by Betina Krahn
“Of course she does,” petite, dark-eyed Florence said sweetly. “She has us. Now, if you’ll direct your attention to the items needed in a woman’s sewing basket.”
There were tapes, pins, shears, and curve setters; seam rippers, stitching gauges, thimbles, gathering hooks, grommet punches, and darning eggs. Remington felt his jaw tightening as the list lengthened, and he began to understand that this was going to be a tedious business indeed. With strained courtesy he nodded as they demonstrated a number of pieces of the sewing equipment, then introduced him to a treadle sewing machine. When he saw the ominous way the needle jabbed and the machine’s foot clawed at the fabric, he declined their offer to give it a try.
Just as he was on the verge of sinking into surliness, they trundled out one last bit of equipment from behind a screen: a dressmaker’s form. It was a startlingly detailed female figure, and when they announced that it was set to Antonia’s measurements, his gaze fixed raptly on that padded shell.
There were her breasts, her narrow waist, her nicely rounded hips—by proxy, but tantalizing to the imagination all the same. He was staring at it so intently that he missed the knowing exchange of looks between Florence and Victoria.
“We have discussed it, your lordship,” Victoria announced. “One week is not much time. The most we can do is have you observe our work and learn a few basic mending stitches and how to sew on buttons.”
“A grave disappointment, of course. But I shall try to bear up,” he said dryly.
With indulgent wags of head they put him to work learning to thread a needle. The work was every bit as tedious as he had expected, and his fingers seemed to possess all the dexterity of boiled sausages. The ladies couldn’t find a proper thimble in his size, so he was reduced to puncturing his thumbs several times before he mastered the technique of spearing the fabric and not the flesh beneath it.
The gashes of thread he made through the fabric were wildly uneven, and they puckered the material or left it too loose. Florence and Victoria smiled patiently and corrected his grip on the cloth, the angle of his needle, and his assumption that sewing was simple, mindless work. He was just showing some promise at making an even stitch when they added a significant complication: a button.
“Buttons are so important to good clothing,” Florence said earnestly, leaning over the edge of his chair as he struggled to hold the button in place while he jabbed the needle through the holes again and again. “We’re forever having to set or replace buttons in this house.” She looked to Victoria, who nodded and took it up.
“Because of Lady Toni, of course. She has a perfect passion for buttons.”
“She does?” He tried not to sound too interested.
“Oh, yes,” Florence agreed, nodding and peering through her spectacles at the bollix he was making of the thread. She put her own work down to help him untangle it. “You probably haven’t noticed, but she wears a million buttons. She doesn’t own a single bodice that has less than thirty of them. Most of them are small and delicate. She wears whole rows of them to close up her seams.”
Ah, but he had noticed.
“Even her gloves. She wears five-button length most days, but a full twenty buttons for dress,” Victoria added.
He smiled with what he hoped passed for polite attention, while his mind flew back to the sight of her at the Ellingsons’, with her arms lined with rows of delicate kid-covered buttons. Twenty-button gloves. What kind of woman wore twenty-button gloves and thirty or more buttons on every bodice? A woman who was deathly afraid of … what? Coming unbuttoned?
“Well, I see they have you hard at work.”
Antonia’s voice startled him and he jabbed himself with the needle.
“Owww—damm—” He stuck his wounded finger in his mouth and turned to glare at her. But his eyes quickly slid from her cool smile down to the rows of buttons slanting downward over each breast. There had to be at least thirty silken spheres caught in loops that formed a V-shaped panel down the front of her fawn silk bodice. In spite of himself, he smiled.
“He’s doing rather well, we think,” Victoria said, holding up his work for Antonia’s inspection. She swayed closer and looked it over.
“Very good, your lordship. We may convert you to something useful yet,” she said with a teasing smile.
“Don’t depend on it,” he said easily.
“You find needlework not to your taste?” Her eyes sparkled. “Well, I must confess: neither do I. But it is a duty virtually all women must contend with, willingly or not.” She pushed a parlor chair toward their circle, picked up a needle and a bodice in need of some work, and seated herself.
“It is only one of many women’s tasks that men find tedious and taxing of the patience and fine skills.” She engaged his eyes briefly, then began to thread her needle. “Another characteristic of women’s work is that it comprises a thousand tiny details, each task made up of smaller, more intricate steps that must be mastered and executed in close succession. You have spent an hour learning to execute the simplest mending stitch and beginning to sew on a button. Just imagine the work involved in constructing an entire dress, a child’s smock, or a man’s coat.”
She looked up at Florence. “While his lordship wrestles with that button, why don’t you show him the steps required in making a dress and tell him how much it would cost to hire the work done?”
Florence obligingly launched into a lecture on the process of dressmaking, beginning with constructing and altering a pattern, then laying out the fabric, cutting, basting, lining, stiffening, sewing. Then came fitting and seam binding and altering and trimming and hemming …
Remington listened with half an ear and watched with half an eye. His attention wavered between the dressmaker’s form and Antonia’s neatly imprisoned curves. Then as Florence and Victoria chattered on, his attention settled on those tantalizing little fastenings stretched in pert rows across the tips of Antonia’s breasts.
Antonia felt the heat of his stare, shifted distractedly, and tried to bury her interest in the garment she was mending. Neither realized at first that the lecture had stopped. The silence finally registered, and Antonia looked up to find Florence leaning on the table and holding her head with an anguished expression.
“What is it, Florence?” she said with concern, snapping forward on her chair.
“One of my headaches, I fear. Ohhh—” Florence stiffened, reacting to a sharp pain, and Victoria hurried to put an arm around her.
“It’s all this fine work again. You need a lie-down,” Victoria said determinedly, turning to Antonia. “I’ll see she gets her powders and a cool cloth.”
Antonia nodded gratefully; Florence was in capable hands. When the door closed behind them, she sat a moment, then turned to Remington with the dawning realization that she was left to carry on the lesson. The challenge in the lidded look he gave her made it impossible to call it off without feeling like a coward.
“Well,” she said, sliding to the edge of her chair and setting her own mending aside, “at least now you have some idea of how it is done.”
“Indeed I do. But then, I have known how it is done for some time.”
Clearly, he wasn’t referring to stitchery or mending. She swallowed hard and pushed to her feet, willing herself to ignore his wretched double entendres. But the rule of her will did not quite extend to the beating of her own heart or the sudden sensitivity of her lips. She rose and put the fabric-strewn table between them.
“Now, after only one lesson, you’re an expert in sewing and dressmaking?” she said, dismayed to hear the breathiness in her voice.
In a moment he was on his feet and standing beside her, alarmingly close. It took every bit of control she possessed to keep from looking up.
“Not in dressmaking.” His voice poured down over her like warm honey. “Only in how I would dress you, Antonia, if you were mine.”
The shock of his words freed her gaze and it floated up. There he stood, with his dark, tempting
look that melted her knees and made her skin hunger for contact with his. She braced, both anticipating his touch and dreading it. But he backed away and reached instead for the dressmaker’s form, pulling it in front of him and placing his hands on its shoulders.
“I would dress you in soft tea gowns—sheer, embroidered surah or whisper-soft tussore silk, with no stays.” As his gaze melted her defenses, his hands slid down the sides of the form to what would be her waist and splayed possessively over the ticking that stood as proxy for her ribs. “Your waist needs no improving, and I would be able to feel the warmth and the softness of you through your garments.”
She quivered as she remembered the feel of his hands on her waist.
“I would toss out all your bustles … dress you in skirts that hug your hips.” His hands drifted downward over the form. “Skirts that flare and swirl softly around you with each step, draping and wrapping around your legs. Such lovely curves. And I do love the way you make them sway as you walk.”
Her gaze fastened helplessly on his supple, long-fingered hands. As they cupped and slid down the abdomen of that form, she somehow felt every stroke, knew the intensity of each touch. She couldn’t protest; could only feel the promise of his hands on her belly, firm and possessive, caressing her. Longing settled, hot and growing, into her deepest core.
“Your bodices would always be low and clinging, ready to slide down your shoulder at the slightest inducement, baring the lovely skin you hide.” His hands slid up the form to draw a deep circle around its chest, across the tops of its molded breasts. His fingers slid with tantalizing hesitation across those unresponsive mounds, carrying her gaze with them, making her body respond the way that carved and padded wood could not.
A low, sweet flame ignited in the tips of her breasts, and she stiffened visibly. Her eyes darkened as she visually measured the distance to his hands, wanting to pull that lifeless form from them and replace it with her own yearning flesh.
But the steps that would have required yawned like miles between them, stretching farther and farther … until they snapped something in her consciousness. She surfaced from that sensual immersion, and gasped quietly as she stumbled back.
“Well then, I must be thankful I am not at your mercy. I would be the laughingstock of polite society … dressed as a … as a gypsy.” She picked up his sewing and held it out with a glower. “Enough talk. You have work to do.”
He hesitated a moment, then rounded the table and took the cloth from her. Snatching up her scissors and mending, she hurried to the settee on the far side of the room. He watched her flee, noting the high color in her cheeks and the tremble of her hands as she had held out the fabric to him. He had gotten to her.
Smiling lazily, he crossed the room and settled on the end of the settee beside her. “The light is much better here,” he said without an ounce of sincerity.
She huffed irritably and withdrew to the far end of the settee. Undaunted, he moved closer and craned his neck to peer at what she was working on. Buttons. He bit his lip thoughtfully and let his gaze wander from her sewing project to her person.
She had a passion for buttons.
Suddenly so did he. He was seized by the most irrational urge to grab her and pull her beneath him and undo all those saucy little buttons—one delicious flick of the thumb at a time. He edged still closer and began to count.
“Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen,” he finished aloud. Examining her lowered lashes and fiercely set jaw, he leaned close enough for his shirtfront to crush the puff of her sleeve. “I assume there are the same number on each side.”
“I beg your pardon?” she said hoarsely, lowering her needle and communicating her outrage by her refusal to look at him.
“Your buttons … nineteen on a side. That makes a total of thirty-eight. Florence and Victoria said you have a penchant for them. But even so, thirty-eight on one dress … it’s enough to make a man wonder.” He paused and watched her fighting the urge to look at him. She needed a bit more incentive.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked with a low, husky laugh. “That something will get out?”
“What?” She whirled on him, her eyes flashing.
“Or perhaps you’re afraid something else will get in.” He lowered his head, breathing her roselike scent, feeling her allure curling through his blood. Then he boldly engaged her eyes.
“Ah, Antonia. Buttons aren’t much of a barrier if a man is truly determined.”
And his expression said he was a most determined man. Tilting her backward as she strained to avoid contact with him, he impulsively picked up the scissors in her lap. She gasped as he opened them and slid them around her top button on one side, shearing it off. A heartbeat later he slid them around a second … a third … and a fourth.
He cut off button after button. It was an outrage, an assault upon her person, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop it or even to protest it … not when he was so near and her blood was surging against her skin in eagerness for his touch. She couldn’t move, could only watch as her buttons rolled and the top of her bodice began to slide.
“I want in, Antonia,” he said in low, penetrating tones that set her every nerve vibrating. “I want to see you … to touch you.”
Suddenly those scissors were at the tip of her breast, separated from that exquisitely sensitive flesh by a mere layer or two of cloth. Snip. Snip. Every muscle in her body contracted in response. Then those cool, dispassionate blades slid down the underside of her burning breast, severing threads that seemed to be connected to her sense of control. In turmoil she looked up into his face and found there, unshuttered, the same desire she was feeling.
This was no teasing, no contrivance on his part, she realized dimly. He truly wanted her. A dizzying surge of joy washed through her, and the release of tension made her feel oddly weak and air starved.
Then the entire row was gone, and with a nudge from his hand, the soft fabric rolled back, baring one fashionably imprisoned breast. His eyes slid from hers to her pink-blushed skin and she held her breath as he lowered his head and pressed a passionate kiss just above the rim of her corset.
He coiled his arms around her and drew her hard against him, raining kisses over her chest, up her throat, and across her cheek. When he covered her mouth with his, her arms wrapped his neck, and a moment later neither could say where the moan that resonated between them originated.
This was what she had been waiting for … this tempest in her blood, this storm of desire. She opened to his kisses, welcoming that sultry and erotic penetration. She arched against him, hungry for the feel and the motion of him, aching for the realization of every sensation promised in her night-spawned dreams.
They sank back onto the pillows, parting briefly as he braced above, allowing her to turn beneath him. Then he settled over her once again, molding tightly against her narrow skirts. As his mouth poured over hers again, she coaxed his tongue with hers, enticing him to resume his exquisite oral caresses. That invitation melted the last barriers of propriety between them, and his hands began to move over her, caressing, claiming, invading her bodice, touching her as no one ever had.
His kisses drifted down her throat to her breast, leaving a trail of liquid fire behind. She gasped and shivered beneath him as he slid a finger under the edge of her corset and gently pried her tightly budded nipple above the edge of it. With agonizing tenderness, he kissed and tantalized that aching point with his tongue. Whimpering with pleasure, she arched toward his mouth, instinctively seeking a firmer possession, a deeper pleasure. Eager to oblige, he took her taut nipple into his mouth, suckling, conjuring erotic undulations in her body as it lay beneath his.
Half of her was on fire and the other half ached to be consumed by that same exquisite flame. Her fingers fumbled hopelessly with the buttons on the other side of her bodice before he raised above her and brushed her hand away. An instant later the scissors reappeared and more buttons began dropping like her inhibitions, scatt
ering on the floor around them. With eyes like burning coals, he finally seized the front panel of her bodice and yanked. Cloth groaned, stitches popped, and she groaned with soft satisfaction as his mouth closed over the tip of her other breast.
Heat welled within her, responding to the weight of his body on hers, and her hands began to move, seeking the shapes and textures of him. His hair was silky, his cheeks raspy, and his neck was corded beneath his starched collar. Beneath his coat, inside his vest, beyond the cool barrier of his shirt, he was firm and sleek against her hands. His back was layered with bands of muscles that shifted and bulged as he molded himself against her.
Each kiss, each motion, pushed her higher along a broadening plane of excitation. Of its own will her body began to gather and tighten, bracing for an approaching storm. She parted her legs as much as her restrictive skirt would allow and felt him pressing down through her clothes. Unerringly he found that singular burning point around which her desires were somehow gathered. Her hips angled and rocked slowly against his, finding his weight now focused behind the swollen ridge that was the counterpart of the heat and pressure building in her loins. She strained closer as once, twice, that luscious hardness raked her.
More, she wanted more. His body flexed and thrust, providing it, pushing the tension wildly, precipitously higher within her. She gasped for breath as turbulent waves of pleasure crashed over her, one after another, wrenching all sense of control from her. One instant she was floating, exultant, the next she was drowning under those powerful deluges of sensation. Her heart beat erratically, and her body seemed to be turning molten.
Then a sharp flash of panic erupted through her feverish excitement.
It was too much! One last desperate flare of reason illuminated the dim corners of her awareness, and she understood what was happening … sensed the approaching limit of excitation … realized where this wild, impulsive pleasure was pushing her. It was a forbidden limit, a shattering apocalypse of self.