Good God.
The bands of muscle across her stomach tightened involuntarily, bracing to withstand his raw male beauty. Those vast shoulders she’d admired before did indeed taper down to a narrow, hard waist. He turned slightly, deciding to shake out and smooth his shirt more carefully onto the chair, and a mesmerizing series of muscles slid elegantly beneath the skin on his back, which was achingly tawny and smooth and gleaming in places and mapped in scars in others—here was a narrow white flat slash—from the time he’d won Lavay at cards?—and another, a round one, white and raised, low on his back near his waist; one that had clearly been stitched closed; it was uneven, puckered at the edges. From the prison escape? She thought of the woman at the viscomte’s party giggling over the romance of piracy.
There was no romance in violence.
What to her was unselfconscious brute beauty was for him simply armor, a utilitarian suit he possessed and used to go about the daily business of being Captain Flint. He flung it into danger; he waltzed with it, he steered the ship with it, he saved lives with it.
He made love to his mistress with it.
She shied violently away from that thought.
He’d pressed a jasmine blossom into a book.
A vulnerable man might have done that. But it was a half-naked warrior who stood before her now.
She put her hands up to her face, found her cheeks hot, brought them down again. Her entire body sang with a ferocious awareness, with longing. She felt, yet again, unequal to him. Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t love to try to feel equal.
“He’s a V.”
She’d meant to think it. Too late she realized she’d murmured it rather than thought it.
Chapter 16
Flint went comically still. The words echoed in the semi-dark, an absurd non sequitur demanding acknowledgment as surely as if she’d wantonly broken wind.
Please ignore it, please ignore it, please ignore it.
He turned very, very slowly. He stared at her, the blankets clutched up to her bosom in one fist, her white nightdress slipping from one shoulder. The air chilled her skin where it was bare. The rest of her was certainly unusually warm.
“A V?” He studied her gravely.
He didn’t seem surprised at all.
And suddenly she wondered if his appearance had been planned.
His chest was magnificent. Scored in neat divisions of precise muscle, begging for a finger to trace them the way one might use a compass to chart courses. Lightly furred, a dark trail forming a seam to vanish into his trousers.
She couldn’t think or speak when her eyes were so very occupied.
“Have you given up speaking in complete sentences, Miss Redmond? Please say it isn’t true. What a loss it will be to the world.” He waited, eyebrows relentlessly arched.
“A V,” she repeated faintly, a little irritably now. “It’s the shape of…”
She couldn’t finish this sentence. It could lead nowhere good. Or certainly nowhere comfortable.
“The shape of you,” she admitted, resigned.
His puzzled frown deepened.
So she sat up and released the blanket. It rolled to her lap, and his avid, unabashed eyes focused on the parts of her revealed instantly. The lamplight was likely making her nightdress nearly transparent, or casting her in tantalizing shadows.
She was wickedly, dangerously glad.
With one finger, with slow, exaggerated patience, she sketched a broad V in the air, beginning at the vast shelf of his shoulders—the left one—slanting slowly, slowly down to that hard narrow waste scored in muscle and golden skin and scar, drawing it upward to the hard round wonder that was his right shoulder.
Perhaps the world’s most glorious V.
Flint stood transfixed. As though he could see himself shimmering in the air between them.
And then he jerked his head away and sat down hard on the bed, his back to her. Surely his face was warm simply because the night was sultry. It seemed instantly important to work his boots off, to set to work on something. His deft hands suddenly felt huge and clumsy; he tugged; it clung. He abandoned the effort and put his hands on his thighs.
Why was he undressing? He ought to leave.
He’d forgotten it was her turn to sleep in his cabin.
Or had he?
Silence landed, butterfly soft, strangely fraught.
He turned to look at her. In the lamplight her skin was half golden, and this was disorienting: she seemed soft and exotic and…eminently mussable. Made for mussing.
“How on earth did you arrive at that conclusion?” he managed to ask casually.
“All English young ladies are taught to draw, and to view the world in terms of shapes when we do. I noticed that y-your torso is shaped rather like a V.” She shrugged with one shoulder.
For some reason the one-shouldered shrug irritated him.
“Are you trying to tell me that I’m a work of art, Miss Redmond?”
He returned his attention to his boots. They were beautifully made and he cared for them meticulously, because he valued and respected all things beautifully made and useful. And yet the toes were still creased from uncountable steps across the deck of ships, across foreign lands, across ballrooms. If he could count those creases, perhaps he could measure the distance he’d come, the way one could measure the age of a tree by counting rings.
But this…why did this moment feel like terrain he’d never before crossed?
She’s just a woman, Lavay had said.
When no retort ever came, he looked up sharply. He was certain nothing short of fatal apoplexy could rob her of a clever rejoinder.
He stared. Violet was…Good God, was she blushing?
If she was, this was clearly the very first time, as surely she would have contrived to do it prettily if she’d had any experience with it. As it was, she was blotchy to the brow and frowning so powerfully two distinct furrows cut across her forehead. She didn’t even put her fingers up to her brow to smooth it into perfection again.
And this was so disconcerting he nearly reached over to do it for her.
No, not pretty. But definitely fascinating.
He finally got his damned boot off to the sound of silence. When it thunked to the cabin floor they both started absurdly. He set to work on the other one, and still it was a struggle, too. He stopped. He was an earl, for God’s sake. Perhaps he ought to get a valet to help him do things he’d done for himself his entire life.
He looked up at her. “You’re blushing,” he said rudely, finally.
“Nonsense,” she declared. The blush retreated almost instantly, as if by command. The forehead magically smoothed.
And thus aplomb was restored to both of them, and when she spoke, and it was in her cool Violet voice.
“It’s just that a girl will instinctively seek diversions when her usual diversions are denied her, details can become more pronounced. More noticeable.” She lifted one shoulder again, a Gallic gesture, an attempt at nonchalance. Again. And so reminiscent of Lavay Asher felt himself stiffen absurdly. Irrationally, he disliked seeing his first mate’s influence stamped upon her. It was like watching the other man’s hands on her.
“I see,” he said thoughtfully. “Are you a very good artist then, Miss Redmond?”
“No,” she said instantly.
He wanted to bedevil her. “Perhaps I’ll inspire you to heights of artistry. My V might…as it were.”
“I shouldn’t nurture that particular hope if I were you,” she said quickly.
He smiled, enjoying himself, more comfortable in the territory of volleys.
And then without warning he levered himself back on the bed, his bare back pressed against the satisfying scratch of the blanket, the mattress singing a siren song to his body. It fit him the way his boots did, the way no human did: with intimate knowledge of his weight and weariness, taking it upon itself willingly. Close your eyes, it sang. Surrender to me.
It was provocative,
and it was a provocation. He heard the faint rustle of this girl who’d been teasing for days tensed with awareness.
But his body was strangely alert; he felt its contours and needs and temperature somehow more acutely now that he knew a girl was studying him…all of him…in terms of…shapes.
And the girl was but a few inches away from him.
He could think of a few diversions.
He ought to leave.
“When I was in a Turkish prison, my cellmate didn’t speak a word of English, so I taught him words of English to pass the time. I pointed to things—my nose, my eyes—and the like. I’d say the English words for them. He did the same with his own nose and eyes. Told me what his nose was in Turkish.” He pointed to his nose.
He sensed rather than saw her quick smile. He was pleased beyond all reasonable proportion.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who casually begins sentences with things like ‘When I was in a Turkish prison.’”
He smiled to himself again. “Senin güzel bir burnun var,” he murmured.
“What manner of Turkish insult was that?”
“Not an insult. It means you have a lovely nose.”
He glanced up as her hand flew to her nose as if discovering it for the first time, then dropped it almost immediately. He could almost hear her thoughts: Of course she had a lovely nose. All of Violet’s parts were lovely, both considered together and separately, and she knew it.
The two of them surely possessed far more than their respective fair quotient of confidence. Which made him smile again.
He inched backward until his head met his pillow. Lifted it up, and settled it down gently as porcelain teacup.
Breathed out a sigh with every appearance of nonchalance.
He thought perhaps two tenser people had never lain alongside each other.
He wondered just how far he intended to go, and how it would transpire.
“Where did you get the round scar?” she asked suddenly.
Not precisely what he’d expected her to say next.
“I was shot,” he said simply.
She sucked in her breath sharply as though she’d just been shot.
He knew remorse. It had been a terrible thing to say so glibly. “An ambush on a trading mission in India.”
She was quiet. “Did it hurt terribly?” Her voice was odd. As though she were steadying it through some force of will.
Funny to have a vertical conversation in which neither party looked at one another.
“It went through the muscle and bled quite a bit but I dodged quickly enough. So no vital organs were ruined. It did hurt. But it’s a funny thing. The force of it knocks you to the ground. But there’s this moment of numbness, of surprise, really, before the real pain sets in.”
That seemed to be the end of her questions.
But not of his.
He propped himself up on his elbow to look down. “Only angles?” he whispered.
A hesitation. His bare chest was mere inches from her. She wasn’t looking at him; her eyes were on the ceiling. Mesmerized, he watched the rise and fall, rise and fall, of her breasts as her breathing quickened. He could see the shadows of her nipples through her night rail.
Then a rustle on the pillow by way of reply: she shook her head back and forth. No. She understood what he was asking.
It amused him how well she could follow a thread. But then, perhaps, this evening had a theme.
The shape of things.
“What else, then?” he urged softly.
A swell lifted and swayed the ship almost tenderly, rocking them the way a mollifying hand rocks a cradle, and timbers sighed.
“Curves.” A curt confession.
“Curves?” He feigned bafflement, in almost a whisper. “I’m not sure I understand.”
She froze, eyes aimed ceiling-ward, decisively away from him, breath seemingly held. Thinking.
Always dangerous when Violet Redmond thought.
At last she sighed out a long breath, capitulating, and slowly she rolled her body toward him. And as her dark hair waterfalled forward with her, there was a peculiar sweet pain smack in center of his chest. Perhaps the most simple and profound jolt of sensual pleasure he’d known.
It was glorious to at last see all of that hair unleashed. He wanted to wind his hands in it.
“For instance…” Her hand came up slowly, and she pointed to the dark and woolly hollow of his armpit. “…here.”
Her finger a mere half inch away from his flesh, she began, slowly, slowly to outline its contours: tendon and muscle, illustrating the depth of the hollow. Watching him with intent blue eyes, her lips parted ever so slightly, a half-drawn curtain of hair across her face, the ends of it brushing the tops of her breasts.
He froze.
His skin heated along the path she traced in the air as surely as if the tip of her finger was lit like a candle. Gooseflesh lifted the hairs at the back of his neck; the bands of muscle across his stomach were taut in sensual anticipation, and his groin tightened portentously.
She wasn’t even touching him.
She knew precisely what was happening to him. Her own breath came shallowly now. She was so entirely new to this but she was no coward; she was testing the boundaries of her own power by testing his control.
And venturing a little deeper, deeper into the waters of seduction. Where would she stop? Everything was a test of power with Miss Redmond. It would likely be her downfall.
She would stop when he stopped her. He ought to stop her.
“Where else?” he whispered. Urging her on.
“…and…here…” Her voice was so soft. He watched her lips, fascinated all out of proportion by her words.
She pointed to the hard gold-brown curve of his shoulder.
And in the air, her finger just shy of touching his skin, she followed the terrain of his shoulder, his biceps. Slowly, slowly. And God help him, all the hair on his arms tingled to a standing position.
He shifted to accommodate the growing swell of his cock.
A word came to him now, unbidden, as natural as a breath, and it frightened him.
Breathtaking.
That was the word, the only word, for watching Violet Redmond discover her sensuality.
“…and here…” Her hand hovered with torturous uncertainty, then drifted down, down, down to his waist, hovering above that straining cock.
And she knew.
God help him, he was nearly quivering now. Sweat beaded his back, where part of that round white scar was visible. And that lit match of a finger hovered above the scar, and circled it slowly.
Then stopped.
They stared at each other. His breath was hoarse now.
And then her hand fell next to her, and she pressed it against her hip, as though tucking a weapon back into its scabbard.
He instantly regretted the distance between it and his body.
He pretended to think a moment.
“I think I see now,” he said conversationally, musingly. Very softly. “Curves. Well then, by your definition…would…this… be a curve?”
He brought a fingertip to her lips, slowly enough to allow her to turn her head if she so chose. She watched it, riveted, her eyes nearly crossing at the bridge of her nose.
He wasn’t coy. He wasn’t a green lad.
He intended to touch her.
Don’t toy with me, Miss Redmond.
His finger landed on her lips. And as though it had found the road home, reverently, trembling a little, followed the line of them, and he was surprised to realize that he felt he already knew them. The bottom a full swooping curve, elegant and sensual, unimaginably pillowy, so delicate one would think a passionate kiss would tear it like a petal from a flower. The top lip as lyrically arced as a heart.
He hadn’t expected to mesmerize himself. To feel an ache where his heart beat, an unnerving yearning, as well as that all-too-familiar throb in his groin. To want to whisper her name like the ch
orus of a song.
And yet she’d been entering his bloodstream like slow opium smoke for days.
He rested his fingertip at the center of her lips. And cocked a brow, reminding her he’d asked a question.
“Yeth,” she whispered, finally.
He could feel her quickening breath against his fingertip. He took it away so she could speak clearly.
“What was that again?”
She cleared her throat. “Y-yes,” she clarified. Her voice husky. “A curve.”
“Ah, very good,” he said softly now. “Very good. I might be a simple man, Miss Redmond, but I believe I grasp the concept now. But just to be certain…would this be a…curve…?”
He drew the finger down that unthinkably satiny throat, lightly, lightly, slowly, slowly, watching with an achingly deep pleasure the gooseflesh rose in its wake.
“…here?”
Beneath her nightdress, as soft and fine as her skin, was the dark shadow of her nipple at the tip of the upthrust curve of her breast. Without slowing the progress of his finger, he snagged the lace edge and dragged it down, down, down, until her breast, one beautiful, full breast was bare to his eyes.
Her breath shuddered. And she was trying to maintain aplomb, but he felt her rib cage leap up, then rise and fall swiftly.
Her eyes widened. She was afraid now.
And as mesmerized as he was.
And very, very aroused, he knew.
He drew his finger slowly, slowly along the unthinkably soft, vulnerable, arc of her breast, stifling a groan, the blood beating in his head, in his groin, the extraordinary, painful tumult in his body at complete odds with the precise goal of his finger.
Knowing he was the first man to ever touch her here was unbearably erotic.
He brought the tip of it to a stop on the ruched tip of her aroused nipple…and drew a slow, lazy circle.
Her head tipped back sharply; her teeth sank into her lip on a gasp of pleasure.
And the sight of her experiencing this for the first time was so erotic he bit the inside of his lip to stop his own moan. He took his finger away as casually as he’d begun, but now his hands were shaking.
She stared at him, eyes huge and dark, lips parted softly.
I Kissed an Earl Page 20
