“Somewhat.”
“Then since I have summoned my better nature this long, I will stay on the honorable path. I will ask instead of act. Are you glad that I followed you here?”
She rather wished he had chosen to be dishonorable. Now the decision was hers. This conversation had done little to encourage a sound one.
“I am still settling that question,” she said.
He took it very well. He stood. That brought him closer to her, so close that her heart rose and flipped. He looked down and she sensed that dark power surrounding her. It was a very brief attempt at invasion, but it left her mesmerized and helpless.
He still held her hand. “I will allow you to ponder the question on your own. I will set aside my inclination to tip the argument in my favor the only way I know how.”
“That is good of you.”
“I doubt that I will be so noble for more than a day. If you conclude I must be warned off, you had better settle in that direction quickly.”
He began to let go of her. She tightened her own fingers so he could not.
“It truly is good of you, Christian. Very kind, really. I have more than proven how weak I am with you already.”
“And I have been ruthless as a result. I succumbed to a bad family trait, to make sure I got what I wanted.” He kissed her hand, and released it. “Unless I want to succumb again, I must leave you now.”
He was an idiot. A fool.
He slammed his fist against the sill of the window where he stood looking out at nothing.
No, not nothing. Above him, out of sight, another window emitted the faintest light. It fell like a faerie glow on the garden. The evidence that Leona was still awake made his jaw clench.
So much for the great conundrum. Hell, when she tallied up the good and the bad, the pleasure and the cost, then added in the potential misery and scandal of an affair with the half-mad marquess, her shrewd mind would settle the question in the way he least wanted.
He had almost killed himself riding cross-country to get here tonight. Even his dislike of this house could not diminish his impatience. It was a miracle that he had not slung her over his shoulder and taken her to bed as soon as he saw her.
Instead, in a fit of sentimentality that came from God knew where, he had all but told her to throw him over. As if she wasn't going to do that soon enough anyway, without his leading her to it.
She had appeared stunned at his reference to marriage. Appalled. If the notion had ever entered her head she had discarded it long ago.
Just as well. Doing the right thing often resulted in living the wrong thing forever. All the luxury in the world would not make that life any easier. That was one calculation on Leona's part that pleasure had not obscured.
He glanced to the valise on the floor, still sitting where he had dropped it upon arriving. The servant who had trailed him upstairs to play valet almost fainted when a snarl greeted his attempts to unpack it. Inside was that damned leather notebook.
The notebook was one excellent reason why a proposal would be ill-advised. If she learned its contents, or if she found her answers some other way, she would be certain he had gone to Macao to betray her father.
There were plenty of other reasons too. Leona had compiled a long list of her own should he want it.
She thought him willful, peculiar, rude, conceited, and arrogant—and those were the opinions she had actually voiced. One could only imagine the ones she politely kept to herself. She did not treat him carefully, as if he were half mad, but she considered his habits unbearable.
I will not join you in that isolation.
The night suddenly got darker. The low light leaking from the window above disappeared. Desire carved through him with a vengeance, mocking the stupid hope that light had given him.
He opened the window to the chilled air. He stripped off his clothes and stood there naked. The cool breeze did not help. He burned from the inside. The fire in his blood and head would not go away.
He strode to the bed, feeling more inner chaos than he had since he had left Macao. Anger at what he was, fury at his impotence to change it, alarm at how fate had played a cruel joke that would never end—it swept him as he lay beneath the sheet and faced a sleepless night.
With the dark emotions came the insidious craving to escape into paradise. That was what opium seemed to offer, and still did at moments like this. He was in hell but heaven was in the pipe, waiting to provide so lace. For a brief time, while in opium's haze, the world was simple and perfect and he was normal and full of potential.
He rarely experienced this craving now. Normally he could seek the dark center and find peace, but that would not work tonight. All the same he controlled his breathing the way Tong Wei had taught him.
It sustained him through the peak of the wave that the hunger formed, through that instant of unbearable physical madness when a man will sell his soul for relief. Then, also as Tong Wei had promised, the worst was over even as it happened. The crest of the craving signaled its retreat.
The breathing had not been enough to break the chains that were forming in Macao. Even meditation had not been enough. True control had required he gaze a long time into the mirror Leona had held up that night.
Accepting the past as irrevocable had been a big part of his victory. Accepting his inheritance in full had been the rest.
This house was the least of it. The title, the wealth— all of that hid the darker legacy. He may have received the estate, but he had also received the worst of his family's blood.
It might have been tolerable without his mother's curse. If he had not sensed the extent of his father's ruthlessness, he could have chosen to ignore his own inclinations in that direction. He could have even pretended that the old man was not as bad as everyone feared.
If he had not watched his mother retreat from everyone and everything, if he had not watched her isolation bring her to the brink of true madness, he might have overcome his fear of his odd gift earlier too.
He saw her sitting at that library desk, lost to them. The rumor started that his father had locked her away. Her eldest son knew differently. She had just withdrawn into the world of her mind where only her own melancholy had to be accommodated.
He knew the temptation to hide the way she had done. Hadn't he tried to run away himself? From the chaos that came from knowing too much, and more than others ever did. From the sense of having no identity after his father died, because he dared not admit that he shared too many similarities with the last marquess.
Whatever you run from is inside you.
The craving subsided, but not the chaos. His thoughts ran wild through past and present, as if he had a fever. He saw Leona in Macao and then in the library below. He experienced again her trembling when he first kissed her years ago, and when he first took her last week.
She would leave. No matter what else happened, she would go.
Maybe she feared he would not allow that. Leona still read his heart better than anyone ever had. She probably sensed in him the temptation to do whatever was necessary to keep her, but she would never understand the reason.
He had spent two years finding his true self, but in reality the man who returned to England had been a feint, a construction designed for survival. Tonight was proving that.
He was only his true self, he only really lived, when he was with her.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
It was astonishing. Amazing in its way. Here she stood, almost breathless with excitement, but inside her soul she experienced total calm.
She opened her door. No one was about. She walked to the stairs and descended. Her bare feet sank into the deep strip of carpet that silenced her steps.
She knew where Easterbrook's apartment could be found. She had noted it more specifically than she ought when the housekeeper gave the tour. The truth hiding inside her had counted the steps to her own chambers, and mapped the corridors and memorized the doors while the houseke
eper chatted away.
She pushed at the entry door to his private rooms. All was dark, but she felt his presence. She peered into the corners, to see if perhaps he sat in the blanketing blackness.
She padded across to another door, one that was ajar. The vaguest light filtered out that crack. She gazed into his bedchamber. Like her own it faced the gardens, and the drapes had not been drawn. Moonlight flowed in, giving form to the bed and its hangings, and the moldings and furniture. And to him.
He was not sleeping. He was in bed, though, almost sitting against the pillows, his naked chest carved by the moonlight and one leg bent atop the white sheet that covered most of his lower body.
He did not move when she entered. He did not even greet her. He just watched while she set her lamp on a table.
The room quaked with what was in him. She recognized the turmoil. She thought Easterbrook had tamed that confusion, but tonight, for some reason, it had triumphed again. She wondered if he would reveal the same sardonic humor that Edmund could employ to mask his soul's disorder.
“I am grateful that you are here,” he said.
He sounded sincere. But then a man expecting pleasure would probably be grateful at the proof he would not be denied.
She could not worry about his reasons. She barely knew her own. It had not been her mind that urged her to come to him, after all. It had argued forcefully that she not do this.
A detailed accounting had been taken up in her chamber, listing all the costs. The final sum should have discouraged any woman. Instead her heart had noted the amount, then swept it away in an outpouring of yearning.
She would not pick up the debate again. Yes, this was a mistake. Yes, she would regret it soon enough. Yes, too many questions remained unanswered. Yes, even the memories might not survive after the world demanded its payment.
“I knew I should settle the question differently, but could not.” She walked to the side of the bed, and turned down the sheet. “I only ask one promise from you first.”
He waited to hear it, with no reaction.
“You must allow me to leave when it is time. You must help me finish what I came to do, then allow me to return to my brother. He needs me. I have duties to my family that are equal to yours.”
“I cannot permit you to walk out that door now that you are here. You have your promise, but do not expect me to like it.”
“I do not require that you like it. I may not either. It is how it must be, however. I must not forget who I am.”
She went to the window, and closed it to the night's chilled breeze.
“You are lovely in the moonlight, Leona. You always were. Stay there a moment so I can see you.”
She wondered what he saw. Not the girl who had gone into the garden that night in Macao, even if her hair fell like it did that night, and the white garment was much the same.
He had kissed her then. It had been too long coming, and she had almost wept at the beauty of the intimacy. She had never forgotten that kiss.
“Take off your nightdress.”
His command made it clear that she was no longer that girl, and that she had come here for more than one sweet kiss.
She plucked the ribbons of her simple nightdress. The gap at her neck grew until it sagged on her shoulders. She peeled it down and let it fall to the floor.
She gazed out the window because, for all her boldness tonight, she was not so experienced that she could stand naked like this and not feel embarrassed. The vulnerability contained erotic depths, though. His attention already fanned the low burn that had tortured her since she noticed him in that chair by the fire. Its tongues of anticipation flicked at her without mercy.
“I have imagined you like that more often than you can know. I see you in a moonlit garden, but you are naked like this, and perfectly beautiful.”
“You imagined the girl I no longer am.”
“You were not really a girl. You always had a woman's manner about you. A woman's way of understanding people.”
Whatever stormed in him had calmed, but hardly disappeared. It remained, a distant rumbling that wanted to grow.
“Come here and lie with me.”
She padded across the chamber. She climbed onto the bed and lay beside him. He turned and braced his weight on one arm so he could look at her. He caressed down her body.
She closed her eyes and savored the lively reaction of her skin to his firm, warm palm.
“There are things I should tell you. Explain to you,” he murmured.
“What things?”
His head dipped and he kissed her. There would be no explanations now.
She expected an explosion of passion like the last time. She expected to be pulled into a mindless state of hunger and sensation. Instead he caressed her slowly. He purposefully delayed surrendering to the crescendo that drove them in the past.
The pleasure grew beautifully, as if he lowered her into a warm bath of sensuality. Her body responded more thoroughly to this subtle, nuanced seduction, until all her consciousness followed the paths of his hand and mouth.
He moved on top of her, and settled between her spread legs. His arms surrounded her, supported her, and lifted her to his kisses. Slowly, so slowly, his mouth burned and bit and explored.
She clung to him and explored too. She tried her own kisses, tasting him with mouth and tongue. He encouraged her, and seemed pleased with her efforts.
The tide rose languidly but it rose all the same. Her body grew impatient for more, and frustrated from the tense craving twisting ever tighter inside her. She felt his arousal near her thigh, hard and big, so tantalizingly close. It maddened her. She tried to wiggle down just enough, so that he would press her where that needy pulse throbbed.
“You are too impatient,” he chided quietly. “Tonight of all nights, it would be better not to encourage me. If I succumb to what is in me, I may be too rough.” He removed her arms from his body, and placed them on the bed so they flanked her head. “I want to enjoy you at my leisure tonight anyway.”
She took stock of her position. She could not even touch him now. “You want me to just lie here like this? Completely still, without moving?”
She felt his smile against her neck while he nuzzled her. “I do not think you will be still for long. Let us see if you can manage it for a while, though.”
She did not manage long at all. When his kisses moved to her breast and his tongue tantalized the tips, she arched. The titillations became a luscious torture. She barely resisted the urge to embrace him so she would not be so helpless to it. He unwound his own embrace and closed his hands on her wrists, removing that option. He demanded that she submit to his control of her pleasure.
She opened her eyes and glanced at her wrists, then at the way her breasts rose full and firm. His soft waves brushed her skin. His teeth closed gently, causing a sharp arrow to penetrate the slyer sensations. It aimed low, increasing the intensity of desire that frustrated her.
The tide rose ever higher, saturating her with need. She could no longer control her reactions. She began sinking into that dark place where sensation ruled, and where pleasure became her whole world. Still he teased at her, luring her deeper, his tongue laving her nipples.
She moved. His weight and hold restrained her but she found a way. She bent her knees and raised them so they flanked his hips. She sought a way to demand relief, completeness. Groans formed in her head, and became impatient, needy, urging sounds. The pleasure kept intensifying, focusing, and collecting low and full.
He released her wrists. She reached to embrace him but it was too late. His shoulders lowered as his kisses moved down her body. He held her hips while his mouth pressed its heat on her stomach and flanks.
Then there was no weight. No hold. She opened her eyes. He braced himself above her on rigid arms flanking her body. He gazed down at her spread thighs and splayed knees and the way her position begged for him.
Her mind chanted pleas and urges. She wanted him to to
uch her, to caress her, to fill her. She wanted him so badly she could barely stay sane. She moaned her frustration when he moved again, to kneel between her legs. His long caresses on her legs seemed designed to madden her.
The sight of him awed her, though. Kneeling tall, his torso sculpted by the dim light, he looked strong and hard and in command of this night and her. His tousled hair made him appear less than civilized, free of laws and rules, and wonderful in his differences. Her heart filled even more because this pleasure was shared with him.
His caresses lightened, softened. His fingertips became feathers on her knees and thighs. The lightest kisses joined his touch. She could not breathe and her gasps sounded louder. She watched that dark head bending, felt those feathers teasing, and her legs spread all the more.
So close. So close. She clutched at the sheets while her skin became more sensitive. Her body wept, and it felt as if those feathers would never stop and she would die from how needful they made her.
The kisses became less random. They moved in a path down her thigh. She knew their destination. Her body knew. The notion shocked her but her legs parted all the more. The first touch, the first kiss, sent her consciousness spinning, spinning, moaning with gratitude and triumph.
A new torture. Pleasure so intense it was unnatural. She could not control her body. She rocked and cried and it seemed as if the sensations only grew and deepened until they encompassed her, surrounded her, and vibrated from their source where gentle fingers and masterful kisses did their wicked worst.
Her climax broke hard. He made it go on and on. He would not let her hide from it, retreat from it. The quake seemed to continue forever.
He took her then. It was hard and rough as he had warned. She absorbed him and let him release the storm. She sensed it in him, felt the turmoil darkening the pleasure, saw the relief spreading with each thrust. She did not accept him passively. Instead her body stirred again, and the shivers of release grew once more until she merged with him in a ferocity of emotion and need.
Everything burst at the same time. The hunger, the pleasure, the darkness. She held onto him during a long moment when everything except their essences ceased to exist.
The Sins of Lord Easterbrook Page 19
