What Not to Bare

by Megan Frampton

  Mr. Goddard … hm. Had he met him? Was he worthy of Charlotte? Would he answer all her questions? Would any man alive be able to?

  “So your assignment to court her might be over sooner than you thought,” Lord Bradford added.

  He felt an immediate wave of disappointment. “But as we’ve discussed, it wouldn’t be wise in terms of Lady Radnor to stop my attentions to your niece.” Because, damn it, he liked spending time with Charlotte, no matter what she was wearing. Or not wearing, more precisely.

  “Ah, excellent point. Never mind, that is, unless this Mr. Goddard actually proposes and Charlotte accepts. Then I would imagine Lady Radnor would see through your subterfuge. But by then you should be back on your way to India, leaving all of this intrigue behind.”

  Right. On his way back to India, which was what he wanted.

  Wasn’t it?

  ***

  It was definitely more fun to write about clothing and fashion when one had a real live fashionable person to ask questions of. Especially when the live fashionable person was the opposite sex, and had a crooked smile, and was tall and muscular and …

  This was not getting the column written at all. Charlotte bent her head to her desk and squinted at what she had written thus far.

  Frogs, dirt, and—what had she written? Smallclothes. She would have to ask about smallclothes, now that she knew men didn’t wear chemises.

  She drew another piece of paper toward her, one with much more writing on it than the first. “Ask about smallclothes,” she wrote down, following such questions as “Did men even look at ladies’ shoes?” and “What was the best part of a hat?”

  She could not wait until tomorrow. But another column was due tomorrow, and unless she wrote something, she would be disappointing Emma. And herself. The column, and figuring out how to write it, was proving surprisingly fun. Even without the added attraction of Lord David’s information.

  And his kisses, and the way he looked at her at certain times, after her gloves were off.

  She wondered how he’d look if she removed more of her clothing. A shocking thought, of course, but not one that hadn’t already crossed her mind a few times. More than a few times.

  She would have to ask him about that, too.

  But meanwhile, the column. Frogs, dirt, and earthworms. That was an excellent start.

  And tomorrow would be an excellent continuation.

  Thank goodness for an inquiring disposition. And a gentleman willing to answer whatever it was she had in mind.

  And she had a lot in mind.

  If this was to be her last Season, she was going to have fun during it.

  ***

  It was three fifty-five when she knocked on the door, Sarah right behind her, shielding her from the street, in case anyone she knew passed by. It opened before she’d even lowered her hand, and David’s servant, Gotam, yanked them both inside.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” Gotam said. Was it her imagination or had he smiled more when looking at Sarah? “May I take your coats? Lord David will be down in a moment. You are early.”

  Charlotte would have been embarrassed at being early, only she had wanted to arrive just after breakfast, so she was proud of herself for only being five minutes early.

  “Lady Charlotte,” David said as he strode out from the room they’d been in yesterday. “Right on time, welcome. Gotam, you can entertain Lady Charlotte’s maid—Sarah, isn’t it?—while we talk?”

  “Of course. This way, please.” He allowed Sarah to pass in front of him, then jumped ahead to open a door to what appeared to be a library.

  Leaving the two of them alone in the hallway.

  And one of them, at least, wanted to start kissing immediately.

  “This way, Lady Charlotte,” David said, gesturing to the open door he’d emerged from.

  “I think you can dispense with the ‘Lady’ part, don’t you? Just Charlotte is fine.”

  He chuckled as he shut the door behind them. “Yes, of course. Please call me David.”

  “Not Mr. Gorgeous?” she teased, sitting down and raising her gaze to his.

  He smiled, and instead of sitting in the chair opposite, as he had the previous day, he knelt down in front of her. He was not going to pro—

  “I have to tell you something.” He sounded quite serious, not at all the way a man would if he were professing his undying love or anything foolish like that.

  Well. Good, then. She attempted to put her heart back in her chest.

  “What is it?”

  He reached for her hand, frowning as he saw her glove. She didn’t wait for him, just removed both of them and laid them in her lap.

  He took her hand. His was so warm and so large.

  He cleared his throat. Uh-oh. Perhaps he had learned the throat-clearing trick.

  “The thing is, Charlotte, I have not been entirely honest with you.”

  She leaned back in her chair and raised one eyebrow at him. “You’re not really incredibly handsome?”

  He squeezed her hand. His expression was sheepish. “Well, I suppose I have to admit to that. Thank you.” He paused, and glanced away. “You know I am acquainted with your uncle.”

  She mentally scratched that question off the list she had tucked into her pocket.

  “In fact, he is in charge of some of my assignments.”

  More scratching of questions.

  “And so when I returned home, he asked me to do something for him.” Now he looked guilty. And she hadn’t even had that on her list in the first place.

  “What did he ask you to do?” And what did this have to do with her?

  “He cares for you, very much.” She nodded; she knew that already. If that was his confession, then he didn’t understand the concept of confessing.

  “So he asked me to—to pay attention to you, to try to remove some of the stigma caused by that nickname.” His features hardened, as though it hurt him to think of it.

  That was very sweet. Only … “What? My uncle asked you to pay attention to me in a sort of pity courtship?” Her voice rose with each word until she hit a note that made him wince.

  He did not let go of her hand, even though she tried to wrest it away from him. “I cannot believe my uncle would think I was so pathetic that I needed someone to be told to speak with me. And you,” she said, finally yanking her hand away. She pointed her index finger at him and jabbed him in the chest. “You might be who you are and everything, but that does not mean you can—oh, I have no idea what I am saying. I thought we were friends. Real friends. Not just someone you had to be told to speak to.”

  She wished she were alone, because then she could do what she really wanted to, which was cry and drown her sorrows in a plate of tea cookies.

  But if she were alone, he wouldn’t be here, and he wouldn’t have confessed.

  “Wait.” She drew her finger back from where she had stuck it into his chest. “Why are you telling me, anyway? I wouldn’t have found out if you hadn’t told me.” An awful thought, even worse than all these thoughts currently running through her mind, struck her. “You didn’t force yourself to kiss me, did you?” She put her face in her hands and spoke in a choked voice. “I kissed you first. I asked you to kiss me. And you did, because you were following my uncle’s directions. Oh, could this be any worse?”

  He took her hand and pulled it away from her face. She couldn’t bear to look at him, to see the pity and whatever other pathetic-Charlotte emotion he was feeling, so she squeezed her eyes shut.

  “I have to be honest, I did it at first because he asked me to. No, ordered me to,” he corrected. “But I wanted to tell you about it because I want to keep spending time with you. I could have kept it from you, but I felt it was only fair to be honest. I like you, Charlotte. You are making my time in England way more interesting than I thought it would be when I returned.” She opened her eyes. He wasn’t looking at her as though she were pitiful. Thank goodness.

  “Why did you return?” D
amn, here she was asking him questions again. She waved her hand at him. “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

  He smiled. “Yes, of course you do.” He took her other hand and laid their hands in her lap. “But first I want to talk about this thing, and why I did it. Not so you’ll forgive me, since I don’t know if you will, but so you can see why.”

  She nodded. “All right. Tell me.”

  He dropped her hands and rose, turning his back to her as he began speaking. “I love India. I love living there and working there. It’s the one place I’ve been where I am valued for who I am, not what I look like.” He looked back over his shoulder at her and twisted his lips into a wry grin. “I know you might find that hard to understand.”

  He put his arm on the mantle and looked into the fireless grate. “I needed to come home for a while. To avoid a scandal. The reason itself isn’t important. Your uncle is one of the people tasked with giving me my assignments. If I don’t complete my assignments properly, I don’t get to do what I like doing best. I wouldn’t be able to return home, I wouldn’t feel productive. I’d just be the second son whose only value was in my family name.”

  He paused, and Charlotte half-rose from her chair to go to him, but stopped when he resumed speaking. “When your uncle told me what he wanted, I’ll admit it—I was resentful. I felt that once again I was being valued for something over which I had no control.” He turned back to face her. “But I also have to admit, since I’m being painfully, incredibly truthful, that my feelings of resentment faded when I saw you in that rose gown. The boring one. You remember?”

  She nodded.

  “And I realized that there were ways of hiding behind how you looked that I hadn’t understood before. And that I wanted to get to know you, the person Charlotte, and not just be distracted by what you were wearing.” His eyes traveled from her hat—the one with the artificial grapes—down to her shoes, which also featured grapes. “Even though I have to admit that not being distracted by your clothing is one of my tougher assignments.” He advanced toward her, his blue eyes dark in concentration. “I can understand if you no longer wish to visit me, but I will say I am grateful that your uncle assigned this task to me and not to another handsome face.”

  Oh. Her heart fluttered in her chest. She walked to close the distance between them and took his hands in hers. “Here,” she said, raising their joined hands to her hat, “you can do the honors of removing this, if you want.”

  He laughed. “You’ll forgive me, then?”

  His hands were already removing the pins from her hat and dropping them into his pocket. She felt it loosen, then fall entirely off, dropping with a soft plop onto the carpet.

  “I will. But only if you answer my questions.” She took the sheet of paper from her pocket. And cleared her throat.

  “Tell me, are your smallclothes made of linen or cotton?”

  What Not to Bare

  Dear Ladies:

  A well-dressed woman is considered well-dressed as much by what she chooses to not wear as by what she chooses to wear.

  A well-dressed gentleman is only considered well-dressed if he is wearing everything he should be wearing.

  Is it fair that gentlemen should be held to a different standard of clothing than women?

  Maybe one day we should ask the handsomer (as opposed to fairer) sex to remove items of clothing to reveal more of themselves.

  That would be only fair, wouldn’t it?

  The Fashionable Foible

  Chapter 14

  He choked. Given that he wasn’t eating or drinking anything, it was quite a surprise.

  “Linen or cotton?” he repeated. “I—I honestly haven’t thought about it. I don’t know.”

  “Hm,” she said. She held a crumpled piece of paper in her hand and looked down at it. Then she tilted her head and caught his eyes with her own horse-brown ones.

  Eyes, he was beginning to realize, that were lovely in their own way.

  “Do you know what your chemise is made of?” he said in retort.

  She did not respond as he’d thought; instead, her eyes brightened and she smiled. “That is an excellent question. Let’s see, shall we?”

  She was not going to—oh yes, she was. She turned her back to him and pointed over her shoulder at her buttons. “Undo me, and let us have a look. This will be very useful,” she added, even though he had no idea what would be useful. Though her tone certainly sounded enthusiastic.

  By this point, actually, he felt as though he were in a muddle entirely of his own making. Well, and hers; she was the one who kept asking him questions and kept wearing these gowns that made him practically forget his own name. Yet he couldn’t resist the allure, either of her questions, or the finger beckoning him to remove the clothing that was so befuddling, to reveal the woman within.

  Was there even a question?

  Oh, yes, there was. Related to chemises.

  He stepped forward and brushed his fingers against the back of her neck, right above where the buttons started. She shivered and glanced back at him, desire mixed with apprehension in her gaze.

  “My buttons?” she said, almost hesitantly.

  “Yes,” he answered. “If you want me to.”

  There was a pause. She cast her eyes down, as though considering. Her cheeks were flushed. Then she raised her gaze back to him and he knew. And his body knew as well. “Yes. I want you to.”

  Suddenly his throat felt thick, not to mention other parts of him growing thicker. Her skin felt so soft and smooth under his fingers. He slid one button out from the buttonhole, his fingers trembling.

  And another.

  And another.

  And still she stood there, both of them breathing more rapidly. It was the only noise in the room.

  “Almost done,” he said in a low voice as he reached the second-to-last button. On impulse, he lowered his head and kissed her there, at the base of her neck.

  He kept his lips pressed against her skin, moving his mouth lower so it reached just where the gown was gaping open. He kissed her again, right between her shoulder blades, and slid his hands around her waist and drew her body up against his.

  Her back pressed up against his chest, her rear pressed into his groin.

  He had an image of her on one of the fragile chairs, kneeling, with him standing behind her, thrusting into her, her chemise flung up over her back.

  It should have been a demeaning image; with any other woman in his thoughts it would have been, but he just knew she would revel in it, would turn her head to the side to look at him as he took her, would giggle as the chair creaked and he found himself unable to get the proper angle.

  And they’d have to tumble onto the carpet where he’d take her there as well.

  “Are you going to remove it?” she asked. Her voice was low, laced with desire.

  “What? Oh, the gown,” he said, drawing his hands back and putting his palms on either side of the fabric. He tugged, and the whole hideous gown slid off her body to fall in a pool on the floor.

  It clashed horribly with the carpet.

  The chemise, he could safely say, was made of fabric so fine, it was almost translucent. The effect made it very hard to discern precisely what fabric it was made of, because his brain wasn’t able to focus on such details.

  All he could see was her body, revealed tantalizingly through the fabric, the curves and femininity of her easily apparent. Even if he couldn’t make out the details.

  “Is it … Am I?” She stopped speaking, and she turned around to step into his arms.

  She didn’t try to complete her thought, just raised her face to his and smiled, her eyes focused on his mouth.

  For once, he could answer her question.

  “Yes,” he murmured before claiming her mouth.

  ***

  It was beyond delicious—beyond the most delicious thing she had ever had in her mouth before—to be kissed by him. To be kissing him. He had his hands at her waist again, and w
as gradually moving his fingers so they rested at her back.

  Pushing her entire body into his.

  Their height discrepancy, a small part of her brain noticed, wasn’t as bad as she’d theorized it would be when she was pondering kissing him.

  And if it were, she’d just make sure she brought a small stool next time she visited.

  His chest pressed against her breasts, and she was acutely aware of the contrast between his body and hers. Of course, he didn’t have breasts in the first place, but it was beyond that reality. His chest was hard and solid against her, and she felt as though her body was being pushed and pulled to accommodate his. As though his body was a part of hers that was being returned.

  As a proper young lady, a lady with limited experience with men—as it should be—prior to this, she should have been horrified at all the new, intriguing sensations coursing in and around her body.

  But she was not horrified. She was the opposite of horrified. Happy-fied? And so, when one of his hands reached lower, to slide over the top part of her behind, she arched up into him even more, noting the change in his body in the lower region also.

  Well. Wasn’t this interesting?

  Meanwhile, he was kissing her with a ferocious, but delicate, intensity that made her quiver. She felt her skin prickle all over, even as her mouth and her breasts and even farther down felt hot and sensitive.

  Goodness.

  She had instinctively closed her eyes, but she opened them for a moment to peek at him. His lashes—really, was it fair his lashes were so long, on top of everything else—lay against his skin, a tiny furrow between his eyebrows showing his concentration.

  He was concentrating on kissing her.

  That felt lovely.

  She’d figured out how to breathe while kissing, which was a bonus, given that they really did seem to have breathing in common. She didn’t have to lie to her mother about that, at least. Her nose rested against his, and she felt the rough rasp as his stubbled cheek grazed her skin.

  And he was caressing her bottom, running his palms over her, sliding them back to her waist, and then beginning again.