Unlacing Lady Thea

by Louise Allen

  When would he come? She studied her reflection in the glass, her confidence diminishing by the second. What on earth was it that Rhys found so desirable about her? Perhaps she should snuff out some of the candles....

  Their rooms were quiet and faced the back of the inn, not the yard or the busy street. The silence was broken by a dull thump from outside as though something had fallen. Thea caught her night robe tight around her and went to ease open the shutters onto the balcony. Was that a faint curse from somewhere outside?

  The moon was half-full, the sky clear and, as she glanced up, she caught her breath at the blaze of stars. Then a gleam of white to her left caught her eye. ‘Rhys!’ He was standing on his own balcony’s parapet and by his foot was a black hole where a stone should have been.

  ‘Damn thing fell off,’ he whispered.

  ‘Go back, then, it isn’t safe,’ she hissed back. ‘Come in through the door, for goodness’ sake!’

  ‘Less chance of being seen this way.’ He shifted his balance and jumped the four feet to the intervening balustrade and then down to the balcony itself.

  Thea removed her hands from her mouth where she had clamped them to hold in the scream and peered at the stonework. ‘This looks in very bad repair.’

  ‘Stand back.’ Rhys climbed onto the edge, and the stone beneath his feet rocked.

  Thea fought the instinct to try to reach for him and retreated to the far side. Rhys jumped, the stone teetered but stayed put and he landed and jumped down with perfect grace.

  ‘You idiotic man,’ she scolded.

  ‘I thought it would be a romantic gesture.’ He held the shutter for her, then followed her into the room. ‘Is the door shut? No?’ He strode across and locked it.

  ‘Romantic? You don’t have a romantic bone in your body.’ Thea plumped down on the dressing-table stool and tried to recover her breath. ‘I thought you would fall off—and a mangled lover at the foot of the wall is not at all romantic.’

  He grinned, unrepentant, and began to brush dust and lichen off his evening breeches, which were all he appeared to be wearing apart from his shirt, open necked. ‘I should have put riding breeches on,’ he observed. ‘Lord knows what Hodge is going to make of these.’

  ‘He has gone to the fair and taken Polly. Did you realise?’

  ‘It was my idea.’ Rhys looked smug. ‘I suggested he might like the evening off and he jumped at the chance. He even managed to keep a straight face while remarking that Polly might welcome the outing.’ He strolled towards her with what seemed dangerously like a prowl. ‘Why are we bickering about the way I arrived here and discussing our servants’ love lives, Thea?’

  ‘Because I am frightened,’ she admitted. Where had that come from? She slid round to the far side of the stool.

  ‘The other night you were lying naked in my arms.’ To her intense relief Rhys leaned against the bedpost. ‘I do not think that fear was uppermost amongst your emotions then.’

  ‘You are not mellow with red wine and I am not angry now,’ Thea explained, as much to herself as to him.

  Rhys smiled, lazy, dangerous and yet somehow reassuring. ‘We do not have to do anything.’

  Thea flickered a glance at the arousal that his thin evening breeches were doing nothing to disguise. ‘You are hardly going to be pleased about that.’

  ‘Thea.’ His voice was suddenly rough. It was not anger, but surely it could not be emotion? ‘We are friends. Old friends. I have never made love to an unwilling woman and I am not going to start with you. This is about what you want. If you do me the honour of lying with me, I will do my best to make you happy and I know it will give me great pleasure. But if your happiness requires me to go out of the door now, then that is what will happen—with no ill feeling.’

  ‘Not back along the balconies?’ Something bubbled inside her, something close to happiness tinged with the traces of that fear. But now it only gave the happiness a sparkling, dangerous edge.

  ‘If my lady commands.’ He had seen the change in her eyes; she did not have to tell him.

  ‘I think the door, later,’ she conceded. ‘I buffed my toenails.’ Rhys’s eyes crinkled into a smile. ‘I do not know why, because I really did not understand what you were talking about in the carriage.’

  ‘Then let me show you. Stay just where you are.’ He straightened and dragged off his shirt, then his breeches.

  Oh, but he was magnificent. She remembered the lanky boy swimming in the lake in his drawers and just had time to wonder where all that elegant muscle had come from before he was kneeling at her bare feet.

  ‘And very pretty toes they are, too.’ He lifted her right foot and the flounces of her night robe fell back, pulling the nightgown with it to bare her leg to the knee. When he sucked her toes into his mouth and did outrageous things with his hot, wet tongue, she did not giggle or shriek, only reached wildly for the edge of the dressing table and held on. And then he did as he had promised, and his tongue trailed up her calf to circle her knee before he switched legs, and her other foot was left tingling.

  ‘I have never been so shocked in my life,’ Thea panted. She had to say something, do something...

  ‘In which case,’ Rhys said as he got to his feet and scooped her up in his arms, ‘you haven’t been trying hard enough. Now for those deliciously ticklish bits.’ He laid her on the bed, her garments bunched into a mere froth of inadequate coverage at the top of her thighs, and bent her right leg.

  Those broad shoulders pushed her legs apart so she could do nothing but sprawl shamelessly as he explored the delicate skin behind her knee. It wasn’t ticklish; it was bliss. Wicked, wicked bliss. None of the books she had studied so surreptitiously had said anything about knees!

  And then, before she could recover herself enough to understand what he was doing, his mouth was buried in the curls at the junction of her thighs and his tongue had slipped into the secret folds. All she could do was fist her hands into the bedcover and try to stop herself lifting up to wantonly press herself against his sinful, clever mouth.

  One moment she was consciously fighting for control, the next something took her, took charge of her body, her mind, her soul and swept over her with an irresistible force. She heard a scream and felt Rhys move, there was a moment, or perhaps an hour—an entire night?—of dizzying pleasure and then she was wrapped in Rhys’s arms, his body hot and hard and strangely gentle as he held her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’ There were probably words, but she had no idea what they were or what language she needed to say them in.

  ‘Thea,’ Rhys said, his voice strangely husky, and then his weight was on her and she felt him nudging between her thighs, and she opened to him and tried to breathe as he pushed into her. So slow, not like Anthony’s painful, impatient thrust. Gentle, smooth, inexorable. He was very large and it was not exactly...comfortable. She shifted instinctively, tilted her pelvis and heard him groan against her hair and, strangely, that gave her confidence.

  There was discomfort. Her brain told her it was pain as he stretched and filled her, yet her body told her it was not. Her body welcomed it, sang with delight, arched against him, tightened so that the pain should have become worse, but instead became simply pleasure, shimmering through her muscles and veins, driving her thoughts into abject submission as they tried to tell her this had been an unpleasant experience before.

  But that was not Rhys. She caught at the vanishing thought and sought for his mouth. There. Kiss me. At last. Oh, kiss me. I love you....

  His body arched over her, muscled, hard, tense to breaking point, every sinew, it seemed, straining. Thrust and withdrawal, thrust, in a rhythm of spiralling tension and pleasure. Their skin was slicked with the heat of effort and the warmth of the night and her nostrils were filled with his masculine scent and what she hazily realised was the musk of their lovemaking.

  She needed to be closer to him somehow, anyhow. Thea curled her legs around Rhys’s hips and he cried her name and held still for
a second like a hawk poised to plunge. The strange tightening, spinning sensation swept through her again as he thrust and his mouth found hers. Thea was distantly aware of him leaving her and cried out in protest. And yet, as she lost herself utterly, she felt Rhys holding her, surrounding her, kissing her. I love you.

  * * *

  Rhys stirred and drifted up to consciousness. He had been here before, his arms around these soft curves, his nostrils teased with the scent of rose and this warm, sleeping woman. But this time they were not on a makeshift bed on a ship and this time he did not have to conceal the all-too-evident fact that his body was ready and eager to make love to her. Rhys smiled into the darkness and nuzzled the soft skin below Thea’s ear.

  She mumbled something and wriggled more firmly into his embrace, but she was clearly still asleep. Faintly the sound of the church clock striking four drifted through the latticed shutters. There was a perceptible lightening at the window.

  Time to go. He would have to wake her so she could lock the door behind him. The temptation to slide into her, wake her that way, was considerable. And inconsiderate, Rhys realised. He had no right to assume Thea would want to make love again. Her curiosity had been satisfied and, very likely, that flare of desire for him had been quenched. For him it was going to take some time to get the need for her under control if Thea decided that enough was enough.

  Could they go back to the way they had been before? No, because that had been founded on his lamentably slow realisation that his childhood friend was a woman now. So what next? Rhys indulged himself by running her hair through the fingers of his left hand, the one that was free and not under Thea’s ribs, fingers curved around her breast.

  They could continue with this and it would become an affaire, or they could stop now, and find a way of coexisting until they reached Venice. Was that possible? Rhys had never been friends with a mistress and had never had to live in close proximity with one after the relationship had ended.

  But he could not compare this to those past liaisons. Those had been, at heart, a business matter. True, he had done his utmost to give pleasure as well as gold, but it had still been a transaction. And this? Honest mutual desire, as simple and as fiendishly complicated as that. Because he had taken the innocence of a respectable lady, never mind that she had not been a virgin. To all intents and purposes Thea had never made love before, and she could have gone to a husband’s bed with a very good chance of him never realising that someone else had been before him.

  Now, not. Although, knowing Thea, he thought she would carefully explain to the man that she was not an innocent before matters progressed as far as a proposal. And then the proposal would not be made unless the suitor was head over heels in love with her and, given that she was hardly going to find herself courted by some idealistic nineteen-year-old, that was not likely to be the case. Grown men had more sense than to fall in love.

  He should, he knew perfectly well, offer her marriage. And he could imagine, with a searing clarity that brought him thoroughly awake, what Thea would say to that. He had shaken her faith in him quite far enough by thinking she would accept a suitable marriage to Giles Benton. She wanted to marry for love, and she expected him to understand and support that.

  It was a relief, of course. Thea was far from the placid, domesticated, undemanding lady he needed to marry. House, home and children would not be enough for her. She would demand to be involved—when she was not doing something outrageous like reading unsuitable books or climbing trees. That would be fine while they agreed. But when they did not? When that enquiring mind of hers decided she was not happy with one of his opinions or decisions? Would she then be wishing she was not tied by vows and friendship?

  But the biggest barrier of all was that she expected to be loved, and he could never feign that besotted state—she would see through him with one sharp glance from those clear hazel eyes. He did not know how to make that unquestioning surrender any longer, and Rhys found he could not bear the thought of hurting her.

  ‘Wake up, Thea,’ he murmured into her ear.

  She stirred and then, without saying anything, wriggled round in his arms and kissed him, finding his mouth, it seemed, by blind instinct.

  Rhys fought the urge to follow where that kiss was leading. He lifted his head. ‘Sweetheart, I have to go.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Her hand slipped down between their bodies and Rhys groaned. Four warm fingers and an erotically enterprising thumb closed around his erection. ‘Thea, if I don’t go out of the door now it will be the balconies later.’

  That worked. Thea rolled away. ‘You are not risking breaking your neck again.’ She slid out of bed, groped her way across to the shutters and opened them, letting in the faint grey light of dawn to bathe her unashamed nakedness. ‘Brrr. It is cold out here.’

  ‘Then get back into bed.’ Rhys winced as his feet hit chilly boards, but he pulled on his breeches and found his shirt as briskly as he could, trying not to look at the pale dawn ghost that was Thea as she flitted about the room setting things to rights. ‘Or put on your robe and slippers.’

  To his secret disappointment she pulled her nightgown over her head. ‘I’ll get back into bed when you have gone,’ she promised. When he padded over to join her by the door she put her head on one side and laughed, clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle the sound and stood there, eyes twinkling at him.

  ‘What?’ He knew he sounded grumpy with the sheer effort of not throwing her back onto the bed and having his way with her.

  ‘You look like a tomcat going home after a very wild night on the tiles,’ Thea said, and reached up to stroke his hair into some kind of order.

  ‘Well, and so I am.’

  ‘At least you did not yowl at the moon.’

  ‘Oh, I did,’ Rhys said with a grin and bent to brush his lips over hers. ‘Inside I was making enough noise to have every boot in the neighbourhood thrown at me.’ He eased the door open and checked the corridor, then slid outside and shut the door before she could reply and make him laugh even more than he was tempted to do now. Tomcat, indeed!

  He reached his room without so much as seeing a sleepy-eyed boot boy. What would be heaven, of course, would be a wife for duty and Thea for fun. And passion. And something else he could not quite put his finger on. Friendship, he supposed.

  Rhys threw off his much-abused clothing and got between his own chilly sheets. The bed needed to look slept in, so somehow he was going to have to try to sleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Thea shook out the bedding to remove any betraying jet-black hairs, remade the bed then got in to toss and turn it into a convincing state. That took ten minutes in all. After a further two hours tossing and turning she sat up and ran her hands through her tangled hair in exasperation.

  What idiocy had made her think that one night in Rhys’s arms would be enough, that she could keep the memory like a pressed flower in an album to be taken out and sighed over in pleasant reminiscence? All she had achieved was to make her long for him more, with the added torment of now knowing exactly what she would be missing every night for the rest of her life.

  And he will be married to his dull, respectable wife and it will be positively sinful of me to feel jealous of her. Why did I assure him one night would be enough and that I would not ask for more?

  It was all very well and good being undemanding and honourable and doing everything to make him not feel he was under any kind of obligation but... No, she had been right. The only thing worse than not having Rhys in her bed would be him being there, but knowing it was out of pity.

  There was a faint scratching at the door. ‘My lady? Are you awake?’

  Thea opened the door to find Polly beaming with good humour. ‘Would you like your breakfast in your room, my lady?’ She came in and flung the shutters open. ‘What a glorious morning it is! We don’t get sunshine like this in London, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Breakfast here would be excellent, thank y
ou, Polly.’ And would have the advantage of giving her some time before she had to face Rhys under Giles’s perceptive eye. Possibly she could manage not to blush like a peony when she was dressed.

  ‘Not that it’s much like a proper breakfast. The food’s all right over here—better than I thought it’d be—but there’s nothing to set a body up for the day in those mimsy little pastries, now is there?’

  After countless breakfasts with her father demolishing bloody beefsteaks and fried eggs, Thea was grateful for chocolate and croissants and some fresh fruit. ‘It suits me very well,’ she said. ‘I’ll have my washing water first, though.’

  ‘You’ve had a restless night,’ Polly observed, flapping the bed into some sort of order as she passed it. ‘And you’ve put your foot right through the bottom of this sheet, my lady.’

  ‘Oh, dear. I must make sure it is added to the accounting.’ She escaped behind the screen to hide her scarlet cheeks. That must have been Rhys.

  * * *

  ‘Did you have a pleasant evening at the fair?’ she asked when, washed, dressed and feeling rather more composed, she sat down at the little table on the balcony. It was a miracle that Rhys hadn’t managed to demolish that on his way to her room.

  ‘It was lovely, my lady. I bought ever such a pretty lace trim for my Sunday best and a handkerchief and some soap. And there were swings and jugglers and a fortune teller.’

  ‘And did you have your fortune told?’

  ‘John...Mr Hodge, I should say, teased me until I did. But he had to come in with me or I wouldn’t have been able to understand a word!’

  ‘Sit down and tell me what your fortune is to be,’ Thea urged.

  ‘Ooh, my lady, thank you. Well, I’m to meet a dark man with grey eyes who is good with his hands and much travelled and we’ll fall in love and live happily ever after and have three children. What do you think of that, my lady?’

  ‘That possibly it was being translated by a dark man with grey eyes?’ Thea teased.

  ‘Could be, my lady.’ Polly’s pink cheeks dimpled into a smile. ‘Not that I mind him taking an interest, mind you.’