by Julie Kenner
He reddened, and a muscle flexed in his jaw. Without a word he turned and struck off down the street again.
Well. She stood watching his broad shoulders trying to shake off some of the conflict they carried. He seemed to have a conscience after all. He knew that the position they’d forced her into wasn’t right. It didn’t change anything, but that discovery felt like a small victory.
They soon found a firm called Halliwell, Soames, Make-peace and Bickering; it turned out to be just a few doors away from a stationer’s shop where they stopped to inquire. The clerk, an older woman, said that the shop supplied office materials to the firm and, without being asked, revealed that Thomas Bickering had just been made a partner there.
Jack thanked her and turned to go, but Mariah lingered to purchase some new pencils and another writing pad, and asked the clerk if she were acquainted with Mr. Bickering.
“I am. A fine young man.” There was genuine admiration in the woman’s eyes. “Alwus tips ’is hat to women…ladies and shop girls alike.”
“A ringing endorsement from the shop-girl contingent,” Jack muttered as he held the door for Mariah.
“A woman could do worse than a man who is polite to people of all stations.” She shot him a look as she stepped onto the street.
Thomas Bickering’s name had just been added to the sign hanging above the pavement, painted onto a board tacked below the names of the other partners. Mariah’s pulse picked up as she stared at the change. At least Mr. Bickering was clever enough to advance in his chosen career.
The lobby of the firm’s offices gave an impression of solidity and worth…wooden paneling, large windows and comfortable leather chairs in a waiting area set off from the clerks’ desks by a heavy railing. The young man at the desk in the reception area confirmed that Thomas Bickering was indeed a member of the firm and was at that moment on the premises.
Mariah gave him her sunniest smile.
“We have it on the best authority—the Earl of Chester—that Mr. Bickering is a very capable solicitor. We’ve had something of a journey and are anxious to meet with him.” When the clerk looked doubtful, she handed him their calling cards. “Surely he can find a few minutes in his schedule for us. The work must be started today if it is to be finished in time for the wedding.” She glanced at Jack, who looked as if he were biting his tongue.
“I’ll see if Mr. Bickering has some time to give you.” The clerk looked from her to Jack and then down at their names. “And may I offer sincerest congratulations. Matrimony seems to be in the air these days.”
As the fellow strode off, Jack leaned closer with a glower.
“You know, you’ve made him think we’re—” He cut off that alarming thought. “Do you always play so fast and loose with the truth?”
“I prefer to think of it as creative use of the facts,” she countered in an emphatic sotto voce. “I can hardly barge in, demand an accounting of his personal life and then tell him he’s been instructed to marry me.” She looked up with a taunting smile. “That’s your job.”
The clerk returned to usher them down a hallway with: “You’re in luck. Mr. Bickering has a most important engagement this afternoon, but he has agreed to see you for a few moments.”
Mariah held her breath as she entered her potential husband’s office.
Thomas Bickering was a man in his thirties, moderately tall and of medium build, with brown, prematurely graying hair. He looked a bit frazzled, sitting behind a large desk in an office full of crates, boxes and half-filled bookshelves. His new office, no doubt. As he rose to greet them she assessed his face—pleasant, if a little ordinary; his eyes—clear and watchful; and his handshake—firm and businesslike. He invited them to be seated in the chairs the clerk scurried to pull from under stacks of papers.
“Well, Miss Eller—” He tugged his cuffs self-consciously.
“It’s Mrs. Eller,” Mariah said sweetly. “I’m a widow.”
“Oh.” Flustered slightly, he cast about on his chaotic desktop for paper and a pen. “Well, then, this makes more sense. A second marriage. Property involved, is there?”
“I knew the earl wouldn’t steer us wrong,” Mariah said, putting a hand on Jack’s sleeve. “You see how quickly he’s assessed the situation?”
“And you—” he consulted Jack’s card for his name “—Mr. St. Lawrence. Have you been married before?”
“I have not, b-but—”
“Mr. St. Lawrence has numerous properties and family to whom he has made certain promises,” she inserted. “We felt it only prudent to discuss the situation with someone knowledgeable and seek professional advice.”
“A wise course of action,” Bickering said, smiling with fresh warmth at Mariah. He had a nice smile; his countenance became quite attractive when it appeared. She experienced a quiver of feminine interest. “If only more people would be so rational upon entering into marriage. It is, after all, a solemn responsibility as well as a joyous undertaking.”
“So it is.” Mariah studied the man, trying to square that statement with his presence on a list of potential husbands for a prince’s mistress. A joyous undertaking. Perhaps there was more to him than met the eye.
“I own an inn on the Edinburgh Road, north of Lincoln, which I wish to continue to operate after my marriage,” she said with a sidelong glance at Jack. “Though I will likely be spending time away from it.”
“Moving to your husband’s home, no doubt,” Bickering said, looking increasingly uncomfortable under Jack’s increasingly stony regard.
“Yes, but there are circumstances—” She laid a hand on Jack’s sleeve again. “Would you mind leaving us for a few moments? I have a matter to discuss with Mr. Bickering in private.”
“Private?” Jack straightened. “Anything you have to say can be said in front of me.”
“I would draw on Mr. Bickering’s experience in a delicate matter.” She ordered him to the door with her eyes, eager to test the new sense of possibilities that had come over her. Perhaps…just perhaps…being married again wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to her.
“All the more reason I should be here.” He scowled, clearly offended by the notion of personal contact between her and her prospective husband.
“Don’t be silly, it has nothing to do with you. I simply want to consult Mr. Bickering’s experience.” She pulled Jack up by the arm and bustled him out. When she had closed the door behind him, she leaned back against it, facing Thomas Bickering, who had risen with them and stood watching her with visible confusion.
She smiled.
“Tell me, Mr. Bickering, do you think marriage is a wise choice for a woman of independent means?”
“The right marriage, Mrs. Eller. Certainly.” His confusion melted into heartfelt sincerity. “The right marriage is far more than a civil arrangement for providing heirs and apportioning property. It is a partnership of souls crafted out of love, respect and commitment. As such, it is one of the greatest gifts life has to offer.” His gaze shifted and warmed subtly, as if he were seeing something not quite material. “Had I believed otherwise, I would never have asked my sweet Cynthia to marry me.”
“Your—” her jaw dropped “—Cynthia?”
OUT IN THE hallway, Jack St. Lawrence paced and fumed. If there hadn’t been so many people around, clerks trundling back and forth with arms full of legal folios, he’d have had his ear to the lock. Why did lawyers have to have such damned thick doors?
But he didn’t really have to hear; he already knew what she was up to. He could see it as plain as day in his mind. She was swaying across the room…removing her scented gloves with mesmerizing leisure…gliding around the poor wretch’s desk like the Serpent in the Garden…all while interrogating him suggestively about his table manners and gambling habits and corset preferences. He could guess what came after that: a sampling of the wretch’s amorous skill. Or lack thereof.
He made himself take one deep breath and another before he lunged for th
e knob…and managed to stop himself. Charging back inside would be tantamount to admitting that he cared that she threw herself at the lawyer. The satisfaction that would give her would be just too humiliating. Growling quietly, he stepped away from the door.
Voices rose after a few minutes and the door opened, startling him away from the wall where he had been leaning. The lawyer escorted Mariah out with a chummy hand on her elbow. Her gaze was lowered, but she was smiling, and Bickering’s face was red and his eyes were unnaturally bright. Clearly, something had happened between them.
“Good to meet you, St. Lawrence. Let me know if I can be of further service.” The lawyer offered Jack his hand while consulting his pocket watch. “Must be on my way. Can’t afford to be late—not for this.”
With a gracious nod, he abandoned them to rush down the hall, retrieve his hat and exit via a side door. By the time Jack turned back to Mariah, she was moving in the other direction, headed for the reception area, straightening her hat and donning her gloves as she went.
He waited until they were on the street and walking briskly in the direction of the hotel before demanding, “Well?”
She looked as if she was concentrating on something as she stopped abruptly on the pavement.
“Chocolate,” she declared. “I’m dying for a piece of chocolate.” Peering up and down the street, she spotted something that looked like a sweet shop down the way and struck off for it.
“What?” He was caught flat-footed.
She wanted chocolate? Now?
Infernal female.
He followed her into a shop that specialized in gustatory decadence. The air reeked of edible sin—melting sugar and tempering chocolate—and the place was crowded with ornate glass cases containing confections displayed like the blessed Crown Jewels. She selected piece after piece of chocolate-covered nuts, nougats, crèmes and caramels. After the clerk had assembled a sizeable collection into a pink pasteboard box, she instructed the woman to give the bill to Jack, seized the package, and exited the shop.
When he caught up with her, she had pulled out a nougat the size of a Yorkshire pudding and was nibbling it. He stepped in front of her to block her way, and she looked up with lips laced with chocolate and eyes luminous with pleasure. Wordless, she held up the candy to offer him a bite.
“I want—” His mouth was watering so profusely that he had to swallow in order to speak. “I want to know what happened with Bickering.”
She popped the rest of the piece into her mouth and closed her eyes, radiating such indecent pleasure that two men passing by slowed to leer at them. It was all he could do to keep from shaking her. Or licking her. Odds were even on which.
“A-are you marrying him or not?” He tried to keep his voice down.
“Not.” She dabbed the corners of her mouth with the crumpled candy paper, gave an enormous sigh, and headed toward the hotel.
“Not?” The news struck him like a blast of fresh air. His whole body relaxed. Annoyed by his relief, he hurried after her. “Why not?”
The look she gave him from the corner of her eye was infuriating. She was tormenting him and, from every indication, enjoying it.
“The hotel man indicated that there were dressmakers and milliners in the next street,” she said with a wave in that direction. “I really should have a look before we leave tomorrow morning. Their work may not be quite London quality, but I imagine they’ll have some things of interest.”
“We’re not going anywhere until I have a straight answer from you.” Glancing around and finding the street around them mostly empty, he snagged her arm as they approached the hotel. “Why did you reject him?”
“Does it matter? We simply go on to the next candidate.”
“Not until I know why you refuse to wed this one,” he demanded.
“Very well.” She tugged her arm free. “He was genial, gentlemanly, intelligent, mannerly…perfect in all respects but one.”
“And that was?” He could think of only one criterion just now, staring at her chocolate-tainted lips and imagining her using them on the accommodating lawyer.
“He’s being married this Saturday to the daughter of the head of his firm.” Her face sobered. “Which I believe makes him ineligible as a husband for me. I don’t know where you got his name, but he’s been betrothed for more than a month now. And to a young woman he dearly…well, he seems to be quite smitten with her.”
Cutting off further discussion, she quickened her pace to the hotel, past the doorman and through the lobby. With the box of chocolates dangling from one hand and her skirts held primly in the other, she swept up the stairs. He had to take the steps two at a time to catch up with her on the second-floor landing.
“Did you find out he was to be married before or after you kissed him?” he demanded with an urgency that should have embarrassed him. But his heart was pounding, his vision narrowing and his head was filling with the scent of the chocolate on her breath.
“A moot point, I believe.” There was a trace of something like regret in her voice as she sidestepped him to continue to her room.
Determined to have an answer, he bounded up the stairs and down the hall to plant himself in her path yet again. What was it about the woman that incited him to such extremes? He’d never behaved like this with a female in his life—brash, irritable, impulsive. Get hold of yourself, man!
Standing over her, he clenched his hands and made himself swallow.
“Well?”
For a moment she stared straight ahead, visually scorching his shirtfront, then raised her face to him.
“Did you kiss him?” he demanded.
“What do you care?” Her eyes, dark-centered in the dim hallway, sought his. Whatever she saw in him caused her to smile in a way that melted the bones in his knees. “Unless, of course, you would prefer to be kissing me yourself.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners. Lights in their depths twinkled. “Which would be perfectly understandable, after this morning. I’m a delectable kisser.”
His gaze dropped to her lips and his mouth opened and then closed soundlessly. With her words ringing in his head like a bell, he managed to make himself take a step backward and allow her to pass.
It was a mistake to watch her walk away, he knew, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the sway of her hips, the curve of her spine, and the errant curls at the nape of her neck. He was suddenly galvanized by the memory of the feel and the taste of her.
Like a spectator inside his own head, he saw himself go after her, turn her and swoop down on her mouth.
7
THERE WAS no squeal, no gasp, not so much as a breath of resistance as he bore her back into the shelter of the nearest door frame. Her lack of shock hinted that she had expected this. The way her arms lapped around his neck said she had wanted it, too.
Plunging into the taste of chocolate, the velvet of her mouth, and the responsiveness of her tongue, he found himself instantly detached from the moorings of his life…adrift…suspended in time and place. Suddenly there was no before or after; this contact, these sensations were all that existed. His body caught fire and unbidden, he wrapped both arms around her, lifting her, holding her fiercely against him, kissing her with a hunger he had forgotten he possessed.
The door behind her opened unexpectedly, and his embrace was all that kept her from falling backward through it. A man’s shocked face appeared briefly through the haze in his vision, and then the door closed with a resounding thud. Operating with only a fraction of his faculties, he managed to turn her, shift them both across the narrow hall and work the knob of another door. When it opened, he carried her into the room with him, stifling the question of whose room they’d entered, and pressed her back against the wall, kicking the door shut.
Her body molded to his as he leaned into her, and her hands cupped the back of his head to pull him closer. Her mouth was alternately tender and yielding, then firm and demanding as she sought new combinations of position and pressure against his. The pl
ay of her tongue inside his lips, and the way she raked his lips with her teeth sent voluptuous sensations spiraling through him. Her words were no boast; she was a delectable kisser.
He could have stayed there for hours, immersed in kissing, licking and tasting her, feeling as if together they had just invented that oral entree into pleasure, but there was so much more of her to experience. He trailed his lips down the side of her face to her throat, kissing, nibbling and registering that her head sank to the side to give him access. The sight of her tongue laving her lips, compensating for the absence of his, sent a bolt of electricity through him.
His arousal was full-blown and urgent and his hands burned with the need to feel her bare skin.
THIS was what she wanted, Mariah thought, pushing aside all other thought as she leaned into Jack’s body and luxuriated in the pleasure spreading along the underside of her skin. This was what he’d denied her that first night…this erotic resonance…this tingling in her lips, drawing hunger in her breasts and gathering fullness in her sex.
His hands slid over her hungrily, tracing the rim of her corset and the mounds above it. She stretched, hoping to give him access to the nipples tucked into the edge of the boning, but found herself too respectably wedged inside it. With a moan of frustration, she slipped her hands between them and he inched back—without abandoning her lips—to give her room.
“Buttons,” she whimpered as she worked them with trembling fingers, “too many buttons.” When her jacket opened, she realized there was another whole rank of them at her back and looked over her shoulder with a groan.
With a wicked laugh against her throat, he peeled the jacket down her arms and tossed it to the side. Before she could catch his hands and direct them to the rest of her buttons, he slid them down her hips and thighs and began reeling up her skirt and petticoat. He dipped so that his fingers could find the tops of her garters, then glide up her sensitive thighs to the frothy silk of her knickers. He muttered something vehemently appreciative.
