Whatever he did to her, it affected him the same way. Pleasuring her, he was buoyed with pleasure. Caressing her, his fingertips took joy in the touch.
And then, when her laugh had gone quiet and her eyes met his gaze, his touch changed. Softened. Slowed.
She wanted them to enjoy each other? He would make sure of it. He would make sure she enjoyed him so damned much that she would never forget him or this night. He would make sure one night wasn’t enough for her.
On the soft velvet of the settee, with firelight tracing her from springing hair to clenching toes, he lavished her with touch. The neglected bits, like the tender skin behind her knees, where a brush of his fingertips had her wriggling. Through light, abrading linen, the sensitive bowl of her navel. The bits she called lumpy, which to him were curves. Curves from running and dining and bearing children and growing older. Curves that shaped and reshaped her body and showed how she had lived. Curves to fill his hands and tempt his tongue.
He nibbled along the swell of her hip, the side of her breasts. Near the center of her pleasure, tantalizing, each touch and caress a pleasure in itself.
She wiggled and twisted under his touch. “You seem as though you want me.”
For years. You. No one but you.
Of habit, he replied lightly. “Ha, I have fooled you completely. I am not enjoying myself at all.”
She shifted against him. “But your cock—”
God. He got stiffer just hearing her say the word. “It’s always like that. You should see it when it’s hard.”
“I should, should I? Let’s see if we can make it so.” Curving into him, she reached for the fall of his breeches.
He swallowed. “If you touch me…”
She did so, a caress that rocked him even through the layer of buckskin. “Will this be a threat or a promise?”
She looked so mischievous that there was only one possible answer. “It will be,” he said, “a kiss.”
At first, it was a press of lips to lips: chaste, almost friendly. Not that he had ever kissed her thus, outside of his imagination, though many was the time he’d given her a peck on the cheek or forehead.
His imagination had never touched the reality. Even this simple, light pressure was enough to squeeze at his heart. Careful…be so careful. You are within reach of everything you have wanted. What could he do, then, but reach for her? Catching her shoulders, he leaned back and pulled her atop him.
“Mmm,” she said, which was encouragement enough to continue. He parted his lips to sip at her, so warm and delicious. A quick brush of tongue that she matched, then a deeper one—more and more each time, each kiss, as they clutched at one another. This kiss, the next, the next: all were a way to make love with lips and tongue.
They clashed and joined, kissing and kissing, until Evan was hitching up one leg and surrounding her in an embrace of his limbs. She rolled her hips against him, thighs parted.
“I’m being cut in half,” she gasped, “by the tie of my robe.”
“I’ll take it off you. Problem solved. Here, you can take something off me too.”
Freed from the knotted sash, she knelt upright and let the robe slip from her shoulders. She was clad only in a shift now, simple and diaphanous.
“If you insist,” she said, and entered into the play of the exchange. Reaching to dip her finger into the nearer tumbler of brandy, she trailed it down his profile, chin, then jaw. “What a mess I’ve made. The rogue housekeeper must make things right.”
Leaning over him, she kissed the brandy from his forehead, from the line of his nose. She lingered on his lips, as though she found him worth savoring.
When she lifted her head, Evan was in a scatter of anticipation. Fumbling for blithe words, any words. “You are forever altering that phrase for me. I shall not be able to hear of a housekeeper without stripping free my cravat and collar.”
“Stripping free of a few articles of clothing. Now, that’s an idea.” She worked at the knot of his cravat.
The position was a ripe one, with her breasts right where he could touch them. As she kissed and licked at the spirits on his jaw, he grazed her with gentle hands, then between the knuckles of each caught her nipples through her shift and pinched at them lightly.
Her hips bucked. “God. Do that again.”
He complied.
The result was impressive. They undressed in a tangle of garments and hands, of questing mouths, and the tickle of her loose and flowing hair. Clothes were flung over the back of the settee, and had to be drawn back from a landing spot perilously close to the hearth.
Once bared, Evan asked, “Would you like to move to the bed?”
She nodded, a jerk of the head that hinted at the return of her agitation. “I haven’t done this in a long time. When I found out Con was…”
Evan shut his eyes. Con, you fool. “Not true to you?”
“He was in so many other beds. Eventually I forbade him mine.”
His heart shifted out of place, beating awry. “None of that matters now. I would not be scoundrel enough to judge you for anything you’d done or not done in the past.”
“Would you not? That is more than I can say of myself.”
“The rogue housekeeper is always her own harshest critic.” He busied his hands until she was pliant and gasping.
“Now you will ruin that word for me if you keep touching me like that.”
“Ruin it? I rather think I shall remake it.” Drawing her to the bed, he tossed back the folded coverlet to reveal a smooth expanse of crisp white sheets. When they settled onto it side by side, the mattress beneath was pillowy and yielding.
“Let me enjoy you now,” Evan said.
“You want to enjoy me even more?”
“You are not a maiden. Do I need to remind you what more there could be?”
“Yes. No, you don’t—but please do. I…I…don’t know what I’m saying.” Laughing, she covered her face.
“As long as it starts with yes?”
“It does. Yes.”
When she lifted her arms to take him into her embrace, he felt new. For a long moment, he held her in his arms, inhaling the scent of her spicy sweet perfume, the musk of her desire. Nudging a knee between hers, he then slipped a hand down—over the line of her belly, to tickle the curls below. She dug her nails into his shoulders, opening her legs to him. “Yes.”
Yes. He slipped a finger through her slickness. She was ready, wanting—her body as much as her words.
He painted her with her own excitement, easing a path for his fingers. Stroking the nub of her pleasure, piercing her with one finger, then two.
“Yes,” she said again, clutching for his hips. The invitation was unmistakable, and he’d no wish to decline.
He positioned himself above her, and with one sleek glide, he filled her to the hilt. A moan broke from both their throats at once.
Face to face, they looked at one another: wide-eyed, disbelieving, delighted. “God, I have wanted this,” he confessed. Revealing too much, maybe, and he stopped further words by kissing her deeply.
“Guh,” she replied when they broke for breath, which he took as a good sign.
Bracing himself on his elbows, he slid free, then thrust home again. They quickly found their rhythm, the intimate push and pull that made sensation spiral to pleasure, to delight. Clenching his toes against the gathering wave, he played her body with mouth and tongue, with everything he had and was, until her breath turned to gasps, then to a soft cry and a quaking climax.
Gritting his teeth, he withdrew from her. “Best to be safe,” he managed.
At once she reached for him, wrapping her hands around his slick shaft. “I will do it,” she said. Pumping him swift and hard, she brought him off with shocking ease. As the orgasm claimed him utterly, she caught his seed in her hand.
Spent and sated, they lay panting. “I…enjoyed that,” Kate managed.
“Likewise,” Evan said.
One of the greatest understatements of his life.
Chivalry prodded him from the bed first, to retrieve a handkerchief. He dipped it in the pitcher on her washstand, then returned to the bed and cleaned her hand with the damp cloth. “What else? I have another handkerchief.”
“Nothing else. I want to stay like this for a while.” She stretched like a cat in the sun.
It was erotic and innocent and lovely, and he lay on the bed beside her and could not look away. She was glad, wasn’t she? That she had taken him to bed? At least for now, she was glad.
She could not know this was the closeness of which he had dreamed for years. He could not tell her his true feelings. Not yet. The weight of his love would be a burden, when she already had so many to carry.
“Did that truly please you?” She sounded saucy as ever, but there was something careful in the set of her features.
“You have always pleased me,” he said quietly.
One brow lifted. “Bollocks.”
“That didn’t please me. Such doubt. You malign my honor.” He reached for her hair, then spiraled a curl about his index finger, as though in so doing he could hold her fast. “Perhaps we have changed in these past two years, after all.”
Not only her, in abandoning the proper shoulds. He had too. He wasn’t in the habit of being so honest. His conversation was of the sort that skimmed the bright surface, lest he go too deep and tap into the grayness.
“If this is what change brings, then I am glad for it,” she said. “Are not you?”
“More than you know.” For a minute, an hour, an untellable amount of time, he remained at her side and settled into the rhythm of her breath. At last, he forced himself to wrench free, to slide from the bed.
As soon as his feet touched the floor, she spoke. “Will you not stay with me?”
He looked over his shoulder. “I shouldn’t.”
“Because?”
He hesitated, then turned back to face her, bare in a way that had nothing to do with being nude. “Many reasons.”
Reasons ranging from protecting the servants’ sensibilities to protecting his heart. Though it was difficult to give a damn about those reasons as she hitched herself up onto one elbow, imploring him with eyes the shade of the Irish Sea.
“You are right.” She blinked, then looked down to trace a shape on the sheet beside her. “I ought to be prudent and let you go. But I would rather hold you longer.”
And that was that for his heart, as surely as if he’d taken a spear for her. Clearly, he would never recover from his wanting of this woman. He could not deny her what she asked, especially when it was something he wanted as well.
“Let me put out the candles, then.”
After he snuffed them in their branches, he returned to bed. She rolled away then tucked herself against him, back to belly, like the nesting of spoons. His upper arm she took over her body in an embrace. A cage of Evan, protecting her.
A shield of Kate, colorful and strong.
Breathing in the scent of their entwined bodies, he fell asleep.
Nine
When Evan woke, he was alone in an unfamiliar bed.
The disorientation of nighttime wakefulness seized him for a moment. The fire had gone cold, and outside, blackness blanketed the thin draperies at the windows. The softness of the mattress pulled at him as he struggled to sit. A faded, sweet scent tantalized his senses. Where was he? What had happened?
Memory came back in a flood: Kate’s bedchamber. Chandler Hall. It was…some hour of the night, or the morning, early enough that the maids had not yet entered to lay the fire.
Where was Kate?
As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he noticed his clothing still flung over the settee. Hers was gone, such as it had been. Those filmy gowns didn’t cover her well enough for her to roam the house.
Finally, finally, he had been with her in almost every bare way—of mind, of flesh. He had not shown her all his heart, but God, it had been a good night.
He should have departed when he’d felt the urge, instead of allowing himself to be the one left behind. A matter of self-preservation as much as wisdom, for as he slid from the bed, his thoughts began to fog. What happened? Why? What if?
He pushed such questions back with cutting logic as he gathered his clothes. Maybe he would find Kate in his own bed. Maybe she had startled awake, unused to another person in bed with her, and gone in search of a cup of tea. There needn’t be anything amiss.
It was for the best that he leave now, though. He needed to get himself out of here before he was seen.
Quickly, by touch, he tugged on his clothing. Shoved his feet into his boots. At every second, he expected Kate to enter the chamber again.
But it didn’t happen, and he instead found himself skulking through a night-dark passage to reach his own room, so he could mess up the bed as though he’d been sleeping there all along.
She wasn’t in his chamber either. In fact, he didn’t see her again until entering the dining room for breakfast, where he found her alone.
“Another day of races,” Evan realized. “Your father and brother are off again. How can they stand it?”
This last question covered a multitude of frustrations. Kate lifted a dish cover with such calm, he wanted to snatch it from her hand and send it crashing to the polished stone floor. How could she look so fresh and unaffected? How could she greet him without the slightest blush?
“I don’t know,” she replied. “One day is enough for me.”
“Is it? Was it not so pleasurable that you wish to go again and again?”
The serving spoon clattered from her fingers. “Indeed it was…pleasurable.” The flush on her cheeks revealed her understanding of his meaning. “But I have so much to do here, and preparing for the journey back to Ireland—I couldn’t think of going to the track again.”
“You’re already somewhere else, even as you stand before the sideboard and take…” He peered into the dish. “Ham? Well, well. No Irish breakfast for you today?”
“It wasn’t enough of an Irish breakfast to put the servants to such trouble.” She replaced the lid with a determined clang. “Of course, you must go to the races again. If you wish.”
“Going to the races isn’t nearly as pleasurable when one is alone.”
He managed to keep his tone flip, even as he parsed her every word and movement. She was all of a bustle, not meeting his eye. The rogue housekeeper at mealtime. Where was the friend and lover of the night before?
“Do you never rest, Kate?” he wondered.
“As little as I can.” She took her plate to the table. “If I don’t wander, my thoughts do instead.”
“I know what that’s like,” Evan muttered.
Without paying much heed, he piled food on his plate from the various serving dishes, then sat at the table across from Kate. “Where did you go this morning? If you wanted the room, I would have left it. I offered to do as much last night.”
Her knife skidded across her plate, chopping the slice of ham in two. “No, no. I didn’t want you to leave. I couldn’t sleep, and so I tidied my things and went to Father’s study for a while. He needs help with his papers, and—”
“All right, all right.” He held up his hands. “That’s my answer. You got up at an ungodly hour of the night and left your own room because you were being sensible. Very well.”
She cut her food into little pieces, pushing them around on her plate. A tower. A circle. A heap. A mess—all scattered with her fork. “I was afraid. Of—of what it meant, that we’d done something we’d never done before.”
“It meant we wanted to do it.” He squinted. “Is this difficult? It doesn’t seem difficult. You invited me to
your room. I said yes. You asked me to stay with you. I did.”
“And all that was agreeable of you. With you.” She hesitated. “Maybe I haven’t changed as much as I assumed I had. Propriety is a habit of long standing with me. And I’m, you know, me.”
His eyes felt grainy from lack of sleep. “I know it well.”
“I’m just…so many things already. I can’t think of becoming something else too. Countess and mother and terribly proper widow, and…” She trailed off, looking confused.
Gray trembled at the edge of his vision, and he rubbed his temples. “Here I had hoped for the opposite: that yesterday was something for you. For your own pleasure, not regarding anyone else.”
He knew this for an untruth as soon as it had passed his lips. He had hoped that enjoying each other would wind her closer and ever closer to him.
“It was a great pleasure, but—” She shook her head. “It’s too much. I can’t—that is, it was…”
“If you don’t finish a sentence within the next three seconds, I’ll throw my toast at you.”
“You are my only real friend,” she blurted.
The silence that followed seemed especially silent.
“It’s true, Evan.” Her sea-colored eyes were full of entreaty. “I left England behind for Con. I acted the perfect wife and mother until the roles felt natural. But who would be my friend, Evan? Not the people of Thurles, who saw me as an interloping Englishwoman. Not the servants. I always had to…to be countess-y around them. Only you were a true friend.”
“Only me,” he repeated. How could this be, bright and warm as she was? It was no wonder that she had been hurt by his long silence.
No wonder, too, that now she had drawn back from change.
“You said—this time in England might be a respite for me, from all the things I have to be.” She blurted this, not meeting his eye. “And I am grateful. As I would now be grateful if we could go back to the way we were. Exactly as we were.”
This brought his temper to a simmer. “Which were do you mean, Lady Whelan? Would you prefer the were in which I sat like your lapdog while you settled into the arms of another man? Or the were in which we had nothing to say to each other for months on end?”
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