by Isobel Carr
She’d reached the edge of the pool and was busy removing garters and stockings: sturdy cotton ones, not one whit less enticing than their silk brethren as they rolled down her calf. Desire whipped through him. Battered and bruised, she was still enchanting enough to steal his wits. His pulse pushed down into his groin. His cock throbbed and stiffened.
Viola slipped into the water like an otter escaping a hunt, not bothering with the steps. Leo ripped his own clothes from his body, scattering them as he went, a trail leading back to sanity. She watched him from the far end of the pool, his own personal siren waiting in the mist.
The water verged on too hot, scalding his skin as though he’d walked into the bonfire on Guy Fawkes night. He surfaced beside Viola, rising into her embrace: arms and legs twining about him, hair tangled around them both like a net, mouth meeting his in a kiss hotter than the water would ever be. Her arm slid between them, her hand grasped his engorged cock, and her fingertips teased the folds of his foreskin near the base.
Leo lifted her away from him, pushed her out of the water, and set her on the lip of the pool. Lord knew his cock was more than willing to take the shortest route to fulfillment, but what had been haunting his dreams was her taste. He wanted her panting and sobbing his name as he filled her.
He pushed between her thighs, gripped her hips, and slid her forward until she was perched on the very edge. It was easy to sink down, to thrust his arms under her thighs, encircle her hips, and tilt her up. Viola rocked back, supporting herself with her arms, knees wide, one foot on his shoulder, one trailing down his back.
Sweet flesh on his tongue, Leo opened his mouth wide and sucked hard on her inner thigh. She gasped and squirmed, knees falling just a tad wider. He bit down lightly on the straining tendon that led from thigh to groin, then slid over to delve into her folds, parting her with his tongue. He fastened his mouth over the sensitive peak at the top of her cleft, pressing his chin hard against the opening of her body.
She strained, breath hitching, the foot on his shoulder beginning to tremble. Leo slid his tongue inside her, lapped slowly all the way up her cleft, then renewed his assault on her swollen clitoris.
Her hand smoothed over his head, locked in his hair. Leo smiled to himself, refusing to be dislodged. She was mumbling, brokenly, words interspersed with gasps. “Vaughn… my lord, oh God… Leo! Leo!”
At last. His name on her lips was as sweet as the taste of her on his. Triumph rippled through him as her whole body trembled. He pulled her back into the water, filled her with one hard thrust, and held her there while the last ripples of her release pulsed around him.
Viola clung to him, spine arching, hips circling in a tight little spiral. He trapped her between his body and the wall of the pool. Waves slid over his shoulders, spilled over the lip of the pool, burst between them like a small geyser. His world spiraled down to the joining of their bodies, the pulsing embrace, the surging thrusts, the incoherent gasps and cries.
As he came, he lost his footing, dragging her beneath the water as he fell. Her mouth found his, and her hair swirled out around them. He found the bottom with his feet and stood, arms locked about her.
Heart pounding in his ears, pulsing in his cock, Leo dragged her to the steps and sat down. She propped herself on her knees and slid back just enough that his cock slipped free. His pulse was slowly returning to his chest where it belonged. She kissed his neck, just below his ear, with the slightest hint of teeth. “In another week or two, I think I could safely return to town.”
Leo let his breath out through his teeth. I, not we. He should have been expecting this; she’d run for the safety and anonymity of London the last time, too. His hands slid up her thighs, gripped her hips lightly, thumbs resting on her hip bones. “Or you could stay here.”
She pulled away just enough to look him in the eye, her hand pressed over his heart, weight bearing down on it. Her perfect brows pinched sharply over her nose.
“Think of it as trying it on for size.” His index fingers circled on her naked skin.
Viola shook her head almost imperceptibly. Her lips parted. Then she caught them between her teeth as though she couldn’t quite find the words she wanted, or was holding them back. “It’s no use trying on something one can’t afford.” Her head dropped so that her hair swung between them like a curtain. “In fact, it’s madness to do so. Leave well enough alone. Though perhaps, being a duke’s son, you don’t know much about wanting what you can’t have, about settling for what you can.”
She tensed, as though for flight. Leo tightened his grip, holding her firmly in place. “If I don’t know by now, by God, you’re teaching me. This isn’t enough. Not for me. I don’t want a mistress, never have. I don’t want a nursery full of bastards. I want a wife, Vi.” Her head came up, eyes boring into him. “But you don’t want a husband, do you?”
“The son of a duke—”
“A younger son—”
“—to marry his whore?”
“—with a brother and three nephews between him and the title. I can’t offer you strawberry leaves—”
“What on earth would I want—” She cut herself off as the meaning dawned on her, eyes widening with indignation. “If you think I’d marry you if you had a title—”
“There’s very little chance of one, just to be clear.” He relaxed his grip, slid one hand around, fingers brushing her cleft. He spread the other across her lower back. She caught her breath, but didn’t move away. “But we could make Dyrham our own little Strawberry Hill. Fox and Mrs. Armistead seem happy enough.”
“But not married. Can you imagine the scandal if they did? The great-grandson of Charles II married to a—”
“Stranger things have happened.” Leo slid one finger into her, followed it with a second, and found the still-swollen peak of her clitoris with his thumb. “Their royal bastardy being established by the king’s penchant for his own French whore, I see very little for the Foxes and Lennoxes to cavil at when it comes to Mrs. Armistead.”
Her look of outrage gave way to the flush of desire. He curled his fingers, twisted his hand so that his thumb was replaced by the heel of his hand.
“Cry pax and be done with it, sweetheart. It was a clumsy proposal—I’m a fool to have said anything at all just now—and I beg you to forget it.”
“It’s not the sort of thing one forgets.” Viola angled her hips toward him, holding on to his shoulders for balance.
“Especially if it becomes a recurring theme.” Leo smiled, and her eyes widened, her expression showing a mercurial flash of outrage before her head dropped back and her thighs began to tremble.
She might not have said yes, but he’d set the idea running through her brain, as unstoppable as a horse without bit or bridle. Leo slid a third finger in and leaned forward to capture a nipple with his teeth. Viola rose up, back arched, knees gripping his hips, voice intermingling his name and God’s.
“I know a bribe when I see one.” Viola eyed Leo with distrust.
The flashy chestnut gelding he’d presented to her knocked its hoof against the stall door, demanding attention, much as Leo did himself. Arrogant beasts, both of them. Beautiful, too, and likely to be just as temperamental, just as difficult to master.
Their tryst in the bathhouse had opened the floodgates. He was once more in her bed, the penitent at the temple, the lover enshrined, the wooing, would-be husband rampant… and she could sense her defenses crumbling day by day, disappearing with every kiss, every touch, every look.
Leo smiled, refusing to spar with her. For once, his blue eye looked as mischievous as the green one. He’d not a shadow of a doubt how his gift would be received. And he was right. The horse was everything she could have hoped for. Viola turned her back on a still-grinning Leo. The gelding blew out his nose, much as Pen did, and pricked up his ears.
“Yes, that’s my pretty boy.” She found herself crooning nonsense like a moonling. His nose was impossibly soft against her cupped hands. He lippe
d her fingers, looking for treats. She heard Leo chuckle as he handed her a lump of sugar. The gelding ate it greedily, lips searching for more.
Viola reached up to scratch behind his ear, and the horse arched his neck and bent lower, pushing back and waggling his head in ecstasy. “You’re impossible, my lord.”
Leo’s answering laugh made her roll her eyes.
“Well,” he began with a hint of offense, “the offer of my own noble hand was declined. Laying Dyrham at your feet doesn’t seem to have done the trick, not even the bathhouse, which you must admit is a strong inducement indeed. I’m simply stacking the deck a tad more in my favor.”
Viola rested her forehead against the horse’s neck and shut her eyes, letting the scent of horse and hay and dust build a wall around her. Bit by tiny bit, Leo was tying her to Dyrham. And she was letting him. She wanted to be convinced, wanted the warning that screamed in her bones silenced once and for all.
She’d ignored it once, and doing so had led to short-lived and nearly unbearable happiness, followed by unimaginable pain and disillusionment. Opening herself up to such a fate a second time was foolhardy in the extreme.
If she married Lord Leonidas Vaughn, he’d be as trapped as she in the end. Did he have any idea what that meant? If his friends cut him, if his family disowned him, was he prepared for that?
She certainly hadn’t been.
CHAPTER 30
Thought this might be of interest. Leo’s distinctive scrawl slashed across a slip of foolscap tucked into a magazine. Viola spread open the issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine that he’d left on the table in the parlor she’d claimed as her own.
Mr. Green’s Comments Upon the Further Refinements of Lord Henry’s Translation of The Iliad. She dropped the magazine to worry at her thumbnail with her teeth.
The thrill of being truly seen, of being recognized, coursed through her, only to be quickly overborne by the well-ingrained instinct to prevent such insights. Hiding in plain sight had become second nature. Being dragged out into the light of day as herself, as Viola rather than Mrs. Whedon, was somehow almost as frightening as being snatched off the street.
That a man might notice her penchant for sapphires, or her taste in hats, or even keep track of how she took her tea was one thing. It was safely within the bounds of flirtation and seduction. It was expected. Needful even.
That he might delve deep enough to realize that such a topic as this would be of interest set every nerve blazing with alarm. But then none of Leo’s gifts or insights fell into the mundane: a mongrel dog, the engraved collar, his penchant for knowing exactly how to tempt her (whether it was into his bed, or merely his home), the horse that must have cost more than most people’s yearly income.
She believed that in this moment, in this place, this idyll away from the world, he loved her, but how to trust that it would last? That it was real enough to endure what would come when the scandal sheets were filled with his name and the gossips got their claws into him?
Was love enough if you didn’t have trust, too? She could hear her heart clamoring that it was, but her ever-logical brain—crammed to the brim with useless Latin verbiage and sordid Greek plays—refused to agree.
She could get no peace. The Bible had dour things to say about a kingdom divided. How much worse to be a person divided against oneself?
She retrieved the magazine from where it had fallen and ran her fingers over the cover as though she could somehow bring it to life, force it to speak, to give up Leo’s secrets.
If he were plain Mr. Vaughn with two thousand a year and a cottage in Cornwall, she could almost have married him without a qualm. But he wasn’t, and even if he were, the undercurrents that swirled between them, as dangerous as Scylla and Charybdis, were impossible to dismiss.
Viola threw herself back into her chair and buried herself in The Gentleman’s Magazine. She was halfway through the article and busy composing a rebuttal in her head when the door to the parlor opened with enough force to rattle the paintings on the wall. Pen hackled, and the woman standing in the doorway, looking very much like Medea triumphant, shushed her with unmistakable authority. Pen cocked her head, her stub of a tail twitching against Viola’s skirts.
“Well, I see some of the tale I’ve been told is true.”
Viola scrambled to her feet, magazine falling from her shaking hands. She curtsied and darted a glance at Leo’s butler. Pilcher hovered behind the new arrival in a dither that could only be explained by a supreme calamity: welcoming the duchess into a house where her son’s mistress was currently resident.
The expression in the woman’s blue eyes would have told Viola everything she needed to know, had she been in doubt as to her identity. Everything she’d ever heard about Lord Leonidas’s frosty gaze was more than true of his mother. Viola’s heart struggled to beat as her blood chilled. She was sinking into an icy pond with no hope of rescue.
“I’m sorry, Your Grace.” Her voice came out surprisingly calm. “Your son is away at the moment.”
“So I told Her Grace,” Pilcher said from the doorway. “It isn’t fitting—” His words choked off as the duchess threw him a quelling glance.
She turned back to Viola, resolution in her spine, determination in the set of her shoulders. “I’m well aware Leo is elsewhere today. I came to see you, Mrs. Whedon. But since servants who should know better by now,” she said loudly, in a tone that promised dire consequences, “seem to be able to do nothing more than quake and hound me when they should be offering me refreshments, I propose you join me in my carriage before I have my say.”
She adjusted her hat upon blond curls shot with silver, and spun about, Viola’s acquiescence clearly assumed. Viola motioned for Pen to stay and followed the duchess out. The last thing she needed was Pen in a closed coach with Lord Leonidas’s mother. Whether the dog loved her or hated her, the duchess’s spangled silk wouldn’t have survived the encounter.
Viola tasted bile at the back of her throat. There was something truly frightening about the way the duchess carried herself. A threat was implicit in every motion. That she was used to giving orders, and to having them obeyed, was beyond question.
A coachman, two footmen, and a prodigious mountain of baggage sat atop a glossy coach-and-six emblazoned with the ducal crest. Viola followed the duchess into her carriage without gloves or hat, feeling oddly bereft without them, like an unarmed gladiator thrown to the lions. She took the rear-facing seat and spread her skirts about her as though this were no more than a friendly drive in Hyde Park.
No matter what the duchess had to say, Viola refused to cower. But the door shut behind them with a click that made her jump. Without a word or motion from the duchess, the carriage rolled into motion. Viola searched for calm, forcing herself to meet the duchess’s gaze unflinchingly. She’d faced down angry relatives before, though never under circumstances such as these.
She had done nothing wrong, had nothing to apologize for, nothing to explain. The duchess couldn’t even accuse her of being mercenary, as not so much as a ha’penny had changed hands between her and Lord Leonidas. All the same, she could feel an anticipatory quake of nervous energy low in her belly, and it took all her self-control to prevent her foot from shaking and her knee from bobbing.
The duchess pushed the curtains more fully open and continued to simply stare at her in the bright light of day. Viola stared back. Let her look. Let her study every bruise, memorize every mark.
Finally the duchess sighed loudly and said, with something that might have been a smile curling up the edge of her mouth, “My daughter said you had bottom.”
Viola’s mouth dropped open, and she shut it with a snap. The duchess glanced down as she smoothed out her skirts, shaking them out so they hung perfectly over her knees, as though sitting for a portrait.
“So unlike my boy to become entangled with a courtesan. If I’d heard he’d eloped with one of his friend’s wives, I’d have been less surprised… I hear I owe you a deal of t
hanks for getting Beau out of a scrape. And for that I do thank you. Daughters are something of a trial, and I say that having been an enormous trial to my poor papa. Beau is my just deserts, it would seem.”
The older woman sucked in one cheek and continued to study her, as though something would announce itself or reveal itself if she just looked hard enough. “I’d like an explanation for the state I find you in from your own mouth, for I’ll go to my grave swearing that my Leo couldn’t have done that to a woman—any woman, regardless of the provocation—and you don’t strike me as the kind to take such treatment lightly.”
Viola caught her breath and held it. Her hands crushed the fine linen of her petticoats. She swallowed thickly. Was it possible to tell only part of the story? How much did the duchess know already?
“I can assure Your Grace that it wasn’t your son.”
The duchess arched a brow. “You should know that London is rife with rumors. One version says my son caught you with another man, murdered you both, and smuggled your corpses out of town—I’m relieved to see that’s blatantly untrue. Another says you and he had a row, and after beating you half to death, he then dragged you away and locked you up as though he were a Bluebeard. My personal favorite is that he fought a duel over you and nearly killed a man.”
The duchess watched her very carefully. Viola struggled to breathe normally. Did the duchess know about her nephew? And if so, what had she been told? Viola’s hands began to shake, and she balled them into fists.
The coach rocked as it made a sharp turn, and the sound of a whip cracking was followed by the unmistakable sensation of speed. Outside, the avenue of limes that marked the entrance to Dyrham was quickly receding.
Leo’s mother slid the length of her parasol across the door as though she were barring the gates of a castle. “When I travel, I don’t like to waste time.”