by Deborah Hale
“Oh, but there is need, my lady.” He nuzzled the cleft between her breasts with his unshaven cheek.
“This need.” He led her hand down the flat plane of his belly to wrap around him.
Felicity could never remember touching him…or any man in such a way. It filled her with a heady sense of power.
“And this need.” Leaving her to explore, Thorn thrust his hand up beneath her gown. Before she had time to guess what he would do—or having guessed, to object—he delved between her thighs to the slick, hot welcome awaiting him.
“Yes, but…” Behind Felicity’s closed eyelids, the moist heat of tears hovered. She could not fight the urgent demands of her own body, even when they tormented her heart.
“Then it will be over.” The words sighed out of her.
With a scarcely audible chuckle, as comforting as the soft patter of raindrops on a window, Thorn shook his head.
“Then…” He spoke in a delicious husky whisper as he lowered her onto the pillows and pulled her muslin bodice down to uncover the breasts that craved his attention. “…it will have just begun.”
The breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding wafted out of Felicity in a gasp of understanding followed by a purr of sweet anticipation.
Too impatient to undress her completely, Thorn raised her skirt until it bunched around her waist with her bodice. Parting her stocking-clad legs, he eased himself into Felicity on a crest of sensation that carried her to the brink of bliss and held her there.
Chapter Ten
It seemed to Thorn as if he’d again plunged over a steep bank and felt the wonder of flight for a lingering instant before shattering and losing himself. Only this time passion and pleasure replaced panic and pain.
He lazed in the dark, sultry depths for what seemed like a very long time, more free than he could ever remember from the demands of his life. Nothing could tempt him back to consciousness…except the sweet prospect of making love to Felicity all over again.
This time, slowly.
The sensation of her lips on his stubbled chin, lured him to open his eyes. He couldn’t bear to waste a single moment of this night not drinking in her beauty.
“I must say, you have phenomenal powers of recovery, sir.”
She treated him to a bewitching grin as she wriggled out of her gown and stockings and tossed them to the foot of the bed. “Who would ever guess that not an hour ago you scarcely had strength enough to hold a sandwich?”
Thorn could not let such impudence pass without exacting the penalty of a kiss.
“A patient would be far gone, indeed, not to improve under your tender care, my lady.” He cupped her breast, passing the pad of his thumb over the rosy-brown peak. “As for my recovery—you have seen nothing yet.”
She cast a glance up at him through the fine dark fringe of her lashes. “From any other man I would call that a boast, but you are the least boastful fellow I have ever met, Mr. Greenwood.”
“I have a good deal to be modest about,” he replied, only half in jest.
The faint light of the fire gilded her features, suddenly fierce and ardent. “A good deal to be proud of, you mean. There’s not a person of your acquaintance who does not speak of you with respect. Even Weston St. Just, who holds almost nobody in esteem.”
Tiresomely respectable. Thorn swore he could feel the bonds of convention and propriety weighing him down. He had made a temporary escape from them to take up with Felicity, but it was madness to think of abandoning them altogether. Without his reputation, what identity did he have?
“If nothing else, you must be proud of your sisters,” Felicity insisted. “Ivy once told me you practically raised them both.”
“We raised each other.” With a sigh Thorn subsided onto his back with Felicity’s head pillowed in the hollow of his shoulder. “They are fine girls, both. You’re right—I am proud of them, though I take little credit for how they turned out.”
He gave a rueful chuckle at his own expense. “You see? I’m hopeless. What proper sort of man talks about his sisters while he’s lying in bed with his beautiful mistress in his arms, after he’s just made love to her and means to again?”
For the last time.
Thorn clenched his lips to imprison those wistful words. Why could he never allow himself to live in the moment instead of brooding over the past or worrying about the future?
Thorn wasn’t certain what reaction he’d expected from Felicity. What he did not expect was for her to reach up and slide her hand down his cheek in a lingering caress.
“A very good sort of man, I would say.”
Perhaps she did not intend to add anything more, but further whispered words trickled out of her, just the same. “I wish I’d been brought up by people who’d put my welfare ahead of their own aims.”
She didn’t intend to reproach his behavior, Thorn knew, for she had done everything possible to prevent him going in search of Ivy and Oliver, as he’d meant to do. Her words stung him just the same.
True, he’d been a trifle unsteady when he first woke up. That had passed quickly, though. If he’d insisted, as he ought, Felicity could never have detained him here against his will. But he’d wanted this one, last night with her, and he’d been prepared to sacrifice his sister’s future happiness to satisfy himself.
Bemused by his shame, it took Thorn a moment to realize the significance of what Felicity had just told him.
By mutual unspoken consent, they had never talked much about their pasts. Knowing this brief reprieve would soon be over, Thorn found himself suddenly greedy to find out everything he could about Felicity Lyte.
Where had she come from? Who were her family? What were her dreams and fears? What experiences had made her the passionate, fascinating woman she’d become?
“How old were you?” He ran a strand of her lustrous dark tresses between his thumb and forefinger, savoring its rich, smooth texture. Comparing Felicity’s hair to mere silk didn’t begin to do it justice.
She did not answer him right away. Thorn wondered if he should frame his question more clearly or continue to honor their tacit agreement to avoid discussing their pasts.
“Thirteen,” she said at last in a hushed voice, “when my mother died. I barely remember my father. I didn’t have a responsible elder brother to take charge of me, and my grandfather was off making piles of money.”
“It could have been worse,” said Thorn. “The old fellow might have been off losing piles of money, like my father.”
“I’ll grant you that.” She glanced up at him then. Her gaze held neither the pity nor censure Thorn half expected to see. “I wish I’d had someone sensible on hand to tell me so at the time. It might have helped me accept my privileged lot with a little better philosophy.”
“I’m sorry, Felicity. I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant, Thorn.” Yet she did not appear to resent it, for which he was grateful. “No doubt there were plenty of girls who’d readily have changed places with me. I doubt either of your sisters would have, though.”
She looked away from him, then, but not before Thorn thought he had seen a faint film of tears in her eyes. “Fortune is all very well, but there’s a good deal of truth in the old saying that you can’t buy happiness.”
“Perhaps that’s what my father tried to do after my mother died,” Thorn whispered to himself.
For the first time since he was a very small child, Thorn thought of his frequently absent, increasingly desperate father with something other than resentment. It felt strange, yet somehow…liberating.
Felicity appeared not to have heard him. “My grandfather left me in the care of a lot of beastly governesses who were bent on turning me into a milksop miss.”
Thorn pressed his cheek against the top of her head. “I’m delighted they failed so miserably.”
“They certainly made my life miserable in the attempt, with all their rules and lectures and punishments.”
The plai
ntive bitterness in Felicity’s tone made Thorn ache for the high-spirited child she must have been.
“Though your sister is not the sort of wife Oliver needs, her vivacity does you credit. You must have been tempted to break her of it—to make her more respectable, less apt to embarrass you.”
“Now and then,” Thorn admitted, warmed by Felicity’s approval. “Though it wasn’t quite the struggle you make it sound. I’ve always rather envied Ivy her exuberance. Who knows but a little of her daring may have rubbed off on me?”
With the delicate pressure of two fingers under Felicity’s chin, he tilted her face toward his for a kiss. “For instance, I wonder what my respectable acquaintances would say if they could see me now?”
“No doubt we’d provide the Pump Room with entertaining gossip for a week.” A mischievous chuckle escaped Felicity’s lips as she parted them to welcome his. “Perhaps even two.”
The corners of Thorn’s mouth curved upward. No woman had ever buoyed his sober spirits the way Felicity could with no more than a look or a word. No woman had ever kindled a storm of passion in his tranquil heart the way she did.
The hot wind of that tempest roused within him once again. “In that case, don’t you think it would be our civic duty to provide them with something truly worth tattling about?”
“Indeed?” Felicity ran one smooth slender hand over his bare flank. “What did you have in mind, my dutiful darling?”
As sternly as Thorn warned himself not to interpret her playful banter as anything more, the word darling still caressed his ears like warm liquid velvet.
“You’re a good deal more imaginative than I am,” he teased her back. “Have you any suggestions?”
Her hand blazed a trail up his chest, then along his shoulder. The dying firelight cast bewitching shadows over her face as it stirred the verdant embers of desire in the depths of her eyes.
“I believe you have already overtaxed your strength for one night.” She gave a gentle push against his shoulder, tipping Thorn onto his back again.
Before he could protest that he had strength enough to make love to her at least once more, Felicity canted herself up on one elbow until she hovered over him. Her hand began a provocative slide from his shoulder, down the ripple of his chest to the flat plane of his belly and lower.
Any words Thorn might have spoken rolled into a resonant growl of arousal instead.
From deep in Felicity’s throat came a husky, sensuous chuckle in answer. “I know you promised to make love to me again…slowly. But I think you should conserve your energy while I amuse us both.”
She played her hand over him, running her fingers like a fleet, delicate scale on the pianoforte that set a drumroll of pure hot lust coursing through him.
Her lips poised above his—ripe and sweet as temptation. “Let me truly be mistress of you.”
“With pleasure,” he whispered.
Her dark hair fell forward, creating a silky veil around their faces.
“With pleasure,” she promised.
Felicity proved as good as her word, and better. Using not just her hands and mouth, but every delectable part of her, she coaxed him again and again to the very peak of delight. Each time easing away at the last instant, then beginning the delicious ascent afresh.
She finally welcomed him into her sultry sanctum before he broke down and begged her, a favor for which Thorn was grateful. He had not guessed how much rousing him would rouse her. Scarcely had they joined when she gasped his name and her body clenched in sweet spasms around him, sending Thorn on a swooping cartwheel into ecstasy.
He returned to awareness with a mixture of eagerness and reluctance. Eager to cradle Felicity in his arms until morning. And more reluctant than ever to let her go again.
From the moment she had challenged him to become her lover, he had begun to admire this woman, with her full-blooded zest for life and her daring penchant for denying society’s often rigid expectations. She was his opposite in those respects, and while it vexed him at times, being with her made him feel whole in a way nothing else ever had.
The prospect of losing her from his life brooded on his horizon like a day when the sun would disappear from the sky and never shine again.
The obstacles between him and Felicity were many and none admitted of an easy solution. He’d overcome obstacles before, though—both in raising his sisters and in recovering his family’s fortune. Anything worth winning demanded hard work and sacrifices.
Felicity Lyte was worth winning.
His unexciting virtues of patience and persistence had stood him in good stead before, Thorn assured himself, and they would again.
Somehow he knew that the key to any future for he and Felicity lay buried in her past. But could he delve for it, without driving her away?
Her head pillowed on the solid swell of Thorn’s chest with the steady rhythm of his heart beating a lullaby in her ear, Felicity had never felt more safe…or more free. Somehow his reliable strength and quiet constancy gave her a secure perch from which to fly.
Tonight for instance. She had never taken so active a role in lovemaking before, never put concerns for her own satisfaction aside in a single-minded quest to give pleasure. The result had catapulted her higher than she’d ever soared, to wheel and glide among the stars.
Perhaps it was fitting that her most sensually fulfilling encounter with a man should be her last. Hard as she tried not to let that regret mar this wondrous, peaceful moment, a faint chill quivered through her, as though a splinter of ice had pierced her heart.
Alert as ever to her unspoken needs, Thorn reached down to twitch the coverlet over them. If only he knew—a mountain of blankets could not substitute for the dependable warmth of his embrace or the mellow timbre of his voice.
“Did you ever try to buy happiness, Felicity?”
Though asked in tones of warmest sympathy, Thorn’s question made her insides clench tight. Much as she wanted to dismiss it with some wry half jest, she couldn’t.
Perhaps the shadowy intimacy of the moment seduced her, or perhaps the secret she was keeping from Thorn required all her powers of discretion, leaving her ill-equipped to guard herself in other areas.
She gave a brittle, mirthless chuckle. “How do you suppose I learned the folly of it? After my grandfather died, I purchased the handsomest, most well-bred husband money could buy. I thought I was buying my freedom, as well. But it turned out to be as elusive a commodity as happiness.”
If Thorn had made any reply at all, Felicity would have found a way to change the subject. But his understanding silence would not be denied.
Words seeped out of her like blood from a tiny, unnoticed wound. “I had this ridiculous notion that being married would let me escape all the people who tried to control me—governesses and trustees and grasping relatives. Then I met my mother-in-law.”
She shuddered. “The woman was like the worst of my governesses all rolled into one. She never missed an opportunity to insinuate that my filthy trade fortune besmirched her family. All the while her son was spending it like water to keep Trentwell from falling down around our ears.”
“The rotter!” Thorn’s indignant anger sounded so sincere.
How easy it would be to convince herself that her heart was safe in his keeping, because he was nothing like her late husband.
She’d been fooled before, Felicity reminded herself. “Oh, Percy was quite nice at first, taking my part against his mother. I did try very hard to be a good wife to him. Much harder than I’d ever tried at anything before.”
Her voice grew more and more quiet until she could scarcely hear herself above the soft crackle of the dying embers in the hearth. “It was no good, though, since I failed in a wife’s prime duty.”
No word, sound or movement betrayed Thorn’s reaction to what she’d said. Felicity sensed it just the same. If anyone could understand the shattering humiliation of failing in one’s duty, he would.
“My mother-in-law to
ok such grim delight in being right about me. Until she came to realize what that would mean for her precious family.” More than anything, that had probably contributed to her rapid decline. Felicity had taken no satisfaction from it. “Percy didn’t take my part then.”
She shook her head slowly, acknowledging a deep regret. “If only I’d known…”
“Known what?”
The quiet, earnest question slapped her out of the fuzzy half dream into which she’d slipped.
Her insides felt like some strange manner of engine, with her hurtling heart agitating her stomach and squeezing the air out of her lungs. Did she need any further proof that she could not trust herself around Thorn Greenwood?
His quiet sympathy seduced her wary spirit just as his tender caresses seduced her yearning body.
Part of her wanted to change the subject or kiss him cross-eyed again. Anything to rescue herself from the treacherous waters into which they’d drifted. But if she didn’t soon make a clean break from him, she might end up telling him about the baby. Then, knowing Thorn’s overdeveloped sense of duty, she’d never be able to rid herself of him.
“If only I’d known that widowhood is the most advantageous state for a lady of fortune.” She could not bring herself to look her lover in the face as she delivered this tart pronouncement. “She can still enjoy all the pleasures of marriage without losing her independence.”
Thorn flinched. Felicity did not have to see it to know.
She hardened her heart against the pity that would leave her vulnerable. He deserved a little sting, after all, for making her dredge up all those distressing memories and making her feel their forgotten pain all over again.
She braced herself for Thorn to sting back. It would give her a reason to peel herself off of him and go find out how her servants had fared in their mission. Once morning came and the two of them parted ways once and for all, perhaps fewer regrets would plague her. Not likely…but perhaps.
Instead, Thorn enfolded her with one arm, while his other hand passed over her hair in a comforting caress.
