Cecilia Grant - [Blackshear Family 03]

by A Woman Entangled

  A clanking sounded as the fire tool was put back; then the scrape of the screen on the hearth. A footstep or three, and the room dimmed as one lamp and then another went out. A faint light remained; that would be the maid’s candle. Shadows slid across the wall suddenly as her shoes resumed their purposeful tread on the carpet.

  Nick held his breath and wove his fingers with Miss Westbrook’s. Ruin or reprieve, they would meet it together. Within seconds. Within heartbeats. Within the few remaining steps that would carry the maid from carpet to door.

  There was a split second of awful illumination as the candle came to a place where its light fell over the sofa’s back, and in that instant he could see that Miss Westbrook had her eyes shut tight. But the candle moved on without pause. Of a sudden it was on the other side of the still-open door, then the door was swinging closed, and an instant later the hardware clicked into place, a sound of such sweet finality as he’d never imagined.

  He let out his breath, listening to the footsteps recede. “Good God.” His words hung in the room’s utter darkness. “Pardon my language. That can’t have been more than two minutes, but deuced if it didn’t feel like half a lifetime.” Already he was getting his feet under him, disentangling his fingers from hers that he could properly help her to stand. “Now let’s get you back to your aunt before anything else can happen to put your reputation at risk.” He found a hold on her elbow and started to rise.

  She tried to rise with him. She set one hand on the sofa’s back and gripped his upper arm with the other, but she’d barely come up from a crouch before her knees gave way.

  He caught her with both arms, just in time to stop her tumbling to the floor. She was shaking all over, like a shorn lamb caught in an out-of-season hailstorm. “I’m sorry,” she said, and the two words bore an ocean’s worth of mortification. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for.” Carefully he knelt, lowering her likewise to the stability of her knees. “Take a moment to recover yourself. It’s no wonder your knees are weak, after such an alarm.” If she were another woman, one with whom he claimed privileges of intimacy, he might have clasped her to his chest until the trembling stopped.

  Instead his hands found their way to her elbows again as he eased his body clear of hers. “And please, let me be the one to apologize. I was a terrible hypocrite, taking you into a room alone to lecture to you on prudence and propriety. I wouldn’t have soon forgiven myself, if …” But perhaps it was better not to voice their near-missed fate aloud. “At all events, we’re out of it safely. No harm was done. You’ll be well again in a minute, I’m sure.”

  He bent and pressed his lips to the crest of her forehead, lightly, in reassurance. It wasn’t so forward as an embrace, and truly he wouldn’t have done even this much but for the darkness of the room, and the grueling few moments they’d just borne together, and the fact that she was shaking, still, and gripping his coat sleeves like a woman in deep water who didn’t know how to swim.

  Her breath caught at the touch of his lips. Her grip on him changed, fingers spreading over his upper arms to hold on to him, instead of the fabric of his coat. He could feel, in the air between them, how her face tilted to peer up at him, though of course she wouldn’t be able to see.

  He’d stopped breathing, too. He hadn’t intended … suddenly it didn’t matter what he’d intended. Here she was, angling herself to him and waiting, unmistakably, for him to do whatever he was going to do next.

  Don’t. She’s had a shock. She doesn’t know what she’s about.

  Neither did he, altogether. He bent in. Slowly, to give her every chance to stop him. To give himself every chance to recover his reason and halt this.

  His lips met with her cheek, encountered the firm, elegant structure of the cheekbone underneath. Her hands tightened on his arms. He felt her breath start up again, a ragged warmth ghosting against the underside of his jaw.

  He stayed where he was for a moment, lips hovering a fraction of an inch from her cheek; chin and neck reveling in the caress of her exhalations.

  He would have sworn on his soul that he’d stopped wanting this. And in truth he’d never, even in his most besotted days, wanted this. He’d pictured embracing her in a sunlit parlor where he might drink in her beauty between kisses, with a perfect understanding of what their future would be. He’d imagined a wedding night with all the candles lit, her body a lambent wonder atop the covers, her unguarded face telling him all the things she might be too shy to voice aloud. Not once had his daydreams wandered to wordless, heedless scandal in a pitch-dark room.

  His hand traveled up her arm, kid against skin, kid against muslin, and then he let his fingertips brush up the side of her neck. She shivered again, and he knew this time it had nothing to do with fear.

  Fool. Don’t linger here. Get her on her feet and get her back to the ballroom. Yes, the responsible part of his brain was still in fine working order. No doubt it would whip up a fearsome and thorough reprimand in the time it took him to finish what he could not now refrain from starting. He set his palm to the corner of her jaw, and found her mouth with his.

  IF SOMEONE walked in on them now, she’d deserve every last whisper of scandal and disgrace. Because Heaven help her, she’d wanted this. From the moment that door had clicked shut, leaving the room in darkness, she’d felt overpowered by sentiments she couldn’t name—and then he’d kissed her forehead, and all the wild sentiments had coalesced into one simple primal thing.

  This. Him. The feel of his mouth against hers. She held tight to his arms and let him tilt her face to an angle he liked better, and gave herself up to whatever came next.

  It was the alarm, surely, the fright of her near brush with ruin that had loosened her hold on reason and shrunk her world down to the touch of his hands on her elbows, the ardent vibration of his apologizing voice, the familiar clean smell of his soap.

  And now it was one dizzying sensation after the next. The smooth kid of his glove against her skin. His arm muscles bunching to fill her grip. The sound of his unsteady breaths in concert with hers … and the slow, thorough exploration of her mouth by his.

  Or not thorough, really; not yet. This careful angling of his face and then hers, the delicate attention paid to every full place and every spare place across both her lips was just the beginning, she knew. No girl at school had ever been kissed, but Penelope Towne had a married sister who was apparently very forthcoming with details.

  So she knew. Soon he would wish to impose his tongue into her mouth, if she didn’t stop him. And then his hands would roam, forsaking the elbow and cheek where they now rested in favor of improper parts and more improper parts. That would shock her, and charge her with the sudden strength to pull away and stop this madness.

  She ought to stop it now, of course. She oughtn’t to have let it begin. But his mouth on hers was an intoxication, a sweet, insidious liquor that left her light-headed and swaying, so that she had to feel about for a firmer grip on his arms.

  She moved her lips, a bit. Surely a woman wasn’t meant to just sit like a statue, accepting a man’s attentions without any answer. So, though it made her feel both brazen and dreadfully unsure, she dragged her mouth, feather-light as she could make it, from one corner of his lower lip to the other.

  He made a sound in his throat. It was unplanned, uncultured, unlike any utterance she’d ever heard from a man, and it struck up a hundred small fires in her. Maybe she wouldn’t prevent the imposition of his tongue. Maybe she’d let his hands wander, especially if it meant he might make that sound again.

  As though he’d overheard her thoughts, his left hand came away from her elbow. Her breath hung arrested as she waited to see where the hand would settle. Men started at the waist sometimes, Penelope had said, and worked their surreptitious way up the ribs. A crude man might go straight for a woman’s derriere, and press her tight against him to gratify his arousal.

  Mr. Blackshear’s hand, clever a
nd subtle, did neither of those things. It drifted to the side of her head, thumb on the sensitive hollow beneath her ear, and his kid-covered fingertips began to play, subtle as a whisper, at the back of her neck where her hair began.

  Good Lord in Heaven. Penelope had said nothing of this. Maybe it was a trick her sister’s husband had never learned. Poor husband, then, and poor sister, because this exquisite touch at her nape, in tandem with the sly restraint of his kiss, was enough to liquefy her bones and evaporate her will altogether. She exhaled, and the breath came out as a sigh, languorous and wanton.

  His own breath caught. His fingers stilled and his mouth paused in its artful siege.

  Her heartbeat thundered in the silence. Now he would throw off his restraint. He would crush her to him. She’d feel his tongue and his teeth. He would lay her down on the floor and take such liberties as an experienced man knew how to take, and she would not offer the slightest resistance.

  But he stayed as he was, fingers unmoving, mouth an agonizing half inch from hers. Then he settled his hands on her shoulders and tipped his face so their foreheads met. His upper arms, where she still clutched, rose and fell on a long breath.

  “You see how easily these things can happen.” His voice betrayed the effort by which he mastered himself. He would have liked to lay her down on the floor, she could tell. “Even a man with honorable intentions … Even a lady whose ambitions depend upon her virtue … Even two people who are no more than friends by daylight can fall prey to the influence of a secret dark room. That’s why you must avoid ever being alone with a man in such settings. Even a man you deem trustworthy.” His hands left her shoulders and he shifted all his weight away, perhaps back onto his heels. She had to let go of his arms.

  “I’m not sorry.” Almost certainly she would be, once the dizziness wore off and she was left to reckon with her own behavior. But before regret set in, she wanted him to know. “I’m not sorry this happened, Nick.” She was all reckless courage now, and to use his name seemed only right.

  “You will be. Katherina.” He made her name into a sentence of its own, as if it were too rarefied to mix with common words. “If not this evening, then one day when you’ve met a man toward whom your heart inclines, and you wish he could have been the first to kiss you.”

  She couldn’t muster up any reply. It seemed reasonable and probably true, what he said, and still she was a hundred miles from sorry.

  And how did he know she hadn’t been kissed before? Did he simply credit her with that much virtue, or had her response to him been tellingly inept? Her hand rose, reflexively, to touch her fingers to her lips.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as though that could possibly be what she wanted to hear. “I owe you a thorough apology for my behavior, but I think it’s better we leave this room without the delay that would entail. We’ve goaded fate quite enough for one night. Can you stand now?”

  “Of course.” She grasped the back of the sofa and let pride and self-preservation push her to her feet; no groping about to see whether he was offering her a hand. She might have liked another minute to recover her steadiness, but he was right in urging a prompt exit. Too, if they lingered, perhaps he’d take the opportunity to tell her at greater length how much he regretted having kissed her.

  And even though regret was surely the correct attitude for both of them, and she would almost certainly arrive at that state herself before too long, it stung to see him so quickly recovered from the event that had turned her thoroughly inside out.

  It’s different for men. A reminder fitted to so many occasions. He’d kissed women before, she must recall. There was no novelty in it for him.

  “I’ll see whether there are many people on the terrace. If not, you should be able to go back that way without being noticed.” He was all business, planning the exact devices by which they would behave as though nothing had happened between them tonight. “I’ll go by way of the halls.”

  “Yes. That will be prudent.” Shame stirred in the pit of her stomach, preparing to rise from its inopportune slumber. She oughtn’t to have told him she wasn’t sorry. She oughtn’t to have called him by his Christian name. That much, at least, she could already begin to regret.

  She didn’t say another word as he led her to the French doors; nor after he’d stepped out and come back to tell her the way was clear. Speech would only delay her further, and after all, what more was there to say? She whisked past him through the doors and took a straight path along the terrace, never looking back to see whether he watched her go.

  HE SELDOM thought of the day that he’d lost hope of winning her. As tales of romantic disappointment went, it had to be one of the most prosaic any man could claim. No one would ever buy tickets to see it acted out on stage.

  Nick turned over in his bed. Sleep eluded him still. Partly because of an importunate erection that he would not, on principle, touch. Partly because what happened at the rout tonight had woken every memory of his foolish youthful hopes and mistakes, particularly the ignominious way it all came to an end.

  He’d been calling in Gower Street for a month or so—he cringed to recall that he’d felt so sure, so soon, of his feelings for a lady he could scarcely have known, but thus it had been. He’d been six and twenty, in thrall to her beauty, his admiration no doubt mixed up with the regard he felt for her father and his infatuation with the family as a whole. At that time in his life he could imagine little finer than to marry a barrister’s daughter, well spoken and lovely to behold, whose parents would smile upon his suit.

  He’d always been careful with his shillings, but he’d laid out that morning for roses. A good big bunch of them, in a golden sort of yellow—he’d gone to four different market stalls before he’d found the right shade—reminiscent of her hair. And he’d written her a note, and copied it in his best hand on a pristine sheet of foolscap, expressing his regard for her and hinting at the hopes that such regard must necessarily engender. Quite a bit of effort he’d put into that note, arriving finally at an optimal balance of sincerity and circumspection: there’d be no danger of her missing his meaning, but also nothing to embarrass her, in the event his courtship was not welcome.

  He hadn’t been entirely stupid. He’d recognized the possibility of failure. But as he walked up Gower Street, roses in hand, recipient of approving smiles from every good-hearted passerby who liked the sight of a courting young man, that possibility seemed more and more distant, crowded almost to the border of impossibility by a prodigious bloating of hope.

  Hope. He turned over again, lifting the sheets clear to avoid unhelpful friction. Well, why shouldn’t he have been hopeful in those days? He’d been a handsome young man with bright prospects and a good family. She’d given every sign of liking him—only later had he been observant enough to notice that she treated every male caller with that same vibrant graciousness.

  The ax had fallen with a swiftness that he’d eventually see was meant to be merciful. All four Westbrook daughters were in the parlor when he was shown in. Miss Westbrook’s eyes fixed immediately on the flowers and she waited only for his smile, and his first step toward her, before springing to her feet and saying something about how pretty the roses were and how good it was of Mr. Blackshear to bring flowers to them. And before he could think of how to tactfully correct her, she plucked out his note and handed it to him, pretending to think it was a paper of his that had accidentally got mixed up among the flowers.

  The rush of incredulity, as he took back the note, had not even left room for mortification.

  “It’s very vexing, isn’t it, to have to make do with poor paper.” That was the utterance most vivid in his memory. Vexing. She’d gone on to say something about how when she married a gentleman of rank and fortune, she would have linen-fiber paper for all her correspondence. By the time she’d finished saying it, his incredulity had made way for a breathtaking surge of humiliation. He hadn’t known his paper was wanting in quality. To copy over his note on a fresh she
et had been a rare extravagance for a man of his means and habits. He’d been proud of the result.

  He’d gone straight home and tossed his note in the fire. And even after he’d girded himself and resumed calling on the family, and found himself capable of friendship with her, and eventually put the embarrassment behind him, he’d never once pleasured himself to thoughts of her since that day.

  It would just be pathetic, wouldn’t it, spinning those fancies round a woman who’d made her lack of interest so plain. A man had to have a little pride.

  I’m not sorry this happened, Nick. He shut his eyes against the memory. From the moment he’d watched her walk out of that darkened room, those words, the fervent voice in which she’d said them, wreathed round his other thoughts like a cat round his ankles, demanding notice.

  I’m not sorry. She’d sounded like passion incarnate. So blazingly sure of herself. So utterly unhindered by shame.

  He swept his palm across his stomach, a restless substitution for the act he would not commit. The muscles there were all rigid with tension, with unruly appetite.

  She wasn’t the only woman in the world who could be sure of herself and unhindered by shame. He knew several such women on an intimate basis. He ought to call on one. It had been too long. That was the real problem, now that he thought of it.

  He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. He’d lit a candle for reading when he’d gone to bed. He hadn’t read a word.

  God, the way she’d sighed when he’d worked his fingertips at the back of her neck! How far would she have let him go, drugged as she was by fleshly delight, her modesty lulled by the dark? What if he’d traced with his fingers down over the little rises and hollows of her vertebrae; feathered them across her collarbones; found his way under the edge of her bodice? A caress at the nape was nothing to what he could have shown her, given time and her acquiescence.