by The Impostor
He shoved away from her hastily. “No. Clara, it’s obvious to me that I am far too dangerous for you. I’ve never… lost control like that before.”
She looked obscurely flattered. “Why, thank you, kind sir.”
“Clara, you aren’t paying attention. That was—so—”
She reached into the hamper beside her. “I believe the word you’re looking for is splendid. But I’ll settle for awe-inspiring. Cheese?”
He shook his head quickly. She’d lost him again. “You… liked it? No, what am I saying, it must have been terrifying for you—”
She snorted. “I’ll admit you’re an impressive fellow. Lord Etheridge, but let’s not get too full of ourselves.” She dropped the cheese back into the hamper and unwound her legs. Rising to her hands and knees, she crawled toward him with a very odd little smile on her face.
The perspective down the torn neckline of her gown was most charming. It held him immobile a moment too long, allowing her to climb up and straddle his thighs where he knelt on the carpet.
She coiled her arms about his neck and gazed into his eyes. He didn’t embrace her… but he didn’t push her away, either.
“Dalton Montmorency, I want you to listen to me very closely. I liked it. I loved it. Perhaps it was a bit too intense for a steady diet, but I wanted to find the man within and I did.”
Relief wanted to spread through him, but he couldn’t allow it. “The beast within, you mean,” he said bitterly.
She shook her head at him. “Poor Dalton. So many walls. Heavens, it took a great deal of imagination on my part to break them down, don’t you think?”
Remembering the exotic pleasure she’d given him, he flushed. His muscles began to unknot. “I’ve… always wondered what that was like.”
Her brows rose. “Oh, you’ve heard of it before?” Consternation brought her brows down again. “I thought I invented it.”
Finally relaxing, Dalton wrapped his arms about her and pulled her close. He chuckled softly into her hair. “I’ll admit you’re an impressive woman, Clara Simpson, but let’s not get too full of ourselves.”
She bit his earlobe. “No, I’d rather be full of you.”
He pulled his head back. “Aren’t you… “Damn, there was no other way to say it. “Sore?”
She tilted her head and considered. “Well, I am… a bit.” Then she touched her fingertips to his lips. Her hazel eyes grew dark. “But you said yourself you aren’t looking for forever. And if I’m going away… I rather thought this time was all we—”
He kissed her. Softly, each touch of his mouth a caress of her swollen lips. He didn’t want to think of her gone. He didn’t want to think at all. “We have until this evening, when James will come to take you away,” he whispered.
Her mouth trembled against his and her arms clung more tightly for a moment. Then she pulled her head back to look at him, her smile mischievous despite the dampness in her eyes.
‘That’s good.” She wriggled on his lap. “Because it’s my turn.”
Clara delighted in the gleam that appeared in his silvery eyes. When he laughed out loud, she treasured the deep sound. One short day might be all she would have. She would not spend it weeping.
There would be plenty of time for that later.
With a deft roll, he had her on her back on the floor. “You’re not naked enough.”
She aided him in pulling off the mined nightgown. He posed her then, stretching her legs out straight and her arms above her head. She saw his gaze falter for a moment when he noticed the other marks he’d left upon her. She made a long arm to retrieve another grape, then threatened him with it until the darkness left his eyes.
He leaned forward to take the grape between his lips, then kissed her fingertips and put her hand back over her head. He shook one finger at her. “Don’t move, remember?”
A shiver went through her. “I do believe I’ve created a monster,” she said faintly.
He ran his palms slowly up the insides of her legs. His thumbs stopped tantalizingly short of her cleft. “Clara.” He smiled down at her. “You’re next.”
She shivered again. Seeing it, he rose to pile more coals on the grate. Then he gathered cushions from the sofa and oddly, the picnic hamper. He returned to kneel beside her with his spoils.
“What is that for?” she asked, her voice breaking very slightly.
He put a cushion under her head and put another under her hips. She began to feel odd for the first time. He was being so methodical. …
“You didn’t answer me.” She gestured toward the basket.
He took her hand and placed it back above her head. Then he gazed down at her hungrily. “I’m going to play with my food.”
That’s just what he did. Strawberries became small cool tents over her nipples. Her navel held a grape. Apple slices framed her nest and he crumbled lump sugar to rain down over her entire torso.
Throughout, he would lean down to kiss her mouth, or flutter a touch over her cleft, or take a soft nibble from that sensitive place where her neck became shoulder.
By the time he finished his task, she was shivering from everything but the cold. She wanted to squirm, to press her thighs together, to pull him down to her—but he was implacable. He would not allow her to move.
Then he drew out the cream puffs.
“French pastry is Kurt’s specialty,” he said conversationally. “He comes back from every mission with another recipe or three.” Then he tore the small round bun in half to squeeze out the center of sweet thickened cream.
“Oh… my.” Clara swallowed. What was he going to do with that?
He licked a bit from his finger and leaned down to share a sweet taste with her. She lost herself in the kiss for a moment—until she felt his fingers, cool and slick with cream, slide deep within her. She started and gasped, her cry lost in his mouth.
After such a long period of tantalization, she was more than primed. It only required a few deep strokes of his fingers to make her shudder and writhe, her hands twining together over her head in a pantomime of binding.
His mouth never left hers as he took her orgasm in a kiss. She relaxed after a long quivering moment and opened her eyes to smile up at him. “That was lovely. I never thought—”
His fingers went deeply into her once more, stimulating her wildly from within. Caught by surprise, overwhelmed into reaction, she threw back her head and cried out as she peaked yet again.
He soothed her down once more—a kiss, a caress, a murmur of endearment. She finally lay quiescent, limp and exhausted from her twofold flight.
At that moment he began to feast on her. His mouth was everywhere, teasing, tasting, turning her skin into a sheath of pure sensation. Then he reached the apples.
Then he found the cream.
At one point he was forced to stop in order to take the pillow from under her head and place it over her face so her hoarse rising cries wouldn’t reveal their hiding place.
Finally, he lay down at her side and wrapped himself around her quivering damp body while she recovered her breath for the last time. He lifted the pillow. “Are you going to be quiet now?”
She nodded weakly, so he tucked the pillow beneath both their heads and pulled her closer.
She protested. “I’m sticky… the sugar—”
He chuckled. “No, I think I got every bit of it. You do make a lovely breakfast.”
“Hmm.” She lazily reached for the basket at their feet. “Time for mine.”
They lay entwined, feeding each other bits of food between kisses and confessions.
“So Monty was your name at school?” Clara could picture him, lanky and too tall for his age, distanced from the others by rank, wit, and some portion of shyness.
“I had a brief period of camaraderie with the other boys then. Liverpool scotched that when I was caught during my one and only misdeed.”
“Which was?”
“Which was a most ungentlemanly visit to an upper room o
f a local tavern when I was fourteen. Or rather, to a handy spot in a tree just outside the window.”
Her brows rose. “A spy even then, my lord?”
“It was an act with a long tradition, actually. Likely generations of schoolboys had sat outside that window, for the tree limb showed considerable wear. It is no longer there. Liverpool directed it cut off immediately and my status with the other lads dropped accordingly, I’m afraid.”
“Why were you caught and not the others?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. “I… climbed onto the window ledge and entered the room.”
She laughed. “You bold fellow! Did you interrupt anything interesting?” He didn’t answer, only lay silent next to her. Her smile faded as she sensed his stillness. “Dalton?”
“A rape,” he said flatly. “I interrupted a rape.”
He started to shift away from her. She reached to pull him back to her. “Will you tell me?”
“I’d rather not.”
She touched his face, directing his gaze to meet hers. “I want to know. Please?”
He nodded. Carefully he tucked her head into the hollow of his chin. “I was so inexperienced that I didn’t know what I was seeing at first. The girl was quite young. I should have known she wasn’t a tavern wench. The brute pulled her into the room and threw her down… I couldn’t see well then. So I climbed onto the ledge.”
His voice faltered. “I was… excited. I thought I was going to see a willing couple. …”
Clara felt him swallow hard.
“He was pulling at her clothing. I was so diverted—I’d never seen so much as a woman’s calf before, much less what he revealed of her.”
Clara stroked his chest. “Young men can be distractible in that regard, I imagine.”
“I was too stupid and too aroused to grasp it. And then it was almost too late. He was about to take her when she finally screamed. I was through the window in an instant… almost too late.”
Clara said nothing. A young man’s first encounter with carnality… and he’d witnessed a rape. Had even been stimulated by it at first, all unknowing. For a sensitive boy, the guilt must have been astounding. Hence his dread of his own darkness, his own animal drives. She was beginning to understand what she had done to him last night.
She rolled onto his chest and raised her head to meet his eyes. “Dalton, you did not rape me. Not last night, nor in the attic. You couldn’t, not you. Don’t you know that?”
He smiled and stroked a strand of her hair from before her eyes. “I know that now. In fact, I’m not at all sure it wasn’t the other way about.”
“Good.” She laid her head down to listen to his heartbeat. “Why did saving that girl get you into trouble? I would have thought you’d be a hero.”
“Ah. Well, it turned out that the fellow was a spoiled young marquess—an upperclassman at school—and the heir of a duke with whom Lord Liverpool was negotiating support for some law in his favor.”
“I don’t think I want to hear this,” Clara murmured.
“He’d stolen a young farm girl from a field and paid the innkeeper a hefty sum not to interfere. Unfortunately for him, I didn’t care who his father was, or how wealthy. Blue bloods bleed just as red, after all.”
She raised her head and narrowed her eyes at him. “He was older and larger, wasn’t he?”
Dalton shrugged. It did lovely things to the hard muscles of his chest beneath her hands.
“He was a bully and a coward. Still, if I had not had righteous anger on my side, it might have come out differently.”
“Did you make him bleed?”
“Rather.”
“Good,” she said fiercely. “But surely Lord Liverpool does not approve of rape?”
“No, not in theory. He simply didn’t see the point of such a fuss over a common farm girl, not when so-called larger issues were at stake.”
“What did he do about it?”
“He forced me to apologize to the marquess, of course.”
“He didn’t? What did you do?”
“I apologized.” He chuckled darkly in memory. “Loudly and publicly. I told him that I was sorry he was so poorly endowed that no woman would have him unless forced to it.”
She laughed and wrapped herself more tightly around him. He stroked her hair in silence for a moment.
“Your turn,” he said. “What was the largest he you told me?”
“Hmm. It isn’t so much what I said as it was what I did. Your Widow Simpleton is not at all like me. I’m afraid I’m not fashionable at all. I never wear face paint. I rarely tighten my corset. Most of my clothing is demure and dull… excepting the green dress, of course.”
“What green dress is this?”
“Oh, sorry. I wore that one for Nathaniel, not you.”
“Who is Nathaniel?”
“Nathaniel,” she said smugly, “is my beau.”
“Is that so?” he growled. He rolled her over in a quick movement and covered her with his body. “Your beau?”
She grinned up at him, glad to lighten his mood with a bit of teasing. “You’re jealous.”
“No, only amused. Nathaniel is no threat whatsoever.”
“Oh? How can you be so sure?”
“Because I made you squeak.”
Her jaw dropped. “What?”
He nodded arrogantly. “Indeed. You squeaked several times. Quite loudly at that.”
“I did not!”
He leaned to nuzzle her ear. “Eeeee … eeeeee,” he teased softly.
She hit him on the shoulder. “Stop that.”
He shifted himself to he between her thighs. He was hard and swollen, pressing gently against her sensitized cleft. “Eeeeee …”
She hit him again, and this time when her body stirred with her blow, he slipped a fraction of himself within her. He was so thick that he parted her deeply even so. A jolt of pure sensation shot through her. She gasped and clutched at his shoulders. He raised his head to smile down at her. “Do you know who’s next?”
“Who?” she asked faintly, stunned at the instant awakening of her desire.
“We are.” He arched his body to kiss her as he began to press gently but inexorably into her body. She squeaked.
Chapter Twenty-two
Pulling on his wrinkled clothing, Dalton tried not to listen to Clara bathing with the cold water in the basin. Her gasps of chilled surprise were very nearly erotic.
When she finally allowed him to turn around, he found her wrapped demurely in the stolen cloak.
“What are you wearing under that?” Her nightgown had been put to its final use as her washcloth. “None of your business,” she said primly. “Well, don’t catch a chill in that damp cloak. And don’t let James get so much as a peek of you under that when he arrives. He should be here with your things soon.”
“Dalton…”
Her tone was serious. He gave her his full attention. “Yes?”
Her chin went up. “I don’t want to go.” Damn. He’d thought it had been too easy. “You must. Going into hiding until I uncover the culprit is the only way to keep you safe.”
“I don’t want to flee. It will only mean they win, don’t you see? The men like your marquess and my father’s earl—if the people who see them for what they are hide away, then who will speak out? Who will save the innocent and the gullible?”
She was so valiant and so naive. “Who will save you when Kurt comes after you again? How can I both protect you and solve this?”
“I can help you. I’m very good at what I do, Dalton. In the months that I’ve been doing it, I’ve never once been caught.”
“It only takes once,” he said grimly. How was he to turn her from this? “Clara, you will leave with James this evening if I have to tie you in a sack and strap you on top of the carriage.”
She gazed at him evenly. “You would force me?”
It was an unfair card for her to play and she knew it, for he could see the darkening of shame in her
eyes. Damn, she was stubborn.
“If you won’t flee to safety, then—” He couldn’t bear it. He spoke before thinking. “I can think of another way for you to secure your future.”
“What is that?”
“Wed me.”
She could not help a disbelieving laugh. “I could not.”
He was affronted. “Why not? As Lady Etheridge you would be nigh untouchable.” He warmed to the idea even as he spoke. “It is the perfect solution. You could live far from town. I have several estates for you to choose from. That way you would pose no distraction to my work. I would care for you beautifully. You would have everything. You would have such wealth you would never need to draw again—”
She flinched. “No, not everything. I would not have you. Nor my self-respect.”
“As my wife, you would have everyone’s respect! I offer you my name and my fortune.”
“How can you think I would accept? You offer me desert and sand, and call it paradise.”
“You think my offer bears no worth?”
“Your offer is an affront. I don’t want your pretty exile, Dalton.” She sighed, obviously reaching for restraint. “Your sense of responsibility is commendable, but I will not sell my future for your peace of mind. I deserve more than that.”
“You are impossible!”
Her gaze turned to stormy green sea. “You are entirely possible, and that is my misfortune.”
He gritted his teeth. “You feel nothing for me?”
She only looked at him. “I feel a great deal for you.”
He thought of this Nathaniel, for whom she had worn green. “Is there another you love better?” He clenched his fists, fighting for control over the wildness and desolation inside of him. “Tell me who! I must know who it is that I lose you to!”
She paused. “Myself.”
He couldn’t answer that, couldn’t justify a single argument in his mind. They stood unmoving, facing each other, together yet very far apart.
A click resounded in the silent room and a panel in the wall opened. Clara blinked. For the first time she noticed that the room had no obvious door. She’d been imprisoned all night and never been aware.