“You decline their further keeping.” His voice had gone from purring to growling, and against her backside, Gwen felt the unmistakable tumescence of male arousal. His fingers closed softly over her breast. “What say you, Guinevere?”
She said prayers—for her sanity, for her reason, because the feel of his hand, gentle, exquisitely knowledgeable, and warm on her breast created havoc with her every faculty.
“You will think ill of me if I embark on this… consignment with you.”
His hand went still then shifted to rest over her heart. “My dear Guinevere, I think ill of the man who used you so poorly and took so much without giving anything in return. I want to take from you, too, make no mistake, but I want to give as well.”
Between the fire before her and the man holding her, Gwen was warm, but when she gazed at the dreary autumn landscape beyond the windows, she recalled that bleak sense of looking down the years, down the decades, with nothing but more coping, more duty, and more maternal devotion to sustain her.
She had crafted an existence that avoided pain and indignity, avoided any chance of encountering those who might disrupt her peace or threaten Rose’s well-being, but her life also avoided pleasure, intimacy of any variety, and even companionship.
Five years ago, when scandal had hung close at hand and heartbreak even closer, those choices had been understandable, but now, when she considered the idea of Douglas Allen giving himself to her, the hummingbirds went into a frenzy.
“I don’t know if I am capable of enjoying intimacies the way you describe, Douglas. I was told—”
He turned her by the shoulders, which allowed her to rest her head on his shoulder and hold onto him.
“—I was emphatically assured I was not suited to intimate relations.”
“And I was told I couldn’t sit a horse for anything.”
“You ride beautifully.”
“I ride well enough to enjoy it,” Douglas replied, stroking a hand over her hair, “because I practiced on the equine version of a schoolmaster until I was competent.”
“And you’re a schoolmaster?” Though in some regards, that term suited him perfectly.
He traced his nose along her eyebrow, the gesture affectionate, approving even, and not characteristic of any schoolmaster in Gwen’s acquaintance. “By no means am I expert at bedsport, though I am proficient enough that you’ll have pleasure from me. A woman is entitled to that, Guinevere. Shall I show you some pleasure?”
Five
Guinevere was in his arms and more than tolerating his advances, and yet, Douglas knew the battle against her nerves, her fundamental propriety, and even her shyness was not yet won. Five years ago, even a year ago, he would never have importuned a decent woman like this, but he’d learned that life could upend the best plans, and opportunities to discreetly, respectfully share pleasure were fleeting and few.
Which point would not be made with lectures and homilies.
He kissed Guinevere’s cheek, a warning shot, another chance for her to step back, hustle away to the nursery, or find some damned correspondence she needed to tend to. She leaned into him, and he resisted the urge to lay her down on the nearby sofa.
“I’d very much like you to kiss me, Guinevere.”
My, how articulate he sounded. His voice did not betray the riot going on behind his falls or the way his heart thumped hard against his ribs.
“I thought the fellow did the kissing.”
Argument, of course. He was coming to relish it from her. “When the fellow has handed the lady the reins, she decides the pace and direction taken on the outing.”
Guinevere did not have to go up on her toes to kiss him, but she had to look up. Her green eyes were wary, which was wise of her, given the tenuousness of Douglas’s control. Watching him, she brushed her lips to his cheek.
Douglas closed his eyes and waited, waited for that soft, delicate press of her mouth to wander to his lips, waited for the clamoring of his cock to subside enough that he could wallow in the pleasure of Guinevere kissing him.
The impact came gently, hesitantly, devastatingly, then came again, and Douglas could not prevent himself from gathering her closer. “Again, please. Kiss me again.”
Please kiss me forever.
Guinevere did not kiss like a woman starved for the familiar pleasure of carnal attention. She kissed like a woman who had no experience with the way two mouths might pleasure and torment each other. She kissed hesitantly, as if… she feared getting it wrong.
Tenderness crested up and over Douglas’s arousal, and chagrin with it, because he’d taken the situation amiss. Guinevere did not want a man who’d permit her to manage their intimate dealings, but rather, she sought a man to whom she could entrust the considerable remainder of her innocence.
“Take your time, sweetheart,” Douglas whispered. “Take all the time you need.”
Gradually, the kiss became a mutual endeavor, though easing it onto that footing took eternities of patience from Douglas, and very likely wagonloads of courage from Guinevere. When Douglas was nigh to spending in his breeches, she traced her tongue over his lips then paused, as if analyzing his taste.
“Do that again, love. I like it. I like it a lot.”
She fused her mouth to his on a quiet moan, and such kissing ensued as Douglas had never thought to experience in the mortal realm. Guinevere shy but determined was a force of nature; Guinevere giving vent to her curiosity was equal parts trial and triumph. Douglas cupped her derriere for dear life, and she—lovely woman—pressed herself tightly into his embrace.
Until she broke away, panting, and took a step back. She bumped the mantel, her expression dazed as she angled away half a pace. “I must think.”
The wrong words, the absolute wrong words. “I cannot think.”
She looked surprised at his admission, then pleased. “You are overwrought?”
“Give me your hand.”
The surprise turned a bit wary. “Why?”
“I adore your independent nature, Guinevere, but please give me your hand.”
She stretched out a hand, and Douglas made a note to list for her all the things he adored about her, for there was a list—a growing list. He brought her palm to his falls, behind which something else had grown considerably too.
“I will not importune you for favors you are unwilling to grant, I will stop when you ask it of me, and I will not cause you pain.” He said these words with their joined hands pressed over his arousal.
Guinevere withdrew her hand slowly. “The Romans swore oaths like this—hand over the testes, or so I once read. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it.” Her tone said she wasn’t sure whether to believe him. “One becomes… overwrought.”
Her mind was a wonderful place; her hand over his erect cock was wonderful too. “I am not overwrought, my lady, I am aroused.” He did not descend into cliché, but the term “on fire” came to mind. “I desire you intensely, and hope I can provoke a reciprocal interest on your part.” Hoped it desperately.
She moved away from the fire, back toward the bookshelves. “So this is to be a mutual consignment, your passion traded for my own?”
“Passion, companionship, affection, all that those imply.”
A gong sounded from the direction of the kitchen. Gwen stopped examining the spines of a lot of useless old books, while Douglas wondered if he had time for further exhibitions of his passions before lunch.
“I must see to Rose. She’s to join us at table.”
Douglas held his ground as Gwen made for the door. Her skirts brushed his breeches, so closely did she come to him, and yet, he did not importune her for favors she was reluctant to give.
Reluctant being worlds and universes away from unwilling.
***
“What do you mean, she isn’t coming?” Guinevere looked more than a li
ttle disconcerted, and when she put the question to Douglas, her tone was abrupt.
“Lady Heathgate has come down with a bout of influenza,” Douglas replied, handing Guinevere the letter. “She says it’s making the rounds in Town, and travel would be unwise until the epidemic has run its course.”
Guinevere paced the library, the same room where yesterday afternoon they’d begun the pleasurable business of becoming lovers. Since then, the lady had avoided him. She’d absorbed herself with attending Rose at lunch, taken a tray in the nursery at supper and breakfast, and hidden in her room until Douglas had found her this morning in the library.
“Her ladyship’s absence upsets you.”
“Of course it upsets me,” Guinevere countered, whirling on him. “Is my reputation not deserving of protection?”
Ah, treacherous waters indeed. “Your reputation is apparently less fragile than Lady Heathgate’s health, at least in her opinion.”
“But, Douglas…”
He leaned his hips against the front of the desk and crossed his arms over his chest. “Yes, Guinevere?”
“Don’t call me that.”
He made a mental note, probably irrelevant given her present mood: no post-coital naps for him, should he and Miss Hollister become lovers. The lady was inclined toward intense self-doubt when left to her own devices. “Do I take it you have had second thoughts about the suggestion I made to you yesterday?”
“You made a proposition, not a suggestion.”
He didn’t dignify that with a reply, but as she prowled around the library, Guinevere did not look… well rested. Her bun was a bit untidy, her cheeks were flushed, and lines of fatigue bracketed her mouth.
“I will not quibble with you over vocabulary, Guinevere. If you are not interested, you have only to say so. If you are troubled by something specific, I am available for discussion.” And at the conclusion of said discussion, he would chop half a cord of wood, dig a mile-long irrigation ditch in the cold, hard ground, and use a dull saw to prune every tree in the orchard.
She paused, facing him several paces away. “You,” she said peevishly. “You have me agitated, as you are well aware.”
“So I can divine the thoughts of others now?” He knew better than to take that tone with any woman, much less a woman he was attempting—more or less—to seduce. Even so, disappointment made him willing to give her the rousing donnybrook she was spoiling for.
“Douglas,” she said, her tone moderating to include a bit of dismay, “I can’t… how can I face you? How can you face me, knowing that I’ve touched… that you’ve… I can’t do this.”
Her shoulders slumped, and she mimicked his body language, crossing her arms.
“I have not the disposition,” she said softly, “for intimate, frivolous pleasures. To indicate to you otherwise was misleading of me, and I apologize.”
That pronouncement seemed to settle her down a bit, but when Douglas took two steps to close the distance between them, her eyes filled with anxiety. “What are you doing?”
“Winning an argument,” Douglas replied, dipping his head and grazing his lips along the line of her jaw.
“Douglas,” she began sternly, “didn’t you hear what I just said? I’ve misled you, I’m not suited to this, and…”
She nattered on a bit more, while he settled his lips at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. She tasted lovely—clean, flowery, and feminine, an intriguing contrast to her starchy tone. He rested his hands on her hips, steadying her—and himself. His thumbs rubbed along the crests of her pelvic bones—did a man ever feel anything more sublime under his hands than the cradle of a woman’s pelvis?—and she fell silent on a sigh.
He paused, drawing back enough to take her hands and place them around his waist before resuming his kissing. While his mouth stole closer to her lips, he slid his hands around to cup her derriere, gratified when she angled her neck to offer herself blatantly to his questing lips.
She was tall, but she still had to draw herself up to kiss him. When Douglas finally allowed his mouth to touch hers, Guinevere’s hands were linked behind his neck, her fingers loosening the ribbon that held his hair in its queue.
He was patient with her—patience being the only possible course with Guinevere—waiting for her to gather her courage and kiss him back, waiting for her to sift her fingers through his hair, waiting for her to sigh her pleasure into his mouth.
When he lifted his mouth from hers, Douglas kept his arms around her and drew her against him.
“That was not fair, Douglas.”
“But you would agree kissing is an intimate, frivolous pleasure, and your disposition is adequately suited to it?” To kissing him, in any case.
“You make my point for me,” she said as she slipped from his arms. “My body may be more than adequately suited to the pleasures of your kiss, but the rest of me…”
Profound annoyance did not make a comfortable companion to arousal. “You will not permit me to offer you an honorable suit, but you will be insulted by anything less, is that it?”
Her gaze flew to his, consternation in her expression. “No! I am not insulted, Douglas, though I suppose I should be. Maybe I am beyond insult, or I do not regard these attentions as an insult from you. I am not insulted, I am overwhelmed, I suppose… Oh, I can’t seem to make myself understood.”
She was pacing again, her arms crossed over her waist, her posture hunched as if a cold wind off the Channel had found its way into the cozy library.
“Try to make yourself understood, Guinevere. Try harder.”
Douglas’s voice was steady enough, while his emotions were in riot. He wanted to throttle her, to ravish her, to wash his hands of her and this whole misbegotten queer start. He’d allowed himself to think something pleasing and fine could be shared between them, just for a little time, to be enjoyed and savored and treasured in memory. His spirits had lifted at the prospect of winning Guinevere’s trust, sharing with her the joys and pleasures of sexual congress, and having her in his life where no other woman had been.
Fool that he was, he’d succumbed to the lure of hope.
She came to rest at the sideboard like a drifting rowboat might bump against a jetty at low tide. “I have lost my nerve. I don’t know how to regain it.”
Her voice, her posture, her green eyes conveyed not only hesitance but also… bewilderment, as if it wasn’t simply her nerve she’d lost but something more profound and precious, something she could not fully grasp herself.
Insight hit him like a blow in the region of his heart: she had lost her nerve, not merely for a discreet dalliance in the wilds of Sussex, but as a woman. That greater loss was old, probably rooted back in her childhood, when her distracted father hadn’t even acknowledged her existence much of the time. An elderly grandfather had simply leaned on her willing shoulder and made her into the son he’d lost, and then Rose’s father—with pain, and shame, and abandonment—had finished the job.
Even now, by leaving Guinevere to manage Enfield, her cousins were complicit in a scheme that was well intended, but that disregarded a woman’s right to her family’s protection.
Every vestige of Douglas’s pique vanished in the face of emotions both protective and oddly sweet. He put his question gently, prepared for any answer she might give. “Guinevere, do you want to regain your nerve?”
Her chin came up. “Yes.”
Some distant, disgraced relative of chivalry hurt for her, that she’d been left to rebuild her feminine confidence in near isolation, when a discreet affaire, a shared tendresse, even a bit of gentle flirtation might have spared her much self-doubt.
“Some journeys cannot be undertaken alone.”
“Douglas…” She stood halfway across the room, solitary and torn, and he did not approach her because she had to know the decision was hers. He might not like her choice, but he would
neither question it nor fume nor pout nor brood—very much.
He wouldn’t make it easy for her, though. She would have to come to him and put her trust in him for the duration. That he could be firm on this point even after a long sexual drought was a fig leaf for his dignity.
“I need time,” she said. “With every change, there is loss and gain. I have to know what I’m losing and gaining.”
She’d had too much time. “One can’t always know those things, my dear. Every decision has unintended consequences, and you must resign yourself to living with those consequences.”
That wasn’t what the lady had wanted to hear—she’d been parenting an unintended consequence for at least five years—and yet, Douglas wasn’t finished. “I would beg you to recall, Guinevere, should you decide you want no further personal dealings with me, that choice will bear consequences as well.”
That, he saw, gave Miss Hollister pause. Douglas was not threatening her with gossip or a fit of the male sulks. He was pointing out that she probably wouldn’t have another opportunity like this—and neither would he.
Out from under the watchful eyes of the community.
Away from the protective—and meddling—presence of family.
Free from the usual duties and obligations at home.
The silence lengthened while common sense, curiosity, and a rebellious determination waged war in Guinevere’s eyes. The battle raging silently inside her tore at Douglas too, though, until he felt like the emotional equivalent of a plundering Visigoth.
“Guinevere, I would not distress you with this needlessly.”
She held up a hand and took a step toward him. While his lungs seized and something like a lump formed in his throat, she took another step, then another. When she stood immediately before him, he continued to wait in silence, though his heart thumped so hard against his ribs, she should have heard it.
Guinevere lifted his right hand with both of hers, then laid her cheek against his palm, closing her eyes. He took the gesture as a silent form of surrender and a… a welcome.
Warmth, sweet and soft, bloomed in his chest. Affection for Guinevere Hollister blossomed along with the warmth, and for the first time in years, Douglas felt himself regarding the immediate future with a sense of gratitude. She’d accepted his offer—accepted him. She would become his lover, and he would become hers. For a few weeks, they would cherish a time together of pleasure, respect, and sharing.
Douglas: Lord of Heartache (The Lonely Lords) Page 9