by Mary Balogh
He began to remove her hairpins, slowly and methodically, setting them down on the table beside the open book. She could have done it faster herself. So, probably, could he. But this was not about speed, she realized, or efficiency. This was about enjoying desire and building it—her first lesson in sensuality. Oh, she knew nothing about sensuality, and she wanted to know everything. All of it. She leaned into him, setting her bosom to the firm muscles of his chest, and holding his eyes with her own while his hands worked. She half smiled at him. Tension built in the room almost like a tangible thing.
“I am guessing,” she said, “that you have some experience in all this. I hope so, because one of us needs to know what to do.”
His hands stilled in her hair, and his eyes smiled back into hers while the rest of his face did not. It was a quite devastating expression, one that surely would only ever be appropriate in the bedchamber. It made her knees feel weak and the room seem a bit deficient in breathable air.
“I am not a virgin, Camille,” he told her, and as he removed one more pin her hair came cascading down her back and over her shoulders. “My God. Your hair is beautiful.”
She had not worn it down outside of her dressing room since she was twelve, but sometimes, in rare moments of vanity, she had thought that a pity. She had always thought her hair was her finest feature. It was thick and heavy and slightly wavy.
“You are beautiful,” he said, his fingers playing through her hair, his eyes on hers.
She did not contradict him. She said something foolish instead, though she meant it and would not unsay it even if she could. “So are you,” she said.
He cupped her face with his hands while she grasped his elbows, and he kissed her, his lips parted, his mouth lingering on hers, his tongue probing her lips and the flesh behind, entering her mouth, circling her own tongue, feathering over the roof of her mouth so that she felt a raw, purely physical ache of desire between her thighs and up inside her. He moved his hands behind her waist, pressed them lower to cup her buttocks, and drew her hard against him so that she could feel the shocking maleness of him, the physical evidence of his desire for her. Her own hands flailed to the sides for a moment and then settled on his upper arms.
“Mmm.” He drew back a little and leaned beyond her to draw back the bedcovers. “Let me unclothe you.”
She let him do it, did not try to help him, and did not allow herself to feel embarrassed as garments were peeled away one by one with tantalizing slowness. He was looking at her, drinking her in with eyes that grew heavier with desire. He had called her beautiful when all her clothes were on. She felt beautiful as they came off—beautiful in his eyes, anyway, and for now that was all that mattered. Her heart hammered in her chest and her body hummed with anticipation and her blood pulsed with desire.
Who would have thought it? Oh, who would? Not her, certainly. Not until . . . when? A few hours ago when she waltzed with him? A few days ago when she dashed laughing through the rain with him? A short while ago when she watched him look on his mother’s face for the first time?
“Lie down,” he said when she was wearing nothing at all and he was turning his attention to removing his own clothes.
She did not offer to unclothe him. She would not have known how to go about it. She lay on the bed instead, one knee bent, her foot flat on the mattress, one arm beneath her head. It did not even occur to her to pull the bedcovers over herself to hide her nakedness. He watched her as he undressed, his eyes roving over her, and she watched him.
His shoulders and arms were firmly muscled. So was his chest. It was lightly dusted with dark hair. He was narrow waisted, slim hipped, long legged. If he was imperfect, as she was, she was unaware of it and it would not have mattered anyway. He was Joel, and it was Joel she looked at, not any romantic ideal of the perfect male physique. She drew a slow breath when she saw the evidence of his desire for her, and for the first time she was afraid, though not with the sort of fear that might have had her leaping off the bed to grab up her clothes and bolt from the room. Rather, it was the sort of fear of the unknown that might just as accurately be described as an aching yearning for what she had never experienced before and was about to experience now.
She had never seen a picture of a Greek or Roman statue, because of course they had been sculpted nude, a shocking thing indeed and to be kept far from a lady’s eyes. But he looked as she imagined those statues must look, except that he was a bronzed, living, breathing man while they would be cold white marble with sightless eyes, like those busts in the hall of Mr. Cox-Phillips’s house. Perhaps he was perfect after all. His eyes, those eyes that could not possibly belong to any statue, were dark and hot upon her.
And then he lay down beside her, gathered her into his arms, and turned her against him. She felt all the shock of his warm, masculine nakedness against her own, but she was not about to shrink away from it now when the long, slow building of desire was at an end, and the urgent heat of passion and carnality was about to begin, and their hands began to explore and arouse, and their mouths met, open and hot and demanding. She was not going be a passive recipient either. All the longings and passions of her suppressed femininity welled up in her and spilled over as she made love with a fierce eagerness to match his own.
But ultimately she was shocked into stillness when his body covered hers, his weight bearing her down, his knees pressing between her thighs and spreading her legs, his hands coming beneath her buttocks. She twined her legs about his as he pressed against her entrance and came into her, slowly but firmly and not stopping until she felt stretched, until she feared there could be no deeper for him to come without terrible pain, until the pain happened, sudden and sharp, and there was indeed somewhere deeper for him to come and he came there, hard and thick, and her virginity was gone.
He slid his hands from beneath her and found her own hands and laced his fingers with hers on either side of her head. He raised his head to gaze into her eyes, his own heavy lidded and beautiful, his weight full on her. And he kissed her while her body adjusted to the unfamiliarity and she tightened inner muscles about him to own him and what was happening between them. She would never regret this, she thought quite deliberately. She would not no matter what conscience and common sense told her afterward. She felt as though she were awakening from a lifelong sleep during which she had dreamed but never been an active participant in her own life.
She thought he was leaving her body and almost cried out with protest and regret. But he withdrew only to return—of course. And it happened again and again and again until it settled into a firm, steady rhythm in which a slight soreness and a pounding sort of pleasure and the sucking sounds of wetness combined into an experience like no other, but one she did not want ever to end. And it did not for what might have been several minutes or only just two or three. But finally the rhythm became faster and deeper, and he released her hands in order to slide his own beneath her once more to hold her firm and still. Pleasure swirled from her core to fill her being, though she willed him not to stop yet, ah, not yet. She did not want the world to resume its plodding course with this behind her, all over, to be lived again only in memory.
He held firm and deep and strained against her so that almost, for a moment, oh, almost . . . But she did not find out what almost happened, for he sighed something wordless against the side of her head, and she felt a gush of heat deep within, and he relaxed down onto her. She wrapped her arms about him and closed her eyes and let herself relax too. Almost was good enough. Oh, very much good enough.
After a few all-too-short minutes he moved off her to lie beside her, one bare arm beneath her head, the other bent at the elbow and resting across his eyes. The late-afternoon air felt pleasantly cool against Camille’s damp body. There was a soreness inside, though it was not unpleasant. He smelled faintly of sweat and more markedly and enticingly of something unmistakably male. She could sleep, she thought, if th
e bedcovers were over them, but she did not want to move to pull them up and perhaps disturb the lovely aftermath of passion.
“And I will not even be able to answer with righteous indignation,” he said, “when Marvin waggles his eyebrows and makes suggestive remarks about this afternoon, as he surely will.”
Camille felt suddenly chilled at the suggestion of sordidness.
“I am so sorry, Camille,” he continued. “I ought to have known I was feeling too needy today to risk asking you to come here with me. You must not blame yourself. You have been kindness itself. Promise me you will not blame yourself?”
He removed his arm from his eyes and turned his head to look at her. He was frowning and looking unhappy—and guilty?—far different from the way she had been feeling mere moments ago.
“Of course I will not blame myself,” she said, sitting up and swinging her legs over the far side of the bed. “Or you either. It is something we did by mutual consent. I wanted the experience and now I have had it. There is no question of blame. I must be getting back home.”
“Yes, you must,” he said. “But thank you.”
She felt self-conscious this time, pulling on her clothes while he sat on the side of the bed and began to dress himself. Self-conscious and chilly and suddenly unhappy. If her education as a lady had taught her anything, it was surely that men and women were vastly different from one another, that men had needs that must be satisfied with some frequency but did not in any way involve their emotions.
What had she thought while they were making love—Oh, that was a foolish, inappropriate phrase after all. But what had she thought? That they were embarking upon the great passion of the century? That they were in love? She did not even believe in romantic love. And he certainly was not in love with her.
Neither of them spoke again until they were both out in the hall, she tying the ribbons of her bonnet while he watched, and arranging her shawl about her shoulders and turning to the door. He reached past her to open it, but he did not do so immediately.
“I can see that I have upset you,” he said. “I really am very sorry, Camille.”
And she did something that was totally unplanned and totally without reason. She raised a hand and cracked him across the face with her open ungloved palm. And then she hurried from the room and down the stairs without a backward glance and without any clear idea of why.
Except that by apologizing and saying it ought not to have happened he had cheapened what for her had been perhaps the most beautiful experience of her life.
Oh, what an idiot she was! What a naïve idiot.
Fifteen
Before the morning was half over Joel had tidied and cleaned his rooms, hung the portrait of his mother in what he thought the best spot on the living room wall, completed the painting of Mrs. Wasserman, walked to the market and back to replenish his supply of food, and decided that he was the world’s worst sort of blackguard.
It had not been seduction—she had said herself that it was consensual. But it had felt uneasily like seduction after she left, for he had been needy and she had comforted him. Then she had slapped his face and rushed away before he could ask why. It was obvious why, though. She had regretted what she had done as soon as it was over and rational thought returned, and she had blamed him. It was not entirely fair, perhaps, but oh, he felt guilty.
He felt like the blackest hearted of villains.
Worse, he had remembered after she left that he had promised to dine at Edwina’s and spend the evening with her. He had gone there and stood in the small hallway inside her front door and ended it all with her, rather suddenly, rather abruptly, and without either sensitivity or tact. There had never been any real commitment between them and never any emotional tie stronger than friendship and a mutual enjoyment of sex, but he had felt horribly guilty anyway. She had had a meal ready for him, and she had been dressed prettily and smiling brightly. And she had behaved well and with dignity after he had delivered his brief, blunt, unrehearsed speech and made no attempt to keep him or demand that he explain himself. She had not slammed the door behind him.
Had there ever been a worse villain than he?
To end a perfectly delightful evening—though it had still been early—on his return he had run into Marvin Silver on the stairs and been grinned and leered at as he brushed past. He had felt . . . dirty.
It had not been the best day of his life.
Joel stood and brooded before his mother’s portrait, wondering what he was supposed to do with himself for the rest of the day. Of course, there was that dinner engagement at the Royal York this evening. He grimaced at the very thought. He could go to the orphanage to apologize again to Camille, but he did not know quite what he would say, and he did not imagine she would be thrilled to see him. In other words, he could add abject cowardice to his other shortcomings. He could stay at home and sketch her—flushed and flustered and animated as she taught the children the Roger de Coverley; flushed and martial of spirit as she taught him the steps of the waltz; flushed and vividly triumphant a few minutes later after he had spun her recklessly through a turn. But when he tried to bring the images into focus, he could see her only as she had looked on his bed—gloriously, voluptuously naked and feminine with her hair down.
Make some stew?
That old man was dying. He could have no wish to set eyes upon Joel again, and he certainly would not want to be pestered with more questions. If Uxbury was still at the house—and he probably was—he would undoubtedly do all in his power to keep Joel out, and there might well be two other equally hostile family members there by now. Even the butler would be difficult to get past. Going back there, then, would be a pointless waste of time and money.
He went anyway.
He was certainly right about one thing, though. He did not see Mr. Cox-Phillips.
As the hired carriage drew up at the front of the house, the door was opening, coincidentally as it turned out, and a gangly young servant stepped outside, an armful of what looked like black crepe in his arms. The butler came after him and stood on the threshold, watching as the young man twined the black strips about the door knocker, presumably to muffle the sound of it. When Joel stepped down from the carriage, the butler looked up at him, his eyes bleak and quite noticeably reddened. Joel took two steps toward him and stopped.
“I am so sorry,” he said.
The butler said nothing.
“When?” Joel asked.
“An hour ago,” the butler told him.
“Did he suffer?” Joel’s lips felt stiff.
“He was in the library,” the butler told him, “where he insisted upon being brought every day. I was pouring his morning coffee when he told me not to bother if all I could bring him was swill that smelled like dirty dishwater. He scolded Mr. Orville for forgetting to wrap his blanket about his legs. When Mr. Orville informed him that it was already wrapped about him warm and tight, he looked at it, and then he looked surprised, and then he was gone. Just like that.” He looked bewildered, and tears welled in his eyes.
“I am so sorry,” Joel said again. If he had come yesterday . . . But he had not. He felt a curious sense of loss even though Mr. Cox-Phillips had been no more than a stranger who happened to be related to him. He had also told Joel his mother’s name and given him a small portrait of her, and both were, Joel realized for the first time, priceless gifts. “I am sorry for your grief. Have you been with him long?”
“Fifty-four years,” the butler said. “Mr. Orville is laying him out on his bed.”
Joel nodded and turned back to the carriage. He was stopped, however, by another voice, haughty and imperious.
“You again, fellow?” Viscount Uxbury asked. “You have come begging again, I suppose, but you are too late, I am happy to inform you. Take yourself off before I have you thrown off my property.”
Joel turned back to look curio
usly at him and wondered briefly who would do the throwing. The butler? The thin young man who had finished with the strips of black crepe and was ducking back into the house behind the butler? Uxbury himself? And my property? It had taken him less than an hour to claim it for himself, had it? Joel wondered what the other two claimants would have to say about that.
“You left your doxy behind today, did you?” Uxbury said.
“You have just suffered a family bereavement,” Joel told him. “Out of respect for the late Mr. Cox-Phillips and his faithful servants, I will let that gross insult to a lady pass by me, Uxbury. But take care never to repeat it or anything like it in my hearing again. I might feel obliged to rearrange the features on your face. You may proceed,” he added to the grinning coachman as he turned back to the carriage and climbed inside.
It would surely be false self-indulgence to feel bereaved over the death of a stranger. He felt bereaved anyway.
* * *
Camille rearranged her room. She hung the Madonna-and-child sketch over the table and stood looking at it for a few minutes. She toyed with her breakfast and ate it only because she would not waste food in such a place. She played the pianoforte in the playroom and sang with the handful of children who clustered about her, four girls and two boys.
She took Sarah out into the garden and sat on a blanket with her, playing with her, tickling her to make her laugh, rubbing noses with her, talking nonsense to her, and otherwise making an idiot of herself. Winifred joined them and earnestly informed her how important it was for babies to be played with and touched and held even if they would not remember it when they grew older.