A Gentleman Undone

by Cecilia Grant

  Obstinate anger poured off her to fill up that space. She loosed her grip on his coat and laid her palms flat on his chest. For a moment she stood just so, defiance pulsing in her touch. Then her palms dragged down his front as she sank right out of his grasp in a whisper of skirts. “Speak all you like,” she said from where she knelt. “I shall be unable.”

  Bloody hell. “This isn’t what I intended.” But his treacherous hand had already found its way to the first button of his breeches. “This isn’t what I want from you.” Liar. He was fumbling from one button to the next as he spoke, and his hand was nearly shaking with how badly he wanted it.

  He hadn’t had her since that last morning at Chiswell. Nearly three days, now. And he’d never yet known the secrets of her mouth. She can suck a man into next week.

  Confound him, was he no better than that coarse bastard who’d kept her? No. He was better. He could still stop this. “For God’s sake, this is madness. Someone could pass this way.” His fingers met hers: she’d been unbuttoning from the other side of his frontfall, which now dropped away. She wore no gloves. She’d shed them, no doubt, in expectancy of his capitulation.

  “Don’t worry.” Her voice carried that easy assurance that came with the upper hand. “We won’t be seen. It’s dark, and I can work quickly.”

  He still held her fingers, adept and devious and naked in his grasp. He let two breaths pass in silence. “No.” His hand loosed her fingers. “Go slowly. Make it last.”

  Linen tormented him with its delicate friction as she freed him from his drawers. She tugged down his breeches and he braced his outspread hands against the wall at his back. He could discern her shape in the darkness now, and he watched with unholy greed as she leaned close and took him inch by inch into the merciful heaven of her mouth.

  And now nothing in the world mattered—not his sins, not his promises, not the things he’d meant to tell her or the duel he must fight in a few days; not anything but her lips and her tongue and the expert way they coaxed him into madness. Or perhaps her hand mattered too, as it came up to cradle his balls and send jagged bolts of pleasure to the middle of his brain.

  “Not too fast. Not too much.” You’ll make me lose my mind. His body clamored to thrust but he was not quite so lost, so bereft of decency as to use her that hard. He fought the urge and moved his hips instead in slow circles, grateful for the darkness that prevented his being seen like this, given up to sinuous gyrations like some Amazon queen’s slave-dancer. She stayed with him as he moved. Her free hand settled behind him, fitting itself to his bunched muscles while one careful finger teased just at the edges of where he was cleft.

  Could a person die of pleasure? His heart felt as though it might batter itself to extinction on his own ribs. What an ignominious end that would be, and what an embarrassment for his family. Home safe from Waterloo only to be discovered on an out-of-the-way gaming-hell floor, his breeches down to his knees and a grimace of agony etched into his face. She’d better have the good sense to leave him where he lay if it happened.

  He brought one hand off the wall to set it at the back of her head, to caress her in meager recompense for the tempest of sensation she’d set going. Devil take it. He was her slave. And better than any Amazon queen, she was mistress of all his flesh. Her hands steadied him, and her tongue drove him, and her finger no longer teased but tortured, boldly stroking where it had no business to be.

  She would turn him inside out. She would annihilate him and he didn’t care. “Harder,” he muttered as her tongue slowed and he felt the soft pull of her mouth. “Suck me harder.”

  Her favorite word. And she took the command as readily as she gave it. He clawed at the wallpaper, his head tipped back, his teeth bared in a feral grimace. He’d spill in another minute. He ought to warn her. She wouldn’t want—

  Oh, but ruthless torrents of pleasure rocked him and he couldn’t find the words. It was her own fault, with her hand tightening on his balls and her mouth taking him in so deep and her finger doing unspeakable things. Her other fingers splayed themselves on his arse and she pushed, gently. Then again. Inviting him to thrust.

  He didn’t need telling a third time. He set his hands by either ear to hold her steady, to keep her just where she was, and he gave it to her in small pulses. Not too hard. Not rough. Just enough to bring the relief of that primal motion she’d known his body so desperately craved, and all the while the words he ought to say, the warning that would spare her, slipped further and further beyond his grasp.

  No words. Hands. He fumbled to push her away as climax came thundering toward him. She didn’t move. “Lydia!” he gasped, and she only held her ground and pleasured him harder, harder, until he shuddered and staggered and finally sank down into the sweet, sweet shame of flooding a woman’s mouth with his seed.

  She sank with him: when he came to his senses he was sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, and she crouched beside him, just lifting her head.

  “I’m sorry.” Shame washed over him, not an ounce of sweetness to it now. He’d meant to speak to her; to discover what had gone wrong and to repair their understanding, and he’d pitched all good intentions aside at the chance to get his cock in her mouth. Then he’d befouled her into the bargain. “I tried to spare you—”

  “I know. You tried to be a gentleman to the last.” She wiped the heel of her hand across her lips. “You forget I haven’t any use for a gentleman.” Her hand fell on his thigh, still bared above his tugged-down breeches. “Take me to your rooms. Let’s cash in our counters and go.”

  She was a stranger again, all appetite and command, no interest in addressing the rift that had opened up between them. And Lord help him, he didn’t care, so long as she wanted to fuck him.

  “Yes,” he said, and covered her hand with his. “Let’s go.”

  SHE COULD not repent. Days from now she might look back on this night as a dreadful mistake, as one more source of pain when that river had quite enough tributaries as it was. Never mind. This was what should be, a whore and the man she’d collared walking wordless through the midnight streets of St. James’s.

  Once, he stopped to press her up against a lamppost and kiss her, with a hunger he made no effort to conceal. A multitude of convenient shadows and he chose the place where they would be most visible to anyone who happened to look. If he’d bid her lift her skirts then and there she would have done it. That was her mood.

  They gained his rooms and he undressed her, deft and silent, pausing only to transfer his roll of banknotes from his pocket to a drawer. Not one stitch of his own clothing did he remove, not even his boots. He put her on her knees before the pier-glass in his bedroom and he knelt behind her, his dark infernal eyes watching over her shoulder as his gloved hands wandered with utter liberty over her naked form. Shoulders. Elbows. The curve of her hips. One hand cupping her breast; one fingertip stroking across her belly and catching in her navel. Again he made her think of a sculptor, studying all her dimensions and committing them to memory for future use.

  “Mine.” It was the first word he’d said since they’d left Oldfield’s. He dipped his head and whispered it with a breath that tickled her ear. His hands slipped down to her thighs. “All of this is mine.”

  “For tonight, yes.” That much was true. If she could be nothing else to him, she could certainly be all the wanton he desired for one night.

  “That’s not enough.” His eyes found hers in the mirror. His fingertips trailed through the curls at the juncture of her thighs. “Tell me you’re mine entirely.”

  Yearning scalded the back of her throat, but the answer he wanted wouldn’t come. She hadn’t enough imagination to push aside a future that might see him perish, or see him prevail in the duel and bind himself to Mrs. Talbot. Whether he loved her, whether her heart answered him, was nothing to the purpose. They could not belong to one another.

  “I can make you tell me.” Undaunted by her silence, he took hold of his right glove and tugged it loos
e.

  Not one spark of protest rose within her. “Do your worst,” she said, and it was not defiance but invitation.

  His glove hit the floor and his hand went straight to work. Both his hands. The left one, still gloved, slid up to tend to her nipples while the right, bared and deliciously warm, slipped between her thighs.

  She closed her eyes and forced them open again. She would store up this sight. She would watch the way his hands pinned her, possessed her; she would watch the perspiration on her body catch the candlelight when pleasure made her flinch, and she would watch the look in his eyes as he watched her.

  “Show me you like it, Lydia.” He could persuade her to throw herself into a blazing hearth when he used that voice. “Show me how good it feels.”

  A half-formed joke shimmered in the remoteness of her rational mind, something about him finally having his erotic spectacle, but to complete the thought, let alone voice it aloud, was more than she could manage. She writhed, all abandoned, and that was the answer he wanted anyway. In the mirror they looked like a tableau from some ancient myth, a nymph escaping a demigod’s rude grasp by turning into smoke, or a dancing fountain, or moonlight on uncalm waters.

  But the demigod in this myth possessed her all the same. He was tireless, and staunch, and he would follow her through every metamorphosis with his unswerving will and his divinely clever hands. “Have I enslaved you, Lydia?” he said by her ear, and his fingers quickened to coax out the response he desired.

  “Yes.” That was the beginning of surrender.

  “So have you done to me. Do you want me?”

  “Yes.” A great shudder seized her.

  “And so do I want you. Are you mine, now?” Urgency burned bright in his eyes.

  One word: yes. One scant syllable, but it might as well have been an operatic aria with multiple occurrences of high C, so absolutely was it beyond her power to voice.

  Instead she gave him inarticulate cries, eager and savage, and she thrashed in his hands so he could know how he pleased her. Crisis was within sight, then within reach, then it was upon her, blinding her to the picture she made with him, shutting out whatever thing he was murmuring, robbing her of every sense and setting her ablaze like a pagan pyre.

  When the flames died down she was limp, his arms across her chest and waist to keep her from collapsing. She opened her eyes and he’d been just waiting for that: he shifted his hold on her, arms behind her knees and shoulders, and lifted her up and carried her to the bed. Then he shucked his clothes, finally, and climbed in beside her.

  “You’re a wicked man, Will Blackshear.” She could almost blush, remembering the look in his eyes as he’d watched himself drive her all out of her mind. “You try to act the gentleman, but you’ve got sin in your blood and your bones.”

  He ought to reach for her now, roll onto her or pull her on top of him. She’d seen when he’d stripped that he was ready.

  But he only smiled, a thin smile that went away as quickly as it came. His eyes grew grave and looked past her.

  She’d said the wrong thing. Wicked. He had reason to believe he was worse than that, and she’d reminded him. And suddenly she felt able, as she had not that afternoon, to hear what he had to say.

  She turned on her side. Her right hand reached out to take hold of his arm. “You can tell me now.” She waited until his eyes went dark with comprehension. “Tell me, Will. I want to know.”

  FOR AN instant his every muscle tensed with the urge to flee. At least he ought to put out the candles. If her face paled in horror as he spoke, that might be more than he could bear to watch.

  But of course her face wouldn’t do that. She never did wear her sentiments there. She lay on her side watching him with that unreadable falcon stare. Was that better than horror, or worse?

  He filled his lungs. “It has to do with Talbot, the widow’s husband. I expect you’ve guessed that.”

  She nodded. Her fingers flexed delicately on his arm.

  He was going to tell her. God help him, though his love for her could meet with no answer, though they could not look forward to a future of relying upon one another, bearing one another’s burdens, being one another’s shelter from the world’s cold winds, he was going to tell her everything.

  “He might have died in any case, Mr. Talbot.” So had the doctor said. There was no reason to doubt it. He fixed his gaze on the ceiling, where a crack in the plaster had worked itself from one corner of the room to the center.

  “You blame yourself, though.” No warmth, no condemnation. She was simply stating a fact.

  “I oughtn’t to have moved him.” He could feel some great sagging surrender at his core as every memory flooded in. Sights and sounds and scents and crushing desperation. “He’d been caught in a charge of cavalry and had damage to his spine, and …” He sucked in another breath, forcefully this time, as though he’d come up from three minutes underwater. “And he hadn’t died. He lay in the mud among corpses, in horrific pain, for hours before I found him, and more hours after.”

  He threw her a look. Still the blank stare. One could believe she heard such stories every time she took a man to bed.

  “And it was night. I was exhausted, and I couldn’t persuade any of the medical staff to carry him to the hospital. I ran out of hope that anyone would stop to help him, so finally I carried him myself, and … I made things worse with his spine. By the time the surgeon saw him he couldn’t move his limbs.”

  Here was where she might have attempted absolution: Surely anyone in your situation would have done the same. Surely all hope for him was already lost. But no sound came from the presence at his right side but her steady breathing.

  And God help him again, only now could he see just how badly he’d hoped she would bathe him in sympathy and tell him, with the full force of her deliberating mind, that for him to blame himself was irrational.

  But it wasn’t. That truth thudded deep inside him like an underwater bell. She couldn’t pardon him any more than he could pardon himself.

  “Go on,” she said, because her sharp falcon eyes read him and she knew there was more.

  He took one more breath, to dive down again. “I carried him to three different field hospitals because I thought … I was so tired, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I hoped another surgeon might give me a different answer. I didn’t want to give up.”

  “Because you knew he had a wife and child.”

  “Yes.”

  “And because you hoped to undo the wrong you’d done in moving him.”

  “Yes.” His voice came out raw and ragged, exactly as it had been that night. Memory had its claws in him and was dragging him back there; he could taste the sour torment of too many hours without water. “Most of all, though, because I’d promised him he’d be all right, and he trusted my word.”

  “How did it end?” Calm and direct as a corporal interrogating a prisoner.

  “I couldn’t do him any good.” That awful, awful sense of uselessness, helplessness, dropped back in to wrap him like a shroud. “I couldn’t even get him opium. I only dragged him about, prolonging his agony for hours. He ended by begging for a bullet to the head.”

  A short silence as she absorbed this. “Did you oblige him?”

  “We didn’t carry rifles, in our regiment. I should have had to use a musket, and I …” I was fastidious in how I murdered the man. “I used my hands.”

  Another silence, this one long enough that he must finally turn his head to look at her. The only mark in her countenance was a thoughtful crease in her brow. “Will you show me how?”

  Good God. The darkest deed of his life and her first concern was with the mechanics. She needed to fill in the outline his story made, or perhaps she meant to make use of the knowledge someday.

  No matter. He’d chosen to confess himself to her, when he might have waited until he’d met a lady with a warm, sentimental nature. Patience and a hopeful disposition. All those qualities he couldn’t seem to want anymo
re.

  He found her hands and brought them to his throat, feeling for the right place to set her thumb. “There’s a vein.” She frowned, faintly, watching the placement of her hands. “If you press on it you can stop the flow of blood. Then everything ends.”

  Her eyes, empty and glittering, came again to his face. Her hands stayed where they were. For an instant it seemed possible she might—and would he resist her, if she did? Might he make that final surrender, and let her relieve him of all his burdens for the rest of time?

  But she didn’t. She took her hands back, and this time neither one settled on his arm. Both lay curled on the pillow under her chin. She didn’t speak.

  He oughtn’t to have told her. Or he ought to have told her long ago. Before he’d touched her, pleasured her, fitted his body to hers.

  “I wish you would speak, Lydia.” If there was a way to say that without sounding pathetic, he didn’t know it. He felt hollow, unmoored, lying beside her without the least idea of her thoughts. “I never could read you. I don’t know … I’ve no idea what you want, now. Whether you want me to …” Help you dress and hire a hackney to take you home. Apologize for having lain with you. Shut my mouth and just go to sleep.

  Two silent seconds passed. Then she rose up and threw one knee over him. Her palms sank into the mattress at either side of his shoulders and her eyes stayed fast on his. “Fuck me,” she said. “I want you to fuck me.”

  He recoiled to his core. To do this now, to follow so grim and solemn a confession with carnal enjoyment, would profane his last remnants of honor. “I can’t.” Could she really not grasp that? “Not after what I’ve just told you.”