“I need to leave.”
“You need to stay. I was in service, Archer. A deaf girl can’t remain in service without learning much no decent female ought to know.”
He nuzzled her temple when he should have been vaulting off the bed. Her rose-and-spice fragrance was soothing, even as it muddled his tired, unhappy brain further. “What are you saying?”
She kissed his jaw. “Who is a better victim for the randy footmen than a girl who can’t say a word against them, a girl who barely knows the terms for the liberties they’re taking? Anna was as vigilant as a mother hen, but she couldn’t go everywhere with me.”
“God.” He started to climb off of her, but she wrapped both her arms and her legs around him.
“I want you to stay, Archer.” She sounded very, very certain.
“But if you were forced…” The notion was horrific enough to dampen his lust. He lifted up onto his elbows. “I’m leaving.”
He didn’t move, didn’t shift away from the scent and softness of her, though he could have broken her hold easily.
She buried her nose against his neck. “I was not forced.”
“You could not give your consent in the King’s English. You were not of age to consent to marry. You were hardly—”
She kissed him again, lingeringly, as if to remind him without words that even a woman incapable of speech or hearing could communicate some things quite well.
When Archer stopped bracing himself against her hold, Morgan let out a sigh.
“He was a running footman, more a boy than a man,” she said, her tone indicating any disclosure was a grudging concession. “I was fascinated with him because he spoke very little English, only French, and while I could read French, thanks to Anna’s diligence, I’d never seen French spoken consistently before. He noticed me.”
“How could any man with eyes in his head not notice you?”
“Not like that. He was deaf and mute in English, just as I was, you see? The difference was he could overcome the lack while I could not, but for a time…”
She opened her mouth on his shoulder and set her teeth against the muscle. She wasn’t biting him; it felt more like an exploration of his person with the part of her that had spent years unable to express her thoughts.
“For a time you did not feel so alone,” Archer concluded.
She nodded, the top of her head grazing his chin.
The wanting inside him shifted again, to a desire he’d felt frequently before—the desire to pleasure the woman in his arms—and something more, too: the desire to ease her aloneness, and even more surprisingly, to allow her to ease his.
He yearned to tell her this. Instead, he touched his mouth to hers, a slow, tender echo of her previous kiss. He would give to her, and in allowing it, she would give to him.
When he shifted slightly to the side, she tightened her arms around him. “Don’t go, Archer. Please.”
“Hush. I’m not going.” He could not go, though he should not stay.
Her grip slackened as he arranged himself along her side. “You are such a beautiful man.”
Her touch on his face was beautiful. Her skin where he untied the bows of her dressing gown and chemise was luminous. Her scent was rosy and female at the same time, and her taste when he took her nipple in his mouth was luscious.
This intimacy did not cause her to tense beneath him, as it might if she’d never felt such a thing before. She relaxed into it, tangling her fingers in his hair and sighing against his temple.
“I have longed…”
She had longed in silence, possibly for years. “Tell me.” He whispered the words against her breast then lifted his face so she might see his mouth when he spoke. “Tell me what you longed for.”
Without warning, she skimmed her hand down Archer’s belly to shape him through his falls. He was hard and aching, and her touch brought both torment and relief.
“Archer, please.”
She whispered the words against his chest, nigh cindering Archer’s reason. He was already moving to unfasten his breeches when something caught his eye, a glow from the night table, or rather, two glows.
The damned cat sat there, staring at the figures on the bed. Firelight reflected against the beast’s eyes, giving its mother-of-pearl gaze a flat, otherworldly quality. Morgan’s fingers applied a slight, lovely pressure to Archer’s cock, but the moment had shifted yet again.
The cat’s eyes held reproach and a call to reason. Archer stared back for one annoyed instant before the beast silently took itself off. In that instant, Archer’s conscience regained its voice.
Morgan was not a lusty serving maid trying to find a moment of pleasure in an otherwise exhausting and lonely existence. She was aunt to the Moreland heir, much loved by her sister and her in-laws alike, no matter her life was still likely exhausting and lonely.
She deserved far more than a furtive tumble that could leave her ruined or, perhaps worse, hastily married to a man from whom she’d sought only passing comfort.
A man who owed his first allegiance, and quite possibly his life, to the Crown.
***
“Lie back.” Archer peeled Morgan’s grip from his cock—she knew only footmen’s words for that lovely part of his body—and kissed her fingers. “Close your eyes and trust me.”
The picture he made propped on his elbow beside her in the bed was both beautiful and erotic, despite the fact that he was still wearing his infernal breeches.
Beautiful, erotic, stern, and yet somehow beseeching too. She closed her eyes and felt him shifting on the mattress.
“Spread your legs, Morgan.” As he spoke, he shifted himself and her limbs too, so Morgan’s spread legs were draped over his thighs, giving her the impression he sat facing the headboard.
“I cannot touch you like this.” Worse, she was intimately exposed to him, vulnerable even though the dying fire would not illuminate much.
“Which arrangement works to your advantage if I’m to acquit myself properly, believe me.” He ran a hand down her midline, a slow, warm sweep of male palm against female midriff.
“How is it to my advantage?”
“I would lose my mind were you free to touch me.” He tugged gently on first one nipple, then the other, and Morgan’s ability to reason skipped off a few yards from where she lay.
“Again, please.”
She did not have to be more specific. With his two hands, and her two breasts, he explored all manner of touches and pleasures with her. He used his mouth as well, creating backfires and crosscurrents of sensation as overwhelming as they were novel. When he paused and rested his hand very low on her belly, Morgan opened her eyes.
“This is… different.” Intimate was what she meant, and precious, but she would not say either word with him looking at her so solemnly, lest she bring up what it was different from.
Furtive gropings in the stillroom, a stolen kiss or two between wet sheets flapping in a cold spring breeze, and such disappointment, no words had been necessary to convey it.
“You are different, Miss Morgan James.”
She wanted to ask him what those intriguing words meant, what they meant to him, and what they meant to him in this context, but he brushed his thumb lower, over her curls, then lower still.
For all the kissing and fondling and cuddling she’d done with Bertrand, Morgan had never felt a man’s bare fingers on her sex.
“That is…” not merely different. She cast around for a word to describe the impulse his touch raised, the impulse to move her hips, to grasp the spindles of the headboard above her pillow and to let soft, needy sounds come from her throat. “That is marvelous.”
He smiled, the sternness ebbing from his features, leaving an expression breathtaking in both its intensity and its tenderness.
And then things progressed to something far better than marvelous. Morgan was soon hanging onto the headboard for dear life, her hips thrashing beneath Archer’s hand. What happened next became unbelieva
bly, wonderfully, miraculously better and better and better.
Then better still.
Long moments later, when Morgan could breathe again, when she could again join action and will, she reached for Archer and hauled him up over her body. “Archer Portmaine, you must hold me. Hold me tightly.” She gripped him hard, shamelessly clinging to his solid warmth and locking her ankles at the small of his back.
He worked an arm under her neck and embraced her, his hold secure and sheltering, while Morgan tried to blink away tears.
“Go ahead and cry.” His hand cradled the back of her head; his voice soothed her heart. “I’ll hold you as long as you like, as long as you need me to.”
This kindness, coupled with the feel of his lips brushing against her temple, turned a trickle into a deluge, until Morgan had to cease crying if only to assure herself she could.
“This has to be bad form, to take on so.” She spoke steadily enough, but she didn’t feel steady. She felt as if his weight was the only thing holding her body and soul together. He hadn’t given her exactly what she’d wanted, but he’d given her something she’d needed desperately instead, and she ached from having been the recipient of such generosity.
“When two people choose to share with each other like this, there is no such thing as bad form.” He sounded quite certain and damnably steady.
“Is that a royal decree?”
“If not, it should be. It’s certainly an eternal verity with me. Would you like a handkerchief?” He nuzzled her eyebrows, as if asking the question with his nose.
“I don’t want to move.”
“I account my exertions a success.” He stretched up without leaving her embrace entirely, and procured a handkerchief from the night table.
“I hate that you can form sentences and pronounce eternal verities, Archer. I cannot think…” She fell silent while he gently blotted the tears from her temple and cheeks. She tolerated it until he finished, then pitched into his chest. “I am undone.”
“Is this the sort of undone that requires discussion?” His question was amused, rather than the wary inquiry another man might have made.
“And if it does require discussion?”
“Than a different arrangement is in order.” He shifted off of her to stretch out on his back, and then it was Morgan who was hauled up over his chest to straddle him. He patted her bottom in a gesture that felt… friendly.
“Get cozy, Miss James, and talk to me.”
This was worse than when they’d shared supper at the Braithwaite’s ball. The words flowed from her in a steady stream, all about Bertrand, about the footmen who’d attempted to take more than Morgan was inclined to give, about missing the sound of human voices and church organs and even the sound of horses’ hooves on cobbled streets.
He held her and he listened, until Morgan was fighting sleep to snatch another moment of nearness with him, until she went silent for longer and longer periods.
He held her until she was silent altogether, until she was asleep, and still, he held her.
***
“I’ve told him all of it, Ellen.” Morgan hadn’t intended this disclosure, and certainly not to the woman sitting beside her on the Windham’s garden swing.
Ellen readjusted the baby in her arms, while strains of lilting piano drifted out over the Windham back gardens—for Valentine visited not only his family, but also their pianos.
“All of it? You are not much past twenty, Morgan, and you’ve had but three Seasons. What all could there be to tell?”
The baby fussed in her mother’s arms, making noises that communicated discontent for all they weren’t very loud.
“I told Mr. Portmaine that when Anna and I fled Yorkshire we went into service. I told him I’d scrubbed my hands raw in the scullery and turned my fingernails black cleaning andirons.” She’d also told him she’d emptied chamber pots, which was an appalling—and amazing—disclosure in itself. And as lovely as the physical intimacies were, this talking, sharing her life in words with Archer Portmaine for the past several nights, was to Morgan even more precious.
For the first time in years, Morgan looked forward to social events, knowing she’d spend at least part of her evening in a secluded corner with Archer.
Ellen set the swing rocking with her foot, and the baby went quiet. “I’ve washed many dishes, and so has much of the female half of England, I’ll warrant. How did Mr. Portmaine receive your confidences?”
To compose an answer required forethought, because his reaction hadn’t been anything Morgan might have anticipated.
“After I told him these things, when he bid me good night, he kissed my fingers as he handed me up into the coach. Really kissed them, and yet it wasn’t indecent.” None of what had passed between Morgan and Archer Portmaine had felt indecent, whether they were chatting in the corner of a ballroom or curled up in Morgan’s bed.
Ellen rubbed her cheek over the baby’s fuzzy crown. “Mr. Portmaine sounds like a good dinner companion.”
“He’s more than that.” They’d not made love completely yet, though Morgan was sure they would, and soon. For now, it seemed more important to hold each other and to learn one another in words. “I’ve never spent so much time in conversation with a man and had it be so little work.”
“Do you mean so little effort to hear him and follow the words, or so little effort to find things to talk about?”
An excellent question. “Both.”
“This child is finally falling asleep. Let’s stroll while we can.” Ellen settled the baby into a basket thickly padded with blankets and linked an arm through Morgan’s. “I’d like to check on His Grace’s roses. It’s still early, but the scent of even one bud is worth a trip into Town.”
Maybe this was why Morgan enjoyed Ellen’s company, for all that friendship with the woman’s husband might have made such a thing awkward. “You are the only person I know who is as fascinated with scents as I am.”
“Or maybe I’m just fascinated with moving among the flowers. When that child is truly fussy, it seems like days go by without my being able to turn loose of her. Valentine says all Windhams excel at cuddling, and—” Ellen fell silent as they moved down the graveled path, then she bent to untangle two stems of daisies. “If I recall Mr. Portmaine aright, he’s quite good-looking.”
“It’s all right, Ellen. I know Valentine is an affectionate man—and a devoted husband. I could not respect him otherwise.”
Ellen rose and smiled down at the daisies. “He treasures you, you know. At first I was jealous.”
“You were jealous? Of me?”
“A wife becomes familiar, but I think in Valentine’s mind, you will always be a little unknowable. He greatly admires how you coped with being deaf. He said it gave him courage when he faced difficulties of his own, and reassured him that if you, who were deaf for years, could still treasure music, his joy would never be entirely lost to him. I do not doubt he thinks of you as his muse.”
Archer Portmaine had gone much further: he had admired her for how she’d coped with being deaf and in service, and yet, Morgan appreciated the trust Ellen placed in her as well.
“Men are easily impressed. The roses closest to blooming are down this way, behind that hedge.”
They progressed a few steps in companionable silence before Ellen stopped short and cocked her head.
“She’s awake. I knew it was too early for her nap.” Ellen turned and headed back the way they’d just come, while Morgan held completely still and tried to hear the baby.
But try as she might, no matter how long she stood straining to hear, no matter how badly she wanted to detect the smallest sound from the crying child, Morgan heard nothing. Not the distant piano, not the fretful child. Not one sound.
***
“It’s bad timing.” Benjamin, the Earl of Hazelton, offered this observation along with a frown. Archer knew his cousin well enough to sense pity in that frown rather than judgment.
“It’s b
loody awful timing, but then I have never been known to fix my affections on the logical woman at the logical time.” Archer continued his progress around the office Hazelton shared with his countess, and shook his head when Benjamin gestured with a decanter.
“You have no leads in the case?”
“We have nothing but leads, and each one takes us to some filthy rat hole in the stews, when my every instinct tells me that’s the wrong direction to look. Such people can’t get close to the royal family, and if we were looking at a simple assassination attempt, why all the whispers and hints?”
“Sit, Archer. Your perambulations are making me dizzy.” Benjamin toed off his boots and set them neatly at the corner of the rug, then sank onto a long leather sofa. “I can ring for tea, if that will help, but I sense that as frustrated as you are with your current assignment, you’re even more confused by your interest in Miss James.”
Confused. A prosaic word for the ongoing riot that characterized Archer’s feelings for Morgan James.
“She’s…” Archer dropped onto the sofa beside his cousin. “She’s different.”
“Different how?”
Archer had not come around to his cousin’s town house to solicit Benjamin’s perspective on the baffling situation with Miss James. Surely a plot on the Regent’s life ought to be of greater interest to both himself and his cousin—if in fact a plot on the Regent’s life was afoot.
“Part of the difference is that she talks to me,” Archer admitted. “She has the prettiest voice, low and musical, as if there’s some Welsh in it, when I know it’s just that North Country lilt. And the things she says…”
“All the ladies talk to you. It’s part of what makes you such a good investigator.” Ben sounded amused, a shot he could take from the safety of his recently acquired marital bliss.
“Don’t be an ass. Your countess talks to you, and I’m certain you talk to her too. You tell her things you don’t tell anybody, about your boyhood, your daily frustrations and hopes, your body’s undignified little aches and betrayals. You tell her the fears and insecurities you used to not even admit to yourself.”
Morgan and Archer: A Novella Page 5
