“Now you’re beginning to sound like poor Colonel Kefauver in White’s.”
He blinked. “How the devil do you know about Colonel—”
“Oh, all the men. Waterburn and d’Andre and the like. They talk.”
A silence.
“All the men,” he drawled grimly.
She shrugged blithely with one shoulder.
He hesitated. And then he needed to know. “Phoebe . . . did you by any chance receive hothouse flowers today?”
She looked surprised, and there it was that soft, genuine pleasure again lighting her face. “Yes, as a matter of fact. And a bundle of sage, as it so happens.”
Which did you prefer? he absurdly wanted to say.
They regarded each other, the air shimmering with unspoken things.
How could he tell her about the wagers? At this point, she might not even believe him. He couldn’t bear to be the one to do it. He didn’t know whether remaining silent was cowardly or altruistic.
It was definitely selfish. Her joy was his own.
“Go ahead, then. He likes his back rubbed. And his head scratched.”
“The creature inflicts grievous wounds upon my person and expects me to forgive it?”
“I expect a lot of creatures inflict grievous wounds and expect forgiveness.”
Well. Silence fell like an axe coming down.
They stared at each other again. Phoebe evenly.
The marquess somewhat warily.
“Are you being profound again, Miss Vale? Are you teaching another lesson to me? I expect that was an innuendo, but I am bleeding,” he said finally with great, and mostly mock self-righteousness.
She arched a single eyebrow.
He sighed. “If you’re going to use an eyebrow . . .” He bent down and dutifully scratched Charybdis on the top of his head. The cat launched into a fresh bout of purring and rotated his head to and fro so Jules could scratch beneath his chin. The Marquess was disgusted. “Mad, mad fickle beast,” he crooned as he scratched.
He stood again and Charybdis slinked under the bed, having satisfied his urge to be fussed over.
They were silent. Without a cat as a buffer, he wondered what there was left to say.
“Did it hurt terribly? The bayonet.”
Silly question, they both knew. But he knew when he looked in her eyes that she wanted to undo his wounds the way he wanted to undo hers. That she suffered from the very notion that he had ever suffered.
“It hurt,” he said simply. “For a time. And then it healed.”
She’d gone paler. She pressed her lips together, drew in a sharp breath.
“Would you like to see my scar?” he tried.
She bit back a smile. “I’m certain that sentence has worked on innumerable ladies.”
“Not innumerable. I can innumerate them.”
She was smiling in earnest now. “I’m terribly, terribly sorry Charybdis hurt you. But I’m . . . more grateful than I can ever say.”
He simply nodded.
And then she asked the most critical question of all. “How did you find him?”
He opened his mouth. Then paused. Clearly considering his answer.
“The creature was sunbathing in a mews. On its back.”
He said it gruffly, turning away from her, toward the window, where the lowering sun was aiming a final, potent golden beam.
The sun nicked sparks of red from his hair.
And she knew for certain: He’d bolted out the door in search of her cat. He’d abandoned Lisbeth, and his dignity . . . for her. Again.
She was making a hash of his life.
He turned back to her. His face inscrutable, apart from two faint furrows across his forehead. He turned to her with something like bemused entreaty on his face. Save me from myself.
“Jules,” she whispered his name like a prayer of thanksgiving. She laid a hand softly against his cheek before she even knew what she was doing.
She remembered her first glimpse of that fascinating intersection of angle and hollow. She hadn’t yet kissed him then. He hadn’t been a person to her then, but a series of myths perpetuated by the broadsheets. Lord Ice. And now she knew how it felt when it was chilled, sandy with the beginnings of his beard, when he’d kissed her during their waltz.
Tentatively, almost experimentally, he turned his face into her hand. And raised his hand to cover hers.
And then he sighed.
She watched, mesmerized, the swell and sink of his broad shoulders with his breath, as he surrendered, momentarily, the weight of everything to her, and to the tenderness of her touch. Two people unaccustomed to taking comfort or giving it. And she was so afraid they would only ever find it in each other.
He closed his eyes.
She took the opportunity to hoard details about him while his eyes were closed. The emphatic dark slashes of his eyebrows. Lashes shuddering on his cheeks. A scar, just a nick of a white line, near his jaw.
This. This moment, this tenderness, was far more dangerous to either of them than passion. Her heart felt swollen. It wanted to open, to go to him. She kept it bound and tethered, of necessity. He couldn’t be trusted with it.
“You’re . . . such an idiot,” she murmured.
His eyes snapped open in surprise.
Then narrowed.
“You might live through this if you apply the St. John’s Wort.” She managed to be brisk.
He stared at her. Assessing the change in tone. His jaw was set.
“Very well, then.” With startling alacrity he unfastened the buttons of his shirt and shook it off his shoulders, and flung it onto the bed, very much like someone throwing down a gauntlet.
Oh.
It was like a blow. She stopped breathing. Instantly, her head floated off high above her body, and heat rushed her limbs, and her knees, well, they melted. She was grateful for her long skirts, because they disguised the sway nicely.
“Too sudden?” he challenged. He shoved both hands through his hair and pushed it back from his forehead. She watched the play of muscle, complex and poetic and heart-stopping, slide beneath his fair skin as he moved. The seam of dark hair that bisected the planes of his chest and disappeared tantalizingly into the top of his trousers, and cried out for a tongue to follow it downward. The eloquent curve of his shoulder, every valley and angle and slope, seemed designed for a hand to trace.
He still had a bruise on his forehead. It had acquired a greenish cast, but half of it was still purple.
Her voice was a thread, but still she managed to sound acerbic. “I believe it’s the devil’s job to tempt me. Not yours.”
“And the difference between the devil and I would be . . . ?”
“None that I can detect.” She opened the jar of St. John’s Wort and dipped her fingers in. “Show me where it hurts.” This was bravado. She wasn’t certain she could touch him without surrendering completely.
And now he was the one who looked uncertain. His bluff had been called.
But finally, like a boy, he tentatively extended his arm. She saw a few puncture wounds with bruised edges, puffing up a little now.
She touched them gently. “I’m terribly sorry he wounded you.”
He shrugged nonchalantly. He seemed to be holding his breath. She touched gentle fingers to each little wound.
“Better?” she asked.
He simply nodded.
“And here,” he said softly. Pointing to his chest.
She hesitated. For a fraught moment her finger only hovered close to his skin. The space between her skin and hers seemed to heat.
And then she moved. She lightly touched him, drew her finger across the beads of blood dried in a perfect little arc across his chest. A violent little rosary left by a little cat whose reflex was to defend himself.
When Jules hissed in a breath between his teeth, it felt like bands of steel going taut beneath satin.
Her finger was trembling. She slowed it. And then stopped. Oh, God. It was no u
se. It was all she could do not to close her eyes. Her senses were swamped. Sight was suddenly an intrusion. All she wanted was to lose herself in the feel of him.
And then she did close her eyes.
For a moment all she heard was breathing. Hers and his. A subtle storm. She could feel his heart beating, the steady thump of it, beneath her hand.
“Go on,” he whispered into the silence. “Do whatever you want to do, Phoebe.”
She hesitated only a moment more.
And then with one finger she traced, delicately, wonderingly, slowly, the defined planes of his chest, following the path etched by the swell of his muscles.
Gooseflesh lifted the hairs on his arms. And his nipples became little hard nubs. She fanned open her fingers and dragged her nails lightly, lightly, over them.
His breath snagged in his throat, and his head tipped back. The sound was as erotic as a tongue applied to the back of her neck.
Tension thrummed in him; his skin was fever-hot.
Her own breathing was more labored now.
She opened her hands, dragged them lightly over the swell of his chest, greedy for, wondering at the feel of him. She lingered over his heartbeat. A gratifyingly rapid bass drum inside him. But he kept his arms at his sides. Allowing her to take what she wanted, to explore. Even as she could feel his cock nudging at her through his trousers.
And she moved infinitesimally closer to him, so that her thighs brushed deliberately against him. He was a devil. She, apparently, was a vixen.
Her fingers traveled that alluring seam of hair down, down, down to where his narrow waist disappeared into his trousers.
She paused them at his waistband, just above that impressive bulge.
They breathed in swift and ragged counterpoint. She rested her forehead against his chest. He smelled, of course, like heaven, like sex, like temptation, like home. She shook her head helplessly against him. She thought she tried to move away, but he was opium and she was intoxicated. She almost whimpered. Help.
“Do you know what I suspect?” His murmur ruffled her hair. Almost conversational. Impressive for a man so obviously aroused.
She shook her head again. Don’t make me speak.
Her chest rising and falling, rising and falling, against his. Rather more swiftly. His arms rose, slipped lightly, lightly around her, skimmed up over her shoulder blades. His words were frayed, and low, and slow. It was his mink wrap of a voice, the voice of a sensual mesmerist. “You see, as we’ve been standing here, I’ve been thinking about the skin above your stockings, on that very secret place just on the inside of your thighs? Right above your garters. Because . . . I suspect . . . dear God, I suspect it’s soft, Phoebe. Like new skin, never touched. The petals of a blossom can only dream of being as delicate as this skin. Charybdis has nothing on you. If you were to lie on your back in the mews, crowds would gather from all over for one touch, one touch, of that skin.”
She tried to laugh. But he’d called every part of her being to life just then. Her skin felt overlaid with fever. The flesh between her thighs burned, burned, as if it knew it was being discussed, was eager to test his hypothesis.
The hammer blows of her heart sent the blood ringing through her ears
And still he spoke. His voice was a resonant near-whisper in her ear, and this, too, was unbearably erotic. “And I think, right now, deep between your legs . . . you’re wet, Phoebe, from wanting me, from imagining me touching you, licking you just there. If I were to slide my fingers between your legs right now, they would come away drenched. If I were to taste you, my thirst would be slaked.”
Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh God.
Her breathing was like bellows now. He’d moved subtly closer; his cock was hard against her belly. His hands slid down to her buttocks and pulled her ever so slightly closer. His restraint was remarkable.
“So . . . purple,” she gasped, a feeble protest, against his chest.
This took him aback a little. “Oh—my prose? Of course it is. But no less effective for all of that . . . is it, Scheherazade?”
The devil was amused.
“Would you like to wager that I’m right, Phoebe? Lift your skirts in your hands for ‘yes.’ I want you complicit.”
And at first she was afraid her hands wouldn’t work at all, and this seemed a terrible dilemma. She tried, but they seemed reluctant to lift from his torso, in case she never touched him again.
There was the murmur again. “Going once . . . going twice . . .”
She peeled her hands from his torso with a heroic effort and slid them down into the folds of her skirts. And as she furled them up he sank down, down, down, easily, to his knees.
And as the air of the room struck her stockinged legs, that bare place above her garters, his hands cupped the back of her calves. He fanned them, and his fingers combed, leaving ten feathery fiery trails along her skin, lighting tiny scattered bonfires across the entirety of her nervous system. Everything that could go erect on her body instantly did so, and an army of gooseflesh likely greeted his fingers when they bypassed her garters and arrived at skin.
She sighed. More accurately, she groaned, softly, shamelessly. She’d never dreamed anything could be so exquisite.
And her legs shifted apart, inviting more.
His finger skimmed along the edge of the garter. He dragged his lips softly over, inside her thigh. And she didn’t know whether it was this or the anticipation of him opening his mouth, of applying his tongue to her skin, but a great throb of yearning pulsed between her legs.
And then he did part his lips and touch his tongue to her skin, and the blood fled her head, rallying to the new center of her universe farther south.
“I was right. So soft.” He sounded intoxicated, too.
Desperation and pleasure and greed and anticipation wrestled, entwined. She didn’t know what she wanted, only that she did, and he was the one who could give her what she wanted.
Her fingers slipped down to rake into his hair, gripping it, just as his mouth slid a little to the left and his tongue oh-so-delicately flicked between her cleft.
Extraordinary bliss spiked her.
She jerked. She swore extravagantly. Apparently she’d stockpiled filthy words when she was in St. Giles and hadn’t had an appropriate excuse for using them again until now.
“You are incredible. And since I was right, I win,” he murmured. “For my reward, I want to make you come apart in my hands, and to scream my name.”
And his tongue flicked her again.
“Oh, God . . . Jules . . .”
Not a scream. A question, a plea.
He did it again.
She slid her hands over his hair, down to his shoulders, needing him to hold her up, as her knees were useless now. His shoulders were so hard they shocked and thrilled her and almost frightened her; all at once there seemed no give in him at all. It didn’t seem inconceivable that he could bear the weight of the world, or that he could break her in two. It was too late now to consider to whom she was surrendering.
Intuitively they moved together to find the rhythm she wanted. The languid heat and velvet of his stroking tongue became more deliberate, more insistent, more precise as they discovered together just what she wanted, and with the last rays of sunlight pouring in the window and warming the back of her neck—she was drugged with pleasure. She was lost. She heard her breath only distantly, a tattered rush of sound. And then he sucked and bliss cleaved her, choking her with a pleasure so violent it was nearly pain.
She shuddered, arching her hips into him. And she moved with him. An icy heat rushed her skin, as if her nerves were recalling every moment of bliss they’d ever known and singing about it.
She dug her nails into his shoulders. Waves of bliss were now as much a part of her as her own heartbeat, as the breath going in and out of her lungs. They built, and rose, cresting, pressed against the very seams of her being. She was going to die. Or scream. Distantly she sensed something coming for her, and she di
dn’t know quite what it was yet. She wanted it, needed it, feared it.
And then his fingers slipped inside her, and crooked, and slid.
“Jules . . . I’m . . . Please!”
A sea of hot stars broke over her, tore her out of her body. Swept her away in an indescribable pleasure, buckling her.
She did indeed scream his name.
She felt his hard arms wrapped around her, holding her fast. She would have fallen.
As it was, she’d dropped her dress over his head.
She seemed to return to her body only in fragments. She was distantly aware of breathing, of hot skin, of sweat, of limbs, of thoughts drifting. She didn’t know what belonged to whom. Her senses needed to recongregate, to separate from him.
He fought his way from beneath her dress.
And looked up at her. His hair was mussed from her rummaging her hands about in it.
He stood, slowly. The better to tower over her, she supposed. So fundamentally male her breath was lost all over again.
She looked down. He had a roaring erection. She wondered now if he intended that she give him more, now that he’d given to her. She supposed she was very like a man in that at the moment she wanted nothing more than to flee.
“Where’s the cat?” He sounded dazed.
“Under the bed. It’s his usual refuge. Why?”
“If I take you now, right here, on this bed, if I make love to you, would he attack me?”
“Why don’t you try it and see?”
“Is that an invitation, Miss Vale?”
It took every ounce of strength she possessed to say the following, and yet she knew that she meant it: “Not in the least.”
She watched his face, and could almost see him review and reject things to say to her. Assessing whether she could be persuaded. At last he sighed, and reached out and awkwardly swept a strand of wayward hair away from her face and behind her ear. It felt a bit like being pawed by a bear. Tenderness did not come naturally to him. Or rather, it might have, if only he would allow it to, if only he’d surrender to it. He’d be as graceful in that as he was in everything else he permitted into his life.
She preferred him when he was awkward and uncertain and finding himself.
How the Marquess Was Won Page 25