by Juliana Gray
Shy men make the best lovers. She’d never had a lover. She’d never wanted one. Why risk everything, one’s reputation and one’s independence and one’s peace of mind, for a few moments of physical pleasure?
Finn—Mr. Burke—knelt in the grass again, considering his tire. He’d left his smock back in the workshop, and a brown tweed jacket now stretched across the breadth of his shoulders. On the side of his face visible to her, brightened by the sun, she could see his narrowed eye and his furrowed brow. He reached out his right hand and ran it along the side of the tire, blunt-tipped fingers smudged with oil.
What sort of lover was he?
She knew the answer. Hadn’t he kissed her already, caressed her already? He was the clever, patient sort, who took his time and had imagination. In bed, he would be a tiger. He would stalk her, subdue her, deliver her that glittering prize and drop it into her lap. He would gather her in his arms and keep her safe.
“Mr. Burke”—what was she saying, what was she doing?—“Finn.”
He looked up at her and smiled.
Her blood thudded drunkenly in her veins. She couldn’t speak.
“I know it’s a nuisance,” he said. “I’ll just dash back to the workshop for my mending kit. It won’t take a minute. You can sit here in the sunshine and listen to the bees.”
“I’m afraid of bees,” she lied. “I believe I’ll come with you instead.”
* * *
Imagine that,” he said, to fill the awkward silence as he fumbled the key into the workshop door. The significance of opening a locked door into a private room, with Lady Morley by his side, had just crashed down about his ears. “Eighteen miles an hour on the first go! By God, I’m thrilled.”
“Why on earth do you keep your workshop locked?” she asked. Her voice held an odd note. Quiet, almost subdued.
He turned the knob and slipped the key back into his jacket pocket. “We motor enthusiasts are a competitive lot, after all,” he said, motioning her through the door before him. “There’s a great deal at stake. It’s one of the reasons I picked this spot.”
“And the other?” She didn’t turn toward him, only drew the pins from her large straw hat, one by one, and set them on the table.
“Fewer distractions.” He thought she would laugh at that, her ironic, musical laugh, but she didn’t. She only pulled her hat away from her head and set it down on the table, next to the pins.
“I suppose I should feel lucky you allowed me in here at all,” she said, still turned away. The morning sun hadn’t quite reached the window yet, and in the diffuse light the skin of her cheek seemed to glow from within. “You must trust me a great deal.”
“Of course I do.” He watched her as she stood, motionless, her hair loosened slightly by the hat’s removal. One hand rested on the table, next to her hat and pins, and the other hung next to her side. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, quite,” she whispered.
“Have I offended you? It was rather a long night, and with all the excitement . . . succeeding at last . . .”
“No. No, you haven’t offended me at all.” Her voice came more firmly now. She turned to him at last, her hands gripping the edge of the table behind her. “Not at all,” she said, meeting his gaze with large, round eyes, looking rather like a prisoner left at the scaffolding to perform her own execution.
His mouth opened and closed. What the devil had come over her? “I’ll just . . . I’ll just gather my mending kit, then, shall I? We’ll head back down to the road and . . .”
“No!” The word burst from her.
“I beg your pardon?”
“No. Let’s . . . let’s stay here a moment.” She swallowed heavily. “Please. Please, Finn.”
He watched her a second or two longer before understanding dawned. “I see,” he said. His head was still heavy from the sleepless night, and his muscles drained from the effort of moving and installing the immense battery and pushing the automobile to the road. Altogether it was much the same as the poleaxed feeling of having drunk the better part of a Scots distillery the night before.
“Please,” she said again, in a whisper, and the heavy feeling in his head dropped into his groin, and his muscles, much like his battery the night before, flooded with new energy.
He stepped toward her, watching her eyes widen and gleam as he came close. He removed his peaked cap and his gloves and tossed them into the chair, next to her skirt-covered legs.
The scent of her seemed to reach out and wrap around them. He leaned his head down next to her ear and breathed it in. “Tell me. Is it your soap or your perfume?”
“What?” she asked breathlessly.
“Lilies. You smell like lilies.”
“My soap, I think,” she said, with a little gurgle of a laugh.
“Bloody reckless of you.” He liked that he could drop words like that around her, that she wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t even notice. He lifted one hand around the back of her head and began to pull out her hairpins, letting the heavy swags tumble about her shoulders. “Have you any idea what your lilies do to a man?”
“No, I don’t.” She tilted her head, exposing the long column of her throat.
He removed the last pin and set it down on the table, next to her hat and hatpins. Her eyes were closed, the lids pressed down tightly, as if she were afraid of opening them. He brought his hands into her hair and spread it about her shoulders, long and thick and shining in the floating late-morning light, smelling of fresh air and sunshine. “They give him ideas, Alexandra. Improper ideas. May I confess something?”
“I hope you will. I adore confessions. The more shocking, the better.”
“I’ve been consumed with improper thoughts for you from almost the first moment of our meeting.” He lifted her hair with one hand and kissed the side of her neck.
“Almost the first?” Her voice wavered.
“You were rather ungracious.”
“I’m so terribly sorry. I’ll make it up to you.”
“Yes, you will.” He straightened and gazed down at her face, at her closed eyes and her wide, ripe mouth. “Look at me, darling.”
“Don’t, please. I can’t.” Her arms came up, wrapping around his neck, pulling his head into hers. “Just kiss me.”
The words sent fire racing across his exhausted brain. He sank his lips into hers and felt her instant response, her gasp of shock, her fingers digging into his neck. God! Her mouth was so sweet, so eager. Her velvet tongue met his, tentative and then ardent, returning each stroke, drawing him deeper, as if she couldn’t get enough of him. He could hardly think from the lust billowing up inside him, months and months of control and frustration, and now came this passionate woman into his arms, this astonishing and beautiful Alexandra, her mouth open and hungry under his, as desperate as he was.
His hand slid downward, along the curve of her back, anchoring finally at her waist, his thumb rubbing between two long whalebone stays, searching for the flesh underneath. “Please,” she said, into his kiss, “oh please.” Her hand slipped down from his neck to the buttons of his jacket, fumbled between their locked bodies, slipped out the top button and the next, and then she slid her fingers underneath the thick woolen tweed to burn through the cotton weave of his shirt and into his chest, finding the buttons.
His breath drew sharply into his lungs. With one hand he trapped her fingers against him, stilling her movement. Her face tilted upward, eyes open now, searching his own with a pleading gleam. “What is it? Don’t you . . .”
“Yes.” He exhaled. “God, yes. But darling, you’re . . . Are you quite sure?” His brain spun dizzily. Every nerve seemed to have gathered underneath the sensation of her fingers against his chest. Stop, said a distant voice, through the maze in his head. Stop. Wait. It’s too soon. Not yet. “Are you quite sure?” he repeated, both to her and to himself.
Her other hand, her free hand, came up to rest against his cheek. “Finn, it’s all right. I want this. I want it . . . oh, yo
u can’t imagine how much. Don’t draw away. Please. I’m a disaster for you, I really am, but I’m selfish and lonely and I . . . oh!” Her head dropped into his chest. “Oh, you damned noble brute. I shouldn’t. You deserve better. You deserve some sweet young thing, some noble girl . . .” She shook against him, clutched her hands around his waist.
“Shh.” He laid his chin gently atop her hair, feeling the silken strands tickle his jaw. Her hands dropped back to circle his waist. “Alexandra, listen. You’ve got it all wrong. My mother . . . you ought to know this . . . before you . . . before we . . .”
She went still against him, the gentle rise and fall of her breath steady beneath his hands.
“She’s . . . you may have heard of her . . . her name is Marianne. Marianne Burke.” The name sounded strange and foreign on his lips.
“Marianne Burke? What . . .” Her breath caught. “Oh!”
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”
“Oh. I see.” She turned her head against his shirt and stared at the window, absorbing it all. She would have heard of his mother, of course. Everyone had. No one became the acknowledged mistress of the Prince of Wales at the tender age of seventeen without acquiring the patina of legend. “Richmond, of course. The little cottage. My God! And you’re her son!” She drew back and searched his face with wide, astonished eyes.
“The hair, of course. And her eyes, though mine are a shade lighter, I’m told.”
She nodded, eyes still round. “I’ve heard she’s quite striking. As one would expect, I suppose. Was she . . . is she very tall?”
“Not particularly. I’ve that from my father.”
“Your fa . . .” She checked herself, covering her tactless curiosity with a nervous laugh. “I never imagined . . . It’s a common name, Burke, I suppose . . .”
“Yes. So you see, as far as my being noble, it’s quite the opposite. It’s I who belong to a world beneath yours.” He took her gently by the arms, set her away, and looked down in her face. “I thought you should know, that you had a right to know, before you decide. Before you say anything, before we do anything, that might . . .”
“Finn,” she whispered, “I’ve already decided. It doesn’t matter about your mother. Who will know, after all?”
“Everyone. Your friends. They’ll find out eventually.”
“No, they won’t. We’ll be discreet. Not even Wallingford . . .”
“I mean eventually. When we’re back in England.”
She stared at him a moment, without speaking. Her lips parted, and then closed again.
A leaden weight settled down around his heart. “Ah,” he said. “I see. You’d rather keep things unofficial.” A lock of hair swung down across her face. He reached out with one hand and brushed it away, tucking it behind her ear.
“Don’t,” she said brokenly. “Don’t. Don’t spoil it.”
“Spoil what, my dear?”
Her hands grasped the lapels of his jacket. “You see? This is what I meant. Vain and frivolous. This is what I am, Finn.” She spoke defiantly, eyes blazing. “If you want me, you’ll have to take me as I am. You’ll have to accept what I am.”
She stood just apart from him, her dress grazing his jacket, the corners of her eyes tilted upward in that catlike way of hers. Watching her, he was reminded of a fox he’d once seen caught in a trap long ago, on one of his many solitary childhood rambles through the woods near his mother’s cottage, before he’d been sent off to boarding school at the age of eight. The fox had looked up at him with that same expression, brazen and fearful both at once, daring him to get close enough to free her.
He placed his hands atop hers, where they gripped his lapels. “I’ve known any number of selfish women in my life, Alexandra, and you’re not anything like them.” He slid his hands upward along her arms, rounding about her elbows, drawing her body against his, and spoke in a low voice. “Let me show you, darling. Let me show you what sort of woman you really are.”
He felt the moment she gave in, when the taut resistance in her muscles eased away and her body melted into his. He moved his hands to her waist, and in a single easy movement he lifted her onto the worktable.
“Oh.” Her eyes widened.
He set each hand on either side of her hips and kissed her forehead. “Now then, Alexandra. Marchioness of Morley, leader of London society.”
“How did you know that?”
He reached deep inside himself for his calm, scientific detachment. “I’m not a complete recluse. I emerge from my workshop from time to time. I hear things. How the drawing room of the dashing Lady Morley is the only place to be seen on Thursday evenings.” He kissed her right temple, a light silken kiss. “How her sixty-eight-year-old husband died of an apoplexy two summers ago, and she has been seen only in deep mourning ever since. As is perfectly proper.” He kissed her left temple. “How puzzling it is that, though she never lacks for admirers, she has no known lovers, past or present. Much to the disappointment, I’m told, of the admirers in question.”
“Perhaps I’ve been discreet.” Her voice brushed against his cheek, hardly more than a whisper.
“I considered that possibility.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “And I dismissed it. You yourself said you were a loyal wife.”
“You’ve given the matter some thought, I see.”
“Endless thought. You’ve no idea. But to return to the point, his lordship found his eternal reward nearly two years ago.” He reached behind her neck for the top button of her bodice. “Which leaves us a long period of time to consider. Why, I asked myself, would a lady of legendary charm and beauty, still in the flush of youth . . .”
“Hardly that.” Her eyes were closed now, the dark curl of her lashes lying against her creamy skin.
He undid the second button. “You’re younger than I am, after all. Why wouldn’t such a woman take herself a lover?” The third button gave way, exposing the edge of her chemise under the tips of his fingers, beneath the parting plackets of the bodice.
“Perhaps I have.”
“No, you haven’t.” The fourth button. “You’re shivering, darling. Your eyes are closed. Hardly the actions of a woman experienced in clandestine liaisons.” The fifth button, stiff in its buttonhole, slipped free at last. Her chemise was fine and thin and delicate, alive with the warmth of her skin beneath.
She gave a shallow laugh. “You scientists. Altogether too observant. I ought to have chosen Penhallow for my first lover.”
“But you wouldn’t, would you?” The buttons were coming more easily now, aided by the slackness of the bodice; a good thing, as his fingers seemed to be growing increasingly clumsy. Owing, he supposed, to the unprecedented concentration of blood in his fully aroused loins. “Because your cousin is in love with him. And because”—the last button gave way now, and her bodice sagged away from her breasts—“you haven’t any interest in a chap like Penhallow, have you?”
“He’s frightfully handsome.”
Finn drew the bodice forward, extracting her arms from the sleeves with the greatest care, spreading his fingers along her skin. “Conventionally so. But you’re impatient with the things everybody else likes. You’re yearning for something different, though you don’t know quite what it is.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you’re here with me. And I’m hardly the sort of conventionally handsome, conventionally employed sort of lordling that hangs about your Thursday evening salons, am I?” He let her empty bodice pool about her waist and placed his mouth just below the hollow of her throat.
“No,” she gasped, “you’re not.”
His lips moved against her skin. “And now you’re wondering to yourself just how much I’ve discovered in my scientific studies. Whether, for example, I’ve made any sort of research into matters of human biology.”
Her head angled backward, exposing the long white reach of her throat. “H-Have you?”
“We scientists are curious animals, Alexandra. And curi
osity doesn’t stop at the boundaries of one’s chosen field of study.” His mouth traveled downward, to where her breasts swelled abundantly above the boning of her corset. “Ah, darling. You’re so beautifully made. So full, here.” He set his open mouth atop her left breast and ran his tongue along the pink sliver of areola that escaped from the top of its confinement.
Her body jolted in his arms.
“There are those,” he went on, kissing the valley between her breasts, “who insist that the human female feels no particular pleasure in the sexual act. Those are not, my dear, the sort of scientists you should invite into your bed.”
“No,” she whispered, “never.”
His tongue traveled along the edge of her corset to find her right breast, and this time she was ready, this time she arched her back and moaned when he found the sensitive ridge, when he drew down the corset so her breast sprang free, when he covered the peak with his mouth and suckled her through the muslin of her chemise. Her hands clutched at the back of his head, taking fistfuls of his hair.
His brain was ringing, throbbing. She tasted so delicious, so pure and womanly, her nipple hard in his mouth, her breasts large and full against his face, her heartbeat so rapid and eager he could feel it pound beneath his lips. “Ah, God, darling,” he muttered, and with his right hand he swept down the endless length of her skirts and found her ankle.
Such a beautiful ankle, trim and flexible beneath his fingers, covered with stockings of fine strong silk. He lingered over it, running his thumb around the little hollow beneath her anklebone, and then he drew his hand slowly up the inside of her leg, rucking up her skirts as he went: the curve of her calf, the round ball of her knee, the narrow silk ribbon of her garter. He was elbow deep in her skirts and petticoats now, and she had frozen, had stilled her breath in her chest, her only movement the involuntary quiver of her flesh.
