It was late and the winter sun had set long ago, but there was still business to conduct, some secretive and some less so. He slipped from persona to persona as he traversed the city with ease, using the most minimal of disguises necessary to protect his identity. But throughout the passing hours, his thoughts returned to Jane, to her cries of passion, her challenge, her— He needed to see her again.
The theater had long been over. By now she was surely asleep in her bed, and that was where he most wanted to see her. To make love to her again, this time slowly, to re-explore every inch of her as a lover. To learn what pleased her best.
It was easy enough to steal into her room. He had made his way into far more challenging strongholds in his life. He could make out her form on the bed, and as he moved closer, breathe in the fragrance she had worn earlier that evening, heating his blood anew. He reached out, gently rested his hand over her mouth, prepared to increase the pressure if she started too loudly. Her head shifted, and she let out a soft moan. Still asleep.
“Jane,” he whispered, his head bent close to hers. “Don’t make any noise.”
“Gerard? What…” But then her protests stopped and her arms were around him, her hair brushing against his cheek, the fragrance of her in his nose and his heart. “I was dreaming of you.”
He thought she might even then still be half asleep. Her voice was thick as she trailed kisses across his face, his neck. Each kiss burned his skin like a brand, marked him indelibly with the need to possess her in every way possible. The way she possessed him.
“I thought I was alive before but now I know I was just an infant.”
He had been her first lover and yet he could have echoed every word she had said and it would have been true. In her arms he was more, better, hopeful for a future. He cupped her head with his hand, stopped her exploration, met her lips with his. The softness of her mouth eased the tension that coiled in his body. He studied the shape of it, the fullness of the lower lip, sucked it into his mouth, between his teeth, licked it with his tongue until she sparred in return, vying for power over his mouth with hers and he let her have it.
Jane pushed at him until he tumbled backward with her atop him, straddling him, her voluminous night rail pillowing over him. The last time he had seen her in a snowy white shirt it had been his, gaping low on her chest and high on her legs, revealing the peaks and valleys that tantalized him. This time, the gown was the respectable garment of an unwed young woman. He reached for her legs, found the bare skin of her ankles.
She gasped at that first contact of his hands, and then he stroked upward, under the cloth. She sucked in the skin of his neck, ravaging him with her tongue, and it was his turn to breathe in sharply. The skin of his fingertips tingled as he caressed her legs, circling upward, finding the hollows behind her knees. His body was awash in sensation from his neck to his fingers and even his toes, to places she wasn’t touching at all.
She tugged at his shirt, and he was grateful that, in his need for stealth, he forwent so many of the layers required for society, the stifling cravat, the waistcoat, the coats that were more about style than substance. Instead, his clothes were basic and without ornamentation, intended for agility, for the ability to blend into the night, to merely pass a moment’s observation rather than extended scrutiny.
His back arched off the bed as her tongue found his collarbone, licked a hot trail across his skin. Ah! She had a wicked, beautiful tongue. She used it in all the right places, all the right ways, as if she had an instinct for Gerard’s body, and for what would please him most. But the pleasure was torture and made him impatient, made him want to roll her onto her back once more and take control. He slid his hands up to her thighs, gripped the firm, silken flesh. She paused in her ministrations and he rocked his hips up experimentally. Despite the layers between them, his swollen flesh rejoiced at the hint of her core nestled at the apex of her legs.
“I want to see,” she whispered.
See what? And then he understood and laughed. See his cock, physical proof of his desire.
“And I wish to see you, but that will have to wait, unless you believe a lamp at this hour will not cause alarm.”
“No more than the squeaking of this bed.”
He stifled the bark of laughter that had almost spilled out far too loud. “I would venture to guess that no one will come to investigate that.”
“I suppose they might think I was enjoying self-pleasure.” Her voice was muffled against his skin and yet he heard it clearly.
That image froze him, and then burned him hot, the way her tongue continued to do.
“Have you?”
She pushed herself up on her arms and he could make out the shape of her face, the outline of her nose, her chin.
“I’ve explored my body. I think it a rather natural thing to do.”
“Though the church does not believe so. Any of them, as far as I can tell. One never thinks of a young woman engaging in any sort of illicit behavior at all.”
“Yet we expect men to engage in such. I would be more surprised to hear that I had been your first.”
He was amused and troubled at the same time. And he was bereft of her mouth, forced to think about things he did not wish to consider.
“I am not my father.”
“Perhaps not. However, I’m not ignorant. I know I was not your first.”
“No. Not my first.” His first had been the girl in Florence when he was fifteen, and after that there had been a very small handful of lovers. His work and the shadow of his father’s dissolution and irresponsibility had not left much room for Gerard to indulge in physical pleasures. But there were times when he had given in to desire, and times when desire coincided with his work, when seduction had been the most direct means to an end.
She bent her head down, blocking his vision into complete darkness, and pressed her lips to his cheek. As she followed that with her tongue licking a hot line to his ear, he relaxed back into sensation.
“You were mine.”
“I know,” he murmured.
She laughed, the breathiness of that exhalation feathering against his skin deliciously. “I had never thought on it before, but now I find it very unfair that women are born with proof of their virginity and men without. If it had been the opposite, perhaps the laws would favor us.”
The idea twisted everything on its end. He looked up at Jane, her body a shadowy silhouette against the room’s darkness, and imagined how her face would look, those light blue eyes, as she so effortlessly challenged everything society took for granted.
Lust surged within him, overpowering thought. This was his woman. In this world or any upside-down one, and he could no longer wait to be inside her, to feel her flesh cling to his in the most intimate way possible.
“Perhaps.” He shifted his hands, pulling at the cloth of her gown until it bunched about her waist. He grasped her hips with his palms and urged her upward. “But no more talk. Take me in your hand. Guide me into you.”
He cursed the darkness that did not let him watch her face, watch her movements, and yet, that inkiness added to the anticipation. Her hand wrapping around his cock was sweet relief and yet pure torture. Then the pressure of that hand eased as her fingers swept over him, studying him. And that touch, filled with curiosity, made him impossibly full, his muscles, blood, everything physical and earthly about him straining against his own skin.
“Jane…” He uttered her name as a helpless plea.
“Mmm.” She shifted, and the warm center of her hovered over him. His hips bucked upward instinctually, and she gasped. He gasped, too, at the contact, at the tantalizing sensation of her welcoming flesh. Her hand fumbled between them, trying to move his length into place.
“Let me.” He rolled her onto her back and covered her body with his own, nestling again between her legs, his cock against her core. And slid between the wet folds.
She was tight around him, but she lifted her hips, wrapped her arms around h
is back and he thrust in deep, till he was enveloped fully in Jane, nothing separating her skin from him. He buried his face in her neck, breathed her in deep, and paused there. Home. A place where for once he belonged.
“You fill me up so completely,” she whispered. “I hadn’t known how empty I was before.”
Physically he was inside of her, but again, he could have spoken those words and they would have been true. Emotion welled up inside him, inside his chest, stealing air.
“Jane,” he said again, everything bound up in her name, in that one word. She rocked her hips against him, urging him into motion and he answered the call. He needed her for everything, for this visceral pleasure, for the cerebral connection, for the understanding in her eyes, and for the challenge that he rise up to be a better man, and in doing so that he find a way to claim her.
She wanted to believe in him and he wanted her to be able to. He wanted to be able to believe in himself. He licked her skin the way she had explored his, lifted his hips slightly so that he could slide his hand down her stomach to the curls beneath that were slick with their exertion, found the rise of flesh hidden there.
Even as his hips continued to thrust and retreat, as her pulse at her neck beat against his searching tongue, he stroked her, listening to the cadence of her breath, the hitches and releases, the clues to her pleasure.
Her body tensed and she gripped him tightly everywhere until at once she arched back, hips rising, a moan escaping her lips. Her release triggered something deep in him, something primal, and he grabbed her hip again in one hand, and the back of her head with the other. Claimed her mouth again with his own as he pumped into her. She was his. His. His.
He came deep, teeth bared in a soundless cry. But even in the triumph of his pleasure, of making her his one more time, he was undone.
“It’s almost dawn.” Jane’s whisper in his ear woke Gerard from the slumber he had not intended to enjoy. Certainly not here and certainly not so deeply that, if she had not awoken him, he would have stayed asleep in her arms.
Her arms, where he was surely crushing her. He started to roll to the side, but ended up hovering, staring down at her. Her outline was more distinct now and the nearly imperceptible shift in the midnight blue of the sky beyond the window made it clear that Gerard had stayed past any advisable hour. Not that any of his actions were advisable. At least to a man who wished to keep his wits about him, save his sanity and perhaps his life.
He was in bed with the daughter of an earl. Had claimed her as his own with his body, had vowed to find a way to make her his own forever.
“Lady Jane Langley,” he mused, studying her.
“Does it change your opinion of me?”
“I should have guessed. My grandpere, he had spoken of you. And of your father. But I confess, your powers of deduction in this matter were far superior.”
“There is a family resemblance. Once the stories matched in places, I discerned the features you share with Lord Templeton and Lord Landsdowne. You do realize, I have likely spent more consecutive days with Lord Landsdowne than you.”
That of all the women in the world this one was so intricately twisted into his life before he ever knew her astounded him.
“As you’ve suggested. But I assure you, if I go to him, I will prevail.”
Her fingers stroked his face, buried in his hair, the sensation painfully, pleasurably, sweet. But she said nothing. She did not believe him. And nothing he said could convince her. Action was what was needed now.
“It is a matter that must be handled in person,” he said.
“You’ll leave Vienna?”
“As soon as possible.” He took her hand in his and bent it backward gently, pressed his lips to the tender skin of her wrist. Closed his eyes. Gerard had never been religious, and it had been years since he had even thought of something such as a higher power, but the touch of his lips to her skin felt strange, felt almost like…a prayer.
Gerard had gone utterly still, his lips pressed to her wrist, and Jane listened to his ragged breath, her own held. She watched him, as she had watched him for hours while he slept, holding him inside her, enjoying the pressure of his body on hers even when it grew uncomfortable, and marveling at the strangeness of them being together in this strange bed, in a strange city, with servants and her father only down the hall.
“I…” I want you to succeed. But she couldn’t say it because she wasn’t entirely certain if she did, if she knew what his success would mean. Certainly, if he went to Landsdowne then that man, one whose opinion she had respected for so long, would know of the folly of her emotions. “I don’t want this night to end.” That much she could say, because here, in Vienna, this night, this bed, was a world apart.
He let go of her hand and rolled to the side, sitting up, looking out to the window. She followed his gaze. The curtains were parted and she could see that the sky had lightened to the gray haze of dawn.
She understood what he saw. It didn’t matter if she wanted the night to never end. It already had. Still, she struggled to express the thought that slithered through her mind. “If you go, it changes everything.”
“Everything changes and nothing stands still.”
She laughed softly. How like this man to remind her how well suited he was to her in so many other ways. “If Heraclitus and Plato believe it, then it must be so,” she said, taking a deep breath. Letting him go did not mean she was bound to some silent promise. Letting him go…it meant she could wait and see. “I suppose this is good-bye then.”
He shook his head. “Only good day.”
Gerard would go to Landsdowne, and if that didn’t work, he would find some other way. And she knew Landsdowne wouldn’t work, and there likely was no other way. Yet…she’d set the challenge and quixotically, Gerard would meet it, would do anything to meet it. She knew that the way she had understood some aspect of him from the first moment her gaze locked with his.
She fought to temper the unfurling bittersweet pleasure in her chest but it remained stubbornly. After all, not once in all of her twenty-three years had she had something to look forward to. Someone.
He kissed her and she lifted her lips to meet his, wrapped her arms around him, soaked in everything of him that she could, memorized the shape of his lips and the sensations the kiss engendered in her. Then she watched him leave via the still open window. She didn’t move from the bed to watch his progress until he was gone from sight. She didn’t want to hold her breath at each foothold and each noise, wondering if he’d fall or be found. Instead, after Gerard was gone, Jane gave in to the grief that tore into her until she sobbed into her pillow, breathing in the scent of Gerard on her body, all too aware that the stickiness between her legs was the only proof left that he had been there at all. Reality did not end with the daughter of an earl and the illegitimate assassin grandson of an earl living happily ever after. Unless happiness could be had away from all of one’s usual society, friends and family, looked down on by the rest of the world. Knowing that one’s husband had lived a dozen or more identities and never knowing if she could trust the one he presented her to be the truth.
The tears dried on her cheeks as she examined that thought. Did she trust Gerard? She had no way of confirming the stories he told, but she had taken his word as truth. Had used the fact that he openly kept secrets as proof that what he did share was not based in lies. Had felt more comfortable because she knew his grandfather and half brother so well. But he was likely a man used to lying. Perhaps he did so without thought.
She had given him everything of herself. No…she had not. She had kept part of herself whole, knowing that this was impossible.
Jane was used to keeping things to herself. There was no bosom friend with whom she shared the emotional fluctuations of her days. But then again, until recently, there had been no emotional fluctuations of this magnitude. She had not bonded with her cousins or the young ladies of the ton over the meaning of a glance or the slightest touch from
a handsome gentleman. Her closest friend was likely Lord Carslyle, and that because he offered her a brotherly masculine escort, with no expectation of anything more than that friendship.
But now, now she wanted a confidante, someone with whom she could puzzle out everything that confused her, the emotions that made her want to go against her intellect. It was strange to think that Gerard was in truth the closest thing she had ever had to a friend. It had been one thing to leave him in Frankfurt, to have the goal of returning to her father and reaching Vienna. Now, he had left her and the loneliness she felt at that loss grieved her most of all.
Chapter Eleven
Gerard did not leave Vienna, not immediately. After all, he needed to make certain he did not leave Jane in danger.
After bathing, breakfasting, and changing into clothes befitting that of a courier, Gerard went to a bookshop on the edge of Leopoldstadt. The neighborhood had once been the heart of the Jewish community but was no longer such. Instead, Vienna’s Jewry was spread in pockets across the city, attempting to stay below notice, breath held that this congress would positively affect their fate as Napoleon had changed that of the French Jews. Not that Gerard particularly cared, but several of his clients did.
Lady of Intrigue Page 11
