He followed her to the house, trying not to watch every twitch of her hips, every bounce of her hair. Trying to find a way to break himself of his desire for her, just as the horses were broken behind him.
It had been three hours since Audrey had gone down and fetched Jude to help her. Over that time, the odd tension between them had begun to fade. Who would have thought it would only take a paintbrush?
Jude watched her as she balanced on the ladder a servant held and stroked the brush over the wall.
“I still can’t believe you took up painting yourself,” he laughed.
She observed her handiwork and smiled before she climbed down. The footman took the brush she had held and gathered up a few more things before he left the room, leaving Jude and Audrey alone for a moment.
“Why not?” she asked as she looked again at the bright, welcoming yellow of the walls. Offset by the white railings and decorative wood, the room was gorgeous. And she had been a part of it.
“Because you are a lady,” he said, emphasizing the word.
She rolled her eyes. “Why should a lady not help? Especially since I love this parlor more than any room in this house.”
He looked around. “Do you? Why?”
She smiled. “My papa used to read to me right in front of the fire there,” she said, motioning toward the now-empty fireplace. “And this was always the room where our family gathered to play cards or talk.”
Jude’s expression softened. “You know, this was the room where I was first introduced to your family, all those Christmases ago.”
She nodded. Of course she knew that. That long-ago night had taken its place amongst her favorites in this room.
“So you see why I have a strong desire to see it perfect, for I hope that there will be many more memories created here in the years to come.” She looked around again. “I think my mother will like the color a great deal, especially when it is paired with the blues on the furniture.”
He stepped closer, a grin on his face and a sparkle in his eyes that she hadn’t seen in a long time. He reached out and everything in her world seemed to stop.
“You have paint on your cheek,” he laughed as he used his thumb to trace her cheekbone. His smile fell, but his hand did not, and for a moment the air left both her lungs and the room itself.
“Jude?” she whispered.
He grunted a wordless sound and suddenly he swayed in closer. He was going to kiss her. She saw it in his eyes, felt it in his heat. She couldn’t stop trembling, she couldn’t stop her heart from throbbing almost out of her chest. What would he taste like? What would he feel like when he took her in his arms? What would happen afterward? Because she very much doubted it would end with just a kiss for them.
It was that thought that brought her up short. And even though she was shaking with the desire to have Jude’s mouth on hers, she staggered away, nearly depositing herself on her backside near the ladder.
He stared at her, his eyes narrowing and his face losing color.
“I’m sorry,” he said, taking his own long step backward. “I shouldn’t have done that. Especially after our discussion yesterday about my place.”
She gasped out a breath. “Oh God, Jude, it has nothing to do with that, I assure you.” Tears filled her eyes and she blinked at them, trying to keep her composure. Trying to stop herself from coming completely undone.
He tilted his head. “Audrey, what is it?”
She held up her hands. “Nothing. It’s nothing. I can’t—”
“Audrey,” he interrupted, moving on her but stopping far short of being too close. “Please. I can see you’re very upset. You said earlier we were friends—why don’t you talk to me?”
She trembled as she stared at him. He was offering her an ear, a place to put fears she could speak to no one else in the world about. And it was tempting, oh-so-temping.
“How can I explain?” she whispered.
“Just say the words,” he encouraged her.
She moved a little closer to him, examining his handsome face. It was such a soulful one, so filled with expression. She had always been able to read his dark blue eyes, his frowns and smiles. She had always longed to be closer to him.
And this confession would certainly do that, both to her benefit or detriment.
“You were going to kiss me, weren’t you?” she asked.
He hesitated for a moment, but then he nodded. “Yes,” he admitted. “I was.”
She nodded, the thrill filling her again. “I thought as much. But it wasn’t your position or rank that made me pull away,” she said, watching that expressive face tighten with anger at himself for his slip in propriety. “In fact, I have wanted that kiss for so long, I can hardly recall a time when it wasn’t on my mind. When I didn’t wish for it.”
He sucked in a breath. “Audrey,” he breathed, his eyes going wide, his pupils dilating until blue was almost entirely black.
“It’s true. I won’t deny it. Not if we are choosing to be honest with each other.” She felt her cheeks growing hotter by the moment, but pushed her embarrassment away. “So you see, I don’t turn away because I don’t want you. It’s because I’m…I’m afraid.”
His brow wrinkled. “Afraid of me? Because Audrey, I would never hurt you, I would never force you. Great God, if you are afraid—”
“No!” she interrupted. “I’m not afraid of you, Jude. I’m afraid of…of…passion.”
“Passion?” he repeated, as if he didn’t understand her meaning.
She swallowed hard. She had kept these feelings inside for so long, she hadn’t expected for them to be so difficult to express. But they were, and not just because her confidante was a man she had been obsessed with for years.
“Yes,” she said. “And why shouldn’t I be? Look at what it has done to my family!”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand, Audrey. What do you think passion has done?”
She trembled as she tried to put words to her fears. “It is like an animal. I’ve seen it live and breathe, Jude. I have watched it wind its way around a person and destroy them. Even now, isn’t it alive in you? In me?”
“You are upsetting yourself, Audrey. I admit what you say is true, but how have such desires harmed your family?”
She threw up her hands and paced the empty room. “You were with Edward during his marriage. His attraction to Alice was why he wed her, wasn’t it? And it destroyed him when he discovered she wasn’t what she seemed.”
Jude pressed his lips together. “I don’t think you can judge the merits of passion on Alice’s vile and violent actions.” She heard Jude’s hatred for her brother’s late wife in every word he spoke.
She shrugged. “Passion drove my brother to desperation,” she said. “You may portray it any way you like. And then there is Claire. It was passion that encouraged her to run off with Jonathon Aston. He played upon some kind of high emotion she was going through at the time and he tricked her into surrender to passion.”
Jude turned away from her. Perhaps she had gone too far, broken whatever pedestal he kept her on. And that might be for the best after all.
“So I am afraid of feeling passion,” she continued. “You must understand why.”
He turned on her, and there was fire in his stare. Fire that was exactly the passion she feared. And yet she wanted so desperately to lean into it. Lean into him.
“There are positive things about passion,” he said softly. “Look at Edward and Mary.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “Yes. Yes, they do seem to care for each other deeply. And they are happy. But couldn’t their passion destroy them in the future?”
His lips parted. Lips she still wanted to feel on her, despite her words about terror and reluctance. That was the most frightening thing about passion. It lured one in.
“You don’t believe that,” he whispered, and moved closer. “Audrey, you cannot fear passion. Desire is a natural inclination that every man and woman feels. To suppre
ss it, to make it ugly, it isn’t healthy.”
“You don’t know that,” she murmured. She could smell his skin now, she could feel his heat.
“I do,” he promised, and suddenly he threaded his fingers into her hair. He tilted her face toward his—and this time she wasn’t strong enough to turn away.
He lowered his lips and kissed her.
Every thought, every fear, every bit of resistance bled away from Audrey’s mind in that charged moment, and the only thing she could do was feel. Feel how soft Jude’s lips were on hers, feel the power in his coiled muscles as he molded her against him, feel the slide of his tongue as he brushed the crease of her lips. She opened to him out of pure instinct and gasped as he breached her, tasting her tongue, stroking her mouth.
She couldn’t resist even though she knew she should. She wound her arms around him and tentatively returned the kiss, meeting his tongue’s strokes with her own uncertain ones.
It was as if fireworks had gone off between them, blasts of light and heat and were so beautiful and so dangerous if not handled correctly. And she was not qualified. Not in the slightest.
His hands slid down to her waist and his fingers clenched there, molding her hips to his, making sensation travel through her desperate body to settle at her throbbing nipples, at the space between her legs where her sex clenched all on its own.
This was passion. The passion she had feared for so long, still feared. Passion that she could not deny any longer. Not when it was Jude claiming her lips and cupping her backside oh-so-gently.
She would have surrendered. It was the only coherent thought in her mind. That she would have surrendered. Only he didn’t offer her the chance. He yanked away from her as suddenly as he had kissed her, staggering across the empty room and turning his back to her. His shoulders lifted and fell with his panting breaths. Ones that matched her own.
He never looked at her. He didn’t speak. He simply strode out of the room without looking back, without offering her comfort or censure. He walked away.
And she feared he might never come back.
CHAPTER SIX
Jude all but ran through the grounds, hardly seeing the tended shrubbery, the bubbling fountains, as he tried to get as far away from the house as fast as he could. As if he could run away from what had just happened.
As if he could run away from how he felt about it.
“Why didn’t you stay away?” he asked himself as he slowed at last. “God damn it, why didn’t you say no to Edward? No to Audrey?”
But he knew why. He hadn’t stayed away because deep in his heart he had wanted this to happen. Worse, he had known it would. At some point, he had always known he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from taking what wasn’t his if he was alone with Audrey.
“God damn it,” he repeated.
“Jude!”
He froze at the voice calling his name. Audrey’s voice, breathless and moving closer. He looked over his shoulder to find her racing down the long hill from the house, her skirt fisted in her hand, tendrils of brown hair streaming from their confines because she hadn’t put on a bonnet.
She was like an angel swooping down from heaven. She was like a demon meant to tempt him and prove that he couldn’t control himself. She was everything.
“Go away, Audrey!” he barked, beginning to walk away again, his strides purposeful and long as he tried to put distance between them.
Impossible when she would not allow it.
“No!” she shouted back, running harder.
She lunged for him and caught his arm, yanking him to face her and forcing him to remain in place. She nearly bent in half, panting as she looked up at him.
“Great Lord, Audrey, you’re going to hurt yourself,” he said, utterly enchanted by her tangled hair and flashing eyes and red face.
“Oh, do shut up. Ladies are not meant to run and I don’t have practice,” she panted. “You are ungentlemanly for forcing me to do it.”
He smiled despite himself. “I apologize. But Audrey—” He extracted himself from her grasp. “You really should just let me go.”
Her face crumpled slightly. “Why? Why are you running?”
He shook his head, unable to express it in words. Unable to tell her that he had loved her for as long as he had known her. Unable to say that he had betrayed her and her family so deeply that he could never, ever let her close.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said instead. “We shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why?” she whispered. “Why did you do it?”
He fisted his hands at his sides if only to keep himself from touching her again. “Why do you think?”
She stared into his eyes for a long moment and then her own went wide, almost impossibly wide. She stepped away and he knew she saw the truth. Or at least part of it.
“You—you want me.”
He bent his head. Given her fears about passion, perhaps this part of the truth would send her away. Where they would both be safe. “Yes,” he admitted. “I do want you, Audrey. I have wanted you for as long as I can remember.”
She blinked over and over, but he could read no other emotion in her beyond shock. He knew she feared passion in general, but he had no idea if she was disgusted by his specifically.
When she had been silent for far too long, he said, “This is why we need to stay away from each other. You should forget what I told you.”
She gasped. “As if I could, Jude.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. This situation was on the verge of spiraling out of control even further than it already had. He knew no way to stop the stone that was rolling down the hill toward them, one that would run them both down in the end if he couldn’t bring it to a halt now.
“Then tell your brother,” he whispered. “Tell him and I will leave his employ. I’ll—”
He didn’t get to finish the sentence. Audrey made a soft sound in her throat and launched herself at him. She cupped his cheeks, pulled his face down to hers and kissed him. It was hard, it was passionate, and as she stroked her tongue against his lips, just as he had a short time before, it was infinitely sweet.
All his shaky control faltered in that moment and he crushed her closer, their tongues tangling with desperate, aggressive passion. She tasted like honey, like the sweetest wine. She tasted like surrender, and he groaned as he backed her up, pressing her to the bark of the closest tree and holding her there as he continued to consume her lips.
She arched against him with a whimpering moan of pleasure, her fingers clawing at his back as she tried to get closer. He obliged her, cupping her backside and grinding her body tighter to the tree.
He was lost, the last vestiges of gentlemanliness, of honor, swallowed up by her kiss. All that was left was want and need that had been repressed for years. Unleashed, it was too powerful. It shut off everything else.
He found his hand sliding down her body, almost of its own accord. He sought her breast and squeezed the soft flesh gently, eliciting another moan from her. Through the thin silk, he felt how hard her nipple was and he thrust against her once more, seeking relief for the mounting desire that pooled in his loins.
She gasped when his hard cock nudged her belly and the action broke the kiss. He stared down at her, unblinking as he pushed again. She squeezed her eyes shut, but her desire remained clear by her expression.
She wanted him as much as he wanted her. And he was going to give her something, anything, to claim at least this one day as his own. He deserved that after holding back for so many other days.
He slid his hand down her ribcage, cupped her hip and ducked his head to kiss her once more. She responded immediately and did not resist as he began to bunch her skirts in his hand.
“I want to touch you,” he growled against her lips.
She caught her breath, her forehead dropping to his. He could feel her fighting with her fears, battling with desire and abject terror at once.
But need won out, as it so often did, a
nd as his hand found its way beneath her lifted skirt, she nodded. “Touch me.”
That acquiescence was all he needed. He looked down, unable to see where he touched her, but still fascinated by the vision of his hand moving beneath her pink skirt. He found the slit in her flimsy drawers and then…heaven. Her sex was warm and wet, welcoming as he cupped her intimately.
“Oh God,” she whispered, a garbled sound of pleasure and shock.
He spread her outer lips with expert fingers and stroked across her entrance. He was going to make her come. Right here in the yard, pressed against a tree that likely her great-grandfather had planted without ever thinking it would be used for this wicked purpose. He didn’t give a damn about anything else, even though he should.
She jolted as he began to stroke over her. His thumb found the nub of her clitoris and he dipped his index finger inside of her. The rhythm was easy to find. He simply reacted to her sighs and gasps as he took her, watching her face for even the smallest reaction.
It was shocking how swiftly he brought her to the brink. A few strokes and her eyes were wide, her breath almost nonexistent as she gripped her fingers against the bark behind her.
“Let go,” he whispered, and pressed her clitoris firmly.
She thumped her head against the tree trunk as a keening cry left her lips. Her body began to jerk around him, little earthquakes that told him she had reached her peak and more. He continued to stroke her through it until her body relaxed. Only then did he withdraw, smoothing her skirts down again and stepping back.
The moment, he did so, the gravity of what he had done returned. There she was, leaning against a tree, her hair tangled, little bits of bark within it. It was the middle of the day and anyone could have stumbled upon them, even though they hadn’t. Her dark brown eyes were glazed with release and continued surprise, and her breasts lifted with exertion.
She simply stared at him, her expression unreadable.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, both meaning it and not meaning it. It was true because he’d gone too far. It was not true because this had been his fantasy for nearly a decade. And reality was so much better.
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