He gazed down at her, his expression both mocking and wary. “Never let it be said that Gabriel Fairchild could deny a lady anything.”
With those familiar words, he slipped one arm around her slender waist and drew her against him. As he swept her into the dance, Cecily closed her eyes, recognizing in that moment that she was willing to take any risk, pay any price, just to be in his arms again.
“I must confess that I was surprised to find you here tonight,” he said as they whirled around the deserted floor, their bodies moving in perfect rhythm. “I thought by now you’d be wed to some country squire or gentleman farmer. I know you prize respectability in a man above all else.”
She gave him a dimpled smile. “Just as you used to prize the quality of being easily seduced in a woman?”
“That was one quality you most certainly never possessed,” he muttered, gazing straight over the top of her head.
“Unlike most of the women ogling you here tonight. Shall I step aside and let one of them take my place in your arms?”
“I appreciate your generosity, but I’m afraid I’ve no time for such dalliances. I’m shipping out on the Defiance tomorrow afternoon.”
Cecily stumbled over her own feet. If he hadn’t tightened his arm around her, she might have fallen. Fighting to keep her feet moving in the rhythm of the dance, she gazed up at him disbelief. “You’re going back to sea? Have you completely lost your wits?”
“I find your concern touching, Miss March, if a bit belated. There’s really no need for you to trouble your pretty little head about my fate.”
“But the last time you sailed, you almost didn’t come back! You were nearly killed! It cost you your sight, your health, your—”
“I’m perfectly aware of what it cost me,” Gabriel said softly. As he studied her face, the last trace of mockery disappeared from his eyes.
Cecily desperately wanted to touch him, to cup his scarred cheek in her hand. But the jagged shards of broken promises and shattered dreams littered the space between them, making it impossible to breach.
She lowered her eyes to his lapel. “Why do you feel compelled to play the hero again? After nearly sacrificing your life on behalf of king and country, I should think you’d have nothing left to prove.”
“Not to you, perhaps, but to someone else.”
“Ah! I should have known there would be a woman involved.” Although she knew she could hardly expect him to spend the rest of his life pining for a woman who had never existed, jealousy still rose up in her throat, more bitter than bile. It was agony picturing him in another woman’s arms, another woman’s bed, doing all of the tender, wicked things that he had done to her. “You always were willing to sacrifice everything for love, weren’t you?”
The music ceased, leaving them standing awkwardly in the middle of the floor. Cecily could see the sidelong glances, hear the curious murmurs.
This time there was only pity in Gabriel’s gaze. “I didn’t even know what love was until I met—and lost—my Samantha. Forgive me for speaking so bluntly, Miss March, but you’re not fit to polish her boots.”
Offering her a curt bow, he turned on his heel and strode toward the stairs, leaving both Cecily and everyone else in the ballroom staring after him.
She stood there for a long time after he was gone before finally whispering, “No. I don’t suppose I am.”
Gabriel slammed his way into his town house, thankful the servants were long abed. He stalked into the drawing room. One of the footmen had left a fire burning in the grate to take the edge off of the November chill.
Shrugging off his damp coat, Gabriel poured himself a generous splash of scotch from the crystal decanter on the sideboard. As the smoky liquor scorched its way down his throat, he remembered another dark night when he had drunk too much scotch and contemplated ending his life. Samantha had come to him out of the darkness like an angel that night, giving him a reason and the will to live. It was the first time he had tasted her lips, held her warm body against his.
He tossed back the rest of the scotch in a single swallow. A carved dragon smirked at him from the pedestal of a glass occasional table. The room had been decorated in the Chinese style, but tonight the hangings of crimson silk, lacquered furniture, and miniature pagodas looked more ridiculous than exotic.
He didn’t want to admit that seeing Cecily again could have put him in such a savage temper. He had thought himself immune to her charms. But when he had seen her standing there at the foot of those stairs, looking as lost and forlorn as a little girl, he’d felt an unexpected jolt.
She’d been thinner than he remembered. Her cropped curls had given him a start at first, but in some strange way they suited her. They gave her beauty a mature edge, made her graceful neck look longer, her luminous blue eyes even larger. It was the inexplicable sadness he had glimpsed in their depths that had jarred him the most.
Gabriel poured himself another glass of scotch. Perhaps he’d been a fool to believe seeing her again would have no effect on him. He’d spent countless nights at sea with nothing but her memory and her written promises to warm him. Promises she’d dismissed tonight with nothing more than a mocking quip and a dimpled smile.
He raked a hand through his hair. The scotch was only fueling the reckless fever racing through his veins. Once he would have sought relief for such a fever in the arms and bed of some skilled courtesan or opera dancer. Now all he had to console him were the ghosts of the only two women he had ever loved.
A knock sounded on the front door, startling him.
“Who in the devil would be calling at this hour?” he muttered as he strode through the foyer.
He flung open the front door. A woman stood there, cloaked and hooded. For one treacherous instant, hope beat wildly in his heart. Then she eased back the hood, revealing cropped honey-gold curls and a pair of wary blue eyes.
He searched the street behind her, but there was no sign of a carriage or hack. It was almost as if she’d materialized out of the swirling mist.
Gabriel’s pulse thudded a warning. He should send her away, close the door in her lovely face. But the devil riding on his shoulder urged him to lean against the doorframe, to fold his arms over his chest and look her up and down with suggestive insolence.
“Good evening, Miss March,” he drawled. “Have you come for another dance?”
She gazed up at him, her expression both wary and hopeful. “I was wondering if I might have a word with you?”
He stepped aside. As she brushed past him, he held his breath, deliberately trying not to inhale any of the floral scent that clung to her hair and skin. He escorted her into the drawing room, remembering all the times he had dreamed of being alone with her—a dream that had come true too late.
“May I take your cloak?” he offered, trying not to notice how perfectly the emerald green velvet offset the peachy glow of her skin.
Her slender fingers toyed with the silk frog at her throat. “No, thank you. I’m still a bit chilled.” She perched on the edge of a chair covered in mandarin silk, nervously eyeing the pair of snarling dragons masquerading as hearth irons.
“Don’t worry. They don’t bite,” Gabriel assured her.
“That’s comforting.” She peered around the room, taking in its lush decadence. “I thought for a moment that I’d wandered into an opium den.”
“I have many vices, but partaking of the poppy isn’t one of them. Would you care for something to drink?”
She drew off her gloves and folded her hands in her lap. “Yes, thank you.”
“I’m afraid all I have here is scotch. If you’d like, I can wake one of the servants to fetch you some sherry.”
“No!” She tempered her panicked outburst with a tremulous smile. “I should hate to trouble them. Scotch will be fine.”
Gabriel poured them both a glass. He watched her face carefully as she took her first sip. Her eyes began to water. She choked back a cough. Just as he’d suspected, it was probably th
e first time she’d tasted the stuff. He expected her to politely set the glass aside, but instead she brought it back to her lips and drained the rest of the scotch in one swallow.
His eyes widened. Whatever she had come to say to him, it seemed it would require a stout dose of liquid courage. “Would you care for another glass or should I just bring you the entire bottle?”
She waved away his offer. The liquor had heightened the color in her cheeks, deepened the dangerous sparkle in her eyes. “No, thank you. I believe that should suffice.”
Gabriel sank down on the end of the broad divan, rested his elbows on his knees, and swirled his scotch around in the bottom of his glass. He was in no mood to exchange pleasantries and small talk.
After an awkward moment of silence, Cecily blurted out, “I realize you may find my visit a bit unconventional, but I had to see you before you sailed tomorrow.”
“Why the sudden urgency? You could have seen me at any time in the past year simply by calling at Fairchild Park.”
Lowering her eyes, she fidgeted with her gloves. “I wasn’t sure of my welcome. I couldn’t have blamed you if you had set the hounds on me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It would have been far more efficient to simply have my gamekeeper shoot you.”
She shot him a sidelong glance, as if to see if he was joking. Gabriel didn’t even blink.
She drew in a deep breath. “I came here tonight to inform you that I wish to accept your proposal.”
“Pardon me?” He leaned forward, believing he must have heard her wrong.
“You once asked me to become your wife.” She lifted her chin, meeting his gaze squarely. “I would like to take you up on that offer.”
He gazed at her in disbelief for a minute, then burst out laughing. The rich ripples of mirth poured out of him, forcing him to rise and lean against the mantel so he could catch his breath. He hadn’t laughed like that since Samantha had vanished from his life.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Miss March,” he said, swiping at his streaming eyes. “I had forgotten what a wicked sense of humor you have.”
She rose to face him. “I wasn’t speaking in jest.”
Gabriel abruptly sobered in more ways than one. He rested his scotch glass on the mantel. “Well, that’s a pity, isn’t it, because I thought I made it perfectly clear that you no longer have any claim on my heart.”
“I believe your exact words were, ‘I didn’t even know what love was until I met—and lost—my Samantha.’ ”
He narrowed his eyes, coming as close to hating her as he ever could.
She began to pace back and forth, the hem of her cloak sweeping across the Oriental carpet. “There’s nothing to stop us from being wed tonight. We can elope to Gretna Green just as you once begged me to do.”
Gabriel turned his back on her and gazed into the leaping flames of the fire, no longer able to bear the sight of her treacherous and lovely face.
Her floral scent enveloped him, the same rich gardenia that had perfumed the letters he had carried next to his heart through all of those long and lonely months at sea. He felt her hand brush his sleeve. “You once wanted me,” she said softly. “Can you deny that you still do?”
He whirled around to face her. “Oh, I still want you. Just not for my wife.”
She took a step away from him, but he stalked her, backing her toward the center of the room one step at a time. “I’m afraid I’m no longer in the market for a wife, Miss March, but I’d be perfectly willing to make you my mistress. I could set you up in some handsome lodgings nearby and take my pleasure in your bed whenever my ship puts into port.” Gabriel knew he was being a bastard, but he couldn’t seem to stop. All the bitterness he’d hoarded in his heart since Trafalgar came welling up in one vitriolic rush. “You needn’t worry about your material needs. I can be a very generous man—especially if I’m kept satisfied. Nor should you feel guilty for accepting my largesse. I can assure you that you’ll earn every extravagant bauble, every diamond earbob and ruby necklace, either on your back”—he lowered his gaze to her trembling lips—“or on your knees.”
Gabriel loomed over her, waiting for her palm to crack across his cheek, for her to denounce him for the bully he was and run screaming for the door.
Instead, she reached up and unfastened the frog at her throat, sending her cloak sliding off of her shoulders and onto the floor.
Chapter Twenty Three
My darling Cecily,
I shall never be satisfied until you are in my arms to stay…
Cecily stood before him in the firelight, wearing nothing but a silk chemise, gartered stockings, a pair of peach slippers tied with ribbons around her slender ankles, and a look of pure defiance.
She was absolutely exquisite, exceeding anything his imagination could have concocted— round of hip, slender of waist, high-breasted. The delicate chemise could have been woven by butterflies, so sheer was its gossamer fabric. The teasing hint of shadow at the peaks of her breasts and the juncture of her thighs made his mouth grow dry and his body grow hard.
He slowly circled her, drinking in the graceful arch of her calf, the plush curve of her rump.
As he moved back in front of her, their gazes locked and held. “Although the slippers are lovely, I must say that your bridal trousseau is somewhat lacking.”
“Lacking for a bride, perhaps,” she retorted, looking as haughty as a young queen despite her scanty attire, “but not for a mistress.”
Gabriel shook his head, still struggling to absorb this stunning new development. He had never expected her to call his bluff, especially not in such dramatic fashion.
He studied her face, fascinated by the emotions he saw warring in her beautiful blue eyes. “You didn’t come here to marry me, did you, Miss March? You came here to seduce me.”
“I was reasonably confident that if I couldn’t succeed at one, I could at the other.”
“Well, you were wrong,” he said flatly. Retrieving her cloak, he swept it around her shoulders. He started for the door, determined to show her out before his resolve could weaken further. “I’ve already told you that my heart belongs to another woman now.”
“She’s not here tonight,” Cecily said softly. “I am.”
Gabriel halted, pressing his fingertips to his throbbing brow. “I should warn you, Miss March, that you’re tempting both fate and my patience. Do you know how long I’m going to be at sea once I sail tomorrow? Those nights are very cold and very lonely. Most of the men under my command are probably going to spend tonight rutting like beasts. And they won’t be particularly fastidious in their choice of bedmates. Any willing woman will do.”
“Then pretend I’m any woman.”
Gabriel slowly turned.
She stepped out of the cloak, gliding toward him like a vision from one of his more daring fantasies. “Or better yet, admit that I’m the woman who deserves to pay for breaking your heart. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted ever since I ran out of the hospital that day? To punish me?”
No longer able to resist the temptation, Gabriel curled his hand around her throat, his broad thumb caressing the pulse beating wildly at its base. Oh, he would punish her, all right. Not with pain, but with pleasure. A pleasure such as she had never known. A pleasure such as she would never know again. A pleasure that would haunt her through all the nights—and all the lovers—to come.
He lowered his head, but before his lips could brush the softness of hers, she turned her face away. “Don’t! I don’t want you to kiss me. You won’t mean it anyway.”
He frowned, taken aback by her vehemence. “Most women require a certain amount of kissing before they’ll allow a man to proceed to other…um, even more pleasurable pursuits.”
“I’m not most women.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “I’m beginning to realize that.”
“I have two other requirements.”
“Indeed?”
“Don’t let the fire go out and don�
�t close your eyes.” She glared at him accusingly. “Do you promise you won’t close your eyes?”
“You have my word as a gentleman,” he replied, feeling less like one by the moment.
Her requirements demanded no great sacrifice on his part. She looked so beautiful in the fire-light that he was reluctant to blink. It was one of his keenest regrets that his blindness had prevented him from ever seeing Samantha this way.
As Gabriel strode to the hearth, Cecily stood in the middle of the drawing room, trying not to shiver in her thin chemise and stockings. His shirt stretching taut over his broad shoulders, he wrested a log large enough to burn the whole night through from the firebox and shoved it into the flames. Dusting his hands off, he turned, eyeing her hungrily across the leaping shadows.
Standing before Gabriel in her chemise while he was fully clothed was an incredibly wicked sensation. Cecily felt like some sort of slave girl on an auction block whose very life depended upon her power to please her master.
Embracing that power, she drew the chemise over her head and tossed it aside, leaving her garbed in nothing but her stockings and slippers. Gabriel made a guttural sound deep in his throat. Then he was coming for her, his determined strides eating up the space between them.
“I’ll never love you,” he warned, even as he eased her beneath him on the divan.
“I don’t care,” she whispered fiercely, gazing deep into his eyes.
And she didn’t. All she wanted was one more chance to love him before he sailed on the morrow.
He lifted his weight from her to drag off his waistcoat, tug the collar and stock from his throat. Then her hands were there, tearing at the studs of his shirt, spreading the linen so she could flatten her palms against the golden expanse of his chest, sift her fingertips through the crisp whorls of hair she found there.
As Gabriel’s shadow fell over her, she turned her cheek into the pillow to remove the temptation of her lips.
Yours Until Dawn Page 23
