A Counterfeit Courtesan
Page 18
She pulled back a fraction. “Ellis—”
He cut her off with another kiss. “Not yet,” he murmured against her mouth.
Perhaps she should have pushed the issue. Perhaps she should have demanded they speak further about what drove him so hard to catch Leonard. Why he looked so…lost…when he told her that everything would be over once he did.
But she couldn’t demand. Not when he tilted his head and the kiss deepened. Not when his fingers bunched in the silky fabric of her dress and lit her on fire.
The tenor of the kiss shifted slowly. It had started out gentle, explorative, but the need in it shifted the longer they stood there. His lips grew rougher, more insistent, and she met him with her own pulsing desire. He grunted out pleasure as she clutched his lapels and tugged, smashing herself tighter against him.
He pivoted, spinning her so that her back was to the sideboard. Leaning into her so she felt the length of his body and his cock pressed firmly to her stomach. She wanted them both so very badly.
She snaked a hand into the tight space, letting her palm stroke over him through his trousers, feeling him shudder when she did so. He yanked away and stared down at her. His expression was fierce, no longer the playful lothario with all the time in the world to seduce and pleasure.
No, this Ellis was a man driven. A man who feared to lose. A man who needed to forget, and she was willing to be the one who helped him do just that. He leaned in, his mouth finding her throat, sucking there, biting gently, and she arched at the unexpected flash of pain amidst the pleasure.
Pain she actually liked, given the way her sex throbbed in response. He smiled at the jolt of her body, licking where he had nipped, and then his hands came to her hips and he lifted her up onto the sideboard.
Glasses rolled away, the bottle of whisky rocked, and she squealed at the unexpected movement. “Ellis, we’re making a mess,” she protested.
“Not yet we aren’t,” he grumbled, and then he cupped the back of her head and drew her down for another kiss. She grabbed his cheeks, her fingers fanning across the rough evidence of beginnings of a beard. She lost herself in full lips, a rough tongue, the way he whispered her name as he reached down to unfasten his trousers with one hand even as he cupped her head with the other.
The front fall dropped away and she broke the kiss to look down at him, already hard. Already waiting. She could see now the value of being placed on the sideboard. It aligned them perfectly.
She worried her lip before she parted her legs, before she gathered her skirt into her fists and slowly pulled it up. He shook his head, his cheeks bright with color, his eyes dark with determination.
He stepped into the space she’d created and placed his hands on her thighs. He slid them upward and the fine fabric glided up, revealing her stockings and her drawers.
“Wider,” he ordered.
She didn’t have to ask what he meant. She pushed her legs farther apart and the drawers gaped at the slit. He nodded, his gaze transfixed on the pink of her sex as it peeked out from the fabric.
He cupped her hips and dragged her forward, sliding her to the very edge of the table. Then he leaned up to kiss her as his hand came between her legs. His fingers tiptoed into the fold of the fabric of her drawers and brushed her sex.
She was wet. She already knew that, but he smiled against her mouth as he discovered it. He maneuvered her a fraction more, matching the head of his cock to her entrance, and then he surged forward.
She was still a bit tender from the first time, but the pain was gone as he seated himself in one wild and reckless thrust. She gripped her thighs around his waist with a cry and clung to his shoulders.
That seemed to be the permission he needed because he began to move in earnest. He thrust, circling his hips on every movement, grinding against her so that the pleasure mounted and mounted every time. She dipped her head back and he took advantage, tracing patterns on her exposed skin with the tip of his tongue.
And he took. His fingers dug into her body through her dress, the table creaked and the bottles shivered with every hard, powerful thrust. Harder and harder, building them both toward release. She reached for it, rising to meet him, gasping for breath as the waves of pleasure built in her. And just when she felt she might not be able to take anymore, he pressed his hand between them again and circled her clitoris with his thumb, ’round and ’round, harder and harder.
She cried out his name, jerking against him as sensation overtook reason. Pleasure tore through her, out of control and wild, and she chased it, surrendering as he dragged her into madness. But at least she wasn’t alone. His face contorted as he watched her come, his fingers digging harder and the cords of tendons in his neck tightening as he reached his own edge.
When he fell, he roared and jerked from her body to come into his hand. They were gasping together as he rested his forehead on hers, wordless and soundless except for the sharp intake of their breath that slowly matched.
She wanted this to last forever. This abandonment of the rules she had followed her entire life. She wanted to chase him into oblivion, to stop worrying over all she had to change and repair and instead give into all the pleasures the world had to offer. Chiefly the man who was now stepping away from the circle of her hips.
He stared down at her as he wiped his palm on a handkerchief and then rebuttoned his trousers. “Too much?” he asked, his voice rough from passion.
She shook her head as she smoothed her dress back down and carefully pushed down from the edge of the sideboard. “Exactly what you promised me, I think,” she said. “And exactly what I wanted, Ellis. You didn’t take advantage.”
He rubbed a hand through his hair as he walked away. “Angel, I have been taking advantage from the first moment I laid eyes on you. Let’s not pretend otherwise.”
“Why do you do that?” she asked, and all the old habits rose up in her.
He pivoted and speared her with a glare she supposed was made to make her nervous. It didn’t. She saw it for the shield it was now. “Take advantage?” he growled. “Because I’m a bad person, Juliana.”
Her lips parted. “No, do that. Talk about yourself so meanly. You have certainly done some lamentable things, I won’t pretend you haven’t. But you clearly aren’t a bad person. I’ve heard how you protected Rook as a child. A bad person would have simply left him to his fate. You are a man who did the best he could with the circumstances he was thrust into.”
“And why do you always try to make me into a hero?” he asked, folding his arms across that wonderful broad chest. “I’m not one of your projects, angel.”
She flinched at the harshness of his tone. “Then what are you? If not a villain and not someone who can be helped, what are you, Ellis Maitland? Why are you so desperate when it comes to finding Winston Leonard? Why are you so driven?”
He stared at her and briefly she thought he might simply kick her out of his house. Send her home in his carriage to explain herself to her angry family. Prove that he was the bastard he so desperately wanted her to believe he was.
But then his expression softened a fraction. She saw the real man behind the mask. The one she liked so much when he allowed her a glimpse. The one who she knew instinctively could be and was more than what he pretended to be with his false smiles and lies.
She saw Ellis, not Handsome.
“Do you know I have a brother?” he asked.
She swallowed because she hadn’t actually thought he would open up to her. Now that he was, she feared moving too quickly and scaring him away from this moment.
“Yes,” she said softly. “In fact…I’ve seen him.”
“What?” he gasped his eyes going wide. “When would you have seen him?”
“At the Donville Masquerade,” she admitted. “The night you first kissed me. I was storming across the room, ready to tell you to leave me alone, and a man stepped up to you.”
His brow wrinkled. “And how could you know he was my brother?”
“You are almost too observant,” Ellis muttered. Then his frown turned down. “Rook told your family about Gabriel. Of course he did. It seems all my secrets belong to the Shelley Sisters and Harcourt now.”
“Not all,” she said. “I want you to tell me about him.”
Ellis let out a long breath and crossed to the settee. He sank into the cushions and shook his head. “My father died when I was very young. He was in trade, just a man who delivered ale to the inns and taverns. My mother was a barmaid in one. They married when she got with child. Me.”
“Were they…happy?”
“They survived,” he said with a shrug. “That was something. Until he didn’t. There was an accident. He was crushed when a rope holding some barrels broke.”
She jerked a hand to her lips. His tone was even and breezy. His eyes, though. That empty, haunted look was something she would never forget.
“How old were you?” she whispered.
“I was eight,” he said. “And I mourned him. Perhaps she did too, but she had to eat, didn’t she? Had to live. She found herself a new husband within a few months. The man who owned that same tavern she worked in. A bastard named Young. They became the Young family, and I…well, I was a Maitland. A reminder to that bastard that my mother had once been with someone else. He hated me and he let me know it.”
Her brow wrinkled. “Ellis,” she whispered as pain flowed through her. Pain on behalf of this man as a child. On behalf of him now as he sat on the settee and stared straight ahead like he was in another world. Another time.
Perhaps he was.
“I could see the writing on the wall as he got more hostile to me. I started running the street to avoid him. And by nine, I was out entirely. On my own.”
“You want to sound proud of that,” she whispered as she slowly moved to him and took a spot perched on the other side of the settee. He glanced at her as she took it, his gaze haunted. “But you never should have been put in that position. Did your mother not fight for you?”
The corner of his lips tilted slightly. “My mother was built to fight for herself, not me. She was happy to have peace in her home, I suppose. I visited from time to time when he was out. And I don’t regret it. I met Marcus Rivers on the street. He was working for a true bastard, one who almost killed him. But he helped me learn the ways. I was good at pickpocketing and running the game.”
She frowned. “You’re clever. I’m sure you were very good at it.”
“Then Rook had to run, too,” he said, his lips pursing. “So I took him in. I was ten by then. We started organizing. Doling out work to the other boys, making a real place for ourselves, so we didn’t have to depend on men who had just as bad intentions as my mother’s husband or Rook’s mother’s ‘protector.’”
“You educated yourself,” she said as things became clearer.
“Got that street accent out by force,” he agreed with a slight smile. “It made it easier to slip into their world when we needed to. Rook taught me to read. I devoured everything I could steal. And I brought myself up in the world, out of the shit. And I am proud of it.”
She saw that was true. He was proud of what he’d overcome, and rightly so. But there was also regret there, deep in those glittering eyes. Regret and loss and a tiny wish that he hadn’t had to escape so much.
“So how did the brother enter the picture?” she asked.
He blinked as if he’d forgotten how this story began. He worried his hands in his lap. “I was sixteen when I came home one day to slip my Ma some funds and found her swollen up with a baby. I was so angry. So angry she would make a new family with a man who—”
He pushed to his feet and stalked off to the fire. He stood there, his shoulders ramrod straight, his hands clenched at his sides.
“A man who hurt you,” she whispered. “Who didn’t give a damn.”
He nodded. “Yes. It was a slap in the face of everything I’d told everyone that I was over it. That I didn’t care. But there it was. Things were bad, she needed help. She cried and begged, and what could I do?”
She flinched, for that was the same way she’d justified smoothing over all her father’s messes over the years. What could she do but help?
And yet when Ellis said it, she wanted to save him from that notion. To take away guilt that his mother hadn’t earned. To take away pain.
“I kept coming back, sneaking her money and things I stole for this horrible baby I hated. Except when you see a baby…how can you hate him? To keep hating him would have made me as bad as his bastard of a father. I looked into his eyes, Gabriel’s eyes that are just like mine, and I…”
“You loved him,” she whispered as she thought of how many times she’d looked into her own sisters’ eyes over the years and felt that swell of love and connection and adoration.
He nodded slowly and his expression crumpled. “It was the damnedest thing.” He sighed. “I kept coming back. Visiting when Gabriel’s father wasn’t around. Bringing him gifts and money for what he needed when that bastard she married couldn’t or wouldn’t provide. I paid for his education.”
She smiled. “When I saw you, it was obvious you two are still close.”
“Not too close,” he murmured. “Being near me could be poison. He already had a brief time when he got ideas. He wanted to run with Rook and me, but I wouldn’t let him. No, he’s going to be a barrister. Or a merchant. I’m making sure he has anything he needs. I’ll do anything that will give him a good life.”
“Anything,” she repeated slowly, for the way he said it was so forceful. She saw the way Ellis’s chin hitched up, like he was ready to defend that desire for his brother’s future to the death. A fissure of worry made its way through her. “What does that mean, Ellis? Because I don’t like the way you say it.”
Ellis turned his face, and the fire glowed against his skin as he stared down into the flames. “When Harcourt’s brother Solomon and I double crossed Leonard a year ago, his rage was palpable. He killed Solomon. He has chased me across England, threatening and destroying anything in his path. Rook was safe, since he bolted the moment he knew a man had died due to my bad decisions.”
“When did Leonard find out about your brother?” she asked, clenching her hands in front of her as she stood.
He looked at her, and there was the desperation, only this time it wasn’t a fleeting moment of the emotion. No, all of it was utterly alive and utterly terrifying on his beautiful face. She saw his deepest fears and his most painful regrets. She saw his guilt. His shame.
And all she wanted to do was comfort him. But when she moved toward him, he held up a hand to stave her off.
“A few months ago,” Ellis whispered. “It took him a while because we don’t share a last name. Once he knew, he had my brother roughed up by his lackeys. And he told me if I didn’t get him what he wanted, he’d do worse. Worse than what he’d done to Solomon even.”
She flinched. Torture. The monster was talking about torture before he killed. “Oh, Ellis.”
“I want to be clear,” Ellis said, his jaw clenching. “That’s when I went after your sister. I went after Anne to get to Harcourt because I would rather hurt them than let Gabriel suffer for the crime of being my blood.”
Her lips parted at the way his voice broke when he said those terrible words. He bent his head, and now she couldn’t help but go to him. She clasped his hand between hers gently and lifted it to her lips.
As she brushed her mouth against his knuckles, she sighed. “You didn’t hurt them, not really. You freed Harcourt to marry Thomasina, who is the one he truly loved. And you took Anne…that was wrong. But if you hadn’t, she never would h
ave met Rook, and both of them would be lonelier and emptier for it.”
He shook her hand away. “I don’t want your false absolution,” he snapped. “Don’t you see? You cannot make me into a hero. I’m the villain of this piece, Juliana. Even if I make you come.”
She flinched. “You think it’s because of the pleasure that I have empathy for you? I can make myself come, Ellis. I’ve been doing a perfectly good job of it for a while now.”
His eyes widened, but he folded his arms and she felt the wall come down between them. The one she knew now was a way to protect himself, and to protect her. But she didn’t want the wall. She didn’t want to be protected because what he was turned out to be exactly what she wanted.
She recognized, in that moment charged with frustration and desperation and pain, that she loved this man. She loved Ellis Maitland, despite all he’d done and because of all he was. She loved him.
And she didn’t want to lose him. Not now, not in a week, not ever. She wanted a life with him that was like the one her sisters had found with their husbands. She wanted the private smiles and the gentle support and the loving whispers.
She wanted to save him, not just because that was her nature, but because he was worth saving. And so was she, or at least the version of herself she had found when she spent time with him.
“I feel for you,” she continued, this time gently, because she realized she was dealing with fear now, disguised as anger, and one had to be careful with fear. Tender. “Because I understand the drive to protect those around you at all costs. I’ve done it all my life. You and I are so alike.”
He held her gaze for a moment, his nostrils flaring, his fingers flexing like he wanted to reach for her. She thought he might. Then he clenched them at his sides and turned away.
“No, we aren’t,” he said.
“Yes, we are,” she insisted, and moved to catch his arm and turn him back to face her. “We are. And now everything is changing for us both. Everything is threatened, and we are drowning because neither one of us knows what to do.” She felt the tears in her eyes and didn’t fight it as one slid down her cheek. “I don’t know what to do and I am lost, Ellis. I’m lost.”