“My sister is a very accomplished herbalist. You can ask anyone in Brambledon. She mixed together a new tonic to aid me with my . . .” She paused, the tendons of her throat working. “With my aches.”
“Aches?” He frowned. “What ails you?”
She looked away, clearly discomfited at discussing the subject of her health. He knew one should not pry into a lady’s health. It was not polite, but after this night he considered them well past politeness. The woman had used him to bring herself to climax. That certainly elevated them to intimates.
And truthfully, he felt an odd stirring in his chest. He didn’t like the idea of her ill or hurting.
“Come, lass,” he said gruffly, stepping closer to the water’s edge. “Tell me. What ails you?”
She considered him with those clear blue eyes. She did not look unhealthy. Indeed, the pink flush to her cheeks smacked of health and vitality.
“If you must know, they are pains of the female variety,” she finally confessed, and then watched him as though she expected him to turn and flee. “Nothing life-threatening. They merely plague me once a month and my clever sister sought to help me.”
The way she uttered clever indicated she was not very happy with her sister presently.
She continued, “Nora gave me this concoction on countless occasions . . . but this time she thought to alter it . . . to give me a bit more relief. She meant well.”
“And that’s when you accosted me?”
“Would you stop saying that?” she snapped, her hand slapping the surface of the water, sending it spraying through the air. She swam forward, stopping just short of where the water became too shallow. Closer now, she glared up at him. “It makes me sound positively predatory.”
He arched a brow. “Does it? Well, that’s not an inaccurate description.”
“It was not like that!”
“You tore my waistcoat,” he reminded.
“I popped a few buttons,” she protested. “They’re easily mended.”
“If I was to find them. Right now they’re scattered somewhere on the floor of the library—”
“I’m an excellent seamstress,” she declared. “I can befit your waistcoat with new buttons. Finer buttons than before.”
“Can you now? Fine buttons, eh?” he mocked. “Well, that will go some way toward reparations.”
“Reparations?” she echoed, looking quite stunned. She really was easy to unnerve, a fact he found quite diverting. He could discourse with her all day, in fact.
She continued, “You hardly offered protest, sirrah, when I accosted you.”
He shrugged. “Call me a gentleman. You were in quite a fever and very demanding. Who was I to deny you? I did not want to cause you further distress.”
Her hot gaze actually burned him. “A true gentleman would have turned me away.”
He laughed. “No man, gentleman or not, would have turned his back on a fetching, half-dressed woman throwing herself at him.”
“You make me sound a . . . slattern.”
“Not at all. I respect any woman strong enough to know her mind and claim her own passion. There is no shame in that.”
She gazed at him skeptically.
For a moment, he had a flash of his mother, Helene, as he’d last seen her . . . dark hair like spilled ink on her pillow; not a strand of gray even at her age, not even in her condition. She had been stretched out in a bed, a ghost of her former self. So much in pain. Used up and forgotten and forever broken from all the men in her life, his father included.
Kingston didn’t believe in shame. It was a construct invented to keep people inside Society’s lines—to keep them inside and feeling acute remorse if they ever dared to stray outside those lines.
There was not shame. Only risk.
And the memory of that, of Helene, was enough to kill his good humor.
“Have a care, though,” he heard himself saying rather bitterly. “The next man you corner in the middle of the night might not be so kind as to walk away without lifting your skirts and taking his own pleasure.”
She flinched.
He saw that other scenario in his mind and it turned his stomach. The scenario of Miss Charlotte Langley with some other man. A far rougher, greedy man uncaring of her needs. Any number of men would have taken her in the library whether she wished it or not. They would not have hesitated to seize all she offered and plunder her, and it left him dazed with anger.
He wasn’t just angry at these phantom men. Indeed not. He was incensed at her. Incensed that she would risk herself so foolishly.
“I vow to you,” she whispered, “what happened in the library was not my customary behavior.” Another breath, jagged as a broken bit of glass. “And I told you why.”
“Ah, yes. The elixir.”
Her face tightened in anger and suddenly she was splashing water at him, soaking his trousers.
He jumped back against the onslaught. The nerve of the girl! “Brat,” he muttered, shaking out first one leg and then the other. Even his boots were wet. Fortunately they were made to withstand the elements.
“I speak the truth, and it’s maddening that you truly think me some vulgar manner of female who goes about climbing all over strange men like she is eager to . . . to—”
“Rut?” he suggested.
“Oh!” She gasped at his suggestion.
“Apt, I think.” He nodded.
“You are a wretched, wretched man.”
Smiling, he wished he could see her more clearly through the water, but he could only make out her vague shape.
She swam backward from him, her chin bobbing at the waterline as she inched away, her hands working feverishly under the surface.
“You weren’t thinking that of me earlier,” he taunted after her, the toes of his boots stepping closer, right up to the water’s edge.
She released a cry of outrage while still continuing her retreat. “Please come no closer. Stay where you are until I emerge from the water.”
“Why?” He looked down at the water lapping the tips of his boots. “Are you afraid of me? You know I could have had you last night. You would have made no protest. I would think that earned me a modicum of your trust.”
“You’re a cad to fling my ill behavior at me.”
“Your ill behavior?” He tsked. “Is this not where you again insist that you were drugged with an aphrodisiac and lacking all control over yourself? The behavior, then, is not yours.”
“You continue to mock me.” Even as her words vibrated with angry emotion, she ceased to swim away. In fact, she began gliding forward again, toward him, moving as sinuously as an adder.
He shook his head and stared at her with earnest sincerity as she inched closer. “No. I do not mock you. You believe in your rubbish. That much I know.”
Her eyes flared, but she did not retreat again.
“Are you not a little curious, though?” he continued.
“About what?”
“The library . . . You blame it on this aphrodisiac your sister invented, but wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Know what?”
“If it could be like that again? Without your sister’s potion?” He was humoring her. He knew it. But he could not forget the way she had shattered in his arms, desire convulsing through her. It was impossible to forget. As impossible as not wanting to experience it again.
Impossible, indeed.
“Would you not like another climax?” he taunted. “To see if it’s as good as before?”
Those eyes of hers grew larger yet. “I am certain it won’t be,” she said in clipped tones.
He let loose a bark of laughter. She was blunt. And impertinent. Again, it boggled his mind that he had so vastly misjudged her. How had he ever thought her insipid?
It was gratifying that she’d admitted her climax had been good—even if only indirectly. At least there was that. Especially as she had been denying the authenticity of her desire with the most maidenly airs. In th
is, she was truthful.
This, if nothing else.
“Oh?” He arched an eyebrow. “You seem very sure of that.”
“Indeed I am.” She sniffed. “The tonic clearly heightened the experience.”
He closed his eyes in a tight, long blink. She was unbelievable. The lass was infuriating. He reopened his eyes to look at her. “Is that a challenge?”
“Simply true.”
“Do you not feel it now? The sparks between us?” He motioned across the distance. “I’m standing here, and you’re there in the water, but it’s still there. The heat between us that has nothing to do with the temperature.”
She held silent for a moment, treading in place, considering him with deep scrutiny and her perpetually pink cheeks. She moistened her lips, catching droplets of water with her tongue. His gut tightened at the small action. “All effects of Nora’s tonic, I am certain. I don’t think it’s left my . . . uh, body yet.”
The bloody tonic again.
“And how long, pray tell, do you think it will before the effects dissipate? Fully dissipate?”
She shrugged and inched closer. “Days. I don’t rightly know. Who can say? You will be long gone from here before then, though. I am certain of that. A man like you has far more diverting things to do than keep to this little provincial backwater.”
It was as though she was a mind reader. That was what he had thought, after all, when he had initially planned to depart after the tediously boring dinner.
He narrowed his gaze on her. She was practically crouching now in the pond’s shallow edge, her attractive knees poking up out of the water. She seemed to be weighing her options. If she were to emerge from the pond she would be fully naked.
He had already gotten an eyeful of her. At least from the waist up. He swallowed thickly at the memory of her yanking down her nightgown.
She only had to stand and he’d have all of her in his gaze.
“Can you turn around, please?”
“I beg your pardon?” The words felt like marbles rolling around in his mouth.
“Turn. Please.”
He snorted. After everything, she would cling to modesty. As though he had not seen her. As though he had not moments ago just witnessed her floating on her back like a water nymph, her perky breasts sticking out of the water, those pebble-hard nipples tantalizing him as they had when she yanked her nightgown down.
Smiling tightly, he obliged.
He listened to the sound of her moving forward through the water, then water dripping and sluicing down her form as she stood, followed by the crunch of her bare feet over the ground.
He had many flaws. Too innumerable to count. As the bastard son of the Earl of Norfolk and a famed courtesan, it seemed he was destined for vice and wrongdoing. His fate had been sketched before he drew his first breath.
But he had never denied a lady’s request for modesty.
If a woman said stop, wait or no, he obeyed. In this, he was at their mercy.
Just as he was now at Charlotte Langley’s mercy. In the library and here. Right now.
“I look forward to continuing our acquaintance and getting to know the real you without the influence of your sister’s tonic,” he called, still humoring her insistence that this tonic was the reason for her behavior this night.
“What do you mean?” Branches rustled as she gathered up her clothes. “You were to leave today. You said so yesterday.” A touch of desperation tinged her voice.
“I’ve decided to stay,” he announced.
Silence behind him met the declaration.
He risked a look to find her attired again, her dress damp and clinging in several places. She stood still as a marble statue, her shoes and stockings dangling from one hand as she stared at him with horror.
She’d only just emerged from the water, but the tendrils framing her face were already curling charmingly. “You cannot. You cannot mean to stay.”
“You needn’t look so appalled.” He stepped forward.
Gasping, she backed up several steps on the pebbled ground, watching him as he advanced. He strolled toward her, enjoying the sensation of her heated eyes on him.
For all her horror, she could not seem to look away.
A gratified smile played about his lips. He looked her up and down. “You’ve dressed yourself, but you might as well be without garments. I can see you quite clearly in my mind. Your lovely dusky nipples, the size of a farthing, perfectly bite-sized. I grow hard just at the memory of you.”
She gaped like a fish at him as he lowered himself down on the grassy earth at her feet.
“Would you like to see?” he asked.
“What are you doing now?”
She glanced around wildly, clearly assuring herself that they were still very much alone. Satisfied, she then looked back at him, and he saw the understanding in her scalding gaze.
She knew perfectly well what he was offering.
“Yes,” she whispered and then licked her lips, staring at his hands as they lowered to his trousers.
He opened his breeches slowly, still giving her time to flee if she chose, but she didn’t move as he freed himself.
“Oh! Cover yourself.” The soft words were barely audible between her ragged little pants.
A dragonfly, its wings beating as rapidly as his heart, darted in the space between them, its blue-green body glinting as it hovered, coming dangerously close to landing on her shoulder. All things were drawn to her. He fought a smile at the whimsical thought.
He lay on his back, elbows propped on the soft cushion of grass. He angled his face up to the lightening sky as though he had all the time in the world to lounge naked.
“You’re incorrigible.” Her breathy words escaped like a caress as her hungry eyes devoured him. He felt them wrap around him in a seductive touch, leaving no doubt that she did not want him to cover himself.
“And yet you still stand here.” He looked up at her as he took himself in hand. “Taking your fill of me.”
She flushed and shifted on her feet.
It was encouraging. She had not fled in scandalized affront. She remained. She was still that lass—the one from the night before who had boldly mounted him and took her hungry pleasure. Of course, she still believed herself drugged.
Her gaze roamed him freely and he could not help his body’s reaction. His cock hardened. He glanced down at his member, noting its deepening color, his prick’s flushed head, swollen and ready.
“Curious, is it not?” he asked.
“What?” She moistened her lips.
“How we’re made to fit each other. Man and woman. Aren’t you a little curious at what it would be like with a man inside you?”
Her nostrils flared as he fully circled his prick and gave it a slow pump.
Her eyes never left him. She watched his hand wrapped around his cock. “I’ll have that experience soon enough. I don’t need you for that,” she blurted defiantly even as her lips parted in unabashed fascination.
His grip tightened on his cock and he felt himself scowling. “With that Pembroke fellow?”
He couldn’t stomach the thought.
She nodded jerkily, and he couldn’t help marveling at her eyes. The blue was so vibrant, shining around her dark pupils.
“Well, you’re not his yet,” he grit out as blood rushed to his cock. “Tell me, Charlie—”
“My name is Charlotte. Not that I’ve granted you permission to use my Christian name. You may call me Miss Langley.”
He ignored the ridiculousness of that request. “Have you ever thought about doing the things to Pembroke you did to me? Fantasized about him?”
Her silence was deafening . . . and telling.
And damn satisfying.
He smiled slowly. Smirked, rather. “Of course not.”
Pembroke was a proper gentleman.
Thankfully, Kingston was not.
She was a vision, inching closer, her lovely eyes drawn to the sight of him, sp
read-eagle, his cock arrow-straight and swollen with need. It was very nearly enough to make him spill himself in the grass right then.
She licked her lips, her breathing labored . . . as though she were in the midst of some exertion and not standing virtually motionless.
“I’ve never even fantasized about doing such wicked things,” she confessed.
“And yet you did. And now you stand here watching me rub one off.” He resumed stroking himself then, watching her rapt face hungrily. Her chest rose and fell faster. She was not unaffected by the sight of him.
Her hands played with the collar of her gown, curling into white-knuckled fists as though she wanted to yank it from her body. “It’s as I said.” Her chin went up defiantly. “The lingering effects of the tonic and nothing more. I would never stand here and watch you otherwise—”
Her words lit a match to his temper. “Tell me, Charlie—”
“I told you to address me as Miss Langley,” she said in the sternest tone.
That made him laugh. A hard and dark chuckle that he felt in his belly.
Her lashes lowered to half-mast over eyes that seemed all dark pupils. She watched him fondle himself and yet she insisted he address her formally.
By God, he would not.
He would use her Christian name. “Charlie . . . come here.”
Chapter 7
At Kingston’s command, she blinked but remained where she stood. Her eyes boldly studied his cock, not at all in the manner of a frightened maid. If he believed in things like love potions he would almost believe she was, in fact, under the spell of one.
But of course, he did not believe in such rubbish. He was not a lad to believe in fairy tales, potions or spells.
“I—I beg your pardon?” she stammered between gasping breaths.
Bloody hell, but she was aroused. Wildly aroused. He could almost smell the desire, the need, radiating from her like something born of earth and wind and the ancient beats of nature.
He did not miss how one of her feet inched closer. Against her will, it seemed, she was tempted.
“If you want this, then get beside me now. Permit me to give you relief,” he taunted—although he felt no levity as he got the words out. It felt like only the most serious thing in his life. This woman getting beside him. Touching him. Letting him touch her.
The Virgin and the Rogue Page 6
