by Carla Kelly
“What is it, Miss Sophia?”
“Furs.” She gestured at the pile he’d made. “Why do you suppose Uncle Oliver had so many furs?”
“They are much in demand amongst furriers and tailors. From beaver hats to fur-trimmed coats, cape lining and lap robes. I imagine he was able to purchase them in America more reasonably than here.” He paused at a sound from the bottom of the stairs.
Potter carried a tray up the stairs and glanced around the attic. “Where shall I leave this, sir?”
Sebastian was surprised that it was lunchtime already. He gestured to the only place to leave the tray—the table where Miss Sophia worked. “Thank you, Potter. We shall eat when we have a chance. Do not worry about fetching the tray. I shall bring it down when we are done.”
The butler looked around and raised his eyebrows. “You have accomplished quite a bit, my lord. If you would like, I shall do the same with the crates in the cellar. I believe those are mostly wines and spirits, and perhaps a few tools.”
Sebastian nodded, relieved. He’d been on the verge of pressing Jonathan Arbuthnot into service, but with Miss Sophia’s warning that he disliked anything smacking of duty, he’d resisted. “Leave the list in my room when you are finished, Potter,” he said as the man took his leave.
Miss Sophia stretched her arms over her head and arched her back, and he realized he’d been working her rather hard. “If you do not mind, Selwick, I could use a bit of hot tea and a nibble of something solid.”
Lord, the curve of her breasts as they strained against the prim white pinafore just about undid him! He cleared his throat. “Of course.”
He looked around, realizing there were no chairs. Miss Sophia had been writing as she bent over the table. No wonder she ached. Potter was gone, attested to by the click of the latch as the stairway door closed. Too late to call for chairs.
Ah, but the furs would make a soft place to sit. He gestured to them and Miss Sophia smiled, kneeling on them with as much ladylike poise as anyone could muster.
“A picnic,” she said with pleasure.
He took the tray and joined her, grateful for her cheerful nature. Were she one of his stepsisters, or his former mistresses, she would be complaining.
Mrs. Cavendish had prepared a wedge of cheese, bread, sliced ham from last night, tea, pared apples and assorted cakes. As if an afterthought, she had included a sherry decanter and two crystal glasses. Very fine fare for a rough working luncheon.
“Thank you,” he said as he handed her a china dish with the apple slices.
“Whatever for?”
“For being so cooperative. And congenial.”
She laughed. “That surprises you?”
“I was just thinking that not many women of my acquaintance would give up their day to help me and then make a game of eating on the floor.”
“Then you must widen your circle of acquaintances, Selwick.”
“I think I ought to introduce you to my stepsisters. They could use a bit of coaching in congeniality.”
“I am sure you exaggerate. I am quite ordinary.”
Lord! How could she look in the mirror and ever think herself ordinary? How could she make him smile every time he saw her if she were unpleasant? He shook his head. “Miss Sophia, my stepsisters never miss an opportunity to make mountains from molehills. Catastrophe is their constant companion. And, since my father died, they and my stepmother expect me to smooth every bump in the road for them. They have quite put me off families altogether.”
He expected sympathy, but she smiled instead. “Do you give them your attention when they do not have a disaster?”
“I have found my own lodgings to avoid their crises.”
“Has that had the desired effect?”
He chortled. “Not in the least. They merely send for me.”
“Do you visit them regularly when there is not a crisis?”
He reached for the sherry bottle.
“Ah, I thought so,” she said. “I suspect their crises are manufactured to claim your attention.”
That notion intrigued him. “Why do you think so?”
“Because they have lost everything but you. Twice, apparently. Their father and husband, then their second father and husband. The world must seem a very precarious place to them. They must be feeling uncertain and a bit frightened.”
Sebastian wanted to contradict her, but she had given him something to think about, a new way of looking at his contentious family. Perhaps they had needed him more than he had thought, but in a different way.
“Have they come out yet?” Miss Sophia asked as she nibbled a crust of bread.
“Next spring.”
“You will have to find them husbands, Selwick. It would be best if you knew their dispositions well, and their preferences, before matching them with any suitors. And it would not bode well if it were known that you were anxious to be rid of them.”
He laughed. “I shall try to hide my anxiety.”
“I know you will not fail them.”
He poured her a glass of sherry and lifted his own in a toast. “To an uncomplicated life.”
Her confidence in him was flattering, especially in view of the fact that he was determined to spend his life dodging the marriage trap.
Chapter Eight
Sophia smiled and sipped. “I hope you will introduce me to your stepsisters, should we attend the same fetes come spring. They sound rather amusing.”
“Amusing? That would be one word for it, I suppose. But I should be delighted to introduce you, so long as you promise you will not advise them to jilt a duke.”
“I promise,” she said, torn between chagrin and amusement. “Though you are naughty to remind me of it.”
He laughed, confirming her suspicion that he’d been teasing, and she loved him for that. How endearing. She took a small sip of the sherry and shivered as a lock of hair came down from the knot on the top of her head and tickled her cheek.
Selwick reached across the distance to brush the lock back and tuck it behind her ear. Something quite delicious kindled a fire deep in her center, and a glance at Selwick told her that he felt it, too. She wondered if he would kiss her, but after a moment, he dropped his hand and asked an unexpected question.
“What happened between you and the duke, Miss Sophia?”
She paused while she put her thoughts in order. Would he think her as foolish as the duke had? She sighed. Though she had no wish to look ridiculous in his eyes, there was no point demurring. He could have it from her or from her family. “Evidently I was a silly schoolgirl, expecting more than he could give me.”
“He was a fool if he did not give you whatever you asked.”
She smiled. “I doubt he was a fool. If he had a fault, it was his honesty.”
“How so?”
Sophia sighed, the humiliation of that night coming back to her afresh. Would Selwick ever look at her the same after he knew the truth? Or would he always see her as somehow flawed? Less desirable? Too naive?
“Tell me, Miss Sophia,” he urged. “You can trust my discretion.”
“We…we were at our engagement ball, quite the largest of the season, and I saw him waltzing with a woman I’d never seen before. She was beautiful, and she appeared to be flirting with him. I asked him about her, and he took me out to the terrace for a private word. He said he hadn’t meant for me to find out in such a public manner, but that the woman was his…his mistress. A courtesan.”
Selwick’s expression was incredulous. “He flaunted his mistress in front of you? At your own engagement ball?”
She nodded. “I could have borne that, I suppose. I knew he was a man of the world, after all. But then he told me that, although he loved me, he loved her more deeply, and that he would never give her up. I would carry his name, his heir, but she would carry his heart.” She gritted her teeth, remembering how much that had hurt at the time. She had fancied herself in love with him, after all. Even so, “I could not imagine goin
g through the rest of my life always being second best, or something that had to be endured for the sake of his public personage and to produce an heir. I wanted love. I wanted…belonging. A family of my own. He could not give me that.
“So, if he was not brave enough to defy society to have the woman he loved, then I had courage enough for both of us. I gave him his freedom, and told him that what he did with it was up to him. He, however, did not see it that way. He reproached me and said I was naive and should put my girlish notions aside and accept the realities of life. But I could not endure being…used in such a manner. To lie with him, knowing he did not want me, but…”
“That was incredibly poor manners.” He placed his large hand over hers. “But he must have been fond of you, Miss Sophia, or he would not have wanted to shackle himself to you for life.”
She gained strength from that touch and forged ahead, determined to make him understand. “Though he professed his fondness, I believe he chose me for other reasons. My dowry is respectable, but a duke could have expected much more. No, he chose me because I was a country girl of good family and he thought I would be so flattered to be marrying a duke that I would overlook his infidelities, his love children and his disregard for my feelings. In any event, fondness would never have been enough for me, Selwick.”
“What would have been enough?”
The absurdity of what she was about to say brought heat to her cheeks. “I wanted to be my husband’s greatest passion. His best friend. I wanted to belong to him, with him, and wanted him to belong to me. All, Selwick. All or nothing at all.”
“That does not seem so unreasonable to me.”
She looked up at him again, surprised that he agreed with her. But his next words sobered her.
“Perhaps, had you wed, you could have won him over.”
“If not? By then, for better or worse, I would have been bound to him forever.”
“And forever is a very long time.” He stood and held his hand out to help her to her feet. She rose and swayed against him on the uneven surface of the furs. He tugged her against his chest and for an endless moment, she stopped breathing. Then, very slowly, he pulled her tighter until she was forced to tilt her head back to hold his gaze. She knew she should turn away, do something to stop him, but she merely parted her lips and lowered her lashes in a shameless invitation.
And he accepted. Not softly or gently this time, not in a tentative request, but hard and demanding, drawing forth a matching fierceness in her. She accepted that it would not end here. She could feel his desire in both the response of his body and the nearly frantic claim he made on her senses. By the time he relinquished her mouth, she was breathless and burning.
“I am glad the duke was a fool,” he growled, his voice hoarse with his vow. “But I—”
“If you apologize again, Selwick, I shall scream.”
“You’d have every right,” he mumbled against her lips. “I’m not in the least bit sorry.”
He lifted her off her feet, laid her on the furs and came down beside her. As he kissed her again, she longed to feel his hand on her breasts, as he’d done the last time they’d kissed, but he lingered, giving exquisite attention to her mouth and making her head swim with the arousing sensation.
She slipped her arms around him, pulling him closer, though there was not a single space separating them. He was solid and warm against her, but that was not enough. She slipped her hands beneath his jacket and the muscles of his chest jumped at her touch, and then that, too, was not enough. She fumbled with his cravat, hungering for the feel of his bare skin.
He seized her wrists and stopped her, pressing her hands back against the soft fur. “Please, Sophia, let me…” His long fingers worked the knots free and slipped the button from its loop, then tugged his shirttails from his breeches.
She marveled at his grace, and at the raw masculine beauty of his form as his chest was bared to her view. She’d never seen a man so…so undone, and the sight was playing havoc with her senses. He turned his attention to her and had her pinafore in a heap beside her before she realized it, then the buttons of her old-fashioned dress and the top laces of her stays were freed.
A flash of fear rose in her and she opened her mouth to protest, but he kissed her again and all her good intentions dissolved in an instant. His mouth was something magical, making her forget caution and good sense, especially as he kissed his way downward to the slopes of her breasts. Her heart beat wildly as he nudged fabric aside, drew one exquisitely sensitive peak into his mouth and rolled it with his tongue.
She whimpered and tangled her fingers through his hair, begging for more. How could she be both drawn as tight as a bowstring and fluid beneath his touch? He swept her skirts up her legs and paused to smooth over her healing injury before he lifted her knee to slide along his hip. She sighed at the texture of his trousers against the inside of her bare thigh. Was she wicked to be so wanton with a man she’d only known a matter of days?
“Sebastian,” she whispered, and then could think of nothing to say. But what need had she of words? He seemed to know her better than she knew herself.
“Sophia, by all the saints, you have bewitched me.” He lifted himself on one elbow and unfastened the knot of her hair to bury his face in it. “You smell of evergreens and sweetmeats, and you look like an angel. I will never have another Christmas that I won’t remember you thus.”
She touched his cheek. “A wanton?”
“Not yet, Sophia, but soon.”
He applied himself to her mouth again, then to the hollow of her throat, while he pushed her chemise higher, skimming his hand along the length of her bare thigh above her stockings and leaving trails of fire in his wake. But when his hand found her inner heat, that secret part of her no one had ever touched, she gasped. She wanted, craved, more of that touch.
A deep shudder passed through Sebastian and she felt him grow still and distant. He was going to stop! “No,” she cried. “You cannot leave me thus.”
“Sweet Sophia. You cannot know what you are asking. The consequences to you—”
“I do not care.” She only knew she could not stop now. This closeness, this intimacy and belonging was all she’d dreamed of for so long. She wiggled against him, trying to recapture the warmth and closeness.
With a groan, Sebastian gave in to her pleadings, resuming his ministration with a renewed fervor. And when he invaded with one finger, and then two, testing, stretching, she could not catch her breath. Her hips rose of their own accord and her fingers bit into his strong arms as he balanced above her, cooing encouragement.
He murmured short breathless sentences, telling her what he needed from her, when she should move, and when she should not. He was gone for one heart-stopping moment and then was back, parting her thighs and positioning himself between them.
Inappropriate. Dangerous. Naughty.
The words whispered across her consciousness and were quickly disregarded. Too late, she sighed. Too late. She was already addicted to his touch.
He lowered himself, probing, finding her core with that wholly masculine part of him. She thought she would faint from a tension that caused an unbearable desperation for something as yet unknown. He gained a shallow entry and she grew light-headed. Then he pushed harder into her and she cried out in surprise at the stinging discomfort.
Sebastian stilled, embedded within her, and kissed her eyes, her nose, her mouth, with a mingling of tenderness and anxiety. “Hush, sweet Sophia,” he murmured. “’Twill be easier now. The worst is over.”
He began moving again, a gentle rocking that sent little thrills from her center in every direction, heating her, lifting her, consuming her, until an unexpected shock and heat shot through her, raising gooseflesh throughout her body. She stiffened and Sebastian followed her, panting, his forehead gleaming with perspiration.
“Sophia…” he groaned, a world of regret in his voice.
Chapter Nine
For the first time in
his life, Viscount Sebastian Selwick had been completely out of control. An animal! A blasted rutting bull! He was no better than the most base of God’s creatures. He’d ruined Sophia Pettibone, and he hadn’t a single excuse for his conscienceless behavior. From her first sigh to her forlorn plea not to stop, then her last cry of passion, she had utterly possessed him. He’d been as powerless to stop as he’d been to pluck the moon from the sky, and he’d never once stopped to think of the consequences to Sophia, or his responsibility to her. But he did so now.
He shook his head in disgust. After he had taken Sophia to her room, he returned to the attic to pace out his frustration. The weather was too cold to go for a ride, and the snow was too deep to walk, but he needed some way to deal with the turmoil in his mind.
She was an enchantress, casting her spell about him so that he could not think straight. In the few short days they’d been together, he’d grown fonder of her than of any woman of his acquaintance, past or present. That, in itself, was not so alarming, but the fact that he had even been entertaining the notion of marriage…
But Sophia had been an innocent—the very sort he’d always avoided. He was experienced, a man of the world, but he’d never trifled with an innocent woman’s future. Before today. And now, because of his actions, Sophia Pettibone would be considered damaged goods by any prospective suitor of good family. Yes, he’d utterly ruined the girl.
He lifted a heavy object from the crate and unwound the flannel around it. It was a bronze of nude lovers locked in an embrace, done in the Greek style. His mouth went dry and his heart skipped a beat as his mind went straight to Sophia and their tryst.
He spun on his heel and glanced toward the pile of furs—the place of Sophia’s ruin. There was no trace of that act but for the impression of their bodies on the soft pelts. He threw his sherry across the room, taking savage satisfaction in the shatter of glass. He paused to see if he could hear the gods laughing and fancied they were.
Sophia. Sweet, dear Sophia. So misunderstood by her family, and so taken for granted. She deserved better than she’d received—from her family, from the duke, from him. And through it all, she’d behaved with such grace and courage that it left him humbled. Indeed, she had not seemed in the least bit angry or disturbed. No hysterics. No demands.
