Pen felt the change come over him. It scared her a little—he was more intent, harder to dissuade. But her own excitement rose with his and when she felt the tip of his penis against her body she arched, trying to feel more of him. “Slow down,” he advised, though it was the last thing on earth he wanted. He wanted to drive the full-length of himself into her over and over until he shattered, but already he could feel the tight resistance holding him at bay. It didn’t worry him. He took a nipple into his mouth and set his thumb against her clit and set up a gentle, rocking rhythm with his mouth, hand and body that made her head turn and turn on the pillows.
Pen was beyond thought, beyond pain. There was only pleasure, not gentle in the least, but driving, almost violent, though Robin wasn’t doing anything in the least violent to her. He switched to the other nipple. Her body was stretched and open and she knew his possession of her was hurting, but it did not register as pain. He, too, seemed pushed beyond endurance, the slow, rhythmic movements with which he’d begun deteriorating into deep, strong thrusts, his voice gravelly when he breathed words in her ear: “Take all of me, Pen.” She did. Sweat formed and broke in droplets, rolling into the valley between her breasts. He bent his head and licked it up. She was close, close to letting go and he wanted to make it last forever, to spin out the pleasure until she couldn’t take anymore, but the demands of his own body wouldn’t let him. He stopped. He flexed his hips, thrusting as deeply into her as he could and held himself there, not moving. She lifted her hips, seeking. “Don’t,” he ground out, and she stilled. He looked down at her, face flushed and damp, eyes dark with pupil, lips abraded. “Do you want to come?”
Her hips rocked again. “Yes, yes, yes.” She barely had the breath to speak, but as soon as she did he moved—just his thumb, rubbing steadily over the sensitized, wet flesh of her clit. Her mouth opened. Her head went back. He bit her neck, unthinking: a mark that would show later. Pen felt her body—all feeling centered in the spot he touched—spiraling upwards, one notch at a time, and at the same time bearing down, contracting more and more tightly on the length and breadth of him inside her. He felt it, too: he dropped his head to her breasts and sucked in air, and just as she splintered, the pleasure at an unsustainable, shrieking pitch, he pulled out of her, almost all the way, and shoved back in, hard, and went taut in every muscle, spasming into his own release.
They lay as if dead, though death could not be so pleasant. Awareness returned. He fell to one side, relieving her of the most part of his weight. Language returned, but proved, Pen thought, to be of little use. No one, no matter how learned or eloquent, could describe what this felt like. Movement returned, but the sheer lassitude was overpowering. Robin scrunched down in the bed until his face was level with hers. Her skin gleamed, the straight hair around her face succumbing to a curl or two from the perspiration. When she felt him watching, her eyes opened. “You won.” But it was amusement her voice was full of, not reproach.
“I’ll still help you,” he said magnanimously, the gracious victor. And when he leaned forward and kissed her on the nose, giving it a quick little lick in the process, the laughter gurgled in her throat. He skated his fingers lightly across her ribs in hopes of getting that sound again. He loved making her come, but he loved the sound of her laughter as much.
She swatted his hand and rolled away to stretch luxuriously. Then she curled up beside him. Silence ensued. Her eyes roamed the room. He wondered, as in the barouche in London, what she was thinking. There had been women he’d wanted to bed, but they hadn’t proved to be women with whom he could share a companionable silence afterward. “It’s a beautiful house,” she said finally. “Though not so grand as I expected.”
He looked away from combing his fingers through her unbound hair. “It’s not the earl’s residence. That’s as grand as you might think.” His tone was more disparaging than proud. “This is my house. It belonged to my grandmother.”
Distracted from the pleasure of the mobile fingers playing with her hair, Pen looked up. “Aren’t they all your houses?”
He hesitated before continuing. “Almost everything down to the last hayrick is entailed to the earldom. It belongs to whomever happens to be the earl, which I grant you,” he said before she could allude to the obvious, “is me.” His broad-palmed hand slid to her shoulder and began to stroke lightly from shoulder to elbow; she wasn’t sure he was even aware of the motion. “But if I was just a man, if I had nothing else, this house and everything in it would still be mine.” He grimaced. “She knew we were all going to pay hell for it, but I don’t think she cared.”
Pen hitched herself up, rearranging pillows against the headboard. “What do you mean?” He took the opportunity to study her in this new position: one breast pushed up by an arm, the curve of her waist, the skew of her long legs tucked up to her body. He couldn’t see between her thighs and wanted to and decided not to be greedy. Pen shifted a little under his perusal, but clearly he wasn’t finding fault with the view.
Robin dragged his attention back to the conversation. He was not, like many men, given to endless discourse on himself. “I have a brother and a sister—both generously provided for, but not earls—everyone thought this house would go to one of them.” One hand came to rest on her knee, the thumb stroking gently. The other scrubbed through his hair. “It caused a ruckus. Though,” he added after a moment, “in the most seemly way you could imagine.”
Pen could imagine: it was the difference between the Black Swan and St. Mary-le-Bow in a nutshell. “Shouting would have been better,” she said decidedly, and he looked up from his close inspection of her knee, assessing her.
“Much better,” he agreed. “And the thing is—” He stopped. Pen waited, not speaking. He was debating whether or not to tell her what was in his mind. His hand tightened on her knee. “And the thing is, I was unholy glad of it, even though the general agreement was that I didn’t deserve it and certainly didn’t need it.” He shook his head. “I still am.”
Pen understood exactly. “I have—” He watched her unblinkingly. She discovered in herself a deep reluctance to proceed. But he had. “I have a ring from my mother.” Pen found she could not meet his eyes. “It’s the only thing I have of hers, except these.” She widened her eyes. “It’s a man’s ring, a facet-cut amethyst with the initial H inlaid in diamonds and rubies. The thing about it—” She looked up at the ceiling, drowned in dismay by the tears coming into her eyes. “The thing about it is that Salamandre could have sold it a hundred times over for my keep, or given it to the convent.” She pushed the tears out of her eyes and shook her head when he moved to comfort her. “And that would have been no more than just. But she kept it for me. And I’m so glad of it.” She smiled at him. “Don’t look sad,” she instructed him firmly. “I’m not sad.”
“No?” was all he said, and went back to plying his fingers through her hair. She must have lived with Salamandre then, for at least part of her life, he thought. He wasn’t sure she realized she’d just confessed it.
She watched him. Nothing so intimidating now, the glorious member lay flaccid against his thigh. She sighed. “You’re so pretty.”
He winced a little. “Masculine?” he suggested. “Handsome? Virile?”
“Oh, those, too,” she assured him. He looked better with his clothes off, or at least she felt so. Like his house, he was so correct in all his proportions that the overall effect was one of harmony. But he was also warm and smelled good and had creases at the corners of his eyes, and he made her laugh.
“Keep looking,” he warned her mildly, “and it will change.”
“Really?” This notion appeared to fascinate her. “If I just look at it and think…thoughts,” she said suggestively, “and—oh!” She wasn’t backing up now, he noticed. “Do they all do that? Or is yours different, or—” She watched him collapse into laughter. “What?” She sounded, and it made him laugh even harder, slightly offended. “These are good questions. If I stopped watching woul
d it shrink?”
He was stretched full-length on the bed now, and amazingly he yawned. “Sometimes it might, but at the moment—” he looked at her speculatively “—no.”
Since he didn’t bother to mask it, even she could read the desire in his eyes. Her belly filled with warmth. She rearranged herself until she was lying next to him. “Well, then?” she said.
His heart had begun to beat in time with his rushing blood, or perhaps it was the other way around, but he made a belated attempt at chivalry. “You’ll be sore.” Her lids dipped; he couldn’t fathom what she was thinking.
“All right,” she whispered.
“More sore,” he clarified. “It’s like…” he sought for an analogy. “It’s like riding a horse for the first time.” His breath hitched when she slid a hand over his belly. “The muscles are there, you just haven’t used them in that particular way before.” He groaned in satisfaction when she wrapped her hand around him and the throbbing intensified, harshly insistent. He struggled to hold on to his train of thought. She was laughing for some reason, which was good, or might be.
“Is that what it was like for you? Riding a horse?” She was laughing at him, he realized, but with her head buried in his chest and her hand on his cock, searching slowly for a rhythm, it was hard to mind. Then the meaning of her words sank in. His face flamed. “God, no! Of course not. I didn’t mean you—” She stopped his words with a kiss.
“All right,” she said again, and gave his cock a gentle but unmistakable little tug.
He rolled her so fast she gasped. He slid on the slippery, viscous fluid, entering her easily, but the size of him was another matter altogether. Watching her face he asked, “Too much?”
She nodded. “Don’t stop. I want you.”
She was more than the sum of her parts. He felt buoyant; a kind of wildness took hold of him, centered on her. It was joy, though he wouldn’t have called it that. He set a strong, steady pace and held to it for a long while. She grew desperate and sweaty and he kept her pinned down beneath him. “It’s not going to happen so fast this time,” he warned her and proceeded to prove it in mind-dissolving detail. It was not that he held back. He gave everything unstintingly, a generosity Pen took for granted because she’d never had the misfortune to suffer through its absence. And it was not that he refused her anything; he would have done anything she asked. It was as if their bodies met in the tacit agreement to ride it out together. Her body rose to his will, or his body bent to hers, but they met in accord. For Pen it was not the same spiraling, blinding pleasure as before. She reached a plateau and stayed there, working her body around his, striving and staying in the same place. At a certain point she simply gave way to a convulsive orgasm and he just gathered her up and kept going in the same steady, driving rhythm until a great wave rolled over the top of him.
Breathing as if he’d run for miles, Robin contemplated Pen with an emotion akin to amazement. A kind estimation of his proclivities would be that he’d seen a lot in his years of sexual congress. A more cynical eye might deem him to be sexually jaded. But he’d never seen a woman give way like that, with him and with him, falling into it without so much as a murmur. It made her rare to him, and made the act itself seem gut-wrenchingly new. Pen stirred, making unmistakable and unwelcome signs of rising. He snaked an arm around her waist and hauled her back down. “Where do you think you’re going?” And then more gently, “Stay with me.”
Pen couldn’t know he’d never asked it of a woman before; she did not remark on it, only said quietly, “I mayn’t. I told the London staff I was going to Holborn, and Holborn thinks I’m back at the London house.”
He frowned, pulling the coverlet up around her shoulders. There was a slight resistance all through her body now; he could see her in her own mind’s eye getting up, returning to the London house, the return journey back to Cheyning Court. The pit of his stomach rebelled. “When must you be back?”
“By dusk, at the very latest.”
He tucked her hair behind her ears, smoothing the ends over her breasts. “You have time yet. Rest. Sleep if you like. I’ll wake you. It won’t be dark for a few hours yet. And—” he paused, listening “—it’s still raining.”
Pen studied his face and with the shift in her attention he felt some of the tension drain from her body. He used the coverlet to pull her into him, and she allowed it. There was nothing in his face now of the passionate lover so recently met and matched. It was just his face, serious and thoughtful, looking back at hers. She relaxed into him.
“Good,” he said, his arms coming round her shoulders, his chin finding a resting place on the crown of her head. And, “Thank you,” he said.
She subsided. She lay with him in a swamp of peace, boneless, thoughtless, free from worry for perhaps the only time in her adult life. For no other reason than that he wished to know, he said, “How do you feel?”
She yawned, hugely. “As if you’d taken the sun and placed it in my body and made it rise and burn its hottest and set, all in the selfsame hour.” Her eyes were shut; he did not need to hide the naked astonishment in his expression. He shifted a little and she moved with him. She slept.
Silence settled over the house. His secretary had discreetly disappeared, along with his valet. Mrs. Hobson would no doubt be rattling sabers in the kitchen, but he couldn’t hear it from his bedchamber. Slanting bars of light wove in through the shutters and fell across the wood floors, telling the time in their own silent way. The rain stopped. Robin did not sleep. He was not sleepy. He lay and felt as though every desire had been satisfied, a near impossibility for him and rare, he suspected, for any being walking the earth. He did not need to wonder about Pen. She was here, a warm, heavy weight under one arm. The peace of this allowed his mind to roam over mountains and across oceans to a place he had always wanted to see called America, which had fought a war when he was four years old in order to be free of what they called tyranny and the king, and men like him. A vast land, as Britain had never been, and wild, as Britain once was. The even rise and fall of her breathing perhaps informed these thoughts of things rising and falling: moons and oceans, armies, nations and earldoms.
When it was time he woke her, and she sat in the middle of his bed and dressed while he, naked, retrieved their clothes from various locales around the room. He stood and watched her fasten her stockings to her garters with her skirt flipped up so she could see—his mouth dry with envy and the blood rushing to his groin—and turned away to dress so she wouldn’t.
“Shoes?” she asked.
“Downstairs, I think,” he said, stuffing his foot into a boot.
She was smiling when he looked up. “You should see your hair,” she said in explanation.
“You should see yours,” he retorted, a comment that would have sent any other woman of his acquaintance rushing for the nearest mirror. She only went on a search for hairpins; by sifting through the covers and turning the pillows she found enough, and by the time he had got the other boot on, tucked in his shirt and combed his hair, she was presentable. Her wooden heeled shoes made small clicking noises across the marble floors of the entry. At the door he said, “You’ll take my carriage. It’s waiting.”
She demurred, wrinkling her nose at him. “I’ll walk through Green Park.”
“It’s going to rain again. Take the carriage.” He frowned as an errant drop hit his outstretched hand.
“Does everyone always do exactly as you say? Doesn’t it become dreadfully tedious?”
“Yes,” he said. “It does.”
“Then I’m going to walk and it will do us both good.” The smile she gave him turned his knees to water.
He motioned to the footman, who jumped down obligingly from his perch at the back of the carriage and waited, an unwieldy bird stranded at the gate. “I’ll send the carriage round to the other side of the Park in case you have need of it.”
It was time to go, but still she lingered on the step, the afternoon’s slanting rays gi
ving way to evening. “You try all your life to be good, and then—”
“And then?” he prompted.
She only shook her head in mute apology. “My mind is a sieve at the moment.” But her body was singing a song of its own creation, lighter than air. She turned to go and he spoke from behind her.
“Who are you, Pen Montague?”
At the top of the steps she looked back and shrugged. “Half my mother. Half my father.” And turning, she went down them.
He watched her go. A fine mist was falling, but she had thrown back the hood of her woolen cloak. She hadn’t found enough pins; he could see her hair coming uncoiled as she walked. She reminded him of an old tale his Nan used to tell him in the nursery, about a girl in the forest and a wolf. And if she was the girl in the red-hooded cloak, that meant he was the wolf. And he couldn’t for the life of him remember what happened in the story after the wolf caught the girl, because the wolf always caught the girl. That was what made the story memorable. Did he keep her? Did he let her go? Or did he stand in the doorway of his grandmother’s house on a Tuesday afternoon and watch her walking away through the trees?
Pen walked, her hair falling down. The tears filled her eyes and she let them fall. There was no one to see. The light was going. Ahead of her on the path, a man waved.
Standing at the top of his stairs, the carriage waiting below for his instruction, Robin’s belly tied itself into a hard knot. His chest seemed to shrink back, pressing on his heart. Penelope had disappeared into the trees; the simmering dread flared into panic. “Wait,” he said to his driver. He patted his waistcoat pockets, a man needing something he doesn’t have. He wore not cravat, no coat, no hat or cloak. “Around the park,” he said, and plunged down the steps. He sat white knuckled in the carriage. One voice said, Nothing happens in a park in broad daylight—though it was, in truth, no longer day. It’s murky in the trees, another voice said. Footpads lined the paths, waiting for lonely passersby after dark—though it was, in truth, not yet dark. Please, he prayed. Please be wrong. The fear made him sweat. At the west corner of the park, where the road narrowed, a dray incorrectly loaded had overturned. The horses, placid in the face of disaster, stood patiently as they were cut from the harness. Robin exited the carriage. A light rain had begun; the fat, pattering drops hit his bare head. “Come round when you’re clear,” he shouted up to Lubb, who touched the brim of his hat in acknowledgment. Robin paused to get his bearings, or hers, rather: where she had entered the park and where she would come out. He began to run. He left the path, crossed an open space and ducked into a line of trees. The rain falling on the leaves made the sound of an irregular heartbeat. Pen was on the other side, hood pulled up, talking to a coster who had let go the handles and was pointing at something in his cart. “Pen!” Robin shouted her name, an alarum. She whirled at the sound, throwing her hood back, worry vivid in her face.
The Earl Takes a Lover Page 4
