ He appeared surprised. Then he shrugged. ‘A show of jealousy on my part will only serve to stoke curiosity to fever pitch,’ he offered by way of explanation. ‘Since I have never, ever displayed it before.’
Harlequin Historical February 2013 - Bundle 1 of 2: Never Trust a RakeDicing With the Dangerous LordA Daring Liaison Page 12