“You are showing off your great good looks,” Jeanette said, folding back the covers and settling onto the bed. “Do you know what my favorite part of you is?”
He closed his hand around his rampant shaft and stroked himself idly. “You can have more than one favorite part of me, Jeanette. A lady should not have to choose.”
“Come to bed, Sycamore. My favorite parts of you are your eyes. You have honest eyes.”
“I have girlish eyes, all periwinkle and lavender and unmanly. Do you know what my favorite part of you is?”
He climbed onto the bed and kept coming until he was crouched over Jeanette like a lion guarding his next meal.
“I am not inclined to be reduced to my female parts,” Jeanette said, “though a general sort of appreciation for them is permissible under the circumstances.”
Sycamore nuzzled her breasts, took a nipple in his mouth, and suckled just long enough for Jeanette to begin undulating her hips, not quite long enough to make her groan.
“I love your heart,” Sycamore said, crouching closer. “I love that fiercely guarded citadel you call your heart. You will never give up on your brother, no matter how clodpated he is. You will still be looking out for Tavistock when he’s a grandpapa, and when you ought by rights to be bitter and shallow and vain, you are dear and lovely and brave.”
“Sycamore, I’m not.” And yet, had Jeanette been given those words of flattery as a new bride, as a girl of seventeen… Had somebody looked upon her with that much respect and liking before her engagement, she might have been the woman Sycamore spoke of.
“You are all of that,” he said, levering himself up to kiss her brow. “And my every most passionate longing come true. Please don’t argue with me, for I will win by cheating.”
He nudged at her with his cock, the merest, most maddening tease.
“I might let you win, Sycamore, this time.”
“Right,” he said, getting a hand around a breast, “lull me into anticipation of an easy victory. Lull away, Jeanette, and then thoroughly trounce me.”
He began the joining in slow, sensual earnest. He could not know how his teasing banter, his determination to see her aroused and unraveled, met a need not only of the body but also of the heart. This was not merely rutting, but mutual adoration and joy.
Jeanette’s desire and emotions blended into one yearning and then into one great conflagration of satisfaction. Sycamore trounced her, thoroughly, with more pleasure than she could endure, until she was a moaning, heaving beast beneath him and then a quietly shaken, tenderly kissed lover in his arms.
“It’s too much,” Jeanette said as Sycamore rested his cheek against hers. “With you, it’s too much, Sycamore.”
“Good,” he whispered. “And next time, we’re using some damned sponges, so it can be beyond too much for all concerned. Hold me, Jeanette.”
He eased out of her heat and finished on her belly, and when Jeanette ought to have fussed him about making a mess and giving her room to breathe, she instead held him close and endured a few tears.
For whom or why she cried, she could not have said, but Sycamore had not cheated, and she knew that, with her, he never would.
Did Jeanette cry for joy, sorrow, or something of both? Sycamore wanted to ask her, but that would invite her to question him about his own emotions, which were new, tender, and powerful.
She changed him for the better, with her stubbornness and self-possession. When she came all undone in his arms, surrendered to what he could give her and to her own pleasure, he was suffused with joy and awe, and with a towering need to both be close to her and be what she needed him to be.
All quite… quite… befuddling, in a lovely sort of way. He had been infatuated regularly, and what he felt for Jeanette made those enthusiasms so much frolic by comparison.
Jeanette slept on her side, Sycamore curved around her. A cool breeze off the river came stealing through the open window, and Sycamore resisted the urge to join Jeanette in slumber—to rejoin her in slumber, for he’d already stolen a nap. He instead tucked the covers up around her shoulder and considered what he knew of her situation.
She might well have been followed by Goddard’s minions.
Trevor’s misadventures could have befallen anybody who strolled London’s streets, and they could have been aimed at Jerome, if they’d been aimed at anybody.
A matchmaker bent on chasing Jeanette away from guard duty where Trevor was concerned might have sent along the nasty notes.
Sycamore wanted to cobble together a string of unfortunate, unrelated mishaps, but that took a great deal of cobbling, and thus other explanations wanted examination.
“You’re awake,” Jeanette said, taking his hand and kissing his knuckles. “I slept like I’d been out dancing until dawn.”
“You slept like a well-pleasured lady.” A well-loved lady. Sycamore tried on the word in his mind and was pleased that it fit. This welter of concern and desire and affection, the thinking of Jeanette when they were apart, the pleasure he took in her company, no matter the occasion…
He did not simply love her, he had fallen in love with her.
His first thought was that his brothers would laugh themselves silly if he announced this state of affairs, but his second was that, no, they would not. He’d not be announcing anything so important to that lot of buffoons anyway, but if he did, they wouldn’t laugh.
Not this time.
“I am worried,” Jeanette said, shifting to curl against Sycamore’s side. “About Trevor, about the staff at Tavistock House, about nasty notes, and ruffians in alleys.”
“I am worried about you,” Sycamore replied, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “I want to excuse all that has occurred as happenstance. Each incident on its own can be reasoned away, but the pattern is unsettling.” To say nothing of supposedly hard-of-hearing butlers lurking in corridors or Jerome Vincent’s brooding looks and mounting debts.
“Precisely, and there’s something else, Sycamore. Why, when I borrow Rye’s coach, do his young friends pursue me? If they want to know what I get up to of an evening, they can simply ask the coachman. He’s been with Rye for years and would protect me with his life.”
As delightful as drowsing naked in bed with Jeanette was, as temptingly as renewed lovemaking beckoned from the merrier part of Sycamore’s imagination, Jeanette was raising a troublesome point.
“And why spontaneously decide to start following you now?” Sycamore murmured. “Why follow you when you’re off to a mere musicale and Goddard’s coach is nowhere to be seen?”
Jeanette sighed, kissed his chest, and rolled away. “I should practice with my knives, Sycamore. I’ve been getting acquainted with the blade you gave me, and it’s amazing what the right weapon will do for a lady’s aim.”
She wasn’t flirting, alas, but rather, sitting on the edge of the mattress and looking about like a woman who’d had enough frolicking for the nonce. She paused to rub her temples when Sycamore expected her to hop off the bed and begin dressing.
“A touch of hay fever?” he asked, taking the place beside her. “Too much champagne?” Though Jeanette had had only two modest glasses with a full meal, and she’d sipped rather than guzzled her wine.
“I’m sure all I need is some fresh air. You brought me more knives?”
“The whole set. Shall I rebraid your hair?” He wanted to, wanted to linger and bill and coo, which was surely a symptom of excessive country air.
Jeanette rose and pulled her chemise over her head. “A touch-up with a comb and a few well-placed pins ought to suffice. You’d like to tour the manor house, too, wouldn’t you?”
Something was wrong. This abrupt change of mood, complete with brisk good cheer, was not how lovers who’d just swived each other to exhaustion behaved.
“Jeanette, are you sorry you went to bed with me?”
She wiggled into her stays and gave him her back. “Why would I be?”
“Because,” he said, slippin
g his arms around her middle, “the feelings refuse to be put into tidily labeled crocks with lids sized to match.”
She had no reply for that, so he gently tugged her laces into submission. “Tighter?”
“That will do. The feelings are complicated, Sycamore, and I don’t know what to do with them.”
He passed the laces forward and tied them off loosely. “You need not do anything, Jeanette. Enjoy having a devoted admirer, for I do admire you.”
Don’t leave me. The lament was old, aimed by a small boy at a mother overwhelmed by too many rambunctious children. She’d frequently decamped for Bath in an effort to gain the notice of a husband preoccupied with his botany, and then she’d gone to Bath and never come home.
Don’t leave me had been silently flung at two sisters, one lost to matrimony, the other to service and then, again, to matrimony.
Older brothers had disappeared to public school, and—worst hurt of all—Papa, after disappearing on endless botanical excursions, had died. They all left, all of them, and that Jeanette might cast Sycamore aside caused him something approaching hysteria.
“I worry,” she said, turning into his embrace. “If something seems too good to be true…”
He held her gently, knowing her pessimism was justified. “I am not a swaggering marquess twice your age and bent on securing my dynasty at the expense of your happiness. I am not a father who appears to dote on you—when I recall you exist—while I in truth burden you with making my hopes and dreams come true. I am not your brother, gone to war and come home to you an unhappy and guilt-ridden stranger.”
She pressed her forehead to his chest. “But you are dear, and I did not intend that you become dear. You were to be annoying and possibly charming, though mostly useful.”
From anybody else, that would be an almost humorous lament, but from Jeanette…
Sycamore kissed her temple. “Let me be dear to you, Jeanette. You are very dear to me.”
She sighed and, for a luscious moment, yielded to his embrace. “I am daft. You make me daft, and I like that, but now is not the time to be daft. Where is my dress?”
He aided her to don the costume of a proper lady. She tucked and tidied him into a gentleman’s riding attire. Her touch was impersonal and unloverlike, from which Sycamore took a backhanded satisfaction. Jeanette would ruthlessly suppress only those emotions that threatened to swamp her self-possession.
“Will I do?” he asked, draping his riding jacket over his arm.
“You more than do. You are a fashion plate of masculine pulchritude. Do you know why I first graced the Coventry with my presence?”
“You were curious, and the Coventry is fashionable?”
“I was bored, that’s true, and I like the challenge of a fresh deck, but I’d passed you riding in the park of a morning. You tipped your hat to me, and I saw your extraordinary eyes.”
“My extraordinary eyes earned me a number of schoolyard thrashings,” Sycamore said. “They are pretty, in the opinion of more than one youthful pugilist. Until Ash showed me how to defend myself, I suffered regular beatings. The beatings were nothing compared to the work it took to hide their effects from my family.”
“And that was the last time anybody laid a fist on you, I trust.” Jeanette began straightening up the bed. “You were tired when I passed you on that bridle path, had probably been up all night at the club. I saw the weariness in your eyes and the complete lack of flirtation. ‘There,’ I thought to myself, ‘is a man of depth and substance. A man thinking about more than his last tumble or his next pint. He would never be obsessed over something as shallow as a spare of the body.’”
“A man of substance and depth?” Had anybody ever paid him such a high compliment?
“Yes,” she said, sitting once again on the made bed. “Would it be possible to return directly to Town, Sycamore?”
“You don’t want to practice with the full set of knives?”
She put a hand over her tummy. “Perhaps tomorrow. Something I ate did not agree with me, and a return home posthaste appeals strongly.”
Sycamore assayed the state of his own digestion, for he’d partaken of the same food at lunch that Jeanette had. Jeanette was asking politely, but for her to even mention feeling unwell she was doubtless in distress.
“The coach will have returned by now, and I’ll tell John Coachman to spring ’em. Can you walk, Jeanette?”
She managed, but before climbing into the coach, she was sick in the grass. They had to stop halfway to London for her to be unwell again, and by the time Sycamore carried her into his house, she was pale, clammy, complaining of a serious headache, and in immediate need of a chamber pot.
Sycamore sent for a physician he trusted, but he did not need a doctor to tell him that Jeanette was suffering a serious, possibly fatal, case of food poisoning.
Chapter Twelve
“You are no longer begging for death, but rather, simply longing for it. That is progress.”
Jeanette rolled over to face a petite, dark-haired woman whose observation carried a hint of a Northern accent. The lady had the inherent reserve of the denizens of the Northern counties as well, though her eyes, a startling green, were kind.
“I am…” Jeanette looked around at the room and saw a fan of knives arranged on the opposite wall. The bed was enormous, the sheets softest flannel, the quilts even softer. “I am not at my best. You are Ann.”
“Miss Ann Pearson, and you are going to live.” She pulled draperies closed over two windows and poured half a glass of water. “Drink, please. A bout of the flux necessitates fluids.”
The flux, a raging headache, body aches worthy of an eighty-year-old granny in winter, and a belly that had rejected Jeanette’s entire lunch hours ago and still felt tentative. She recalled watering eyes and cold sweats as well.
“What time is it?” The water felt good in Jeanette’s mouth, though Ann permitted her only a few sips.
“Going on eight in the evening. Mr. Dorning sent a note to Lord Tavistock not to wait supper on you. You will feel much better by tomorrow morning.”
This woman had an air of competence, suggesting she was no maid. A housekeeper perhaps?
“I am the undercook at the Coventry,” she said. “Sycamore Dorning is my employer and my frequent cross to bear. He intrudes into the kitchen, claiming he is trying to help. Monsieur Delacourt takes a dim view of infidels who attempt to offer aid to his culinary art. Men must have their little dramas.”
“Mr. Dorning brought me to his home.”
Ann set the water glass on the bedside table and helped Jeanette sit up. “Mr. Dorning brought you here, refused to leave your side even when the physician made his examination of you, tended to you until I reminded him that his club does not run itself, and will doubtless be back at regular intervals, once again claiming he is trying to help.”
Even changing positions caused a crescendo in the throbbing at Jeanette’s temples. She nonetheless made the effort, hounded by a nagging sense that a puzzle needed urgently to be solved.
“Mr. Dorning did help.” Jeanette had mortifying memories of Sycamore assisting her to her feet after she’d cast up her accounts into the grass, carrying her up a flight of steps, and summoning a physician.
“I am wearing one of his shirts, am I not?”
Ann passed her the water glass. “Your clothing needed the attention of the laundress, though your things are dry now. Mr. Dorning will doubtless object to you going anywhere for at least the next year.”
The water was an exquisite pleasure. Jeanette permitted herself three small sips. “Is Sycamore—Mr. Dorning—well?”
“As obnoxiously hale as ever. He suspects you ate some bad mushrooms at breakfast. Lord Fairly and I concur with that theory.”
“I barely had any breakfast.” A few bites of omelet, because she had been eager to leave the house on Sycamore’s arm. “Is Fairly the physician?” A soft-spoken man with a light, competent touch.
“He is,
and he came quickly. Mr. Dorning was quite insistent.”
“He often is.” But Sycamore hadn’t insisted on throwing knives, hadn’t insisted on tarrying out in Surrey.
“As is Monsieur Delacourt, and there I am, surrounded by open flames, sharp objects, and stubborn fellows. The life of an undercook is never easy. I would put Sir Orion in the same category of stubbornness, but he at least keeps his mouth shut.”
Unease that had nothing to do with bad mushrooms joined Jeanette’s general malaise. She took one more sip of water and set the glass on the bedside table.
“Sir Orion was here?”
“Pacing the corridor like a man awaiting judgment. Mr. Dorning sent for him as well. Do you think you could keep dry toast down?”
“Must I?”
“Your body needs nourishment, fluids, and rest, but of the three, nourishment is the least pressing. Many a child goes all day without eating in this great metropolis.”
“Is Sir Orion still in the corridor?”
Ann busied herself refolding the quilt draped across the foot of the bed. “Lord Fairly assured your brother that the worst was behind you, and Sir Orion decamped amid many threats to Mr. Dorning’s wellbeing if anything more should happen to you.”
“A worried man is not at his best.” Though Sycamore had been the soul of calm all the way back from Richmond. Jeanette recalled that much and had vague memories of him easing her out of her clothing. He’d jollied her along, like a nanny with a fractious toddler, and roused the watch all without revealing his worry to her.
The beatings were nothing compared to the work it took to hide their effects from my family. When had he said that?
“I should get dressed,” Jeanette said.
“You should rest.” Ann regarded her with the sort of dispassion Jeanette associated with artists and scientists. “But stubbornness apparently runs in your family. You will need it, if my reading of Mr. Dorning’s intentions is accurate. I must look in on the kitchen. I have had your clothes brought up, but you are not to get out of that bed without somebody to assist you. Lightheadedness can follow a bout of food poisoning.”
The Last True Gentleman: The True Gentlemen — Book 12 Page 23