“What do you hope to accomplish?”
“Authority. I can hope to regain authority over everyone who is there. Anyone who appears, but whom I do not expect, will be removed at once—after I have questioned them extensively. I will get to the bottom of these events. And when I do, those responsible will suffer.”
“I wish you good fortune, but I cannot accompany you.”
He laughed and wished he felt amused. “Of course you can.”
“No. My sister is in need of me here. It seems we have important personal matters to attend.” Lady Upworth had passed invaluable information while Meg waited for Jean-Marc outside M. Verbeux’s bedchamber.
“How do you know?”
“By what has been said.” She could not betray Her Ladyship’s trust. “No matter, please don’t press me on this.”
With anger building in his veins, Jean-Marc poured himself a large brandy and drank half of the glass in one swallow.
Meg had already noted he appeared to have drunk more than a little strong liquor. The mood it induced disquieted her. He pressed the rim of his glass to her lips and tipped until she was forced to take an aromatic sip that burned her throat.
Jean-Marc piled pillows behind her back and, very carefully, pulled her skirts up to her knees. The silver silk stockings she wore had melted with the flame and only made her condition worse.
“They must be removed,” he said and proceeded to cut them away so surely she could scarcely believe he had not done such things on many occasions. The procedure hurt, and she held her breath.
“There,” he said when the silk was free of the wounds. A few more swift slices and he could remove the stockings altogether.
“This is humiliating,” Meg said.
“How can that be? I have seen a great deal more of you than your naked limbs.”
She covered the top of her bosom and felt the heat in her skin.
Jean-Marc was grateful the lotion went on easily, but he took his time. He caressed each foot and placed kisses on the arches before smoothing the angry wounds. She sighed with each application as if the relief was immediate, and he was heartened.
At last each blistered area was thickly coated, and he spread a white linen sheet beneath her legs. “You must stay where you are,” he told her. “Whatever you need, I will make sure you have. Tomorrow you will be placed comfortably in a coach and I shall escort you to Windsor myself.”
“You don’t listen, do you? I will not go to Windsor.”
“You will go to Windsor. I shall speak with Sibyl, and once she knows how much is at stake, she will insist you both go.”
“Don’t. Please, don’t. You will sway her because she will believe it is for the best. She is too susceptible to male authority.”
“I always knew I really liked your sister,” he said, smiling. He was relieved when Meg smiled back. “That’s better, my lovely girl. I shall look forward to showing you the full extent of the estates at Riverside. And in time you shall get to know the villagers in Castleberry. The vicar’s wife will be so delighted to have you play an active part in the affairs of the parish.”
He did, Meg thought, truly believe he could have his own way in this, as he did in so many things.
She would lie if she didn’t admit her longing to remain with Jean-Marc, but she couldn’t do so with a glad heart, not under the only terms he could offer that would not threaten them both with scorn.
He was watching her face. Meg looked at him.
“Ah, Meg,” he said, and sat beside her on the bed. “You are a considerable complication to me, but I have never been more grateful to have my peace disrupted.”
“You have an odd turn of compliment,” she told him. “I shall be truthful. You have disrupted my quiet life. You have presented me with dilemmas I never expected to experience. But every moment I spend with you is sweet. Aren’t I a fool—to present you with such power over me?”
“No.” Very slowly, he bent closer, his attention on her lips until he covered them with his own. He kissed her insistently. His finesse spoke of his experience, but her breath shortened and she closed her eyes and gave herself up to the sensation that the joining of their mouths was a joining of everything they were.
His hands lightly circled her neck, and he pushed her onto the pillows. Meg ached with her longing. He brought every nerve alive until she could imagine they were all just beneath her skin and open to his touch.
Tucking a knee beneath him, he moved Meg until he cradled her head and shoulders in one of his arms. He rocked her almost imperceptibly and he studied her face in detail. Even as he held her so intimately, she felt him grow still within himself. A dark force with the power to break her. The length of her body received his appraisal. Without warning, he swept a hand up one thigh and inside her clothes to spread his fingers on her stomach.
“You know you shouldn’t,” she whispered.
“But I want to, and you want me to,” he whispered back.
He played with the hair that sheltered her womanly places, and bent over her to kiss the swell of her breasts at the neckline of the costume.
Meg throbbed all over. “Jean-Marc, please.”
“Please what?” he asked from his nestling place in the deep hollow between her breasts. He licked the tingling flesh there.
“I don’t know,” she told him, and she didn’t, except she was losing focus on everything but what he made her feel.
Removing his hand from beneath her skirts for a moment, he quickly loosed the delicate silver buckles that closed the front of her bodice and opened it. She glanced down at her breasts and quickly away. There was, Meg thought, entirely too much of her, and he had arranged the bodice so that it accentuated her fullness, framed the straining, sensitive flesh.
“Jean-Marc?”
“Don’t say that again. Not now.”
His mouth on hers ensured that she said nothing for a long time. And while they kissed, he returned to the warm places that caused her to squirm at his every fleeting touch.
He parted her and stroked, and she rolled her hips away. A white line formed around his compressed lips. He took the small, tender piece of flesh that pulsated between his finger and thumb and pulled lightly.
Meg cried out.
Jean-Marc’s face grew tighter yet, and he pulled again, then rubbed, first with a feathery touch that drove her wild, then with increasing vigor. He turned her in his arms and fastened his mouth on a nipple. Her self-consciousness fell away. Meg held his head against her breasts, and she kissed his hair, and raised her hips to meet the now rapid stimulation. Moist and slick, she writhed against him, and reached for him, but she could not move her legs as she wished to, and his weight held her down.
“Don’t stop,” she panted. “Never, please.”
“Only when I have to,” he murmured. “But now I should allow you to rest. You are undoubtedly shocked.”
“I should be more shocked if you left me now. Could you take off your clothes, please?”
He studied her and said, “You are so polite. So, of course I must grant your wishes.” Always keeping a hand or his mouth on her, he stripped. “This clever skirt I had made for you could be a nuisance.”
She giggled nervously, and he took her breasts in his hands, smoothed and molded them. His strong tongue worked a magical thing that made her pant and then, when she felt she could not bear another second, a ripple of heat, burning heat, broke over her of its own volition. A great throbbing, aching wonderment pumped through the flesh he had pulled. Her stomach drew tight. Meg panted and reached for Jean-Marc. She touched whatever she could get her hands on.
“You are unusual,” he told her, unsuccessfully trying to capture her roaming hands. “So passionate. I am awed by you. But if you continue what you are trying to do, my girl, I shall have to make you regret your forwardness.”
As he spoke, he grew a little careless, and Meg encircled his rod. He attempted to remove her hand but she held on so tightly he let out a groan.
“You are a torturer. I cannot—Meg—I should have kept my clothes on.”
“You took them off because you want what I want.” She knew she was abandoned, that she would come to him like this again and again if he wanted her.
The skirts of the costume were separate from the bodice. With frustrating difficulty he managed to undo the waist and slide it down. He pushed inside her, and she raised her hips to grant him easier access. Even as he moved, waves of exquisite tension flowered in Meg.
He had grown so remote, purposeful but distant.
If she could not agree to take what he could willingly give her, and she was soon left with nothing but memories of him, how would she live?
She didn’t want to think such thoughts now.
The hair on his chest softly scratched her nipples. She could not get close enough to him.
“Meg, let go. Give yourself to me, now.”
She might have told him she could not order the moment when that would happen, but instead her body became his to command and she was a helpless vessel gladly giving and receiving.
He thrust again, and once more, and pushed up on his locked arms to look down at her. “Fate can be cruel,” he said. “I…You are my dream. My dream, damn it.” And he lowered himself to lie half over her, his face in her neck.
Meg lay still and thought she understood his anger.
“Have I hurt your ankles even more?”
She smiled into his hair. “What ankles?”
Jean-Marc didn’t laugh. He shifted until he could fold her in his arms and hold her much more tightly than was comfortable. His face remained against her neck. He embraced her almost convulsively.
They both suffered, but he would never know how powerless she felt.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “there will be much to be done before we can leave. I should prefer to keep you and Désirée together. You will be guarded—by myself as much as possible.”
“We will be safe in the daylight,” she told him. “It would be best to behave normally so that we don’t cause suspicion. But when you—”
“No one will be admitted to this house without my direct permission.” Jean Marc raised his head and looked at her. “No one.”
“Mr. FitzDurham and Sir Robert—”
“I shall invite Mr. FitzDurham to Windsor. Sir Robert Brodie will be told you do not wish to see him.”
She didn’t want Jean-Marc to behave as if she was his to command. “Under the circumstances it would only be polite to see Sir Robert as a friend.”
Jean-Marc’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t want you to see any other men. If Brodie calls, you will have him told that you cannot receive him.”
“No.”
“I have made up my mind. You will never leave me now.”
Meg felt the sting of tears. He waged his own battle and thought he could somehow order the future and make peace for both of them.
“I will be your protector. Always.”
“I don’t need a protector. Please, I have allowed—no, I have willingly abandoned all convention to be with you. I do not regret that. It will be all that I have, the memory. But my sister would never understand or agree to be part of such an arrangement, and I won’t desert her.”
Some mighty emotion possessed him. His dark eyes glittered in a face become stark. A faint sheen emphasized the muscular form of his rigid body.
“I am not your responsibility,” she told him quietly.
His smile was not comforting. “If you think that, then you are simple,” he said. “I see no reason why Sibyl can’t remain where she is. She will want for nothing. And you will visit her. If she is not walking in your shadow, perhaps she will marry. You make her less sure of herself than she should be. Ought to be.”
He kissed her swiftly, a demanding kiss Meg resisted, but only for a moment before she returned the ardor, ran her fingers through his hair and struggled for breath while they all but consumed each other.
When Jean-Marc rested in the hollow of her neck once more, she stroked the backs of her fingers back and forth over his cheek.
“You must recognize what can’t be ignored,” he said. “We have been together. We will be together again. There may already be a child. My child.”
Speechless, Meg was utterly still.
“If that is so I will insist upon marriage. No child of mine will be born a bastard. Marry me now, or marry me later. Take your choice. In either case you are mine and I don’t give up anything that is mine.”
32
Spivey here.
I was not a vindictive man and I am not vindictive now, but I must defend my honor, the honor of the Spiveys.
That ungrateful cub, Hunter, has gone too far. He actually said his ancestors had not amounted to much! And considers it an insult for his looks to be compared to mine!
Very well, since he has no respect for the impressive accomplishments of his—well, for my accomplishments, to be frank—so be it. He can go and pay his way elsewhere. Why should he enjoy the comforts of my extraordinary house? As soon as certain other, even more unacceptable annoyances are dealt with, it will be Hunter’s turn.
I grow genuinely afraid that I shall be drawn into physical action again—through the person of Lavinia Ash, of course. It happened to me once before, you know, but that is of no interest to you. What damnable luck that the caper merchant isn’t a man. No matter. I shall press her into service and she will follow instructions exactly. She must be in the right places to stop whatever I want stopped—such as an arrangement between Count Etranger and Meg Smiles that would almost certainly result in Sibyl Smiles remaining at Number Seven and advance my cause not one whit.
All that need happen is for Sibyl Smiles to marry William and depart with him, and with Meg, to wherever he chooses to take them and for whatever reason. I do not care. And in case you really believe Sibyl intends to marry Godly-Smythe just because she has said she intends to accept him—think again. I could be wrong—for the first time—but my highly developed intuition tells me she plans to trick her cousin in some manner.
You, dear readers, hope Count Etranger and the strumpet, Meg, will find bliss. Together. You are romantics. Oh, how the very word makes my blood run…would have made my blood run cold. And I know perfectly well that you have approved of the abandoned behavior between these two selfish people.
The time for delicacy is past, so be prepared. You should be ashamed of yourselves. You know why.
No doubt you are also sniggering over the disgraceful antics of our would-be Queen Caroline, and anticipating the spectacle this new King George will make of his Coronation in July and the revelry to follow. You all deserve each other, say I.
33
One by one, members of the household appeared in Jean-Marc’s apartments. Each one entered the study too apprehensive to do other than keep curious eyes on their master.
One by one, Jean-Marc decided who should go to Windsor and who should remain at 17 Mayfair Square. He hoped to return soon, and there was an adequate staff already in place at Windsor, but they were neither as polished nor as practiced as those at the London house. Since Désirée might receive visitors at Windsor, adding additional servants from Mayfair Square seemed sensible.
When the last of the candidates left, Jean-Marc stood and went, less confidently than he preferred, to the bedchamber door. He knocked lightly, waited for Meg’s response and entered.
Dressed in the beautiful pale yellow nightgown and robe Désirée had rushed to bring earlier that morning, Meg rested against a pile of soft pillows atop Jean-Marc’s bed. The night they had so recently spent there together was all too vivid. He said, “Am I interrupting? You were meditating.”
She had covered her eyes with a forearm and did not immediately remove that arm.
“You are an uncommon woman,” he said, “but I have already told you that often enough. Are you angry with me, Meg, and growing more so? Is that why you feel you must remove yourself from me like this?”
“No.”
She uncovered her eyes. “To draw all of one’s strength and peace to one central part of your mind, to close out everything else, is to heal.”
He approached the foot of the bed. “I still believe you are angry with me.”
“Not angry. Bemused. You cannot hold what you do not trust, not really. If you think you must keep me almost a prisoner, then you must expect me to disappoint you, or to place my interests before yours. How can you think such things?”
Clumsy as he knew he had been in telling her what had become obvious to him, he could not take back the words. “You don’t want me to do my duty toward you. Under the circumstances I must ensure your safety, and assume responsibility for you.”
“But only because you enjoy…Because you enjoy me and intend to continue doing so. And if there should be a child, you want that child. You find it all a heavy burden. It would not be your choice, but you can’t see another way to have what you desire—at least for now. That is no way to begin a life of deep commitment. I see unhappiness before me, yet I can’t deny you.” She pushed her hair back from her face, and her sleeves fell away from rounded arms.
“You assume more than you should. Perhaps that is because you spend too much time with your abstract thinking. I will not be forced to explain the obvious.” If she insisted on pretending she didn’t know he cared for her, so be it.
“I want to go about my business. I do not need to be treated like an invalid.”
“You are burned. That is a good enough reason to nurse you. And we know you are in danger—by your association with me, I fear. But we can’t forget the original incident that occurred before we met. I continue to question if that was an isolated event, perhaps truly an accident. Regardless, these things are a good reason to insist you remain where I can keep you safe. The household, including the Princess, has accepted your being in this room as necessary in light of what has happened.”
“So they would have you believe,” she said.
“They will not dare to suggest anything else, not outside the privacy of their own quarters. I think I shall have Désirée sit with you. That will comfort her and should further silence any gossip.”
All Smiles Page 36