When she had thoroughly explored and found the terrain to her liking, she ventured lower to investigate the magnificent proof that Jack did want her after all. The first brush of her fingertips over his proud shaft was tentative—admiring but a little wary, as if she were daring to waken a powerful beast.
Jack tensed and a gave a deep rolling growl.
Instinctively she pulled back. “Was that unpleasant? Forgive me! I have never...”
Never touched a man that way before—not even her late husband. Nor had she ever wanted to.
Before she could bring herself to admit any of that, Jack gave a hoarse chuckle. “It was not unpleasant, believe me. If anything, it might have been too pleasant.”
“Too pleasant? How is that possible?”
He lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss upon the palm. “It takes all the control I can muster to keep my desire for you from bursting its bonds too soon. When you touch me, that control frays down to the slenderest thread.”
The way he spoke, Annabelle sensed she should be flattered that she had provoked him to such extremity. “In that case, I shall try to restrain myself.”
“And I shall do everything in my power to reward your sacrifice.” One by one, he took her fingers into his mouth and suckled them.
Much as his physical attentions roused Annabelle, these moments of fond banter between them satisfied a different, deeper hunger within her. They made her believe she could become more to Jack than a convenient mother for his children and a desirable bedmate.
“Everything in my power,” Jack repeated with sensuous significance as he raised himself to straddle her supine form.
He kissed her very thoroughly, every subtle movement of his mouth a promise of further delights to come. Then he began inching lower, making good on those promises. He explored the length of her neck with his lips, charting every sensitive spot that wrung a sharp little gasp from her or made her quiver with delight. From there he strayed lower to her breasts, where he treated her to a repeat of his earlier attentions, nuzzling, licking and suckling with the most blissful effect.
At last, when he had whet her need to a razor-sharp edge, once again he nudged her legs apart with his knee and spread his favors lower still, to the very center of her desire.
Annabelle gave a faint gasp of surprise. This was something Frederick had never done.
Her strangled cry quickly muted to a husky purr of pleasure when Jack slid his tongue over the entrance to her passage, mingling the moist heat of his mouth with hers. After he had stoked the fire within her to searing intensity, he thrust his tongue inside her, once again pushing her to the brink of ecstasy.
The quivering tension in her body must have signaled Jack that the time to crown his seduction was ripe. He left off his delicious tormenting and eased his straining shaft inside her. Meanwhile he reclaimed her mouth with a raw, ravenous kiss. A sound rose in his throat, mingling a sigh of the most profound satisfaction with a feral growl of hunger. It assured Annabelle, beyond any words, that the powerful sensations he provoked in her were returned in full measure.
Once he was securely sheathed inside her, Jack began the slow rhythmic thrusting with which she was familiar. Yet the sensations his movement coaxed forth were an astonishing revelation to Annabelle. The hot, sweet yearning she had experienced earlier returned, more intense than before and rapidly built to a taut, dizzying peak.
When it broke at last, the result was not a single shattering jolt, but wave after powerful wave of delight almost too intense to bear, quaking through her. Their force seemed to tear her apart and refashion her into a different woman entirely.
After slowing to savor her climax, Jack increased the pace and power of his movement until it reached a thundering gallop. It carried him far beyond the bounds of self-control into explosive spasms of bliss. He cried out her name, bringing Annabelle’s heart the kind of joyous satisfaction his skilled seduction had brought her body. It assured her that no other man could want her as much as he did and that he could never want another woman in such an all-consuming fashion.
When Jack became aware of his surroundings again, he found himself lying on his back, wrapped with Annabelle in a lazy tangle of arms and legs. Her head rested against his chest while his arm wrapped around her shoulder in a protective embrace.
Could she feel his heart slowing from its earlier thundering pace? In some ways, he felt like a green boy after his first conquest. But no youthful fumbling could begin to compare with what he had just experienced. Never had he received greater fulfillment from his partner’s pleasure than his own—in spite of how overwhelming it had been. Never had he delayed his gratification for so long to make certain he had wrung every last drop of delight from her. The result had been devastating in its intensity, leaving him spent in every possible way.
Hard as he tried to deny it, a sense of unease rippled through him when he contemplated the power Annabelle might wield over him. If she could bring him such consuming ecstasy, might she also be able to inflict equal agony? Might it make him prefer to lose his own life rather than lose her? For the first time, Jack began to understand and pity the father he barely remembered.
With ruthless force, he expelled those misgivings from his mind. They had no place in the warm haze that followed lovemaking.
To distract himself, he wound a strand of Annabelle’s chestnut hair around his forefinger and inquired in a playful tone, “Tell me then, was I boasting when I promised you there would be better to come?”
She shook her head. “At the risk of making you insufferably vain, I must admit you were telling the truth. In fact, once again I believe you underestimated.”
“I am gratified you think so.” Jack rested his cheek against the crown of her head. “Then tell me, did my performance persuade you to accept my proposal?”
What made him ask that question? And what answer did he want Annabelle to give? He scarcely knew. It had been his original reason for this seduction, but that was before he’d recognized the dangerous intensity of his feelings for Annabelle.
The long awkward pause that greeted his question made Jack wonder if she still had doubts which even their passionate lovemaking could not assuage. If so, perhaps there might still be time to step back from the precipice of matrimony.
“I know I cannot replace Frederick in your heart,” he began, “nor do I want to...”
His words seemed to shatter Annabelle’s hesitation, forcing her to give him an answer... though not the one he expected. “Can you still not understand, Jack? It was Frederick who could never take your place in my heart. I know he loved me, or thought he did, and I tried to be a good wife to him. I hoped that having someone who wanted me at last would change my feelings.” She paused for a moment then continued in a tight whisper. “After you made it clear you could not care for me as anything more than a friend.”
“When did I ever do that?” Jack heard himself demand through the clamor of his conflicting thoughts.
Annabelle’s confession threatened many of his long-held certainties about his past. He knew she’d looked up to him and thought well of him in a way no one else ever had. But love—romantic love? He had assumed that must be reserved for his cousin, who’d been smitten with her for as long as Jack could recall. Even now he could scarcely believe otherwise.
“Don’t you remember?” She sounded impatient with his ignorance. “After Frederick proposed to me, I tried to tell you I did not care for him the way a woman should for the man she meant to marry. I tried to make you see it was you I wanted, but you refused to take my meaning.”
Jack struggled to reconcile the things Annabelle was telling him with his memories of their youth. “Why did you not come right out and tell me? I have never been good at deciphering what it is women want, or think they want.”
He had trouble enough sorting out his own baffling feelings, let alone those of others. The queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach, for instance, and the weight that had descen
ded on his heart—what did they signify? Were they symptoms of guilt because he had unwittingly stolen something that belonged to Frederick?
Annabelle raised herself on one elbow to stare at him. “Just now you seemed to understand what I wanted better than I did myself.”
Even by the dim, flickering light of a single candle, her perceptive gaze penetrated deeper into him than he could bear. “That is not the same thing and you know it.”
“Perhaps not.” Annabelle sat up, raising the sheet to cover her breasts. Her action reminded Jack of Eve in the Garden of Eden, suddenly aware and ashamed of her innocent nakedness. “But would it have made any difference back then if I had spelled out my feelings for you in letters a foot high?”
Would it?
Jack sat up too. “How can I answer that? It was a great while ago and many things were different then. I had no fortune. I could not have afforded to take a wife even if I’d wanted to. Frederick had the means to provide you with a comfortable life and make you a countess one day. Besides, I could not have taken you from him—he would never have forgiven me.”
Clearly that was not the answer Annabelle wanted.
“My feelings would not have mattered, I suppose?” She sprang out of his bed, seized her clothes from the floor and hastily dressed. “As long as your cousin got what he wanted and you were not put to any inconvenience.”
“That is not what I meant,” Jack protested, though without much conviction. Part of him wanted to take her in his arms and mend this breach between them. Powerful bonds of fear and guilt held him back.
“Perhaps not.” She glared at him. “But it is true just the same. I would have been a bother to you then, but I am a convenience now. Only one thing has not changed—my wants and feelings still do not signify.”
Before Jack could deny it, she strode out the door, shutting it behind her with quiet but determined finality.
Suddenly dizzy, Jack fell back onto his pillows. The area of his bed where Annabelle had lain was still warm, but quickly cooling. He tried to convince himself that he had just made a fortunate escape.
Chapter Fifteen
ANNABELLE WOKE THE next morning from a restless doze. Her mouth felt as dry as dust, while an iron band of pain tightened around her head. Her stomach threatened to expel its contents at any moment. She had never felt so ill in her life.
Was her misery entirely due to Lord Cheviot’s potent punch, of which she’d drunk far too much? Or was part of it caused by regret over her behavior?
When she recalled the brazen way she had all but forced herself into Jack’s bed, a wave of nausea gripped her. And yet, she could not bring herself to repent her actions entirely. To have experienced even one hour of such transcendent bliss in Jack’s arms was something for which she had long yearned. Now, whatever else happened, she would always have that memory.
If only it had not come at such a high price...
Why could she not simply have agreed to marry Jack but remained silent on the subject of her true feelings for him and Frederick? From the moment she’d mentioned it, she had felt their chance for happiness begin to slip away. The harder she tried to grasp it, the faster it had evaporated until there was nothing left but recriminations.
Now the band of pain around her head squeezed tighter and her eyes stung with the threat of tears.
She did not have the luxury of indulging them, Annabelle reminded herself severely, as she often had during her years of servitude in her aunt’s house. Jack might not want her, but little Sarah still needed her. Steeling herself against the pain, she pried open her eyes and glanced toward the baby’s cradle. But there was no sign of the child or of her nursemaid. Polly must have taken the baby downstairs to let Annabelle sleep. Gratitude for the girl’s thoughtfulness welled-up inside her.
With it came gratitude toward Jack, who had insisted on hiring someone to help her care for the baby. Last night she’d accused him of caring nothing for her feelings, but now she began to wonder if that was true.
Might Jack have urged her to wed his cousin not out of indifference but rather out of concern for her welfare? Had he wanted her to enjoy a brighter future than he could have provided at the time? Could the deep wounds from his childhood have prevented him from recognizing his true feelings, just as hers had kept her from revealing how much she cared for him?
She needed to speak to him again, when their wits were not addled by drink and their emotions not inflamed by passion. Annabelle gritted her teeth against the waves of queasiness and the stabs of pain that assailed her when she crawled out of bed to dress for the day. As she donned her shift, stockings and morning gown, her flesh still tingled with the echoes of Jack’s delicious lovemaking.
When she emerged from her bedchamber a short while later, the rich aroma of freshly-brewed coffee greeted her. She glanced toward Jack’s door, wondering if he was up yet or still nursing the aftereffects of the previous night. Annabelle dismissed a fleeting impulse to peek in, and perhaps slip back into bed with him. She feared such an encounter would likely end up with nothing resolved between them.
Instead she crept downstairs where she found Polly in the drawing room with the baby and Gabriel. He was trying to jolly the child out of a fussy mood.
Annabelle flashed the nursemaid a grateful smile. “Thank you for bringing her down so I could sleep. I did not even hear you go.”
The moment she spoke, little Sarah turned toward the sound of her voice. The child’s fussing quieted and she held out her arms. Annabelle retrieved her from Gabriel, enfolding the baby in a fond embrace.
“You’re most welcome, my lady,” Polly replied. “I woke early and dressed before Little Miss began to stir. I was able to take her away before she made much noise. I though you would need your rest after such a late night.”
“What time did you and Jack leave the ball?” Gabriel smothered a yawn. “Someone was looking for him, but I could not find either of you.”
“I’m not certain of the hour.” Annabelle concentrated on the baby to avoid his gaze. Did he or Polly suspect she had spent part of the night in Jack’s bed? What a hypocrite she had been to chide Jack about damaging her reputation when she had all but forced herself upon him. “It was after the Prince Regent arrived.”
Gabriel nodded. “Was that before Lady Halston discovered she had been relieved of her sapphire bracelet?”
“Good heavens!” For a moment Gabriel’s question drove all thoughts of Jack Warwick from Annabelle’s mind. “That jewel thief had the audacity to strike in the middle of your parents’ ball? He truly must be a shadow as the newspapers are calling him.”
“Mama was mortified and the duke was furious.” Gabriel looked rather amused by the incident. “He vowed to contribute a substantial sum to the reward for catching the Mayfair Shadow. He suspects someone in King Vlad’s entourage might be behind it.”
“Behind what?” Jack’s voice broke in on their conversation.
Annabelle turned toward him with a smile that she hoped would convey welcome and regret but he scarcely seemed to notice her. She sensed an invisible but impenetrable barrier between them. But when the baby crowed and chortled, his stout defenses came tumbling down.
As his friend explained how the Mayfair Shadow had struck again at last night’s ball, Jack approached Annabelle and held out his finger for the baby to grasp. Then he raised her tiny fist to his lips. She rewarded him with a wet, toothless grin then buried her face in Annabelle’s shoulder.
Over little Sarah’s head, Jack and Annabelle exchanged a look that communicated their mutual affection for the baby. No matter who might have bred and borne the child, they had both come to care for her deeply. Might that unreserved, uncomplicated love provide a bridge between them to explore their very complicated, volatile feelings for one another?
“This Mayfair Shadow has been a busy fellow,” Jack remarked after Gabriel had repeated his tale. “This must be a prime Season for such thievery with so many balls and assemblies to celebr
ate the Regency. Does anyone know if the Moldavians attended all the events at which items were stolen?”
Gabriel shrugged. “Someone ought to find out. Perhaps Rory and I should investigate. That reward money would set us both up very well.”
Jack’s valet appeared just then to inquire if he and Annabelle would care for coffee. They both responded with desperate eagerness.
But as Godfrey headed off to fetch their coffee, the entry bell gave a loud, jangling ring.
“Who can it be at this hour?” Gabriel wondered aloud as Jack’s valet went to answer the door. “It is far too early in the day for anyone to be calling.”
Hearing a distinctly feminine voice coming from the front entrance, Annabelle turned toward it just as Godfrey returned and announced, “A Madame Reynard to see you, Mr. Warwick.”
Jack started at the mention of the caller’s name. A shiver went through Annabelle as if the open door had let in an icy December draft.
“What a surprise to see you here, Clarissa.” Jack approached the handsome, fair-haired woman who entered the room behind his valet. “I thought I caught a glimpse of you across Lord Cheviot’s ballroom last night.”
He made a gallant bow over her hand.
Annabelle could not suppress a pang of envy as she noted Madame Reynard’s elegant pelisse and matching hat, as well as her perfectly coiffed golden curls. What a fright she must look in comparison to the alluring courtesan!
“My dear Mr. Warwick.” The woman greeted Jack with a seductive purr that set Annabelle’s teeth on edge. “I attended the ball hoping to speak with you on an urgent matter. Lord Gabriel tried to assist me but you were nowhere to be found.”
So this was who had been looking for Jack last night. Annabelle wondered how such a notorious creature had managed to brazen her way into the duchess’s ball. Had Lady Cheviot tried to deflect attention from the scandal surrounding Gabriel and his friends by inviting guests whose reputations were tainted even worse?
A Most Peculiar Season Series Boxed Set: Five Full-length Connected Novels by Award-winning and Bestselling Authors Page 38
