The part of her that was contrary and abrasive, the part that—beneath ordinary circumstances—would have continued to argue and justify and maintain the necessity of her deception, fell abruptly silent. These weren’t ordinary circumstances. And Henry—Henry wasn’t Mama; content to send her out into the world to perform her thievery on his behalf with no thought to the consequences she might face. He cared for her safety and her reputation. Perhaps even more than she ever had.
In this moment, he didn’t care that he’d lost what he’d come to retrieve, that his uncle had succeeded in obtaining a critical piece of evidence that would, in short order, be used to ruin him. He only cared that she had made it out of this particular scrape unharmed.
“I’m—”
“Don’t say you’re sorry,” he huffed indignantly. “I know you’re not.”
She wasn’t, really. That was the trouble of it. She could respect, after a fashion, that he had been worried for her and still know that it hadn’t been necessary. “I suppose it wouldn’t do any good to tell you that I’ve got loads of experience with such performances?”
“Not a whit.”
“Or that I made certain to carry a knife with me to ensure that the men present kept their hands to themselves?”
“Grace, you have got a penny in your bosom that proves they did not,” he said. “And IsawCooper pat your bum with my owneyes.”
“Henry, gentlemen—or men who would call themselves that—have done just the same in a ballroom. They always think they’re subtle about their pawing, but they never are.” He made a resentful sound deep in his throat, and his fingers plucked a pin from her hair, loosing a curl. “And besides,” she said, “I told you. It was a tuppence piece.”
A wheeze of reluctant laughter. “Don’t tempt me,” he said as he eased closer still. “Iwillspank you again.”
Grace found herself…less averse to the prospect than she might have imagined. She could feel the frantic race of his heart against her breasts, the way his lungs still sucked at air as if a punch to the solar plexus had rendered him unable to fully fill them. A queer softness stole through her, and a delicious warmth pooled in her belly. She lifted her arms to slide them around his back—
Her bodice gave up the ghost, the last shreds of whatever claims to modesty it might once have bestowed vanished entirely as her breasts popped free.
The tuppence coin clattered to the floor and rolled away.
“Good God.” For a moment, it seemed Henry tried to do the honorable thing and closed his eyes. “Not even so much as a chemise, then?”
Grace’s gaze traced the path of his long, hard swallow down the line of his throat to where it disappeared beneath the collar of his shirt. “Of course I have got a chemise.” Stays and petticoats, too, owing to the slight chill in the air this time of night. “It’s just that nobody expects modesty of a serving maid. So I chose one intended to be worn beneath an evening gown.” And she had wrenched the neckline still further down besides. “I have got short stays, too, but I had to bunch them up beneath my bosom and lace them rather tightly to, er…produce a certain effect.” That was to say, thrusting her breasts closer to her chinthan they’d ever been in her life.
“Of course you did.” He said it with a sort of fatalistic inflection, as if some conclusion had just presented itself within his mind, an inescapable truth to which he had at last resigned himself. A shudder wracked him from head to toe. His eyes opened, and that clear, crystalline blue burned with a deep fire.
Grace had known that when he’d purchased the room for the night, it had been with largely pure intentions. A convenient way to escape notice, to avoid any possible sightings on the street and the potential risk that his uncle would spot them. He had also been keen to take her to task, to impress upon her the depth and breadth of his displeasure. Even to reassure himself that she truly had come to no harm in his absence.
Whatever his intentions had once been, they were not pure now. His hands slid down the slope of her back, grabbed the globes of her bottom, and yanked her straight off of her toes. His mouth came down upon hers as he wrenched her into his kiss.
Her toes curled within her shoes as her fingers raked his back for purchase. The thrust of his knee between hers provided a hint of stability as she managed at last to hook one arm about his neck. For a moment she could only marvel that he had lifted her so easily; first on the stairs, and now once again.
She knew she wasn’t a particularly small woman; it would have been impossible not to. Those who wished to flatter her vanity would have called her voluptuous or Rubenesque; those who did not might have called her plump. Pleasingly, she had always thought.
And Henry—Henry thought so, too. It was in the low, tortured groan he uttered against her lips, in the tremor that slid down his spine, in the fierce clutch of his hands on her arse, as if he desired nothing more than to leave the impression of his fingers upon her—a private, proprietary mark that only the two of them would ever know about.
His tongue thrust into her mouth, greedy and blatant, inviting the stroke of her own. The pressure of his knee there between her thighs had wrenched up the fabric of her skirt and underthings. Cool air swirled around her ankles and calves. That ache between her legs deepened, and she squirmed in an instinctive urge to soothe it. Her skirt rode higher, and—there. She wriggled her skirts free of the trap of his knee, hauled herself up into his kiss with her arm about his neck, and managed to wrap her legs around his hips.
His breath hissed between his teeth. “This is madness.”
Yes. But it was also inevitable. Perhaps it had been since the very first time she’d witnessed that unguarded desire upon his face the night she’d invaded his home. The slack-jawed disbelief, the wonder—as if he had half-suspected he’d conjured her up from a dream.
His heart pounded in his chest; a riotous beat that revealed a strain, an urgency that would have been anathema to the man she had once thought him to be. That cold, stern, aloof exterior had been exorcised entirely. Not just a chink in that armor, but a fracture, cleaving every last remnant clean off.
He bent his head, lowering his mouth to her exposed breasts. The tender brush of his lips seared her skin like a kiss of flame. An odd, strangled sound slipped between her lips as her fingers seized a handful of his dark hair. “Henry,” she gasped, her voice reduced to a throaty murmur.
His tongue teased her nipple; a hot, wet stroke that made ever muscle in her body clench and tremble. The ridge of his arousal was heavy and hard behind the placket of his trousers. Firm, unyielding, notched perfectly between her thighs, the pressure and friction a distinct threat to her already-overwhelmed senses.
The delicate scrape of his teeth coaxed a plaintive whine from her lungs. Her fingernails raked his scalp; her hips arched intothe heavy press of his as much as her spine would allow. A groan rumbled across her sensitive skin, and the heat of his breath misted her flesh. He shifted, bracing himself to pin her against the wall with the weight of his body. One hand released its grip upon her bottom, fought through the web of her skirts and petticoats to slide between the tight press of their bodies.
Warm fingers glided through sparse curls, found the molten heart of her. A satisfied sound rumbled in his throat as his fingers slid smoothly over silken skin, already damp and swollen. In tantalizing, searching strokes he parted the slick petals of her sex, explored the silky heat beneath. There was whisk of his thumb over the bead of her clitoris, there and gone again in single sizzling moment. Her breath backed up into her lungs as that ache mounted, still unsatisfied.
The tiniest rock of her hips; the only shred of movement she could manage, and his fingers found the entrance to her body, the space that yearned to be filled. The tip of one sank inside her, lingered just there, barely within her. So much less than what she wanted of him. She could feel the tension in the muscles of his shoulders, the hot puff of each ragged breath that tore itself from his lungs. A trembled slid through him, as if every inch of him creaked beneath the stress of that impossible restraint he exercised.
