‘Why, then, since you think you know me so well?’ That pout, the full lip he’d bitten and would bite again.Christ.
‘I don’t know you at all. I don’t know what your favourite colour is, or your favourite book, or what you dream about at night, or secretly wish for from life that you fear you’ll never have. I don’t know what gives you nightmares so that you wake in the dark with your heart racing, though I’d wager something does. But none of it is of any consequence. Because I know what you want right now, which is all that matters to me.’
‘You think it’s you,’ she said bravely.
‘No, or not precisely. It’s what I can give you. Pleasure. Escape.’
‘You’re wrong. No one can give me escape. There is no escape from my life – from any woman’s life.’
He would not let his heart ache for her. He had no business thinking of hearts, but only of bodies, of hungry mouths and limbs entwined and mutual ecstasy. ‘Not permanently, no. But for a few precious minutes…’
‘You will not compromise me.’ It was not clear if this was a question or a command.
‘I will not put a child in your belly, or any woman’s. I was born a bastard; I will not inflict that on another innocent babe. And so I will not take your virginity. Despite your doubts of me, you may trust me so far, even though I have so recently and in the main correctly told you that you should not. I may compromise you… a little.’
She smiled, which she rarely did. The rarer the smiles, the more precious they must be. ‘You mean you will give me such pleasure that no other man can ever match it, and when I lie with my husband at night – whoever he may be – it will always be you I think of? Is that the heart of it? Such confidence – one might even say, arrogance!’
He didn’t want to think of her in another man’s bed, still less… ‘Shall we see?’ he said roughly, his poise momentarily deserting him. And eventhatwas exciting and new.
Because he was at her side now, his hands tight about her waist, the thick velvet brushing his palms. She was breathing hard, and so was he. Very deliberately he raised his hand and let his thumb seek out her nipple beneath her thin shirt, and stroke it. He knew she would not pull away, and she did not. She bit her lip, and arched her back, pushing her breast into his hand, so he continued to caress her. He felt the tight bud of flesh peakbeneath his touch, and it was a struggle to go as slowly as he knew he must. ‘I think we had progressed just about so far, and no further, before,’ he murmured distractedly.
She was cooler in her speech than she had any right to be; her body told a different story. ‘That’s true, I have some vague recollection of it, but then you stopped.’
He grinned. ‘My recollection, unlike yours, is far from vague. I’ve been regretting stopping ever since. I assure you, Miss Constantine, it was from no lack of desire.’
‘Desire… I know the others want to marry me, but I don’t know why, not really. At least I know what you want from me.’ His hand was still on her breast, his thumb lazily circling, and somehow it was all the more erotic because she was speaking, looking at him with those big, dark eyes, the pupils so large they almost hid the velvety brown irises. He was generally of the opinion that fucking and conversation should be kept entirely separate, but with her it seemed it might be different.
‘I wonder if you do know what I want, Miss Constantine? Well, I can help you with your very dull suitors, a little, and then we’re going to stop talking about them, and put them entirely from our minds to concentrate on more important matters. Eager, in so far as he is capable of thought, thinks you’re a damn fine girl, by Gad he does. Englishby wants desperately to have you, which is a reasonable ambition, but then once he had won you, he’d bully you and make you miserable, because he has an uncertain temper. Furthermore, you’d challenge him, by your very nature, and what’s worse, you’re not rich enough for his ambitions, but he can’t aspire to anyone richer. And Milton… well, I don’t believe he has any burning desire to make love to you, the damn bloodless fool, but he needs a wife to give him an heir, and your family…’
‘Is notoriously fertile,’ she finished for him with a sad littlehalf-smile that he wanted to kiss away. ‘No, you’re right, let’s forget about them. Let’s… enjoy the time we have.’
‘Oh, gladly,’ he said. While he’d been speaking, his hands still on her, he’d noticed that her shirt was secured with a drawstring tied in a neat bow. He made short work of the fastening, and pulled the white lawn down, so that only the tight-laced corset prevented it slipping off her body completely. Her breasts were now covered only by her thin chemise, which offered little concealment but merely tantalised with glimpses of what glories lay beneath. She did not melt at his touch; she stood defiant as he partially undressed her, though her breathing was coming fast and their eyes were locked. It drove him wild; he wanted to drive her wild too, to strip away each precious vestige of control as easily as he could strip her body. He dragged his gaze from hers and bent his head to taste her dangerous sweetness. ‘This,’ he said against her breast, ‘was just a part of what I wanted to do when I saw you dancing.’
And then his mouth was on her, drawing her swollen nipple in and sucking on it through the flimsy fabric. She let out a little moan of pleasure, and fixed her hands in his hair as she had done before, and he lost himself in her.
Time ceased to have any meaning. The world shrank to this tiny room, and to his lips upon her, his body pressed to hers and hers to his, her heady scent in his nostrils, her hands tight in his hair, tugging at it right on the edge between pleasure and pain. Soft sounds they made, both of them. It was at the same time too much and not enough.
He didn’t want to be the one to tell her that they had to go back, not again, even though it was true, or would be soon. Hadn’t he promised her pleasure, a moment of sweet oblivion? Well, he believed he could give her that, at least. Somehow he didn’t likethe thought of lying to her, or making promises and then breaking them.
He slipped his right hand down her body, over the velvet and the silk. Trying not to hurry even though he knew that his sense that they had escaped the outside world and all its pressures was a complete illusion, he pulled up her petticoats and continued his journey of delicious exploration. The slight roughness of her stockings – the smoothness of her thighs – her curls – the hot, wet core of her. Someone gasped, but he was in no state to tell if it was him, or her, or both of them in unison.
She said, and her voice was, unbelievably, trembling on the brink of laughter, ‘I must warn you, sir, if you stop now, I really will slap you, much harder than even you will like.’
Although she was probably wrong in that, he didn’t stop.
13
Allegra was back in the ballroom a short while later, as if nothing of any significance had happened to her. It was a sea of bodies – the dancers, and those standing in crowds to watch them. But as far as she could see, her mother was not present, still presumably allowing herself an evening of rare self-indulgence in the card room, and therefore her own absence might have gone undetected for once, which made her luckier than she deserved. Leontina enjoyed gambling – it could have been described as her only perceptible weakness, except that she was clever and cautious, knew when to stop, and won with unnatural regularity. Possibly she cheated; it would be entirely typical.
A hand seized Allegra’s and pulled her back into the whirling throng – not Severin, not one of her suitors, not anyone she knew, as far as she could tell behind the mask. In some ways this was a relief, and she lost herself in the exhilaration of mindless motion, a pleasure that did not demand any sort of reflection and was far less dangerous than what she’d been doing a few moments earlier. And infinitely less earth-shattering.
Severin had wrought her delicious ruin with his clever touch,and when he’d realised somehow that she was going to be noisy in her release, a liberty they could not afford to indulge in, he’d offered her his other hand and she had found herself sucking greedily on his fingers and biting them, instead of screaming aloud as she came for half the house to hear. He’d had her pressed back against the panelled wall, his hard thigh between hers, his lips still worshipping her nipples. She had no idea how he knew exactly what would please her when she barely knew herself. Even more of a mystery was how some ancient part of her brain could easily divine the reasons for his actions when such shocking contact was entirely new in her experience.
And what of his pleasure in turn – could this possibly be enough for him, even if she was entirely overset by it all?
It seemed, astonishingly, that it was. ‘Understand this, Miss Constantine,’ he’d told her with an edge to his voice that made her shiver afresh. ‘I don’t ask anything of you. I’m sure you must be wondering if I will, expecting it even, but I won’t. This… encounter, wonderful as it has been, need never be repeated, unless you wish it to be, and even then, it comes with no obligation on either part, and never shall.’
Now that she had come back slowly to her senses, she found that hard to believe. Not of him – she hardly knew him, after all – but of any man. She also could not believe that the mind-melting pleasure she’d just experienced could be entirely without consequences. Her experience of the world suggested otherwise. ‘You have me in your power, I think,’ she said with a passable assumption of calmness, though she had no idea why she was telling him, if indeed it hadn’t occurred to him already. But surely it must have done.
