“Or course I can.” He thrust out his chin. “And you needn’t think…”
“I don’t. I shouldn’t dare. But first, there’s a bath for you. Come on. Here, take my hand. Let’s get you into the water before it cools.”
Jasper had already seen the room where she bathed, the capacious, enameled tub standing upon tiles of green marble amid a little forest of waxy green plants and large potted ferns, and lit by a bank of candelabra set with thick, creamy tapers.
But seeing it – briefly, by way of a tour of her rooms – was one thing. Experiencing it as it was meant to be experienced – tub nearly overflowing with fragrant, soapy water, candlelight flickering through clouds of most air – was quite another. Having all this voluptuous luxury devoted to the matter of his comfort another thing still.
She was brisk and businesslike in the matter of undressing him – if you didn’t count a stifled giggle when she came to the trouser button that had once been such an object of contention between them. After which – and after gently removing his spectacles and putting them safely aside – she led him to the tub and helped him lower himself into it.
“Is the temperature all right?” Her voice floated to him through the fragrant steam as she bustled about the room. “Because I’ve got a few buckets of cold water over there in the corner, and more water heating in front of the fireplace. I imagined you’d want it quite hot, though.”
Yes. Very hot. He sank down more deeply into it, almost up to his nose.
“Lady Gorham,” he murmured, “has anyone ever told you you’re a ruddy angel sent from heaven?”
Laughing, a bit flushed, her face came into view amid the steamy air at the side of the tub. She’d taken off her dressing gown and pinned her hair into a careless knot at the top of her head, but curling tendrils were already loosening themselves about her neck and in front of her ears. The air smelled of the burning beeswax tapers; the water was scented with something he didn’t recognize.
He sniffed curiously.
“Lotus,” she said.
Closing his eyes for a moment, he sniffed more deeply. How singular that until this moment he’d never known what lotus actually smelled like. He smiled his astonishment, his pleasure. She was wearing a very plain, wholly untrimmed muslin shift. When she leaned over to kiss him, he could see her stiffened nipples, the flesh around them dark and distinct beneath the cloth’s gauzy weave.
She ran her finger up his arm now, to his shoulder and around the back of it where it felt as though a great many muscles must attach together. He thought of men sculpted from bronze and marble, reaching back to throw a javelin, bending over to hurl a discus…
She pressed a fingertip – hard – against one particular spot and he stopped thinking of anything.
“Ouch.”
“I thought that might be one of the sore places.”
Her face, her breasts, disappeared back into the steam. He felt himself bereft. Don’t go, Marina, he wanted to call out.
But he was glad he hadn’t said anything when he felt her hands upon his back, her fingers suddenly slippery against the painful spots at the bottom of his shoulders. She must be using some sort of oil: it smelled of pine, like the resin the Greeks used to flavor their wine.
There was another smell, too. He took a long, astonished breath. “Wild thyme,” he whispered. The stuff had been growing everywhere over the rocks, the day he’d found the Eros and Aphrodite in a remote Achaean village. There’d been a broken shrine; the statues had been buried for centuries beneath mounds of earth. Somehow, he’d known where he and the other men must dig. The moment of discovery had been thrilling, but for too many years since, he’d looked back upon it as theft, as one of his greatest shames.
And now he didn’t have to. Because now – soon – he’d be making restitution. This morning he’d locked the Aphrodite away in the cabinet in his study and posted off his letter to Greece. The little kneeling goddess would wait at Charlotte Street until Dr. Mavrotis’s arrival in London this summer. And after he met with Parliament and with Jasper and the other gentlemen of the Greek Emancipation Committee, Mavrotis would accompany the goddess back home.
Her fingers paused for a moment. “What did you say just now?”
“The scent. Wild thyme. In Greece. But please, don’t…”
“No, after you said that. I thought I heard…” She chuckled. “No matter.” She resumed her probing and kneading, of the knotted muscles and tendons.
It hurt a bit.
“Oh yes, that’s it exactly, Marina.”
It hurt quite wonderfully. As though the warm blood had once again begun coursing through his back and shoulders.
Perhaps it had – as indeed the blood seemed to be coursing more quickly to other parts of his body as well. He opened his eyes, glancing down past his belly to his knees rising out of the suds. And then finally, to another perturbation of the water’s surface.
If perturbation it could be called.
“I think,” she said, “it’s time to give you a bit of a wash.”
Excerpt from The Slightest Provocation
Nominee for the 2008 RITA for Best Historical Romance
“Come here,” Mary said, “so I can look at you more closely.”
In truth, to do more than simply to look: she’d have to employ all her senses to encompass the fact of Kit’s presence. Her lips trembled, parting to take a deep heady breath of him. As once she’d taken greedy, icy gulps of water from the brook at the border of Rowen and Beechwood Knolls.
He’d taken hold of both her hands, holding them down at her sides, his own large, strong hands about her wrists. They exchanged a tiny, conspiratorial smile; she gazed serenely upwards, to take his measure.
The curtains stirred in a sweet salt breeze. A serene, temperate night; one wouldn’t guess at the ferocious weather they’d been having just a few hours earlier. The fire burned low and even, its mellow warmth spreading upward around their legs.
Time was when the two of them would fall to sleep like puppies on the floor, in front of just such a low, comfortable fire. Sated by some newly discovered pleasure, exhausted and beguiled by some elaborately contrived private diversion, congratulating themselves on one or another highly athletic position they could almost believe they’d invented. Housemaids and butler would have gone to bed long before, or might even be beginning their workday, if Lord and Lady Christopher had made a really late night of it.
Shaking her hands free of his, she lifted her fingertips to trace the lines of his face: curl of lip, bump at the bridge of a nose broken so many years ago, swoop of eyelid fringed with straight, thick black lashes.
Difficult to cease her explorations, even more difficult to turn away. “I meant it,” she said, “about my stays.”
“I’m quite at your service,” he replied, “but we’ll have to start with your dress, won’t we? Such a sweet pale green… it’s very pretty on you.”
She turned to allow him to get to the hooks at her back.
“Pistachio green, it’s called.” Uttered so softly that she doubted he’d heard her.
A ridiculous state of affairs in a civilized nation – how had it come to pass that a lady was unable to get out of her clothes without assistance? If assistance were what you’d call what he was offering.
Peggy would have had the buttons and hooks undone in a trice. But Kit wasn’t bad at it. (Of course he isn’t bad at it, she reminded herself. It’s not as though he hasn’t unhooked a lady’s dress during the past nine years.) He fumbled now and then, cursing good-humoredly at the dress’s formidable array of hooks, the buttons being more for show than function. Still, he had marvelously deft hands for a gentleman. When he’d been bored, he’d sometimes amused himself by carving little birds or animals out of wood.
She’d burned all the ones he’d left behind.
His breath – slow and warm on the back of her neck – came more quickly now, a low, cool whistle of triumph at getting through all those fastening
s. She glanced sideways at the window, at their reflections against the black night sky. He was grinning, a slightly chipped right front tooth catching a ray of moonlight just an instant before he bent his lips to trace the curve of her nape. The tip of his tongue, rough as a cat’s, began its nimble descent down the bumps at the top of her spine.
Her dress would have slipped down around her if she weren’t holding it up, her hands on her breasts, the chambray falling in uneven folds – high around her shins in front, drooping down to the floor behind her.
He’d lowered her shift around the tops of her arms, his lips continuing downward, to her shoulder blades at the verge of her corset.
Her wings, he’d once said. If she’d had fairy wings, they’d have sprouted right there. Like water lilies, from those pads of bone and muscle.
You’re a poet, she’d exclaimed, like Ovid. Don’t tell my brothers, he’d responded—so quickly that they’d both laughed at how scandalized he’d sounded.
He must be surprised, she thought, at how primly she was holding the dress about herself. The two of them had been so careless back in Curzon Street. Returning home late at night, you could trace their path through the house by a trail of discarded garments – coat and waistcoat, cloak and lace mantilla… neckcloth and petticoat like snowdrifts on the entryway’s black marble floor.
His hands had crept around her, to grasp hers, to pry them open and cause her to loose her hold on the fabric. Oh, all right – she sighed, and so, it seemed, did her gown, expelling a puff of air as it fell to the floor about her feet. Impatient and untidy as she’d ever been, she kicked the heap of cloth out of their way.
He’d cupped her breasts through the stiff fabric of her stays… no, wait, there’d been a sudden loosening – he’d taken a lucky tug at the drawstring. His inquisitive, leisurely fingertips moved closer to her skin, taking the time, she thought, to remember the shape of her nipples, which were stiffening at an alarming rate. He caressed her through her shift – she was wearing an old one. Damnable to be so short of clean undergarments, she thought. The silk had once been very fine but now it was almost threadbare – he could be touching her through a cobweb.
She must have leaned back against him. Her naked shoulders chafed against his coat; she could feel his hips, his belly – no use denying it, she could feel his cock – hard against her, through her petticoat.
“My stays,” she repeated, in a more temperate voice than she’d have though she could manage. “Please, they’re awfully tight about my waist. The… supper I ate, you know.”
Forcing herself to take a step forward, she put an inch of space between their bodies, to stop him from continuing to press himself, in that disreputable, near-irresistible way, against her arse. Arms akimbo, she pushed her hands hard against the sides of her waist to relieve the tension of her flesh against the laces up her back.
“Ah,” he murmured. His fingers had crept upwards from her breasts, to the shoulder straps, held fast with ribbon. No, not held fast, not now. She wiggled her shoulder blades, but he wouldn’t be distracted from unknotting the strings at her waist.
“Ah yes, the supper you ate. I’d forgotten – no, in truth I’ve never forgotten – what a picture you make while you’re enjoying your food. Press a bit harder for a moment, will you, so I can get a little slack on this loop… much better, thanks… do you know, Mary, that watching you eat, I found myself envying the capon?”
She smiled despite herself. “I expect there’s rather a smutty witticism to be made from that.”
“I should have thought you’d have made it by now.”
“But you see,” she told him, “what a staid, well-governed, and circumspect lady I’ve become.”
Or at least a less vulnerable one.
He snorted with laughter and then took a breath. “Ah, got it, no more need of your help, thank you, Lady Chris…”
But she could already tell that he’d gotten it, by the sudden easing of pressure about her torso, not to speak of the impatient breaths he was drawing while he waited for her – to? Well, that was rather the problem, wasn’t it? She’d hoped that this step of her hastily conceived strategy would have become clear to her when the need arose. Though in truth she remained unsure…
But she wasn’t really obliged to do anything, was she? Even with the laces undone, she could keep her hands at her waistline and hold the garment’s stiff canvas in front of her, as a sort of shield.
Hands firmly planted, she turned to face him. Her voice (she hoped) would issue light and abstracted, as if attentive to other concerns.
“Yes, well, my thanks for your assistance, Lord Christopher. Couldn’t have managed without it, but as I’m sure must be shockingly evident, I’ve had a most tiring day…”
His face darkened, jaw tensing, eyes slowly comprehending.
“…and so,” she continued, “as I won’t be needing you for anything else tonight…”
He snarled. “That was…”
You’ve got the advantage, she told herself. Have the courage to use it.
She dropped her hands and let the length of boned canvas tumble to her feet.
“…low!”
“No, they’re not,” she informed him (and rather coolly, too, she thought). “They – and I as well – have weathered the years quite admirably, thank you.”
She supposed (later, upon reflection) that she’d put out a hand then, as a gesture of conciliation or even apology. From which it reasonably followed that he’d taken it in his own, their fingers interlacing.
But as for how she had found herself so tightly and precipitously clasped against his front – in truth she wouldn’t be able to render complete account of it. Though she was pretty sure it wasn’t entirely his doing, now that his coat, waistcoat, shirt, and cravat were all pressed so importunately against her flesh, not to speak of his doeskin pantaloons with all their buttons below.
Disagreeable, him being so covered up: she should do something about it.
About Pam
A funny thing happened to San Francisco computer programmer and occasional essay writer Pam Rosenthal on or about the beginning of the twenty-first century: She became seized by an urge to write sexy period romance novels. She’d already published some erotica, buoyed by a wave of life-changing feminist discussion about what was possible, permissible, or just plain fun to say about female sexual desire. This led her to explore the history of sexual expression – and to think hard about what love has to do with sex and sex with love, and what sex and love have to do with freedom and respect between equals.
Or to put it another way, she’d begun taking on the big subjects at the heart of countless lives and also at the heart of romance fiction – at a historical moment when the romance genre was learning to write about sex in ways that spoke to women’s whole selves as well as their fantasy lives.
Nurtured by this wide-ranging, supportive, energetic community of readers and writers, Pam wrote four romance novels and one novella. It was the experience of a lifetime, culminating in 2009, when The Edge of Impropriety won Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award for Best Historical Romance.
And then – sadly and surprisingly – she found that she’d said all that she had to say.
But the books remain. And Pam maintains an abiding respect for the writers who prevail over the long haul, a deep affection for those (like her) who have their say and move on, and a fascination with a genre that continues to grow and change, as it teaches itself to serve a wider, more representative community and a richer understanding of love, freedom, and respect for all of us.
Pam’s a grandma now; retired from programming and novel-writing, these days she works alongside Michael, her retired bookseller husband, at their copyediting business, P&M Editorial Services. They love editing romance (check out their website at pmeditorial.com), and recently P&M have begun lovingly reissuing revised and expanded versions of Pam’s romance fiction.
Visit Pam on the web at: pamrosenthal.com | twitter
| facebook
Find out about P&M Editorial Services at pmeditorial.com
And (if you’re of a mind) check out Pam’s erotica-writing alter ego Molly Weatherfield, at: mollyweatherfield.com
“Thank you for giving me so much to think about. Thank you for challenging me and for moving me. Thank you for having the courage to break so many conventions, to write something so complex and unique…”
– DearAuthor.com, about The Slightest Provocation
Afterword and Acknowledgments
When I got the rights back to this novella, first published in 2004, I thought that I (along with my copyediting partner Michael Rosenthal of P&M Editorial Services) would merely be fixing up those errors in grammar, syntax, or punctuation that might have slipped by the original copyeditor. And if I’d been in charge of this job, that’s probably all we would have done.
But like my hero Jack, I found myself confronting a situation that was more than I’d bargained for, thanks to a partner who was wiser than I was. It was no big deal to take on the technical errors, from the smallest to the most cringeworthy (in the original, the walls of the entrance hall go from green to blue). But after we cleared away the obvious stuff, Michael’s marginal comments grew sharper and more focused: from “What did he do with the cane?” to “Is this even physically possible?” to “Why did you choose this verb tense?” to “I don’t think that’s what he [or she] would have said here.” Sometimes he was wrong (it was physically possible), but at best he made it impossible for me to ignore those places in the manuscript where I’d settled for a facile, unearned emotional interaction instead of going deeper.
Which was sobering, because when I first wrote A House East of Regent Street, I didn’t think there was a deeper place to go, and this time around it hadn’t even occurred to me to try for a revised, expanded version. The romance trope it’s based on – an erotic quid pro quo becoming something more serious – seemed like a sturdy enough armature upon which to exercise my craft, but not a lot more. So I certainly didn’t expect either Michael or myself to begin advocating for the characters, each in turn, and to demand that I play fair by them. Which only goes to show what a lovely, challenging, and complicated business it can be to write about love and sex, in close collaboration with one’s all-time most astute reader. So yes – this is a revised, expanded version. Not a whole lot longer or a lot more sexually athletic (Jack and Jenny didn’t need much help in that department). Just, I think, a little more coherent, a bit deeper. Thanks again, Michael.
A House East of Regent Street Page 10
