“You ought not to have come down,” he said. “Or you ought to have crept into the library and chosen your book and ignored your curiosity. You have caught me at a bad time.”
She understood his meaning. It was a bad time for her too. They were firmly caught in a situation that was unfamiliar to them. In a mellow, somewhat melancholy mood. Alone together—as they often were, of course. But entirely alone this time, with no servants moving about beyond the door. Late at night.
“Yes” was all she could think of to say. She stood up then, drawing her hand free of his. Yet everything except her common sense yearned to stay.
“Don’t go,” he said, his voice unusually husky, and he swiveled around on the bench until he sat with his back to the pianoforte. “Don’t leave me yet.”
It was a moment—and only a moment—of decision. She could listen to common sense, say a firm good night, and walk from the room. He could not—and would not—stop her. Or she could stay in a situation that was charged with tension and against which her defenses had been lowered. There was no time to debate the matter with herself. She took the couple of steps that brought her directly in front of him.
She lifted both hands and set them on his head as if in benediction. His hair was silky and warm beneath her fingers. His hands came to rest on either side of her waist and drew her toward him. He sighed and leaned forward to bury his face between her breasts.
Fool, she told herself as she closed her eyes and reveled in the physical sensations of his touch and his body heat and the smell of his cologne.Fool!But the thought was without conviction.
When he finally lifted his head and looked up at her, his dark eyes fathomless, she went down onto her knees on the floor between his spread thighs. She did not know why she did so, whether at the guidance of his hands or from some instinct that did not require thought. She set her arms along the tight fabric over his thighs, feeling their firm, muscled strength, and lifted her head.
He was leaning over her, and his fingers touching her face were feather-light and tipped with a heat that scorched its way into the depths of her femininity. He cupped her face with his hands before kissing her.
She had been kissed before. Charles had been her beau for four years as well as her dearest friend forever. On a few occasions she had been alone with him and had permitted him to kiss her. She had liked his kiss.
Now she realized she had never been kissed before. Not really. Not like this.
Ah, never like this.
He scarcely touched his lips to hers. His eyes were open, as were hers. It was impossible to lose herself in sheer physical sensation even though every part of her body sizzled with awareness and ached with desire. It was impossible not to know fully what was happening and with whom. It would be impossible afterward to tell herself that she had been swept away by mindless passion.
This was not mindless.
He feathered kisses over her cheeks, her eyes, her temples, her nose, her chin. And returned to her mouth, which he touched softly, teasingly, with his lips, coaxing her to kiss him back in the same way.
A kiss was not necessarily just lips pressed to lips, she discovered in growing wonder. There was the warm, moist flesh behind her lips, which he touched and stroked with his tongue. There was her own tongue moving lightly across his top lip and back over the bottom one. He touched its tip, sliding over the top of it deep into the cavity of her mouth. There were sucking and stroking and soft, wordless moans in her voice, in his.
And then his arms closed about her as he leaned farther over her, half lifting her against the taut strength of his chest, and they shared a deep, hard, openmouthed embrace that had her clinging and pressing and yearning for more.
At last she was down on her knees again, his hands spread over her own on his thighs, his dark, heavy-lidded eyes gazing down into hers.
“We will have to punish each other for this in the morning, Jane,” he said. “It will be amazing how different it will all seem then. Forbidden. Impossible. Even sordid.”
She shook her head.
“Oh, yes,” he insisted. “I am just a rake, my dear, with nothing on my mind except covering you on the floor here and taking my wicked pleasure deep inside your virgin body. And you are the wide-eyed, innocent dove. My servant. My dependent. It is quite impossible. And definitely sordid. You think that what has happened is beautiful. I can see it in your eyes. It is not, Jane. That is merely what an experienced rake can make a woman think. In reality it is the simple lustful, raw desire for sex. For the quick, vigorous mating of bodies. Go to bed now. Alone.”
Both his face and his voice were harsh. She got to her feet and stood away from him. But she did not immediately turn to leave. She searched his eyes with her own, looking into the mask that he had settled firmly in place. The impenetrable mask. He was gazing back at her with a mocking half smile on his lips.
He was right. What had happened had been entirely physical. And very raw.
But he was wrong too. Her mind could not yet grapple with what exactly was wrong with what he had said. It just was. He was wrong.
But yes, it was quite impossible. And without a doubt this would all appear very different in the morning. She would not be able to look calmly at him tomorrow as she was doing now.
“Good night, your grace,” she said.
“Good night, Jane.”
He had turned back to the pianoforte by the time she had picked up her candle, left the room, and closed the door behind her. He was playing something quiet and melancholy.
She was halfway up the stairs before she remembered that she had come down for a book. She did not turn back.
9
