When she’d clearly expected some explanation for his being on the road, something other than following her, he’d given Stoke as his destination. Perfectly plausible, though he had no intention of actually going there, of course. Even had he wanted to, which he did not, he needed to return to London and answer his uncle’s accusations. Still the mere idea of an excuse to spend three more days in her company, along with—no, he had refused to tempt himself with the thought of as many nights—had done nothing to return his heartbeat to normal.
He’d settled for an hour or two, just until the next change of horses. Seated across from her in the confines of a carriage, however, so close that their knees bumped whenever the body of the coach was jostled by the rutted road, which was all too frequently, he had found his desire to touch her had not abated. So he had contrived a way to get closer.
Certainly, he had not meant to fall asleep with her in his arms. In fact, he’d pinched himself to stay awake merely for the chance to watch her. Knowing such a pleasure ought never to be his, and delighting in it all the same.
Then he’d awoken to the sight of her sprawled against the cobblestones, apparently lifeless, and for a moment, he’d been certain his heart meant to stop for good. Cradling her against his chest, washing her, skating his fingers along her soft skin…extraordinary intimacies. He thought he’d known what it was to touch a woman. He had been wrong.
Worry? No, that wasn’t the half of what he felt. He could deny it, of course. Continue to be glib, to use wit as a shield—to protect her, as much as himself. He’d been doing that most of his life, after all. But sheer exhaustion had worn down his defenses.
She was studying him intently, as she so often did. How much could she see? Despite her missing spectacles, he felt stripped bare by that look—and not in the way he longed to be.
He turned away from the door and walked toward her. When he stopped beside the bed, just inches away from her, she rose to meet him. With anxious eyes, he searched her face for some flicker of discomfort, but he saw none. Instead, her pupils flared wide until her green gaze was nearly black. Desire.
“Yes. I meant it,” he answered at last. Setting his hands on the curve of her shoulders, he lowered his mouth to hers.
She did not immediately return his kiss. Her palms slid lightly up his chest along the silk of his waistcoat. Neither pulling him closer nor pushing him away. “I cannot…” she whispered against his lips. “We must not. Felicity.” The name was barely a breath.
Raising his hands to either side of her head, he lifted her face, made her feel the weight of his stare, so there could be no misunderstanding. “I will not be marrying your cousin.”
His words were met with a long silence while she absorbed their significance. He could see other questions forming in her eyes. Wondering, perhaps, what had changed. At last she said, “What about Stephen’s debt?”
“Forgiven.” He hesitated another moment. “But only after she’d cut me loose and told me to come after you.”
A certain tightness—guilt, perhaps—eased from her, and she sagged into his grip. But her breath came more rapidly. He watched her breasts rise and fall. Oh, she wanted him, perhaps almost as much as he wanted her. And one barrier had come crashing down.
It was not, however, the only thing standing between them. “Don’t misunderstand me, Camellia,” he said firmly. “I am not a free man.” Uncertainty streaked across her expression. No matter what happened between them tonight, he did not dare promise to do what society would call—wrongly, in this instance—the honorable thing. “I cannot marry…anyone.”
“I don’t—” Hesitation caught her next words, held them back. He could sense a war waging within her. “I don’t want to marry you, Gabriel,” she said finally, watching her fingertips flutter against the folds of his cravat. “I just want—”
“This?” Dropping one hand to her lower back, he brought her hips flush against his, leaving no room for doubt. Crude, but then, he had never claimed to be a gentleman.
She snagged her lower lip between her teeth, then eased it free. “Yes.”
Had he imagined his heart raced before? A wild, primal beat pounded inside his chest, almost drowning out the soft knocking, deeper still, of something that might have been disappointment, a flicker of longing that there could have been something more, something lasting between them. Resolutely, he ignored that quiet sound. He could not plan for the future. But he could give her what she wanted in the here and now.
Even positioned as they were, with his erection cradled against her belly, he could not quite convince himself she had said yes. But last night—God, had it been just last night?—she had kissed him with greedy lips and told him she was no innocent miss. He had not taken her at her word then. Now, however…
Curiosity prickled along his spine. Had she…? With whom? When? The questions implied no judgment, no scorn. After all, he was hardly innocent, either. And he had never subscribed to the notion that women did not feel lust, any more than he believed they never felt hunger or thirst, though they were sometimes persuaded to ignore even those urges.
She stretched upward to brush her lips along his jaw, and he turned toward her to meet her mouth with his. He had never given kissing much thought before, other than as a prelude for more interesting things to come, but he felt suddenly as if he could spend a lifetime learning her lips, the sharp bow of the upper as he traced it with little nibbling kisses, the plushness of the lower as he sucked it between his own. With his tongue he stroked deep into her, over her teeth, along her tongue, against the roof of her mouth, and she did not spar with him for once, but let him plunder her with a groan. When she tipped her head back to take him deeper into her mouth, her hair tumbled loose of its pins and cascaded over her back, over his hands, black as a raven’s wing and more beautiful than he could have imagined.
As he kissed her, his fingers worked at the fastenings of her gown. Buttons, hooks, ties that had never baffled him before seemed strange, and strangely wonderful, as they forced him to slow down and unwrap her, inch by precious inch. The challis of her dress gave way at last to a plain cambric shift, gathered low across her chest with the bow nestled between her breasts. He ran one finger along the edge of the garment, never dipping beneath its ruched hem, the merest brush of skin against skin. Gooseflesh rose and she shivered, but he could feel it was not from cold.
Nor were her hands still. She loosed the buttons of his waistcoat to clutch at him through the fine lawn of his shirt, then began to tug at the knot in his cravat. “Easy,” he murmured, backing ever so slightly away, catching her fingertips and kissing them one by one while she watched with wide, dark eyes. Pleasure could be found in haste, yes. But also in leisure. “Sit down. Rest your ankle.”
To his surprise, she did not protest but sank onto the mattress. Her gaze traveled down his body, lower, lower, as if she meant to devour him with her eyes. When he bent to capture her lips again, her eyelids drooped but refused to fall. “What did I tell you, my dear?” he asked, catching her chin in one hand while the other tugged loose his cravat.
“About what?” Already she had a dreamy look about her, her plump lips slightly swollen.
“Those eyes.” With a snicker of fabric, he slid the strip of linen free of his collar and dangled it from one hand. “Will you close them? Or shall I?”
Defiance sparked in their green depths. “What?”
For answer, he stretched a length of his cravat between two hands and held it before her at eye level.
“A blindfold?” Her eyes flared when he nodded. “That sounds…” One finger came up to stroke tentatively along the edge of the slick linen. “Wicked.”
He’d intended only to tease her with the idea, to shock her a bit. But she was intrigued! “There is very little I have not done in the way of wickedness, I assure you.” His voice had dropped so low he struggled to recognize it as his own. “
Or in pursuit of pleasure.”
“Pleasure?” She tipped her head to the side.
“Yes. Pleasure. You see, every time I catch your eye, Camellia, I find you studying me. Nothing seems to escape your gaze. Always watchful, always alert. You look and look. Have you never wondered what it would be like just to let yourself feel instead?”
Her lips parted and she blinked up at him, then squinted slightly to bring him into focus. “But without my spectacles, I can really see very little as it is, and nothing clearly.”
“All the more reason to forgo that faulty sense and let the others have their turn, yes?”
She hung for a moment on the precipice of uncertainty, then shook her hair back behind her shoulders, tipped up her chin, and closed her eyes. “All right.”
Good God, this was a woman who never went without a shield of some sort, from her tart tongue always ready with a retort, to that damned writing desk she had refused to relinquish until sleep made her grasp relent. Once, in his mind, he’d called her vulnerable, then later dismissed the word as having nothing to do with Camellia Burke. But in this moment, she was willing to be vulnerable. For him. With him.
He would make sure she did not regret it.
His hands trembled as he wound the strip of linen around her head twice and carefully tied the knot so as not to tangle her wild hair within it. With her head tilted back, her throat was bare to the brush of his lips as he bent to kiss the wild pulse point that hammered just beneath her delicate skin.
He let his hands settle lightly on her shoulders and trailed his fingers down her arms, so that his touch would not startle her. Then, kneeling, he brought his hands to her uninjured ankle and removed her shoe. Easing his hands slowly up her calf, over her knee, he untied her garter and rolled her stocking down over her foot. She shivered. “Sensitive?”
“I—I don’t… Yes?”
He understood her uncertainty. His feather-light touch had raised gooseflesh. It could produce a ticklish sensation, if done carelessly. But he intended this to be something else entirely. Pure pleasure, sending a spark along every nerve ending, chasing along skin that had perhaps never known another’s touch. Greedy, he longed to run his fingers over her everywhere.
Instead, he released her leg and rose.
“No,” came her harsh whisper. “Don’t stop.”
“I won’t.” Beneath her eminently practical shift, he could see the tight peaks of her nipples but little else. “Can you stand, just for a moment?”
She rose without any visible difficulty or discomfort, although she listed slightly to one side as she shifted her weight onto her left foot. Again, he ran one fingertip along the gathered edge of her last remaining garment, that same light touch he meant to teach her to crave. Her chest rose, pressing toward his hand. Slowly, he plucked at the tie between her breasts, and when it was loose he eased her shift down over her shoulders. It met no resistance as it came to her hips and slid over them to puddle on the floor at her feet, like the marble gown of some Grecian goddess, draped over the pediment.
“Ah, Camellia. How lovely you are.” And she was, with her high, round breasts and skin like fresh cream, though there was a bruise on one shoulder from her fall, and she was far too thin. Had her aunt’s cruelty extended to starvation?
The sound of his voice seemed to remind her that his sight was unimpeded, and she moved her arms to cover herself. “Don’t,” he said, tracing one finger along the angle of her jaw. “If it will make you feel better, I’ll douse the candles, while you lie down on the bed.”
As he moved around the room, extinguishing the lights until all that was left was the soft glow of one flickering flame near the washstand, he shed his coat, his waistcoat, and his shirt, letting each garment fall where it would. When he reached the bed again, he propped himself against it to tug his boots free. She was lying half curled on her side, imagining, he supposed, that she was shielding herself from his gaze, though the sight of her long legs and the curve of her bottom were more than sufficient to send a bolt of heat straight through his belly and into his cock.
He did not generally let that organ do his thinking for him. It would have been death to do so at any gambling hell, where beautiful women were often employed as distractions. He knew he ought not to be thinking with it now, either. Whenever the right cards simply fell into his lap, he had taught himself to play as if the game were rigged, which it usually was. There had been women who wanted nothing more than a tumble with the notorious Lord Ash, of course, and he’d generally been willing to oblige. But he’d certainly not expected it of this one.
He wished he felt more confident of his ability to read her intentions. Perhaps the blindfold had been a tactical error. No matter—he did not have the strength to deny her, whatever her intentions were. Still, as he kneeled onto the end of the bed beside her feet, the shudder that passed through him was more than desire. A premonition of loss, perhaps.
Except what he feared losing in this gamble was not money or land or some other meaningless bauble that could easily be replaced.
His eyes fell on the scattering of silvery scars just above her makeshift bandage. She had risked at least her limb, perhaps even her life, to save her sister. What was it Fox had said about the burdens of being the eldest sibling? Always responsible, never quite free. He’d witnessed the same protective instinct in her treatment of Felicity. She had given a great deal of herself to so many.
Had anyone ever sacrificed anything for Camellia?
Bending low, he set his lips gently against the curve of her calf. The physical hurt from that incident with the dog was no doubt long gone. But there were other sorts of pain, and he would kiss them away, kiss every inch of her, until she let go of everything she’d been carrying and…flew.
Careful to skirt her injured ankle, he suckled her toes, then moved up her leg, nipping the soft flesh behind her knees, laying kiss after kiss along the back of her thigh till he came to her bottom and paused to pass his hand lightly over its plumpness, feeling her skin prickle to awareness, drawing her womanly scent into his lungs. Then he started again with the other foot, tasting salt. When her hips began to lift eagerly to his touch, he knelt above her and began at the top, sweeping aside her hair to kiss her neck, the slope of her shoulders, down the valley of her spine. Lips, teeth, tongue, over and over again, until she was breathless and so was he.
When he’d given her a moment, and only a moment, to recover, he cupped one shoulder. “The best is yet to come,” he said with a low laugh as he coaxed her to turn onto her back.
Chapter 14
As Cami turned, the straw in the mattress crackled beneath her and the faint fragrance of the field rose from it, not unpleasant. The sheets felt coarse against her bare skin, abrading her cheek, her nipples. To her surprise, that feeling was not unpleasant either. She had thought she knew what to expect when he stripped her of her sight, but she could not have anticipated this rush of awareness, the way even ordinary sensations threatened to overwhelm but never did. Touch, scent, sound—they left no room for modesty, crowding out her doubts and the niggling vestiges of guilt.
And she could only be grateful.
Though why should she feel guilt? He was not now Felicity’s, any more than he would ever be hers. It was only giving in once—or perhaps, if it was very good, twice—to the practiced seductions of a rake, as heroines were wont to do. But this time she was beholden to no pen but her own to craft a satisfactory conclusion to the affair. Once they reached Shropshire, she would leave him, and they need never see one another again.
She felt the bed shift as he rose, heard the soft sound of some item of clothing being shed. His breeches, almost certainly, for she had already heard his coat hit the floor. Oh, my. Heat rushed over her; the nighttime chill of the room was little more than a suggestion to be ignored. Once she was fully on her back, though, uncertainty nudged closer to her consciousne
ss. She didn’t know quite what to do with her hands. Press them to her sides? Fold them primly in her lap?
A nervous sort of laugh bubbled in her chest at the mental image that arose. She felt the mattress sink again as Gabriel returned to the bed. “Something amusing, my dear?” His warm voice at her ear made her scalp tingle. The lingering hint of his cologne combined with the elemental scent of his maleness to tickle her nostrils.
“I was wondering where to put my hands,” she confessed.
“Mmm.” He nuzzled her neck and drew in a deep, hungry breath, granting her permission to do the same. “I have a few thoughts. But to start…” His fingers tangled in hers and he lifted her arms over her head, pinning them to the pillow as he came more fully over her. His mouth sought and found hers, his lips soft, his day’s growth of beard rough, his tongue sleek and demanding. And she surrendered to all of it with an eagerness that once would have made her blush.
As before, his kisses did not linger in any one spot. She felt his lips along her jaw, down her throat, over the ridge of her collarbone. What happened when he reached her—?
“Ahhh!” She bucked upward as his mouth closed over her breast. The flickering heat of his tongue was almost too much; then he began to suck. The wet sound filled her ears and spikes of lightning shot from the place where his mouth was through every nerve in her body. When she was absolutely certain she could not survive the pleasure, he shifted his ministrations to her other breast, freeing his hands from hers to run them down her arms and along her body, at last settling to cup the breast he had abandoned, to pluck her tender nipple between finger and thumb.
There could be no better feeling. She was sure of it. Another cry escaped her lips, this time a cry of despair as his mouth shifted once more, now exploring the valley between her breasts before grazing along her ribs and over her belly. When he lifted his body away from hers, she gripped the headboard so tightly the delicately turned spindles dug into her tender palms and gave her pain. Anything, anything to keep herself from begging.
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