“Why didn’t you name the kitten something precious, like Daphne, or Apollo?”
“I suppose it’s because I always wished I had an ally, someone to protect me, and Charybdis the monster was the most fearsome thing I could imagine. Even more fearsome than The Watch or the drunk men who fought in the streets and, well, you can imagine. I supposed I had little faith that even the Greek gods would be much of a match for the likes of St. Giles. I wanted something truly nasty as a familiar.”
More dry humor.
But Mother of God, what must she have seen as a child?
St. Giles was violence and darkness and noise and rot; sagging drunks leaning against sagging buildings and dying in alleys from gin poisoning. Criminals committed their thievery in other more affluent parts of London and fled to St. Giles like rats into holes.
He looked at her, fine skin, worn walking dress, new bonnet . . . and the thought was unbearable: she’d been so afraid she’d needed a kitten for a talisman. He almost couldn’t breathe from imagining it.
He understood now that her unique light, the light he basked in, existed by virtue of all those shadows. And the shadows were what made her seem more real than everyone else, threw her into relief.
She was right. He didn’t know what to say to her. And until he’d met this woman, he’d never in his life been at a loss.
“Is Charybdis very fearsome, then?” What a coward. And yet it seemed safe enough to keep talking about the cat.
“Oh, yes. Very.” Oddly, she sounded sincere. “He has a good deal of striped fur. One of the other teachers is feeding him while I’m here.”
“And what will he do when you go to Africa?”
“Why, come with me, of course.”
He saw Waterburn turn his great blond head toward him. Then narrow his eyes thoughtfully.
“Seen anything you’d like to shoot?” he called to Waterburn, devilishly.
Waterburn shrugged, bored. The hound swiveled its big head disinterestedly at the sound of a raised voice, and trudged onward with a world-weary, put-upon seen-it-all gait. Honestly, dog, how unbearable could life in the Redmonds’ stables be? Jules wondered dryly.
When he turned back around, Phoebe had vanished.
Completely.
Chapter 12
He swiveled his head about madly.
Lisbeth frolicked ahead of Jonathan and Argosy, looking like one of those lacy white flowers she’d just plucked up. Tendrils of dark hair escaped artfully from her bonnet and lay as eloquently as sixteenth notes against the white of her neck.
“It’s this way, Lord Waterburn. Isn’t it, Jon? Since you claim to know. Jules, I cannot wait for you to see it!”
She turned her head, sent a smile over her shoulder. It was a breathtaking angle for her, all cheekbone and long throat. Her eyes flashed blue.
He smiled again. “I cannot wait to see it,” he echoed.
There were ruins simply bloody everywhere in this part of England. They were all to some extent picturesque. The things one did for women.
“No, not that way. There’s a haunted hunting box that way, Lisbeth,” came Jonathan’s voice, “and best mind yourself or someone will mistake you for a deer and shoot you.”
“Oh, Jonathan!” She was irritated. “That would never happen. I’m all in white. I hardly look like a deer.”
“A unicorn then.”
“But who would shoot a unicorn?”
And so they disappeared, bickering, from view.
What the devil—? A woman couldn’t just vanish into thin air. He scanned the pathway. Oaks had dropped their loads of leaves, but hawthorns were everywhere thick and rustling with tiny hidden creatures.
And then he saw the narrow passage between a hawthorn and the trunk of a large oak.
He peeked through.
And there she stood, in an almost magical clearing, a circle of lush meadow grass not yet killed by frost bounded by, hidden by, hawthorne and oaks and trees that hadn’t yet lost all of their leaves.
She was dappled in the shadows of leaves when she stood up, smiling, with a handful of green clutched in her fist.
“You see?” she presented, triumphantly. “I was right. Sage does grow here. And it smells heavenly.”
She pressed it to her nose and inhaled deeply.
He watched her close her eyes to isolate herself with the scent. All at once every corner of his being seemed filled with light.
He’d gone mute.
“There’s a region in France that claims sage helps in the easing of grief. They plant them around tombstones in their cemeteries,” she explained.
“How did you . . .” he tried.
But there really was no point in asking. She read things, she knew things, and out they came, little surprises. It was strangely like unwrapping little gifts, not all of which he appreciated. She clung to facts and information, like flotsam in a shipwreck. They’d saved her.
Mutely, he looked at her. Too full to speak. Her eyes were green. He knew that decisively now. A more facile man would have compared them flatteringly to something—leaves or moss or emeralds or some such—but all he would truthfully be able to say was that no one he’d ever known possessed eyes quite like hers. It had little to do with their color. It was in the way that over the course of mere days he’d found himself saying things just to see how they would change: how humor would kindle them, and kindness soften them, and anger make them flash, and how he felt when the light of them was turned on him. How he wanted to hold up his hands before them and warm them.
“I read about it,” she told him anyway. She looked down at the bundle in her hand, indecisively. And then:
“Here.” She extended it to him. “A gift for you.”
He stared it. All at once too many thoughts and impressions jostled for the exits, and none could escape in the form of words. So he did as she ordered. Slowly, wordlessly, he reached for them.
And as she began to surrender them, her fingers brushed his.
He stopped breathing.
He’d once seen a man struck by lightning. He’d watched as the bolt held him helpless, motionless, arcing his body. Having its way with him.
It wasn’t unlike that.
Breathlessly, dumbly, they both stared at the place where their fingers met. Stunned to at last, at last, be touching. Skin to skin.
He dropped the herbs and seized her wrist. “Enough.”
The word was low and dark. And it thrummed command and something like a plea.
Slowly, slowly, she levered up her head, as if spooling courage on the way up. Her jaw was taut; her eyes were wide when they met his, but comprehension flickered in them.
The air suddenly seemed full of snapping sparks. One would have thought he’d captured a unicorn, for God’s sake, for how enervated he felt.
As he watched, a flush painted her from her collarbone upward. Beneath his thumb, placed over a pale blue vein in that silky hand, her pulse raced.
He turned her palm up. He wished he could be certain she was the one who was trembling, for one of them was. Her hand was achingly soft, too vulnerable. It was cold, which struck him as poignant. He wanted to warm her. He needed to warm her.
And so he brought her palm to his mouth.
He softly opened his mouth against her skin, touched his tongue there, burned her with a kiss that was at once chaste and perhaps the most carnal he’d ever given.
Her head tipped back hard; her eyelids shuddered closed. She made a soft sound, a gasp of shock and pure sensual pleasure.
Mother of God.
He lifted his head with some effort. He curled her fingers closed over the place he kissed her, as if handing her a keepsake.
He knew he ought to. And yet he found he couldn’t relinquish her hand.
“Look at me, Miss Vale.” His voice a low demand.
A moment’s hesitation. She opened her eyes. He was absurdly thrilled to see them again. They were dazed and starry and wary. The sun haloed her, and the lig
ht both set her aglow and obscured her. As he stared, he withstood bolt after swift bolt of impression, each distinct and pure and primal:
Who kissed you first? I will kiss the memory of it away. I will run him through with a sword. I can’t recall kissing anyone before you. I am ruined. I am happy. I’m afraid. I need to leave. You need to leave.
He was holding her hand as though it was a Fabergé egg. Which rather contrasted his expression, which, little did he know, was edging toward the thunderous.
“I didn’t know I was going to do that,” he said finally.
“Do you always know what you’re going to do?” Her voice was a low husk.
“Always,” he said shortly. It sounded like an accusation.
A heartbeat’s worth of silence passed.
“What are you going to do now?” And in her whisper was both sensual challenge and trepidation.
They could hear the distant voices of Jonathan and Waterburn and Lisbeth and Argosy, all still bickering happily, but they seemed as consequential as the birds rustling in the trees. Dangerous to think that way, he knew.
He heard his name: Jules! Cheerfully sang out by Lisbeth.
The rest of their party could come upon them in seconds or minutes. He was just clear-headed enough to realize that arousal could tinker with a man’s sense of time enough to doom the pair of them to discovery.
And yet.
He drew in a long breath. Exhaled at length.
Phoebe must have seen his plans in his eyes. “Don’t,” she urged on a panicked whisper. “You’d best not. Please—”
He took hold of her other wrist, gently, as if she hadn’t spoken at all, and Phoebe let him take it, because his touch turned her bones to water. And as he pulled her toward him, he gave his head a regretful, incredulous little shake, as though neither of them had a choice in the matter, as if he were at the mercy of momentum. Which appeared to be true, as her head was already tipping back to meet his lowering lips, and later she could not have said how that had happened, only that his will in that moment was hers.
His lips landed softly on hers at first, the merest bump of his warm firm mouth against her soft one. And then he coaxed hers apart with his. More shocking than the kiss was the relief, as though she’d longed for this her entire life, for him, for this kiss. It nearly buckled her knees. Her body seemed to know precisely what to do and what it wanted, and her sense dissolved against the onslaught of sensation. Her breasts crushed against his hard chest, the button of his shirt was cold against the skin of her collarbone. His mouth like cognac, the kiss spreading like slow fire through her veins, until she was molten. When her body blended against his with such wanton ease he might as well have been the missing part of her, he loosened his grip on her wrists, clearly satisfied she was going nowhere. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with her hands, so she settled them on the front of his shirt and slowly curled her fingers into it. The linen was hot from being next to his skin. And this seemed so unbearably erotic she moaned low in her throat, a shameless animal sound, pure need.
And when she did he muttered a hoarse word that may have been Christ or an epithet or her name, something raw and helpless and very enthusiastic. He shifted abruptly so that his hot hands were sliding over her back to cup his hands beneath her arse and lift her with shocking deliberateness against his cock.
And through the fine fabric of her twice-sewn dress, she felt him: enormous, inexorably male, shockingly hard. His hands were furling up her dress; she felt the air on the backs of her stockinged calves. Their lips clung and parted, then returned more hungrily, their tongues twined and tangled, teeth once clashed gracelessly. But the kiss never seemed deep enough, penetrating enough, because what he wanted was more than a kiss and she wanted what he wanted, and she was at the mercy of that.
Help. The word rang in her head, though she didn’t know whom she was entreating or what she wanted. She was endlessly spiraling, in a fever induced by the heat of his body, the taste of him. His cock was so hard it hurt to be held against it, and yet she pressed herself closer, as close as she could, because every time she did pleasure cleaved through her, built upon itself, doubling, trebling, until she was trembling with urgency.
And suddenly her head was bare. She felt the air on her hair, the back of her neck. Her bonnet had been knocked free and was bouncing around the back of her neck.
His mouth traveled to the place her pulse thumped in her throat, bare to him now. He made a desperate sound in his throat, and his lips traveled lower, and she arched backward to abet him.
His mouth had just skimmed the bones at the base of her neck, so close, so close to the swell of her aching taut nipple, when:
“Oh, Juuules!” Lisbeth trilled again.
Her voice echoed. “uuu . . . uuu. . . . ules . . .”
Christ! That voice was close now!
They froze in the midst of what amounted to climbing each other.
“Phoooeeeebeee!”
Now without the echo.
The marquess stepped back so abruptly she staggered forward.
He righted her by clapping his hands on her shoulders.
They stared at each other. His eyes were dazed and hot. Their breathing was a low roar.
A breeze rattled the leaves on the trees, and to Phoebe it sounded like so much ironic arboreal applause.
Finally, gingerly he lifted his hands from her shoulders, as if worried she was so kiss-drunk she might topple. Or disappear like a mirage the moment his touch left her.
Satisfied, he lowered his hands to his sides and seemed to, with an effort, hold them very still.
She touched her fingers to her lips. They burned; she’d taken from him as savagely as she’d given. It was an excellent sort of pain. Her skin felt everywhere feverish.
But she left the other hand on his chest, and watched as it rose and fell, rose and fell, with the bellows of his breathing. And as if she couldn’t help herself: she slid it inside his shirt, between the gaps in his buttons . . . over his hot skin.
He hissed in a breath. “Phoebe.” His voice was hoarse, curt. A warning. He wrapped her wrist in his hand again.
But in case she never kissed him again, she wanted to feel for herself what she’d done to him. And wonderingly, she savored the hammer blows of his heart against her palm.
Until he gently, gently, lifted her hand away. Gave it back her.
And unwrapped his fingers from it, one at a time, prolonging the time he was touching her.
Until they were no longer touching at all.
Which seemed wrong all of a sudden.
She considered that one of them ought to say something, but she could think of nothing appropriate, and couldn’t imagine what he might say that would be at all the right thing. The language she knew—the King ’s English, and all the precious facts she’d acquired over the years that could be used to explain or sum up or keep the world at bay—were useless here. This was another language entirely.
“Juuuu-ules!” Lisbeth sang out. Her voice seemed closer now, but it was impossible to know just how close, given the way sound tended to ricochet off and pool in the little valleys between the hills, the way the breeze picked it up and dashed it about through the trees, playing tricks. “Phoeeeeebeeee! Where have you got to?”
She still sounded brisk and playful.
But they were startled seconds later to hear the crunch of footsteps and the huh huh huh of the old hound.
Bloody hell!
Jules and Phoebe realized at once they were essentially trapped in the clearing. And one of them had an erection and the other one was pink in the face and in the lips and her bonnet was askew and her dress was hiked up in the back.
Only an imbecile would come to the wrong conclusion about what they’d gotten up to.
Thus began the frantic hissing whispers.
“Your dress is—” He gestured broadly.
“Your hat . . . !” She pointed at his head.
“Your bonnet!”
“Thank you,” she said on a frantic abashed whisper.
“Not at all,” he replied under his breath.
For heaven’s sake. Why on earth were they being polite?
The hound gave a rusty, disinterested bark from what sounded like an uncomfortably close distance.
They were both a little wild-eyed now.
“Your—is still—” he hissed urgently, gesturing at his own head.
She clawed at her bonnet ribbons again, but they were knotted hopelessly. She nearly lynched herself trying to free it. Her hands were trembling and useless.
Woof! the dog said again. And they heard the crackle of footsteps, too, over leaves and twigs.
“Smell something, old boy?” Waterburn’s voice now.
Rank fear, Phoebe thought. Or perhaps mortification has a smell.
“Do you hear voices, Lord Waterburn?” Lisbeth called. “This way, I think.”
Phoebe abandoned her bonnet efforts instantly.
“We can’t both stay here.” She was light-headed with panic.
“Too right. You stay. I’ll go!” Jules lunged to the left, ready to plunge through a hedgerow.
She seized his elbow. “No! Not that way! You’ll end up in a bramble. I know the woods, so I’ll go—”
He seized her elbow as she lunged to the right.
It was like a reel gone violent.
“For God’s sake, we can’t both go crashing off like deer through the underbrush,” he hissed.
And Jules knew with despairing, crystalline clarity he’d been wise to avoid the illicit affairs other men seemed to find so invigorating. He’d only barely gotten an illicit affair under way and his dignity was already in jeopardy, what with the beaming in church and the bonnet purchase and now this. He cherished his dignity.
An “affair”? It was just a kiss.
Well, two kisses.
Nevertheless, two kisses in a clearing did not qualify as an affair. And as embarrassment was hardly an aphrodisiac, it was unlikely to become one. So he told himself.
How the Marquess Was Won Page 12