His hand lingered there between her legs as he leaned up over her, the muscles in his upper arm springing into prominence as he rested his weight on it for balance. He looked startlingly grave in the half-light, his fingers moving so gently up and down that wet and wetter part of her. She reached out and laid her palm atop his biceps, then pulled herself up to plant her lips onto his shoulder, which was as smooth and hard and hot as she had imagined. She licked him, for the taste, and maybe to shock him, but she forgot whom she was dealing with; the low, broken thread of his laugh announced only approval. “Bite,” he whispered, and she almost wasted time by giving him a look of surprise, but what was the point? Biting was a brilliant idea. She put her teeth gently against his flesh, and below, he pushed one long finger into her, so she inhaled in startlement against his skin, and then broke away to arch up as his thumb hit some sweet nerve that made her light up like the windmill at the Moulin Rouge.
He stroked again, and again, leaning down now to kiss her earnestly, his lips never breaking from hers as she twisted and pushed beneath his touch. There was more to this, she knew there was more to the marriage bed, or the un-marriage bed, the fornication bed they could call it, she did not care, only she knew that the part of him that had grown hard, his erection, was meant to be involved, too, and he was driving her toward some point, his hand setting a purposeful rhythm that tormented her and made pleasure pop through her like champagne bubbles, but his erection remained uninvolved. She groped blindly, finding it, and he hissed into her mouth when she closed her hand over his length. His hips jerked into hers, and she pushed harder back; this was what she wanted, she felt achingly empty, incomplete in a novel and wholly delicious and utterly abandoned way. This couldn’t go on, she couldn’t go on like this—she felt a lick of anger move through her, and bit his lip to express this. He settled the full weight of his torso against hers while his hand continued to drive her mad and his kisses grew harder and deeper, and she lifted her hips, once, twice, a third time, and, oh.
“Oh, oh, oh,” she gasped, as her body, her hips, the aching places deep inside her, sprang apart and snapped back together; she felt like one of those wind-up alarm clocks with bells, which rattled and jumped and clanged, oh. She felt his lips turn into a smile against her mouth and well he might smile as her head fell back; her mind went blank as the pleasure uncoiled again sharply through her, fading slowly, in deep, pulsing throbs, until the gentle reminder of his hand called them forth once more, briefly now.
Her muscles unwound like overcooked pasta. She lay back, gasping, her eyes blindly fixing on the darkness of the ceiling, the ghostly rippling silhouettes of trees, rising and falling, rising and falling as the train passed onward.
She had never felt so . . . replete . . .in her life.
A gentle kiss pressed against her cheekbone. She blinked slowly, then turned her sweaty face to him.
One might have thought it would be awkward. His hand was still pressed between her legs. But the sight of him, his angular bones, the long, dramatic sweep of his mouth, seemed so natural to her. As though she should see his face every night in the dark.
Slowly he removed his hand, sliding it gently over her bared hips.
“What of you?” she murmured. Her voice sounded slurred.
A soft breath escaped him. She knew enough now to interpret it: he liked the way her voice sounded, or the remark. It made him hot, as he’d made her.
He was still hot, in fact. The awareness stirred a small bit of anxiety. She was not so naïve as to imagine that this was why men visited brothels. She started to sit up. “You haven’t—”
“Shh.” Delicately he touched her temple, the feathery hair there. “Lie back, Gwen.”
“But I wanted—”
“No. We’re not going to do that.”
No? The words tripped off a flutter of strange panic. Weren’t they done with rejection? She’d looked up at him in those moments of immense pleasure and seen him gazing back at her, expression stark, and she’d felt as though they were attuned. Would he refuse her again tomorrow, then? She felt greedy for him now. The very pores of her skin seemed to be opening in order to inhale him, the scent of him. “But why not?” she asked, and her voice emerged so clumsily, sounding as small and petulant as a child’s.
He pulled away from her, rose from the bed, crossed to the small ledge built into the teak wall. He had ordered another bottle from the porter. As he splashed brandy into a glass, the moonlight caught his face again, outlining the sculptured contours of his mouth. He glanced up at her, as if sensing her inspection, and his eyes caught the light, glittering beneath the heavy fall of his dark hair.
“I can’t do this,” he said quietly. He put down the bottle with a thump and kicked around the chair so its back was to the bed. He fell into it, straddling the seat, one muscular forearm propped atop the back, the brandy glittering in the cold light.
She knocked her nightgown back over her legs. Did up the buttons above her waist. He sat in all apparent comfort, although he was naked from his trousers up. His torso—well, it distracted her briefly. As a boy, he’d been sent down from the Rugby School for beating Reginald Milton bloody—she knew this from Richard, whom his violent intervention had saved, and the twins besides. She knew, too, that he still studied violent arts, but his manner was so casual and his physicality so indolent that one did not imagine him capable of brutality, until one studied the muscled hew of his arms and chest.
“You can do anything,” she said. Her throat tightened; she spoke the next words with difficulty. “But if you don’t want to, that’s another thing.”
He leaned forward, quick as a snake, and caught up the chain around her throat. He let a length of it run through his fingers, setting Richard’s ring swinging over her breast.
Her stomach fell.
“I meant to take that off,” she whispered. She could not believe she’d forgotten.
“Did you?” He sounded contemplative. “We talked of Richard all night, you know.” He let go of the chain and took a sip of the drink, then added, “But we never talked of what he would have thought about this.”
Cold foreboding stabbed through her—through a body that still felt lethargic, weighted with the remnants of pleasure. The combination dazed her. “Perhaps we did not mention it because my brother is dead. His opinion no longer signifies.”
A caustic note entered his voice. “Of course I am aware of that. Let me be clearer: when I am speaking of Richard now, the person I am really speaking of is you. I begin to wonder at your motives, Gwen.”
She stared at him, utterly confused. “I have been as frank with you about my motives as I know how. I have told you again and again that I’m in search of a different life. Of something . . . something that is—”
“Irrevocable,” he said. “You are in search of a moment, an experience so irrevocable that you will never be able to turn back.”
She pondered this for a moment, looking for traps. But she found none. “Perhaps that’s part of it,” she said. But not all of it. If it had been, then any man would have served for seduction.
Instead, she only wanted him.
“It’s good that you admit it,” he said casually. “But as I said, there are always two choices involved. And I won’t be your guillotine. Regardless of what happened to Richard.”
The words chilled her. She did not understand them, but she recognized their power. They raised a wall that would take an axe to break down. “What happened to Richard has nothing to do with this.”
“And yet we’ve never spoken of it,” he said. “An absence so pointed is not an absence at all.”
She drew her knees up into her chest. “I have . . . no wish to die, if that’s what you mean. This is not some grand, reckless, suicidal lark on my part.”
“I don’t think he meant his to be, either.”
Silence. “He was . . . angry with you,” she said finally. “I know.”
“I could have stopped him,” he said.
“So easily.”
The rawness in his voice jarred her. “Alex—do you think I blame you for his death? I have never done so. Not once.”
The corner of his mouth tipped up. He sat back into the shadows, his expression lost to her. “Not once,” he echoed.
The mocking emphasis filled the air between them longer than she should have allowed. But she knew a challenge when she heard one—and also that old habits were so hard to shake, while new skills took time to sharpen. She did not want to be clumsy in her honesty.
“Perhaps,” she began carefully, “in the early days, when he had just . . . left us—”
“Been murdered,” he said emotionlessly. “He did not leave us, Gwen. He was violently taken. It is an important distinction: it means there is blame to be apportioned.”
“All right,” she said softly. “After he was murdered . . . I did think, once or twice, that it was you who taught him to play such games—that it was your path he had followed to the grave.”
There. That was the cruelest part, and it was spoken, now.
By a fierce act of will, she restrained herself from rushing onward.
He, in turn, sat impassively, watching her from the dark.
She stared back into his featureless face. She did not need the light; she knew what she was looking at. Chestnut hair, ice blue eyes, broad cheekbones over gaunt cheeks, a strong jaw and high-bridged nose: he was the picture of rugged good looks, and girls did sigh over him, in secret, when their mothers were not listening.
For herself, she had always, usually reluctantly, admired his more intangible qualities—foremost, his unshakable composure.
It was rather unnerving now to be faced with the full force of that composure. He had asked the question; surely he owed her some reaction to the answer.
As the silence extended, his impassivity, his unfair use of the darkness, roused a small strain of resentment in her—just enough to remind her of exactly what she had thought, in those weeks after Richard’s death. After his murder.
“At the funeral, you were so cold,” she said. So composed. It had unnerved her. Unnerved and angered her, too. She had lost the last person remaining to her, but he still had so many people to love him, for all that he took them for granted, rebuffing their every sign of care.
“I was in shock,” he said evenly.
“Yes.” That had been her later conclusion. But at the time, locked in her own shock, she had thought that maybe it was not composure so much as inhumanity that aided him—in which case, people would do better to admire him as they might a tiger at the zoo: from a distance, with no ambitions.
She did not believe that now. She saw him more clearly.
“Here’s something,” she said quietly. “I thought to myself that you put a spell on people—inadvertently, of course. Sometimes I still think it. Your wit and charm seem so careless—almost accidental, really. You’re so at ease in the world, Alex. And I think, because you make it look so easy, that people think they can emulate you—can seize life by the throat as you do. But it requires skill to skirt the risks you run. And my brother never had that talent. He was not . . . watchful enough.” She paused. “But I am.”
He made a soft noise, of skepticism or scorn.
“I am,” she said more sharply. “I am not my brother. And I knew my brother as well as you did, mind you. When I say you charmed him, that does not mean you were somehow to blame.” By befriending Richard, Alex had only done what her parents had hoped for. They had wanted Richard to learn to see the world from a particular vantage point: how to make the sort of assumptions, and to demand the sort of entitlements, and to formulate the sort of expectations, that any gentleman of the upper class did. How to gamble, how to drink, how to cut a stylish path through the Continent—why else had her parents sent Richard to Rugby?
Alas for her parents, Richard had fixed on the one aristocrat’s son who’d learned his lessons outside the canon.
She cleared her throat. “You cared for Richard deeply—that I never doubted. And he knew you far better than I. Certainly he knew you well enough to understand the difference between style and substance, and also the relation between the two.” She folded her hand over the ring. “He must have known your mettle. He knew what he was trying to emulate. And if he didn’t . . . then that was his failing, not yours.”
“Perhaps,” he said.
“No,” she replied instantly. “Since you have asked me the question, you will do me the favor of believing my reply. As his sister, I am best equipped to judge this question. And had you escorted him directly to that casino, it still would have had no bearing on the fact that some drunken barbarian shoved a knife into his chest. Yes?”
Her voice had grown very firm. He sat up a little, doing her the favor of showing her that he was looking directly into her eyes. “Yes, Gwen,” he said. “I heard you.”
“But do you believe me?” When he did not immediately reply, she let go of the ring and reached out for his hand, grabbing it harder than ever would have come to her by habit or whim. “Do not offend me,” she said, “by implying that I would long to touch a man who bore any blame in my brother’s murder.”
She felt his fingers move at that pronouncement, a small, indecipherable ripple. But his regard remained as neutral, as coolly speculative as his voice. “Perhaps you do see me clearly,” he said. “And from what you’ve said about my effect, wanting to touch me seems very unwise. Better, I think, to stay away.”
“Yes,” she said. “For most. But not for me. And by your own admission, if you believed me incapable, you would not have invited me to come with you on this journey.”
He gave her a lingering look, from eyes to lips to shoulders and breasts. “I begin to regret it,” he said, almost beneath his breath.
Her hand moved of its own accord to her stomach. Such pain those words lashed into her. Only a quarter hour ago, he’d made her feel so replete. But now, all at once, she felt battered by him. Drained.
On a sigh, he turned back to the bottle. “Go to bed, Gwen,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m done with company for the night.”
Chapter Eleven
Alex woke slowly and with difficulty, fighting with an undertow of sleep that wanted to drag him back under and keep him there. His eyes opened briefly and the light fell like a weight upon his lids, pushing them closed again. He lay still for a long moment, listening to the roughness of his breathing, as though he indeed had just been through a fight. His mind wanted to remind him of something. Ah, yes. Last night, he’d shown Richard’s sister far more about pleasure than was his right. Somewhere in the afterlife, a dead man was cursing his name.
Even this small amount of thinking felt difficult. Exercise, he thought groggily. He would feel more alert once he’d done his calisthenics. The burn in his muscles would force him awake. He could pay his penance to Richard in sweat.
He sat up slowly, a groan escaping him. Every bone in his body creaked, unhappy to rediscover the way of it. His head did not hurt, though.
He swung his legs off the bed, then paused. Why should his head hurt? This misery could not be the effect of the liquor. He’d had only a few glasses of cognac, over the course of seven hours.
It struck that something else was amiss: the train was not moving.
He leaned over and pulled back the curtain. The station placard outside bore a single word: Nice.
His hand dropped like a stone.
Jesus Christ. No wonder he felt as though someone had bashed his skull with a mallet. He’d slept for—he quickly calculated it—nine hours straight.
He stared in disbelief at the platform. It was Nice, wasn’t it? The sign wasn’t a sham?
Yes. He recognized the station, the distinctive scrolling archways that led toward the concourse proper.
He sat slowly on the foot of the bed, staring out. On the platform, a handful of men were shifting luggage. A woman stalked past, elbows pumping angrily, a parasol swinging from the ribbon at her wrist.
The man at her heels made a quick sidestep to save his thigh, then uttered some protest that made the woman look back, her mouth a perfect O.
She came to a stop. So did he. He clasped his hands to his heart. Quite suddenly she laughed. The anger melted from her spine. He held out his elbow, and she took it, proceeding onward at his side.
It looked warm out there. The woman’s blue silk skirts gleamed. Lemony light bounced down on the green iron benches, called into blazing richness the crimson petals of the rosebushes beside the track. A bright day, sunny and alive.
His own lifting mood gave him pause. He had no right to feel cheerful. Had Richard been alive, the man would have been demanding Alex’s blood for last night’s betrayal. A pretty thing to do—indulging one’s own appetites with the sister of the man one had directed to his death. He had fallen asleep furious with himself.
That anger now seemed very distant.
His hand paused, shoved halfway through his hair. In fact, the very reflex to castigate himself—to revile his own weakness with regard to Gwen—felt limp and tired, like an overused muscle that no longer held any power.
He did not feel guilty at all.
A banging came at the door. Bit aggressive for a porter hoping for a tip. He rose on a curiously light sensation, opened the door and discovered his Achilles’ heel. Gwen stood with her arms crossed under her breasts, freshly dressed in a tweed walking outfit. On her head perched the most ridiculous hat he’d ever seen—some long-brimmed affair that featured an assortment of garden creatures, miniature birds and bees and butterflies, held aloft by rose stems made of gutta-percha.
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