A Lady Never Lies

by Juliana Gray

  “You’re beautiful. Magnificent. Oh!”

  His tongue flicked into her navel with a lightning jolt to her senses.

  “Finally, of course, there’s the ginger hair. Unlucky business. Nothing at all to be done about that.”

  “I adore your hair.” She wrapped her fingers around it with a little purr of satisfaction.

  “So I quite understand your reluctance to marry me. Most sensible. Levelheaded, even. Though, on the other hand, there is this.” He kissed his way down her belly and settled himself between her legs.

  “What?” she gasped.

  “This.”

  At which point the thinking portion of her brain exploded into a cloud of useless particles, leaving only sensation: the hot slide of his tongue in her intimate flesh, exploring each fold in patient detail. She clutched at his hair, clutched at his shoulders, clutched at a pillow; tried to secure herself to something in the throes of this unbearable pleasure. His tongue circled her slowly, too slowly, driving her beyond madness; his mouth touched her everywhere but there, that raw, magical core, the part of her that cried out for him. “Oh please, oh please,” she heard herself say, and something glided inside her—his finger, two fingers—and then at last, at last his tongue found that locus of sensation and stroked it, expertly and lovingly. Her body jerked and spasmed beneath his mouth, outside all control, but he kept on licking her, steady and constant, the immutable center around which her world spun.

  Climax bore down on her like a juggernaut, unstoppable, and when it came she threw her head back and flung the pillow over her face just in time to cover her howl.

  He knew what to do: damn him, bless him. At the first throb he stilled his tongue against her, stilled his fingers inside her, let her body ricochet off the gentle pressure to even greater heights. The waves rolled on and on, gradually diminishing, leaving the most delicious floating languor in their wake. She was only vaguely aware of Finn’s body sliding upward, warm and solid; of his mouth covering hers with her own scent and taste. “Mmm,” she said, twining her arms about him.

  He made a growling noise and went on kissing her, delicately at first, patient, letting her drift to earth by easy degrees. Then his tongue stole deep, hungry, and with gentle hands he turned her over onto the pillow.

  “What . . .” She drew in a gasp at the insistent brush of his cock, hard and massive between her thighs.

  His breath curled around her neck, her ear. “Trust me, darling. Let me. Let me show you. Let me love you.”

  He eased himself between her swollen lips, millimeter by exquisite millimeter. She could feel the slickness of his penetration, her own arousal lubricating his passage, and her hips rose upward to take more of him, all of him, until her buttocks nestled intimately into his groin and the skin of his chest brushed along her shoulders. A deep groan came from her throat at the marrow-deep satisfaction of his cock buried so solidly, so snugly inside her, exerting wholly new pressures on her tender flesh. She was surrounded by him, immersed in him, her existence encompassed in the space of their two bodies rocking together as a single united whole.

  Impossibly, beautifully, it was rising up again, the excitement and the friction, that now-familiar sensation of her building peak. He seemed to sense the escalating tension inside her. He rose up on his hands and began to thrust, slow, deep strokes in perfect rhythm, tilting himself just so. It was too much; it couldn’t be borne, pleasure so intense it was almost painful. She needed to escape, to climax, but he wouldn’t let her: He kept on thrusting at that same relentless pace, trapping her on the brink, just short of release.

  On and on he went, holding her hostage, while her hands fisted into the bedclothes and the moans spilled from her throat. It might have been minutes; it might have been hours: She lost all sense of time and place, all sense of anything but the slow, infinite beat of his body, the weight of pleasure bearing forever down on her.

  Finn. She heard her own impassioned groan as if from a stranger.

  Just when she thought she couldn’t take it any longer, when she thought she might actually expire from the eternally building crescendo, he quickened his thrusts, slipped his hand beneath their bodies, and pressed his broad palm against her, just above his own sliding flesh.

  Release came hard and sudden and gorgeous, sweet relief and mindless exhilaration all at once. Her cry ripped into the pillow. She felt his swift withdrawal, felt him take up his shirt again in an agile gesture, felt him sink gently against her, bracing himself on an elbow and nuzzling at her neck as the spasms receded.

  She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Every last particle of energy had drained from her body. Her limbs were like lead.

  He settled himself behind her in the bedclothes and gathered her up against his body, his hot, damp chest cradling her back, his legs following the bend of hers. “Now, my love,” he whispered, his breath rough in her ear, “now will you marry me?”

  * * *

  She hadn’t planned to sleep, hadn’t planned to waste a moment of the few precious hours allowed them, but she found herself emerging from a velvet unconsciousness to a darkened room, all the candles out except one, and Finn’s body curled solid and protective around hers, one hand cupped beneath her breast.

  “What time is it?” she gasped, fighting upward.

  “Shh. Not two o’clock, I should think.” His voice was low and soothing. His arms urged her back down in the warm cocoon of blankets and drowsy flesh and the mingled scents of lovemaking.

  “You let me sleep,” she said accusingly.

  “You were exhausted.”

  “And you’ve been awake all this time?”

  “Darling, I slept until five o’clock this afternoon. I’m as sharp as a dagger point.”

  She turned in his arms to face him. “I’m sorry. You must have been frightfully bored, lying there.”

  “Not at all.” He kissed the tip of her nose.

  “Are you hungry? I’ve brought a basket from the kitchens. Cheese and bread and wine and the most divine almond cake. It might help to make you sleep.”

  “I don’t want to sleep.”

  She put her hand to his cheek. “You’re an idiot. Go fetch that basket.”

  He laughed and turned his head to kiss her palm. “As my lady commands.”

  They ate in his bed, feeding each other, crumbs dropping indulgently into the blankets, and then they made love again with marvelous slowness: shifting positions, tasting and exploring, drawing out the pleasure until at last, when she dissolved into climax, it was hardly more than an intensification of an ages-long simmering of incomparable sensation; when he withdrew and spent himself, it was as if he’d ripped away a part of her own body. Stay inside me, she wanted to say, don’t leave, but that was tantamount to an acceptance of his proposal. Taking his seed inside her meant absorbing the possibility of his child, of a future with him, of marriage.

  She must have drifted off to sleep again, because the next thing she knew, she was in his arms, her gown hanging loosely about her body, being carried down the darkened hallway to her room.

  “No, don’t,” she whispered, muzzy headed. “Someone will catch us.”

  His kiss touched her hair. “I almost hope someone will.”

  He found her door without direction and tucked her into bed just as the fine gray light of dawn outlined the ragged hills to the east. She remembered his lips on her forehead and the faint scrape of the closing door, and nothing else.

  EIGHTEEN

  Midsummer’s Eve

  Finn couldn’t see Giacomo’s disapproving gaze, but he could feel it infuse the warm air of the workshop with pious contempt.

  After all, he’d grown quite familiar with the sensation over the past two months.

  “Come to berate me again for my folly, Giacomo?” he asked, not looking up. He was reinstalling the battery yet again, after still more improvements, and he dared not remove his gaze for an instant.

  “Is only trouble, the women,” Giacomo muttered.


  “Yes, and so you’ve observed to me on perhaps dozens of occasions now, yet I remain most steadfastly in love with her. So bugger off, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “Bugger? What is this?”

  Finn made a last clamp of the cable and propped himself up on the edge of the engine block. “A crude term, I’m afraid, referring to a peculiarly British preoccupation with carnal vice. What can I do for you, my good man?”

  “Is the letters.” Giacomo slapped a few envelopes on the worktable with unnecessary vigor. “Is also a question.”

  “Oh, Lord, Giacomo. Not another one of your questions. Can’t it wait?”

  “Is she telling the ladies, the other ladies?”

  Finn paused. “No.”

  “Is she saying to marry you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Is she saying she love . . .”

  Finn pointed the remaining battery cable at him. “Look here, Giacomo. That’s quite enough. I’m not in the habit of telling a lady’s secrets, and certainly not to a woman-hating fellow like you. I don’t know how you’ve discovered these things, or think you have . . .”

  Giacomo sighed. “Is not hard, Signore Burke. I see your face in the morning. I see the light in the window in the night, when the others are dark.”

  “I often study late.”

  Giacomo rolled his eyes. “Study. Ha. Is that what the English are calling it?”

  “We are not calling it anything at all.”

  “Is only trouble, this studying. You will see. One day you will see I say the truth. The women, there is no trusting them.”

  Finn straightened. Tomorrow was the first day of summer, and though the carriage doors were wide open to the breeze coming down the hillside, the air in the workshop now grew warm and dense by noontime, particularly when the dynamo ran at full pitch, recharging the battery for the usual afternoon trial. He felt a trickle of sweat roll down under his collar and into his shirt. “Lady Morley is a woman of honor,” he said. “I’d trust her with my life.” He reached with his free arm for the glass of water perched rather precariously on a nearby axle rod.

  Giacomo shrugged. “Ah, the lovers, the young lovers. They think they discover everything. They think they discover the great thing no person ever discover before. But I tell you, Signore Burke”—his fist dug into the worktable—“is not possible for woman to be true. Always, she is fuckle.”

  Water sprayed from Finn’s mouth in an elegant triangle. “Fuckle?”

  Giacomo gestured in the air. “She is fuckle, mobile, like the wind in the springtime.”

  “Like the . . . ? Oh. Yes.” Finn set the glass down and dabbed at his chin with his sleeve. “I believe you mean fickle, old chap. Fickle.”

  “Think of the song, Signore Burke.” Giacomo’s voice slid into a surprisingly lyric tenor. “La donna è mobile . . . Is true.”

  “Yes, but as it turned out, she wasn’t fickle at all. That’s the point of the aria, after all. The duke was the fickle one. Irony, my good man.”

  Giacomo frowned. “I am confuse.”

  “The opera, Giacomo. Rigoletto. Your aria’s from Rigoletto.”

  The man pulled himself up with dignity. “I am not seeing the opera. I am only hearing the song from the men.”

  “Well, it’s a charming tale, I assure you. Delightful sort of yarn, except perhaps for that sobering bit at the end, when she dies for the cad. In any case, it quite disproves your point about women. Noble to the core.” Finn bestowed a smug smile upon the groundskeeper.

  Giacomo’s eyes narrowed. “So you think, Signore Burke. So she says to you.” He picked up the small stack of envelopes from the table and brandished them menacingly. “But perhaps you read the letters. Perhaps you see what I am meaning.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Giacomo. How can you possibly know what’s in my letters? And what on earth have they to do with Lady Morley?”

  Giacomo returned him the same smug smile he’d just bestowed. “When you are not busy, signore. When you are having the time.”

  Finn opened his mouth to reply just as Alexandra swept through the open carriage doors, blue skirts gusting about her legs in the sun-scented wind. “Good morning, Finn. How’s your battery coming along?”

  Giacomo’s smile melted into a scowl of glowering proportions. “I leave now. Good day, Signore Burke. Signora Morley.”

  She only raised her eyebrows as he brushed past, ignoring him in her stately way. She and Giacomo had never been on what might be called speaking terms. “Everything all right?” she asked Finn, placing her hands on her hips.

  “Yes. Yes, of course. Battery’s nearly in. I’d greet you properly, darling, only I’m rather attached to the cable at the moment.”

  She laughed. “Then I suppose I’ll have to do all the greeting,” she said, and crossed the room to plant a kiss on his lips over the engine block. “Mmm. You smell divine. All oily and sweaty. I adore you this way. You’re in your element.”

  “You’re my element, but I’m flattered nonetheless. Could you perhaps toss me the clamp on the bench over there?”

  “With pleasure.” She found the clamp and slipped it into his waiting hand. “I meant to bring the post, but it’s already disappeared. Wallingford, no doubt, rifling through your correspondence in desperation. I’m certain he suspects.”

  “He’s always suspected, darling. It’s just that he’s given up caring anymore. Troubles of his own, I gather. In any case, Giacomo’s brought the post already. There.” He stepped back from the engine, wiped his hands on a reasonably clean rag, and captured his lover around her waist. “And now, my dear, I’ll greet you properly.”

  She responded ardently, as she always did, with her gurgle of laughter and her soft figure curving into his and her face reaching upward for his kiss. As springtime had advanced, as the sun had mounted high in the hot blue sky and the grapevines had unfurled their leaves in long, undulating rows down the sides of the hills, she’d shed most of her petticoats and loosened her corset, like the rest of the women in the village. Now her body glowed warm and vibrant beneath his hands, a thing of summer; the luxurious swell of her hips teased him with memories of the night before, and all the nights before that. He caught her familiar scent curling around them both, and his body, recognizing all the signs, hardened like the well-conditioned beast it was.

  She must have felt him stirring. A little groan escaped her throat and her lips slid across his face to whisper in his ear. “Do you remember what you told me about swiving women in libraries, those months ago?”

  “That I’d never even begin to contemplate it, I believe,” he said, doing exactly that. He pictured Alexandra bent over a gargantuan lion-footed desk, positioned perfectly under the lamp’s soft glow, her round, firm arse beckoning him inward. Or else sprawled naked on a leather-upholstered chesterfield, her hair spilling over her abundant breasts, one leg propped atop the sofa’s low back.

  Well, he was only a man, after all.

  “Mmm.” Her hands slid down his body to cup his buttocks, urging his arousal into her belly. “I don’t know about libraries, but I daresay workshops would be perfectly suitable.”

  “Strumpet. Coming into my sanctum with your lilies and your lascivious ideas, expressly to distract me.”

  She laughed and pulled back. “You began it. And if you hadn’t insisted on denying yourself last night, I daresay you’d have no trouble at all resisting me now.”

  He took her hands and brought them around front, where he could keep a watchful eye on them. “You’re in the exact middle of your month at the moment, darling. I daren’t go near you. Or that salient part of me, in any case.”

  She groaned and pulled her hands from his, covering her face with them. “How on earth do you calculate these things? It’s mortifying.”

  “It’s my business to calculate these things, my dear.” He kept his words quiet, gentle. “I know enough about a bastard’s lot to make quite certain I don’t cause another to be brough
t into the world.”

  Her shoulders sagged. She parted her hands and peered at him, her face flushed and resigned between the fingers. “And yet, my dear, I’m eternally grateful your own father wasn’t so careful.”

  He extended his long arms and drew her unresisting body back against him. “Only marry me, darling. That’s all. It’s quite simple.”

  “You know I can’t.” Her voice was low and implacable.

  “You needn’t take a penny of my money. I’ll give it all away if you like. Only be mine, for God’s sake.”

  “I am yours.”

  She had burrowed her face into his chest, her breath warming the sturdy cotton of his smock until he could feel it against his skin, could still taste it in his mouth: sweet with tea and jammy toast and her own particular essence. His arms tightened around her. “In any case,” he went on, more lightly, knowing better than to push her, “what difference is it to you? I made jolly fine work of consoling you last night, after all.”

  Her back vibrated with a chuckle. “You were splendid. I woke up this morning and instantly thought of a dozen ways I might have reciprocated, had I any remaining faculties after you were done with me.”

  “Ah. I should very much like to hear them all.”

  She drew back and touched her finger against his lips. “Not now, I’m afraid. I only came to tell you that I won’t be able to assist at the trial this afternoon. This wretched Midsummer’s Eve feast tonight. Abigail has the household in an absolute tizzy over it.”

  He opened his lips and sucked her fingertip into his mouth.

  “Mmm. I’ve been drafted to help with the preparations—oh, that’s very nice.” She withdrew her finger and traced around his chin and down his neck, leaving a damp track behind. “I shall be in a frenzy of decoration and whatnot all afternoon. Abigailish sorts of things, quite impossible to explain.”

  He frowned. “Exactly what is this feast of yours? Is it for the village?”

  “It’s Abigail’s idea. Signorina Morini says it’s an old tradition on the solstice, quite deliciously pagan, though of course the Church now sanctions it and the village priest will be there and all that.” She circled her finger around the hollow of his throat, the action absorbing all of her concentration. The innocent touch went straight to his groin and tingled there, almost painfully. “We’re going to have masks and torches and music and dancing. All very decadent. You must come, of course.”