Guilty Series

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  He moved closer and bent down to touch her lashes. She blinked, smearing a tear against his fingertip, making herself a liar.

  “No,” he said gently as he pulled his hand back, “you’re much too sensible, of course, to get all sentimental over a hairpin. Forgive me for thinking anything of the sort.”

  He was smiling a little, she could hear it in his voice.

  Dylan Moore was a rakehell, she reminded herself. She knew all about him, how easily he could get any woman he wanted. He had the money to buy her, the smiles to beguile her, the charm to win her, the prowess to pleasure her, whichever was required at any particular moment. He had the knowledge to mix those things like notes, making a melody that many women would fall in love with.

  His reputation made her aware of the other women to whom he had given his potent attentions. Now he was doing it to her. The worst part of it all was that she did not want to believe it was a farce. She wanted so badly to think he was giving her that attention because he cared about her. It was a dangerous illusion.

  His love affairs were legendary, and so were their endings. He had never really cared for any of those women, she suspected, not deeply. Worse, he didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.

  His hand came into her line of vision, no longer holding the hairpin. She did not know what he had done with it. He reached across the table, bending close to her, his chest brushing the back of her shoulder as he grasped a pink ribbon she’d saved from a Viennese chocolate box.

  He straightened with the thin strip of rose silk in his fingers. Her gaze followed the move, staring at his hand. The ribbon seemed an absurd, flimsy little falderal caught like that in his grasp. He lifted his other hand, and she watched as he twisted the bit of pink silk into a bow. Before she realized his intent, he was standing right behind her, putting the ribbon in her hair, probably along with her gold hairpin.

  She remained perfectly still as he tucked the makeshift decoration into the heavy mass of braids looped at the back of her head. Once he was done, he did not move away. Instead, he spread his hands over the ribbon and the braids and was still.

  What is he doing? she wondered as several seconds went by and he did not move. As if in answer to her silent question, he slid his thumbs over her temples and tilted her head back. He leaned down, his face upside down over hers, his black eyes and black lashes so close, a hint of a smile curving his lips. He bent closer, until both his face and mouth were out of her view and all she could see was the long, strong column of his throat and the pulse that beat there. Cupping her head, his thumbs caressing her temples, he kissed her.

  It disarmed her, that contact, the tender press of his lips to hers in this upside-down kiss. It was all a game to him, but it was hard to care about that when he pulled her lower lip between both of his, sucking gently as if on a piece of candy, nibbling, tasting, savoring.

  Grace felt herself unraveling. Her common sense and self-respect threatened to abandon her entirely in the thick, heavy haze of desire. Upside-down kisses, topsy-turvy emotions, and him, his hands, his mouth, his long hair a black curtain around her face. She was so mixed up that she didn’t know what to believe about him anymore, but she knew what she wanted to believe. Cried out for it with a hunger she had not felt in years.

  He straightened, his hands sliding down her arms, pulling her to her feet. “Grace?”

  She felt the chair between them being pulled out of the way. “What?”

  “Did you have an affair with Liszt?” he asked, his lips brushing against her hair. When she did not answer, he pulled her back against his chest, then his hands slipped beneath her arms and curved around her waist.

  “Tell me,” he said, bending his head to her ear. “If you don’t,” he added, his voice low and silky, “I’ll have to just stand here kissing your ear until you do.” He suited the action to the word, and Grace shivered, her body tingling from head to toe.

  “You like that, don’t you?” he asked. He was smiling, she could tell. He kissed her there again, teasing. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she gasped. “Yes.”

  “God, I love that word.” When he pulled her earlobe into his mouth, she gave a strangled little moan, and something went wrong with her knees. He wrapped one arm around her, pulling her even more tightly against him, grazing her earlobe with his teeth. With his free hand, he began to unfasten the buttons at the front of her bodice. She ought to stop him. She didn’t.

  He was flagrantly aroused. Even through the layers of her clothing and his, she could feel the hard ridge of his penis against her buttocks, and she moved against it, savoring the feel of him, instinctively seeking what her mind kept telling her she did not want. He continued unfastening the buttons of her dress as he held her body tight against his, and she knew she had to call a halt now while she still could.

  “Dylan—” she began and sucked in a deep breath, but he cut her off before she could tell him to stop.

  “Did you have an affair with Liszt?” he asked again, his voice low and rough now, demanding an answer. “I want to know.”

  “Why should you care?”

  “I care.” He moved his hand beneath the edge of her unbuttoned bodice, the low square neck of her chemise, his hand pushing beneath the edge of her corset to embrace her breast. He cupped it in his palm against the tight fabric. “Did you?”

  Grace could hear herself making little panting sounds. “I am not that sort of woman,” she gasped, twisting in his arms, trying to remind herself of that fact at this very moment. “You know that. I do not have affairs.”

  “Virtuous.” He sounded so pleased, the wretch. He laughed softly, blowing warm air against the base of her throat. “Poor Franz.”

  His fingertips brushed the side of her breast within the confines of her corset, and he trailed hot kisses along the line of her shoulder to where the edge of her partially unbuttoned dress cut into her skin. He made an impatient sound and left off caressing her breast, lifting his hand to the buttons of her dress to unfasten more of them.

  “I heard what you said earlier. Did you mean it, Grace?” His breathing was ragged as he unfastened the remaining buttons on her dress and untied the ribbons of her chemise with practiced skill, reminding her how many times he must have done all this before. He grasped fabric in his hands and pulled down her dress and chemise to bare her shoulders. “Are you lonely?”

  Such an unfair question. She didn’t answer, but then, she didn’t really have to. He already knew, and he was exploiting it. She was letting him.

  He cupped both her breasts, his thumbs brushing her bare skin above the corset. He edged his thigh between both of hers. Not at all hampered by the folds of her skirt, he moved his thigh, sliding against her where she burned the hottest. “Are you?”

  “I…I do not believe…oh, God.” Her voice trailed away. She was hovering on the edge of reason, and she knew she had to stop him now. Her loneliness would not be assuaged by one glorious, frantic rut. It was a loveless act that would only leave her aching more than she already did. If she waited, if she played with this any longer, Dylan would scorch away all vestiges of her self-respect. Even as his thigh slid provocatively back and forth against her, she forced herself to say it. “Dylan, stop.”

  Stop. Somewhere beyond the fire in his body and the roar of sound in his head, he heard that word. He didn’t want to hear it, he tried to think he had not really heard it. Women said all sorts of nonsensical things at moments like this.

  She couldn’t mean it. Not really. Not now. Not when her breasts were in his hands and his head was spinning, not when he was rock hard and she was making erotic little sounds. Not when all he wanted was to pull up her skirts, impale himself inside her, and end this torture. Stopping now wasn’t possible.

  Dylan could feel her move against him again, but this time it was different. She was stiffening, pulling away.

  He could not let her go. Everything inside him demanded completion. He grasped her shoulders to keep her
there. “I get lonely, too, Grace.” He could hear the hard, desperate need in his own voice as he spoke. “Come upstairs with me. Now.”

  She was frozen in his grasp, stiff as a board. “I thought you were going out.”

  “When I could spend my night with you?” If he wasn’t in such desperate straits, he’d laugh at that. There was nothing on God’s earth that could compare with what he had in his hands at this moment. He nuzzled her neck, knowing he had to get any crazy notions of stopping out of her head. “Go out now?” he groaned against her ear. “Not bloody likely.”

  He felt her flutter for a second, soften, wavering in his arms and driving him to madness. Then, without warning, she stepped side ways, twisting out of his grasp. “No,” she said, her voice ringing with a sincerity that even his lust-filled senses could not ignore. “I cannot do this. I will not.”

  He made a low savage sound of protest, his body rebelling against this sudden, inexplicable withdrawal.

  She was turned away from him, fastening buttons, her head bent. He moved to stand in front of her, and he saw that her hands were shaking. “Grace,” he said, striving to sound gentle when there was nothing but seething masculine chaos inside him. “Grace, stay with me.”

  “I am staying.” Her voice was prim and cool, infuriating in its normalcy. Only the trembling of her fingers as she fastened the last button of her dress gave her away. “I have to stay for a year.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He reached for her, cupped her face in his hands.

  “I said no,” she reminded him. Her voice was soft, and she did not try to escape him. Instead, she looked straight into his eyes and said, “You gave me your word of honor.”

  He could have laughed at notions of honor at this moment, but those green eyes of hers were so steady, so unwavering as she looked at him, and it suddenly struck him that she was afraid. She should be. If he stayed here one moment longer, he did not know what he would do. The whine in his brain amplified to a screech, and he felt as if his head were exploding.

  He uttered the foulest oath he knew and turned away, striding toward the doors, hating her, hating himself. He had to get out of here before he came apart. Never in his life before had he been close to forcing a woman. He flung back the doors with such violence that they probably dented the plaster walls. The footman in the chair near the door jumped to his feet. “Get my carriage,” Dylan said as he passed the servant, knowing he was shouting over the noise screaming through his mind. “I’m going out.”

  He ran up the stairs to his room, sent Phelps scrambling for hot water, and less than fifteen minutes later, he had shaved, changed into evening clothes, and was downstairs in the foyer waiting for his carriage, his body still raging with unslaked lust, his head drowning in noise and static and the erotic sounds Grace had been making two seconds before she’d stepped right out of his arms.

  He was finally going over the edge of madness, he must be. Grace, who was supposed to be his antidote, was making him insane. For weeks now, he’d been panting after that woman like a half-grown pup, rejected time and again but still coming back for more.

  These past two weeks, while his body had healed, he had tried to keep thoughts of her out of his mind so that he could work on the symphony, but she’d kept getting in the way of it, invading his thoughts with such unerring persistence that hearing anything like music had been impossible. Things weren’t all that different than before Grace had come, really. He still couldn’t compose. He went out, caroused about town, sought his pleasures, indulged his whims, did all the things he usually did, with one glaring exception.

  He hadn’t touched another woman, much less bedded one. He had not really wanted to. He had become too captivated by the woman living under his own roof.

  How long was this going to go on? He’d been cooling his heels for weeks now, getting a few passionate kisses and any number of erotic fantasies. He wanted some erotic reality, damn it.

  Before this evening was over, he was going to have a woman beneath him, by God, a woman eager and willing, a woman who didn’t say no right at the moment when his cock was splitting his trouser buttons apart. A courtesan, a demirep, a bawd, a streetwalker—any was preferable to a woman of virtue. When the hell had he started to forget that?

  When the carriage pulled up in front of the house, Osgoode set Dylan’s cloak across his shoulders, a footman opened the front door for him, and he walked out into the soft air of a warm spring night.

  He would have relief from this torment. He knew exactly what he needed right now, and a virtuous woman was not it.

  It was a good thing Papa’s house was on the corner of the square, Isabel thought as she crouched down in the night shadows, watching through the bars of the side gate as her father’s landau drove from the mews to the front of the house. She breathed a sigh of relief that the tops had been lifted and the landau was enclosed.

  The moment the carriage passed her, she grabbed the black wool blanket she’d brought with her, opened the gate, and followed the landau to the corner of the house, where the vehicle turned left.

  Isabel did not continue to follow it around the corner. Instead, she stopped, flattening herself against the side of the house, waiting and listening as the landau stopped before her own front door only a few feet away. She heard the carriage door open, she heard her father give a direction to Roberts, then she heard the door close again. The moment it did, she peeked around the corner and saw that Roberts had his back to her and was walking toward the coachman’s seat at the front.

  Isabel knew this was her chance. She came out from around the corner and ran to the back of the carriage. She grabbed the bar and hauled herself up onto the footman’s dummy board.

  “Walk on,” Roberts said, the landau jerked forward, and they were off. She wasn’t tall enough to be seen by Roberts if he happened to look over his shoulder, but she did not want to be noticed by people on the street either, people who might be intelligent enough to see that the footman at the rear of the carriage was very short, very small, and didn’t have any livery. The last thing she needed was for someone to call out to Roberts that he had a stowaway. She covered herself completely in the black blanket and curled herself into a little ball on the dummy board, hoping anybody who happened to look would think she was a bundle being transported.

  Unless it made the society papers, like the fight two weeks before, she didn’t know what her father did when he went out at night. She could make lots of guesses. He belonged to Brooks’s and several other clubs, though precisely what men did in clubs she had no idea. Gambled, she knew that much, and drank. She didn’t mind so much about those things. Papa did seem to win a lot at cards, and it wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford to lose. He drank, but he never became one of those horrible men who did mean things when they were drunk, so that was all right.

  As for the other things he did, she was rather proud of some of those. It was exciting when you had a handsome father who fenced on top of stone walls and raced phaetons with other members of the Four-In-Hand.

  His exploits with women, though, were a whole different matter. Isabel knew quite a lot about that sort of thing, and she was going to put a stop to it. If he was going to be the kind of father she wanted, he had to get married to a nice woman. Then she’d have brothers and sisters to play with and she wouldn’t be lonely anymore. She wanted to live on Papa’s estate in the country, where there were orchards, and baby chicks, and ponies.

  On the trip from Metz, she had planned just how her life with her father was going to be, and she meant to have it just as she’d planned. Papa was just going to have to change, and she was going to help him do it.

  She did not know how long they drove or how far they went, but it seemed to take a long time before the landau finally slowed, then stopped. She felt the carriage rock a little as the driver hopped down to open the door and her father got out. She listened to what the two men were saying, something about Papa intending to be here for several hours th
is time, and how Roberts could take the carriage around to the stables. He’d send word when he wanted to have the landau brought round.

  Isabel squeezed her eyes shut and stayed utterly still, hoping neither man took a look at the back of the vehicle. If they did, they’d see her, certain sure. But when she felt the carriage rock again as Roberts climbed back up onto the seat, she took a peek out from under the blankets and saw her father go inside a house. It was a small villa, surrounded by a bit of park and trees.

  The carriage circled around to the back of the house, and she pulled the blanket back over her face. When the landau was parked in the stables, Roberts was greeted by male voices of some other drivers, and Isabel concluded her father had been to this house before, because all six of the coachmen seemed to know each other well.

  Isabel had to wait for a chance to escape without being seen, and it took a long time. It wasn’t until the men began a game of dice that she saw her chance. From the sound of their voices, she could tell they were playing toward the front of the carriage, and when the dice game sounded like it was getting exciting, she peeped out from under the blanket. She saw nothing in front of her but the open stable doors, and she slid down from the dummy board and ran, hearing only the excited shouting of the winner of the dice game behind her.

  Using the ivy to help her, she climbed over the garden wall of the villa. She tried several doors around the house, but all were locked, until she came to the conservatory on the far side of the house. That door was open. Thankful for careless servants, she slipped inside.

  She could hear piano music, voices, and laughter coming from above. It might be that a party was in progress. She navigated her way through the house, dodging a few servants along the way, but she managed to find the stairs without being seen by anyone. By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she knew just what sort of party was going on.

  Isabel had peeked in on parties like this. Her mother had given quite a few. She cast a glance around and down the stairs, then she took a quick peek around the jamb of the open door into the parlor.