He made a sharp sound—between a groan and a gasp. He broke free of the kiss and laid his head into her throat, so his hair brushed against her chin. His ragged breathing heated her collarbone. “There’s a moment,” he said. “A moment . . .”
She slid her fingers through his hair, holding him there. In the distance, some cheap clock struck the midnight hour with tinny, hollow bangs. “A moment for what?”
He raised his head. “I loathed the spectacles,” he said, very low. His thumb traced her brow once. “They did hide you.”
She turned her face to kiss his wrist. An hour ago, a month ago, a year ago, he had been untouchable. And now, in the space of minutes, he was suddenly hers to touch as she liked. Who said life did not hold miracles?
His hand slid under the small of her back, nudging her up. “Come.”
She sat with his help, let him draw her to her feet. Robbed of support, her breasts felt heavy and loose. His lips parted as he looked at her. He ran his thumb across her right nipple, and a sound slipped from her.
He kissed her flat on the mouth. His hands slid down her body; he caught her skirts and lifted the dress off her, then untied her petticoats and lifted her out of them.
“My God.” He stepped back, gazing at her. “You were hiding more than your eyes . . .”
The wondering note in his voice made her flush. She sat back on the bed, and he nudged her all the way down. When he came over her again, the angle turned him into a featureless silhouette, like a figure from a dream.
Her dream-lover had hot, wandering fingers. They cupped her breasts, tested their weight. His thumb outlined her nipple, causing her to shudder; pleasure yawned open inside her, demanding she part her legs, push herself up toward him, so she might know once more what she had experienced in the library.
But he had other intentions. He lowered his head; his lips closed around her nipple, a shocking sensation. She heard the sound of his suckling, and it made her hotter yet. The softness of his lips, the wet heat—she gasped—of his tongue, the momentary edge of his teeth as he tested her liking for that . . .
What leapt through her was a pulsing, urgent demand; she grabbed his head, pulling it harder against her.
“I would spend a thousand years here.” His voice was rough. “Would you have me?”
“Yes.” Here was what she had forgotten to say, what she had needed to say all along: “Yes, yes, yes.”
But it became a lie the moment he began to suckle her again, for she realized that this would not satisfy her; a wildness was running through her now, spreading her hunger across a dozen different places, all throbbing, all in need of his attention. Her mouth, which needed his tongue, and the place deep in her belly, which was heavy and full, the place between her legs that felt too empty, throbbing with need. She groped him blindly, like a mountaineer in the dark, looking for the places that would progress this journey. She massaged the muscled bulk of his upper arms, pressed roughly down his flanks—
He sat up and shrugged out of his jacket. Off came his waistcoat; his suspenders, his shirt. She had seen his bare chest before, but now she could reach out and press her palm against the rippling planes of his belly, and feel them contract as he drew a sharp breath. He caught her hand, bit her fingers lightly, sucked them deep into his mouth; his eyes found hers, and the flick of his tongue, the grip of his lips, felt like a wicked promise. He licked down her palm and bit her inner wrist. “Patience,” he said, and only then did she realize that she had said Please.
His trousers came off next. She was so much bolder than she’d guessed; she sat up to help, and their hands stumbled over each other. He laughed, and his clear exhilaration struck her as sweet and marvelous, and she laughed, too.
He was beautiful. His legs were long and lean, his calves tightly knit, his thighs shelved with muscle. She ran a wondering hand up the length of his quadriceps, feeling the hair, so much coarser than her own. Her hands paused at his hipbones, beneath which a notched indent angled down on either side to frame that part of him that would shortly concern her most. He had given it a name, in the library.
Holding her breath, she laid her hand over his cock.
He hissed, and then—when she tried to draw away—caught her hand and held it there. He showed her how to stroke him, this length that felt impossibly hard. Yet the skin was so soft.
As she explored him, he reached between their bodies to find the spot—precision; she had read of the term—her clitoris, pressing and rubbing in a way that concentrated, suddenly and fiercely, all the vagrant pulses of desire into a single aching demand. The part of him that she gripped suddenly felt like an answer. She understood now.
He came over her then, and positioned himself, pushing into her with one finger, and then another. She arched beneath him, and then his fingers were replaced by a larger, harder pressure, for a brief moment painful, and then filling her completely.
Stunned, she lay beneath him, looking up at him in the darkness, uncertain of what to do.
He put his forehead to hers and began to move.
It was, from that first thrust, more than she had imagined. For it was not simply the smell of him, the weight of him, his grip as he held her in place, the strength of his hips, which ravished her.
It was everything intangible that had allured her before—the intensity of his looks, his uncannily sharp perceptions, his cleverness, intellect, and power. When he thrust too deeply, and she winced, he noticed it; he began to move more shallowly. When the angle of his hips struck a strange, queer spot that made her whimper, he heard it, and repeated the move, until her fingers began to scrabble across his back, and animal noises came from her throat. His intangible qualities became the talents with which he made love to her. Even his cruelty ravished her: she felt it in the demand his body made of hers, this steady, incessant, thrusting possession.
She felt herself balanced on a strange, wild, intoxicated laugh: And you think I do not know you? She was enveloped by him—possessed in a way only she would understand. And he knew her; she was seen and known by him. This ravishment was a joint production, she and he together.
She surrendered to it. He was whispering words to her, his cheek pressed to her temple, and the words were hot and vulgar, and what they were doing was hot and vulgar, and so was she. She felt wild with his assault, and voracious, desperate for it never to end. For with each sharp movement of his hips he was striking some place deep inside her that swelled and twisted and tightened. It was stronger, more frightening, more wonderful even than what had happened in the library. He was going to break something in her and the shattering would be worth how it destroyed her, for this mounting desperation had to be satisfied; it must be—
For a desperate minute she lingered on this awful, wondrous edge, hearing noises from her own mouth that she did not recognize, that he drank as though they were ambrosia and he starving; and then he began to whisper to her, an instruction she could not follow: “Come,” he said. “Take it. Come, Olivia.”
The convulsion seized her: her greediness made incarnate, inner muscles gripping him, demanding more, more—and then . . . at last . . . releasing her from the frenzy, leaving her limp, boneless, replete.
He groaned, long and low, and then gathered her to him. She kissed his shoulder, salty from sweat. He murmured something. “Sweetness,” he said. He stroked her cheek as they lay together, in the darkness of the room.
The clock chimed half past twelve in tinny tones.
* * *
He wanted to say something. But the words eluded him. His voice would shake if he spoke. He would say something he later would regret.
He stroked her arm, hoping she might read into his touch whatever a woman might need to know, to hear, in such a moment, after such a . . .
Such an event? That was not the word for it. He could think of no word for what had just passed between them. Sexual congress was clinical; it described only the mechanisms of body parts. But what had just occurred seemed to inv
olve his soul. He felt lighter. He felt unburdened of something.
He put his face into her nape. The smooth length of her back pressed against his chest; she adjusted her hips, the soft flesh of her buttocks easing away from him a little. He resisted the urge to pull her hips back into his. He breathed deeply, and the scent of her stirred him—a stirring that against all odds promised to build. He would be ready for her again very soon.
He angled his face so her hair brushed along his forehead. He imagined it was her hand, smoothing his brow.
A man who had been married should know his bodily capacities. But he could not compare this with that. This woman with Margaret. The two women, the two experiences, were so profoundly unalike that they did not seem even to belong in the same category. What other explanation could there be for why he should feel so awkward now, so profoundly naked, in a way that transcended by far the bareness of his body?
He was not sure he liked it. He should be done with uncertainty. God above, was there not a time, finally, when a man was done with surprises?
But this surprise was . . . sweet. It was sweeter than he had the will to name.
He looped his arm around her waist, then held his breath as her hand tentatively covered his own.
Whom did she think she grasped in the darkness? That man whom the newspapers had heralded? Or the man who had gripped a pistol and spoken of murder? But the hand she now held belonged to another man entirely: one who felt, all at once, like a green boy.
Perhaps this confusion was renewal. He was relearning himself. And here, in this bed, his first lesson in this new life was so extraordinary and unexpected that better did not describe it.
She rolled to face him. He could not resist the urge to stroke her hair from her brow, for she would not do it to him, and the longing, strangely, was as well satisfied this way, with him doing it for her.
Her eyes were dark pools, her face a blur. “I had never . . . done that,” she said.
“I know.”
Her breath whispered out, a hot rush across his chest. “I should have asked beforehand.” She spoke so softly that he could barely make out the words. “It is . . . important to me . . . not to be with child. Not like this.”
He understood. From her halting words this afternoon, he knew that she had cause not to wish bastardy on another soul. “I did not spill inside you. Do you understand what that means?”
Her head jerked—a clumsy nod. “That I’m safe. Yes?”
And as simply as that, compassion twisted through his heart.
What was he doing, taking her to bed? This brave, unlikely girl who did not know when she was beaten . . .
He eased off, putting space between them—no wider than a finger’s width, but too wide for his body’s liking, for his greedy cock, which already had stiffened again. “You’re safe,” he said quietly. “On the morrow, we go to Allen’s End.”
She turned into his arms, then. Her head settled in the crook of his shoulder. He held still, unnerved. Her weight on him felt like the physical manifestation of guilt. And then, as she sighed and nestled more deeply into him, it began to feel like something else entirely, much more dangerous.
She lay with trust against him. She fit perfectly beneath his arm.
This meant nothing, he wanted to warn her. This was for my own pleasure. I have promised you nothing. I am no man to make promises, anymore.
But he could feel from the limpness of her body that she had fallen asleep again, and these words seemed no way to wake her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
By train, Allen’s End was only two-odd hours from London. Olivia remembered how this revelation had once amazed her. She had spent most her life watching her mother wait, pale and frustrated, for Bertram’s rare appearances—and when he’d arrived, how he had grumbled, what a fuss he had made, over the pains of the journey! Olivia had imagined Bertram like the Marco Polo of her picture books, and Allen’s End, the end of an English Silk Route, reached only after braving innumerable perils.
Even once she was older, she’d imagined that there must be more to the journey than the maps suggested. To a girl of fourteen or fifteen, after all, Allen’s End did feel like the end of the world—a place that time had abandoned, with London as distant as China.
But on a dreary evening seven years ago, she had boarded the train at half-past six. And at a quarter before nine that night, the conductor had announced Charing Cross. Olivia had been nursing enough determination and grief to carry her all the way to China, so her prompt arrival had left her vaguely disappointed.
Now she was making the journey in reverse, in a first-class compartment that Marwick had booked completely—for privacy, he’d said. That announcement had amply distracted her. She’d envisioned all manner of reasons he might require privacy for the journey, most of them torrid. Could one be ravished on a train? How would the mechanics work?
She’d rather looked forward to finding out. It had been somewhat anticlimactic to wake alone in the flat this morning, with no more evidence than a smudge of blood—hardly respectable even for a nosebleed—to prove what had happened last night. And in the morning light, after a solid, dreamless rest, she’d felt so much better, so much more herself, that all the mad events of yesterday—the ambush at the park; the hours in prison; Marwick’s rescue, and the strange, feverish hours that had followed; the feel of his skin against hers, and that shocking, complete possession—all of it seemed fantastical, half remembered, like a fading dream.
Only the small smudge of blood said otherwise.
When Marwick had finally appeared, she had expected . . . something, she wasn’t sure what, to have changed between them. But there’d barely been time to exchange greetings. He’d entered like a storm cloud, a valise in hand, which he’d opened to reveal a dress that she’d been forced, last week, to abandon, it having been in the possession of his laundress at the time of her flight.
“Change,” he’d said. “We have tickets for half past nine.” And any chance for revelations (to say nothing of shyness, or another go at debauchery) had been lost in the haste with which he’d hustled her into the coach, out through Charing Cross station, and onto the train.
Now Marwick sat across from her, making a silent perusal of the stack of newspapers he’d purchased on the platform, which somehow had kept him thoroughly absorbed for the last two hours, though she knew that in the normal course, it did not take him half that time to read every paper that London had to offer. He was deliberately ignoring her. Why? In her confusion, she could not quite find her bearings.
She stared at his hands.
Those same hands, long-fingered, rings gleaming (three of them now; they were, as she’d predicted, accumulating), were the same hands that had touched her last night. Those full lips (now pressed in a grim line, though a moment ago they had looked quite relaxed) had wandered over her body and spoken hushed, fervent words against her skin. I would spend a thousand years here, he’d said.
The memory made her breasts feel odd and tight, too full for her stays to contain. She took a deep breath.
He looked up. “What?”
She gave him a guileless smile. “What do you mean, what?”
He looked pointedly back to his newspaper.
With a sigh, she looked out the window. The morning was gray and wet, and the constant drizzle made it look as though the marshy bogs were boiling. She felt his eyes on her. But when she glanced back, he was absorbed in the news.
She shifted in her seat, making the springs creak.
His eyes still on his reading, he slid a newspaper across the table toward her.
She had already tried to read one, but she had not been able to focus. Now, dutifully, she scanned the headlines again, wondering at how little interest they stirred. It was not her way to look on tidings of national crises, of unrest in Afghanistan, of Russian threats and famine in Egypt, with the indifference of some vapid miss.
She frowned. Had he done something to her last night?
She did not believe that a woman’s virtue lay in her physical integrity. But had he corrupted her somehow at the mental level? For all she could concentrate on was him.
He was slumped in his seat, the newspaper hitched at an angle that obscured his face. Frowning, she studied what she could see of him. His jacket fell open to show his flat belly beneath a pin-striped waistcoat. His trousers clung to his lean hips and the length of his muscled thighs, which had felt hard to the touch, and flexed so powerfully . . .
His thumb was stroking over the newsprint. This slow, idle stroke riveted her. He had been inside her.
And now he would not even look at her! Suddenly, she could not bear his aloofness. “Was I such a disappointment to you, then?”
His thumb stilled. “What?”
“Last night? Was I such a disappointment?”
The newspaper lowered, revealing his widened eyes. “What?”
Perhaps his mind had been corrupted, too. “Your vocabulary seems much diminished this morning.”
He folded down the newspaper to reveal his whole face. He must have shaved while at his house this morning. His jaw looked clean and sharp against his tightly knotted tie. Her fingers itched to feel the temporary smoothness of his skin. “You’re making no sense,” he said levelly.
“You’re behaving oddly all around. I believe I’m the one who should properly feel shy. I am the woman, after all.”
His jaw squared. He laid down the newspaper. “Don’t be ludicrous.”
That retort seemed somewhat more forceful than merited. She felt a glimmer of mischief. “You’re not feeling shy, are you?”
To her amazement—and, yes, her delight—the color rose in his face. “Shy, by God—”
“You’re avoiding my eyes,” she said. “You could not have hustled me out of that flat more quickly this morning. And now you’re refusing to have a conversation. Are you afraid that you disappointed me? For I assure you, it wouldn’t have been possible. I wasn’t expecting much—”
Fool Me Twice Page 24
