His mouth left hers to trail tiny, nibbling kisses along the line of her jaw. Gabby’s eyes fluttered open then, as she realized with the small part of her brain still capable of rational functioning that the bargain had been well and fully met. But she no longer cared about the bargain, she found, and it seemed to be the furthest thing from his mind, too, as he pressed more kisses down the side of her neck. His mouth was hot and wet against her skin, and his hand on her breast was warm and hard. . . .
The bargain was forgotten entirely as he tugged the front of her nightclothes down to expose a breast. Her eyes stayed open long enough to watch with a kind of shocked anticipation as he bared the curving white flesh with its taut pink crest. No man had ever viewed her nakedness before—but she suddenly, fiercely, wanted him to look at her, wanted him to touch her. He lifted his head then, gazing down at her breast, and gently cupped a hand beneath it almost as if he would test its weight.
Gabby’s lips parted. His hand was big and dark against her tender flesh. It felt warm, and faintly rough, and . . .
His head dipped. Her eyes widened in shock as she realized that he was going to kiss her bare breast. She felt the gentle touch of his lips as he nuzzled her, and the abrasion of his unshaven jaw against her skin, seconds before he sucked on her nipple, drawing it into the scalding hot interior of his mouth.
Gabby’s senses exploded. It was the most erotic thing she had ever seen, or felt. Unable to help herself, she gave a little choked cry as his tongue found her nipple, and her nails dug deep into his shoulders as she watched him suckle at her breast like a babe. What he was doing was indecent, she knew, and lewd beyond description, and yet it sent her body up in flames.
She had never dreamed that a man would do such a thing to her, or even want to. It felt wonderful, exquisite—obscene.
She didn’t even know his name.
The thought came to her from somewhere, from, she imagined, that still functioning part of her brain that was now concerned with her self-preservation, and it shocked her back to reality.
He was an experienced seducer, making lascivious use of her body. In permitting it, she was no better than a wanton, as roundheeled a female as had ever warmed her father’s bed.
“No!” she said, the protest sounding weak to her own ears. She began to struggle, pushing his head away from her breast, fighting to get free. She did not credit herself that she achieved her own liberation. As she tried to cover her breast with her hand, attempting to wedge it between his mouth and her flesh, he lifted his head and looked at her. His eyes glittered and his cheeks were flushed in a way that made her fear for the outcome.
“No!” she said again, with more urgency. Their gazes held.
His jaw clenched, his eyes narrowed—and he let her go.
Gabby immediately stumbled to her feet, pulling her nightclothes back into place with shaky hands.
He remained seated, hands curled loosely over the ends of the chair arms, head resting against the back of the chair, looking up at her with an expression that she found impossible to decipher. Meeting his gaze, she was all too terribly conscious of the enormity of what she had done. She had let this man, this stranger, hold her on his lap and kiss her and bare and caress and kiss her breast. She could not even defend herself by claiming, this time, that he had compelled her—he had not. She would not even have consented to a kiss if she hadn’t, somewhere deep inside, wanted to kiss him. Not even for Claire.
Her clothing was askew, and her hair, having escaped its pins unnoticed sometime in the last few heated minutes, fell in tumbled profusion over her shoulders. How must she look to him? Gabby wondered, agonized. She flushed painfully as she realized that she must now appear in his eyes as a woman of easy morals, a light-skirt, a bawd.
Which, in some measure, with him, she supposed she was.
But she would not think of that, not now. The final humiliation would be to permit him to see the true depths of her shame.
Accordingly, she took a deep breath, and lifted her chin a notch.
“I think you will agree that the bargain has been met,” she said, proud of the coolness of her tone.
Then, turning her back on him, she walked with great dignity through the adjoining door, closed and locked it behind her, then all but fled back to the cold solitude of her bed.
25
As Lady Salcombe had predicted, on the following day they were beseiged with callers, some of whom had seen them at the opera and some of whom had merely heard that they were there. Several assorted relations were among them, including one of Gabby’s Hendred cousins and several assorted Dysart connections of Claire’s. Among the last of the relatives to arrive was Cousin Thomas’s wife Lady Maud Banning, with her two daughters, Desdemona and Thisby. Thisby had been successfully puffed off the year before, and was the Honorable Mrs. Charles Fawley now. As Stivers announced the newcomers, Gabby, who along with Claire was in the drawing room chatting with earlier-arriving guests, stood to greet them.
“Lady Maud Banning, the Honorable Mrs. Fawley, and Miss Banning.”
Despite the chilliness that had long existed between the families, Gabby accepted air kisses from Lady Maud and her daughters with a smile, and offered to make them known to the other guests, who, it turned out, they already knew. After a few moments of general conversation, the earlier company took their departure, and those who remained sorted themselves out into two groups: Gabby and Lady Maud, in chairs before the long windows that looked out on the square, and Claire, Desdemona, and Thisby grouped on the sofa near the hearth.
Glancing over at the trio of girls, Gabby could not prevent a purely ignoble spurt of pride. Lady Maud was herself a wispy blonde who had once been accounted something of a beauty. Her daughters were both blondes as well, one of wheaten hue and the other flax, and gifted too with their mother’s slim figure. Unfortunately, though, in the girls’ countenances Cousin Thomas’s characteristics came to the fore: their blue eyes were rather bulbous, and their chins receded to a regrettable degree. Desdemona, who was flaxen, had a round face and, in addition, displayed a most deplorable tendency to freckle, while Thisby’s face was so long that she very nearly resembled a horse. In any company, Claire was unequaled. But with her blonde cousins on either side of her, her dark beauty shone like a beacon on a stormy night.
“Well, I must say I never thought to see you looking so well,” Lady Maud said in her discontented way, her gaze traveling critically over Gabby’s simple but fashionable gown of azure blue crepe. As the hairdresser engaged by Aunt Augusta had arrived earlier that day, Gabby also felt reasonably confident that her heretofore unmanageable locks—which had been trimmed and styled so that a few cunning tendrils escaped from the topknot that he had deemed most suitable for her face shape—provided her cousin’s wife with no fatal flaw on which to batten.
“Thank you,” Gabby replied composedly, although the tone in which Lady Maud spoke them made the words seem even less like a compliment than they did on their face. As she sought for a safe topic of conversation with one who had never made any secret of her dislike for the late earl’s daughters, her gaze strayed again to the girls on the sofa. “I understand from Cousin Thomas that you have been away visiting Thisby’s new parents-in-law?”
“Oh, yes, the dearest people! Charles—her husband—has eight thousand pounds a year, you know, so it was a very suitable match despite the absence of a title. I fancy I may look a little higher for dear Mona, though.”
The complacent glance she cast toward her younger daughter darkened as it rested, as Gabby saw, on Claire.
“Thisby is to be felicitated, certainly,” Gabby said. “And I am sure I shall shortly be offering you felicitations on Desdemona’s behalf, as well.”
“Yes, indeed. Your sister is quite lovely, isn’t she? If it were not for her dark looks—so unfashionable at the moment, unfortunately—and the fact that her parentage on her distaff side is perhaps not quite top drawer, I am sure she would quite take the ton by storm.
”
“I am still in hopes that she might,” Gabby replied lightly, having no trouble recognizing jealousy when it stared her in the face, and most nobly, in her opinon, forbearing to reply to veiled insults in kind. “By the by, Desdemona is certainly in looks today.”
That last remark was not, she reflected, entirely insincere. Mona did look better than she had the last time Gabby had set eyes on her. Perhaps, she thought with just the tiniest, most regrettable spark of inner malice, Lady Maud had been applying bleaching lotion to her daughter’s freckles as Twindle had, in the spirit of defending her charges, once recommended that she should.
Lady Maud looked complacent.
“Well, you know, I think she is, too.” Her gaze traveled to the trio of girls again. “I like to see my girls in pale colors and modest designs, especially when they are newly out.”
Though said with Lady Maud’s trademark dieaway smile, this was clearly another stab at Claire, whose slim, high-waisted dress of lemon muslin was as bright and airy as sunshine next to her cousins’ softer pastels. Its tiny puffed sleeves and scooped neckline did indeed reveal a considerable amount of Claire’s creamy skin. But certainly no more than was proper—and no more than either Desdemona or Thisby was showing, to rather less salubrious effect.
Gabby made some determinedly agreeable remark, and she and Lady Maud conversed for a few minutes on neutral topics. Then Lady Maud, with a conspiratorial smile, lowered her voice.
“I should congratulate you on the most fortunate change in your circumstances since we last met, I suppose. What a wonderful thing it is that Wickham should have allowed you to come to London, and bring out Claire. I gather he has not quite recovered from his mishap? We were shocked—shocked—to hear that he’d accidentally shot himself. As someone very nearly concerned—Thomas is Wickham’s heir, after all—I would advise him not to be so clumsy.” She laughed gently at what she plainly considered to be a witticism. “He is recovering, I presume?”
“Yes, indeed.” Gabby refused to allow her thoughts to dwell on how very far along the road to recovery Wickham was. In fact, she refused to allow her thoughts to dwell on Wickham at all. “He is much better, thank you.”
“You must be most thankful that the dear boy did not take after Cousin Matthew—and I would not say this to anyone but you, my dear, I assure you—in his nip-farthing ways. Indeed, quite the contrary, if what I hear is true! I understand that Wickham is to give a ball for Claire, with Augusta Salcombe to act as his hostess?”
“That’s correct,” Gabby answered with a smile, perceiving behind the faintly incredulous note in Lady Maud’s voice the envy of one who was widely known to be quite as big a nip-farthing—as she had put it—as the late earl. In that speech Gabby also divined the real purpose behind the unlooked-for visit, which was to be sure that Lady Maud and her daughters were invited to the ball. “And a very grand one it is to be, too, if Aunt Augusta has her way, as she certainly will. You may be sure of receiving cards for it, by the by.”
“Of course I never doubted that cards would be sent to us. Are we not family?” Lady Maud asked with a sniff. “Very peculiar it would look if we were not invited to our own cousin’s ball, indeed.” She gave a trilling little laugh, then glanced over at the girls again, and raised her voice. “Well, we have other calls to make. Thisby, Mona, kiss your cousins and let us go!”
When they were gone, Claire rolled her eyes at Gabby.
“Kiss your cousins, indeed,” she said, mimicking Lady Maud’s sugary syllables in a way that made Gabby laugh. “They treated us like lepers when we were living at Hawthorne Hall, if you recall. Do you imagine she thinks we’ve forgotten?”
Still smiling, Gabby shook her head. “She seemed most eager to be friends, did she not? Well, it will do none of us any good to be seen to be at outs with them. As unpleasant as they have been in the past, they are our cousins, after all. It costs nothing to smile, and be polite.”
“I shall have to bite my tongue every time they come near,” Claire said with a grimace, then took herself off upstairs to join the gaggle of very young ladies who were at that moment enjoying a lively coze with Beth in the old nursery.
If truth were told, Gabby mused with a smile, Claire probably would have been far happier playing games and chatting with the younger guests than joining the adults in the drawing room, though she would never have admitted to such a thing. Despite her eighteen years, Claire was still very young, after all.
Gabby still had to look over her wardrobe for a dress suitable to wear to that night’s entertainment: a musical evening to be held at the home of one of Aunt Augusta’s friends, to which she and Claire had been bidden that morning by a hand-delivered note. Changing her clothes up to half a dozen times a day was something she was still not accustomed to, and just thinking about it, and the night to be spent in conversation with what was sure to be mostly her aunt’s elderly friends, made her feel tired already.
Of course, it didn’t help that she’d gotten practically no sleep at all the previous night. Every time she’d closed her lids, Wickham’s face had appeared in her mind’s eye. And no matter how she had tried to repose herself, her body had remained throbbingly awake, aching for more. You have the most kissable mouth. Oh, God, so did he.
Such a thing could never be permitted to occur again, she told herself sternly. And to make sure it did not, she meant, in future, to keep out of Wickham’s way.
She remained downstairs for several minutes after Claire left, checking over the cards that had arrived over the past few days.
Thus she was still in the drawing room, standing beside the fireplace with no possibility of concealment, when the next visitor arrived on Stivers’s heels.
“The Duke of Trent to see you, Miss Gabby,” Stivers said in a sepulchre tone.
At the sound of that name, which she had thought—hoped! never to hear again, Gabby felt her stomach drop. She looked up in a panic, meaning to bid Stivers to deny her presence, only to find Trent himself walking toward her in Stivers’s wake.
The room spun, and for a ghastly moment, as she stared at the gaunt, grayish-hued face that had haunted her nightmares for years, she actually feared she might faint.
26
“Gabby,” Trent said, inclining his head as he strolled toward her. “Or, you having grown so grand, must I needs call you Lady Gabriella now?”
At a gesture from Trent, Stivers bowed himself out before Gabby could think to bid him to remain. Of course, Stivers would never have left her had he known. . . . But all he knew was that Trent had been a friend of her father’s, one of many of whom Stivers had violently disapproved. Left alone in the drawing room with one whom she had hated and feared above all others for most of her life, Gabby struggled to retain her composure.
“I prefer that you not call me anything at all, your grace,” she said in a wintry voice, grasping the tail end of her self-respect with both hands before it could quite slink away. The child in her longed to run and hide; the woman the child had become disdained to so much as blink lest she appear weak in the face of this predator. “You will forgive me if I tell you flatly that I am surprised that you have the audacity to present yourself here.”
He chuckled, coming closer. He was, she saw with the dispassionate gaze of one now safe beyond his sphere, a relatively small man, not many inches taller than she was herself, and slim of build. His hair was gray and thinning now, where it had once been shining blond, and many lines creased a face that looked as if had too rarely seen the light of day. His nose was a hawklike beak; his eyes were heavy lidded and still keen. In one hand he held the same—she was sure it was the same—silver-knobbed walking stick.
She wondered if he carried it deliberately.
“You wound me, Gabby, truly you do. Are we not the oldest of friends? I made sure of my welcome. When I saw you and Claire at the opera last night, I was quite imbued with the ambition to renew what has truly been among the most delightful of my relationships.”
“I have no wish to acknowledge you in any way. Please leave, and do not call again.”
He smiled. She remembered that smile. It was a humorless stretching of thin lips, giving his face more than ever the appearance of some ghastly death mask. He looked her over as openly, and rapaciously, as a hawk might prey.
“I make you my compliments, by the way. You’ve become quite a taking little thing, not just in the common way. And Claire—she is a rare jewel. One any collector would be proud to claim.”
Gabby couldn’t help herself. At the memories that conjured up, icy fear snaked down her spine. She took a tiny step backward. His eyes gleamed.
So riveted was she on the man in front of her that the sound of footsteps crossing the hall behind him barely penetrated her consciousness. More difficult to overlook was the tall, broadshouldered form that appeared without warning in the drawing room doorway, then checked on the threshold to survey the scene before him with a suddenly sharpened gaze.
“Wickham.” She registered his presence with blind gratitude, and held out her hand. His gaze moved swiftly from her face to that of her guest, who had turned to survey him through a languidly lifted quizzing glass, and his posture of easy negligence vanished as he came toward her.
“Introduce me,” he commanded in a clipped tone, walking past Trent as if he didn’t exist to take her hand and tuck it into the crook of his elbow. The warmth of his fingers was very welcome as they enfolded her cold ones. The firm muscles of his arm provided their own reassurance. For a moment he looked down at her, frowning. Meeting that dark blue gaze, Gabby felt relief wash over her like a tidal wave. She took a deep, steadying breath. Wickham’s mere presence gave her strength. Scoundrel, criminal, and vile seducer though he might be, he would keep her—keep all of them—safe from Trent. This she knew with absolute certainty.
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