by Gaelen Foley
His heart slammed. Moving with care so as not to scare her, he lifted his hands from his sides and slowly ran his palms down her arms, savoring the satiny perfection of her skin. He felt her quiver under his light touch, heard her breath catch. He caressed her again, gliding his hands back up her lovely arms, past her puff sleeves and low neckline, until he came to the creamy expanse of her chest. He could feel the hectic beating of her pulse as he touched her, gently stroking her alabaster neck with his fingertips. Her long lashes drifted closed, and her shimmery rose lips parted with desire, her head tipping back ever so slightly.
My God, you are so bloody beautiful. His smoldering stare took in the sight of her rapt face, so innocent, so ripe for seduction. He gazed at her beautiful, waiting mouth, lowering his lips toward hers; but halfway there, he paused with a brief, anguished wince.
William Spencer Albright, he said harshly to himself, you must not.
The girl was vulnerable, traumatized. He could not take advantage of such an innocent creature. Good God, she was in the midst of running away from home. He knew from experience that what she needed right now was someone she could trust, not some rough stranger groping her. The thought of this naive beauty alone on the streets of London filled him with genuine alarm. She had no idea what she was getting into. Somehow he found the strength to divert his kiss to her smooth forehead, capturing her chin between his fingertips. He closed his eyes, determined to show her that he wasn’t an utter barbarian. When he needed to, he could still act like a gentleman—but then she moved closer.
Nestling against him, she laid her cheek on his chest with a sigh as soft as the brush of a dove’s wing, as contented as that of a weary traveler who had just come home.
Blade trembled with thwarted desire as she caressed his dragon tattoo, studying it with a fascinated stare. Unable to resist, he went exploring, as well, his deft, thief’s fingers loosing the little star-shaped pins that held her wild, resplendent curls captive. He slid them out of her gleaming tresses. She did not seem to mind, closing her eyes in pleasure. One by one, he freed them, until her long hair tumbled around her delicate shoulders in shining cascades the color of sunlight.
He caught a pair of her long curls between his fingers and pulled them gently, unfurling them to their full length. Pulled straight, her hair reached all the way to her elbows. He was still marveling over her when her lashes swept open. She tilted her head back and smiled at him, slightly starry-eyed.
“Whatever are you doing?” she asked in a deliciously flirtatious purr.
He met her smoky gaze. He couldn’t believe he was letting the chance to make love to this angel slip through his fingers.
He released her curls. “Just…playing,” he murmured in a husky voice. Her curls bounced back up toward her shoulders, perfectly re-forming in their natural spiral shape. He returned her smile, feeling drunken and tender. He took her small, delicate hands in his. “You are,” he whispered, raising her knuckles to his lips, kissing each pretty hand in turn, “the most luscious, outrageously lovely thing I have ever seen in my life. Including the Canaletto.”
She smiled again, gratitude shining in her magnificent eyes. Such eyes. Dark and sparkling like a starry night.
“However,” he continued, “it occurs to me that I have been shockingly remiss in offering you my hospitality.”
“Oh? I hadn’t noticed.”
He narrowed his eyes with a wry smile at her saucy answer. “You’re a bit of a hellion, aren’t you?”
“Never. Just ask my governess.”
Though sorely tempted to kiss that vixenish smile on her lips, somehow he resisted. “You’re dangerous,” he muttered, leading her over to the secretaire. He pulled out the wooden chair, offering it to her.
She sat, her every movement graceful and ladylike, even the way she crossed her ankles and tucked her dainty feet under the chair. He just stared at her for a second, dazed to realize how she had let him touch her. He couldn’t believe it.
She likes me. The shock of it sent a jolt of wild joy through him that stole his breath and robbed him momentarily of his common sense. He, Blade, who stared down cutthroat thugs in the meanest streets of the city, who laughed at death and snapped his fingers in the hangman’s face, found himself nervous and jumpy in the presence of a pretty girl. How utterly stupid. He felt like an ass.
He didn’t care.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Uh, no.” He jerked himself out of his daze, casting about for the proper care and feeding of a lady. “Let’s see. Perhaps you would like some, er, tea?”
She looked at him dubiously, possibly surprised that he had ever heard of the stuff. “I’m sure that would be lovely, thank you.”
“Right.” His mission clear, he strode to the fireplace and promptly discovered he had used all the hot water to cleanse his wound. Bloody hell. He turned around again, chagrined.
She lifted her eyebrow at him quizzically.
“Perhaps…wine?” he attempted.
She smiled, trying and failing to hide her amusement at his efforts. “Even better.”
He marched over to the storage trunk at the foot of his veiled bed, opened the creaky lid, and pulled out his best bottle of claret. The sight of his clean shirts lying balled in one corner of the trunk reminded him of his state of undress. He yanked one out and shook out the wrinkles, then quickly pulled it on over his head. What she must make of him and his tattoos, he barely dared think—but that thought itself was alien, for it was a policy of his never to give a damn what any living soul thought of him.
I am out of my element, he reflected as he poured out two glasses of the purplish-red wine. If he were with Carlotta, they’d have already finished their primal coupling by now and would be sharing a cheroot. He brought the wine over to “Miss Smith.” She accepted it with a nod. Taking a drink from his wineglass, Blade sauntered over to his bed a few feet across from her and sat down.
He watched her sample a few sips of his mediocre wine, then smiled as she politely lied to save his feelings. “It’s…very good.”
She was the worst liar he had ever seen, but he was amused by her attempt to reassure him. He lounged back on his bed, leaning on his elbow. “So, Miss Smith, if you refuse to reveal your true name, won’t you at least tell me why you’re running away?”
She looked into her glass, tension in the angle of her shoulders. “I don’t see why you should care.” She glanced at him from under her long lashes. “You have troubles enough of your own with O’Dell.”
“True, but it so happens I have some experience with these things.” He paused. “Generally, I’ve found that running away is a very bad idea.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Did you run away from home, too?”
He nodded, looking around at his room with a sigh. “Many years ago. Trust me; I don’t recommend it.”
“What made you run away? That is—if you’re willing to say.”
He eyed her in wary indecision. So, she wanted to swap war stories, did she? He shrugged. “My old man had a penchant for blacking my eye,” he said in a broad, offhanded sort of way. “After a particularly unpleasant bout of his discipline, I left. I was thirteen.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said softly, staring at him.
“I’m not,” he replied, and took a drink.
“You come from the West Country?”
“How did you know?”
She smiled. “You roll your R’s.”
“I was born in Cornwall. You?”
“Cumberland.”
“Ah, now we are getting somewhere. So, why are you running away, Cumberland?”
She stared at him, looking wary and perplexed, but he could see the little wheels and cogs turning in her mind. She drew her slippered feet up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her bent knees, regarding him with a lonely, mistrustful gaze.
“Ah, come, you can tell me. There’s no harm in it,” he cajoled her with a half smile. “Soon you�
�ll be off to France and you’ll never see me again. Say what you want; it won’t leave this room.” He paused, studying her. “Was someone cruel to you, frighten you?”
“Nothing like that.”
“What was that you mentioned about an unwanted betrothal?”
“Truly, it’s of no consequence—”
“Oh-ho, what’s this, Cumberland?” he teased her, passing an assessing glance over her face. “Papa wants you to marry some decrepit old wigsby?”
She gave him a charmingly rueful smile, all tousled golden curls like some angel who had rolled off a cloud in her sleep, he thought, and had fallen to earth with a thud.
“Something like that,” she said in vague amusement.
“I see. Well, surely we can find a solution.” He snapped his fingers and gave her a grin. “Shall I ruin you? That should solve your problem. The old wigsby won’t want you if you’re used goods, and I assure you, I’d be happy to oblige.”
“Hmm, an interesting suggestion.” She tapped her lip and pretended to consider it. “Thank you for your generous offer, but on second thought, I’ll pass.”
“Is there someone else that you prefer?” he asked a bit more intently.
“No.”
“Well, marry the old wigsby, then, and cuckold him. That’ll show ’em—and you’ll have his money when he’s dead. What you need,” he said, “is to learn how to think like a thief.”
“You are a devil,” she scolded him, laughing.
“I hope at least your old wigsby has a title.”
“Indeed, he does, but I would never cuckold the man I marry.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“Not me.”
“Gracious, Miss Smith, are you a romantic?”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
“Talk nice and slow, then,” he drawled, “so my poor Cockney brain can absorb it.”
She smiled wryly at his sarcasm and blew a curl off her forehead with her sudden sigh. “I don’t know why you care. Nobody ever listens to me.”
“I’ll listen.”
She shrugged. “Well, if you must know…” Rising to her feet, she took a sip of her wine and paced over to the chest of drawers. “I’m afraid I was rather naughty a fortnight ago at Ascot. Because of that, my eldest brother has arranged my marriage to a man he deems well suited to keep me in line.” She picked up her leather satchel from off the floor where she had left it and dusted it off.
“Naughty…exactly how?” His glance flicked to her bag as she carried it back over to his secretaire. There was probably something in it that would tell him her name.
“All I did was make an innocent little wager on a horse race.” She jerked the mouth of her satchel open and rather violently began throwing her star-shaped hairpins into it.
“How much did you lose?”
“Oh, the wager wasn’t for money. I had already spent my pin money for the week; so, you see, I wagered against a couple of my suitors for a kiss. It was all in fun—I was sure my horse would win anyway. He was the favorite. Unfortunately, he went a little lame in the final furlong and finished third.”
Blade’s smile flattened. “Exactly how many men did you end up kissing?”
“Exactly zero. My brother arrived on the scene with my governess before I did it. Can you believe Robert actually made me renege on my vowels? Honestly! The next thing I knew, he was drawing up my betrothal to—”
Blade lifted his eyebrows as she nearly blurted out the name. His curiosity was intense.
“A family friend,” she finished warily, then gave a heavy sigh. “I meant no harm. But Robert says I must be ever so careful about such things or I will end up ostracized from Society like Mama.” She turned away and gazed broodingly into the fire, twining a lock of hair around her finger.
So, that was it, he thought, watching her for a long moment in silence. The harpies of the ton had sent her mother packing, leaving the daughter torn between filial loyalty and the quite understandable need not to be blackballed herself.
She turned to him with an air of distress. “You mustn’t think badly of her, Blade. Mama never meant for all the other ladies’ husbands to fall in love with her. They just did, and they would woo her, and Mama, well—Mama was a ‘frail vessel,’ as Robert says.”
“Robert?”
“My eldest brother. Why is it that no one ever complains when a man takes a mistress, but let a lady take a lover, and she is called all sorts of names?” She paced across the room. “It isn’t fair! Nobody ever remembers Mama’s genius, or the marvelous essays she wrote on the rights of women, or the rounds she drove about London making sure her gentlemen friends got out of bed and into the House of Lords to cast their votes on important matters of state—and no one ever even mentions the heroic death she died!”
Momentarily entranced by her gown floating weightlessly about her neat, trim legs as she paced, Blade had to shake himself back to attention. “How did she die?”
She sighed and stopped her agitated pacing, leaning her hips back against the chest of drawers. She rested her pampered hands on the edge of it. “Mama loved France. She had gone to the Sorbonne and had countless school friends among the ladies of the Ancien Regime. When the Revolution came, she and one of her lovers, the marquess of Carnarthen, got involved in smuggling the aristocrats’ children out of France to escape the guillotine, but she was eventually caught and executed for a spy.”
“My God,” he murmured. “Is this true?”
“It is.” She returned to her chair, sighed heavily, and sat down again, looping the leather strap of her satchel over her shoulder. She rested her elbow on the table, laid her cheek in her hand, and gazed at him, restless and pensive, the very sketch of tempestuous youth. “Do you see my plight? I want to be like her—I want to be something more, but how can I when I can’t even move, pinned down under all Society’s endless petty rules, plus the added millstone ’round my neck of being expected to atone somehow for my mother’s sins?”
“Wagering your kisses on a horse race does not sound much like atonement to me. It sounds to me as if you’re deliberately flouting Society.”
“Maybe I am, a bit—but can you blame me for resenting them? My mother was worth more than all those pompous hypocrites put together, but they banished her and now she’s dead. I never even had a chance to know her.”
“Well,” he said drily after a moment, “I hope you at least left your family a note.”
“Of course. I don’t want them to worry.” She glanced at the dusty wall-dial timepiece, which read midnight. “I doubt they have seen it yet. They’re probably still at Almack’s. Blade, are you going to show me back to the inn, or am I going to have to find my own way?”
He did not answer at once. “Why don’t you stay here for a while? Sleep on the matter before you go all the way to France. You can take my bed.”
She dropped her hand and gave him a startled look.
“I hate the thought of you out there alone. No one will harm you here, I give you my word—and who knows? I might find the influence of so much beauty…elevating to my moral sense.”
Blushing with a little smile at his echo of her earlier words, she looked away, her long curls falling forward to veil her face. “That’s really very sweet, but my mind is made up. I am determined to reach the coast by dawn. Besides, all my things are still at the inn. My post chaise will be waiting.”
“Suit yourself, then.” He looked away, irrationally stung by her refusal, but still seeking some way to keep her a bit longer. “May I ask you a question?”
“I suppose.”
“What exactly were these ‘sins’ your mother committed that were so awful?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Aye, I’m asking.”
She stared at him for a second, then lowered her lashes. “Mama had six children by four different men.” Lifting her gaze again, the defiance in her dark eyes warned him that his reaction to her revelatio
n would determine everything between them.
If she was worried about him passing moral judgment, she would have done well to recall his occupation. Careful to keep his expression nonchalant, he lifted his eyebrows wryly before taking another sip of wine. “Impressive.”
Relief skimmed her fine features at his smooth acceptance of her secret. “She was beautiful and brilliant—and brave, as well. Most of the men were in love with her, and most of the women…hated her.”
“I see.” He lowered his gaze, studying a small hole in the knee of his trousers. “So, your dam made a scandal of herself…and now all the ton expects you to prove a ‘frail vessel,’ as well?”
“Precisely. They’re no doubt laying wagers on it even now. ‘How long before that girl comes to ruin, and with whom?’ Especially Daphne Taylor.”
“Who?”
“The plague of my existence. She’s the daughter of Viscount Erhard—the reigning beauty of the Season,” she said in droll sarcasm, then waved it off impatiently. “Oh, but let her talk. The ton will never have the satisfaction of seeing me fall into scandal. I may misbehave from time to time, but unlike my mother, I know to a very hair’s breadth the limits of what I can get away with. I had better know,” she added cynically. “I was still in the schoolroom when the whole ton began predicting that ‘Georgiana’s daughter’ would prove a wanton.”
He would kill whoever said that about her, he thought with a rush of violence, but he checked it, holding her in his fascinated stare.
“Well,” he asked slowly, “are you?”
She looked startled by his dangerous question, but for a long moment held his gaze expectantly with a look of innocent perplexity, as though she wondered if he might hold the answer. “Truthfully? I’m…not sure.”
A jolt of electric hunger ran through him.
She smiled candidly, blushing as relief flitted over her youthful face at having set her secret free.
He realized full well that she had just told him something even more important than her name, and though she was innocent, he knew an invitation in a woman’s eyes when he saw it.