He was at her feet again. A string of pretty little kisses, the scrape of his beard, the sweep of his hands, up her shins, over her knees, to her thighs. Then…
“Open your legs.”
Shock shuddered through her at his dark tone of command. That inner voice, the one the blindfold had temporarily succeeded in silencing, wrangled itself free of its restraint and urged her to resist, to maintain some semblance of control. But the second, secret heart at the joining of her thighs pulsed eagerly. Not surprised that it would betray her, she searched the heart lodged safely behind her ribs, the heart that had always been under her sole command. It too throbbed and leaped at his startling demand.
After the briefest hesitation, hardly worthy of the name, she slid one leg over the edge of the bed, opening her very core to him.
With a whisper of touch, his fingertips skated over the soft skin between her thighs, learning this part of her as he had learned all the others. The merest brush against those silky curls, up to the swell of her belly and back down again. Her flesh tingled, anticipating his playful tracery.
His kiss followed, as she had feared—nay, prayed—it would. She was on fire, and yet his mouth burned as it traveled up from her knees to the delicate skin where her thighs joined her body. Hot breath ruffled her curls, then scorched her navel as he rested his rough cheek against her hip and let his fingers slip into her wetness. His touch was sure and steady and maddening, seeking and finding the place where her pleasure was centered. The first few strokes were enough to leave her panting, but when he set his mouth to her there, her body grew rigid with passion. If she screamed, would someone come?
But she did not want to be saved from this.
Without conscious thought, her hands dropped to his head, tangling in his hair as he sucked and licked until she shattered and shuddered into release. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, but the blindfold wicked them away.
Her breath was still sawing in and out of her lungs when he reached up to push the cravat away so he could look deep into her eyes as he entered her.
She had not known whether to expect pain the second time, as there had been the first, so long ago. But Gabriel had been born to bring her only pleasure, it seemed. He held her gaze as he filled her, arms at either side of her head, his strokes slow at first, then building and deepening as her desire built and deepened again. Now she could see the slight sheen of perspiration on his skin, the straining and bunching of the muscles that stretched across his shoulders, the way the flickering light of the last candle picked out the coppery gleam of his dark hair, both on his head and on his chest. And his eyes, black now in the shadows, drawing her down into their depths. She could drown in them, and she did not care.
Soon, too soon, she was lifting her hips in time with his thrusts and crying out when another climax overtook her, just as he jerked from her body and spent against the rough sheets.
* * * *
When the sun began to creep over the horizon, Gabriel awoke to find himself tangled in the bed linen and Camellia’s black hair, one arm thrown possessively over her naked body. He’d done many things with a woman in his bed, but they had never before included sleep.
Last night had been extraordinary. He’d been delighted to discover she was every bit as passionate as he’d imagined. Had he ever been quite so focused on a woman’s pleasure, on making her feel? Certainly, he had never taken so much pleasure in doing so.
Somehow, though, even those delicious memories paled in comparison to the experience of waking beside this woman. He was tempted to accompany her on the rest of her journey—he had never been to Ireland, after all—just for the possibility of starting another day, all his days, this way. Barring that, he was tempted to snuggle closer to her right now. To drowse until the sun was high in the sky, and when he woke again, to set his lips to the place where her shoulder and neck met, a spot last night’s explorations had revealed to be most sensitive…
Instead, he eased away from her and slid out of the bed, careful not to disturb her rest. He’d delayed too long already. Unless he returned to London and challenged his uncle’s accusations, he had no future at all. And for the first time in many years, he wanted to be able to dream about tomorrow. No, he wanted to do more than dream.
A wash with the cold water left in the washbasin made quick work of his lingering arousal, then he set about gathering his discarded clothes. His cravat, however, was still wrapped around Camellia’s hair. Well, he had packed a change of linen, just in case it took more than a day to catch her. If only…ah, there was his bag, beside hers, beneath the window. Once he was dressed, he would go out to the stables to find her spectacles as he had promised.
First, however, he had to move her battered writing desk. The servant had placed it squarely atop both their bags, which formed a sort of nest for the wounded thing. The worn, ink-stained wood was scarred and chipped in several places. He bent to pick the desk up with all possible care, but it was no use. The latch had been broken by the fall and when it was moved, the front panel, which the latch had once held in place, tipped forward. The desk’s contents spilled at his feet: folded letters, quills, a penknife, and what had no doubt once been a neat stack of papers closely covered with dark writing.
He froze with the desk in his hands, then glanced toward the bed to see if the sound had woken her. But she did not stir.
He might have stood admiring her sleeping form indefinitely, until something moved, tickling the top of his bare foot. Startled, he looked down to find a length of ribbon, coquelicot silk ribbon, dangling from the gaping hole in the side of the box, like a tongue lolling almost to the ground. Only its frayed end, threads tangled on the broken latch hinge, kept it from falling. The sight of it hanging limply ought not to have made his heart lurch. It had made a much more spectacular showing at Lady Penhurst’s musical evening, bright and sensual against Camellia’s black hair and pale skin.
But to discover that his ribbon had been included among the meager possessions quickly packed for her journey home…
He shifted so that it was no longer touching him, but that only sent paper cascading into the place his foot had been. With an abundance of caution, fearful of causing another minor avalanche of parchment, he set the writing desk down on the floor and stepped back. She had not wanted anyone else to handle the desk, that much had been clear. Its contents were precious to her. Precious and private, and though he had seen every part of her last night, in this matter, he did not intend to pry. He would dress. He would go out to the stables. He regretted leaving a mess for Camellia to straighten, but he would not look. On the rare occasions Gabriel was required to offer his vowels, he always made certain to honor them. After all, a gambler was only as good as his word.
But there had never been a time, he realized as he bent over his bag to rummage for a clean shirt and a fresh cravat, that he had been forced to quell the curiosity that surged through him at the sight of his picture among a woman’s things.
Dark eyes glowered up at him from the floor, revealed by the shifting of papers that had previously hidden them. Easily recognizable. Proof she had been thinking of him when they were apart.
But hardly a flattering portrait.
She had sketched hastily—on the back of a letter, he discovered as he held it up to the pale morning light for a more thorough study. A letter from a man named Benjamin Dawkins, of the firm Dawkins and Howe. Booksellers on Fleet Street.
Camellia had written a book?
The brief letter bore the date Gabriel had first called at Trenton House. “A London audience will find your English villain wholly unbelievable, a caricature drawn out of Irish prejudice….” This Dawkins had prompted Camellia to reimagine her book’s antagonist, and her mind had gone immediately to him. Which meant…
He glanced down at the swirl of paper surrounding his feet, the manuscript pages of a novel. A novel in which he, app
arently, played some part. No, not just some part. Despite himself, he laughed softly. The villain’s part. Of course.
The letter slipped from his fingers and fluttered once more to the floor to join them. With crisp, efficient motions, he tied his cravat, finished dressing, slid his legs into his boots, then shuffled the disordered papers back into a neat stack. He would go the stables and find her spectacles, though he no longer doubted Camellia’s clarity of insight. For a moment, he’d let himself imagine she saw something else, someone else, in him. He’d urged her to think of him as Gabriel, but she had really only ever been interested in Ash. She had known just what she was getting last night.
Only he had been blind.
* * * *
Cami clung stubbornly to the last fragments of sleep. Yawning, she stretched. Her muscles felt stiff and sore, as though she had slept the whole night through without stirring once. She also was not wearing a nightgown.
The previous night’s activities came back to her in a rush, and she clutched the sheet to her chest. But when she at last opened her eyes, she discovered the room was empty. Passing a hand over her hair, she found Gabriel’s cravat still tangled in it. Deftly, she twisted the strip of linen to keep her unkempt locks out of her face. As she moved, a silvery gleam caught her eye. Her spectacles lay on the table beside the bed. He had found them. With fingers that fumbled in their eagerness, she unfolded them and put them on.
Suddenly all was in sharp relief. The faded floral paper on the walls of the shabby but clean room. Steam rising from the pitcher of water on the washbasin. On the chair in the corner someone had laid out her clothes; her dress had been brushed, the linen was fresh. Her eyes traveled to the place where her bag and writing desk had sat, but someone must already have carried them down to the coach. When had Gabriel risen? Just how long had she been asleep?
She stepped out of bed with caution, but her ankle gave her very little pain. After she had splashed water on her face, dressed, and arranged her hair as best she could, she made her way down to the public room of the inn and found him seated at breakfast. The aromas of toast and coffee and other good things wafted from the table. Yesterday afternoon’s meat pie was no more than a distant memory, and she approached the repast with an eager, slightly embarrassed smile.
Gabriel rose. He was handsome as ever in his well-tailored clothes, with his crisp linen, his freshly shaved jaw, and…a look in his eyes she had never seen before. She had not realized how warm their hazel-brown depths had always seemed to her, until she saw their cool, wary expression now.
Suddenly nervous, she dropped her gaze to the table and saw what she had not noticed from across the room. At her place lay the thick stack of paper that made up her life’s work, neatly tied with red silk ribbon. Her stomach, which had been growling keenly over the other contents of the table, performed a poorly executed somersault and landed somewhere in the vicinity of the floor.
“Please sit down,” he said, as if he suspected how her knees wobbled beneath her skirts. “I regret to say that your writing desk was another casualty of yesterday’s fall.” The explanation was offered in a voice as distant as his eyes as he resumed his seat opposite. “It was resting atop my valise. I did not realize that the hinge holding the front panel in place had broken. When I picked up the desk to set it aside, everything spilled out. Including that.” He gestured toward the stack of bound pages.
She fought the impulse to snatch it up and clutch it protectively to her chest.
“Did you—did you read it?” she managed to whisper.
The wait for his answer was torture, and after last night, she suspected he enjoyed keeping her on edge. “No,” he admitted at last. “But I gathered from Mr. Dawkins’s letter it is a novel, one in which my own likeness features rather prominently.”
She nodded, but hidden beneath the table, she twisted her fingers in her lap. “Are you…are you angry with me?”
“Angry?” His expression of wide-eyed surprise was tinged with mockery. “Why, Miss Burke! What would there be to anger me in your tale? I trust you’ve told only the truth. Say rather, flattered,” he corrected, pausing to take a sip of coffee. “Not every villain can hope for the lasting infamy of print.”
No, he wasn’t angry. That much was true. He was… She raked her eyes over his face as her mind flailed for a word. Resigned. Yes, that was it. Resigned to being thought a villain. At the discovery of what she’d done, he’d slipped back into his comfortable role, donned once more the familiar mask.
She’d gone to bed with Gabriel, and woken up to Lord Ash.
He pushed away from the table, as if preparing to rise. Did he intend to punish her presumption by abandoning her in—in—? Why, she didn’t even know the name of the village. Almost every coin she’d had to her name had been spent on a ticket for the public stage. She hadn’t enough now to return to London, to say nothing of getting home. Her heart rattled in her chest.
Time for a gamble of her own.
“Is there anything more calculated to bring on a bout of ennui than driving through the Midlands?” she asked. He hesitated, and a shadow of confusion flickered across his gaze. After a moment, he gave a cautious nod in acknowledgment of the truth of her observation. “Miles and miles of nothing but fields and sheep. Hours and hours with nothing to amuse the traveler. Fortunately,”—she lifted her hands and laid them, palms down, on her manuscript—“I have had the foresight to bring a book.” Now, his dark brow arced. “And so, I wish to make a proposal.”
Though he said nothing, she knew from his posture she had his full attention. But as she weighed her next words, his expression smoothed into something unreadable, part and parcel of the skills that made him successful at the card table—an ability to lure others into risking what they could not afford to lose.
“Despite the admirable restraint you have shown, you are curious, I suspect, about what I have written,” she said. “If you will agree to convey me at least as far as Shropshire, I will read to you from The Wild Irish Rose.”
He was much too skilled to allow surprise to show on his face, though she felt sure he had not anticipated such an offer. Would he refuse it? She thought of what she had written about Lord Granville. No, she did not expect Lord Ash to sit quietly through a recital of his sins. But there were certain things he needed to hear.
“As Lady Merrick’s companion, I often read novels aloud,” she reminded him encouragingly. “She seemed to find my voice pleasant enough.” Despite my accent.
He stood. “I’ll leave you to your breakfast,” he said, nodding at the table. A pause, while his long fingers drummed against the back of his chair. “And I will tell the driver to have the carriage ready in a quarter of an hour.”
It was not precisely an invitation to accompany him, but it was answer enough. A species of relief curled through her, but its unusually sharp claws dug into her belly, robbing her of any remaining appetite.
Gabriel seemed to read her thoughts. “Eat, Camellia.” That tone of command again, softened when he added, “You’re far too thin.”
A flush swept over her skin—embarrassment, yes, yet tinted with the memory of his touch. The strange realization that he had seen more of her than her nakedness. The possibility that in some corner of his charred heart he cared—or would care, if anyone had ever shown him how.
With the slightest of bows, he strode to the door. When he had left the room, she picked up a piece of toast and forced herself to take a bite. For what lay ahead, she was going to need her strength.
Chapter 15
The morning sky was bright without being sunny, damp without being rainy. Gabriel stood beside his coach, glanced at the low hanging clouds on the horizon, and wondered what other nonsensical observations about the weather he could make to pass the time until Camellia came to resume her travel northward.
He had greeted the day with every intention of traveling in the
other direction, eager to confront his uncle face-to-face. Determination had burned in his belly, hot and bright. Over the course of the last hour, however, that flame had begun to sputter and smoke. Soon enough, it would be snuffed out entirely.
What did it matter, really, whether he went forward or back? Whether he was charged with treason and hanged? Hadn’t he always expected to meet some scandalous end? And as for Stoke, what had possessed him to believe that its people were better off with him as its master, that he ought to fight to keep it out of his uncle’s hands? Camellia’s reminder, though unintentional, had been timely.
He was and never would be anything more than Ash.
In the doorway of the inn, she appeared in her plain woolen dress, covered by her usual brown pelisse. Once, he had read the loose fit of her garments as a kind of disguise; now, he found himself wondering if they had been cut for a fuller figure that had since been worn away by work or worry or homesickness. In one hand, she carried her bonnet by its ribbons; the stack of papers she held against her breast with the other. Her hair hung over one shoulder in a thick, black braid, and her chin tipped upward when he caught her eye.
Altogether a much more appealing picture than it had any right to be.
With slow steps, but no obvious limp, she crossed the cobbled inn yard to the carriage. To his side. “I hope I did not keep you waiting, my lord.”
For answer, Gabriel held out one hand to help her up. Instead, she laid the bundle of papers on his palm, followed by her bonnet, and clambered into the coach—favoring her right ankle, yes, but determinedly unassisted.
Inside the carriage, she arranged her skirts and her bonnet with care to take up the entirety of one bench. When he looked into the coach, she was sitting primly with the bound stack of pages in her lap. He could order the coachman to drive on and send her away, alone. Or he could take the seat facing the rear, facing her, and subject himself to her tale.
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