“I consider myself a candidate for no man’s hand,” she told him, prodding him in the arm with her fan. If Comerford was looking, she could not see him. “I would not make a proper wife.”
“Even if a gentleman wishes to marry you?”
“You are mistaken,” she said, turning to the curtains as they jerked and slid away to the side, revealing the stage. “It is not marriage George Comerford wants from me.”
Chapter Four
As George lay with Caroline’s head on his heart, he listened to the sound of her breathing, the flow of it soft against his skin. It struck him as a particular kind of privilege to see her in these rare, unguarded moments. When she was in his arms in this way, she was nothing more than Caroline Spenser, and he was nothing more than George Comerford, and they were nothing more than the sum of their time together.
“In passion’s embrace, all boundaries fade,” he said against the silk of her hair. “As souls entwine beneath the starry glade, No earthly tether can restrain its flight, For passion knows no bounds, no end in sight.”
She stirred sleepily, and he felt her cheek curve against him. “Where did you read that?”
“Now that would be telling.” He ran his fingers down her plump arm, tossed carelessly over his chest. The week had progressed from clandestine, frantic, desperate couplings to this—something frighteningly close to intimacy. “Do you like to read?”
“The only poetry I read is the kind ladies should never consume,” she said, and he laughed.
“Is that where you learnt all your tricks?”
“No,” she said, and twisted like a cat, her breasts pressing against his chest as she shifted to look up at him, the beginnings of a wicked, knowing smile on her mouth. “I learnt my tricks from a gentleman who frequented brothels a great deal before frequenting me. That was early in my career as a mistress.”
“I should thank him.”
“Oh, I have no idea where he is now,” she said carelessly. “I never keep track of my former lovers.”
“Am I to take it you won’t keep track of me once we part?”
The smile slipped from her lips, and he regretted the question almost immediately. “When we part,” she said, walking her fingers up his chest, “it shall be as though we never met.”
#
Well, she was certainly behaving as though they’d never met.
He had never ascertained why she had refused to continue their relationship after Worthington Hall, but he had told himself he accepted her decision—until he saw her on the arm of another gentleman. Heat flooded him at the way Sir Percy Somerville put his hand on hers, commanding her attention with the ease of someone who knew her well. She had often been seen with him—gossip spread in London like wildfire—but he’d thought their time together had ended with Somerville’s marriage.
Evidently not.
Why had she decided that Somerville was a better fit for her purpose than him? Yes, he was to be married soon, but he had thought she didn’t consort with married men, and Sir Percy was certainly married.
Jealousy prickled across his skin. If their time in Worthington Hall had been any less to both their liking, he would haveassumed he did not match up to her expectations. But she had shown every sign of enjoying herself. And the fact she had tossed him aside and taken up with another gentleman instead rankled.
She was not his, but by God he wanted her to be.
The thing that consumed him was not the pleasure, although he still dreamt about her curves. It was the time after, in those quiet moments between sleep. Intimacy that had him writing verse in her name and spending days wondering about the precise shade of her eyes. He still didn’t think he had a word for it, and wasn’t that a travesty, that nothing in the human language could adequately capture their knowing sparkle?
Yet she was now entertaining other gentlemen as she had entertained him. Falling asleep with Sir Percy in her bed and waking to his slow, ardent kisses.
The feeling inside him rose until it burned.
The first half of the opera was indeterminable. A dragging of time that seemed to last forever and yet went by in a flash of longing.
When at last the curtains closed for the intermission, Miss Browning glanced over her shoulder. As the youngest daughter of a viscount and one of the most highly sought-after ladies of the Season, she knew precisely what she was about. The only reason she had accompanied him tonight was to make her other beaus—an earl and a disastrously rich gentleman with land in Derbyshire—jealous.
From what George knew of her, she would choose the Earl.
“Lord Darlington is on his way,” she said, proving him right. “Make a show of having enjoyed your time with me, then relinquish me to him.” Her gaze slid meaningfully to Caroline’s box.
He could hardly argue with that, just as he could hardly argue with not being the prize she wished to hook. Better they were both upfront and honest with one another.
