“It was not so straightforward a conversation as that. I may not possess Restell Gardner’s experience in eliciting information, but I could appreciate there was need for circumspection. Mrs. Romney in particular was quite willing to talk about the trials of managing the inn. Finding good help being chief among them. You can imagine how it went from there. She mentioned one young woman of whom she was most particularly fond, but discovered her to be as lacking in good judgment as those who came and went before her. ‘They meet a rascal,’ she told me, ‘posing as a gentleman who promises much in a fine, silky voice, and then they’re gone without so much as a by-your-leave.’”
He waited as she took it all in. “It was your disappearance that was remarked on by the Romneys. They would not have recalled anything about the students who stopped at the inn so many years ago if your departure weren’t fixed so clearly in their mind. It certainly gave me pause, Olivia. You also, apparently.”
She nodded slowly. “I thought that when no one came for me quickly that the Romneys may have taken it upon themselves to protect me. It never occurred that there might be another reason for their silence.” She searched Griffin’s face. His expression held no urgency that she accept any of the things he’d told her. She was free to examine what he’d said, free to discredit or embrace all of it. He had no compelling need to convince or coerce her. It was enormously liberating and unlike anything in her experience.
“What is to be done now?”
“Nothing except wait on the confirmation that the man you thought was Rawlings is indeed the same gentleman found hanged at university. It ends there, Olivia. It must. For everyone.”
She understood what he was saying. Whether the hanging was coerced, done by his own hand, or staged to hide evidence of a murder, the inquiry ended with the fact of his death. “The identity of this man, that is what Mr. Gardner is trying to establish?”
Griffin nodded. “He is engaged in a search of the London hells, looking for the foursome who appeared here. He has a description such as I was able to give him, and he expects to be successful. The four of them are bound by what happened that evening, and it makes them easier to find than if they’d scattered.”
“You have done so much,” she said softly. “Given so much.” How had she not known? she wondered. How had she not known from the very first?
She lifted one hand and laid it along the side of his face. Her thumb made the lightest pass down his scar. “I do love you, you know.”
His smile was gentle. “So you have come to it at last.” He turned his head and caught the heart of her palm with his lips. He pressed his kiss, then folded her hand around it. “That is quite something indeed.”
“It is good of you not to be smug.” She felt as if what she held in her fist had substance. She settled it between her breasts. “It is disconcerting how often you are right about a thing.”
“I am going to treasure you said that and keep it close for all the times I am wrong.”
Olivia drew down his head and raised hers a fraction. “Will you have me now, Griffin? I think I should like that very much.”
Their mouths closed that infinitesimal gap. Heat blossomed the exact moment their lips touched, and their need was mutual and immediate and powerful.
Olivia tore at his stock and linen until she had her hands splayed across his chest. Her fingers curled a fraction, and she lightly scored him with her nails. His flesh was warm and taut and responsive. He anticipated her touch, prepared for it, and sucked in a breath just as she would have dragged her hands across his flat belly. Her fingers dipped unerringly into the small space he gave between his abdomen and his trousers.
He groaned against her mouth as she clutched him. His fingers fumbled with the fastening to his fly. She released him long enough to deftly manage the thing herself, then took him in hand once again. He was hot and hard and thick in her fist. She could feel the coursing of his blood, the steady pulse that matched the one in his throat and was set to the beat of his heart.
Griffin caught her hand and held it still. “Not yet. Not just yet. I want…God, Olivia…you can’t…” He covered her mouth hard with his as she squeezed her fingers ever so slightly. He throbbed heavily in her fist. He pushed his tongue deep in her mouth, ground his mouth against hers, then ground his hips equally hard.
Olivia arched, pushed herself against him, dug one heel into the mattress for purchase, and all but slipped under his skin. There was a brief struggle, and for a time they were equally matched, but she lost ground gradually as he drugged her with long, slow, deep kisses that left her boneless and pinioned under him.
She looked up at him, her darkening eyes vaguely unfocused, her lips swollen and damp. Her wrists were caught in his hands and held in place on either side of her head. Odd, but she did not feel as if she’d lost, and the gradual appearance of her slightly wicked siren’s smile underscored her satisfaction with the turnabout in their play.
Griffin gave her wrists a little shake that only had the effect of deepening her smile. “You are maddening,” he said, his throat tight of a sudden. “And I thank God every day for it.”
That pleased her, for she hadn’t the least idea how she might go about being anything else. The knowledge that he wouldn’t ask it endeared him to her, and she thanked him in her own way. To the extent that she could move under him, she did so. The press of his body on hers made it provocative in the extreme. “You will not make me wait overlong, will you?”
“I should,” he whispered. “But it will kill me.” He bent his head, kissed her again, ran the edge of his tongue under her upper lip and sipped. He made a feast of her mouth, then placed kisses at the corner of it. He dipped his head and found the curve of her neck and shoulder. His teeth caught her skin, bit down gently, worried it, then laved it as though licking a wound. Her whimper, the hitch in her breathing, provoked him to do more of the same.
He released her wrists, but only because he needed his hands to open her robe. He fairly dragged it off her body, then applied himself to the problem of her nightgown.
The thin, delicate batiste was a modest barrier at best. Griffin made damp circles at the tip of her breast. The pink aureole was visible through the fabric. The nipple rose like a bud. He took it between his lips and sucked.
Olivia’s fingers plowed through his hair, folded, and held fast. Slender ribbons of heat curled in her belly. She closed her eyes, squeezed them, really, and felt nothing so much as the rhythmic tug of his mouth on her breast. She arched, wanting more, still more, and he frustrated her by moving his attention to her other breast and beginning again.
Her hands slipped out of his hair and found his shoulders. When he lifted his head, she tore at her gown herself and made a knot of the ribbon that closed the neckline. He had the nerve to laugh, though the sound of it was so darkly wicked that she was aroused by it rather than offended.
“Let me,” he said, pushing her hands aside. His fingers were only marginally more skillful than hers, but the frustration of the exercise merely added to the heat. He spread the material wide, laying her breasts bare to the glow of the candlelight and the gleam in his eye. “Touch yourself.”
Olivia’s mouth parted, but no sound emerged. The tip of her tongue appeared, and she licked her lips.
“Go on,” he whispered. “Touch yourself.”
She lifted one hand, quite uncertain it was done of her own volition, and slid it gently across her right breast. The budding nipple caught in the vee between her index and middle finger. The touch of her own hand excited her. The sight of it excited him more. She closed her fingers gently around the nipple and tugged and knew a corresponding tug in her womb. He pushed himself against her then, rubbed his cock in the cleft of her thighs.
