by Betina Krahn
Now she wanted to experience all that could be between a man and a woman. She wanted to understand what was behind those far-off looks of longing and fulfillment that Cleo, Aunt Hermione, Eleanor, and the others sometimes wore. She wanted to taste life the way Aunt Hermione had, wanted to know what it was like to be a part of “two hearts beating as one” as Cleo had been. And she couldn’t imagine wanting those powerful and intimate experiences with any man but Remington Carr.
The door swung open with a clunk and a scrape, and she jerked her hand back with a gasp. A balding houseman in crisp black and white appeared in the opening with an air of having expected her. “Welcome, madam,” he said, stepping back to admit her.
She hesitated, glanced toward the empty street, then swallowed her trepidation and stepped inside. The large center hall was dimly lit by brass and crystal gas sconces, burning low as the late hour dictated. The butler closed the door behind her, then asked if she would prefer to have him take her cloak or to keep it. As she followed him toward the stairs, still wearing it, she wondered if it was the sort of question butlers asked of women who visited by night—implying they might need a cloak at hand, in the event they had to make a less than dignified exit. The thought produced a sinking feeling in her stomach, and she almost turned back halfway up the stairs.
“His lordship had to step out for a short while.” The butler chose that moment to speak, and his respectful tone arrested her flight. “He begs you to wait in his apartments and has instructed me to welcome you warmly in his stead.” When they reached the top of the stairs, he smiled and gestured gracefully along the ornate gallery. “I fear I am a poor substitute for his lordship’s hospitality, but I shall try to make you comfortable. I am Phipps, the earl’s butler.”
Antonia nodded, thinking that no amount of courtesy could have made her feel comfortable at that moment.
Phipps installed her in an ornate sitting room, done in grand Louis XIV style, where a bottle of wine and a tray of succulent cheeses, fruits, and chocolates had been laid out. He removed her cloak, asked her to ring if she needed anything further, then departed, closing the doors behind him.
Antonia wandered about the chamber, absorbing with her fingers the richness of the silk brocade upholstery and the polished mahogany and gilt-edged wood. The comforting golden light came from candles, not gas jets. Nervously, she investigated the books on his writing table and the portraits and paintings on the walls. She came to a door and, after a slight hesitation, opened it to discover a rich bedchamber dominated by a massive estate bed that was richly draped and laden with bolsters and pillows.
She jerked back into the sitting room, found her hands trembling, and in desperation hurried to pour herself a glass of the wine. Rich vapors filled her head and comforting heat seeped into her blood, thawing her icy hands and frozen limbs. By the time she finished her wine, her circuit of the room had taken her back to the bedroom door. She set her glass aside, took a deep breath, and stepped into his bedchamber.
It was breathtaking: brocades and velvet plush, gold cording and gilt edging on upholstered chairs and divan, with thick carpets underfoot. But the bed was what captured her attention. The crest of the house of Landon was carved above the headboard, tucked between the massive posts, and there were layered drapes on each side—graceful swags held by heavy, fringed cords and translucent inner curtains. Pillows made of shimmering satins, rich tapestry, and downy velvets formed a backdrop for the pristine linen of the sleeping pillows.
Her gaze trailed over the bed and her eyes widened on the expanse of white linen, invitingly turned back. A wave of longing swept her, and she swayed against the foot of the bed, resting her cheek against the drapes as she imagined the feel of the cool linens against her heated skin.
“You came.” Remington’s voice startled her. She whirled and found him standing in the doorway, watching her with a look of pleasure. She backed away from his bed, mortified that he’d caught her in the midst of anticipating the pleasures she would discover in it. Before her embarrassment could raise an obstacle between them, he was at her side.
“Do you know, this has been the longest evening of my life,” he said in intimate tones that set her skin tingling. “Longer than the dance with the chaperon at my first cotillion. Longer than any Christmas Eve on record. Longer than the first thirty years of my wretched life.” He took her hands in his and raised them to his lips, pressing a soft kiss on each. Then he dropped a caressing look down the front of her dark satin dress. “You look wonderful, Antonia.”
She looked away, feeling suddenly all nerves. “Your house is beautiful.”
“Thank you. Of late, I’ve thought it seems rather empty.” He chuckled softly. “Though there are times that an empty house can be an advantage. Like now.”
Before she could protest, he wrapped her in his arms and kissed her with all the joy, tenderness, and hunger he possessed. By the time he lifted his head, she was warm and pliant against him, and all embarrassment between them had been dispelled.
“Ahhh, Toni,” he said, breathing in the scent of her hair, “do you have any idea what it does to me? Having you in my house, seeing you here by my bed?”
The heat and hardness of his body against hers produced a thickening in her blood, and she instinctively understood the same thing was happening to him.
“I have a fair idea,” she murmured.
He scooped her up into his arms, carrying her to the bed. After depositing her against the bank of pillows, he dropped a kiss on her forehead and disappeared into the sitting room. He returned moments later with the tray of wine and glasses.
“Would you like something to drink?” he said, pausing to consider the label of the bottle with a wry smile before pouring. “My best Bordeaux.” When he looked up, she was sinking into a sea of elegant down pillows and looking a bit overwhelmed. He laughed and held out a glass to her.
“Are you having some?” she asked, struggling up out of the pillows to accept it with a trembling hand.
“Of course I am.” He smiled and tilted her glass to her lips. When she had sipped, he removed the glass and replaced it with his lips, savoring the mingled sweetness of her mouth and the wine.
“Ummm,” he murmured. “Phipps and I had a rather lengthy discussion about what sort of wine was appropriate for the occasion. He said champagne. I said red wine.” He planted a knee on the bed and dropped to his hands to prowl across the linen toward her. “I believe red wine goes best with voluptuous widows. Shall we test my theory?”
He tilted his head and captured her lips, sending warm spirals of pleasure winding luxuriantly through her body. Only the feel of wine dripping on the bed linen, as the glass tipped, caused her to pull away. She meant to react to the spill, to see how bad it was, but he held her gaze with lidded eyes.
“I was right. Bordeaux is perfect. And red wine is always better when served at body temperature,” he whispered, pulling the goblet from her fingers and setting it aside. Then he raised himself onto his knees above her, ripped his coat from his shoulders, and flung it past the edge of the bed. His vest was next, then his stiff collar and neatly wound tie.
He stretched out over her, bending her back onto the cushions, and lowered himself onto her, blanketing her senses, rousing her responses as he pressed soft, clinging kisses over her face and throat. After several tantalizing moments she felt him pull back and realized his fingers were fumbling to work her buttons from their loops. Laughing raggedly, he shifted to one side and propped himself up on his arm, looking at her. “I think I’d better let you undo them this time.”
“Me?” she said, gazing up at him.
“I’ll watch.” He grinned and settled back on the pillows with his arms crossed behind his head. When she frowned, he added: “Unless you’d prefer that I ring Phipps for a pair of scissors. If I do, you may find it difficult getting dressed in the morning.” When she hesitated, he popped open the single stud of his shirt. “There—I’ve undone mine. Now it’s your tu
rn.”
She had come this far, she thought desperately. But the idea of undoing her own buttons was unsettling on several levels. He was asking her to open more than just a few fastenings, she sensed. He was asking her to open herself to him, of her own will. It underscored the fact that she was giving herself to him, not being seduced. And on a still deeper level, it stirred memories in her.
As her hands worked the buttons, she lowered her eyes and glanced away. Her attention caught on the open door and she hesitated, feeling vulnerable and unsettled as her past boiled up inside her.
“Could you … close the door?” she whispered.
“No one will disturb us, Antonia,” he said with a lazy smile. “This is my empty house, remember?” But when she caught her lower lip between her teeth and gave him a beseeching look, he gave an exaggerated groan and rolled from the bed to do as she asked. When he turned back, she was standing by the bed, clutching her bodice together with one hand. Her hair was escaping her upswept coif, and she looked tantalizingly rumpled.
“Take it off, sweetheart,” he urged softly, leaning his back against the door.
The endearment caressed her like a reassuring hand.
Sweetheart. Never in her life had she been anyone’s sweetheart.
She peeled her bodice back and let it slide down her arms, revealing that she wore no corset, only a thin French chemise. In both her choice of garments and her furious blush, he read her desire to please him, and he smiled, pushing off from the door to gather her in his arms.
“You’re trembling,” he murmured into the edge of her hair.
“It’s just that I’m not used to … My husband was not …”
She seemed so troubled by thoughts of her past that he caught her face between his hands and stared deep into her eyes, willing her to forget everything but the moment. “Whatever he was or was not does not matter. We have each other now, and what we will do is only a step beyond what we have done before. Pleasure, sweetheart, has no commandments. We will make this night our own.”
He kissed her lips, her shoulder, and the hollow at the base of her throat, each touch from his lips a promise of security. Her tense frame relaxed. His hands ringed her waist and found the buttons of her skirt, then the ties of her petticoats. Soon they were sliding down her hips, and he helped her step out of them.
She saw the need collecting in the depths of his eyes as he stood gazing down at her in her thin chemise and frilly drawers and gartered stockings. With feminine instinct she realized that the power to fulfill his need lay solely within her. The delicious arousal of the senses, the sumptuous and enthralling banquet of sensation, and the sweet release that restored balance and reason—they would be his only by her giving. And she began to understand that in the giving, her own deepening needs would be satisfied.
That was the way of it. The giving and the receiving were part of the whole, like sides of a coin. One was not possible without the other. The wanting and the yielding were one. Inseparable. And at the base of it all was desire. Desire for the other. Desire for the intimacy, the joining, the love.
When he reached for her, she let him take her … let him open those parts of her that had been locked away … let him rouse the tenderness and giving that lay unexplored in the long-sealed chambers of her heart. He pulled her up into the bed and she responded to his desire with a need of her own.
They lay together, their bodies pressed close, unhindered by layers and bones and stays. Kiss by kiss she accepted and then sought his hands on her. When he made to remove her remaining garments, she redirected his hands beneath them instead, and closed her eyes, savoring the deepening pleasure of those hidden caresses.
He nibbled and nuzzled and caressed her, freeing her hair and exploring the erotic curves she withheld from his sight. His arousal was enhanced wildly by the way he had to seek her inside the constraints of those soft, clinging silks.
As his fingers edged toward the sleek heat of her woman’s center, she gasped. He touched her in a way no man had, making slow, erotic circles around the burning focus of her arousal. The heat of her embarrassment was quickly absorbed into the desire intensifying in the deepest hollow of her. She arched sinuously and twined her legs with his, urging him onto her, seeking his weight.
“Is this what you want?” he whispered hoarsely against her neck, fitting himself snugly within the wedge formed by her parting thighs.
“Yes,” she said on an indrawn breath. “Well … almost.”
He laughed softly. “We’ll get to almost, soon enough.” And he flexed his body, rubbing his hardened shaft along the sensitive groove of her woman’s mound.
She reacted with a spasm of pleasure and, after a stunned pause, undulated against him, entreating another. Each movement thrust her higher along a bright, swirling vortex of pleasure. This time she would not run from it. He was taking her into realms she had never known, not even in the depths of her passionate response. She prayed that he would see her safely through, for she was long past the point of stopping.
Tension mounted in her like waves, pushing her higher, faster, further. Then a swelling, heart-stopping crest of pleasure broke within her, flinging her through fragile barriers of perception. She clung fiercely to him as that flood of sensation rumbled through her again and again, and slowly subsided. When she could focus her gaze, his face filled it … so warm, so loving.
And she finally understood the longing in her ladies’ wistful smiles.
Outside, Rupert Fitch shifted uncomfortably against the brick wall that surrounded the carriage court of Remington’s house. His shoulders ached with tension and his eyes burned from the strain of unblinking scrutiny. He had followed Antonia Paxton here almost an hour before and watched her disappear behind that formidable door. Every predatory nerve in his body was vibrating with the conviction that all his snooping and skulking was about to be rewarded with the juiciest of scandals. The lady’s late call on the Ladies’ Man was certain to prove a lover’s tryst.
Over the last two weeks he had cultivated something of an acquaintance with the cook of Paxton House, who had unwittingly supplied him with the hint of a developing attachment between the lord and the lady. This evening when he called at the kitchen door, he found Gertrude distressed, and he learned that something had happened between Lady Antonia and the earl that had sent the nobleman flying from the house that afternoon. And he hadn’t returned … not even for supper, which he was scheduled to help prepare. Fitch had pacified the anxious Gertrude with a wink and a flirtatious pat, then slipped away himself, wondering what it meant and where the earl might have gone. Then, as he emerged from the alley, he spotted Lady Antonia in a long cloak, hurrying stealthily toward the local cab stand.
Galvanized, he had given chase. And she had led him straight to the earl’s posh residence.
Some time later the earl himself arrived home in a rush, and Fitch now waited and watched, writing headlines in his mind for the next edition, trying to decide how best to word it. He wanted to be the first thing Lady Antonia saw when she opened Remington Carr’s door the next morning. And he intended to be the one to break the scandalous news story that the stakes had just become intensely personal in the notorious Woman Wager.
Just as he was settling in for the long night ahead, a pair of cabs came rumbling down the dimly lit street. Something about them drew him upright on his seat. It was a moment before he realized what had tweaked his sense of expectation: they were slowing … stopping … at the earl’s house. Scrambling off the wall, he hurried toward the circular steps and crouched by the side, in the shadows.
The coach doors banged open and several figures tumbled out—men that Fitch recognized. Sir Albert Everstone, Lord Carter Woolworth, Lord Richard Searle, and Basil Trueblood were there, along with two others Fitch couldn’t place at first. As they staggered and lurched up the steps to the earl’s front door, he realized they had all been drinking heavily; some were positively stewed.
“Come on, Landon—o
pen up!” Everstone demanded, pounding the side of a brawny fist against the door repeatedly.
“Come out an’ face us, you … dir-rty welsh-sher!” Trueblood yelled, shaking a fist.
“We come to s-settle th’ s-score, Landon! You owe us-s!” Woolworth yelled, adding his fist to Everstone’s, battering the door.
It was a veritable lynch mob, Fitch realized with shock that quickly turned to delight. Whatever it was about, it was a disastrous turn for the earl, and manna from heaven for a newshound like him! He instinctively snatched his pad from his pocket and began to scribble as he worked his way around the bottom of the steps to get closer.
The huge door opened and a blanched butler appeared in the slice of interior light, protesting that the earl had retired for the evening and was not receiving visitors.
“Bloody hell ’e ain’t! He better s-see us-s, the bounder!” Everstone growled, shoving and strong-arming his way past the helpless houseman. The others surged into the entry hall after him, staggering to a halt and ignoring the butler’s outrage and his threats to call the constables if they didn’t leave at once.
“Where is ’e?” Woolworth shoved his face into the butler’s. “Where is the lous-sy cad?” Then he staggered back and called out, “La-andon—where are ya?”
“He’s abed, remember?” Searle said. “Retired a’ready.”
“Then, by gawd—we’ll wake ’im up!” Peckenpaugh declared, waving a fist.
Things were happening too fast to call for help. The invaders were suddenly headed for the staircase, and the butler rushed ahead of them to plant himself bodily on the bottom steps. Undaunted, they charged right into him and nearly bowled him over. He struggled to hold them back, pleading for them to stop, to consider the infamy of their actions. As a last resort he made an appeal to their gentlemanly code: “I beg you to cease, gentlemen—his lordship is not—alone!”
