by Stacy Reid
Nicolas could not speak, not with the fierce and complex emotions burning through him. “Thank you for listening, Maryann.”
She rubbed her nose on his, almost playfully. “Thank you for sharing.”
“I would like to take you sailing,” he said. “To stand on the deck as the boat powers through the churning waters, the fine ocean spray wetting your skin, the wind behind your back. The sense of freedom and joy is one I would love for you to experience.”
A soft smile touched her mouth. “And I would love to accompany you, Nicolas.”
He gently nudged her chin. “It is time for me to take you home. I can smell the rain on the air.”
Chapter Nineteen
Nicolas sounded…lighter, and she was incredibly glad she had risked so much to be with him tonight. A fine misting rain began to fall, and she hurriedly repinned her hat and lowered her veil. They slowly descended and made their way inside. Nicolas collected a large black umbrella, and once they were outside he opened it above their heads. The rain fell in earnest, and she inhaled, loving the dark scent of the earth and the grass.
They did not speak, simply walked closely together under the umbrella. It felt intimate, remarkably wonderful, and Maryann was glad he had not called for a carriage to be prepared. The rain heavily fell on the wide umbrella, wetting her clothes despite the covering, yet Maryann wouldn’t trade this moment for a dry carriage and a warming pan.
The darkness of the night, broken by a few gas lamps here and there, the starless sky, and the fog hovering about the city appeared magical to her instead of ominous. A lone carriage rattled past them, and Nicolas caged her to his side, his gaze watchful and alert until it passed by.
She tugged off one of her gloves, immediately feeling the chill of the air against her bare hand. Then she pushed it out, collecting the cold drops in her palm, turning her hand to let the water caress against her knuckles.
“I’ve always loved the rain. I think I am the only one in my family who sighs with pleasure when I see the overcast sky or hear the rumble of thunder. It is the absolute best time to snuggle into my bed or a large armchair and read,” she murmured, lowering her hand. “Sometimes I stand by my windows and watch as the rain falls to the ground, and against the leaves. I love hearing the sound of it on the roof.”
They slowed as they approached a large puddle. Maryann barely restrained her gasp when his hand snaked around her waist, lifted her, and walked through the puddle. Then he lowered her to her feet.
“You do know we could have walked around it.”
His lips tipped in a small smile. “And deny myself such a pleasure?”
By the time they crossed the third puddle, Maryann was giggling.
“You have a beautiful laugh. I enjoy hearing it.”
She couldn’t help it. Maryann faltered and peered up at him.
“Do not be so startled that I find you beautiful.”
She said no more as he drew her closer to his side, protecting her with the umbrella against the sleeting rain.
“Let’s get you home.”
They continued on, and whenever they encountered a puddle, he would lift her over them with masculine ease. By the time she reached her home, Maryann was breathless with want.
“My parents have gone to a ball. And Crispin is at his club.”
“It is still safer to enter from a side door. I’ll pick the lock if need be.”
Nicolas led her around to the gardens and opened a terraced door leading into the ballroom. She rushed from under the umbrella into the room and turned to face him. Rain ran in rivulets down his forehead, and his eyes gleamed with an emotion she was unable to decipher.
“Thank you for taking me into your confidence,” she said, hoping he would hear her above the patter of the rain and the soft rumbles of thunder.
He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Maryann closed her eyes, savoring the feel of his cold lips against her skin. His mouth disappeared, and when she opened her eyes, it was to see the back of him walking away. She gently closed the door, resting her forehead against the glass pane for a few seconds.
Maryann hurriedly left the ballroom, traversed the long, empty hallway and then the winding staircase to the second floor. An odd awareness went down her spine, and with each step, her heart pounded, not with alarm but with an unbearable shivering excitement.
At her door, Maryann closed her eyes and sent up a silent entreaty—please…please. She twisted the knob of her door and entered her chamber. She scented him first, and his flavor was one of wild, dark, beautiful fire. Her gaze found him unerringly. He stood by the window, the now-folded black umbrella held loosely in his hand and dripping water on the carpet. She did not care.
He leaned the umbrella against the wall and shrugged from his coat, walking to rest it on the fireguard by the fireplace. His hair was wet and clung to his forehead, his eyes piercing and so intent on her.
“I…heard a rumor that I was not brave enough to ask you about earlier,” she started.
“Ask me.”
“The gossip says that you are about to procure yourself a mistress.”
He froze. “It was a rumor I hinted at some days ago while visiting White’s.”
Everything inside her rejected the very idea. It made no rational sense, but she accepted the burning absurdity of her emotions. “To complete your persona of a libertine? Or because you need a woman?”
His brow lifted at her boldness. “It would be another scheme, to prove I have no attachment to a young lady of quality.”
“So, this mistress will be to protect me?”
“Yes.”
She softly scoffed.
“Do I detect derision?”
“Will this lady be a mistress in name only?”
He thought about this. “I had not decided when I dropped the hints here and there.”
“Don’t you dare!”
The words lashed from her before she thought about his plan in its entirety.
Raw peril coated the silence that fell in her bedchamber. He said nothing, and Maryann did not rush to fill the quiet, merely stared at the crackling fireplace, painfully aware of his gaze upon her.
“I dare not,” he quietly said. “Please be assured that scheme is now dismissed.”
A gust of wind swept through the room and she shivered.
“Are you cold?”
“Unbearably so.”
He looked at the dying embers in the hearth. “There’s no log to rekindle the fire.”
“The servants believe me to be at the ball. We are expected home in the morning. A servant will come up here at the break of dawn to rekindle the fire,” Maryann said.
“How are you going to keep warm until then?”
She smiled. “You are here, aren’t you?”
He closed his eyes for a long, silent minute, then turned to face the open windows. She waited, wondering if he was about to slip away once more. Thunder cracked and the rain sleeted. Reaching behind her, she closed the door with a soft snick. That sound seemed as if it echoed inside her chamber.
She toed off her shoes and padded softly…silently across the carpet. Her courage deserted her along the way, and she faltered. The small space between them felt like a vast chasm. A powerful need to touch him seized her, stealing her ability to breathe.
“Ah, Maryann, I wonder why there is nothing in this entire world but you that makes me happy?”
She grabbed that soft whisper and stored it in her heart.
He closed the window, shutting out the cold and the outside world. Then he faced her and held out his hand. Maryann stared at him, the dichotomy of such aching wants and fear freezing her in place. She looked up at him, and in his eyes she saw a beguiling mix of tenderness and savage desire that stole her breath.
A sudden blinding realization pie
rced her like a well-aimed arrow. “You waited for the day…you waited for yesterday to end.”
A glance at the clock revealed it to be six minutes after midnight. He had only come to her room after the new day began.
“I wanted no past between us when I take you.”
Her entire body vibrated with the awareness of him. “Take me?”
“Yes.”
“Take me where?”
Silence…such wicked silence.
“The instant I touch you, you’ll know.”
Oh God. He was planning on ravishing her, and she knew with every fiber of her being that she would allow him everything. A thrill coursed through her at the thought.
Maryann licked lips that suddenly felt dry. “Arianna is not here in your thoughts now?”
“Whenever I am with you, she… Revenge does not exist.”
Maryann’s heart cracked at the rough guilt heard in that admission. She overshadowed Arianna in his thoughts, and Maryann could find no joy it in, not when it seemed to wreck Nicolas. “I am sorry,” she gasped hoarsely.
“Do not be.” He took a step toward her. “It is a struggle to recall anything else that exists in my mind once I am with you. In truth, I am lost in you.”
“The prospect sounds terrifying for you.”
He cupped her cheeks with his powerful hands. “You obliterate even my darkest thoughts and replace them with sunshine and want and hunger and dreams of things I’ve never thought about. I do not like it.”
“I do!” she assured him, gripping his wrist and feeling the tripping of his pulse underneath her thumb.
He tucked a strand of wet hair behind her ear, his knuckles barely grazing her cheek. “It was a matter of honor and willpower to hold Arianna in my thoughts and speak of her yesterday when I was with you.”
Only a few minutes after midnight had passed but everything felt changed, as if they had entered a different world with unlimited possibilities. “And yesterday ended.”
He dragged her closer to him and dropped his forehead to hers. “The feelings I have for you, I’ve never had them before, and I do not understand them.”
She pushed the glasses atop her nose and stared at him wordlessly.
“Whenever you fiddle with your spectacles, while it is a most charming oddity, it tells me that you are nervous,” he said, touching the bridge of her nose and then her glasses.
“I…I…being with you sometimes makes me feel nervous,” she said with a shaky laugh.
“Why?”
“The feelings you rouse in me are so… I…I am not sure what they are.”
“They are visceral, unforeseen, and hungry,” he murmured. “They are so intense, you lie awake at night wondering at the madness of it. You are almost afraid to get close, to delve deep and understand what you feel because you are not sure what you will find. Yet there is something there luring you closer still, every day, every minute…this very second, and when you try to understand the nature of the piper…you realize it is the very one who caused that raw, chaotic need.”
She swallowed, and answered the raw desire peeking down at her, “I wonder what the craving low in my belly is, and this unrelenting ache in my heart.” Maryann lifted her hand and brushed a wet tendril from his forehead. “It is more than an ache…there is excitement, a sense of wonder…and a sense of fright.”
His mouth curved in a beautiful smile. “What do you think it is?”
She willingly tumbled over the precipice which she had been perched on so precariously. “It must be the beginning of love, and I dare hope it is also the middle and the end.”
“You speak your thoughts so boldly. Is there nothing you are afraid of?”
“I am afraid of years from now looking back on my life and feeling the keenest of regret that I had not lived. Of never feeling again the way I feel with you.”
Cherished.
“You are my future.” He said it so softly, Maryann wasn’t certain she had heard correctly.
He leaned with space between them and kissed her. It was the briefest touch of lips to hers, but there they were, firm and supple against her mouth. She lifted her fingers to touch his cheek, astonished her hand trembled with the force of emotions working through her.
Nicolas drew back and shrugged from his waistcoat and jacket, letting them fall to the carpet.
“If you want to, and only if you want to, take off your clothes.”
Oh God. The awareness of exactly what he now meant by “taking her” sent such sensations tearing through her heart, they were frightening and exquisite all at once.
Maryann untied the tapes to her cloak and shrugged it from her shoulders. Then she turned around and closed her eyes when he methodically unbuttoned her dress. His movements were so slow, as if he savored removing her clothes. She could feel the warmth of his breath against her nape and smell the wild flavor of rain and fire. After the last of her garments fell to the floor in a soft swish, he removed the pins holding her heavy tresses together. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, down to her back, and his soft exhalation of satisfaction had delight coursing through her.
The silence felt thick, charged.
Maryann almost fainted when a finger ran over her back and down to the arch of her derriere. There his touch lingered before his hand fell from her buttock. Her entire body was blushing.
When she faced him again, her lips parted, and her eyes widened. Her chest went so tight, she could scarcely breathe. The marquess was stark and beautifully naked and completely distracted her from the awareness that she stood only in stockings and garters, with her hair tunneling down to her waist in a riot of curls and damp tendrils.
He watched her with an unreadable intensity that sucked all the air from her lungs, and Maryann lowered her gaze and blushed fiercely. His eyes devoured every dip and hollow of her body.
And she swallowed the cry rising in her throat when his body reacted. The statues in the museums had lied, and she had to remember to tell her friends. His manhood hung long and heavy between his brawny thighs, which were carved with such strength, he could have been one of those sculptors. His thighs and calves were thick and powerful, stomach and buttocks lean and delineated with muscle.
The very awareness that she was being so wicked with him had a familiar ache settling low in her stomach. I have fallen in love with you, she wanted to say, but to her shock, her mouth would not part. Maryann was never one to shy away from speaking her opinions, but at this moment she felt ridiculously vulnerable and timid.
As if he sensed the emotions rioting inside her, he came closer and pressed a kiss to her forehead. It asked for trust, and it also reassured her.
He moved away and held out his hands. And even in that action, he gave her a choice. Her marquess did not ruthlessly seduce her, using her untapped passion to assault her senses. Should she step back, he would not pressure her.
Maryann smiled tremulously up at him. To take his hand was to be forever altered, yet she reached for him.
He dragged her up against him, one hand curving to the swell of her hips and lifting so she wrapped her legs around his hips.
“I fear when I am through with you, all your sensibilities will be forever devastated,” he murmured, his voice rich with hunger and arousal.
She touched his mouth with trembling fingers. “I want to be so very wicked with you.”
Nicolas took her mouth in a kiss of violent tenderness that shook her. Then he ravished her lips with passionate kisses. Their tongues tangled wildly, and a long, low moan broke from her lips.
A slow, languorous ache rolled through Maryann and settled in that secret place between her thighs. She was terribly conscious of her naked breasts pressed against the smooth muscles of her marquess’s chest, and that he moved with her toward the bed, never relinquishing her lips.
He tumbled them, twis
ting so that his back hit the mattress first and she atop him. Their mouths seduced each other with long, passionate kisses that soon had her squirming atop his hardened body, a desperate ache for more burning through her like the hottest fire.
He kissed her. Again. Over and over. As if he couldn’t get enough of her taste.
Nicolas rolled with her, his large frame blanketing her much smaller one. One elbow braced above her, but his other hand did not remain still. He delved and stroked his fingers over her collarbones and down to her aching breasts. One of his palms cupped her breast, his fingers tweaking at her nipple, stabbing pleasure to the heart of her, then lightly pinched her other nipple, and the shock of that pleasurable pain had her arching sharply upward, flushing her wet sex directly against his hardened manhood.
Then he rubbed a thumb and forefinger over her throbbing peak.
Maryann never imagined a touch to her breast could illicit such a fever of need. She thrust her fingers through his hair, sobbing against his kiss that seemed to burn out of control in its ravishing wildness. Cocooned in the darkness of her chamber, Maryann became lost entirely in the taste, the scent, and the feel of him.
Finally, their mouths parted, and he dipped to kiss the soft hollow of her throat where the pulse tripped like a captive bird. Her thighs were nudged apart, and his heavy weight cradled between her splayed legs. The hand he had between them glided from her breast down to her quivering belly, and much lower. Her body flushed and her chest lifted on ragged pants as his fingertips stroked over her aching sex. She was already wantonly wet for him, and he groaned his pleasure.
Her body was wet, soft, and yielding, and she welcomed the finger he slipped deep inside her. The feeling of him there was so remarkably intimate.
Then that finger stroked in and out, and she gasped at the incredible sensation, gripping the sheets beside her. His mouth took her breast, and he sucked at her in a long, strong pull that she felt right in her belly. The sensual assault on her senses almost felt like too much, and he stroked her over and over as pleasure swelled inside Maryann until it expanded and burst forth in white-hot bliss.