The Allure of Attraction

by Julia Kelly

  Her body arched again, demanding more while his free hand snaked up to shape the curve of her breast. His fingers slipped into the edge of her bodice and yanked it down as far as it would go. It was enough to free her breast and, as she cast her gaze down at the man lavishing attention on her, he lowered his head, closed his lips around her nipple, and sucked.

  She cried out as her orgasm rolled through her, pulsing and pushing her along. Her arms wrapped around him, pulling him closer until her face was buried in the crook of his neck. Maybe she should’ve held something of herself back, but she was lost in the touch of the man who’d once known her so well. It was all she could do to hold on as he continued to circle his fingers, drawing out every last bit of her desire.

  The muscles of her thighs quaked when his hand finally stilled. With her eyes closed, she could hear the pant of his breath. He’d always been like that, taking a quiet but proud pleasure in her enjoyment as they’d explored one another’s bodies with the care of two young people who believed they had a lifetime together stretching out before them.

  But then he’d sailed off that last time, bound for the Caribbean, and everything had changed.

  She opened her eyes and found Andrew sitting on the wood floor, his elbows braced on bent knees, staring hard at her. A chill that had nothing to do with the sweat cooling on her skin rocked her, and suddenly she knew what would come next.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I should’ve shown more restraint.”

  A mistake. He thought this was a mistake. Something inside her chest twisted—whether it was her heart or her pride, it didn’t matter—as she realized that this hadn’t been about his desire or her pleasure or even the temptation found in the comfort of a long-lost lover.

  She tilted her chin back, determined to push past the embarrassment. “Really? That’s your first concern?”

  “A man should respect a lady’s wishes and—”

  She put a hand up. “I was a more than willing participant in what just happened, and I’m certainly not delicate enough to break. I never was, or don’t you remember, Andrew?”

  For all the guilt he seemed to be holding, his eyes flashed icy cold at the mention that this was neither the first time she’d found herself with his hands up her skirts nor the only time she’d enjoyed it.

  “We shouldn’t have kissed,” he gritted out.

  The words jabbed her low and true in the gut, because in that he was not wrong.

  “That is, I shouldn’t have kissed you,” he said, not seeming to notice that her face had fallen. “A sailor should know discipline.”

  She snorted. “Not according to some of the stories I’ve heard.”

  “A captain should be able to control himself,” he said, his voice gruff. “I’m not the boy I was when we knew each other. I’ve changed, and I should know better. Becoming . . . involved in any way could compromise my ability to look out for your safety.”

  Oh. He had changed so much, and yet in one fundamental way he would always be the same man. Even through his obstinate belief that she’d betrayed him, his first concern was her. He’d been protective of her from the first time they played together. Eight-year-old Caleb had shoved her off the side of the road, knocking her into a ditch. Andrew had jumped down to haul her up and then punched her brother on the arm so hard the bruise had been black and purple for weeks. It was juvenile justice—the kind that needed no explanation. Anyone who trifled with Lavinia would have to answer to Andrew. It had only been a matter of time before she was madly, head-over-heels in love with him.

  She leaned back on her hands, aware that he kept glancing over to her still exposed breast and her disheveled hair. She’d spent many years sure of his anger for her, but she refused to be ashamed of his desire for her or her desire for him because he was still the Andrew she’d known.

  “There are many things that might be broken between us, but sex was never one of them,” she offered, her lips crooking into a smile.

  He shook his head and began to tug at his necktie to set it to rights. “As your handler—”

  “As a woman, I can promise you that if you call me your asset one more time, I’ll scream.”

  That lifted his lips a fraction, but they fell just as quickly.

  “If I can’t think clearly around you, I could put you in danger,” he said.

  “And holding on to your anger against me lets you see me or this mission any more clearly?” she asked.

  After a long pause he shook his head. “No.”

  “Then perhaps we call this evening what it was. Inevitable.”

  Andrew had been prepared for many things when he’d walked into Mrs. Parkem’s, but ending up on the broad plank floor with a wanton Lavinia in his arms hadn’t been one of them. Now she sat there, exposed and unbound, as though defying him to look away and, weak man that he was, he couldn’t.

  Ever since he’d learned that she was to be his last operation, he’d spent all of his energy focusing on not recalling the halcyon days of their youth. He was exhausted because it was an impossible task. How could any man will himself to forget his first love, first kiss, first everything?

  He should’ve known that to dip a toe into the sea of the past would be to lose himself. And yet here he was, staring at the woman he’d once thought would be his bride, her wavy sable hair spilling over the creamy, exposed skin of one of her shoulders.

  “Inevitable?” he repeated, rolling the word around in his mouth as though it were foreign to him.

  She shrugged that unclad shoulder, her hair slipping over her breast to hide her nipple. Thank God, he thought at the same time that his brain roared in protest.

  He’d loved her for this boldness once. She used to lie stripped and bare before him, allowing him to trace the lines of her body while he whispered his love. The contrast of his calloused, sea-weathered hands against her soft, pristine skin had fascinated him nearly as much as the little, indecipherable noises she made when he pushed into her. He’d relished her lack of shame then, enjoying that only he had access to this secret saucy side to her.

  That sauciness had matured, more powerful for the fact that they were no longer young. She was the queen of this little world of hers, and he could sense the power pulsing off her as she pinned him with her gaze as though challenging him to rise to this strange game of dares he didn’t know the rules to.

  “It was only a matter of time before we would act upon our mutual attraction to one another,” she said with a shrug, as though her orgasm had hardly affected her.

  His knuckles popped as he clenched his fists to his sides. It shouldn’t anger him to see this casualness, but he couldn’t help it. She’d been everything to him, pulling him back from the brink in a thrashing sea when he thought he couldn’t hold on any longer. It was the memory of her that had kept him going when he’d been picked up in a remote village in Suriname, stopping in Curaçao, Port-au-Prince, and Kingston, before finally landing on British soil once again and making the bumpy, uncomfortable ride back to Eyemouth by mail coach. And when he’d arrived in their hometown and knocked on her father’s door only to learn from her cold, self-satisfied mother that Lavinia Malcolm was now Lavinia Parkem, he hadn’t believed it. It was only when he saw Alistair Parkem loop his arm around her waist that his world shattered. She’d been his beacon in the dark sea, until he’d learned she’d turned her back on him, just like everyone else in his life.

  When Sir Newton had told him that she’d been reduced to owning a shop and working for her living, he’d felt a flutter of unmanly satisfaction he knew he should be ashamed of, yet the sight of the proud, determined woman who’d faced off first with Wark and then taken him to task had bowled him over. Ever since that first meeting, he’d been unable to shake the feeling that she had once again knocked him off his balance until, gripped by an impulse he could neither name nor control, he found himself in this situation.

  Strangely, he found he didn’t regret it one bit.

  That wa
s the stunning, disturbing truth he wrestled with as she slowly put her dress to rights and began to collect the hairpins he’d scattered across the floor.

  “I’ll remind you that you kissed me first,” she said, as she used her short nail to catch up one of the hairpins that had fallen into a crack between the floorboards. “And I suspect you liked it more than you wish to let on.”

  Of course he had. He could try to deny his attraction to her, but there was no way he could’ve hidden his body’s reaction. Not when he’d been pressed up against her legs, his tongue laving at her breast while he’d breathed her in. He’d wanted her something powerful, and now that he’d had his first taste in over a decade, he was afraid he couldn’t stop.

  “I should go,” he said.

  She nodded. “You should.”

  He shifted, unsettled as she watched him. He didn’t want her to think that he was the sort of man who counted down the minutes until he could slink out of a woman’s home after an encounter. Not that he cared what she thought.

  Eventually good sense won out, and Andrew hauled himself to his feet and then reached down to help her up. “Here.”

  Her hand—no longer soft but strong from work—set his skin sparking as she placed it in his. He jerked against the strange sensation, pulling her just a little too hard and sending her careening into his chest. His arms instinctively went around her, trapping her with her hands flat on his chest.

  They stayed there for a stunned moment of pure torture. That damned gardenia-scented soap she used to wash her hair wrapped around him, and he could see the subtle thrum of her pulse at the side of her neck. The fingers of her hands curled slightly into the cloth of his jacket, holding her in place, and when she looked up at him he knew with frightening certainty that if she lifted up just a couple inches and kissed him there would be no sanity left in him to keep him from lifting her skirts and taking her up against the wall.

  “So we find ourselves again in a familiar situation,” she said. But the amusement in her voice wasn’t enough to cover the vein of desire pulsing underneath. She was not so very unaffected after all.

  Turning over this new information, he stepped back, holding her at arm’s length. Her fingers brushed down his chest but she didn’t grasp at him any longer.

  “You’re determined to attend Wark’s dinner Tuesday?” he asked. “You won’t stay away even if I tell you to, will you?”

  Her smile faltered for a half second, but she shook her head.

  He should shut the whole operation down. No matter how hard he fought it, he was emotionally compromised. Still, without her, he and Gillie would be blindly throwing darts, hoping one would stick. It had to be Lavinia. It had to be now.

  “I’ll ask Gillie to put together a list of Wark’s known associates so you can prepare, and she’s already investigating Douglas,” he said. “If you’re going to go into this, I want you as ready as possible. The more you know, the less likely you’ll be to say the wrong thing and stir their suspicions.”

  “Then you’ll support me?” she asked.

  “I don’t see how I can do anything else.”

  She nodded. “Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. I trust you.”

  They were the words he’d never thought he’d hear from her again, and they felt strangely like succor to his soul.

  Lavinia followed him down the stairs to let him out. He lingered only long enough to hear the bolt on her door slide into place, and then donned his hat and began the short walk home to his lodgings through the cold Edinburgh night.

  Nothing about this operation sat well with him, but he knew two things for certain: the years had done nothing to diminish his longing for Lavinia, and he knew as surely as he knew the sun set in the west that this evening was not the end of whatever had sparked again between the two of them.

  Chapter Ten

  “BUT DON’T YOU think this means something?” Siobhan asked for the fourth time in as many hours. “After all of these years, Mrs. Wark is asking you to dine with the family.”

  “Seems dodgy to me,” Caleb grumbled from his post just outside Lavinia’s bedroom door.

  Lavinia sighed. She’d managed to keep the news of Wark’s invitation to herself until Tuesday, when she’d had to ask her head seamstress to stay late to help finish an order in her absence. However, the quiet word she’d meant to have with Siobhan and only Siobhan had spiraled out of control when Caleb had overheard them as he was coming up the stairs. Now he’d parked himself in a chair in the corridor and refused to move.

  “All this means is that Mrs. Wark is a generous woman,” she said.

  She certainly wasn’t going to disabuse Siobhan or Caleb of the notion that Mrs. Wark and not her son had issued the invitation. To admit that would’ve meant facing an entirely different slate of questions, and her nerves were already a mess.

  Still, her brother wouldn’t be put off. “Are you certain that it was Mrs. Wark’s idea?”

  “She does seem like the most horrible snob,” Siobhan agreed. “Not that I mean any offense.”

  “None taken. Perhaps she was short a lady and needed to make up the numbers at the table.”

  “We’re supposed to believe that the Warks know no other single women whom they could invite?” asked Caleb sourly.

  “If you’re so intent on finding out, you should ask Mrs. Wark yourself,” she said, turning to the mirror to smooth the front of her skirt. She was wearing her most attractive gown of deep purple shot through with a pattern of black embroidered flowers and a long row of tiny gold buttons marching up the front of her bodice to its low square neck. It was a fine dress—far too elaborate for a tradeswoman—but since fashion was her livelihood, she’d justified the expense of making up the fine fabric for herself. Of course, that had been before Caleb had come crashing into her life with another disaster.

  In the mirror she could see Caleb crane his neck around the door.

  “You should wear something with color,” said her brother.

  “Purple is a color,” she said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “It doesn’t have to be anything bright, but it would be lovely to see you in something . . . different,” said Siobhan gently.

  “Are you two actually agreeing on something?” she asked.

  Siobhan and her brother said in unison, “Yes.”

  “This will do for tonight,” she said. Wark had seen her in nothing other than black, gray, and purple since he’d become her landlord. If he liked her in those, that was enough.

  Her brother’s sour expression remained unchanged as Lavinia hurried downstairs to hail a cab on the Grassmarket. Her parents hadn’t had a carriage, but Alistair had. He’d proudly driven her all over Eyemouth in it for a full eight months before selling it and the team of horses who drew it to try to prop up his quickly diminishing funds. It had been so long since she’d been anywhere that might require one that it hadn’t occurred to her to hire one for that night until she was dressing. When she reached the street, however, she saw a large black vehicle with gold-painted wheels waiting just outside her shop door.

  “Oh no,” she muttered.

  Two doors down, Anika poked her head out of her shop door. Catching sight of Lavinia, she hurried out.

  “Is this for you?” her friend asked with a sparkle in her eye.

  Lavinia was about to shake her head when the driver climbed down and opened the door for her with a sweeping bow. “Madam.”

  Anika crossed her arms with a teasing smile. “Look at you, your majesty.”

  “Oh, stop,” she said before turning to the driver. “Who are you meant to be collecting?”

  “Mr. Wark sent instructions that you’re to be escorted to his home, Mrs. Parkem,” said the driver.

  Anika’s eyes widened. “Mr. Wark?”

  She shot her friend a grim look. “I was invited to dinner.”

  “My goodness. I hope to hear all about it when you return,” said Anika.

  She nodde
d, thankful that her friend didn’t demand an explanation while they were out there in the street. It was after closing for most of the shops on Victoria Street, and while a customer’s carriage might’ve been expected in front of her shop during working hours, it would be sure to raise eyebrows at this time of day. Her mother would’ve told her she was being ungrateful for looking askance at a man’s generosity—and maybe she was—but this sort of public display felt more like an attempt to brand her than anything else.

  As the carriage rumbled through the tiny, winding streets of the Old Town to the wide, open boulevards of the New Town, where wealth and privilege were the norm, Lavinia found her nerves beginning to take over. Andrew was right. She was taking a considerable risk in accepting Wark’s invitation to dinner, but she’d made her decision. There was no turning back now. Besides, hadn’t Andrew himself begrudgingly told her that he thought she could do this?

  Heat pricked the back of her neck at the thought of him. She wasn’t ashamed of what had happened between them, but neither could she control the urge for more. To feel his touch again had been intoxicating, and when he’d left that night she’d found herself wanting. A low, dull ache had accompanied her for the next few days, peaking at night when she was alone. It had been so long since any man had lavished attention on her, but the pressure of his fingers against her was proving to be inadequate. She wanted to feel her body clench with the shock of him first sliding into her and the stretch of every thrust after. She squirmed in her seat thinking of what he could do with his mouth, his tongue. She longed to lose herself again, to be free even for a moment from the account books and orders, rent payments, and invoices.

  Andrew could make her forget, but would he want to?

  In the moment, he’d been entirely focused on her, as though her pleasure were to be his greatest achievement. But as soon as he pulled away, she could feel him start to recede into himself. He’d thrown up obstacle after obstacle, making objections where there should be none. He’d given her so many excuses to pull away. To say she hadn’t really desired him.