by Gaelen Foley
“Alice. Arabella. Agnes. Agatha?”
“No, it’s not an actual name.”
“Ah . . . Anise? Alphabet? Azalea?”
“No, no, think more . . . geographical.”
“America? Atlas?” He stole a naughty glance at her breasts. “Alps?”
She laughed. “You beast! I think you need another hint—”
“No, don’t tell me. Now I am determined to guess it. It’s Arundel. Ascot?”
“No.”
“Blast. I was going to bet a shilling on you in the Derby.”
“Ha.”
“I’ve got it!” he said suddenly. “Africa!”
“Finally, you’re on the right continent, at least.”
He narrowed his eyes in thought. “I see. Someplace hot. Exotic.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Fits you,” he murmured, raising his glass to her again in practiced gallantry.
She stretched her legs out under the table, her calf briefly caressing his shin. “We’ll be at this all night if I don’t give you another clue,” she said.
“Well, we can’t have that. All right.”
“My father,” she said meaningfully, “was in the navy.”
“Oh, yes. I recall you mentioning something about that while you were threatening to brain me with the candlesnuffer.”
“It made a tolerable weapon, I thought.”
“God knows you used it well. Father in the navy . . . hot place. Of course! It’s Aboukir! Aboukir Bay, at the head of the Nile. You must have been born in the year of the battle.”
“Actually, sir,” she informed him with a rather tipsy lift of her chin, “I was born in that battle. God save the Queen,” she added.
He watched her in amusement, which she apparently mistook for disbelief.
“It’s true! While my father was on the upper gun-deck of the HMS Goliath helping to blow up Boney’s fleet, Mama was in the sick bay giving birth to me.”
“Really?”
“Yes!”
“I see. So, you’re lucky to be alive, is that it?”
“No, no, it’s a much more cheerful reason than that,” she scoffed.
“Born in a battle?” he murmured admiringly. “That explains a lot about you. Do tell.”
“For weeks our ships had been scouring the Mediterranean in search of Napoleon’s fleet, for the French just kept running and hiding, whisking away just ahead of us at every turn. But then, in the same hour that my mother went into labor with me, the French fleet was sighted in the Bay of Aboukir. They were riding at anchor, their sterns to our guns, defenseless—with no escape route. After weeks of searching, we had stumbled across the enemy purely by chance, like finding a needle in a haystack.
“Papa declared to Admiral Lord Nelson that it must have been the fortunate star of my birth that had brought them that stroke of good luck, for my arrival in the world was the only thing that was different from every day that they had been on the hunt. And it’s true,” she added proudly, “because the Battle of the Nile was, aside from Trafalgar, our most glorious victory. It ruined French sea power and changed the course of the war.”
This girl astonished him.
“Thank God you had the foresight to be born then,” he said abruptly.
“Yes, I know. Otherwise, we’d all be speaking French.” She grinned and took a swig of champagne.
Charmed to the point of distraction, wanting nothing so much as to scoop her up in his arms and kiss her senseless, it took Alec a moment to recover his wits.
“What the devil was your mother doing on board a warship?” he asked. “Surely the navy has rules against that sort of thing.”
“Well, my dear Lord Alec,” she said confidentially. “I’m sure you’re very innocent about such things, but there are rules and then there are rules. Officially speaking, we were never there. Nor were the several dozen other women who lived on board the ship with their husbands. That was the problem, you see. Mama was very beautiful, and Papa’s commanding officer took a fancy to her. She would not tell my father of his superior’s advances,” she added wistfully. “She did not want him to do something rash and jeopardize our livelihood by harming his career—let alone call the man out to duel, which he surely would have done. Papa was very dashing,” she informed him. “Instead, Mama gave him the excuse that my education was being neglected with such an unconventional upbringing. After that, she and I took rooms in Portsmouth and became landlubbers.”
“Landlubbers,” he echoed in quizzical amusement.
“Yes. I haven’t seen the sea in years,” she added pensively, staring at nothing. “Sometimes at night I dream about it, miles and miles and miles of waves.” She paused. “Mama died the summer I was fourteen. She fell ill caring for a poor family of the parish.”
Alec laid his hand over hers in a silent offering of comfort. “I’m very sorry.”
“It’s all right. She was wonderful to me while I had her. They both were.”
“What’s this?” he murmured, leaning closer to capture the tiny pink seashell that hung from a ribbon around her neck.
Her sudden, lovely smile dazzled him. “Do you like my little shell?” One would have thought it was a flawless diamond, for all her pride in it.
“Very pretty. Did you steal it from a mermaid?”
“Papa gave it to me the last time I saw him.” Sadness crept into her voice as she spoke. “Mama and I bade good-bye to him at Portsmouth, the last time he went away. He said that I could hold this seashell up to my ear and, anytime I wanted, I could hear him whisper inside it, ‘I love you.’ ”
Alec looked into her eyes.
With the seashell still resting on his fingertips, he was flooded with such a wave of protective male instinct that he barely knew what to do with himself.
Parents dead. No wonder she had ended up on the streets. “Come here, baby,” he whispered, releasing her trinket and sitting back slowly in his chair, offering her his lap. “Come on,” he ordered softly, taking her hand and drawing her to him.
She came to him with uncertainty in her wide violet eyes. He wrapped his arms around her, gathering her onto his lap. “It’s going to be all right.” He pressed her head down onto his shoulder and stroked her hair. “Why don’t you stay with me for a while?” he murmured. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
“Alec.” She trembled a little as she breathed his name. Raising her head from his shoulder, she pulled back a small space and stared into his eyes; her own, liquid pools of emotion, their glowing violet hue like sun-kissed clouds at dawn.
Her beauty, he knew, would long haunt him.
“You are the sweetest man,” she breathed. Cupping his cheek in her hand, she closed her eyes and gently kissed him.
Alec quivered, breathless with the butterfly caress of her silken lips against his, healing him, enticing him, redeeming him. The ends of her sable hair tickled his skin; he pulled her closer, winding his arm around her, splaying his hand across her hip, kneading her. The feel of her firm young flesh was luscious to the touch, sheathed in his silk dressing gown.
Capturing his face between her soft hands, Becky tasted him more deeply. Alec opened his mouth, welcoming her tongue’s delicate explorations; and with that, the two of them simply picked up right where they had left off beneath that awning.
Alec couldn’t get enough of her. After a few moments she let him turn her on his lap so she was facing forward, straddling him, both of them engrossed in kissing and caressing. Her bare feet curled around his calves. His hands roamed hungrily up and down her back.
The candles flickered, creamy drops of melted wax rolling down their shafts; the music from his neighbor’s pianoforte floated through the ceiling, while the rain drummed the windowpanes. Alec’s heart slammed in his chest as he focused all his attention instead on the tender neophyte in his arms and his own strange longing to protect her.
His fascination with her took him by surprise, God’s truth; he had not expected to fin
d this sense of connection. Maybe he could keep her, just for a while, he thought as his right hand ventured under blue silk, exploring the juicy thigh that hugged his hip.
He had never taken a mistress of his own before. Surrounded all his life by more women than he knew what to do with, there had never been any need. But she was different, he mused, shuddering at the unbearable softness of her skin. So eager, so sweet. The gentle way she stroked his belly was driving him insane. The delicious heat of her body called to his blood like a siren’s song.
Half maddened by her position astride him, her legs spread, the humid warmth of her core permeating his groin and teasing his ferocious erection, he could think of nothing else but parting that dressing gown and taking her right there on the dining table.
“Darling?” he panted, finally finding the strength to break their kiss.
“Alec,” she answered breathlessly.
The way she moaned his name made him smile. He hadn’t even really started pleasuring her yet. He cupped her lovely face between his hands, relishing the sight of her like this, utterly aroused for him, her violet eyes smoldering, heavy-lidded with desire, her cheeks aglow with passion’s flush. It seemed he had finally succeeded in warming her up. The girl was on fire. His pride swelled, along with other regions of his anatomy.
The dressing gown he’d lent her had come loose in a deep V that ended at her navel. He trailed his fingertip down the center. She flinched with want, her chest heaving under his light caress. “Becky,” he whispered slowly.
“Yes?”
“Shall we go to bed?” When he reached her navel, his touch traveled back up her bare flat midriff again, but he veered off to the right at her chest and ran his fingertip up along the lower curve of her breast, moving with exquisite slowness over the pebble-firm point of her erect nipple.
She gasped and closed her eyes, enjoying the sensation, her inhibitions lowered by champagne. Encouraged, he squeezed her nipple gently between forefinger and thumb, and licked his lips at her sigh of delight, half ready to explode before he even got inside her.
“Becky?”
“What?” she murmured dreamily.
“I need you, kitten. Come to bed and love me.”
“Alec,” she groaned again.
“Please.”
He was the living, breathing definition of irresistible.
His kisses had made her more drunk than the fancy French champagne, she thought, insofar as she could string a thought together. She felt the massive readiness of his body throbbing with insistent demand against her pelvis, and did not suppose a refusal at this late juncture would have been very well received. She was not sure that she was capable of uttering one, anyway.
She was lost and drowning in the deep blue ocean of his eyes, and it was wonderful. Any threat from Mikhail seemed naught but a bad dream. She had gone to the Blessed Isles with Alec.
She may have begun this night with calculation, but now there was only the honeyed sweetness of his gaze and the fierce primal need he had awakened in her.
This moment might be her last chance to change her mind, but his powers of persuasion were too great for her to withstand.
It was all over when he started kissing her earlobe, whispering to her. “You’re so different, Becky. So beautiful. So soft.” His fingers still flirted with her nipple while his other hand cupped her head, his thumb caressing her jugular.
With his mouth’s warm caress at her ear, she closed her eyes and bent her head, kissing his broad shoulder. His skin was bronzed velveteen beneath her lips. When she tasted him with the tip of her tongue, he quivered. She grew intoxicated by her power to make him respond to her touch in the same way that she responded to his. Aye, whatever mysteries lay in store for her in that other room, she wanted her initiation to be with him.
And she wanted it now.
She slid her palms slowly up his muscled biceps to his shoulders, then wrapped her arms around his neck and held him close. “Make love to me, Alec,” she breathed.
He stood up, lifting her with him. She clung to him, her hands locked behind his neck. He made her feel so feminine, carrying her into his bedchamber as if she weighed no more than a feather. She just stared at him, half besotted; she left her last maidenly doubts by the door. He walked across his chamber toward the magnificent alcove. Becky could feel the invisible draw of the ornate towering bed behind her, like another presence in the room, as if the carved cupids round the gilded dome were watching. The mirrors reflected the three candles that burned there, bathing the velvet-draped alcove in a wash of flickering light.
“Nervous?” he asked softly, nuzzling her nose with his own.
“N-No.”
“Liar,” he whispered. “It’s all right. You won’t regret it.”
“I know.”
He set her down on her feet at the bottom of the mahogany bed-steps. Her heart pounding, Becky turned slowly to study their opulent playground for the night.
Alec touched her chest, slipping the silk dressing gown off her left shoulder. She blushed in lingering modesty, not wanting to part from it quite yet, not that it hid much now, with the cloth belt undone. The robe hung open, but her arms were still threaded through the capacious sleeves; the garment half flowed off her, loosely garlanded through the crooks of her elbows to drape behind her like an elegant India shawl.
This pleased Alec, judging by the lustrous glow in his eyes.
“You are an exquisite woman,” he whispered hoarsely. He lifted her hand from her side and kissed her knuckles, then escorted her slowly up the bed-steps.
Becky hesitated at the top step and turned to gaze at him uncertainly.
His stare was gravely worshipful. No man had ever looked at her that way. She bit her lip and put her resistance aside for once and for all. There would never be another night like this, she knew. The future was dark, but come what may, this honeyed memory would be her secret, her own delicious indiscretion.
Her heart beat faster as she crawled toward the headboard and then sat in the middle of the vast mattress, bracing her hands behind her. It was very cozy under the bed’s sweeping draperies. She glanced up at the underside of the dome and found it whimsically painted with blue sky and puffy white clouds. How very Alec, she thought, looking at him again with a lazy smile.
Her position afforded her a breathtaking view as her sun god came walking up the bed-steps with an air of predatory languor. He went down on his knees at the foot of the mattress and stared at her as he approached on all fours.
Anticipation gave her such a tremor that she suddenly was glad he wore those loose linen trousers. She was still quite intimidated by that part of him that she had first encountered full-on in his dressing room.
His knowing half smile soothed her fears.
“Trust me,” he whispered as he moved atop her, his advance coaxing her onto her back. Her heart pounding, she lay back slowly under him, resting against the satin bolsters of the headboard.
Alec reclined on his side, partly atop her. Below the waist, all of him was pressed firmly against her body. Distant piano music and the light beating drum of rain on the window glass infused the charged silence in the alcove. Propping his elbow on the bolster by her head, Alec rested his cheek in his left hand; his right went exploring.
When he touched her, an indecent wave of relief rushed through her. She luxuriated in his caresses. Closing her eyes, she drew in her breath and dropped her head back, reveling in the gentle warmth of his hands and the coolness of the rain-scented air against her bare skin. She could not bear for him to stop.
His hand glided over her body until she was quivering. His mouth followed, first at her throat, her pulse hammering in the artery beneath his lips. He became more aggressive, claiming her neck in a deep, open-mouthed kiss, all but biting her. She surrendered completely to him in climbing ecstasy.
“Take this off.” His order was taut, rugged. He pulled at one sleeve of the dressing gown. She was quick to obey, sliding her arm o
ut of it and letting the luxurious garment whisper down onto the mattress behind her in a pool of blue silk.
Alec’s fiery stare devoured her nakedness. “God, Becky,” he ground out. “You are . . . just what I’ve needed so badly, so long.”
“Am I?” she breathed.
He nodded with a wicked glance, and moved atop her. Becky abandoned herself to kissing him, savoring that gorgeous mouth, but he left her lips after a moment, moving lower. Much lower.
Not an inch of her body did he leave unexplored—the delicate skin in the fold of her elbow, the little notch at the base of her throat, the bend of her knee, the gentle slope of her foot, the soft curves of her inner thighs, and her breasts, which seemed designed for his cupped palm. He studied and learned every curve with an intimate mastery.
Her pulse was pounding, her back arching under his touch; she drew in her breath in delight when he laid his middle fingertip on the hardened jewel of her womanly center. She had not known that this was what she needed until he stroked her.
“So wet for me,” he whispered, sliding his fingers inside her. She moaned in sweet anguish, bringing her hands up to her breasts as he pleasured her. “May I?” he asked huskily. She gasped his name in helpless hunger. Her chest heaved as he lowered his head, her nipples swelling eagerly as his lips approached, but rogue that he was, he played with her a bit, driving her mad. He blew gently on each turgid crest before he gave her the relief of his warm, hungry mouth.
She ran her fingers through his golden hair while he suckled hard, his hand stroking deeply between her thighs. “Oh, Alec, Alec.” She gripped his broad shoulders and tipped her head back in delight as he flicked little rings around her nipple with the tip of his tongue.
“You had better not come yet,” he warned in a velvet murmur, denying her his hand as he moved up to kiss her neck.
She wasn’t sure what that signified, but she was happy to let the man do to her whatever he fancied. If this was ruin, she had no use for respectability.
Alec eased down onto her, settling heavily between her thighs. She trembled with yearning as she clung to him, moaning a little at the depth and urgency of his kiss. Her hips rose with a shocking will of their own, caressing his giant hardness through the single layer of his clothing. He groaned with pleasure at that, and so she did it again, and he responded with a wild kiss, gently grasping her nape beneath the soft mass of her hair.