“I’m not one of your girlish fantasies, Lucy. I’m not your tragic and noble Captain Doom. I’m a man. Flesh and blood. Cut me and I bleed. Provoke me and I strike back. I’m fully capable of taking what’s offered me for my own selfish satisfaction. Fully capable of compromising a foolish girl who’s had too much champagne to consider the consequences of her actions.” Lucy would have almost sworn she heard a hint of a plea in his harsh words. “Trust me. You’d be better off passing your lonely nights with your precious shadow of a ghost than with me.”
Lucy refused to shrink before his rebuff. “I’ve spent my entire life with the shadow of a father and the ghost of a mother. I need someone I can touch. Someone warm. Someone real.”
“Oh, that’s bloody rich!”
Gerard clenched his teeth against a despairing laugh. Before he’d met Lucy, he’d felt as ephemeral as her Captain Doom, nothing more than a murky shade of the man he’d once been. But with this woman standing so boldly before him, her delicate jaw set with determination, her silky hair tumbling from its gold fillet, he felt every inch a man. Rushing blood and straining flesh, fraught with all of its mortal perils. His pulse roared in his ears, pounded a temptation in his aching groin.
He might have been able to resist its siren throb had Lucy not chosen that moment to forsake her stubborn pride. She lowered her smoky eyes and whispered, “I’m not asking for any promises.”
He caught her to him with reckless ferocity, knowing this might be his last chance to extract one or both of them from a silken snare of disaster. “What are you asking for? This?”
He collapsed against the door, legs splayed, and pinned her between his thighs, lowering his head to tangle his tongue with hers. He thrust roughly into the warm, wet recesses of her mouth in a crude imitation guaranteed to challenge her innocence. She whimpered against his lips and grasped his forearms as if to deny the sensation of falling.
His mouth plundered a ruthless path from her lips to her ear. His voice dropped to a ragged whisper. “Was that what you came here for, my sweet little mouse? Or was it this?”
Sinking his teeth gently into her earlobe, he filled his palms with her backside and rubbed his hips against the softness of her belly. She gasped as he forced her to acknowledge the full measure of his desire and the high stakes of her surrender.
Still cupping her bottom, he leaned his head back against the door and surveyed her through his lashes, raking his gaze down her shuddering breasts with deliberate insolence.
Gerard expected her to slap him as he so richly deserved. Expected her to gather her icy composure and coolly denounce him for the vulgar commoner he was. Expected her to burst into tears and run screaming for Smythe.
What he did not expect was for her to cup his face in her cool hands and press her lips to his with a loving fervency that crumbled the last of his defenses.
Shamed by her selfless tenderness, Gerard gentled his grip, running his hands up her slender back.
“You’re drunk,” he muttered against her lips, hating himself for reminding her.
“I’m tipsy,” she whispered.
“I’ll take advantage of you,” he warned.
“Promise?”
She looked so hopeful that a choked laugh escaped him. He smoothed her hair away from her face, held captive by the earnestness in those incredible eyes. She had only tonight to love him, he thought. She would have a lifetime in which to hate him.
Driven by that realization, he backed her toward the bed in a dance as old as time itself. Once learned, its steps were never forgotten.
Lucy felt herself tumbling headlong into some sweet abyss, as dangerous as it was seductive, her fall broken only by Gerard’s arms and the scratchy softness of the quilt beneath her knees. They knelt on the bed, face-to-face. The intensity of his gaze sobered her.
Afraid she would start quaking with fear, she reached to extinguish the lamp.
Gerard stilled her hand. “No. I like the light.”
It was then that Lucy saw the tarnished candlestick and neat row of candles kept next to the lamp, insurance against the shadows of night. The sight inexplicably touched her. She suspected Gerard didn’t like the light nearly as much as he hated the darkness.
Gerard drew the fillet from Lucy’s hair. As the silky mass cascaded around her shoulders, the lamp flame seemed to flicker and pale as if she had absorbed its incandescence. Light filtered through her hair, burnished her skin to opalescent pearl, sifted the white of her dress to ethereal gauze. Gerard realized that the lamp flame was but a paltry imitation. Lucy was the embodiment of light. Shimmering. Quicksilver. Elusive.
Gerard buried his hands in her hair. The ashen skein slipped through his fingers like moonbeams.
His hands tightened into fists as he gazed into her misty eyes. He’d been a creature of the darkness for too long. The light he craved was now his enemy. It was too harsh, too revealing. He couldn’t bear for her brightness to illuminate his vulnerability, the rawness of his need.
Breathing an oath, he killed the lamp himself, then leaned against the headboard and drew Lucy into the cradle of his thighs until her back was wedged against his chest. It seemed fitting that he should come to her this way—a faceless lover in the dying firelight. His arms circled her from behind, holding her steady when she squirmed in protest.
“But, Gerard, I don’t under—”
“Hush.” He rubbed his cheek against her temple, soothing her like a child. “Let me take care of you. It’s my job. Remember?”
As she ceased her wiggling, the softness of her backside molded itself to his aching flesh. He rolled his eyes and sucked in a shallow breath. He had thought he knew all there was to know of torture, but this mingling of delight and deprivation was a taste of heaven and a blast of hell, a torment beyond any he had known before.
Until he began to touch her.
Lucy had spent almost twenty years building her prickly shell of reserve, yet Gerard cracked it with nothing more than a few artful strokes of his fingertips. They probed her temples, skated down the column of her throat, caressed the fluted valleys above her collarbone.
“I told you once,” she said breathlessly, “that I don’t like to be touched.”
“And I told you,” he replied, tasting the sensitive whorl of her ear with the tip of his tongue, “that you were lying.”
He proved his accusation with another foray of his magical hands. A man’s hands, roughened and callused from a lifetime of hard work. Lucy was hypnotized by their downward glide as he lowered the bodice of her gown, dragged down the delicate puffed sleeves of her chemise, exposing her small, pink-tipped breasts.
Her first instinct was to moan with shame and cover her breasts with her hands. But Gerard, her bodyguard, her protector, did it for her, shielding them from the flickering firelight with his sun-darkened fingers. Lucy shivered with mingled delight and mortification as she realized he was watching over her shoulder, sharing the provocative sight of their mingled flesh.
Her breasts fit the nest of his palms as if they had been made for him. They flushed, fevered by his touch. He teased her nipples to aching buds, circling, stroking, then gently tugging until Lucy felt a kindred tingling between her thighs. Pleasure and need rippled through her. A helpless whimper escaped her. She arched against him, pressing her yearning softness instinctively to the unyielding ridge of flesh beneath her.
Fearing he might reach the limits of his endurance long before she did, Gerard growled deep in his throat and kissed the corner of her mouth. “Shall I stop touching you now? Is it too much for you to bear?”
She shook her head, then nodded, then shook her head again. He took advantage of her haze of confusion to gather the gossamer fabric of her skirt and petticoat beneath his palm. He eased them up, past the blush of her stockings, past the frivolous rosebuds embroidered on her garters, finally revealing the silken folds of her drawers.
“Vive la révolution,” he murmured hoarsely, blessing the French for the de
cadent fashions they’d foisted on proper young English ladies like Lucy Snow. At this juncture of his life he doubted even an iron chastity belt would have kept him from her.
The contrast between the prim purity of Lucy’s thighs and the lace-edged carnality of her undergarments maddened him, made his hands shake with hunger. He steadied them on her knees and felt a tiny shudder of panic rip through her muscles.
He nuzzled the pulse beating frantically at the side of her throat. “Don’t be afraid, Lucy. I’ll stop whenever you like. I swear I won’t touch you anywhere you don’t want me to.”
Gerard’s vow failed to ease Lucy’s terror. Because she wanted him to touch her everywhere. All of those sweet, forbidden places she’d never dared to touch herself, not even when in the throes of her darkest, hungriest fantasies. Not even when they ached and melted with anticipation. She wasn’t afraid of his touch. She was afraid she would humble herself beyond redemption by begging for it.
“Please …?”
At first she thought the hoarse plea had tumbled from her own lips, giving substance to her fears, but as Gerard’s powerful hands used all the gentleness at their disposal to coax her knees apart, she realized the entreaty was his own, offered without a trace of apology.
She watched her legs part for him as if they belonged to someone else, mesmerized by the wanton grace of her own surrender. His splayed fingers stroked the virgin cream of her inner thighs, each tantalizing foray edging his blunt thumbs nearer to the damp silk molded against her like a second skin.
A shudder rocked her to her very soul as his warm fingers unerringly found the thin slit in the expensive fabric and slipped beneath to cup her throbbing flesh.
After a lifetime of being denied intimacy, being touched there was the most exquisite and terrifying sensation Lucy had ever endured. She turned her face away and closed her eyes, no longer able to bear watching. Tears slipped silently down her cheeks to dampen the hairs of Gerard’s chest.
With infinite tenderness, his deft fingers parted her, stroked her, explored all but the most vulnerable of her satiny hollows. All the while, his thumb rubbed the sensitive nub buried in her nether curls, striking sparks of fiery pleasure that threatened to incinerate her.
Every nerve in her body began to hum like a piece of Waterford crystal poised to shatter beneath the wild, piercing climax of an aria. Her heels dug into the feather tick. Her hands kneaded his muscular thighs in mute plea. She turned her head from side to side, blindly seeking fulfillment, ease for the void she feared would swallow her whole if she could not soon appease it.
When she would have clenched her thighs together in desperation, Gerard hooked his ankles around hers to pin them open, baring her body, heart, and soul to his tender mastery.
Once when he’d been a younger and more foolish man, Gerard would have sought only his own pleasure. Now he sought only hers. He clenched his teeth, torn between anguish and ecstasy. He wanted to comfort Lucy, reassure her that he would be there to pick up the pieces when she splintered into a thousand glimmering fragments.
But what did he have to offer her? A passel of lies? Promises he could never keep? Vows that would be broken before dawn? He didn’t dare speak for fear of what might spill out. So he kept them both imprisoned in a world without words. Without truth. A world of darkness. A world of devastating pleasure and bittersweet denial.
She sprawled against him in wanton abandon, melting into his hand as he had always dreamed she would do. When her murmured litany escalated into piteous cries, he slipped one finger into the honeyed cocoon of her body, never ceasing the provocative ministrations of his thumb. She was softer than silk, hotter than fire. Her husky moan coaxed him to dare more. Two fingers. Her untried body received him with such unabashed generosity that he groaned and arched against her, tempted almost beyond the bounds of sanity to ease open the straining buttons of his trousers and bury more than his fingers in her. Much more.
Then he felt the tiny convulsions ripple out from her womb, gloving his fingers in searing heat. Gerard lost all conscious thought except for the presence of mind to lay his other hand over her mouth to capture the first of her breathless, broken cries in the cup of his palm.
Lucy shuddered again and again as Gerard’s hands, his clever, magnificent hands, held her hostage to delight. Rivers of pleasure poured through her in an unending torrent, sweeping the last of her inhibitions away. Her hips moved of their own accord, wildly seeking the mate of the spasms that raked her with such exquisite rhythm. Just when they began to abate, his thumb worked its dark magic again. Her scream would have awakened the entire household had Gerard not had the foresight to tighten his hand over her mouth.
She collapsed against his chest in a shivering heap, her hands groping for the sustenance of his warm skin.
Gerard wrapped his arms around Lucy and cradled her in his lap, his desire to protect never so strong as in that moment when she was at her most vulnerable. That moment when she gave him the gift of her trust although she’d never been more at risk.
He smoothed damp strands of hair from her flushed cheeks, realizing in an instant of ruthless clarity that he held in his arms the perfect tool to achieve all of his goals. He’d sown the seeds for scandal by dancing with her publicly at the winter masque. All that remained was to reap them by ruining her and abandoning her to face the Admiral’s wrath and the consequences of their folly alone. Consequences that might very well include his bastard.
The ease of it taunted him. The Admiral’s haughty daughter seduced by a servant. Her father’s worst expectations of her fulfilled. It would be a scandal of epic proportions to be savored by every gossipmonger in London.
Lucy emerged from her drowsy haze of satisfaction as Gerard’s arms tightened painfully around her. She could feel his arousal nudging her rump, unabated and unassuaged. A small, guilt-stricken sound escaped her. He had given everything, but asked nothing for himself. She turned in his arms, no longer content to be held as a child. She wanted him to make her a woman. His woman.
Her lips flowered against his chest, tasting the salty spice of his skin as she had longed to do for so long. Her hands crept through crisp hairs still damp from her tears, drifted upward to ease his shirt over the muscled breadth of his shoulders.
He caught her wrists in his hands. “No!”
Lucy recoiled from the harsh warning, gazing up at him in bewilderment. Conflicting emotions warred in his eyes, as if he wrestled with some dark demon visible only to him. An all too familiar feeling of dread blossomed in her belly. No matter the outcome of the battle, she feared she would be the loser.
His tormented gaze raked her face, then dropped to flirt voraciously with her bare breasts. There was something different about his eyes, some mercenary flicker that made Lucy painfully conscious of the gown bunched around her waist, her crooked garter, the stocking collapsed at her ankle. Something that made her cheeks burn with shame at her disheveled nudity. A tendril of panic wove through her desire.
“What is it, Gerard? What did I do?”
His grip on her wrists softened. His eyes darkened with a bleak regret that made her heart quail. “Nothing. You’ve done nothing. Which is exactly why you should go now. Before it’s too bloody late.”
His fingertips grazed her cheek in the ghost of a caress before he stood, dumping her from his lap to the rumpled quilt. He tugged his shirt closed, his profile implacable in the dim light. Only moments before his hands had been adept enough to melt her trepidation to pleasure, skilled enough to keep that pleasure from becoming pain. Now they fumbled clumsily with the buttons of his shirt as if they’d turned to chunks of ice, devoid of all grace and feeling.
Gerard couldn’t afford to be gentle with her. He had no comfort left to offer either of them. He was too frustrated. Too near to the edge. One tender touch from her would push him right over the precipice and he wanted her badly enough to take her along for the fall without a qualm of conscience.
“We can discuss this in
the morning,” he said, his voice gruff with unspent passion. “When we’ve got all our wits about us.”
For the first time, Lucy allowed her gaze to linger on the gaping door of the wardrobe. On the yawning leather valise that had confirmed her worst fears the moment she’d stepped into the gatehouse.
She tugged the sleeves of her chemise over her shoulders and pushed her skirt down to shield her nakedness, possessed by a calm as fragile as the glassy surface of the sea after a raging storm. “You won’t be here in the morning, will you? Smythe as much as told me you’d been dismissed.”
“Dismissed?” Confusion touched his features, elusive in the dying firelight, then he shrugged carelessly. “Being dismissed is a hazard of my profession. If you do your job well enough, eventually you’re no longer needed.”
I need you.
The words hung unspoken between them, as tangible as the knot of longing wedged in Lucy’s chest.
As if to escape her challenging gaze, Gerard moved to the wardrobe and began dragging out his meager collection of well-worn garments, cramming them into the valise with no more care than Lucy would have taken in organizing her dressing table.
Smoothing her skirt, she rose to stand beside the bed. “Take me with you.”
Gerard’s hands faltered in the motion of wadding a cravat into an untidy ball. Lucy was willing to sacrifice everything for him—her reputation, her wealth, even the improbable but irresistible chance that her father might someday come to love her. The sharpened blade of irony twisted in his heart, giving him the unholy strength to do what had to be done.
“You should go, Miss Snow,” he said without turning around, knowing only too well that each cold word was like the jab of an icicle through her tender pride. “I’d hate for your presence here to cost me my references.”
He heard the padded sigh of her feet across the rough planks, felt a blast of wintry air against his nape. He rushed to the still swinging door to watch her running figure dissolve like a phantom into the swirling curtain of white.
He slammed his fist into the doorframe. Lucy had been right. He wouldn’t be there in the morning. He wouldn’t be there in an hour. No matter the cost of his haste, he couldn’t spend a minute longer than necessary within sight of Ionia’s gabled roof. If he dared, he knew he would find himself slipping into that decadent bower Lucy called a bedroom, smothering her sobs with his lips, and soothing her stricken pride beneath the hard, hungry thrusts of his body.
Thief of Hearts Page 18