by Louise Allen
‘Oh no!’ Sarah stared back, aghast. ‘I thought it would be easy to get free.’
‘Silk tightens under stress and those pearls are an expensive string, the thread is strong. No, Sarah, I was trussed like a gamecock in a basket and had to wait to be rescued.’
‘I am so sorry. I can understand why you are angry,’ she murmured.
‘I am hardly angry about that. My friends dismissed it as a drunken, amorous romp—they just want to meet the lady involved, whom they think must be a most inventive playmate. No, what angers me is the fact that you saw fit to pay me for my services last night.’ He gestured abruptly toward the pearls.
‘I didn’t! At least, they seemed like something useful to help tie you and then I thought, you have a living to make…’ Her voice trailed away.
‘Not as a male whore,’ he said harshly.
‘Oh no, never that,’ she whispered. ‘You did me a favor. I had no thought of payment, just a gift.’ He was right, it had been insensitive, insulting. She straightened her spine. ‘I apologize. I have no idea how I can make amends. I just wish I could.’
She saw his eyes close and the harsh line of his mouth relax into a rueful smile. ‘I am a stiff-rumped idiot to take offense. It was a miracle you were thinking straight at all, and as you say, you thought I had a living to earn.’
‘You haven’t?’
Jonathan smiled, silent.
‘Who are you?’ He shook his head.
‘That is unfair,’ Sarah protested. ‘You know my name now.’
He grinned. ‘All part of your punishment for the offense to my pride.’ The smile was positively wicked now. Something inside her tightened in fearful excitement.
‘Part?’
He withdrew his hand from his pocket and there was the silk stocking, dangling from one long finger.
She edged toward the bed. ‘You…you want to tie me up?’ Her voice rose to a squeak as the excitement turned hot and lodged low, sending shocks of anticipation into the secret places that were becoming damp even as he watched her so intently. ‘And make love to me? Here?’
‘Mmm. If you would like me to.’ Jonathan seemed so cool, but she could see the pulse hammering in his throat where his shirt lay open and his lips were parted, so very temptingly.
It was madness. They would have to be so quiet—could she be quiet if he touched her as he had before? Could she trust him to untie her again? But the excitement was building, coiling, making her feel different—dangerous, reckless. Jonathan had awakened something inside her that she could hardly recognize.
‘Only if you promise to untie me before you leave,’ she said, trying to match his teasing tone.
‘I promise.’ And the look in his eyes was no longer teasing, no longer hot. For a moment she saw tenderness and melted. He locked the door, then moved suddenly, like a cat, to spin her into his arms. The robe was off her shoulders, the nightgown sliding toward the floor, even as his mouth crushed down on hers and his arms lifted her, tossing her onto the bed, gasping with laughter and a delicious, fearful anticipation. ‘I need another stocking.’
‘Top drawer of the dresser.’ She watched him tear his own clothes off as he walked across the room, his very urgency arousing her. He was so beautiful, she thought, feasting her eyes on taut buttocks and the elegant dip of his spine at the waist, the length of his legs and the definition of the muscles. Last night she had been too apprehensive to really look at him. Even his feet, with their long tendons and the flexible toes curling into the Chinese rug, were beautiful.
He came back, stocking in hand, and stood contemplating the bed head. He was already aroused, she saw with gathering excitement, as he tied one stocking to each of the top corner posts, then looped the free ends around her wrists so that she was lying back against the pillows, her arms outstretched. ‘Comfortable?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted, wary.
‘I will not take any notice of demands to stop or cries of No! If you want me to free you, say Release me, and I will, at once.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’ Jonathan strolled round to the foot of the bed and took her right foot in his hand, lifting it to his mouth. ‘Are you ticklish?’
‘No,’ Sarah said, lying, as he began to suck her toes. Toes? Toes were not sexual, toes were…Oh! By the time both feet had been nibbled, sucked and licked she was in a state of bemused desperation. Was he punishing her? Was he never going to kiss her, touch her breasts, do any of those things he had done last night, or would he drive her insane just by sucking her toes and never move above her ankles?
Chapter Three
‘Jonathan!’
‘Yes?’ He looked up, face serious, an unholy twinkle in his eyes.
‘Please?’ Sarah was not sure what she wanted, she just knew she needed it now. He grinned and began to lick upward. Oh yes. At last he was going to stop tormenting her and tip her over into that blissful state…He just kept going, up her thigh, lingering on her hipbone, across her belly to her naval. ‘Oh.’ It was nice, it was more than nice, but it wasn’t that. The skin across her belly tightened as though to control the heat that was swirling inside her and she tilted her hips up, hoping he would take the hint. If she only had her hands free!
Then he reached her breasts and settled down, comfortably propped on one elbow, to continue tormenting her, nibbling and licking like a man with a bowl of strawberries who wanted to savor the scent and the taste for as long as possible. He reached out for something with his free hand, drew it toward her and she felt the snaking slither of the pearls, cool against her skin as they trailed over her hipbone and slid between her thighs.
Jonathan began to tweak the string and they grazed over the sensitized soft skin, touching, just, the aching nub that she so wanted him to caress, a teasing, frustrating counterpoint to the shocks of sensation his lips and teeth were sending direct from her nipples to her groin.
She was moaning, her head restless on the pillows as she felt him sit back on his heels, one hand still trailing the pearls through the moist, swollen ache between her thighs. He was watching her, she knew it, but fear and shame had dissolved in the cauldron of sensation he was stirring up within her.
Sarah opened her eyes and looked at him, his erection straining up against his flat stomach, and realized, through her own haze of desire, just how rigidly he was controlling himself to pleasure her and how much she wanted to touch him. As he bent to flick his tongue across the track of the pearls, she felt, with an intensity that shocked her, that she wanted to caress him like that.
‘Release me,’ she said, wriggling back so she was half sitting against the pillows. ‘Please, release me.’
As she hoped, he straddled her body, moving up the bed so he was astride her rib cage as he reached for her right wrist. His erection was right in front of her face, so close she could see a pearl of liquid at the tip. As he stretched across she raised her head and took him into her mouth and they both froze, he with a gasp of shock, she with the rush of sensation.
‘Sarah!’ He tried to pull away, but she closed her teeth in delicate warning and he was still again while she moved her lips, her tongue, fascinated by the taste and the texture and the effect she was having. Jonathan began to work at the knots and suddenly her hand was free and she could flatten it against the taut buttocks, holding him to her while he freed the other wrist, and then his weight shifted and she realized he was gripping the rail above her head.
He was so still, his breath rasping as she sucked, drawing her tongue up and down, loving the intimacy and the power. She could sense, as her hands held him, the effort it was taking him not to thrust into her mouth, realized the strain she was putting him under and somehow summoned up the will to release him. He moved with the speed of a lunging swordsman, sliding down her body, crushing her under his weight, his pelvis pressing against hers, and she reacted instinctively, opening to him even as her fingers bit into his shoulders.
Jonathan found himself stretched over Sar
ah’s body, her legs cradling him, his hips tensed to thrust. He caught himself, the effort wrenching a groan from deep in his chest. ‘God!’ He rolled off her, forearm flung across his eyes, fighting for control. She had trusted him and he had damn nearly…then her hand took him, sure and generous, and he turned back to caress her, shaking in her embrace as they fell into ecstasy and darkness together.
Sarah was curled against him, sleeping, he realized, as he came to himself. That had never happened to him before. His mistresses had never shown any inclination to snuggle confidingly against him, and that avoidance of feigned sentiment suited him perfectly. Caroline, his current maîtresse, most certainly never clung. The thought of appearing anything less than perfect sent her from the bed the moment he left it to retreat behind a screen and emerge ten or so minutes later, cool and immaculate. And by then he would be in his robe pouring champagne ready for an uninvolved exchange of civilized pleasantries. All so very sophisticated, all so very…cold.
This was not cold. Sarah’s body hugged his with the trusting, innocently sensual abandon of a sleeping kitten, her breath tickling the hairs around his left nipple, her right arm flung over his rib cage, her right leg across his thighs. They were both hot and damp, sticky and tousled, and he found that strangely pleasurable.
Jonathan wondered how long he had slept, then stopped caring and rubbed his cheek against the tangle of brown curls that was all he could reach. After a moment he dropped a kiss on the crown of Sarah’s head and smiled as she stirred, muttering, and caught his nipple between her lips, playing with it in her sleep. It hardened and other parts of his body began to react. Jonathan shifted a little, so she let go with a soft sound of protest and lay still again.
He had not reckoned on feeling like this when he had let his temper and his pride ride him that morning. He had spent the day tracking her down and the evening finding his way into the house. An unlocked storeroom window had given him access, then he had slipped upstairs to check each bedroom until he had found hers.
The alcove with its swathe of drapery had been perfect—perfect to wait unobserved as the maid closed the curtains across the windows, and perfect, as he had rapidly discovered, to torment him with first the scent and then the sight of Sarah.
He had closed his eyes as the maid undressed her: he had not lost all control. But his eyes might just as well have been wide open as he followed every whisper of silk, every rustle of petticoats, the sound of her sigh of relief as her stays were unlaced, the maid’s comments on the pretty clocking at the ankle of her stockings.
Then there had been the soft sound of a loose nightgown falling over her head to toes that, his imagination was telling him, were bare, and the murmur of their conversation. All so intimate, so feminine, as the two young women shared their joy that the unwelcome suitor had been routed.
Sarah had not confided how she had achieved that to her maid, he noticed, realizing he would have been well served for his intrusion if he had had to spend long minutes listening to a dissection of his performance.
But that realization did nothing to dampen the heat of the anger that the discovery of the pearls had ignited. His friends’ teasing had been bearable, rooted more in admiration of his prowess at finding a bedmate so inventive rather than scorn at the predicament he had found himself in. No, it was the fact that she had carelessly left him jewelry worth a considerable sum laced mockingly into his bonds.
It was not until he had seen the remorse in her wide, gray eyes and understood that she genuinely had not counted their value, had thought only of delaying him long enough to escape, that the hurt pride vanished like smoke in the wind.
Idiot, he thought now, stroking the warm, soft skin of her shoulder with his palm. Sarah was not some pouting Society beauty buying what she wanted, careless of the feelings of those she used. She was different, and he was beginning to find that very difference disturbingly appealing.
The clock struck one as he pulled the light coverlet up over their bodies and let himself drift off to sleep, his mind full of new and disconcerting possibilities, his arms full of curves and fragrance.
‘Sarah.’ She came up out of a dream of Jonathan to find him there, bending over her, fully dressed.
‘You are real,’ she observed, half-fuddled with sleep and pleasure, then smiled as his eyes crinkled with amusement at her folly. ‘Of course you are. What time is it?’
‘Four. I must go before the household stirs.’
She sat up, careless of the way the sheet fell to her waist, and surprised at how quickly she had become so shameless in his presence. ‘You are leaving Saint’s Ford, aren’t you? You will not be coming back.’ Of course he would not; this was merely an unusual incident for him. For her, she realized, watching his face in the candlelight, it was everything. She had solved the problem of Sir Jeremy and paid with her heart for it.
Jonathan stroked the back of his hand down her cheek. ‘Your highwayman will never come back, Sarah. Would you be glad to think that perhaps you have reformed me?’
‘I do not think you were ever a very dangerous highwayman,’ she observed, fighting to keep her tone light. ‘So I doubt I can claim much merit for any reformation that has occurred. But yes, it is not a safe occupation for a man such as yourself: I would not like to think you might have ended on a gallows.’
‘A man such as myself?’ he asked, his mouth twisting into a smile that seemed to mock himself, not her.
‘Honorable, kind, brave and clever,’ Sarah said, wondering at Jonathan’s sudden stillness.
‘Thank you,’ he said softly, lifting her hand and pressing his lips to her knuckles. ‘You give me something to live up to, my sweet.’ He was on his feet, and unlocking the door before she could say anything else. Then he paused in the open doorway before slipping like a ghost into the dark corridor and away.
‘I suppose you expect me to allow you to go to that house party your school friend invited you to, despite your behavior,’ Sir Hugh Tatton snapped as Sarah sat nibbling listlessly at her bread and butter ten days later.
‘Jessica Gifford?’ She had forgotten all about that invitation. Jessica, a firm friend despite a two-year difference in their ages, had left school to earn her own living as a governess, and then, by some miracle, had met and married Lord Standon.
‘She is the Countess of Standon now, Papa. And it is Lady Dereham whose invitation it was. She is a cousin of Lord Standon’s.’
‘Lords, ladies—hah! Aye, and there was something smoky about that match, from what one hears,’ Sir High grumbled. ‘Henrietta wrote to me from London to say Standon was kicking up no end of a to-do, flaunting his new mistress all over Town, and the next thing we know he’s off on the Continent marrying some governess he finds there, if you please.’
‘She has obviously reformed him, Sir Hugh,’ Mrs. Catchpole ventured nervously, still obviously expecting retribution for not exercising sufficient control over Sarah. ‘And she must be a superior young woman if she went to Miss Fletching’s Academy, as Sarah did.’
‘Hah!’
‘And it might be as well if dear Sarah does attend the party. There will be numerous eligible gentlemen present. Gentlemen who would be interested in making a speedy match if the dowry is right…’ She let her voice trail away as Sarah felt her blushes mounting. Somehow she kept her mouth closed on the vehement rejection of any suggestion that she might try to palm off her love child on an unsuspecting husband.
‘Indeed,’ Sir Hugh said slowly. ‘A point well made, ma’am. One trusts that there is no need for haste, but still, one cannot be too careful.’
As if I would, Sarah thought, laying her hand protectively over her belly, then realizing the hollowness of the gesture. There was no chance she was pregnant, thanks to Jonathan’s care of her, but if she were, under no circumstances would she let his child grow up as any other man’s. Not the child of the man she loved.
‘Sarah?’ Mrs. Catchpole was on her feet.
‘I…I’m sorry, a cru
mb…,’ Sarah said, wildly catching at any excuse for leaping to her feet, her hands pressed to her mouth. ‘Water, I’ll just go and get…’ She fled. Love? I am in love? Of course I am. I am in love with an utterly unsuitable man whose full name I do not know, who is never coming back and who, obviously, does not love me.
‘Mary,’ she said firmly, startling the maid, who was standing in the middle of her bedroom frowning at the black silk mask in her hands, ‘we have to think about what to pack for Lady Standon’s party. It seems I must catch myself a husband.’
‘Yes, Miss Sarah. What is this? I found it at the bottom of your stocking drawer.’ The maid held out the band of silk.
‘A souvenir of an adventure,’ Sarah said, blinking back a tear. ‘One that is about to become just the memory of a dream.’
Chapter Four
‘Jessica!’ Careless of waiting servants or other houseguests, Sarah threw herself into her friend’s arms. ‘Oh, Jessica, I am so happy to see you!’
Reeling slightly from the impact, Lady Standon hugged her tight, then held her at arm’s length, the better to look at her. Jessica looked radiant, Sarah thought.
‘What’s wrong?’ She tucked Sarah’s hand under her arm and drew her into the house. ‘Come and meet Bel—Lady Dereham—and the others and then I’ll show you your room and you can tell me all about it. Whatever it is.’
Coppergate, the Derehams’ country house, was deep in the Hertfordshire countryside and had the warm feel of a home. Lady Dereham greeted her with a smile, introducing her to the other guests, who were all relaxing, comfortably informal, in the big salon. Sarah did her best to commit the names of the host of assorted Ravenhurst relatives to memory before letting Jessica whisk her away.
‘So, tell me what is wrong. There are dark circles under your eyes and I would swear you have lost weight. Is it Sir Jeremy?’
Jessica curled up in the window seat and listened as Sarah paced the room recounting the tale of Sir Jeremy’s infamy, her impetuous ride and her meeting with Jonathan. When Sarah got to the part where he made his outrageous suggestion to rescue her from her fiancé, Jessica clapped her hands over her mouth and stared in horrified amazement.
