She desperately hoped he couldn’t read her thoughts. Despite all the awkwardness between them, Strathmore was correct in his assessment of her situation, that she needed him more than he needed her. He waited for her to continue. “You are quite right,” she admitted finally, “I do need you. Your assistance,” she amended quickly. “I shall share the image of Faron with you on one condition.”
He went still, clearly surprised. Then he tilted his head to the side and gave a disbelieving laugh. “Miss Woolcott, your conditions interest me not in the least. You can keep your daguerreotype. And please do not give me reason to caution you again about the dangers of attempting to find Faron on your own.” It was both an acknowledgement and a warning.
“You mean before he finds me—or my aunt and sister—again?”
“A defensive move is most likely your safest option.”
“As opposed to offensive?” As though a country mouse could mount an attack on a man as powerful as Faron. Perhaps not alone, Julia thought, but if she were to harness the talents of Strathmore…“How will I know that you have found Faron, unless I give you something in return?” she asked. “You have absolutely no reason to come back to me—”
“That’s correct, no reason at all.” His tone struck Julia like a blow. In that moment, the sun broke through the skylights overhead, framing them in a shared nimbus of light. Her heart thudded heavily but her mind skittered ahead, scavenging for possibilities.
“Have you no sympathy? The lives of my aunt and sister are at stake.”
“Yet you refuse to tell me anything more about it.”
“Because I don’t know anything more,” she confessed, well aware that the truth could hurt her.
His gaze shifted beyond her, to her trunk and collection of boxes. “I don’t believe you. You’re hiding something, Miss Woolcott.” Causing her to hold her breath, he added, “I see it in your eyes.”
He might as well have called her a bounder or a rakehell. “That’s the most ridiculous notion I’ve ever heard,” she said.
“Is it?”
“If you’ll excuse me, I believe I’m finished here. I’m sure someone will deliver my belongings to my rooms.” She gathered her skirts in one hand and turned to leave.
“What are you afraid of, Miss Woolcott, other than, of course, Faron?”
She should have kept walking. Instead, she stopped, as if in some unknown, secret part of her being, she knew the answer to that question. It had everything to do with Strathmore, and her confusing, inexplicable desire—craving—to be with the man. To touch him again, make him respond to her as a man responds to a woman. Were those her true motives, buried beneath her concern for Meredith and Rowena?
She felt on fire, anxious under the pressure of her feelings, wishing she could speak quickly and leave, but wanting to bring resolution to her suddenly ungovernable emotions. Damn, she was confused, her fear for Meredith and Rowena mingling with a desire as exotic to her as manna from heaven. As always when the weight of life became too much for her, she lost her willingness to speak, words scuttling away from her, lost in her mind, cotton batting lodged in her throat.
Biting her lower lip, she turned toward him, intending to force out a quick adieu and flee to her rooms to collect herself. Answering his question was proving more difficult than she’d imagined, his probing had lifted the scarred corners of a deep wound she was reluctant to examine.
“Are you staring at me because you are afraid to respond to my question, Julia?” His use of her name was terrifying, testament to the strange and improbable intimacy that yoked them together. He smiled, disarming her, stripping away another layer of her defense before she could snatch it back. “You become strangely quiet when pressed,” he said.
He was close, too close, not simply contracting the space between them but trespassing upon a place deep in her soul. The last of her resolve threatened to crumble when he captured both of her hands in one of his. Sparks, a combination of pleasure and pain, danced up her arm and along her spine at the brush of his thumb over the back of her hand.
“I could help you, Julia, if you would but let me.” A finger beneath her chin tilted her face to his. Her lips parted, but no words formed on her tongue. Her complex desires were reflected in his eyes, trapping her there. Escape became impossible.
Her eyes closed at the first brush of his lips, his mouth warm and compelling, sliding over hers with a languor that made her arch up against him, searching for more. The breadth of his hand at her back molded her to him, making her forget all reason and any argument, her fear disintegrating when he drew her bottom lip between his teeth. He traced the lush fold with the velvet of his tongue. “What is it that happens when your eyes shutter, your expression stills, as though you are going to a place far away, known only to you?”
She felt boneless, a moment away from melting into a puddle at his feet. She was as powerless to stop him as she was to stop the yearnings of her body. His breath skimmed along the skin of her throat. “You may trust me, Julia. I spared your life. I can help you if you’ll help me.” His hands at her back arched her nearer until Julia helplessly sank her fingers into his hair, cupping his head between her palms. She was watching them, watching herself with an anguish that burned, every inch of her body and every corner of her mind desperate for his touch, yet dreading it all at once.
He kissed her more deeply and her own mouth, lips, and tongue matched his strokes, a slow, torpid battle that neither could lose. Her breasts were heavy, a taut fullness that left her panting for more. Her lips parted to welcome the deep thrust of his tongue, her thighs resting between his, the heat beneath the voluminous fabric and heavy whalebone as startling as licks of flame.
She felt his hands maneuvering beneath her skirts and along the stockinged length of her inner thigh. She twisted her head away, gasping for breath, for reason, and for words.
He supplied the voice for her thoughts. “I know you believe this unfair,” he said as her skin pulsed with his heat. His hand spread over her thigh and his fingertips brushed against the lace at the tops of her cotton stockings. “But I know when you are at your most vulnerable, Julia. You remember as well as I our encounter at Eccles House, however much you’d prefer to forget,” he murmured against her lips, his hand cupping her thigh and caressing the curve of her buttock. “I have a most vivid recollection of your offering me your breasts.”
A liquid flame poured through her, an exquisitely painful amalgam of desire and shame. She cringed against him, the desperate humming of her mind grappling for logic and reason. It was then she looked up at the skylight, where a shadow passed over them like a cloud over the sun.
The hard muscles under her hands went rigid. They heard a footstep above, the roof of the carriage house creaking under its own weight. The rectangle of light still enveloped them but also threw a hulking, cloaked shadow against the wall.
Strathmore tensed as the fine nerves at the back of Julia’s neck prickled. Without saying a word, he edged them back against the wall of one of the stalls.
The shadow grew and Strathmore’s eyes sought the source. A face, shielded by a tall hat, appeared in the window, and then shifted slightly, as Strathmore suspected it would. Julia’s lips parted wordlessly as Strathmore threw his body atop hers, in perfect time with the retort of a pistol, the noise exploding in the silence of the carriage house.
The horses went wild. Julia and Strathmore went down hard, rolling into a bale of hay just as the bullet struck the stone masonry a few feet away from them. Splinters of glass glanced off Strathmore’s hands and shoulders. He pinned Julia to the ground beneath him, craning his neck to see the shadow above them disappear as quickly as it had come.
Julia struggled under his greater size and weight, trying to roll onto her side, the snorting and stomping of the horses forming an unruly background chorus. A heavy piece of parchment descended from the broken skylight overhead, landing a few feet from their grasp.
“Get off me!” She tur
ned her head in profile so as not to make eye contact, no doubt battling both fear and mortification.
He swallowed his irritation, remembering the intricate charade that accompanied so-called intimate relations in England. So bloody complicated when it should be so very simple. “Are you hurt?” Strathmore was reluctant to move; the length of her body beneath him seemed to meld with his own. When she didn’t immediately answer, he followed her gaze to the white piece of parchment lying tantalizingly close by. She freed a hand trapped between his chest and hers and stretched for the paper. But his arms were longer. He closed his hand over the missive. “Are you alright?” he asked again.
“In all probability I’m fine,” she said, “unless you have succeeded in crushing me.” She simmered beneath him, angry at herself, him and, the note in his hands and not in hers.
To hell with her. He’d saved her life twice and all he had to show for it was her pinched, outraged response. He pushed himself upright, ignoring her and his cockstand for the moment. He seemed to have a raging erection whenever Miss Woolcott was near.
As for the crumbled parchment in his hand, he didn’t have to look at the script to know whom it was from.
The recent escapade, the shards of glass, and the spent bullet underscored that his ruse had failed. Faron’s people knew Julia Woolcott remained alive and that he had not delivered on his promise. However, it was clear the single shot fired from the skylight above had deliberately missed its mark. A provocation and a warning, a signal that more was to come.
Julia had pushed herself to her feet, brushing her bodice and skirts with surprisingly steady hands. It occurred to him that he should have helped her rise, but he was predictably reluctant to touch her again, the ache in his groin not even beginning to dissipate.
Her hair tumbled around her face, and her eyes were wide with misplaced fear. With an instinct honed over the years of amorous encounters, he knew that she was afraid of her response to him, overwhelmed by sensations for which she had no name. It was a response that he could and would continue to use to his advantage. Because there was no doubt, Julia Woolcott was hiding something, not only from him but from herself. Montagu Faron, he’d wager, was at its center. The man remained a cipher, remote, mysterious and dangerous—particularly to the Woolcott family.
The flames of ambition burned higher. Strathmore was adept at reconnaissance—byzantine mountain passages and perilous terrains a temptation more seductive to him than a king’s ransom. It was the unknown that interested him most, snagged his attention, and played him along like the most accomplished seductress. He was not about to surrender.
“That note”—Julia began tightly—“I’d like to read it.”
“I’m sure you would.”
“It’s the very least you could do,” she said with forced primness, leaning on the bale of hay to get her bearings. She smoothed the lace collar at the neckline of her dress, trying to lessen the imprint of his hands on her skin.
He brushed the dust and a shard of glass from his knees. “The very least I could do,” he repeated, looking for a small kernel of apology in her subtly delivered scorn. “Are you not concerned that you were very nearly shot and that I saved you from a wayward bullet?”
“I refuse to indulge in a fit of the vapors. Meredith always counseled us to keep our heads. But it is the very least you could do after…” Her voice trailed off.
“So I’m to understand you are referring not to the fact that I saved your life,” he said, “but that I should in some way compensate you for my unwelcome advances upon your person—which is absurd, as you very well realize.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Hardly absurd! Simply because we found ourselves in an awkward situation at Eccles House, you have no reason to continue with this…with this…” She freed herself with some difficulty from his gaze, and frowned down at his hand and the crumpled note.
“Hypocrisy does not become you, Miss Woolcott,” he said with grim humor, shoving the note into his pocket. “You constantly remind me of your erudition and yet you continue to deny what is plainly and obviously nature’s intended course. Despite your having read Catullus and de Sade, you are reluctant to admit that pleasure stimuli create a craving between the male and female, a very basic way of explaining why crocodiles go to the bother of having sex despite the anatomical challenges posed by their muscular tails and why lions mate continuously for three to four days at a time.”
She opened her mouth and closed it again. Then blurted out, “Crocodiles and lions? You are comparing what we just did with animals?”
“We are animals, Miss Woolcott, mammals more specifically. Furthermore, in my travels, I have found the sexual compulsion is something humankind shares across all tribes and clans—if they are willing to admit to the fact.”
“Ahh, yes, of course. I had forgotten what an expert you are.”
“You are so rigid, Miss Woolcott, I sometimes believe you might shatter into a million pieces.”
Julia tilted her head back, a hand to her forehead. “You are truly conniving, do you know that, Strathmore?”
It was not the response he’d expected.
“You expect me to accept your palaver when in reality I know why it is that you are forcing your attentions—”
The thought was repugnant. “Hardly forcing. I’d be more than pleased to parse out your extravagant response to…” He was unable to finish.
She batted away his explanations with her hands. “Precisely, Strathmore! You are using your knowledge of these things”—she paused—“to overwhelm me, to rob me of reason, to have me do your bidding. All of which has less to do with our animalistic tendencies and everything to do with your own coldly rational strategems concerning Faron.”
A brief, silent stalemate followed.
Her analysis was impressive. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “it helps to have one’s thinking processes shut off, to feel rather than to cogitate. In short, you think too much.”
“I’m certain you prefer your women not to think at all. It only gets in the way of your ambitions,” she said tartly.
“An oversimplification, and unworthy of your subtle intelligence, Miss Woolcott.”
“Oh, hell and damnation,” she said through clenched teeth, beginning to straighten her hair, sticking pins into the thickness right and left. “You wish to seduce me, I fully realize, Strathmore, not for my person but rather for the information I may divulge. And further,” she continued, jabbing a pin into the coil at the nape of her neck, “I don’t flatter myself with the delusion that your actions are genuine.”
It struck him that he could not honestly respond to her assertion. That he could not be attracted to a country mouse, a bluestocking, an untutored virgin? A siren in a film of blue silk with legs that beckoned and skin like cream?
Christ, he couldn’t hope to explain it himself. Except in the reality of the moment, when he wanted nothing more than to throw her against the bale of hay, pull the pins from her hair and complete what had started those first moments in the dark, cork-lined room at Eccles House.
No doubt he’d simply been without a woman for too long. His mind worked efficiently, coming to his rescue. He would seek to remedy the situation. Because authentic enthusiasm was the greatest aphrodisiac, prostitutes had never appealed to him and he had been away far too long from England to have a mistress at the ready in some town house off Grosvenor Square. There were other options to be considered.
Her next words interrupted his plans. “Do you appreciate how ridiculous this discussion is when we have more important matters to resolve?” She paused significantly. “Such as the message in your trouser pocket. Who is it from—Faron?” Her dark blue eyes were on him, an unidentifiable expression fleeing from them, neatly setting aside the physical matters raging between them.
There was nothing she could do about it. To test her, he pulled the note from his pocket. Lowther’s assured and confident signature stared back at him. A meeting the next evening at Gordon
Square.
“Oh, tell me what it bloody well says.” Her voice was rich with resentment.
He made a sound of mock disapproval at the oath. “Why should I, Miss Woolcott? Remind me again, if you please.” Strathmore made sure his smile was provocative. “Your penchant for cursing is startling, by the way.”
She blinked and then straightened her spine, unmistakably putting distance between them. “The daguerreotype.”
He shook his head. “Nice to have but not necessary. We’re not even certain that an image exists after all this time. What else?” It was a goad intended to ensure she knew her place in the complicated and very dangerous dance.
“Nothing else. I know nothing else.”
He didn’t believe her. “But you do know that Faron’s people have learned”—he glanced up at the skylight—“that you’re alive.”
Her face lit up with a smile, and he was struck by its beauty. Her full mouth, the mouth he’d tasted just moments before, curved into unadulterated pleasure. “Then I can let Meredith and Rowena know I am well and warn them of Faron’s intentions.”
“About which you know nothing,” he said.
“Which is precisely the reason why I am accompanying you wherever you go from this moment onward.” She glanced at the note in his hand. “You have another meeting, do you not? With the man you mentioned previously. It’s obvious.”
Her mind was quick.
“How would that help? Your accompanying me—other than to flaunt my failure.”
Her eyes lit up at the possibility.
“Don’t look so keen, Miss Woolcott.”
She ignored the sarcasm. “I might recognize him, or something may jog my memory.” There was a slight hoarseness to her voice, a plaintiveness touched with desperation that told him she was telling the truth. He’d suspected whatever she knew lay buried deep, requiring an excavation that would be both profound and painful.
The Deadliest Sin Page 10
