Lady Georgina was given a rote explanation for the rowdiness. She had brothers and a father; she was familiar with these types of events. She indulgently went up to her rooms.
He was about to do the very same as he left the billiard room. And later, he would never be certain why he paused near the library door on the way up to the third floor, fourth door on the left. When his faculties were finally returned to him, he would, of course, speculate in terms of the properties of physics: magnetic attractions, atmospheric disturbances, things of that sort, because analysis was what gave order and meaning to his world.
Regardless, pause he did.
And in that dark room, two things created light: the dying fire, and the shining head of the person bent toward it from a perch on the settee. An unmistakable head.
For an instant he went still and admired it the way he might the moon: with a helpless, impartial wonder. All those burnished shades of—
Oh, for God’s sake. Brown. Her hair was brown. Her dress was some shade of brown. And the fact that Cynthia Brightly was still wearing it meant that she hadn’t yet gone up to bed.
She was perched on a settee, her body curled forward toward the fire, her face cupped in her hands. Something about the pose implied…Was she…could she…could she be weeping?
He froze, instantly restless and panicked. He took a step forward.
A step backward.
And then her body slowly curled upright again, as lyrical as a flower blooming, and one hand dropped to her lap, and—
For God’s sake. She’d been leaning over to light a damned cheroot in the fire.
She balanced it at her lips with a disconcertingly practiced motion and was clearly about to suck it into full flaming life when he spoke.
“Where did you find a cheroot?”
Her head whipped toward him and she launched her cheroot-holding hand the entire length of her arm away from her mouth, looking like a chaste maiden fighting off a zealous suitor. She froze that way, her eyes round and white as eggs.
Miles tried and failed to turn his laughter into a cough.
She reeled her arm back in. “I nearly swallowed this thing whole,” she said peevishly. “I searched the house over for it, too.”
“You went…searching…for a cheroot.”
She stared at him, her head at a slight tip, dark brows diving toward the bridge of her nose. And then with pointed theatricality she slowly, slowly—pruriently slowly—inserted the tiny cigar between her lips, pursed them around it. And sucked until the tip was a tiny, angry red dot.
Miles was undecided as to whether he was fascinated or repelled. Though he was certain he was aroused. Out of genuine curiosity, he waited to see if she would cough or tear.
Instead she sagged elegantly against the generously curved arm of the settee, cast her head back and released a slim geyser of smoke toward the ceiling.
The elegant sagging shifted her bosom in the confines of her bodice, which was suddenly beautifully illuminated by firelight, soft, round, inviting. He stared.
And he was, in just about a thrice, hard as a rock.
“I searched the house over, and at last I found three of them in the humidor in this room. Fortunately this room already smells of cheroots.”
“Muskets, sherry, and a room that stinks of tobacco. The stuff of every young lady’s dreams.”
“I find cheroots relax me.”
“I suppose hunting heirs can ride roughshod over the nerves.”
She rewarded this terse witticism with a duck of her head and held the cigar out before her to study the burning tip reflectively.
“The thing is…I find being incessantly…good… and sparkling leaves me strangely depleted. And as I will be allowed no habits at all when I am married—or rather, honor dictates that I continue with the habits I’ve demonstrated thus far—the urge suddenly overcame me.”
Miles was silent. He didn’t know which part of this revelation to address.
“‘Honor,’ Miss Brightly?” he decided upon.
Her head turned sharply toward him. “I’ve more notion of honor than many of the people sleeping under this roof tonight, I’d warrant, Mr. Redmond.”
She left her gaze level with his. He wondered suddenly whether he was included in the remark. Thinking of Lady Middlebough. Third floor, fourth room from the left. Which is where he should be right now.
She took his silence for the apology it was.
“What precisely was the nature of the game tonight?” he genuinely wanted to know.
“We were all to drink when Lady Georgina said, ‘Oh, Mr. Redmond. You’re so interesting.’”
He was struck. Imagine Cynthia noticing such a thing. And once again he was torn between hilarity and anger.
Georgina did say it rather a lot.
“Perhaps she thinks I’m very interesting.” He said this dryly.
“That could very well be,” Miss Brightly allowed skeptically.
He couldn’t help it. He smiled. She shifted again on the settee, and her dress pulled at the swell of her breasts, and his smile vanished, and he felt that familiar difficulty with his breathing.
“She’s very nice,” she added. It sounded almost like an accusation.
“That isn’t her fault,” Miles said quickly.
Which then struck both of them as funny, and they both smiled this time. The smoke she’d released now hovered over them like a net about to drop.
Leave now, you bloody, bloody fool, the voice in Miles’s head said.
“Have you considered that you’ll spend your entire wedded life ‘depleted,’ as you say, Miss Brightly?”
She turned to look at him. “Depleted but rich,” she corrected slowly, deliberately.
He went still.
And then the fury was instant and seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.
It propelled him into the room and down on his knees next to her so swiftly she didn’t have time to gasp: he gained an impression of her wide blue eyes and of the cheroot tip glaring between her fingers like a third accusing eye.
And then he plucked it from her fingers and hurled it into the fire. They stared, astonished, toward where it vanished, devoured with a pop and a hiss.
Silently they sat. Miles watched the flame inexorably reducing the log to ashes, feeling oddly spent. After a time, he became aware of Cynthia’s breathing beneath the groans and pops and hisses of the fire. The logs sounded as though they were objecting to being consumed.
He turned slowly. She wasn’t staring at the fire.
She was staring at him, and some expression that haunted him fled her eyes when he turned. Shadows of flame leaped and shivered over her throat, as though she herself were being consumed.
As if to test whether this was true, he watched his hand move toward her. His fingers landed softly, softly, beneath her jaw.
Her breath snagged audibly. And so did his.
He couldn’t stop.
She didn’t stop him.
With two fingers he slowly, purposefully, gently, followed both the clean, fine line of her jaw and the unthinkably soft skin beneath, marveling at this contrast in textures.
Like a vigilant chaperone, he watched his own fingers as he drew them slowly, slowly, down, down, down. Her throat was satiny and hot, frighteningly delicate. Her pulse bumped hard there, sending blood rushing through her veins, flushing her skin with a heat that transferred itself to his own skin. The surface of it felt feverish, every cell of his body alert to, craving, sensation.
Onward his fingers journeyed. They made an almost whimsical figure eight over those bones at the base of her long neck.
“I don’t want you,” she said. It was a cracked whisper.
Miles, the truth seeker, sought proof of this. Lower, just a little lower, just above the pale round give of her breast, his fingers found again her rapid heartbeat. He paused them there to savor, with vindication, its tempo, and levered his head up to meet her eyes.
It was the only
warning he gave her before he eased his forefinger into that alluring crease between her breasts.
Her head jerked back; her lips parted on a silent gasp; her rib cage gave a minute leap.
“I don’t want you, either,” he whispered, too. It seemed the proper language for the dark, the language to use when touching bare skin.
And at that, she smiled faintly: that was the lies out of the way, then.
And when Miles slowly withdrew his finger from its silken berth, desire dragged a slow, rapier line down his spine, and he was tense and shaking with it.
Ah, but he was a man of method. He retraced his path, lightly up over her chest, her throat, to her face.
And there at last he tipped his fingers up, creating a little cradle for her jaw.
Cynthia turned her cheek into his palm. And as he once suspected, it fit into his hand as though carved for the purpose.
Her eyelids drifted closed.
His thumb ran once over her cheek. Oh, God. There were no words for how soft her skin was.
They were creating something dangerous and foolish that could never end well. Pleasurably, perhaps. But not well.
But it felt like gamesmanship. Miles disliked the quality in people; he disliked strategizing. It reminded him a bit too much of his father. He resented that Cynthia brought out the quality in him, and he resented the tremble in his hands, because it made him feel foolish, naive, for thinking that anything he’d felt for any other woman before now qualified as desire. He now knew he’d only known…appetite before. The one he could satisfy at whim.
This…this had him at its mercy.
And implicit in surrendering was the fear he would simply never sate himself.
To hell with gamesmanship. He knew how to be direct.
He took his hand abruptly from beneath her cupped chin, fitted it around the back of her neck, and sought with his fingers that column of tiny buttons that closed it up.
In a thrice he had the top one undone.
Shock stiffened Cynthia’s spine. He undid another. She possessed a voice, he reminded himself. She could use it if she wanted him to stop. She possessed the ability to fly up off that settee in indignation or deliver a stinging slap.
She showed no signs of doing any of that.
Still, he felt obliged to offer her those options, and did so by raising his brows in a query.
Ah, but she’d turned her head away from him ever so slightly just then. He suspected—no, he knew—it was so she could pretend the choice hadn’t been offered. And with this realization, suddenly lust was a riptide. And as for his erection…well, it was hardly poetry, but the words “ax handle” sprang to mind.
He easily and quickly thumbed open the remaining tiny buttons; the holes were loose from being done up and undone over and over during two seasons worth of balls and soirees. Those loose buttonholes were a reminder of Cynthia Brightly’s straightened circumstances. But he didn’t pause to reflect.
He wanted. He wanted.
And then they were open, all of them, and the fabric of her bodice loosened and sagged, and her throat moved in a swallow. He felt her head turn again to watch him. Flickering firelight tended to distort expressions; the glance he cast made him think he saw uncertainty in hers. But he promptly buried his face into the crook of her throat so he wouldn’t need to wonder about it.
A few threads of her hair came down to brush his cheek; he breathed her in, sweetness and smoke. He considered then that he ought to have begun by kissing her mouth. In truth he was working his way toward her lips because he now knew he could lose himself entirely there, and the idea of experiencing that sort of vertigo again unnerved him.
He surprised himself by licking her instead.
Given how rigid she went, he wasn’t the only one surprised by the licking.
Still, he’d begun, and he felt compelled to commit to it. His tongue continued in a slow line up the cord of her throat. Cynthia remained unnervingly still, tense as a harp string.
He began to feel a trifle uncertain. Was she…shocked? Frightened? Horri—
She exploded in a muffled giggle.
Wonderful. She’d been suppressing hilarity.
“For heaven’s sake, Redmond. You’re not a spaniel. And I’m not a bone, so you needn’t go at me with your tongue like—”
His tongue flicked out to touch, delicately, the lobe of her ear.
Which silenced her instantly.
He knew why: the promise inherent in that particular little caress made the point—he knew things about her body she’d never suspected, and how to make her feel things she’d never imagined. And because of the sensations one flick of his tongue against her ear had sent through her body, she was in thrall to possibility.
He followed through on the promise.
He dipped his tongue into her little ear. Delicately. Once, twice. His breath soft and warm there, too. He took her lobe lightly between his lips. Cynthia exhaled a soft breath, sucked in a deeper one, and her body shifted on the settee, her fingers slowly curling and uncurling in the plump velvet in an attempt to accommodate the current of new pleasure he was sending through her body.
He left her ear to blow softly over the path his tongue had traced.
“Oh…oh.”
One “oh” for comprehension, the last one—the fractured whisper—for arousal.
Cynthia’s hand stirred indecisively then on the settee. And then it took slow flight, and came to rest softly on the back of his neck. Her fingers knit up through his hair.
And with this act she was fully complicit.
It also reminded him that he’d been keeping his own hands knotted against his thighs, as if in solidarity with the ax handle cock imprisoned in his trousers. Ridiculously delighted to recall he possessed hands, he freed them to do what he’d intended to do all along: lower that bodice.
Miles devoted himself to kissing her throat now, kisses involving lips and tongue and teeth, the variety intended to dazzle her senses and distract her from the fact that his hands were now peeling the dress away from her shoulders and would have her breasts out in seconds. Her neck arced to abet his kisses; her fingertips glided over the nape of his neck, her nails lightly, lightly scoring his skin, sending threads of lightning through his veins. Sweet merciful—
And then at last the dress slipped the rest of the way of its own gravity with a silken sigh of its own. Cynthia Brightly was nude from the waist up, and Miles abruptly stopped kissing, to admire. Her breasts were saucy and luscious and vulnerable, and before the woman who possessed them could become fully aware of how exposed she was, he cupped his fingers beneath the silky curve of one and bent his head to apply his tongue with wonder and skill.
Cynthia made a sound, something between a gasp and a whimper.
The velvety wet heat of his mouth shocked her. The sensation unbearably exquisite in a way she was tempted to battle. It was too much, and too good, and too foreign, and she was frightened.
And she’d told herself she would be good.
And still his tongue did slow deliberate things to the stiff peak of her nipple as his fingers feathered along the tender skin beneath her breast, and hot ribbons of sensation unfurled through her body.
“Miles.”
She wanted him to stop.
She couldn’t bear it if he stopped.
He did stop.
But only long enough to rise up from the floor and in a fluid motion stretch his long body alongside her on the settee. He gently and expertly folded her into his arms as though anticipating no protest or struggle, as if it to cover and protect her, though he was the one who’d exposed her. She offered no protest or struggle. He sought her mouth with his; she gave it to him with hunger and relief.
Her lips parted for him, and his tongue found hers, and she took it greedily. She was new to this sort of kissing, this sort of kissing that led places and meant things, but she didn’t care: it became a battling kiss, a hot and graceless tangle, deep and invading, dark and dr
ugging. She learned and refined as she kissed him; she gave back what he took and wanted more.
So it was this she needed: his tongue in her mouth, and now, just now; and then to feel the low moan in his throat vibrating through her.
I did this to him.
But as his tongue plunged and tasted, drove her to depths she didn’t know she possessed, dissolved the supports of the world from beneath her, his fingers were gliding so very, very lightly, reverently, over the surface of her bare back. Skimming the blades of her shoulders, following the line of her spine up to the fine hairs at the nape of her neck, leaving a trail of sparks on her skin. The sensation was like being simultaneously devoured and cherished.
Her eyes felt hot with something nearly like tears.
She broke the kiss abruptly, placed a hand hard against his chest.
“I don’t—” she whispered urgently, her voice shredded and frightened.
His hands froze on her; he stared down at her, his dark eyes glittering even in the shadows, nearly obscured by the fall of his hair. What had he done with his spectacles? He must have deftly removed them. His vast shoulders beneath her hands rose and fell hard.
What was he thinking? What was he feeling? She didn’t dare ask.
At last she shook her head roughly, unable to say anything or even remember what she’d meant to say. She found her hands on either side of his face, pulling him down to her mouth again.
She was afraid of herself.
She stopped kissing him to reach for his shirt buttons, and she stared at her ten fingers dumbly, as though she could not be held responsible for their actions as they worked open the first one. She felt Miles Redmond’s eyes on her face; she ignored him and frowned with concentration, until four of his buttons were open. She gently spread his collar, arced up and until her breasts met his skin.
She felt his belly shift over her as he drew in a sharp breath. His eyes closed. He exhaled at length.
“This,” she whispered to herself, surprised and satisfied, as though she’d solved a puzzle.
How did her body know what it wanted? How could she allow it to rule her?
Like No Other Lover Page 16