Her breath choked. He planned to…wash her?
She swallowed nervously even as the idea tempted her so much that her thighs clenched. “You don’t have to—”
“Lean up,” he commanded gently.
She hesitated. No one had ever washed her before, certainly not a man. Yet knowing she had no choice but to do as he ordered, and not wanting another argument, especially when they were finally getting along, she fought back her uneasiness, closed her eyes, and leaned forward. Besides, it was only a bath. He most likely washed his horse once a week.
When his hands touched her shoulders and spread the soap across her bare skin in slow, soft caresses—oh, lucky, lucky horse!
She bit back a soft moan of pleasure. Everywhere his fingers brushed over her skin, heat radiated and chased away the last of the cold until she pulsed hot and tingling, the ache of the chill replaced by a far more electric one. As his hands slipped lower to languidly roam up and down her spine, a contradiction of sensations skittered through her. The slippery-smooth soap beneath his rough hands, not washing so much as massaging, the soothing warmth of the water against the exciting caresses of his fingers—she trembled.
“Are you cold?” he asked, mistaking the reason for her shiver, and poured warm water down her back. “Better?”
“Oh yes,” she sighed in a long exhalation, no longer bothering to hide her enjoyment. Her head sagged forward, and with his thumbs, he massaged the back of her neck and rubbed out the tension. Oh, this was nice…very nice.
He took her shoulders and eased her back against the tub, then reached for her arms to leisurely wash each one. Despite the heat of the steam drifting up from the water, she shivered as his soapy hands rubbed down her arm to her hand, then tantalizingly along each finger.
“You’re barely showing at all now, but you wouldn’t have been able to hide the baby much longer.” He gently lowered her left arm into the water and reached for the right, then started all over with the delightfully slippery caresses. Everywhere he touched, goose bumps dotted across her skin in his wake. “If someone was watching you, they’d have soon known.”
Her soft admission came as a breathless sigh. “I had a plan.”
“Of course, you did,” he murmured.
She thought she heard a touch of amused admiration in his voice, but all logical thought was driven from her mind at the wickedly scandalous feel of his hands slipping down under the water to reach for her leg, to begin the sweet torture of washing down her thigh and calf to her foot. She bit her tongue to keep back another soft sigh of pleasure, not wanting him to think her a complete wanton for enjoying a simple bath this much. But that was exactly how she felt, and she liked it immensely.
“Yardley has a sister in Glasgow who owns a dress shop. I was planning to go there, change my name—” She caught her breath when he ran his fingers between her toes. Oh, how much she liked that! If he kept that up…She licked her lips and forced out, “She was going to take care of me until the baby arrived. If it was a girl, I would have gone back to London to be with my family.”
“But if it was a boy,” he murmured, his hands moving to her other leg, his fingers gently kneading along her calf to her knee, “he’d be the heir to a marquessate.”
“Then we’d have stayed in Scotland, and no one would ever have known.”
His hands paused in their caresses. “You would have denied him his birthright?”
“Yes.” If it meant saving her son’s life, she would have done exactly that. This baby meant the world to her, and she would sacrifice everything to keep him safe.
“You would have had to live a lifetime of secrets,” he mumbled. “Could you have done that?”
“You have.” She opened her eyes to find him staring at her, his chocolate-brown depths warm and arousing in the firelight. “Your entire life has been a lie.”
* * *
Grey froze, his heart stopping for a fearful beat. His hand stilled against her body beneath the water.
What she implied was impossible for her to know. Impossible. He’d covered his tracks too well over the years for anyone to figure out the truth. Not even Edward Westover and Thomas Matteson. And especially not some society chit living in Yorkshire whom he hadn’t seen in five years.
Yet somehow, she knew. In the stormy blue pools of her eyes, as she waited patiently for him to let down his pretenses so they could truly be themselves with each other, he could see the truth. But there was no judgment on her face, no disdain, no pity—he thanked God for that, because he didn’t think he’d have been able to bear any condemnation for the way he’d chosen to live his life. Not from her. For some reason he couldn’t name, what Emily thought of him mattered.
He sat back on his heels, drawing his hand out of the water. “I’m just an army officer. No secret there.”
“Perhaps not,” she said quietly. “But what were you before?”
“Younger,” he quipped. Ignoring the sudden tightening of unease in his chest, he curled his lips into a half grin, the smile he used whenever he wanted to get his way with a woman.
But when she frowned like a governess, his grin faded. He should have known charm wouldn’t work on this one, not that he needed any more proof that Emily Crenshaw wasn’t an ordinary woman.
“Who I was doesn’t signify,” he stalled, hoping she would let the matter drop.
But of course, she didn’t. “It does to me.” She reached for his hand, and the warmth of her touch shivered through him. “Who are you, Nathaniel Grey?”
A forced shrug of his shoulders. “Just the runaway son of a blacksmith.”
“From Trovesbury Village,” she added flatly.
“Yes.”
Her eyes saddened, and he felt the force of her disappointment as fiercely as if she’d slapped him. “There is no blacksmith in Trovesbury named Grey. There never has been.” She laced her fingers through his, as if she could sense in him an urge to flee. “When Thomas told us you’d been wounded, I tried to write to your parents, to assure them that you had friends in our family and that we would do whatever we could to help.”
Oh God. His world began to rock beneath him.
“Even though the letters were franked, they weren’t received, so I contacted the local constable for help.” Her eyes fell to their two hands, her soft fingers interlocked with his rough ones, and humiliation curled through him. “He told me that there were no blacksmiths named Grey, not in Trovesbury, not in the entire county.” She took a deep breath. “Thomas doesn’t know. I haven’t told anyone. It’s your secret, after all—”
“Yes, it is,” he snapped.
Outwardly, she ignored that, but he felt her fingers tighten against his. “But I’ve told you all my secrets.”
His jaw tightened at her unspoken challenge as he asked sarcastically, “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine? Is that it?”
“I think,” she offered shyly, biting her lip, “I’ve already shown you all of mine.”
Sweet Lucifer, she had indeed, and a stolen glance confirmed it.
In the flickering shadows of the firelight, the water just tickled at her breasts, her nipples puckering from its warmth, while beneath the surface, her round hips gave way to impossibly long legs on a woman so petite that the top of her head barely reached his shoulder. And if he looked hard enough, he would see the tiny baby bump, barely visible.
In his life, he’d seen so many naked women that he couldn’t remember them all, stunning women who commanded the attention of every room they entered. But Emily…well, Emily was different. Quietly beautiful, alluring without trying. Simply lovely.
“I trust you, Grey.” She slipped her hand away from his and closed her eyes, and even though she sat within his reach, she suddenly seemed a world away. “I only wish you knew how much you can trust me.”
He stifled the bitter laugh that rose to his lips. She had the body of a woman, but still clung to the innocence of a child if she believed in trust. She, of all people, should
have known that there were some secrets that were meant to be hidden away, secrets that weren’t safe to reveal to the light of day.
Trust me. She had no idea how much she was asking of him, to trust her not only with his secrets but also with his life. If anyone found out the truth, his reputation would be ruined; his position in Spain would be repealed, and possibly his entire career at the War Office ended. Everything would be stripped away, and he’d be back in the streets. He’d fought too hard for too long to lose everything.
But if he didn’t tell her the truth, nothing would be the same between them. This fragile friendship they’d managed to carve out would shatter, and he’d never be able to confide in her again. If it had been any other woman asking this of him, he would have flat-out refused. But not Emily. The brat had gotten under his skin since he saw her standing in the garden with such fear in her eyes—no, perhaps this pull toward her had always been there, even when he’d kissed her all those years ago at Ivy Glen.
He muttered a curse of surrender under his breath. “All right, you win.”
Of course, she’d won. Truly, could there have been any other outcome, even knowing the admission she wanted would endanger his future? She trusted him with her life. He only hoped he could do the same.
“You’re right,” he admitted grudgingly. “My father wasn’t a blacksmith. Or if he was, I didn’t know it.” He paused. “I was an orphan.”
Slowly, she opened her eyes, and he steeled himself against what he expected to see in those sapphire depths—pity, contempt, disdain. Instead, all he saw was understanding and compassion. “Tell me.”
“Are you certain?” He’d never told anyone before about his childhood, nor did he plan on speaking of it ever again, so he needed to make certain she understood from the beginning the importance of this moment and the depth of the trust he placed in her hands.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Slowly nodding, his expression carefully stoic, he reached for the soap. “Then lean back.”
Emily stared at him warily for a moment, sensing that something had just irrevocably changed between them and that there would be no going back now.
She eased herself down against the tub. Until that moment, she’d felt no self-consciousness in front of him, and nothing about the bath had changed—she was still just as naked beneath the water now as she’d been five minutes ago. But this time when he lathered the soap between his hands and brushed it over her shoulders in long, caressing strokes, she trembled with vulnerability. There were no more secrets between them now, no more barriers of any kind. They’d both laid themselves bare, her with her body and him with his past.
“My earliest memory is from the orphanage when I was around three,” he began quietly. “I don’t how I got there or when. But it was either stay there or live on the street, and at least there, I had shelter from the rain and an occasional meal.”
“What was it like?” she asked breathlessly as he slowly reached for her leg, to massage down her thigh to her knee and calf.
His fingers lingered against her skin, drawing slow and delicate patterns against her wet flesh. “Exactly as you think…cold, dank, filth everywhere.” Delicious heat flared up her leg to the ache blossoming between her thighs. “We were left to run wild.”
“Wasn’t there—”
Her voice hitched as he stroked his hand up her inner thigh and nearly to the wet curls at her center, making her squirm in the warm water and distracting her from the details of his past. He wasn’t even bothering to pretend now that he was washing her. Sweet Lord, he was exploring her! It was scintillating. Scandalous. Wickedly sinful. And oh, she didn’t want him to stop.
But she needed the truth.
As his hand retreated back down her leg, she took a deep breath and tried again. “Wasn’t there a matron to oversee you?”
“Yes. But since she beat us, I doubt she cared what we did.”
“Grey—” He swept his hand up her leg again, this time letting his fingertips graze against her feminine folds before retreating, and a shiver tore through her. That time, he successfully distracted her, and whatever she was about to say fell lost forever.
“I never knew my parents. I made inquiries a few months ago, but nothing came of them.”
She tried to concentrate on what he was telling her, but she was rapidly losing her ability to breathe, caught between arousal and relaxation, swept away by his erotic caresses.
“I ran away when I was ten,” he continued, both with his story and with his tender assault on her body as his fingers closed around her toes and gently squeezed. “That was when I made up the story about having a blacksmith for a father and lied about being a runaway apprentice. Lots of apprentices run away, so I became just another. Eventually, I found a job as a stable boy for Viscount Henley.”
“Henley?” Closing her eyes, she licked her lips as he decadently rubbed soap between her toes, one by one. Oh, how much she liked that…and she suspected he knew, too, and was using her own body against her in distraction. “I know him—I mean, his family.”
Another long stroke up her leg to her thigh. “You know the dowager viscountess, I’m sure.”
“Lady Henley is a friend of my parents. She’s very…” Her voice trailed off into a soft whimper of disappointment at the retreating strokes back down her thigh to her knee, moving his hand away from the part of her that craved his touch the most and now pulsed hard in aching syncopation with her heart.
“Formidable,” he finished.
If his hands hadn’t been on her body, she might have heard the affection for the viscountess in his voice. But she was only aware of the way his fingers continued to erotically lather the soap against her skin and knead her muscles, sore and stiff from the long carriage ride. With a deep sigh, she melted beneath his seeking hands.
“So I grew up in the Henley stables and discovered I had a gift for working with horses.” He gently scratched his fingernails seductively along her inner thigh. “As soon as I could, I joined the army.”
“As a Scarlet Scoundrel.” Squirming as he drew slow circles against her skin, unable to sit still beneath the delicious torture the bath had become, she fought back a whimper. Well, he was certainly a scoundrel for bathing her like—
Her breath caught as she suddenly realized where the regiment’s nickname had come from. Little to do with battle, more to do with women. And if Grey were one of its most scoundrel-minded officers…God help her.
“Then you became a hero,” she breathed, unable to speak above a whisper.
“No,” he corrected, “I became a lurker.”
She opened her eyes, her lips parting. A lurker? She couldn’t have heard him correctly. “Pardon?”
With a devilish smile, he took her surprised reaction as an invitation to brush soap bubbles over her bottom lip with his fingertip.
“That’s what I do, brat. I lurk.” He traced the outline of her mouth, and the tingling of tiny bubbles bursting against her lips reverberated with the force of fireworks and made her tremble. “I live on the fringe of society, never completely part of that world.” His eyes slowly followed his hand as he trailed his fingers away from her mouth and down her neck. “Your world.”
But he was wrong. It wasn’t her world, and it never had been. As the daughter of an East India Company official, an exiled schoolgirl, then a widow, she’d spent her life exactly as he had…on the outside looking in. They were two of a kind, and knowing that made her feel even closer to him.
His hand paused at the hollow at the base of her throat. She forced herself to breathe calmly beneath his touch, but her heart beat so hard and fast at the realization of how much they shared that the blood pounded through her ears in a loud rush. He was the one she’d been searching for since she was sixteen, the man who understood how it felt to be an outsider, to be surrounded by people yet feel so terribly alone. And any doubts she had about him disappeared beneath the soft strumming of his thumb against her racing pulse. The sa
me soft stroking that now throbbed through every inch of her.
“I’ll never have their respect nor their confidences.” His fingers traveled lower, down into the water-beaded hollow between her breasts. She gasped as he began to draw small, tantalizing circles against the inside swells in the lather clinging to her skin. “I’ll never be welcomed into their drawing rooms or to their soirees.”
But he would be, and she’d make certain of it. Even as she bit her lip to keep back the soft whimper that rose inside her when his hand drifted lower, she promised herself that she would somehow find a way to make that happen.
His fingers slipped over her breast in a flutteringly light touch, barely grazing against her nipple, but the unexpected sensation jolted her with the force of a lightning bolt. She shuddered and bit her lip to keep from moaning, to keep from begging for more because she feared that if she did, then he would stop, the same way he’d stopped in the carriage. Yet between her thighs the pulsing ache continued to grow, and she shifted her hips against the side of the tub to keep her legs from shaking so hard they splashed the water.
“But it’s never bothered me.” Thoughtful reflection tinged his voice, oddly contemplative considering that he was drawing slow circles across his palm with her hard nipple. “In fact, it’s given me the freedom to move between social classes as I wish, belonging to whichever is most useful. I have the best of both worlds.”
When his hand closed over her breast, the low moan she’d been holding back fell helplessly from her lips. Shamelessly, she arched herself to press his hand even harder against her. Shivering, aching, yearning for more…only Grey did this to her. He aroused her in a way her husband never had, and when he gazed at her with heated desire, she knew what it meant to be wanted as a woman.
Every terrible minute of his life had brought him to this night. With her. Even as her mind fogged from his touch until she could barely think, she instinctively knew that if one piece of him were different she wouldn’t crave him like this nor feel the arousal he radiated through her. It was all of him that did this to her, and she wanted all of him.
Along Came a Rogue Page 10
