But he was different, Sophy told herself. His card-playing face could be as good as hers. One had to study him closely to catch the way his dark eyes glittered when he was noticing her in a more intent way than usual . . . and there was a certain slant of his mouth or tilt of his head . . .
She shivered, recalling when last he’d regarded her that way, only a few hours ago, an instant before he’d kissed her.
She was in a very bad way.
If she hadn’t had to rescue Lady Clara, with almost no time at all to do it, Sophy could have easily made a great fool of herself over him. She could have wept into her pillow at night. She could have written sickening poetry about Lovers Torn Apart by Fate. She could have quoted whole scenes from Romeo and Juliet, and sobbed because those young lovers hadn’t had it so bad, compared to her.
But she hadn’t time to act like a sentimental moron.
She was obliged to play Cleopatra to Adderley’s Mark Antony—and really, she’d never thought Mark Antony worthy of the Queen of Egypt. A bit dim, she’d always thought.
She was contemplating the role of wicked seductress and thinking it mainly took patience, when the footman standing outside the door of her suite informed her, as he opened the door, that Lord Longmore awaited her in the drawing room.
Her heart sped up.
She’d thought she’d have time to rest and compose herself before Longmore arrived. Being calm with him wasn’t as simple as it ought to be. Too often she felt he was looking straight into her brain and seeing what he ought not to see. It was like being undressed, with the difference being that she didn’t mind his seeing her body unclothed. She minded very much his seeing inside her head.
Keeping her guard up was not going to be easy, after a draining evening with Lord Adderley.
His mind was slow. She’d had to slog through their conversation while keeping him, not at arm’s length, but not too close, either. She’d had to work carefully, to bring his mind to the right position. It was like dancing with a man with two left feet. He’d tried to be subtle, and it had been difficult to pretend she didn’t understand what he was trying to ascertain.
It was hard work, and it sapped one’s energy—and the project had taken longer than she’d planned.
Still, she’d had success, and that was what she set at the front of her mind. And that was what animated her when she sailed into her drawing room, the picture of confidence.
A maid hurried out, but Sophy ignored her. Longmore stood by the window, a glass in his hand. His dark hair was rumpled and so was his neckcloth. She couldn’t tell whether he’d been in a fight or had slept in his clothes. He looked thoroughly disreputable, and his dark eyes held a dangerous gleam.
She waved the girl away. “Go to bed,” she said. “I’ll ring if I need you.”
When the door had closed behind the maid, Sophy stripped off her gloves. “I hope they’ve looked after you well,” she said. She noted a decanter, three-quarters empty, on one of the room’s elegant tables.
“They fed me and they kept my glass filled,” he said. “Where the devil have you been?”
She dropped the gloves on the nearest chair, unfastened her mantelet, and carelessly flung it on top of them. Dressmakers neatly folded garments and put everything in its proper place. Great ladies left that job to servants.
“How much have you had to drink?” she said. “Have you forgotten that I was dining with Lord Adderley?”
“For five hours?”
“Certainly not. It can’t be—what time is it?”
He slanted her a look, took out his pocket watch, and flicked it open with a sharp click. He said, in a too-quiet voice, “It’s half past midnight.”
“That’s not five hours,” she said.
“What the devil have you been doing for all this time?”
“Keeping him occupied.”
“Two hours, you said.”
“I said I could give you at least two,” she said.
“That isn’t what you said.”
“What difference does it make?” she said. “Or are you vexed because you had to cut short your search, thinking you had only two hours?”
“Never mind my search.”
“Never mind? That was the whole point of this exercise.”
“Apparently not,” he said. “Apparently, you found a good deal to occupy you.”
“Well, I did, rather,” she said.
“I’m eager to know what that was,” he said.
She was not about to describe to him the various maneuvers and counter-maneuvers she’d had to use. She had no intention of instructing any man—and most assuredly not this one—in the arts she used to manipulate males.
“You ought to know what it wasn’t,” she said. “I can’t believe you stand there glowering at me as though I’m a wayward sister. How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not Lady Clara, who doesn’t know better than to let herself be led out onto dark terraces by bankrupt lords. I’m not Lady Anybody. I’m not naïve.”
“All the same—”
“Nothing was supposed to happen,” she said. “I know better than to let anything happen. Nothing happened.” She wanted to shake him. How could he think she was so stupid? How could he believe she was so undiscriminating? “Considering the foul mood you seem to be in, I can only conclude that nothing happened on your mission, either. Or did you find something worse than one could imagine? Grisly remains in the cellar or—”
“Dust clumps under the bed,” he said. “And what may or not have been a dead rodent. I didn’t touch it. I’m judging only by smell. It might have been your would-be beau’s stockings.”
“You searched under the bed?” she said. “Why didn’t you make Fenwick do that? He’s smaller and less likely to bump his head . . .” She trailed off, as the image rose in her mind of Longmore squeezing his big body under a bed. “Oh, no! Did you bump your head?” She moved toward him. “Let me see. You should have told the servants to get ice. I’ll send for ice.”
He took a step back. “I did not bump my head,” he said. “I know to keep my head down. I’ve been under beds before, though not in recent memory. I remained there utterly still and quiet while a pair of servants made good use of the master’s absence by fornicating against his wardrobe. In which Fenwick had secreted himself.” He turned away, walked to the decanter, and refilled his glass.
She watched him while her imagination painted the scene he’d described. She knew about these things. She’d seen pictures. But she’d looked at them coolly, feeling mainly curiosity.
She tried to make her mind detached, but it made its own exhibition, of lurid pictures of him, naked, pushing into her and making her feel things she’d never felt before, such wild emotions, so pleasurable as to hurt, almost.
She went hot everywhere, remembering. She wanted to run across the room and open a window and lean out of it.
But no, that wasn’t quite true.
She wanted to run to him and make him do it again, make him touch her and kiss her and love her and possess her and wipe out the memory of Adderley’s insinuating voice and double entendres, and his face and body too close to hers.
She made herself look sympathetic but amused. “But you weren’t detected,” she said.
“I could have started singing God Save the King, and I doubt they’d have noticed,” he said. “Luckily the position isn’t easy to maintain. They weren’t long about it. They had a good laugh after, and went out—maybe to repeat the performance in the next room. I didn’t stay to find out. I unearthed Fenwick and we made ourselves scarce.” He drank.
She said nothing, only watched his hands, and the motion of his shoulders and the way the light played on the bones of his face.
“I had to climb down the drainpipe,” he said, into the silence. “After which Fenwick administered a critique of my mode of descent.”
She found her tongue. “I do think he—”
“It was a complete waste of time!” He slammed the glass down
on the tray, making the decanter bounce. “Adderley has nothing in his house that we don’t already know about. It was exactly as I told you it would be. The sorts of things you hoped to find are the things imaginary people find in stories. In make-believe. This isn’t bloody make-believe!”
Chapter Fifteen
Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!
—Robert Herrick, On Julia’s Clothes, 1648
Her head went back as though he’d struck her. Then Longmore wanted to hit something, preferably himself.
He was behaving like an idiot because he’d let himself get into a maddened state—and for that he’d only himself to blame.
He was the one who’d insisted on their meeting here after they’d completed their respective assignments. This way, he’d reasoned, if Adderley tried to make a nuisance of himself by following Madame to her rooms, Longmore would be on the spot to send the swine about his business.
Longmore was on the spot, and had been for what had felt like months. By Society’s standards, the hour wasn’t late. It seemed very late, though, for a woman to return from a dinner engagement that was supposed to last two hours.
Then, to return looking like that.
She’d sailed in, hips swaying, smile confident—the smile of a woman who knows she’s desired and believes desire is her due. She’d made her entrance as a queen might do, or some mythical being, a goddess borne on a cloud or a zephyr. And she’d seemed to walk in a cloud in that dress, a mad confection of layer upon shimmering layer, deep pink and black and satin and lace. In the gaslight’s glow the rose silk took on the cast of a stormy sunset. But not an English sunset. It called to mind a wild, magical sunset in the Tuscan mountains, when the mountain breeze had wafted about his head, carrying the intoxicating fragrance of lavender and jasmine.
He’d watched her strip off her gloves, and he’d felt his pulse accelerate. He’d watched her unfasten the black mantle that hung over her shoulders, the lustrous fabric moving sinuously and sounding like a hundred voices whispering. Its lace trim veiled the rosy front of her dress. In his mind’s eye he saw what lay underneath and underneath and underneath, all the way to her skin, and he knew what that felt like. He knew what it was like to feel the velvety curve of her belly under his hands.
He’d watched her drop the little mantle, and he’d caught his breath. The dress’s neckline was shockingly low, barely containing the silken swell of her breasts.
All that.
Adderley had seen all that.
And the realization had made him wild. Then he was furious with her for making him wild and with himself for letting it happen. He was behaving like one demented and like a brute besides—oh, and a schoolboy, too.
“Confound it, Sophy,” he said.
Pink washed her cheeks. “I can’t believe what a fuss you’re making about this,” she said. “You’re the man who cares nothing for what anybody says. You’re the man who laughs at convention, and thrives on risk, the more dangerous the better. This is the sort of thing you’d do as a practical joke.”
“It wasn’t a joke.”
“Well, then, I should like to know what happened to your sense of humor,” she said. “I should like to know what happened to your sense of adventure. I should like to know—”
“You tell me,” he said. “What the devil do I care what you do? Why should I care?”
“You’re making no sense,” she said.
“No, I’m not, and most especially not to myself. I’ve never been so . . .”
Never been so what? What was he if not himself? What was this?
But his mouth went on talking, lagging behind the thinking, as usual. “I let myself be drawn into these mad schemes of yours . . . and it’s amusing. Then it isn’t. Then I can’t enjoy myself. I couldn’t even enjoy housebreaking with the Infant Felon Fenwick because the entire time, every minute while I read the lecher’s boring bills and all the pitiful dunning letters from his creditors—all that time I was thinking what a two-faced cur he was, and how desperate he had to be, to trap my sister, of all women . . . and there you were, so sure you could manage him—”
“I can!” she said. “I did! How can you be so thick?” She kept her voice low, but the throbbing vehemence in it was clear enough. “I know he hasn’t any conscience. I know he cares nothing about women: They’re sport. Even snaring a wife in the most underhand way isn’t unsporting to him. It’s part of the game. To him it’s no different than dice or cards or horse races. I know all of that. I can see him more clearly than you can. And you think I’m in any danger from him—from him of all men? You think I would let him seduce me? How can you be such an idiot?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” he said. “How can I be such a fool as to ruin a perfectly good evening worrying about you? And now—when there’s plenty of perfectly good evening remaining, I waste more of it quarreling with you.”
Her color rose, and her blue eyes narrowed to angry blue slits. She launched into low, furious French: “It’s true. A great waste of time for both of us. Well, let me detain you no longer, my lord.”
She marched to the door, the satin whispering furiously, the very bows seeming to tremble with rage. She pulled it open, much to the surprise of the footman who’d been leaning in, trying to listen at the keyhole.
“Bonsoir, monsieur,” she said, snapping out each syllable.
“Bonsoir, madame,” Longmore said. He collected his hat and gloves and stalked to the door.
She stood, chin aloft, gazing up defiantly at him. Blue fire lit her eyes. Hot color burned her cheeks and neck. The fire tinged her creamy bosom, rising and falling fast.
Longmore reached past her and slammed the door in the footman’s face.
He threw down his gloves and hat.
He scooped her up in his arms.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “You won’t play the masterful male with me, you wretched man.” She hit his chest. “Put me down.” Her voice was cold and hard.
“Make me,” he said, his voice colder and harder.
She wriggled. “I’ll scream.”
“No, you won’t.” He kissed her, and not gently, but with all the frustration and anger and fear that had been roiling inside him all this day and night.
She went on squirming and struggling—and not gently, either—but he felt her mouth give way long before her body did. The rest was only pique. He was piqued, too, and that wasn’t the half of it.
He carried her to the sofa. He broke the kiss and said, “I’m leaving now.”
“Good,” she said. “It’s about time.”
He dropped her onto the sofa, and the satin whooshed and hissed at him as she struggled to pull herself up to a sitting position.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“Good riddance,” she said.
He peeled off his coat. “I’m never coming back,” he said.
“Never is too soon,” she said.
He untied his neckcloth. “I’m done with you.”
“I was done with you ages ago.”
He started to unfasten his trousers. He kept his hands very steady. He didn’t hurry. One. Button. At. A. Time.
She watched him through narrowed eyes. “You’re dreaming,” she said. “Never. Never in a million years.”
“I’m not even going to take off your clothes,” he said. “It’s too much bother.”
“You don’t deserve to see my beautiful body,” she said.
“It’s not that beautiful,” he said.
“Yes, it is—and much more beautiful than yours—which I never want to see again, ever—especially that part.” Her gaze slid to his trouser front, where his excited cock throbbed against the flap. It didn’t know the difference between fighting with a woman a
nd rogering her. Neither did he, at the moment.
She edged back on the sofa.
He took hold of her feet and pulled her back down. He crawled over her and stuffed a velvet cushion under her head.
She said, “I won’t put up with this.” Her mouth turned down, all petulance. “You’re abominable, the worst, thickest, most insensitive cretin to contaminate the earth by being born.”
He bent and kissed each down-tilting corner of her mouth. Then he kissed her full on the lips, deeply and hungrily. He was still in a turmoil, but that mattered less and less. He was tired of thinking, worrying.
He’d made her lose her temper, and she was heated and aggravated, as he was. He wasn’t at all sure what their trouble was, but that didn’t seem very important.
She brought her hands up and grabbed his shoulders and tried to shake him, which was absurd. She did such ridiculous things, like trying to manhandle him. She might as well try to wrestle a house. He felt her hands move upward, closing about his throat, as though she thought she could choke him. But then she rose a little, and her arms went round his neck, and she pulled, and down he went, without a fight.
Down he went, into a rich atmosphere of Sophy: her scent and the feel of her soft, curving body under his and the taste of her and the sound of her, satin whispering against lace, petticoats rustling, the delicious music of her dress.
He drew his hand down along the curves of her neck and shoulders and down over the ripe swell of her breast, barely contained behind the low neckline. She arched back with a sigh and a “damn you.” He slid his hand under the neckline and squeezed and kneaded one perfect, silken breast. Then the other. She writhed under him, her hips moving in undisguised enjoyment.
Undisguised.
Honest.
He slid his mouth from hers and made a path of kisses along the way his hand had gone, over the curve of her throat and shoulder and breast. He tugged the bodice down and suckled, and between moans she told him in French that he was despicable, a wicked man, and she would never, never succumb to him, no matter how much he begged and pleaded.
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