Kitabı oku: «The Regency Bestsellers Collection», sayfa 8
Chapter Fourteen
Chase kissed her with the desperate fervor of a man going to the gallows. Grappling and moaning, pressing her into the wall at her back.
He palmed her breast—the warm, gentle swell he’d felt melting against him last night. She’d made him so damned hard then, and his cock seemed determined to outdo itself today. Her leg wrapped over his. He kissed his way down her neck—her impossibly delicate, lovely neck—until the collar of her jacket halted his progress.
He felt a twinge of conscience. Most people would think he didn’t have a conscience, but he did. It surfaced about as often as the lost island of Atlantis, but he did possess one, down deep.
And it was bellowing at him now.
Then she arched her back, pressing her breast into his hand, and made a soft, pleading moan.
Conscience? What conscience? Lock the prison bars and throw away the key.
God, this place did something to him.
The infamy of centuries swirled in the air. Imprisoned ghosts rattled their chains. He felt the echoes of suffering ages past. The weight of guilt. Crushing regret. Hunger, and yearning, and loneliness. All the same miserable emotions that held him captive, late at night.
Chase had spent years locked away inside himself. And all too often, holding a woman in his arms felt like his only escape.
But this . . . this was different. Alexandra was different. This wasn’t a moment he’d be wishing to erase from his memory later. On the contrary. He yearned to etch the shape of their entwined bodies into the stone, amid all the names and dates and Bible verses, and leave a mark that time couldn’t erase.
What was it she’d said? We all want to be remembered? Well, Chase wouldn’t be inventing a steam-powered phaeton. No monument would be raised to his heroics, and he’d vowed not to father any children of his own. But even if all that survived of him was this embrace, that would be a legacy he could reflect on with pride.
On this site in 1817, Mr. Chase Reynaud gave Miss Alexandra Mountbatten the most passionate, erotic, bone-melting kiss in recorded history.
As he kissed her deeply, he lifted her, parting her slippers from the floor and pinning her hips to the wall with his own. She stared at him, her lungs working for breath, eyes glassy. He reached between their bodies, finding the buttons of her jacket.
He began to undo them, slipping them free one by one. The task was easily done, and he knew the reason why. She had only the one jacket, and she’d worn it so many times that the buttonholes had gone slack. This tangible evidence of her poverty was convenient, he supposed. Many men of his station would view it as permission to make free with her favors. However, it didn’t strike Chase that way. As he slipped the final button loose, he felt resentful and protective.
She deserved better. A young, unmarried woman of her class lived with the specter of danger, and a threadbare jacket made for a pitiful shield. He wanted to peel the garment from her, cast it aside, and offer himself instead.
Chase wasn’t good for much, but he could stand between her body and the world.
He cupped her breast through the light muslin of her day dress. He found her nipple and rolled it beneath his thumb, teasing it to a hard peak.
“Chase.”
The pleading note in her voice made him wild. He stole inside her open jacket, shoving aside the virginal white fichu, then worked his fingers beneath the muslin of her frock. He knew the layers of a woman’s clothing as well as he knew his own. Better than his own, truthfully, since he had a valet to assist with his own attire.
He eased one of her frock’s sleeves down over her shoulder. The strategy gave him just enough space to reach beneath her stiffened stays and linen shift. With a deft, well-practiced motion, he lifted her breast, liberating it from her stays.
Her eyes fluttered closed. She bit her lip, sealing in a gasp. He would have liked to hear her moan and cry out with pleasure. But there was something about the silence that was just as erotic, if not more.
Breathless, he cradled the soft weight in his hand. Caressing, treasuring. She was so small and slightly built. Her heartbeat thrummed like a bird’s beneath his palm.
Holding her breast was like holding her heart in his hand.
And that scared the life out of him.
Guarding her body was just basic masculine impulse. But he couldn’t take responsibility for her heart.
He broke the embrace with uncharacteristic brusqueness, setting her back on her feet. A bewildered look moved over her face as he rearranged her clothing. He regretted causing her any confusion or disappointment, but this time he’d gone much too far.
More accurately, he’d drawn too close.
He cleared his throat. “Alexandra, this . . .”
“Never happened,” she finished. “I know.” Her lips curved in a smile, but her eyes weren’t in on the joke. She was hurt.
He felt small enough to disappear into a crack in the wall. Well, she couldn’t be surprised. She had no illusions about the sort of man he was. Not when it came to women, anyway. She’d had ample evidence of his rakish history from the start.
Apparently, it was Chase who needed the reminder.
Very well, then. He would go out on the town, find a sophisticated, beautiful, willing woman, bring her back to his retreat, put that new mattress to the test—and rid himself of the desire to paw at the governess like a slavering hound.
And he would do it tonight.
Chapter Fifteen
“Come have a look at Mars.”
It was a clear, dark night, and Alexandra had invited the girls to join her for a bit of stargazing, well past their bedtime. A lesson in celestial navigation, she called it. In truth, it was a bribe to get them into their baths and nightclothes, then brush and neatly plait their hair. The girls’ hair smelled clean and fresh, and as she bent over Daisy’s shoulder to help her find the red planet, she drank in the innocent scent. A tender, warm emotion spread through her chest.
In just a few weeks’ time, she’d grown to care for these girls. Deeply. By helping them, it was as though she could reach back through time to her younger, newly orphaned self and clasp that girl in a hug laced with assurance. Don’t be afraid. I know it’s hard now. So very hard. But you’re stronger than you know, and it will all come right in the end.
But as she wrapped her arm round Daisy’s shoulders and pressed her nose to the girl’s sweet-smelling crown, Alex was a little bit afraid, herself. When the girls went away to school, would anyone be there to hug and soothe them then?
“I can’t make it out,” Daisy said. “It’s all muzzy.”
“Truly? Let me see.” Alex replaced her young charge at the eyepiece. “Perhaps I need to clean the lens.”
Before she could take a proper view, however, they heard the sounds of a carriage drawing up alongside the house.
A quick peek out the window confirmed Alexandra’s suspicions. Mr. Reynaud had rolled up to the house in his phaeton—and he wasn’t alone. Light, feminine laughter floated up through the night air and swooped through the open window, uninvited. Alex wanted to swat that laughter like a pesty gnat.
“Oh, Reynaud,” the lady said coyly. “You are a devil.”
Blech.
He handed the lady down from the high-sprung carriage. As she alighted, the woman “stumbled.” Mr. Reynaud caught her in his arms.
Alex rolled her eyes at the transparent ploy.
She was so distracted watching them, she hadn’t realized she wasn’t alone in her spying. Rosamund had swung the telescope to point down toward the street. “Enemy craft sighted to starboard. And la-di-da, isn’t she a fancy one.”
“Give that here.” Alex took control of the telescope and had a look for herself. Once she’d adjusted the instrument, she could make out the lady as well as if they were standing mere inches apart. The woman had golden hair tucked in an elegant upswept style, and she wore a gown of deep purple satin with matching elbow-length gloves. Jewels sparkled at her throat.
Daisy leaned over the window ledge. “She’s rather beautiful.”
“Take care, Daisy,” Rosamund murmured. “Or else Millicent might contract the pox.”
Alex was aghast. “You shouldn’t speak of such things,” she whispered. “You shouldn’t even know of such things.”
“I’ve chased away every governess and been sent down from three schools, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t had an education.” Rosamund smiled. “And you told us yourself, ten is old enough to be a ship’s boy. They see a great deal more.”
From the street below, Alex heard a deeply male murmur of seduction. She couldn’t make out distinct words, but their intended effect was plain.
She burned with indignation. The scoundrel. How dare he parade his paramours directly beneath the noses of two innocent children. Well, perhaps one innocent child and one Rosamund.
“That’s enough.” Alex closed the telescope. “To bed with you both.”
Both girls stamped and pleaded. “Not yet.”
“We’ll continue another evening.” Alex herded them to bed. “I can’t permit you to witness this, and—”
Another giggle from the street below.
Alex cringed at the sound. “I just can’t. To bed with you, then.”
“No.” Daisy stood firm. “Are we pirates, or aren’t we? Pirates don’t retreat.”
Chase attempted to extricate himself from Lady Chawton’s arms. She’d had one or three too many glasses of champagne tonight, and her embrace was all gloves and no dignity.
“I,” she said in a breathy voice, “am going to do the most wicked things to your body. All. Night. Long.”
“All night?”
“Yes.”
Chase sighed. He didn’t have “all night” in him. His plan had been “some of the night.”
And as of this moment, he was leaning toward “none of the night.”
This wasn’t turning out the way he’d hoped. Winifred was beautiful, no question. Witty, too. They’d been flirting for years at balls and parties, bringing their sensual tension to a slow simmer. Yet he’d always held off on making an advance. On reflection, he supposed—and God, it was a worrisome thing to admit—he’d been saving her for a special occasion.
Or, in this case, an emergency. He had never been in such desperate need of a good, hard bout of bedsport.
Now he teetered on the brink of calling it off. He just wasn’t in the mood, for some reason.
No. For one reason.
A small reason, really. One with black hair and eyes that swallowed up rooms. A reason possessing the most tender touch he’d ever known and a voice that curled softly in the air, like smoke.
“Reynaud?”
He snapped to attention.
Winifred pouted. “Do let’s go inside.” She snuggled closer and gave a dramatic shiver. “It’s cold.”
The night was unseasonably warm, even for July.
“Perhaps you’re taking a chill, darling.” He motioned for the groom to remain, rather than leading the team back to the mews. “If you’re ill, I’d better see you home. We can do this another night.”
“Don’t be a bore.” She looped her arms around his neck and swayed like a pendulum in his arms. A pendulum on opiates. “You’ve kept me waiting a long time for this. Far too long.”
“Then what are a few days more? The waiting will make it all the sweeter.” He tried to peel her gloved fingers from the back of his neck, but just when he’d worked one hand free, the other clamped down. He began to wonder if her purple gloves were adorned with octopus suckers.
“What a cruel tease you are.” She leaned forward, falling against his chest, and whispered vampishly in his ear. “Be careful, or I’ll tease you back.” With a satin-gloved finger, she traced the whorls of his ear. A pleasant enough sensation, but it didn’t precisely send lust bolting to his groin. Then she slipped her finger in his ear. All the way to the knuckle. Probing and wiggling.
She murmured, “Do you like that, you naughty boy?”
Actually, no. No, he didn’t.
He batted her hand away, and her finger dislodged from his ear canal with a popping sound.
That was enough. The evening was over.
First, Winifred was drunk.
Second, her sexual overtures were decidedly strange. Chase didn’t mind strange. In other times and other places, he’d enjoyed far stranger. But not tonight.
Third, and most importantly, he couldn’t get Miss Mountbatten out of his mind. Oh, he could coax himself to try panting and sweating her out of his bloodstream. But that wasn’t his style. Chase liked to think he possessed too much respect for women to make love to one while thinking of another. He had too much pride, as well. Halfhearted encounters would tarnish his reputation—one he’d polished to a glossy sheen with hands and lips and tongue.
He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed, applying just enough force to put distance between them. “Listen, Winifred—”
She shushed him by putting a finger to his lips. The same finger that had mere moments ago been knuckle-deep in his ear. “Not another word until we’re inside, naked, and I have my mouth on your—”
Chase would never learn precisely where Winifred meant to place her mouth. Before the lady could finish her thought, she gave a shriek piercing enough to cut glass, and he found himself sputtering with shock.
Cold. That was the first decipherable sensation.
And after cold, wet.
A deluge of water had sloshed over them both. He slicked his hair back with both hands and looked up. He spied Rosamund and Daisy hanging over the window sash far above. Each girl held an empty bucket in her hands.
“Ever so sorry!” Rosamund called down. “We needed to bail out the bilgewater.”
“Too many rats,” Daisy added, hand cupped around her mouth. “There’s plague aboard.”
“Oh, those little . . .” Chase completed the thought with a growl. They had better run and hide, or he would show them the meaning of plague.
Winifred hadn’t ceased shrieking. Her once-artfully arranged golden ringlets were now plastered to her face, obscuring her eyes. She swiped at them with gloved fingers, all the while vibrating with shock.
Chase saw his narrow window of advantage, and he took it. He shook his arms free of his topcoat and draped it over her shoulders, turning her to face the phaeton. To the groom, he said, “Lady Chawton will return home at once.”
What with the added weight of water, and her unwillingness or inability to assist, it took Chase and the groom several failed attempts and a final one-two-three-heave! to boost poor Winifred into the phaeton. Chase fought back clouds of purple satin and netting, stuffing them into the coach and slamming the door.
The groom took the driver’s seat, and Chase gave the lady’s address. “Lovely spending time with you,” he called out, raising a hand in farewell.
Then he turned on his heel and jerked open the door.
Four flights of stairs. Chase stomped on each riser with deliberate, ominous slowness, giving those hellions time to hear him coming and quake with mounting dread. “Rosamund and Daisy Fairfax!” he bellowed. “Pack your things for Malta!”
However, he never made it as far as the nursery. Just as he reached the third-floor landing, he found his march of doom intercepted.
By Miss Alexandra Mountbatten.
Chapter Sixteen
He looked like a wet cat, Alex thought. A wet, angry, ferocious, wild, and very, very large cat. Such as a tiger or a lion or a jaguar or—
“Miss Mountbatten,” he snarled. “Kindly step aside.”
“Wait.” She stretched her arms from the banister to the wall, obstructing his progress. “It wasn’t their fault.”
“Not their fault?” He flung a gesture at the ceiling, spraying her with water. “Are you telling me this is a mystery? That some unknown culprits are at large? Well, let me call in the Bow Street runners.”
Alex retracted her arm barrier and wiped the anger-propelled droplets from her face.
“Rosamund and Daisy were hanging out the window,” he went on. “Holding pails. It was, most assuredly, their fault.”
“Yes, but only partly. I was there, and I didn’t stop them.”
“You didn’t stop them.” He pronounced each word as a separate count in a list of felony charges.
“No, I didn’t. Because I—” Her courage faltered.
Because I was jealous. Irrationally, unspeakably envious in a way that made my toes catch fire.
“Because I believed you deserved it,” she said, lifting her chin. “How dare you conduct your amorous liaisons right under their noses.”
“That’s none of your concern.”
“The children are my concern. Don’t think they don’t know you bring women into that . . . libertine lair.”
“Libertine lair? Oh, that’s a new one.” He brushed past her, stalking down the corridor and disappearing into what she supposed must be his own bedchamber.
After a moment’s hesitation, Alex followed him, charging through the door and shutting it behind her. They were a full two floors below the nursery and at the opposite end of the house—but she lowered her voice anyway. “We’re not finished discussing this.”
“There’s nothing to be discussed. I know I’m a terrible guardian. I know this house is a masonry monument to scandal. That’s why I employed you. You’re meant to teach them proper behavior. Not plague me.”
“Plague you? When have I plagued you?”
“Aside from right now?” He tussled with his waistcoat buttons. “Only every hour of the day and night since you walked through my door.”
“I can’t imagine what you mean.”
He gave her a skeptical look. “Really. So all that rolling around on the schoolroom floor and groping in the Tower of London didn’t give you the slightest hint.”
Alex was coming to recognize his strategy—revealing his naked desire in an attempt to hide his heart and soul. She wouldn’t be fooled this time. “You said . . .”
“I know what I said.” Swaggering strides brought him close. “I said the thought of seducing you would never cross my mind.” He swept aside her plaited hair and bent to whisper darkly in her ear. “I lied.”
He retreated. She was rooted to the floor.
“The thought had crossed my mind before I even made you that promise. And since then, so many thoughts have crossed my mind, my brain is the Charing Cross of filth. A riot of lewd fantasies. You’re naked in nearly all of them, and ever since a certain incident in the schoolroom, a fair number feature ropes.”
Well, then.
Alex needed a moment to recover from that.
Perhaps two moments.
Or a year.
But he didn’t allow her another second.
“Why do you think I brought Winifred home? I thought I could purge a certain governess from my mind.” He cursed under his breath. “And see how well that worked. I can’t even muster the decency to drive you from this room.”
Alex’s mind reeled. He’d been thinking about her that much, and in that way? She didn’t dare plumb the meaning behind it. Instead, she said, “This plan of yours doesn’t sound very fair to Winifred.”
“Yes, I realized that.” He flung aside his unbuttoned waistcoat and pulled his damp shirt over his head, tossing it on the heap. “I was on the verge of sending her home when the girls doused me with”—he swept his hands down his muscled, glistening torso—“whatever this is.”
“Leftover bathwater.”
“Whose bathwater?”
She bit her bottom lip at the corner. “Mine.”
He laughed bitterly. “Of course. Of course it would be yours. I knew I smelled orange-flower water.”
Orange-flower water. He knew her scent?
Don’t make anything of it, she told herself. Naturally, he knew her scent. He likely recalled the scent of every woman he encountered, in the same way a wine merchant could taste cherries or lavender in a bordeaux. One of those talents gleaned from vast and varied experience.
“I suppose I now understand how you can be so callous about your wards,” she said. “Given the way you carry on with women, you doubtless have a dozen illegitimate children you’re ignoring, too.”
“You’re wrong. I do not.”
He snagged a towel from the washstand and gave his hair a good rubbing. Alex gawked, transfixed by the way his arm muscles bunched and flexed.
“How could you be certain you have no offspring?”
“Because I am excessively careful not to create any.”
“No sponge or French letter is that effective.”
“Which is why I don’t rely on them. I simply don’t put myself in that position.”
“What position?”
“Any position that requires insertion of my . . .” He waved vaguely toward his loins. “. . . male member.”
“Male member. Are we discussing a Masonic society, or are you referring to the penis?”
He stared at her.
“We are adults. If you’re going to discuss such matters, you may as well use the proper words. I would never have supposed you to be prudish.”
“I’m not prudish. I’m protecting your delicate feminine sensibilities.”
“I never acquired many of those. And considering that it was pressed up against me the other day, I should think we’ve moved beyond euphemisms. So go on, then. We were discussing your penis.”
He set his jaw and stepped toward her. “Since you’re so fond of bold language, we are discussing my cock. And the fact that I never thrust it ballocks-deep in a woman’s tight, wet cunny. That is how I’m certain I have no bastards in the world.”
She was shocked into silence for a moment. Shocking her was, of course, what he’d intended. The entire scene was scandalous in the extreme—a governess, alone with the master of the house, in his bedchamber, while he was bared to the waist—and he knew it. He wanted her to feel intimidated. He wanted to avoid her questions, and possibly his own answers, too.
With a smile and a bow, he crossed to a low cabinet and withdrew a decanter of brandy.
“You—” She shook her head in bemusement. “You can’t mean to say you’re a virgin.”
“No, I don’t mean to say that. I had my share of indiscretions when I was younger.” He paused to pour brandy into a glass. “But not anymore.”
The low timbre of his voice seeped into her bones.
“I live by one rule,” he went on. “No attachments. I don’t keep mistresses. I won’t risk siring bastards. I refuse to make myself a slave to mercury cures, either. Because inevitably, whether I deserve it or not, the Libertine Lair will become the Duke Den. I’m a poor excuse for nobility, but the least I can do is keep the estate unencumbered by bastards or blackmail, and keep myself free of the pox. So I refrain from—”
“Intercourse.”
“Fucking. Yes.” He downed a swallow of brandy. “If you think I’ve taken you into confidence, don’t flatter yourself. My abstention is no secret. Why do you suppose I’m so popular with ladies? I’ve cultivated other talents.”
“What other—” She caught herself, but it was too late. Her ignorance had been exposed. Much like his bare, sculpted chest.
“So, the governess has a few delicate sensibilities after all. There are other ways to give and take pleasure, Alexandra. A great many ways.” His gaze swept her. “Shall I teach you a lesson?”
Without taking his eyes from her, he drained the last of his brandy.
Alexandra found that her reserve of courage was similarly drained. She didn’t know where to look. Her gaze kept landing in the worst possible places. The heap of his discarded clothing. The closed door. The bed.
“Daisy needs spectacles,” she blurted out.
And then she turned and fled.
