That, and he had gathered her affections were trained elsewhere.
“Didn’t stop you this time,” Westmead muttered.
Apthorp glanced at the clock. It had been seven minutes. He was late.
“Excuse me,” he said, rising. “I want to see that Constance is all right. The past two days have been a trial for us both.”
Before anyone could object, he went down the corridor where she’d fled. There was no sign of her. He poked his head into the billiards room, but it was empty.
He tried the sitting room, but succeeded only in startling a maid who had been cleaning up the tea remains in silence.
“Constance?” he called out in a low voice. At the end of the hall there was only the closet used for powdering wigs. Surely she was not—
A small, ink-stained hand shot out of the door, grabbed him by the wrist, and pulled him inside.
Chapter 5
She knew him by his footsteps alone. That precise clipped pace, the moderate thump of a well-kept heel articulated under a (she imagined) slender but finely muscled calf. He never shuffled or stomped. He walked the way he did everything: elegantly.
She reached out from behind the closet door and grabbed him.
Perhaps with too much force, for he came careening toward her in a half stumble and nearly crushed her against the shelves.
“What are you doing?” he gasped, bracing against the shelf above her head to find his balance. The closet was small, just big enough for two adults to stand in. It was lined with wig stands and jars of powder and smelled heavy, like starch and milled soaps. And now, like the woody, balsam scent of whatever Apthorp used to oil his hair.
“Waiting impatiently to be discovered weeping in the wig closet by my future husband,” she said irritably. “Who is four minutes late.”
“May I ask why you are in the wig closet?”
“Because wig closets are just the improbable, tucked-away kinds of places that young lovers go when they wish to steal a moment of privacy to offer each other comfort outside of the prying eyes of their extended families.”
He glanced at her face in the shadows.
“You appear decidedly dry-eyed.”
“Can you please get on with it?”
“Pardon?”
“Hurry. When we’re discovered, you can’t be freshening up your peruke. Kiss me.”
He inched backward into a stack of smocks. “Absolutely not.”
“Must I do everything?”
She latched on to his shoulders so that he could not escape and, before she could lose her nerve, planted her lips on his.
She had not taken the initiative to kiss anyone since that first fumbling attempt on Apthorp all those years ago—and it was harder than it looked to do it properly, without accidentally eating someone’s nose or clacking into his jaw with one’s forehead. She felt like a mole nosing in the dark for a berry on a bush just slightly out of reach. Under her fumbling lips Apthorp went completely rigid. She stood up on her toes, trying to get better purchase.
He yanked his head out of her reach. “My God, what are you doing?”
“Kissing you. My brother will come looking for us at any moment. We must be locked in a passionate embrace.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes flashing with some emotion she couldn’t place.
“You know, Constance, you really must learn to ask permission.”
He must really learn to stop lecturing her, but now was not the time to press the issue.
“Please just kiss me.” It was imperative that when Archer found them, they be engaged in something more convincing than a discussion of the etiquette of courtship.
Apthorp stared at her, as if debating something in his mind.
“Constance, may I kiss you?” he asked in an official, courtly tone, like he was modeling correct behavior on which she might be tested later.
“Obviously.”
Gently, he took a hand and tipped her mouth up to his. Gently, he put his lips to hers.
Given what she knew about the secret ways he spent his time, this pretension to gentlemanly delicacy was rather laughable. And they did not have time for it.
She snatched his head in her hands and mashed her face to his, trying to mount a more persuasive display of ardor before anyone witnessed this chaste, practically nonexistent peck.
She felt a rumble beneath her hands.
His shoulders were shaking.
With laughter.
She gasped and pushed him back. His shoulders hit the shelves, causing a wooden wig stand to fall onto a sack of lavender-scented powder, which erupted in a cloud that itched her nose. She immediately fell into a coughing fit so violent that, half-weeping with laughter, he pounded at her back.
“You cow,” she said through gasps. “Because of you, we will both suffocate.”
He stilled, clearly trying to restrain his mirth. “I’m sorry.”
“What is so unbearably humorous?”
“The fact that you are mauling me in the powdering room.”
“I was not mauling you. I was evincing passion.”
His lip quirked up. “In my experience,” he said softly, “that’s not how passion works.”
“No? It works by tiny mincing nibbles at my lower lip?”
“It builds. Lovers have to get to get a feel for one another.”
“Sounds dreadfully dull.”
He stared at her lips for a beat too long, then glanced up into her eyes.
“I assure you, Constance, it isn’t.”
She wanted to be angry at him, but she could not fail to notice that his eyes no longer held the ire they’d borne when he’d looked upon her yesterday. His gaze was earnest. Like he wanted her to understand something that was important to him.
She found herself at a loss for a response. Because for the first time, she was connecting the rumors about this man and his salacious nocturnal predilections to the person whose eyes lingered on her face rather more kindly than she’d have expected of a hell-raking letch, yet with a knowledge in them that made her shiver.
“Haven’t you ever been properly kissed?” he asked softly.
She stuck out her chin, embarrassed to admit that she was far less bold in her private behaviors than the devil-take-it portrait she liked to affect in public. “Of course I have.”
He bit his lip. “Not by anyone who knew how to do it properly, apparently.”
She knew exactly whom he meant, and he was right, but it was surly and impudent of him to point it out, for after his reaction to her in the garden maze at Rosemount, and that dreadful scene in Devon, she’d avoided any man who’d betrayed the slightest interest in providing demonstration for five years. She had not wished to be mortified again.
And she still did not. Particularly before a man who had just the day before reacted with visceral revulsion at the idea of marrying her.
“Fine,” she shot back. “I confess. I am ignorant of your debauched ways. Maybe had I spent as much time as you cavorting in a den of fornication—”
He let out a sound of absolute shock that she had said that.
“You want to be kissed properly, you wicked girl?” he growled.
“As I said—” she began, but before she could finish, he put his finger to her chin to tip up her mouth, twined his hands behind her head, and kissed her the way she had imagined lovers kissed.
None of that boring, mousy nibbling.
His mouth was on hers, his tongue was against hers, and he was using it to claim her. It was knowing and erotic and demanding and she felt like she would drown.
And not with passion. She couldn’t breathe.
The portrait gallery and the smell of tobacco and the feeling of being trapped came rushing back.
“Stop,” she cried, wrenching her mouth away.
His hands fell to his sides and he broke away immediately, moving back against the shelf behind him.
“Constance? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sc
are you. I’m so sorry.” He looked stricken.
“No, it’s my fault, I told you to do it,” she said quickly, stunned by her own reaction. “It’s only …” She trailed off. She felt overwhelmed and shy. She realized what the problem was, but she didn’t want to say it: she was not good at kissing. It alarmed her and she didn’t understand it. And she loathed—loathed—being observed undertaking tasks at which she did not naturally excel.
Especially by Apthorp.
“I don’t know how to do it,” she admitted darkly.
Slowly, he relaxed. “That’s all right. There’s no right or wrong way to kiss a person. Only the way that you like.”
She glared at him. “I don’t know what I like.”
He bit his lip, like he was holding back a smile. “Ah.”
“Don’t gloat.”
“I’m not gloating. I’m thinking. Perhaps let’s try it the way I like, shall we?”
She nodded, hating this, wishing she could run away, but knowing that they really did need to be caught by her brother, and not at debating her inability to be seduced.
“Close your eyes,” he said softly. His voice was gentle, and there was no longer any laughter in it.
She did.
“Lean back against the wall and relax.”
She tried, but she was nervous. She waited for his lips again, holding her eyes shut tight. Instead his fingers lightly traced her cheek.
“Ideally,” he murmured, “lovers enjoy each other’s touch.” His fingers brushed the back of her neck and landed at her nape, where the small hairs that always evaded her pins fell against her skin. His warmth made her shiver.
She heard him inhale.
Slowly, deliberately, he put his lips to the pulse of her throat.
It felt warm and feathery. Soothing.
“Do you like that?” he said softly, into her neck.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Me too,” he said, almost to himself.
He ventured higher, dragging an airy line up to a place below her ear. Something crackled inside her, like he had dragged a flint across a fire steel and elicited a bloom of sparks.
His hand came to rest behind her, on the small of her back. “That’s all right? Me touching you?”
“Yes.”
His other hand caressed along her rib cage, just above her waist. “And that?”
“Yes,” she made herself say. She felt at war with herself: very much inclined to like his touch but very reluctant to admit it to him.
His hand rested on her side and did not draw her forward toward his chest nor move up to her breasts. She wished it would do one or the other. Or both.
His mouth, too, remained just so, nuzzling her neck as his fingers stroked that dreadful, lovely spot along her nape. It felt safe, soft, like she was dissolving into light. Then he brought his lips to hers and took her lower lip. It was similar to his first attempt to kiss her and now she understood it.
It wasn’t nibbling.
It was dancing.
Flirting.
Promising something else.
He let out a soft sigh, one that made her think perhaps the same feelings that were rising up in her were rising up in him.
“I would like it,” he whispered against the corner of her mouth as his fingers rubbed small, molten circles over the fabric of her dress, “if you would kiss me back.”
She hesitated, certain she would somehow do it wrong again and ruin this delicate, exquisite demonstration. But when his tongue resumed its passage near her lips, she brought her own mouth to his, lightly. And just like that, it clicked. She didn’t need to think.
Her body told her what to do.
Her body told her that if she tasted him, he would like it, return it, let out another sigh of pleasure.
That he would hold her closer.
That she would kiss him back as earnestly as he was kissing her.
And just like that, she was kissing him exactly like a lover.
And she was not pretending that she liked it.
He’d never expected her to be so innocent.
Given her boldness in kissing him in the garden maze, and what he’d so excruciatingly happened upon in Devon, he’d assumed she had enjoyed flirtations since. When, in weak moments, he’d imagined making love to her, he had assumed she would not come to him a virgin.
Which was fine. He was not a virgin either.
Far from it.
But the woman in his arms was no experienced temptress.
She had been so apprehensive she was shaking.
But now, holding her just so, he felt the shift. The moment when she realized she liked his hands on her. When she discovered that place where one noticed little beyond skin and heat. When she realized one could separate from one’s mind and became a creature of one’s body.
He would never forget what it was like to hold Constance Stonewell as she realized what it felt like to want someone.
It changed everything.
What had started as a game to call her bluff was now too altogether real. He was kissing her in a powdering closet and he wanted very badly to do so much more than kiss her.
He tried to hold himself in a gentlemanly way, so that the telltale hardness rising at his groin would not frighten or embarrass her.
But when she leaned against him and stroked his cheek and let out a little moan, it was so honest that he abandoned his precepts of virtue and grazed against her, just for a fraction of a second. Long enough for her to feel him. Long enough for him to feel her.
He wanted her to feel him and know that he was not pretending either.
Because, damn it, they might never be this close again, and after all the years of wanting her, he wanted her to know.
He needed her to know.
Her eyes shot open and looked up into his.
He stared back, letting her see it in his eyes. Telling her that if she could read his mind, she was welcome to the confession pouring out of him.
The years and years of longing.
She held his gaze. Then she cocked her hip and rubbed against him and he was lost to understanding.
She paused uncertainly, and observing that he had not moved away—for how could he bring himself to move away?—she brought her lips back down and kissed him sweetly.
Fuck.
He fell on her like a wave, pulled her up against him so she was molded directly to all the places where he was hard, and put his mouth on hers while his body made a woman of her. He gave her the kind of filthy, erotic kiss that began in the hips and ended somewhere in the brain, a kiss that was not so much a kiss as a way of making love with all one’s clothes on. The kind of kiss he had told her new lovers did not exchange before they knew each other’s bodies.
Well, he’d been lying. He had wanted her for too many years to pretend that he did not want to fuck her filthily and well and in such a way that she would never want another—
The closet filled with light.
Hands came down on his collar and yanked him into the corridor.
A fist slammed into his jaw.
“I see we don’t have to wait for dawn,” the Duke of Westmead growled. “I’m going to murder you right now.”
Oh, don’t take him just quite yet, Constance wanted to protest as her brother peeled Apthorp off her body by his neck. I was enjoying him immensely.
She sighed as Archer shoved poor Apthorp against a wall and yanked his fussy wig right off his gorgeous head.
He looked so much better without it.
“Have you no respect?” Archer was shouting. “Do you want me to call you out?”
She bit back a smile. There was nothing like the sound of one’s brother threatening to dismember one’s faux fiancé to make a girl feel smug. The force of the duke’s rage could only mean one thing: her plan was working.
She stepped forward and pried her brother’s hands away from Apthorp’s neck. “Stop it, Archer. You’re going to hurt him.”
“Ye
s, Constance, that is exactly my intention.”
She shoved her way between them, separating them with her shoulders.
“Don’t injure him. He was only comforting me.”
“He was doing quite a bit more than that.”
Indeed, he had been. She still felt as if she were made of jelly that hadn’t quite set up. Who knew Apthorp was capable of turning a woman into a quivering dessert?
Not that pointing out this shocking fact would mollify her brother’s anger.
“You needn’t act like an innocent kiss between two people about to be married is cause for execution,” she said. “Need I remind you the way you conducted yourself with Poppy when you were engaged? If she’d had a brother, you’d have been dead long before the wedding.”
Archer turned on his heel. “Come with me. Both of you. Now.”
He strode down the hall.
She took Apthorp’s hand. “Are you all right?” she whispered.
“Never better,” he said, licking away a bit of blood where his lip had caught a tooth.
A wave of tenderness for him rose up in her chest, surprising her.
“Poor man.” She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket in her gown and dabbed the blood away.
He reached down for his wig and attempted to mold it into some semblance of its original shape.
“Don’t bother. I like you better without it. You look agreeably dissolute.”
“I do?” He looked startled but not displeased. But then his face returned to a grim line. “Constance—” he whispered, adopting the rather self-serious tone he always took when he was about to bore her with a pontification upon correct behavior.
Instead of listening, she spun on her heel and followed her brother down the hall. She was not prepared to discuss the oddness of what had just happened, and in any case her brother would certainly not wait for them to parse the strangeness of her intense desire to drag Apthorp to her bedchamber.
When he didn’t follow her, she reached back for his wrist and pulled him after her down the hall, hoping a show of brisk congeniality would reassure him that they did not need to litigate the fact that he had just kissed her in a way that left her vibrating from her belly to her heels.
The Earl I Ruined Page 6
