“What the hell for?”
So now she was on her feet, she could hit him with that box? What did she take him for exactly? The same damn fool he started to think everyone else did around here? Tilly and Belle and the others? The man who had somehow failed to take control of his life?
Her fingers edged to the tie holding her hair. Keeping her gaze fastened on his, she loosened it and shook her hair free. One movement for that. One for the ribbon beneath her breasts, the one holding her pretty black gown shut.
“What do you think? You asked me to prove something, didn’t you? Don’t be coy about pretending you don’t know what it is.”
Devorlane’s throat dried. Yes. He had. But not if he lived to be a hundred did he expect to be told to lock the damn door. When he thought of all the women he’d known, the cheapest whores, the most expensive courtesans, the married women he’d had no qualms about taking his pleasure with, he’d no desire whatsoever to find himself thinking, she was the first to make him this brazen offer.
In the library too, of all places, where he’d sat as a boy, poring over his grandfather’s books. Playing with that globe on the table there.
To say he was stunned, that shock raced through his veins, was an understatement. Because she looked as if she meant it too. Of course, she’d looked that way the night she’d planted those emeralds on him, which was why he should be concerned she looked that way now.
“So what are you waiting for?” Before he could stop her, she tugged the dress down over her hips. “Lock the door.”
His glance shot over his shoulder. Then ricocheted back again to where she stood in a simple cream chemise, facing him squarely. ‘Put some clothes on, for Christ’s sake. Jesus, stop standing here like that.’ He, who never thought to hear such sacrilegious words pass his lips, was shocked to find himself almost uttering them. She could not possibly be serious.
“Well, Lord Hawley? Or maybe you want Tilly walking in and seeing what I am going to do to you? Maybe you are also an exhibitionist?”
“Me? What a sod-awful thought.”
“Of course, I haven’t seen her since I arrived.”
She bent down and edged off her shoes. Nice ones. Nothing like what she wore last night. “But I doubt she wants me here, any more than Belle or Eudora do. So the sooner we do this, the sooner I can get back to discovering who I am. And the sooner I can get out of here, before I affect their chances in the marriage market. Because, correct me if I’m wrong, but we did agree with ‘mistress’ for the duration of the search? But maybe you’d rather wait till tonight? Provided I don’t find anything in the meantime. You tell me.”
As he thought what if she did, she reached down for the hem of her chemise and tugged it over her head. What emerged—she wasn’t wearing a corset, or a petticoat—made his heart buck in his chest.
Jesus Christ, but he’d have to close that door, or get her to put some clothes on before Tilly, or one of the servants, came past and saw her standing like that, stark naked in the middle of the library floor, without the least trace of shame about it.
Tilly was drunk half the time. In all probability, she would think she was hallucinating. But Eudora now, Eudora was an innocent. Not like this hussy.
Having flung the chemise on the rug, she faced him.
"So, why don’t you just tell me how and where you want me. Here? Or on the chaise-longue there?”
He turned sharply on his heel, reached the door with a speed that belied his shattered thigh—his state of arousal too—and slammed it shut. Then he turned the key.
What was wrong with him? If Tilly came by and saw him? Tilly coming by and seeing him was exactly what he’d wanted. He’d told her yesterday she could damn well pack her bags and get the hell out if she didn’t like Cassidy Armstrong being here. But that was before, before Cassidy Armstrong stood here. Before his eyes drank in the sight of her long ivory legs, glowing in the soft firelight, her flawless breasts, and it hit him with the speed of a coach and four plunging down a crevice, this was all his to have, for whatever reason.
What he’d glimpsed through the beveled glass did not prepare him for this. She hadn’t been able to put her fingers through the glass to reach for his trouser buttons, had she?
Christ, it was like being fifteen again. Fifteen with her.
“I asked you a question, Lord Hawley. You’ve not replied. So I’ll just proceed shall I? Do you wish me to pleasure you this way … or some other way?”
Keeping her gaze locked on his, she reached inside his trousers, grasped his burning flesh. Heat oozed through his pores and he slumped back against the door. A virgin? Like hell.
He swallowed the knot in his throat. He would like to grit his teeth, and have her satisfy him with these coral lips he’d dreamed of. Right here against the library door. Why not? But his hunger in that second, with what her cool fingers and coolly glittering eyes did to him, was for tasting her.
He reached out, grasped the sides of her face, and drew her mouth up to meet his. Jesus God. Nothing, certainly not drink, not these damned narcotics he let ravage his body on a daily basis, tasted as sweet as what he tasted here on her mouth.
He clasped his arm around her back and swung her around against the door. A couple of hurried movements, while pressing her there, and he removed his jacket and his neck-cloth. She stood there, cool as a mountain stream, one he wanted to bathe in, and reached for his shirt hem.
“Is this position all right? Or do you want me to turn around?”
He couldn’t believe it. Ridiculous, when he helped her tug himself free of his boots, his trousers, but he was the first to admit, his whores didn’t heat him to the core like this. He couldn’t think beyond running his fingers over her skin, touching her, especially her warm, damp sex.
“This is how I want you,” he murmured, lowering his mouth to her nipple as she stood there against the door, a nipple she palmed her breast to give him. Christ, he had never wanted anything so much as to just have her now against the library door.
“Then I’m glad, Lord Hawley.”
She was too. She must be. He raised his head. She was perfectly prepared for him to enter her. Silky, soft, wet. Even the tight skin of her face somehow indicated how ready she was. The look jammed the breath in his lungs, so her faint breathing filled the silence. Clasping her buttocks, he hitched her off the floor.
He used one hand to guide himself inside. Last night she’d been tight as a strung drum. She gasped. Her hands fisted against the door. He hadn’t managed this far last night. The thought had him grasping the sides of her face before he could stop himself. Her eyes were so dark. In spite of his resolution not to kiss her, he dragged them against his. The building pleasure was almost unbearable.
When he thought about the decorous virgins people wanted to shackle him to, she was there between him and the door, naked, warm, and that was what he wanted. No decorous wife would spread her legs like this, against a library door at ten in the morning. Cling to him, stark naked, her hands fisting his shoulders, her forehead against his chest, her breath coming in ragged pants.
He thrust. Heat sparked. He threw back his head, grunting as waves of the most intense, pulsating pleasure flooded him. Over and over. For a moment he swore he even saw stars at the backs of his eyes. He was so woozy with his relief, so milked by it, so unwilling to part with any of it, it was only at the last he remembered to jerk out of her. He’d said it was something he’d take care of.
She edged her leg down, unpeeling herself slowly. A log split open, the grandfather clock ticked. Only gradually did he become aware they did. And she? If there was one thing he shouldn’t do, given the businesslike nature of the agreement, it was kiss her. Tenderness? He better not. Just because her throat still fluttered and she regarded him through beguilingly lowered, faintly trembling eyelashes. Regarded his damned chest rather.
“I—I trust I have proved that to your satisfaction, Lord Hawley. Now you won’t mind if I get back to my papers?”
Actually he did mind. He minded terribly.
It was what drove him across the floor after her. Anyway, he wasn’t entirely sure, although he had felt her arousal, she’d enjoyed him. Why should he be the one wanting her desperately again and she be only interested in these damned, fusty papers?
That was why what ignited him as he caught her against the table, the carnal images rocketing through his head were one thing, the knowledge that he could do a lot better than simply satisfy himself, as he had a moment ago, another.
“Lord Hawley—”
“Shh.”
Despite having just had her, he did want her, didn’t he, and it wasn’t like a moment ago. He’d forgotten that women could be sweet like this. Forgotten how to distinguish one from the other in what he had somehow become. Or was it just her he remembered? Whatever the reason, women generally enjoyed him.
She would only let her back to these papers when she had.
***
Hearing Belle’s voice, Devorlane cursed foully. All he wanted was to get back up the stairs to his bedroom. Not all, exactly, in terms of there being one thing. Shut the door, reconstruct himself, also featured there, not to mention removing the hand that had unwelcomely fastened about his heart. It was still all though in terms of regaining his tranquility. Belle, in terms of that, was the last person he wanted to see.
“Devorlane—oh, Devorlane, there you are.”
Gritting his teeth, he turned and glowered. “What?”
Of course Belle didn’t know that the damned Sapphire woman was his mistress. Had she, she was unlikely to greet him with quite that degree of simper on her drably dull face, or widen her already bulging eyes in joy at clapping them on him.
“I’m so sorry to trouble you, Devorlane.”
He turned to go. “So why do you keep doing it?”
“I didn’t think that I wa--“
“What do you want?”
“I was just wondering where Cassidy is.”
Devorlane hesitated. Whilst saying, the library but I don’t think she’s dressed, would doubtless swipe off the simper, was a doubtless swipe what he wanted? A week ago he’d have said yes, confidently, without losing a wink of sleep over the matter. Now he was drowning in a sea of treacle. Drink, drugs, women, all these life rafts he’d clung to for longer than he cared to remember, all so damned useless to him in terms of keeping his focus intact, he’d to ask himself if he really needed more of them. Might need—heaven forbid—to wean himself off.
He was getting lost in a sea of night sweats and that constant thrum in his thigh.
He was always able to walk away from a woman. Christ, it was why he’d done this. Damn well brought her here. It could not possibly have backfired. The woman was a thief. A guttersnipe underneath the refinement, who had stolen ten years of his life. He could surely harden his heart about that? And yet, there it was. He straightened his spine.
“Why?”
“Oh … well, Devorlane … ” As her powder-blue skirt swished across the floor, conspiracy gleamed in Belle’s bulging eyes. “That—that woman is here. You know the one.”
Did he? He knew a lot of women. He imagined it might be any one of twenty dozen. And not just that. The one. The one that had always been called the one by Tilly, by Belle, by his mother, his father, by damned Ardent, in those short but tortuous days following his arrest, was already here, wasn’t she? Did Belle know this?
“Which one?”
“Goodness, Devorlane, don’t look so fierce. Obviously I’m not meaning that one, although it would be nice for you, for us all, if it was and she was to finally come clean.”
He set his jaw. If Belle were to know that for him Sapphire already had, she’d collapse at the foot of these same stairs she now reached the bottom of.
“Go on.”
“No. No. I’m meaning the one at Barwych. Ruby, I think her name is. And she’s come looking for Cassidy.”
His heart sunk like a stone. When his philosophy was to ignore what his women did behind his back, how could he be troubled about the fact this harridan had arrived at Chessington to see her partner in crime?
What the hell did it matter if Sapphire invited the entire Starkadder Sisterhood to lodge for the Christmas season? Held meetings where they planned the systematic plunder of every country house in the vicinity, while the rest of the household merrily sang carols and drank themselves senseless—Tilly anyway—on punch? It was no more than anything these same neighbors deserved, disbelieving him all these years ago, treating his protestations about Sapphire as stuff and nonsense.
What did Sapphire’s damned harridan friend plan on doing exactly? Was she here alone, or had she brought the broom handle in order to batter him even harder for demanding Sapphire be his mistress?
“Etti put her in the sitting room to wait. She thought Cassidy was perhaps still in the library. But she wasn’t sure. The door was locked, you see.”
He strove not to let even a twitching facial muscle betray him. And no doubt Etti had heard everything. But the sitting room? Alone? Her?
“Etti did what?” He cursed beneath his breath as his gaze swept to the sitting room door.
“Well, yes.” Belle’s face reddened. “There is something wrong with that? Of course I know the woman is only a companion, and so does Etti, but Eudora was there and we did not think—and you—”
As he thundered down the stairs, Belle faltered.
“We couldn’t find you.”
“Eudora?”
It could have been worse. It could have been Tilly, by which time she and that harridan would be through a port bottle. They would be riding round the room on that damned broomstick. It might all come out who Ruby was, who Sapphire was, and then he was going to look immeasurably stupid installing her here unless he could make the case for doing it to humiliate her.
“Of course Eudora’s there. What’s wrong with you? You don’t think we’d give some companion run of the house, do you, just because Cassidy is here under your protection? Looking through these boxes?”
He didn’t. He was giving a jewel thief though, and he needed to understand this feeling, the one that had him by the gut. Sapphire was all sorts of things, so he needed to keep an eye on her. That much went without saying.
She was setting up residence here though, wasn’t she? And not just in his home. In a place he didn’t think he possessed—his heart.
How else could he explain that he didn’t want Sapphire talking to Ruby? Not about him. Above everything else, worse than hatching some scheme, worse than stealing the dining room candlesticks, he feared one thing.
Her being persuaded to leave.
And at all costs he must do something about that fear.
***
As she sank against the door of the room she’d left so many hours ago now—it made her mind spin to remember—Cass closed her eyes. She was alone. Finally, unequivocally. Thank God.
Ruby turning up like that was the last straw in a haystack of final ones. Need Cass think about being asked to sit down and sip tea? Only seconds after she’d indulged in things that didn’t go with tea. Things that made her blush to remember. Things that …
“Good evening, Miss Armstrong.”
Cass jerked her eyes open. God, in heaven above, was she seeing this? Devorlane Hawley sprawled upright in—it wasn’t her bed, when it patently belonged to him. Not just in the bed either. Naked in the bed. For a second she stared, her first thought that she wasn’t imagining this swiftly overtaken by the second: did he want more? At this time of the day too?
Well, he wasn’t getting it.
She should have gone and gotten the papers, then left when she had the chance, last night instead of sitting in the burning darkness, thinking it didn’t feel quite right somehow to take advantage of him like that. Besides she didn’t want it commonly known, not even by him, that she only glittered in certain departments and was a bit lacking in others--just because she didn’t, not meaning she couldn�
�t and all that. She picked herself off the door, crossed to the sideboard where various silver dishes gleamed. After all, she may be his mistress, she wasn’t his whore. Sapphire, wasn't she?
“Lord Hawley, would you like to tell me exactly what you’re doing here? Why you’ve chosen to lie here in what, in essence, is my bed at this time of the day too? Well?”
She let her gaze flit across the sideboard. So? What would it be? Salmon mousse? Or a slice of the cold pork tart on the pretty, flowered plate? Wedgewood possibly. Nothing would stop her picking it up. A napkin too.
“I think that speaks for itself, when you’re my mistress. I could have waited till we’d eaten, but I thought this first.”
“Really?” Perhaps he did, but she didn’t. She shook out the napkin and laid it across her arm. That was as opposed to picking up the whole damn platter, flinging it across the room at him, and leaving by the first available door.
After all the Argand lamp shade was worth a good few guineas. What if she missed him and shattered it by mistake, especially when her aim had never been good. Besides the walls she had so carefully constructed about herself hadn’t gone up stone by stone to be diminished by rage.
She wanted these papers, especially on this shrinking square she now occupied. The key to this situation was one thing only. Him. In all respects.
“Didn’t they feed you this afternoon? I gave instructions.”
“Instructions?” For a second her hand, clutching the knife, hovered above the salmon mousse. “I’m sorry. Was this for me? Or the household cat?”
“The—?”
“But if you don’t want me to eat …?”
“Not at all. Have you forgotten what I told you the night you kissed me?”
“So far as I recollect, and it was ten years ago, mind you, you told me nothing. Probably because you were the worse for wear.”
“I’m not meaning that night.”
That rustle of the bed linen? She didn’t want him out of bed. Naked and prowling and expecting things.
“Oh?” She turned her back, fixing her gaze on the pork tart. “You mean the other one? Well, you flatter yourself that whatever night it was, I should remember something so boring, I probably yawned. Yes. Perhaps, for that matter, I did. But if I didn’t I can do it now if—”
Loving Lady Lazuli (London Jewel Thieves Book 1) Page 15
