“You.” Her eyes glinted down at him, framed against the sunlight by the wild halo of her hair. She lifted her palm to cup his face, and her touch felt like silk, pulled across sensitive flesh. “This.” She breathed out, and the sound was like a balm to his soul. “Us.”
David pulled her down and rolled with her so they were lying side by side, the water rushing around them. He let his eyes roam down the exquisite length of her, from her pert brows to the pink toes that flashed at him amid the ebb and flow of the shoreline waves. He recalled the water had felt cold to him this morning, but there was none of that in this moment, only an intense, burning heat that seemed to suffuse every pore.
Her eyes met his across the space of the few inches he had created with his repositioning, and he seized upon an adequate description for their color.
Abalone. The most incredible mixture of colors, but defying any single label. She was unique, like the shells that littered this beach, like the storm of emotion that littered his mind. And while he did not know that the next hour might bring, for this moment, at least, she was his.
His gaze drifted down to the tempting, wet edge of her shift. He wondered if she knew that he could see every part of her through the fine, thin cotton. The dark patch between her legs, in particular, stood out against her skin like paint beneath a transparent canvas.
He reached a finger down as he met her eyes once more. Brushed against the curls that waited for him there. Knew he had found her hidden pleasure point when those beautiful eyes widened and she arched up to meet him.
“Is this what you want?” he asked, though it was a question she had already answered with the push of her body against his questing finger.
“You know it is.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth, and her obvious frustration urged him on.
He settled into a rhythm, testing her reflexes, finding them open for his touch. He focused hard on that spot that made her thrash beside him, challenging her to go further, reach higher, than she had yesterday. He offered words of encouragement, carefully skirting any mention of that messy business of love.
And then, in response to her strangled cry, David added the “more” she was begging for, slipping his finger inside her. The blazing heat of her passage was like crossing the surface of the sun.
“I . . . oh. It didn’t feel like this yesterday,” she exclaimed, closing her eyes and straining toward the push of his hand.
He took her lips in a kiss then, drowning in her words as much as her heat. “It wasn’t meant to,” he found the presence of mind to say after a moment. “It was a lesson to teach me what you wanted, not a lesson for you to find it.”
“Then you are an apt pupil,” she gasped, “because . . . I . . .”
And then she was gone, shattering around his hand. She bucked upward through the surf, her cry of release the most beautiful sound imaginable. Her body pulsed around his finger, an invitation his cock readily accepted as its well-earned due.
But still, David hesitated. She was falling back to him now, her wings momentarily clipped. They could stop this. Somehow, some way, he had survived it, though he was about ready to spill in his trousers like an inexperienced schoolboy.
And then she opened her eyes. They were glazed. Brilliant.
Begging.
“More,” she whispered, her drugged smile the most compelling of invitations. And then he was unbuttoning his trousers.
He rose over her, his mind focused on her beautiful face, the primitive echo of “mine” roaring in his ears. He was about to take her, here on the open beach, her invitation unmistakable, his own body more ready than it had ever been.
Only one thing stopped him, a single terrible thought that flashed through his mind and threatened to asphyxiate him far more quickly than any convenient drowning.
What if she had already accepted Duffington’s offer?
Remorse spun through him, all the more confusing because it was tempered by a desire to harm a man he had no cause to dislike, much less want to kill.
But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t go through with this, couldn’t give her the experience she sought, not if she was promised to another man.
David hauled his objecting body off her pliant one, settling into the grit and small, smooth-shaped rocks that lay all around them. He was shocked to his core by how close he had just come to taking her virginity. It did not matter if it was a gift she gave freely. It did not matter if he wanted it more than his body’s next breath. It did not matter if she asked for “more” ten times over.
He was leaving for Scotland with his mother, in just over a week. He had been about to ruin her life forever, on the cusp of an inevitable parting.
And he, of all people, knew what it was like to live with that kind of regret.
She struggled to sitting, her eyes a perplexed shade of amber and green. “Why did you stop?” she asked in confusion.
David swallowed against the trembling note of confusion in her voice. “I think,” he said, struggling to form the words he needed to say, instead of the words he wanted to say, “that before we go any further with this lesson, we need to have a serious talk.”
STUNNED BY THE abrupt shift in mood, Caroline pulled the edge of her shift down as far as it would go. She had found her senses again, and the reality of the moment lay like hot coals beneath her skin.
David had just . . . and she had felt . . . well, she didn’t know what he had just done or what she had just felt, but she was quite sure there was a word for it somewhere in Penelope’s book.
And “celibate” was not it.
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked, struggling to a sitting position and curling her legs up beneath her. She was confused by the new note of censure in his voice. Moments before, he had been urging her into oblivion.
Now, he seemed determined to yank it out of her grasp.
“Did you accept Duffington’s offer?”
She sighed into the directness of his question. “No. Not yet.” Caroline felt as if she were a ship that had sighted land, only to flounder in the shoals. She did not want to think about Duffington’s offer in this moment. Or Branson’s or Dermott’s either. She wanted to return to the distraction of David Cameron’s mouth and busy fingers.
But judging by the dark glower he was tossing her way, she suspected she wasn’t going to get out of the conversation by kissing him again.
“Do you plan to?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, forcing her mind to the pertinent question at hand. “You raised some excellent concerns about Duffington last night, things I had not considered.” In fact, now that a certain part of David’s anatomy had been almost introduced to a certain part of hers, she was rethinking the wisdom of Duffington’s size. “He is not a good fit using weight as the criterion, I’ll admit.”
A hint of relief touched David’s smile. “I am relieved to hear you say that.”
“If I am to go by height,” she mused, reaching a hand to brush away the silver grains of sand that clung to the thick, blond hair on David’s chest, “I think Mr. Branson would serve better than Duffington. But if I am to rely on instinct, I must admit Mr. Dermott has made an excellent case for me to place his offer first.”
David reared back as if she had grasped one of those hairs and plucked it straight out. “What are you talking about?”
Caroline dropped her hand and battled a twinge of guilt. She knew she had been negligent in not admitting as much earlier, but a frank discussion of her choices had seemed a poor preference to kissing, at the time. “Mr. Branson and Mr. Dermott both presented me with offers of marriage this morning.”
David pushed up and away from her in a single, fluid motion. “Bloody hell, Caroline.”
She did not object to the obscenity. Indeed, it was a phrase she had been dancing around uttering herself all morning. As far as expressions went, she doubted she could find a more apt one to describe the absurdity of her week. She, Caroline Tolbertson, Brighton�
��s most established wallflower, had received three offers of marriage in less than a single day, one of them from a man believed by many to be the most handsome of the summer set.
Bloody hell, indeed.
David fastened the buttons of his falls with a series of jerks, buttons she hadn’t even realized had been undone. When he had finished, he glared down at her. “Were you going to tell me before or after I tupped you on this beach?”
Caroline lifted her chin. “That depends. Is tupping still an option?”
He reached down a hand to pull her up. He felt hard, vibrating against her skin like the blade of a sword, swung against granite. “Are you seriously considering any of them?” he demanded.
Caroline spent a long moment scraping the grit and crushed shells from her shift. There was no doubt she was going to find the tiny particles in places best left unmentioned, after David’s bold exploration of her body. And no doubt she was avoiding answering the question.
Finally, she found her voice. “I imagine I would be mad not to, don’t you think? I must marry someone. And I cannot marry someone who hasn’t offered for me.” She allowed her eyes to meet his, wincing as she took in the stone-set cast of his jaw. “Ergo, I must choose one of them.”
David looked ready to explode. “You don’t need to marry anyone, at least not in the immediate future. And you deserve someone better than Dermott.”
“He has quite redeemed himself.” Caroline thought back on Mr. Dermott’s expression from the morning. He had looked desperate for her answer, crushed when she had offered him a delayed response. He had been serious in his offer. Either that, or the man was the most accomplished actor she had ever had the ill fortune to come across.
And unlike Branson, Dermott’s offer, at least, had made her pulse wobble, just a bit. If she was to take David’s own advice on the matter, wasn’t that what she supposed to be looking for in a husband? Only two men had ever made her body hum enough to seek their kiss. One of them, of course, was Dermott. It had ended poorly, but she had not known what she was doing at the time. Logic argued that next time around would be more pleasurable.
The second man, who was even now stalking over to the rock and snatching up her discarded dress, had made his feelings on the nature of their relationship more than clear. Though he was upset over Mr. Dermott’s offer of marriage, he was not going to make a counteroffer. She realized, in that moment, a part of her had been hoping he might. Her heart came close to crumpling in her chest.
David thrust out the gown as if the very fabric burned his hands. “Dermott does not deserve redemption. I should know. I am an expert in the cause.”
Caroline met David’s gaze, anchoring herself to the chink that had appeared in his armor. She accepted the dress from his clenched hands. “Everyone deserves redemption, David. Yourself included.”
David fetched her slippers next. “I do not like the man.”
Caroline stepped into the gown and pulled it up over her shift, wincing as the fabric turned dark with damp. “You don’t have to like him,” she retorted, working to reach the buttons between the back of her shoulders now. “I do. He has a nice bank account. Lovely, straight teeth. There is no doubt he would be my preferred choice over either of my other two offers.”
She risked a glance at her glowering companion, wondering how far she was prepared to needle him. David was rapidly approaching the end of what appeared to be a very short rope. The only question was, did he care for her enough to prevent what she was honest enough to admit might be a grave mistake?
“I am three-and-twenty, David. Falling off the shelf. And Mr. Dermott is considered an excellent match.”
“He does not appreciate you. Not the true you, at any rate.”
Caroline exhaled, praying for patience. Was this really the same man who had just touched her so intimately? He looked angry enough to scale the white cliff walls using only his teeth for leverage. “What do you mean, the ‘true’ me? I’d say he does, if he is offering to marry me. It is not as if I have a dowry to tempt him.”
“Perhaps he is responding to the myth, rather than the woman. Or perhaps he feels the need to best Branson. But he doesn’t know you, not like I do. You would never be happy married to someone like him.”
The first niggling shards of doubt lodged in Caroline’s mind. “What myth? What are you referring to?”
A muscle ticked near David’s right eye, and his face reddened, making the bright, golden color of his hair seem even lighter by contrast. “I might have encouraged Dermott’s thoughts toward you along a more flattering path. Tuesday night, after our moonlit swim.”
Caroline’s thoughts flung wide at his admission, and settled on an inescapable truth. “Branson was there too, wasn’t he?” she asked, horrified.
“Aye.” David at least had the grace to look discomfited now, blast the man. He picked up his shirt and slipped it over his broad shoulders. “Branson was there,” he admitted. “Hamilton too. But not Duffington or Adams. You cannot blame their interest on me.”
Caroline stared at David as he buttoned up his own clothing. How could she not have seen it? It was so obvious now . . . The interest. The offers. Why would any of these men be interested in her, unless they had been spun a string of lies? Caroline swallowed the painful lump of her throat. “What did you say to them? What did you do?”
“I didn’t want your reputation hurt any more than had already been done, and so I spun a little fancy over a shared bottle. I encouraged them to think of you in a more feminine light, I suppose. Distracted them from their incorrectly drawn conclusions. But I only wanted them to leave off with their heckling. I never expected it to result in all this stir.”
The newfound confidence Caroline had discovered during the past few days dissolved into nothingness, displaced by the same self-doubts that had plagued her all her life. “Did you lie? Say something about me what wasn’t true?”
He opened his mouth, a look of swift surprise flaring across his face. He shifted his weight from one foot to another. Guiltily, to her mind. “No,” he finally said. “I can honestly say that nothing I said that night was an untruth.”
But he had not believed it at the time. That much was clear. Her understanding of the situation settled from a vicious churning to a dull ache. She felt a bone-deep sense of who she was, a social plague that would not be cured, no matter the skill of her modiste, no matter her potential choice of husband. “What you are saying,” she said slowly, “is that I was not good enough for them as I was.”
David’s gaze jerked down to meet hers. “That is not what I am saying at all.”
“You had to convince them of my worth, and even that was a facade strung out of sympathy.”
David shook his head. “You are twisting my words. I wanted . . . I want . . . to protect you.”
“But you do not want to marry me.” Caroline caught the sob in her throat, forbade it to escape. “So much so that you invented a story, just so others might remove the burden of my admiration from your hands.”
David spread those very hands to which she referred, reaching for an answer he apparently could not give. Even now, even with all that had passed between them, his expression skirted an emotion that looked suspiciously like sympathy. “I am not the right man for you, Caroline.”
A welcome rage settled in her gut. “So you keep saying, but given that I have already accepted the man you are, what you mean is that I am not the right woman for you.”
She waited for him to protest. To assure her she had the wrong of it.
He did none of those things. Instead, he nodded.
“What you mean,” she continued, her certainty a terrible thing, “is that I am good enough to almost tup in the waves, but not good enough to pledge a troth. Well, let me tell you something, David Cameron. We are through with these lessons. I don’t need your pity, and I don’t need your proposal. It turns out I have plenty to sort through on my own.”
Chapter 30
SUNDAY CHURC
H SERVICE was a painful affair.
Caroline sat stiff-backed in her family’s pew, dressed in her gown with the lavender flowers, her mind on anything but the sermon. She felt hollow inside, David’s words running through her mind again and again. Her attention was snagged only once, when a blessing was offered for those who would compete in tomorrow’s race. And then it was noon, the church crowd was gossiping about the latest news in the Gazette, and Caroline was stepping out into bright sunshine, Penelope walking several yards ahead.
Dermott intercepted her as she made her way down the church steps. He looked devilishly handsome, as always, and she could see at least two girls making moon eyes at him across the street. She knew she was lucky to have such a charming smile directed toward her, but as she summoned a smile in return, it occurred to her she had more than that.
She had an offer of marriage from this perfect specimen of a man. And even if Mr. Dermott’s proposal was more calculated than romantic, even if his interest was based solely on some image conjured by too much whisky and David Cameron’s exuberant description of a make-believe woman, the choice was now in her hands.
And a choice was something David had never permitted her.
“Good morning, Caroline,” Mr. Dermott said, bowing at the waist. “I was waiting for you, hoping for a word about my proposal.”
She eyed him, her stomach jumping like oil in a heated skillet. His nearness did not spark the same violent feelings in her that standing close to David did, but if her recent experience with David had taught her anything, it was that it was far more tenable to be the partner who was adored than the one doing the adoring.
David Cameron didn’t want her. This man did.
Why was she even hesitating?
“I have been thinking hard on your offer,” she told Mr. Dermott, her teeth trembling on the answer she knew she must give. “You make a favorable argument for my acceptance.”
He looked pleased. “Favorable enough that you will have me?”
Caroline nodded. “I think,” she said, willing herself to keep breathing, “that my answer is yes. I will marry you.”
Summer Is for Lovers Page 26
