Not Proper Enough (A Reforming the Scoundrels Romance)

by Carolyn Jewel

  “Chocolate in the evening makes me ill.” She drew his cup toward her. “I’d rather have coffee. Do you mind?”

  “I do.” That response he made with full knowledge of the effect it would have on her. Which was to bristle at him, eyes flashing. He schooled himself to stillness, but when she looked at him like that he wanted to put her on her back and fuck her until neither of them could breathe.

  “You should have asked me what I wanted.” She pushed her chocolate to him before she picked up his coffee and drank from it. “Mm. This is excellent.”

  “The part of the man does not suit you.” He couldn’t help provoking her, but what else could he do? He knew damned well that if he attempted a traditional courtship, she’d resist with all her considerable will. She’d turn to someone like Aigen purely to provoke him.

  She made a face. Eugenia, it seemed to him, delighted in provoking him. “I am an independent woman now. I play whatever part I wish.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Why not?” She returned him a serene gaze. He rather thought she’d learned that particular reaction from Miss Rendell. “If I prefer to choose my own beverages according to what I should like at the time, then I shall, and you cannot gainsay me.”

  He contemplated taking the coffee back and placing his mouth exactly where hers had been. She’d probably pour the chocolate on his head if he did that. “I see all now.”

  “At last.” She drank more coffee. His coffee.

  “My mistake with you from the start was a failure to treat you as if you were a man.”

  “One mistake among many.” Her white cashmere shawl draped down to her elbows, so carelessly sensual. He wanted to kiss her from her shoulders to the tops of her gloves, and then peel off the gloves and kiss his way down to her fingertips.

  “First you take my coffee, next you’ll demand a cigar and a bottle of gin.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” She lifted her chin. “Perhaps I shall. A little blue ruin in the evening might be just the thing.”

  “It would serve you right if I got you drunk and took scandalous advantage.”

  She stared at him, wide-eyed, then burst out laughing and dropped the needle on her lap. While she searched for and found it, she said, “Dear Lord, you can be amusing when you wish.”

  “I am a man of varied talents, as you will discover.” Besides the two of them, there was hardly anyone left in the saloon. Servants, an old man who’d fallen asleep in a chair by the fire, and two other gentlemen. Not of the Ton, he thought. The next act must have already started. He plucked at the tear in his coat. “Speaking of your feminine accom-plishments?”

  “I’ll have to repair the hole first.” She squinted at his lapel, glanced at him, then looked back at his coat. “I won’t darn it tightly. That way your valet can easily pick out this thread and use a better one.”

  “Perhaps I’ll just buy a new coat.” The last remaining gentlemen paid up and walked out of the saloon, leaving them with the servants and snoring old man.

  “Wasteful of you.” She took one more sip of his coffee before she scooted close enough to slip her hand underneath his lapel. He uncrossed his legs and turned his torso toward her. “Keep your head back.”

  “Anything you desire of me, darling.” His position, quite happily, as it turned out, gave him additional opportunity to study her bosom. She hadn’t an extravagant shape, but the curve of her breasts was in no way inadequate, and he was a man who did like a woman’s breasts. Notwithstanding his appreciation of her in evening dress, he wanted to see her nude, to hold her naked in his arms—if they were in the Turkish room at Bouverie, all the better—and suckle and lick and discover where she was most sensitive. Did she prefer a gentle touch? Did she mind a rougher hand? God help him if she did.

  He prayed she might like that.

  Her needle flashed, and he amused himself with imagining her naked breasts in his hands and mouth and reflected images of him touching her in just that way. While she stitched, he tapped the medallion now hanging from his watch chain with his other fob. “To think such a small thing brought us to this pass.”

  “What do you mean?” She used a tiny pair of scissors to snip the thread then tied another knot in the thread hanging from the needle.

  He smoothed a finger over the surface. The metal was warm. “This. Cousin Lily’s medallion. The magic drew me out of Camber’s box in time to prevent you from a very uncomfortable situation.”

  Still concentrating on her needlework, she didn’t look up, but he saw her forehead crease. “The magic isn’t protective.” He could see a smile curving her mouth. “The medallion brings lovers together, as you well know.”

  Fox took a moment before he replied. “I believe that was my point. I wonder how soon you’ll be inexorably drawn to me. Again.”

  She continued to sew. “I fear it’s broken or has lost its magic. I’ve worn it diligently and slept with it beneath my pillow, yet I’ve not been thrown together with a gentleman who makes my heart race, met no mysterious strangers. No beaux send me letters declaring their love. No dreams of my future husband.”

  “What?” He waggled his eyebrows. “The medallion causes you to dream of your future beloved, and you’ve not once dreamed of me? You’re right. The deuced thing is broken.”

  “My dear man, I don’t have dreams about you. I have nightmares.”

  “You wound me.”

  She laughed.

  “What sort of man could win your heart?” She hesitated, and he cursed his clumsiness because he knew the answer. She had found the man she loved. “Someone like Robert,” he said softly. “Honorable. Amiable. Intelligent. A man everyone likes. Never out of sorts. Never cross.”

  “Not never.” She smiled—sadly, he fancied. “But yes, rarely.”

  “I am sorry for your loss. You know that, I hope.”

  Eugenia looked away, then back at him, and he saw the sadness there. “He used to leave me notes to find. I never knew where or when, and some he’d hidden weeks or even months before, if he’d tucked them somewhere clever. I’d open a drawer and there’d be a scrap of paper, and he’d have written a poem for me or related his memory of a time I’d made him smile or laugh or weep.”

  “That sounds like him.” He could see Robert penning a note like that, then hiding it for his wife to find some future day.

  She went back to sewing. He caught a flash of gold as she held the button to his coat and began to reattach it. One day, he thought. One day, the two of them would once again sit in just such a domestic scene, but in his version of the future they were husband and wife. The image felt so real to him, so inevitable that he had to remind himself no such thing had yet happened. She finished with the button and brought out her tiny scissors again.

  “He wouldn’t want you to be alone. Robert.” He paused until he was certain his voice wouldn’t sound thick. “He wouldn’t want that for you.”

  She snipped the thread and sat back, eyeing his coat. She gave his chest a pat, with no thought, sadly, to the intimacy of the gesture. “No.”

  Impolitic words rose up. Marry me, Ginny. Marry me, and you won’t be alone. He did not say them.

  She sighed. “For a very long time after he died, I thought I’d never love another man.”

  “And now?” His heart gave a hard thump. Had Aigen pressed his suit with her while he was away?

  “I know I’ll never love anyone the way I loved Robert.” She packed away her sewing kit, and his eyes followed the line of her cheek, the sweep of her throat. With a sideways glance at him, a careless one, she said, “I’d love another man in a different way.” She dropped her etui in her reticule before she looked up. “Because he would be a different man, you understand. Not Robert. Someone else, and he would be worthy of me and I worthy of him in an entirely different way.”

  He saw all his hopes for the future turning to ash, because she wasn’t ready to see him as her husband. What if she was thinking of Aigen? “You intend to remarry?”


  She gave him a quick grin. “I’d like to.” Her smile faded. “In the vaguest sort of way.” Her hands fell to her lap and he let out a relieved breath. “I liked being married; I would like that again. But I’ve no one in mind.”

  “No?” He heard himself speaking even as a part of him warned him he was making a mistake. Too late. The words he’d held back before flew into the air between them. He took her hand in his. “Then marry me. Marry me, Ginny, and we’ll learn how best to love each other.”

  She folded her hands together, amused, and he didn’t know whether to be grateful, insulted, or crushed. “Now, why would I do that?” She touched the medallion hanging from his watch. “You’ve this now. It’s inevitable that you’ll find the woman of your heart.”

  “True.”

  She touched his other fob, the one he’d already had fastened to his watch, and turned it over. His initials were embroidered on the front of the rectangle. On the other side, the one she was looking at now, appeared the words With Love. “I’ve never seen you without this.”

  “It was a gift.”

  “From someone you cared for deeply. Who was she? Not Addolorata, surely. Or was it?”

  “My mother.” He saw she’d not expected that. “She made that for me shortly before she passed on. I was quite young at the time. An infant.” He touched it, too, and their fingers brushed. “Camber gave it to me when I went away to school.”

  She looked into his face and, slowly, caressed his cheek. He held his breath. “I wish you wouldn’t make it so difficult to dislike you.”

  This was an evening for indiscretion, for more impolitic words spilled from him. “Come back to Bouverie with me. We’ll visit the Turkish room and finish what we began.”

  “I’d best get back to Hester.”

  He tightened his fingers around hers. “Then, meet me there after this interminable opera is over.”

  “Fenris.”

  “I’ll give you a key.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  AS SHE FOLLOWED FENRIS BACK TO CAMBER’S BOX, Eugenia lost her hold on the edge of her shawl and had to twist back to catch the trailing end. By the time she’d done that, she had to hurry to catch him up and then walk faster than she liked to keep pace with his determined stride. She took two steps to every one of his. “Fenris.”

  “Don’t call me that.” The words were sharp enough to cut. “To you, when we are alone, I am Fox.”

  She put a hand on his arm and pulled. “My lord.”

  He whirled on her. “What?”

  She took a breath, and his eyes flicked to her bosom. She did not want him to be angry with her, but she wasn’t about to dance to his tune, either. “Please slow down.”

  He stared at her, hostile, and she glared back, breathing with her mouth open. He flushed. “Forgive me.” He started walking again, more slowly this time.

  “Why are you angry? Because I won’t do that with you?”

  “I am not angry.” He stopped walking and briefly closed his eyes. When he opened them, he spoke softly and without directly meeting her gaze. “I never say the right thing to you. I, who’ve never failed to seduce any woman I choose, never say what I ought where you are concerned.”

  After a moment spent unable to parse out what he meant, she frowned hard. “I suspect your powers of seduction are rarely tested.”

  He glanced at her, and that was uncertainty she saw in his gaze. One of the candles in the wall sconce guttered out and left them in a dimmer light. “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

  “Both.” She touched the button she’d reattached to his coat and wished she understood him better. She wished never to have to guess what he was thinking.

  “You prove my point. You say you want a proper man—some vague fellow who meets some even vaguer standard, one I’ll warrant you couldn’t articulate for all the gold in Christendom.” His eyes darkened, and what she saw there made her think of mirrored rooms and wicked, wicked pleasure. “But, darling Ginny, you respond best to me when I’m not proper enough. By God, you do. Don’t deny it.”

  She didn’t dare answer. She was very much afraid he was right. She didn’t want him to be, but he was.

  He let out an exasperated sound. “Would you come away with me if Miss Rendell weren’t here?”

  “You’re impossible.” She dropped his arm and walked away. He followed. How had things got so out of her control? “We aren’t lovers, you and I.”

  He came even with her and stopped her with an arm to her elbow. All her butterflies came back. “With all due respect, that’s a lie.”

  “There is a difference between a single past encounter and a mutual expectation of future ones.”

  He snorted.

  Eugenia plucked at her shawl. She was out of her depth here. “I can’t be your lover.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I couldn’t love you.” The wall behind him was white, but fingers from all the hands that had touched the surface had left smudges on that expanse of paint.

  “How do you know?”

  They were at the stairs that led to the entrance to Camber’s box, and she headed up them. Fenris took two steps up to her one, turned, and blocked her way. Remarkably, nothing changed in his expression. He seemed as calm, and two breaths from bored, as ever, but he bit off the syllables of her name. “Mrs. Bryant. How do you know?”

  She hoped by all that was holy he couldn’t tell she was taken aback, both at what she’d said and by his reaction to it. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost the keen edge of her dislike. He’d defended Hester against Dinwitty Lane. He’d made her laugh. Even tonight. When he came into a room, every man but him disappeared. “I know it. That’s all.”

  “You think I still hold you in contempt.”

  “No, I don’t.” She tried to walk past him but he stopped her with just the sound of his voice.

  “For God’s sake, Ginny.” He kept one hand on the wall, but his fingers curled into a fist. “You were married to my best friend, the finest man I’ve ever known.” Anger crept into his dark and velvet words. “Do you really think I could despise the woman he loved?”

  She regarded him in silence. He waited her out, waited for some acknowledgment of that confession. What was she to say to that after so many years of resenting him for the awful things he’d said about her? “I don’t know what you felt then. I know only what you said. But that does not signify. It doesn’t. I’m not that young girl. You’re not that young man. That’s all past now. They were your words, and I didn’t know the man who said them any more than you knew the girl you said them about.” She went around him and started up the stairs.

  He grabbed her arm and joined her on the step. Every bit of the charm he’d shown earlier was gone. “I do not despise you. You do know that, don’t you?”

  She stared directly into his face. She wasn’t afraid of him, not at all, and she might have been of another man. “Listen to us. Fox. This is ridiculous. Let’s not fight. All that’s in the past. It hardly matters anymore.”

  “Agreed.”

  She didn’t trust his quick assent, but she summoned a smile anyway. “Excellent.”

  “Yes.” He came down one step. “And given that, why can’t we be lovers in the present?”

  For a moment, words failed her completely and all she managed to say was, “Because.”

  “Why, Ginny?”

  She plucked out some of the very few emotions she did understand among all those swirling in her. “I would feel as if I were betraying Robert. That’s why.”

  “Us being lovers betrays Robert? But not your remarrying some vague, dull fellow?”

  “I don’t know you. I don’t know you at all. Not really.”

  He moved closer, effectively pinning her to the wall unless she chose to push him. She didn’t, though. Why not? Why on earth not? “What do you want to know about me?”

  “I won’t be bullied.”

  “Bullied? Hardly. I’ve asked a fair question. Wha
t do you want to know about me? Besides that I adore your hand on my cock?” He leaned closer. “God, Ginny, don’t do this. Don’t push me away just because you’re afraid of what you’ll feel.”

  She tugged her arm free and moved briskly up the stairs to the next corridor. He caught up, and she hurried toward the entrance to the box. In two long strides he was in front of her again. “Whatever you want. It’s yours.”

  “Fenris. Don’t.”

  “Let’s go somewhere private, you and I.” His eyes pinned her again. He lifted a hand, and she was momentarily breathless with the possibility that he would touch her, and why would she feel like that? She was mad to care an atom for Fenris. Mad, mad, mad.

  “You wouldn’t fall in love with me. You know you wouldn’t.” The walls she’d constructed to contain her opinion of him continued their slow erosion, and she was helpless to stop it from happening.

  He shook his head, smiling. “No, my darling Ginny, I wouldn’t fall in love with you. It’s too late to worry about the barren landscape of my heart. I’m already in love with you.”

  “You aren’t.”

  “Ginny.” He used that dark silk voice, and chills raced up and down her spine from all that she heard in the way her name left his mouth.

  “It’s too soon for me. I can’t fall in love yet. Not with you.”

  “Why not me?”

  “Not with anyone.”

  He backed away, but he was still watching her. Too carefully, she thought, and it was flattering and appalling to think why. “What are we to do? You and I?”

  “Return to our seats and enjoy the rest of the performance?”

  “Very well.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned a shoulder against the wall. He sent a lopsided grin her way. Her heart eased at the sight. She didn’t want him to be angry with her. “Or, we could stay here.”

  “No, we couldn’t.”

  He looked around. “I have been admiring this corridor. The stairs are of an extraordinary craftsmanship.” That made her laugh, and he continued to grin at her. “If this fine corridor is not to your taste, come away with me.” He tipped his head her direction. “I’ll take you someplace wicked. Indulge your every whim.”