“Why?” she asked. “We both know that if you elect to keep me within these walls, there is naught I could do to prevent it.”
“I’m not a villain, Miss Marks, attempting to keep you locked away like some Drury Lane monstrosity,” he said with exasperation as Whittinger tugged the thread taut and tied off the last of the stitches. “I want to keep you safe. Do I really need to list all the ways in which a man such as Alaric West could pose a threat to you?”
She glared at him. “Contrary to what you may think, Lord Deveril, I am neither stupid nor particularly naive.”
It was at this point, Lady Carringden knocked upon the door and simply let herself in. “I can hear the two of you shrieking at one another down the corridor! Really, Douglas, must you behave so abominably? And as for you, Miss Marks, it is highly improper for you to be in here alone!”
“We are not alone. The servants are present,” Devil snapped, unwilling to be besieged by two angry women at the same time.
“Servants are hardly adequate!” Lady Carringden insisted. “If you mean to utterly destroy Miss Marks’ reputation, by all means, persist. Otherwise, I have to insist, Douglas, that she leave this room with me at once!”
“I do beg your pardon, Lady Carringden, but in light of Lord Deveril’s injury, it is hardly improper that we should be here to attend him,” Willa stated emphatically.
His aunt harrumphed loudly. “Honestly, my dear girl! It’s not as if you’d know what is proper at all! You seem to be about as well informed on that matter as you are on proper child rearing techniques—”
“Enough!” Devil shouted. “Aunt Jeannette, you are here to preserve the illusion of propriety. That is all. Remove yourself from my chamber, please.”
She drew herself up, shoulders back and stiff. “And if I do not?”
“Then you will be forcibly removed from it. Miss Marks is in no danger from me at this moment, but we do require privacy. There are matters which must be discussed, and those matters are of a private nature.” His response had been uttered in a more carefully modulated tone, but it was no less firm and brooked no argument.
A squeak erupted behind him. “In your bedchamber, my lord?” Whittinger queried, utterly scandalized.
“Now is hardly the time, Whittinger, unless you wish to be removed from this chamber along with my aunt!” Devil said bluntly. “And I’m more likely to throttle her than seduce her at this point, so the both of you may rest assured her virtue is safe!”
The valet drew himself up to his full but still diminutive height. “Very well, my lord. But I shall remain in the corridor for the sake of propriety.”
“I shall not!” Lady Carringden snapped. “I’ve had about enough from you both! You, Douglas, with your snapping and your temper. And your betrothed,” the word was uttered with a derisive sneer, “she reeks of the gutter, and you may pretty it up as you choose, but it’s clear to me that this is an immoral household and my influence will make no matter there! As soon as I can make proper arrangements, I’ll be returning to my own home. I’ll not gossip about you, but I’ll not support whatever lies it is that you mean to tell. If I am asked, Nephew, I will speak the truth!”
When she was done, Jeannette turned on her heel and strode from the room, leaving shocked servants in her wake. After a moment of stunned and very uncomfortable silence, the servants bustled out. “Am I really so lacking in authority in my own home?”
Wilhelmina looked at him with pure venom in her gaze. “Clearly not, as you have expressed that I am to be cloistered here!”
“Do not say cloistered,” he snapped. “I may have to live like a monk for the time being, but I refuse to have my house likened to a monastery!” He rose from the small settee at the foot of the bed where he’d sat while Whittinger had tended his wound. Crossing to his wardrobe, he removed a fresh shirt and began the arduous process of putting it on while moving his right arm as little as possible.
“Stop it! You’re going to open your wound again,” she admonished. “You need a bandage over it anyway!”
“Well, I’m not bloody well calling my missish valet back in here to do it. My own mother did a damned poor enough job of it that I’m not inclined to let anyone else take over mothering me now!” He all but shouted his response.
She blinked at his cursing. If he’d been in a better frame of mind, he would have apologized to her for it. Or preferably, he would never have used such language to start. She was not one of the soldiers who’d served under his command in India, nor was she one of his rakehell companions. Governess, illegitimate, under his employ—whatever could be said of her, Wilhelmina Marks was still very much a lady.
“I will bandage it,” she offered. “If you will sit down… you are too tall and I cannot reach.”
Devil bit back a churlish reply. His shoulder was beginning to ache, the excitement of the altercation was beginning to fade, and in its place was a not so quiet fury. They’d invaded his own space, lain in wait for them outside his very own home. If he’d been less watchful, if he’d been a moment later in recognizing the danger—thinking of it made his heart race and brought a fine sheen of sweat to his skin.
“Are you feverish?” Willa asked, pressing the back of her hand to his forehead.
“I am not feverish, Willa. I am furious. I understand you do not wish to remain trapped in the house, and it isn’t my wish for you be trapped either. Regardless, it is the only way I know at this time to ensure your safety and Marina’s. Please, just until we can resolve the issue of West,” he implored. “Do not ask me to risk having another innocent woman’s life on my already burdened conscience!”
*
Willa took a deep breath. As she pressed the bandage over the wound, she could feel the warm, silken smoothness of his skin, the firm and sinewy muscle beneath. Distressing was not necessarily the word, though she could not think of a better one in the moment. He left her feeling very unsettled, unsure of herself, unsure of the situation, and unable to adequately categorize her feelings.
“I will concede… for the time being,” she relented. Her voice sounded breathless and thin, a clear indication of the state of her nerves.
Once the bandage was in place, Willa reached for the shirt still clutched in his hands. “Let me help you with this.”
“I can manage,” he said. The tone of his voice was gruff, but not angry.
Willa looked up, meeting his gaze. What she saw there took her breath away. She was a virgin, but she was not innocent. She knew precisely what his expression meant. Desire. And she had to acknowledge the spark of it within herself.
“You’ll dislodge your bandage, bleed on your shirt, and we’ll have to start the process over,” she insisted. “Let me help you with it and we can call it done. I’ll return to my room, and I will not leave this house or the immediate grounds for at least two days.”
“If I agree to let you help me with the shirt, will you make it three days?” he bargained.
“Potentially… but only if you agree to share any information with me that you garner about Mr. West in the meantime,” she countered.
“Fair enough,” he agreed.
Willa took the shirt, her fingers brushing his as he allowed her to claim the garment. It was an impossibly intimate feeling, that brush of their naked hands while he sat before her clad only in his breeches and the bandage she’d applied. With a hitch in her breath, Willa bunched the fabric of the shirt until she could slide his injured arm into the sleeve first. As she pulled the garment over his head, her fingers brushed against the dark waves of his hair, the crisp texture both unexpected and intriguing.
The movement, stepping closer to pull the garment over his head entirely, had brought her so near him that she was cradled between his parted thighs, feeling the heat of him. So close, in fact, that the firm muscles of his inner thigh pressed against her and her breasts brushed his shoulder. The hiss of his breath across her skin told her that he had not missed the contact. Her flesh tingled everywhere
they had touched, even if those touches had been unintended and entirely innocent.
Willa looked down, meeting his gaze once more, and what she saw there sealed her fate. He drew her in with that look, luring her closer and closer without uttering a word, until their lips were just inches from touching. “This is a terrible idea.”
“It is,” he agreed. “And I don’t give a damn. I’ve been aching to kiss you again… to see if it was as incredible as I remember from that all too brief encounter yesterday.”
“Then do it already, so we can both stop wondering.” Her words were as much a challenge to herself as they were to him. In that moment, poised on the brink of doing something wild, reckless, and quite possibly disastrous, Willa didn’t know whether to fall into his arms or run as fast and far as she could away from him. But temptation, the lure of the man himself, and the lure of the unknown held her in sway.
Chapter Seventeen
Unable to resist her and, if truth were told, unwilling to do so, Devil slid his hand over the soft slope of her shoulder until it cradled the nape of her neck. His fingers speared into the mass of her blonde tresses. Hair pins scattered, pinging on the wooden floor as the lush waves fell over her shoulders like the finest gold silk. The firelight caught the various shades of it, highlighting all the subtle variations in hue. With only the slightest pressure of his hand, she moved toward him until he could feel the rush of her breath over his lips. To close that small distance between them, to claim the soft sweet curves of her lips with his own, it was as natural to him as breathing, and possibly as necessary.
By all accounts, it was a chaste kiss. His lips moved over hers, brushing, teasing, mapping every contour and committing it to memory. He was well aware that it might be the last opportunity he would have. Her response, sweet and untutored, was as tempting as the most skilled of courtesans. It evoked a reaction in him unlike anything else he’d ever known. Every part of him was focused on those points of contact between them. The silken skin of her neck beneath his palm, the sensation of her hair tangling about his fingers, the taste of her, the softness and sweetness of her lips—it was intoxicating. And then she leaned into him, and the weight of her against his chest and the crush of her breasts against the hardness of his own flesh prompted him to deepen the kiss.
Gently, he stroked the line of her jaw with his thumb, and with the slightest pressure, prompted her to part her lips. She did so, and he swept his tongue into her mouth, exploring the soft recesses and swallowing the sound of her gasp. She’d been kissed before their encounter the day before, she said, but not really—not by a man who only wished to worship her body and bring her pleasure. Anyone else who had ever touched her thusly had done so with a desire to take.
But even as he plied her soft lips with his own, even as he plundered the sweetness of her, he struggled to hold fast to his control. He had no wish to scare her, to paw at her like some green lad who didn’t know how to pleasure a woman and thought only of himself. And yet her innocent response inflamed him. As debauched as he was, as much as he had thought himself forever burdened by the sense of ennui that plagued him for so long, in that instant he knew himself to be very much mistaken. There was not a part of him that was not consumed by that kiss, that was not affected by it in a profound way. If he’d thought the power of their earlier encounter was an anomaly, he was being proven very wrong. If anything, it seemed that with every kiss, the power of his attraction to her only grew.
She was like water to a man lost in the desert, land to a man lost at sea. For that second, with her in his arms, she was all that he needed and all that he desired. It was a strange thing to feel whole for the first time in his life, and yet he did. It was wondrous and terrifying all at once.
As much as he savored the kiss, and as much he had desired it, he used all of his considerable knowledge and skill to decipher what she enjoyed. Every sigh, every shudder, every stroke of his tongue against hers or caress of his lips that made her tense and shiver, he paid heed to.
Whether she sank against him fully or whether he guided her across his lap, he could not say. But she was there, her thighs draped over his and only the few layers of fabric from her skirts and petticoats separating them. He let his hand trail along the slope of her shoulder, down her arm, and then over to her rib cage. Every move was measured and careful, slow and languorous. When the pad of his thumb brushed against the underside of her breast, she shivered and pressed closer. Her back arched in invitation and he accepted greedily. Cupping the softness of her breast fully, feeling the hard peak of her nipple as it pebbled against his palm, Devil’s pulse quickened. Pulling his lips from hers, he trailed kisses along her jaw line, the silken column of her throat, and then lower.
He pressed a dozen kisses to the swells of her breasts above the neckline of her gown, nipping gently with his teeth and then soothing the sting of it with his tongue. It was an easy enough thing to release the bib front of her gown, for the fabric to part and reveal the simple stays and chemise beneath it. Continuing his exploration, he made a vow. He would not take her innocence. Not like that. It was a line he had never crossed, and he did not mean to begin in that moment. But he could show her passion and, if she permitted, he could show her pleasure.
With her stays laced in front, he simply tugged the knot until it slipped free. The garment sagged, and he slipped his fingers beneath the quilted fabric. Her skin was hot to the touch and smoother than the finest silk. Tugging the fabric aside, he pressed the softest of kisses to the rosy tip of one perfect breast. When she sighed in response, pressed closer to him, and let her head fall back, he repeated the gesture more intently. Opening his mouth, he captured that peak between his lips, teasing the sensitive flesh until a soft moan escaped her lips. But that sound, in a room previously silent, broke the spell that had been woven about them. He felt her tense, felt the very moment when reality, nay sanity, intruded.
She placed her hands against his chest and pushed. Dutifully, he disengaged himself from her and looked up into her flushed face. Her expression could only be categorized as stricken.
“What have you done to me?” she whispered.
He could have lied about it. He could have dismissed it as only a kiss, a few stolen liberties. But it was not. To say so would have been to deny the power of what had just passed between them, to deny that what had occurred had changed him forever. “It is Pandora’s box, Willa. And now there is no going back for either of us.”
She withdrew from him completely then, all but tumbling from his lap as she rose to her feet. She stepped back from him and drew into herself. Her arms wrapped tightly about her and her disheveled clothing as she stared at him with resignation. “I knew the risks coming here. I knew what you were—who you were.”
Anger hit him swiftly. What she implied was beneath him, beneath them both. “I did not force this upon you, Willa. We kissed, and it was by mutual agreement,” he said. “As was everything else. All you had to do, at any second in that exchange, was tell me no or push me away.”
“I was not implying that you had, Lord Deveril—”
“Douglas, dammit. Or Devil. But do not call me by father’s name in a moment such as this,” he demanded angrily.
“Fine, Douglas! I am not implying that I was forced nor would I even say that I was seduced by you. But men such as you, men who are devoted to pleasure, lead women astray without even making an effort to do so. You are the serpent in the garden,” she said bitterly.
“I would remind you, Wilhelmina, that you came to me. One might even argue that by pursuing me into my bedchamber—”
“Pursuing you?” she demanded hotly. “I came here to speak with you, not for… not for—”
“For pleasure? For passion? For desire? To know what it is that you’ve been so dead set on denying yourself for all of your life? You are a woman, Willa, a passionate and sensual one. Draping yourself in dull colors and trying to disguise your beauty does not alter that. Denying your nature does not change
it.”
“My nature is not yours,” she replied. “My life does not allow for hedonism.”
“A kiss, magnificent as it was, does not constitute hedonism.”
“It was more than a kiss!”
He smiled coldly. “Yes. It was. Significantly more, and I don’t say that because I had you half-undressed on my lap. There is a power between us, Willa, that neither of us can deny.”
“I cannot be a party to this kind of debauchery!”
He rolled his eyes. Not on purpose. It simply happened of its own accord. “Debauchery? I know debauchery, and I know it well, Willa. This was not it. One kiss and a bit of petting is hardly a downward spiral!”
“And how did you begin your descent into it, then? Was it a slow process or did you simply race headlong for it? A thing, once known, cannot be unknown. Pandora’s box, just as you said,” she accused.
“You are a plague on me,” he said. “A beautiful, maddening plague. I didn’t kiss you to lead you astray, Willa. I kissed you because I had no other option. I needed it as I need air to breathe. And now I need peace. Go, Willa. Go to your room, go back to Miss Darrow’s. Go anywhere but where I am and leave me be.” He uttered the last word on a heavy sigh. She exhausted him with her morality, with her guardedness, with the unshakeable idea that she would haunt him for the remainder of his days, even if she was long gone from them.
“We will never be alone again after this. Not for any reason. The risk is too great and there is too much at stake.” With that final proclamation, she turned on her heel and strode toward the door. It was the most forceful and strident retreat that had ever been made.
*
It wasn’t temper that had Willa shaking as she entered her bedchamber, it was fear. Of course, it wasn’t Lord Deveril she feared, but herself; herself and her inability to resist him. She’d known from the moment she first met him that he was dangerous to her, that he provided a temptation she was ill-equipped to resist. Devil was aptly named, indeed. Lucifer himself had no greater ability to turn a woman’s head or make her forget herself so easily.
A Rogue to Remember Page 13
