by Erica Ridley
“I’m here,” she whispered. “Show me.”
Those were the words Max had longed to hear.
Everything else he wanted to tell her, he could say with his mouth another way.
He ran his hands up the curve of her hips to her rib cage. She had the body of a siren. If she was singing him to his death, so be it.
Gently, he cupped her breasts. She immediately leaned into his touch.
“I was hoping you’d do that again,” she whispered. “I haven’t stopped thinking about your hands on my body since that night.”
Neither had he. It was time to give her something more to think about.
He rubbed a finger over the hardened peaks beneath her bodice, then tugged the thin fabric down to expose her breasts. Her bare nipple between his fingers was enough to turn him hard as stone.
He wanted her to know the pleasure he could bring. What they could do together. He lowered his lips to her naked flesh and took her breast in his mouth.
She gasped and arched into him, clutching the back of his collar as if to keep him close. He wasn’t going anywhere.
As he suckled her nipple, he lifted the hems of her gown and shift and slipped his hand beneath. She was hot and wet and ready for his touch.
She would be his undoing.
Yet he couldn’t stop.
He rubbed in lazy circles, coaxing, teasing. When her breath quickened and her pulse turned staccato, he pushed her legs apart and placed his tongue where his fingers had been to taste her sweetness.
She gave a little moan of pleasure. He slid his hands up her inner thighs and held on as she arched into him, trembling with each lick.
He told her with his tongue the things he couldn’t say with his mouth. How much she meant. How he longed to please her. That his world was a brighter place with her in it.
She let out a sudden gasp. Her legs clamped tight about him, convulsing in delicious rhythm with the heat of her climax.
When the spasms ceased, he lifted his head from beneath her skirts and arranged them back over her trembling legs.
“Biscuit?” he enquired innocently.
“Bedchamber,” she ordered as she wrapped her legs about his hips and held on tight. “Now.”
Chapter 23
“Are you certain this is what you want?” Max asked.
Bryony cupped her hands to his jaw and kissed him as an answer.
Of course she was certain. He was everything she could want. How could he still doubt? The intimacy of what they had just shared proved that any other future paled compared to a life with him. They belonged together.
He lay her in the center of his bed as if she were a delicate flower who could be swept away at any moment by a gust of wind.
She was not so fragile.
His dark eyes did not waver, his voice as intense as his gaze. “I need you to be sure.”
“I’m sure.” She held out her arms for him to join her and reveled in the weight and heat of his body. This was what she had been waiting for.
She had been sure for weeks. She had been sure when she gifted him her hideous pillow, when she gushed about him to her siblings and begged for them to meet, when she had serenaded him with her violin in his office, when she had presented herself on his doorstep with a baking pan and a bag of currants.
She had never been surer about anything in her life.
He was the one.
Her heart raced at the delicious prospect of making love to him. Of giving themselves to each other completely, now and forever.
His kisses were both possessive and tender. As though he wished to claim her, to conquer, and to keep her safe. As if by kissing him in return, she too was doing the claiming and the conquering, making him hers.
When he moved to sit up, she followed. Laughing between kisses as they tried to shuck their boots and vestments and unmentionables without lifting their lips from each other.
The sight of Max nude put every Grecian statute to shame. He was no boy, no cherubic angel, but a man. Her man.
She hoped he found her body as pleasing. She suddenly felt small and pale and naked. Not a goddess, but a waif. Perhaps a disappointment.
The hunger in his eyes told a different story.
“I love that big, beautiful brain of yours,” he murmured as he kissed her temple. “Turn it off. No mathematics allowed in the bedchamber.”
She grinned despite herself. “What would you have me do instead?”
“Enjoy,” he answered simply. “Close your eyes. Feel the music.”
She allowed her lashes to flutter closed and was rewarded with a kiss so deep she felt it in her very soul.
When at last he lifted his mouth from hers, he immediately replaced it elsewhere on her body. Licking. Kissing. Suckling.
With her eyes closed, she had no way to know where his lips would brush next. Perhaps her breasts. Perhaps a nipple. Perhaps her stomach. Perhaps much lower.
The delicious not-knowing heightened her senses. Every inch of her body felt alive, crackling with awareness.
This was his serenade, she realized. Every kiss was music, every pleasurable lick a soaring melody.
When he returned his mouth between her legs to the place he had tasted before, her body instantly quickened, welcoming the growing crescendo within. She tried to wait. To dance together. Just when she thought she couldn’t hold it back any longer, he lifted his mouth from her legs. He settled his hips against hers instead, his shaft hot and thick between them.
“This may hurt.” His eyes begged forgiveness. “I shall make it as good as I can.”
There was no need for forgiveness. She’d been dreaming of this moment for too long. Yearning to join him as one.
She wrapped her legs about his hips.
“I’m yours,” she whispered. “I’m ready.”
He covered her mouth with his as he entered her, swallowing her gasp, sweetening the pain. Soon, there was only a fullness inside her, quickly replaced by pleasure as he began to rock his hips.
It was better than she’d dreamed. Everything she had hoped. A symphony unlike any other. They were finally dancing.
When he slid his hand between them to coax the music even higher, this time, she could no longer hold the crescendo back.
“Max,” she gasped. “I think you’re going to make me—”
“Thank God,” he muttered, pumping faster in time with her body’s spasms and then quickly jerking free to bury his hips against the blanket. Without lifting his face from the mattress, he swung a powerful arm over her naked form and pulled her close.
She nestled into his warmth with a sigh of contentment. The muscles between her thighs still gave the occasional twitch of pleasure, her mind still flooded with pleasurable sensations.
“Biscuit?” she whispered into his hair.
“Later.” He pulled her tight into his embrace, locking both strong arms about her as if he would never let her go.
Chapter 24
The following evening, Bryony felt almost silly donning her costume of trousers and tailcoat to meet Max at the Cloven Hoof.
Now that they’d seen each other with no clothes at all, she rather wished all their encounters could be conducted in such a manner.
Her stomach fluttered whenever she remembered the events of the previous day. All she could think about was what they had done in the kitchen, and in his bedchamber. She hoped every meal they shared from now on would detour just as deliciously.
As the hackney cab carried her closer to Max, she realized she had left with her head so high in the clouds, they had failed to discuss what happened next. Obviously she would marry him, but it wouldn’t hurt to iron out a few of the details.
She grinned to herself as she alighted from the hack and made her way to the back door of the Cloven Hoof. Perhaps they would start a new journal together. One that chronicled their shared life outside of the club.
She reached in her coat pocket for the key.
The door was unlocked. Max
stood there waiting, just inside the shadowed corridor. His arms folded over his chest.
Bryony’s elation turned to panic. He didn’t look like a man in love. He looked like a man who wished to throttle her.
“What is it?” she asked.
He continued to block the entrance. “Frances has a new post. She’s not a seamstress anymore. She’s been offered better housing and three times the salary to become an instructor at a boarding school.”
“Isn’t that good news?” Bryony stammered, her skin turning clammy.
“Coincidental, wouldn’t you say?” His dark eyes glittered at her from the shadows. “Why, isn’t the St. Giles School for Girls the same charity your sister founded?”
“It’s a growing school,” Bryony managed. “They need all the help they can get.”
“All your help, you mean.” He still hadn’t moved an inch. “It seems there was an anonymous donation with very specific conditions.”
Bryony’s hackles began to rise. How dare he try to make her feel bad for doing something good? His sister deserved every opportunity, no matter how it came about.
“You’re her brother,” she snapped. “I thought you’d be happy.”
His voice was cold. “I’m thrilled for Fran. But I’m disappointed for us.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. “There’s nothing wrong with accepting help. You yourself tried to—”
“That’s right,” he said harshly. “I myself tried to help my sister. Rescuing her is something I have been trying to do my entire life, and you went around behind my back—behind both our backs—without so much as talking it over.”
Bryony frowned. “It was just a donation. I’ve given hundreds. I don’t need your permission to—”
“It is not a matter of permission,” he enunciated in anger. “You took me out of the equation altogether. Robbed me of the courtesy of being a team.”
Her body froze in place. He was right. She had done that.
“Manipulating from on high isn’t treating someone like family,” he said, eyes flashing. “It proves you weren’t thinking about us at all. Another day of Miss Grenville doing whatever she wants, because she can. Just like all the other debutantes and ladies of your set.”
He was right. She hadn’t thought.
“It’s not just that you presume to know how to run our lives better than those of us who must actually live them,” he continued inexorably. “It’s that you come into my club, into my home, into my bed. And you don’t even bother to talk to me about the things I care about most.”
Her legs trembled.
“I am not your plaything,” he said quietly. “Frances and I are not your dolls, awaiting puppet-mastery. We are people, too. I thought you knew that.”
Hot pinpricks seared the back of her throat and stung her eyes. Of course she had disappointed him. She disappointed everyone. And she was exactly as he painted her.
Her breaths were shallow.
Even when she tried to do the right thing, she ended up hurting those she loved.
“It wasn’t my intention,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean—”
Max cast her a flat look. “You are the smartest person I know. When have you ever done something you didn’t mean? If you had spared a single thought, paused to consider whether Frances would wish to determine the course of her life on her own, you might have concluded that these are the sorts of things one does with someone, not against their knowledge.”
She hung her head. His conclusion was incontrovertible.
“I cannot believe you didn’t take the brief moment it would have required to think things through. After everything. After us.” He dropped his arms to his sides as if defeated. “You just acted. On what you wanted, you felt, you decided.”
“I thought it was the right thing,” she whispered.
“Life isn’t always a matter of being right. It’s about making other people feel like they matter.” His eyes were haunted. “The worst thing you can do to someone who has never had anything, is to take away their power to choose for themselves.”
Bryony sucked in a shuddering breath at those words. They hurt because they were true. She wanted to marry this man, to live in bliss forever, yet when given the opportunity to treat him like a partner, she had cut him out instead.
Of course he would be hurt.
He had spent his life trying to help his sister. She and Max might have pooled their resources, found a way to offer Frances an option that allowed her to choose her destiny for herself.
But that was not the path Bryony had taken.
Instead, she was standing outside a gaming hell staring up at the man she loved. The man she had hurt. The man who blocked the entrance. She had lost her right to be let in. Blackballed.
As she deserved.
Her grand sacrifice had been for nothing. All she’d wanted to do was show her love. She had ended up alone, facing unending repercussions. By selling her violin, she had also lost her right to be part of her own family. Now she’d alienated Max, too.
She fought back tears. They solved nothing. She had gotten so close to everything she had always wanted. The confidence to just be herself and the great fortune to find someone who liked her for her differences, rather than despite them. And it was all falling apart. She couldn’t lose him. Now that they’d finally found love.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “In the future—”
“We don’t have to worry about the future,” he said. “It is no business of mine what happens when Lord Moneybreeches puts a ring on your finger and allows you to rule over his household however you wish. You’ll be good at it. You’ve proven that.”
Lord Moneybreeches.
Cold fingers of ice snaked through Bryony’s chest and encased her heart in its grip. Even after making love, Max still intended their paths to diverge.
Her pulse fluttered in horror.
Belatedly, she realized he had never made a single verbal commitment beyond granting her a month to shadow his club. Not even yesterday, when they had joined bodies. She closed her eyes as the available facts clarified to terrible precision.
His repeated Are you sure this is what you want? was because he was offering her ruin, not marriage.
Not out of heartlessness, she realized. He was being logical. She should have done the same.
Even if he would have presented himself to her father, Bryony would not have been granted permission to marry him. If they made the attempt regardless, her parents would protest at the first banns and lock her straight into a nunnery. Or a madhouse.
She was not destined to live happily ever after with Max. The only place such a fantasy had seemed possible was inside her own mind.
Those were the facts.
He wasn’t breaking off a commitment. She’d failed to make one in the first place.
“You’re right,” she said briskly, blinking as fast as possible to keep the tears at bay. “Managing Lord Moneybreeches’s life will keep me busy. Nonetheless, I am sorry to have disappointed you. I thought you would know my heart by now.”
His gaze was shuttered. “I guess I wanted you to be someone you’re not.”
“Me too,” she whispered, then turned and walked away.
When she got home, she would put away her top hat and her breeches and her tailcoat. It was past time to return to the life of a debutante in search of a lord. Accept the cage she was meant to live in. The role Society expected of her.
She had no other cards to play.
Chapter 25
Max closed the door and walked back to his office on wooden legs.
Was he disappointed with the realization that Bryony might like his club, might like his body, might like his mind, but it still hadn’t occurred to her to think of them as a team?
Yes. That would always hurt.
But it wasn’t her fault.
He was the one who should have known better from the start. There had been nothing but signs. He had been shown his
whole life that his needs didn’t matter as much as others’. His wants were unimportant. His feelings, not a consideration.
She had been the first person to make him believe it wasn’t true. That his desires could hold equal importance. That his experience was just as valid.
Clearly, he was not as intelligent as he had led himself to believe.
That her family had forbidden the match anyway was just as well. Max didn’t want a supplicant’s relationship with Bryony. He wanted everything. Her heart. Her respect. Her soul.
After all, that’s what she had taken from him.
He slumped back in his chair and gazed sullenly at his empty office. He hated how silent it was. Hated that he had let down his guard and changed what he expected from the world.
Without her, it was like each day dawned without music or color.
Before he’d met her, he had preferred it that way. Convinced himself gray and black and shadows were what he deserved. What he needed.
She had given him another perspective. A brighter one, filled with melody and laughter.
And now there was nothing.
He propped his elbows atop his desk and buried his face in his hands. His temples pounded. He hated to lose her. His heart ached as though it had been squeezed by rough hands and wrung dry.
At least he still ran the Cloven Hoof. That was something, was it not? He lifted his head and stared at the empty settee across the room.
Frances was right. The club wasn’t Max’s anymore. In this, at least, he and Bryony had been partners. Every room, every table, every bottle of wine now reminded him of her.
He slapped open his agenda and glared at the week’s entry.
Three more days before she was meant to decide what to do with the deed. Sell the property to him? Or keep it for herself?
He might be angry and he might be hurt. Above all, frustrated that even if they hadn’t argued, they still couldn’t be together. Her mother was only echoing the thoughts of all their peers.
But when it came to business, he knew Bryony well.
This past month, she had worked as hard as he had to optimize and improve every aspect of the Cloven Hoof.
