Stroke of Genius

by Marlowe Mia

  “Nothing more complicated than a tambourine,” she admitted. Perhaps her lack of accomplishments would make the marquess look elsewhere.

  “Good. Nothing is more tiring than amateur performances,” he said. “What do you do?”

  “I read. And I write.”

  “I also enjoy quiet evenings with a book. Do you have a favorite?”

  While the rest of the party entertained itself with an impromptu concert and sing-a-long, Grace and the marquess quietly got to know each other better. He seemed a thoroughly decent, perfectly honorable English gentleman. He was the sort of fellow Grace could see herself spending time with in companionable silence, like a pair of old socks comfortably rolled together and stashed in the same drawer.

  But when his arm brushed against hers, there were no sparks, no flutters of awareness. No little faerie of pleasure danced up her arm.

  “I met the marchioness earlier,” she whispered after wondering whether or not to tell his lordship she’d found his mother in the darkened portrait gallery. She wasn’t prepared to discuss the strange likeness of Lord Dorset’s father with anyone yet. “Your mother was kind enough to show me to your library.”

  “Kind, you say? Then you must not have met my mother.”

  Grace blinked in surprise. It was the sort of acerbic comment she expected from Crispin, not a well-bred lord.

  Cousin Jasper launched into a recitation of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The direction of the entertainment could only lead down from this point. Grace decided even if it wasn’t convincing, it was time to feign a headache. She asked Lord Dorset to excuse her.

  “Not at all, Miss Makepeace,” he said, standing and extending a hand to assist her. “Allow me to see you safe to your chamber. This house is the sort that goes off in odd directions if one is unfamiliar with it.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” she whispered, “but oughtn’t we wait till Lord Washburn is finished with his recitation so we can bid the others good evening?”

  He shook his head and led her from the music room. “One of the privileges of rank is that one may come and goes as one pleases and there is none to gainsay it. I daresay Mr. Hawke had the right idea when he made good his escape during the meal.”

  “Are you a recluse then?” she asked as they walked from one grand room to the next gilded space.

  “No, just one who cannot abide the artifice of society. You may have noticed I am not at home in the whirl of London. And once the rest of the house party arrives tomorrow, the increased number will only have moved the mindless activity of the ton to my doorstep.”

  In the exotic trophy room, the marquess put a hand to the small of her back to guide her around the elephant foot ottoman.

  Again no reaction, pleasurable or otherwise, greeted his touch.

  Perhaps because he seemed to be saying he regretted their presence in his home.

  “If you did not wish us to come here, you should not have invited us, my lord.”

  He laughed.

  “I didn’t say anything funny.” She hadn’t meant to in any case.

  “No, I laugh because you make it possible to breathe, Miss Makepeace.” He smiled at her and she recognized his mother’s smile on his face, sardonic and cynical. “Do you have any idea how many people would dare speak so bluntly to me?”

  “Not many, I suppose.”

  “None who didn’t outrank me and there are precious few of those,” he said as they mounted the grand stairs side by side.

  Grace noticed that he was very nearly her match for height. Her mother had been right to insist upon heel-less slippers for her this evening.

  “Let us speak frankly then, Miss Makepeace. You are here because I am considering whether we are well-suited. I must confess, my estimation of your worth continues to grow.”

  “May I take that as a compliment to me and not, as the gentlemen at White’s believe, a speculation on the size of my dowry?”

  He laughed again. “Indeed, you may. You are a woman who knows the value of silence and yet when you do speak, it’s almost always worth hearing.”

  “Almost?”

  He shook his head as they arrived at her chamber door. “You must forgive me. I am not accustomed to courting. My tongue is not as glib as it ought to be.”

  Her belly reacted with a quick roil instead of a flutter of excitement. Claudette’s ribald comments about how rare it was to find an Englishman who knew what to do with his tongue flitted through her mind.

  What was wrong with her? A peer of the realm was courting her! And all she could do was fight off wicked thoughts of Crispin Hawke and how well he might use his tongue.

  “You don’t seem the type to be easily shocked, so I’m going to confide in you a bit about the House of Dorset. My father cut a wide swath with the ladies,” he said. “He was frightfully indiscreet and his affairs embittered my mother till she was unrecognizable. If you met her, you probably already know that.”

  She couldn’t protest the truth, but it might be considered bad form to agree with such an assessment. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt his feelings, so Grace turned to her lips inward to avoid saying the wrong thing.

  “I do not possess my father’s astounding good looks or his easy charm,” he said. “But I flatter myself that I possess other attributes of a more constant nature.”

  The marquess took one of her gloved hands and brought it to his lips. “I would be honored if you would call me Richard.”

  Her jaw dropped. Her mother was right. Lord Dorset was serious about her. Panic bloomed in her chest.

  “Richard,” she repeated woodenly.

  “And may I call you Grace?”

  “It is my name.”

  “Good night, then, Grace.”

  To her dismay, he leaned toward her to kiss her, but she turned her head at the last possible moment so his lips bussed her cheek.

  “Good night, my lor—Richard.”

  She pushed her door open and scuttled through it sideways in order to escape quicker. She leaned against it and the latch closed behind her with a satisfying click. It was several moments before she heard Lord Dorset’s footsteps retreating from her threshold. Only then did she dare breathe.

  Grace wrapped her arms around herself to keep from unraveling in all directions and began to pace.

  She didn’t feel insane. Of course, an insane person wasn’t likely to recognize insanity, was she? And yet she knew she must be.

  Lord Dorset—Richard—was a good man. An honorable man. A wealthy and titled man. He couldn’t have been better designed to please her mother if she’d ordered him by pattern and had him stitched up to suit her.

  And there was no way Grace could marry him. Not in good conscience.

  Not as long as Crispin Hawke was all could think of. If she could feel a little warmth for the marquess, just a brief flicker. One-tenth of the ache Grace felt for Crispin might do.

  Her bedchamber was suddenly too close, the air so stifling she couldn’t push it in and out of her lungs for another breath. She opened the French doors and stepped out onto the fine terrazzo-tiled balcony.

  Except for the hunting call of an owl and the constant scritching sound of insects, the night was perfectly quiet.

  Then, just on the edge of sound, she heard it. The rhythmic strike of a hammer on the blunt end of a chisel, interspersed with a cleaving sound and the clatter of stone giving way.

  She didn’t know where the sound was coming from, but she knew its source. Crispin was working in the cottage. The sound of his blows traversed the distance between them by some quirk of acoustics, bouncing off a hillock, ricocheting off the stables and hammering away at her heart.

  He chipped away pieces of her. A little off her inhibitions here, a mighty whack on her conscience there. Bits of the armor she’d carefully constructed to shield herself from him were falling to the slag pile at her feet.

  She heard frustration in his relentless strikes. Agony. Need. A lump formed in her throat and defied he
r attempts to swallow it away.

  A night breeze rose and ruffled her hair. It didn’t matter. No breeze would cool the rising fire in her blood. She stood motionless as a statue, waiting for the lamps to be extinguished on the lower floors and Lord Dorset’s house guests to retire for the night.

  Then she would answer Crispin’s summons. She’d follow his hammer strikes straight to him and if there was anything left of her when she got there, she’d willingly give every bit of herself to him.

  And if she lost all, so be it.

  Chapter 31

  Pygmalion threw himself into other work, but only wore out his chisel. So long as Galatea held his imagination captive, the only thing he created was a great pile of rubble.

  It wasn’t as simple a matter to slip out of Lord Dorset’s grand home as Grace had hoped. Not only was its colossal size an impediment, she was forced to dodge servants making their sleepy rounds in the dark watches of the night. She suspected her mother found it much easier to sneak out for her naughty evening of clandestine sleighing. Finally, after much trial and error, Grace was able to squeeze out an unlocked door off a breakfast room that opened onto the garden.

  Crispin was still hard at work. As she picked up her skirts and ran toward the sound, the hammer strikes grew louder. Her only fear was that he’d lay his tools down and she’d lose her way to locate the cottage.

  But if anything, the ringing blows grew more insistent. She stumbled past a garden maze, past the stables and through the exercise yard. The full moon silvered every blade of grass and lent a dreamlike quality to her headlong dash through Lord Dorset’s estate.

  Beyond the duck pond, the land fell away. The cottage was tucked below the hillock next to a stream that led from the pond and rioted down a gully. A small herd of sheep was penned in a fold near the dwelling. One room on the main level was ablaze with light, sending long shafts of illumination on the close-cropped grass.

  A pair of French doors was thrown open to the night. Grace crept in there. Crispin was pounding away furiously on a larger than life piece in the center of the high-ceilinged room.

  He stood with his back to her, naked but for the leather apron tied at his neck and waist. Sweat made his skin glisten in the light of dozens of tapers. His shoulder muscles bunched and flexed beneath smooth flesh. His buttocks clenched with each strike and the musculature of his long legs stood out in stark definition.

  He was magnificent, an Adonis in leather. His body called to her body. She responded with fresh dew and a deep ache down there. Then she noticed his right leg began to tremble.

  “Damnation!” He threw his hammer and chisel down with a clatter to the unprotected wood floor and bent to massage his thigh.

  Grace saw a shadow of his private parts dangling between his spread legs and drew in a sharp breath. He turned suddenly toward her, his face as wild and proud and feral as the man in Lady Dorset’s darkened gallery.

  But he didn’t seem surprised to see her.

  He didn’t speak. He just returned her steady gaze. He straightened and slowly untied the leather apron at his neck and it flopped down revealing brown nipples and a dusting of dark hair over his hardened chest. Then he reached behind his waist to untie the last knot holding up the apron. He let it fall.

  Grace was winded from her wild flight down here but now, never mind how badly she needed it, she seemed unable to draw a deep breath. Her gaze wandered down his body, past his flat belly to the mystery of maleness artists normally kept hidden behind fig leaves.

  His long, thick shaft strained toward her, magnificently erect, its skin purpled with his coursing blood. Beneath that wonder, his testicles were bunched in a nest of dark curls. His whole body tensed with the effort of holding himself still while she studied him.

  Her mouth went slack, partly in amazement and partly in an effort to breathe. She’d never seen anything finer, more miraculous than Crispin Hawke just as God made him in her entire life.

  Grace looked back up at his face.

  “If you intend to leave here a virgin,” he said, his lips barely moving, “you must leave now.”

  She shook her head slowly. “I’m not leaving.”

  They met midway across the space in a tangle of limbs.

  Grace suddenly understood the obsession of lotus-eaters. His lips on hers were an addiction. There was nothing else in the world. She wanted him more than anything and she’d never break free of wanting him. She surrendered her mouth to him. Their kiss spiraled into a madness of dark heat, but she didn’t care.

  His skin was warm, almost feverish under her touch. And she touched him everywhere, grasping his arms, splaying her fingers over his chest, reaching around to smooth her palms along the length of his spine. He growled in her ear when she cupped his buttocks.

  He kissed her neck, the tops of her breasts while his fingers worked furiously at the row of buttons down the back of her gown.

  “Turn around,” he ordered, his voice rough with frustration.

  She obeyed and faced away from him, but she reached behind herself and grasped his shaft just to see what he’d do. To her surprise, he ripped the back of her gown, popping off the remaining buttons and shredding the seam down to the top of her buttocks.

  She drew a shuddering breath. His lack of control should have scared her, but instead a thrill coursed through her from head to toe.

  “Unless you want to see how a woman can be violated without removing her clothes, don’t touch me again until I rid you of these,” he snarled.

  She stood perfectly still then.

  Except for the trembling. She couldn’t control that, as he shoved the gown over her shoulders and worked the hooks and eyes on her stays.

  It wasn’t fear. Well, not entirely.

  She was trembling for the sheer aching joy of his hands on her newly exposed skin, for the heat of his breath on the back of her neck, for the crisp male scent of his honest sweat. Every bit of her ached to enfold him, to take him in.

  To make him hers.

  He peeled off her stays and then reached around to untie her chemise. His mouth was on her shoulder, then sucking at her neck. He nipped at her earlobe as he hefted both her breasts. She leaned back into him, feeling his smooth hard length pressed against her bottom.

  There weren’t enough pleasure faeries in the world to distribute all the bliss he unleashed in her.

  Crispin bunched her chemise in his hands and drew it up and over her head. She turned to him, wearing only her pantalets and stockings. Crispin stepped back a pace while she toed her slippers off.

  The pantalets left her sex completely exposed to his view and he looked down at her now, a wild feral gleam in his eyes. He cupped her mound with one hand and she throbbed beneath him. He drew her closer with the other, bending her back over his arm so he could take a nipple in his mouth.

  He matched the rhythm of his mouth with the gentle massage of his hand on her mound. His tongue flicked her nipple. The suction grew deeper and Grace felt as if she was a bow being drawn taut. He bit down on her and she arched herself into him, surrendering to the madness.

  He gave her other breast the same loving, rough attention while she struggled to remain upright. His fingers on her sex separated her folds and teased her intimate crevices.

  She cried out when he grazed that blessed little spot of needy flesh that had risen to be stroked. This time, her parents weren’t a wall away. And even if they had been, she didn’t think she could keep from letting her need escape her throat.

  He seemed to love hearing her incoherent pleas. He kissed his way from the valley between her breasts and down her ribs. His tongue circled her navel. She twined her fingers in his hair as he knelt before her.

  His kisses kept moving down.

  He couldn’t possibly . . .

  He’d stop soon and move back up her body.

  An insanely wicked idea burned across her mind for what might constitute the good use of a man’s tongue.

  Surely that’s not
what Claudette meant . . . a man wouldn’t do such a thing, would he?

  He grasped her buttocks with both hands, pulled her close and pressed an open-mouthed kiss on her sex.

  Evidently, he would.

  And he made such appreciative noises as he devoured her, as if she were the most delectable delicacy ever to meet his tongue.

  “Oh,” she said once so softly she could barely hear it herself.

  Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she was passion-blind.

  His tongue circled. It flicked. His lips massaged and suckled that little center of the universe between her legs.

  “Oh.”

  “Just there.”

  “Yes, harder.”

  Then she heard someone pleading and repeating Crispin’s name. It took her a moment to realize she was hearing herself as if from a great distance.

  His fingers dug into her flesh, bruising her backside, but pain didn’t matter.

  “Just don’t stop.”

  The world faded around them. No sound. No light. Only friction and heat and tension mounding up like a wind-tossed sea. If a rogue wave hit, she thought she might snap in two.

  Then deep in her core, she did. She drew a ragged breath. When something inside her snapped, rings of bliss radiated out from her center, turning her limbs to jiggling pudding. She suspected she was pulling Crispin’s hair, but she needed to if she was going to remain on her feet while her insides spasmed with joy.

  Before the last contraction ended, Crispin threw her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and rose to his feet.

  All the breath rushed from her lungs.

  “Where are we going?” she asked shakily.

  “I’ve wanted to swive you on the floor from the moment I met you, Grace, but I’d rather not take your maidenhead there unless you insist.”

  He deposited her on a tufted velvet fainting couch. Then he made short work of removing her pantalets and stockings. Grace laid back and let him do as he liked. She was still too drunk with bliss to care.

  Alarm bells clattered along her spine, but she ignored them. She knew what she was doing. Her decision was made. There was no going back. If she didn’t give herself to Crispin Hawke now, she’d regret it for the rest of her life.