His Reluctant Lady

by Aydra Richards

  An odd feeling, that.

  David couldn’t remember working so hard for a simple kiss in the entirety of his life. Somehow it seemed terribly unfair that even his dedicated efforts yielded no more than stillness, acquiescence. She had withdrawn into her head, experiencing but not participating.

  “For the love of God,” he muttered against her lips, “one would think you might dredge up a little enthusiasm.”

  The criticism hit, and she went stiff and furious. Her lips parted, no doubt to deliver a scathing rejoinder. He took the opportunity instead to sink his tongue into her mouth, stealing the words away from her. Despite her sharp tongue she tasted sweet, like champagne and raspberries, and he knew she had indulged herself at the refreshment table before retiring to her chaperone’s corner. His tongue stroked hers and he felt, with no small amount of triumph, the shudder that trembled through her. His fingers kneaded the tension from the nape of her neck as he eased closer, and he heard the rustle of her skirts as his legs compressed them.

  There. Finally. Just the tiniest canting of her head to accommodate him, a tentative flick of her tongue. Triumph crested and swelled for an instant, until it flew from his head as her right hand landed on his shoulder. He tensed, expecting her to push him away—but her fingertips flexed on him, and her palm cupped his shoulder as if to steady herself. Then, slowly, as if unsure of herself, she let her hand wander, drifting toward his neck, and she curled it around his nape in an echo of his own hold. In mimicking his actions, she was learning how to react.

  The heat of her skin seared him through the thin fabric of her glove. Her fingers were delicate, slender—they slid into the hair at the nape of his neck, raking his scalp. It shouldn’t have affected him—this was positively banal by his standards. But it did affect him. Somehow this awkward, mouthy spinster and her curious, almost speculative touch, had stirred him in a way that countless trysts had not. He shuddered as his thoughts were sheared from his mind, scattering in the darkness. The kiss took on a life of its own, no longer an idle challenge undertaken of boredom and juvenile contrariness, but something that took hold of him and wrenched every other consideration from his head. There was only the silky sweetness of her mouth, the dainty forays of her tongue to his own. Her breasts were crushed against his chest; he hadn’t even been aware of pressing her back into the bookshelf, pinning her in place with the expanse of his chest, the force of his hips against the cradle of hers.

  He felt more than heard her shocked gasp, the quiver of surprise that slipped down her spine. But he wasn’t yet ready to surrender her, and so he nipped her lower lip and dragged her back down into the kiss with him, until the tautness left her once more. His free hand found the indent of her waist, slid between her back and the bookshelf, and pulled her more securely against him. Heat blazed through him, scorching in its intensity—on impulse, he released his hold on her neck to grab a fistful of her skirt, the fabric heavy and unwieldy in the rough grip of his fingers. But she froze as he lifted it, as the cool air rushed in beneath her skirt.

  It doused her passion as thoroughly as a bucket of water splashed into her face would have. Instantly the arm that had clutched at him began, at last, to push him away.

  “My God,” she breathed, horror dripping from the muted syllables. “Oh, my God.”

  A queer sense of loss assailed him for half a moment, before David realized that he had very nearly lost his head over a simple kiss with a woman who could not possibly be less to his taste.

  She wrenched her arms between them and gave him a firm shove, and he found himself too unsteady, too rocked by the bizarre situation in which he’d found himself, to do anything more than allow her to propel him away.

  All of that proper, icy disapproval had fled from her face, and she looked at once terrified and bewildered, her brows drawn, her trembling mouth trying and failing to form any sort of set-down. “My God,” she whispered again. And then she turned on her heel and fled as if she feared he might give chase.

  David ignored the strange flutter in chest, loath to admit even to himself that for a moment he had been so tempted.

  “Whisky,” he said to himself, surprised by the husky tenor of his voice. “I have got to find some whisky.”

  Chapter Seven

  Poppy had spent the remainder of the evening holed up in the retiring room, having claimed a stomach ailment to Lady Winifred, who had promptly glared and shooed her away. Unfortunately the lack of activity in the retiring room had resulted in altogether too much time to think, too much time to consider what had passed between herself and Lord Westwood.

  What had possessed him to kiss her? Furthermore, what had possessed her to kiss him back?

  Well—perhaps that was not quite so difficult to answer. A terminal case of curiosity, coupled with the realization that she would likely never get another such opportunity to discover for herself what that sort of thing was like, to uncover the sort of sensory details one could only learn through personal experience. It had been a critical bit of research, a sort of study into what her heroines might be thinking or feeling, and her head was filled with all sorts of minutiae that she had never before considered. How one’s pulse raced, how two people could fit together, how one breathed when one’s mouth was otherwise engaged, what one did with one’s hands.

  Or one’s tongue.

  She suppressed a shiver. That she had never expected. And she wondered if it was the usual way of doing things, or if his lordship was just particularly wicked.

  Probably she should have pushed him away the moment he had approached her with any sort of intent. But the temptation to have her questions answered at last had been irresistible. Where else was she meant to learn of such things? Only now she had ended up with even more questions, and she suspected the answers to them would never be found in any research material to which she could ever hope to gain access. Such things were almost certainly not printed in books—and even if they were, it would be a futile endeavor to hope that she would ever be allowed access to them.

  She drew a steadying breath, surprised at the erratic wanderings of her own mind. Sensible, she reminded herself. She was sensible, and rational, and above all things logical. Simply because her pleasant, ordered world had been shaken in the last few hours did not mean she had become anything other than who she was. She could view the…encounter with an analytical eye, a novelist’s critical detachment, and file it away for further use that absolutely did not involve agonizing over any sort of romantic delusions.

  She was most certainly not the sort of woman with whom his lordship would engage in a torrid affaire. And even if she were, it would not justify courting the sort of danger that could ruin not only herself, but Victoria and Isobel by association. What manner of wild impulse had struck his lordship to kiss her, she would never understand. But neither did she need to—it would never happen again.

  ∞∞∞

  David had taken his leave of the ball immediately after his disastrous encounter with Miss Poppy Fairchild. And it had been disastrous.

  Even the copious amount of whisky he had poured down his throat had failed to erase the taste of her from his tongue. She had lingered anyway, rising past the harsh burn of the liquor to tease his palate with the fresh, sweet flavor unique to her.

  He didn’t understand it. He’d kissed countless women in his life, and none had ever affected him as she had done. None had loitered in his mind longer than their brief encounter; none had troubled him after he’d left them.

  Of course, none of them had displayed even the tiniest hint of innocence. It had to be the novelty of her, the tentative curiosity she had shown. He had known what to expect from his previous partners, known what they had wanted, known that they had all been worldly women, keen to give and take pleasure.

  There could be no such expectation with Poppy. She had no idea what he had wanted of her—she had been puzzled by a simple kiss; she could never have dreamed of anything beyond it. Perhaps he had grown so jaded, s
o inured in cynicism and ennui that her naïveté had been refreshing.

  Poppy. Who had a name like Poppy?

  It was too unpretentious, too lighthearted to belong to a woman of her severity. Agnes might have suited her. Or perhaps Esther. Something biblical, maybe, or staid, to suit her temperament. But Poppy? That name belonged to a woman who laughed and flirted, who wore gowns of dampened silk and thought nothing of using her feminine wiles to coax men to make fools of themselves over her.

  He doubted she had any sort of feminine wiles whatsoever, not with that mouth that always seemed to look as if she’d bitten into something sour.

  But somehow tasted sweet as raspberries.

  Damn. Either he had developed an alarming predisposition toward the maudlin, or the whisky was having an adverse effect on him. He considered the decanter in his hand for a moment, weighing the potential of blissful forgetfulness over the possibility that he might also veer toward waxing lyrical over Miss Fairchild’s surprisingly tempting bosom, or the sleek silkiness of her hair.

  No. No, he would not take that risk. He plunked the decanter down upon the sideboard and resolved to call it an early night.

  It didn’t occur to him until he was settling into bed that since his encounter with Miss Poppy Fairchild, Elaine hadn’t crossed his thoughts even once.

  ∞∞∞

  Poppy had finally decided to take a chance on sleep near dawn, after a few hours of frantic writing. She’d produced an additional two installments that were sure to outdo even her latest scandalous scribbling. Mr. Plessing would print them, of course, but she worried about the consequences of it. It was not so terribly uncommon for a hue and cry to be raised over literature that was deemed against public decency, and her writing had most certainly become that of late.

  Still, she didn’t doubt that it would sell. It was simply that each further step toward salaciousness endangered her—would Mr. Plessing’s efforts toward maintaining her anonymity stand up to public scrutiny? If anyone found out—

  No. It didn’t bear consideration. Victoria and Isobel would likely find acceptable suitors by the end of the Season, and with any luck they would be safely married long before any scandal broke. As soon as they were secure, Poppy could simply return to Bath, or—or lease a small cottage for herself somewhere in the countryside, and whatever aspersions London society chose to cast upon her character wouldn’t matter a bit.

  Her precious pages safely tucked away in her drawer, Poppy prepared for bed as quietly as she could manage. Lady Winifred had the room across the hall, and the woman could get dreadfully snappish if her sleep were disturbed for any reason. Despite her advancing years, the woman had the keenest ears Poppy had ever encountered.

  Poppy brushed out her hair and settled into bed, wincing at the sight of the flecks of ink that dotted her nightgown. At least this was a garment that Lady Winifred would not see, and therefore could not criticize. She settled into the narrow bed, mentally calculating the number of gowns she possessed that yet remained free of ink stains, and thus would not offend Lady Winifred’s delicate sensibilities. There might be call for a new gown after all, though she would have preferred to reserve her funds for the purpose of seeing her sister safely settled.

  She rolled onto her back and curled her arms around her pillow. Soon the servants would begin their morning rounds, though she fancied all of them knew better by now than to heed Lady Winifred’s orders to wake Poppy before noon. Breakfast had quickly become something that other people ate, given the late hours she kept scribbling away at her desk.

  Her shoulders ached from sitting hunched over the desk for hours, her fingers cramped from gripping the pen—but her talents, such as they were, were all that stood between them and poverty, and to let her determination slip, even for a moment, could have disastrous consequences for all of them.

  Just occasionally, however, she let herself consider how nice it would be, for once, to be a lady of leisure. To never have to worry about the butcher’s bill, or the rent, or how to keep the girls in appropriate clothes. She couldn’t recall the last time she hadn’t been plagued with worries, with responsibilities. Papa had eschewed any sort of filial duties toward them well before he had passed on, and Poppy had taken up the reins out of necessity, but she did wonder what her life might have been like—what she might have been like—had she ever been allowed to be young and merry.

  A vision of Lord Westwood’s face danced behind her closed eyes. What a louse he was—she doubted he had ever had to consider anything more serious than what waistcoat to don, which intricate knot to tie into his cravat. And he had accused her of having a frivolous name! She hadn’t experienced anything that remotely approached frivolity in years, whereas he lived a life of it.

  A sliver of guilt speared her, because she had used him, and he had unwittingly served as inspiration for her latest work. Even if he was a lecherous, indolent nobleman, it was rather unfair of her to criticize him for it when in fact she had benefitted from it.

  But he had kissed her. She turned away from that worrisome fact, flopping over onto her stomach to bury her burning face in her pillow. It didn’t merit thinking about—she planned to ignore it, pretend it had never happened. So long as he gave her the same courtesy, there was no reason for anything else to come of it. They did not precisely move in the same circles, after all. Though they might occasionally be found in the same room, there was no reason for them to meet again, no reason that they should ever speak to one another.

  And once Victoria and Isobel had married, there was no reason that they ought ever to encounter one another again.

  But somehow the thought brought just as much melancholy as it did relief.

  Chapter Eight

  Noon found David sprawled out on the sofa in his library, nursing a headache and a tonic his cook had prepared as a sort of remedy to the aftereffects of imbibing too much whisky. But the tonic tasted worse than the headache felt, and he’d managed only a few tiny sips for the sake of politeness before setting it aside and collapsing back upon the sofa in a rather undignified sprawl.

  Fenton, the decrepit butler whom he was almost certain had seen his family through four generations and yet still showed no signs of ever tottering off the mortal coil, grumbled from the doorway, “Lady Nettringham for you, sir.”

  On the heels of his pronouncement, the lady herself swept into the room, her brown hair artfully coiled upon her head, and her lithe body sheathed in a charming lilac day gown. She clutched a roll of papers in her hand, and her face glowed with fury and righteous indignation.

  “How dare you,” she snarled, flicking the fingers of her free hand at Fenton, who politely bowed out of the door and snapped it shut.

  “I beg your pardon?” David asked, not bothering even to lift his head from the sofa. If she wished to swan into his home in a magnificent temper, she’d damn well accept what courtesy he chose to give her. Which, given his present condition, was little indeed.

  She stalked across the floor, her fury snapping her spine rigid, and thus he was not even treated to the delicious roll of her hips as she moved. “How dare you,” she repeated, and cast the roll of papers at him. They struck him somewhere about the middle, and he snatched for them with clumsy fingers before they could roll off onto the floor.

  “I cannot believe you would do such a thing,” she seethed. “I might be a widow, but I must insist upon discretion! I’ll not be bandied about London for gossip and—and this filth!”

  “My lady,” David said wearily. “Suppose you simply told me what has got you in such a fuss.”

  The papers in his hand had been twisted and crinkled, as if someone had clenched them in a tight fist, and David carefully spread them out again. Miss Ainsworth’s Mistake leapt across the top of the first page. “A serial novel?” he asked, glancing back up at her. “What’s it got to do with me?”

  “As if you didn’t know!” Her blue eyes narrowed spitefully, her mouth twisted into a feral snarl. But when his be
musement failed to yield even to her obvious disdain, she hesitated, her fury faltering into confusion. “You really don’t know?” she asked. “You don’t know Rebecca Waring?”

  “Who the devil is Rebecca Waring?” He sat up at last, shading his eyes against the light that poured in through the far window.

  “She’s…she’s a novelist,” Lady Nettringham said, smoothing awkwardly at her skirts. “She’s quite popular. She writes such scandalous Gothic novels. I swear half the Ton is quite addicted to her work.” A light flush spread across her cheeks as she gestured to the roll of papers he held in his hand. “The newest chapter of her latest work came out only today. Everyone who is anyone will have a copy. Only it’s…it’s not fiction.” Her gaze drifted away from his, and an awkward silence fell between them. “You probably ought to read it.”

  David had never understood the fascination with Gothic novels, but some eerie sense of foreboding settled upon his shoulders, and he smoothed out the pages once again and began to skim them. It ran along the same vein as his general understanding of such works: a plucky heroine, a mysterious man with an air of danger, a manor house that was inevitably haunted and constantly cast in shadows no matter the time of day, owing perhaps to a generally gloomy weather pattern or perhaps just having been steeped in pathos. He flipped a page, and halfway down his brows lifted. This was—this was—

  Plagiarism.

  He’d been right that night he’d kissed Lady Nettringham in the corridor—there had been a spy in their midst. Someone who had kept to the shadows and jotted down every word, every kiss, every caress. Someone who had stolen their intimate encounter and splashed it upon a page for all of London to see. A hot surge of anger swept over him.

  “I’m going to sue the publisher,” Lady Nettringham ground out, her delicate fingers curling into fists. “I’ll force them to stop printing it, I’ll—”