And so, when he lifted his gaze to her beautiful arrogant face, he began to comprehend, whether he wanted to or not, what the thing was that kept stabbing at his heart.
“I understand,” she said. “I’ve turned out to be a disappointment to you. You might have set aside your personal dislike if I’d been a woman of experience. But to have to tolerate my odious personality as well as play tutor is asking too much.” She looked out the window. “It isn’t your responsibility, as you said. Merely because you started something, unintentionally, you aren’t obliged to finish it. Merely because you introduced me to a neglected part of my education, I shouldn’t assume you must complete my training. The subject is hardly esoteric. It isn’t as though I can’t find someone else to continue my lessons.”
“Someone else? Who the devil do you—But you’re not serious.” He essayed a laugh while he recalled how Helena Martin had invited her friend to come out and make “a more agreeable surprise” for Sellowby the scandalmonger.
“There’s no accounting for tastes,” she said. “Some men enjoy my company.”
“That lot of drunken lowlife scribblers in the Blue Owl, you mean,” he said. “Well, let me explain something to you about men, Miss Messalina Grenville: It isn’t your personality they appreciate. Or your intellect.”
“We’re entering Frith Street.” She turned away from her window. “Not a minute too soon for you, I’m sure. Still, you can bear my thanks, I hope? I was exceedingly glad to have you along this night. I found that man very disturbing. It was comforting to know you’d have no trouble dispatching him. As you demonstrated.”
The carriage stopped before her house.
Vere was still staring at her, the “someone else” blaring in his head like a bugle in time to the furious drumbeat of his heart. “There isn’t going to be anyone else,” he choked out above the inner roar. “You only said that to make me—” Not jealous, it was ridiculous to be jealous of a man he only imagined. “To make me do what you want. The way you manipulated me last night. It’s a taunt, that’s all.”
The carriage door opened. Jaynes could be quick enough, curse him, when it suited him—which usually happened when it was least convenient for Vere. But Jaynes was in a fearful hurry to get home, before any of his acquaintances spotted him in the ignominious role of coachman.
“I beg your pardon,” she said ever so politely. “I did not mean to taunt. Would you kindly step out of the vehicle, Your Grace? Or would you rather I crawled over you?”
Jaynes stood there, taking in every word, obviously, for he’d both black eyebrows lifted nearly to his hairline.
Vere threw him a threatening look and climbed out. Before he could put out his hand to help her, Grenville nimbly alit, and without pausing moved swiftly to her door.
“Wait,” Vere told Jaynes, then hurried after her.
“What are you telling me?” Vere demanded as she paused to fish out her key from a pocket of her spencer. “I’ve corrupted your morals, is that it, Grenville?” He moved to block the door. “Is that what I’ve done?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m not a lady, but a journalist, and everyone knows we haven’t any morals.” The slim hand holding the key waved impatiently. “Do get out of the way, Ainswood. I’m not blaming you for anything. There’s no need to make a scene.”
“Not blaming me?” His voice rose. “Oh, no, certainly not. All I did was start you on the road to ruin. No harm done, no, indeed. Only that you’ve taken it into your hollow little head—”
“Keep your voice down,” she said. “You’ll upset the dog. She doesn’t like it when strange men shout at me.”
“Devil take the curst dog! You can’t dare and daunt me with someone elses—”
“I was not—Oh, there, now you’ve done it.”
Vere heard it, the muffled thumping from somewhere within the house, and then the unmistakable bark of a mastiff, and not one in a friendly mood. The sound appeared to emanate from the bowels of hell. Even with house walls between them, Vere could feel the vibrations in his teeth. The windows rattled.
“Oh, yes, I’ve done it.” Vere stepped back from the door and shouted above the animal’s din. “And you’re too late, Susan. I’ve started it, and now there’s no holding her back. You’d better get used to strange men, my girl, because—”
“Devil confound you.” Grenville pushed the key into the lock and pushed the door open. Then she grabbed his arm, pulled him inside, and slammed the door behind them.
The next thing Vere heard was a furious roar.
It all happened in the blood-chilling space of a heartbeat: He saw the dog leap—Death, black, hurtling toward them with fangs bared—and tried to push Grenville out of the way. But she flung herself against him, shielding his body with hers.
“Down, Susan!” she shouted.
“DOWN, DAMN YOU!” he roared as the beast lunged.
Vere sagged back against the door, his arms wrapped tautly about his would-be savior, while he waited for his heart to recommence beating and his gut to unknot itself.
He saw the dog trot back down the hall, where a flustered maid grabbed her collar. With an apologetic glance at the pair at the door, the maid took Susan away.
The mistress’s last scream—or possibly Vere’s bellowed command—had evidently penetrated Susan’s homicidal brain, for they both seemed to be in possession of their limbs.
Vere didn’t know how the dog had managed to stop herself mid-attack. He hadn’t been watching, but moving, trying to turn to take the brunt of the assault.
He understood mastiffs. He’d grown up with them at Longlands. They were not vicious or high-strung by nature. Unless ill-treated, they were, generally speaking, even-tempered. They could be trusted with children. Still, they were dogs, unamenable to reason and deaf to even the master’s command when their blood was up.
His gorgon might have been mauled…killed.
It was a damn fool thing to do, getting in the way of a maddened mastiff.
To shield him.
Vere brought his hand up to the back of her neck and tunneled his fingers into her hair. The cap, knocked askew when she’d flung herself upon him, fell to the floor.
“You’ll be the death of me, Grenville,” he whispered raggedly.
She tilted her head back and her blue eyes flashed.
“If you had kept still, she wouldn’t have tried to knock you down.” She raised her hand and pushed at his chest. “She was only trying to scare you away.” She pushed again. “You’re crowding me, Ainswood.”
Crowding her. Vere had lost about ten years of his life in the horrifying moment when the dog sprang, and he was certain he’d simultaneously sprouted a large crop of grey hairs.
His hands slid down to her shoulders. He wanted to shake her. He started to. But her eyes shot sparks and her mouth was parting, preparing to deliver more brimstone, and he bent and clamped his mouth upon it so he wouldn’t have to hear it, whatever it was.
She still pushed at his chest, and her other hand beat against his lower ribs: slow, hard, angry blows…once, twice, thrice. But even while she struck, her mouth softened under his, and she returned his kiss in a slow, sensuous surrender that melted his knees. His brain melted, too, along with all the excuses he’d piled there: Innocents were too much trouble; this one was impossibly arrogant and headstrong and fancied herself a match for any man; she was a bluestocking, the most loathsome of female species, et cetera, et cetera.
He was no saint. He’d never learned how to resist temptation. He had an armful of it now, and neither the wit nor the will to let go.
She circled his tongue with hers, and pressed her ripe body to his, moving against him to the slow beat of her hand, this time upon his back.
He’d taught her too well, or she understood him too well. The door to his heart was thick; one needed a battering ram to get in.
She hit him, and not gently, while she offered herself to him.
He didn’t know h
ow to shut her out.
He caught her punishing hands and brought them down to his waist and held them there. Slowly, through the deepening kiss, her fists uncurled. Then her hands began to roam, over his waist and up over his back, and down over his buttocks and hips, and up again.
She was no longer shy, and that unbashful touch burned through his garments and seared the skin beneath. Refusing to burn alone, he caressed her in the same deliberate way, dragging his hands up to rove over her back and down her proud spine to the waist his hands so easily spanned and downward, over the luscious arc of her derriere. His heart beat to the sensuous rhythm she’d set, driving the blood through his veins at the same throbbing tempo.
In a distant corner of his mind, a beacon flashed in warning, but it couldn’t penetrate the thickening heat of desire.
He wanted. Nothing else mattered. He wanted the scent and taste of her and the silken purity of her skin and the voluptuous curves of her long body. The wanting pulsed in nerve and muscle, in every fiber, a fierce hammering need, like physical blows.
He dragged his hands over her, as though his touch were enough to mark every cell of her as his.
When she broke the kiss at last, the beacon flashed again, only to flicker out as she trailed her mouth along his jaw and down to his neck. He branded her in turn with his mouth, along her smooth cheek and down the silken arc of her throat. He drank in the taste of her and the skin-scent of smoke and lilies and something else. “Dragon scent,” he murmured. “My beautiful dragon.”
She shifted against him, and he felt her hands tugging at the buttons of his waistcoat.
No longer shy; far from it.
She stroked over his shirt and laid her hand over his heart, where there was no hiding the truth from her, no concealing its wild hammering.
He was past wanting to hide the truth, even if he’d known how. He was past reasoning in any way.
Mindless, he was pulling at buttons, drawing back fabric warm with her warmth. It whispered as he pushed it away. He found the hot silk of her skin, and teased himself, lightly stroking over the swell of her breast, letting his thumb play over the tight bud while he heard her catch her breath and let it out with a faint cry she couldn’t keep back.
She pushed nearer until her pelvis pressed against his rod, swollen and all too eager to accommodate.
The beacon flashed once more, but he buried his face in her neck and dragged her scent deep into his lungs. The warning light went out, smothered by sensation: Her skin was velvet against his cheek, warm silk under his lips.
He was aware, searingly aware of her hands, tugging at his shirt, then scorching over his skin.
His own were busy, too, searching for the waistband of her trousers, for the buttons, the flap opening. He found it—and in the same instant, a jab of sensation darted from his elbow to his shoulder.
It jolted him into a moment’s consciousness. He blinked stupidly, like a drunkard, sotted with lust. And in the next instant he focused and saw that it was a doorknob his elbow had struck, and it was attached…to a door.
The door.
He had her against the bedamned front door.
“Jesus.” He lifted his head and dragged in a lungful of air, then another and another.
He felt her hands slip away, heard her shuddering breath.
“Grenville,” he began, nearly choking on his thick tongue.
He saw her hands move unsteadily to her garments and clumsily refasten what he’d undone. “Don’t say a word,” she said, her voice as thick as his. “I started it. I’ll take the blame, the responsibility, whatever you like.”
“Grenville, you—”
“I’m out of my depth,” she said. “That’s obvious. I should be thankful, I suppose. Only I can’t quite get to that yet. I understand now what you meant last night about getting in a bad mood.” She shut her eyes, opened them. “You didn’t mention anything about one’s vanity being hurt, but that’s just as one deserves, isn’t it?”
“Damnation, Grenville, don’t tell me I’ve hurt your feelings.” His voice was too sharp, too loud. He tried to level it. “For God’s sake, we can’t do it against the front door.”
She pushed away from the door, picked up her bundle, and started down the hall.
He started after her. “You don’t really want me,” he said. “It was the heat of the moment. The excitement. Danger is arousing. You shouldn’t come within a mile of me, Grenville. I’m a bad influence. Ask anybody.”
“I’m not exactly a model of goodness myself,” she said. “If I were, I should never be attracted to a worthless degenerate like you.”
She punctuated the statement with an elbow to his ribs. “Go away,” she said. “And stay away.”
He stopped then and let her go. He watched her march, spine straight and arrogant rump swaying, the last few paces to her study door.
She opened it and without a backward glance at him went in and shut it behind her.
He stood unmoving, unsure, his mind the churning mess it usually was in her vicinity. This time it roiled with “someone else” and all the lies he told himself and whatever stray bits of truth managed to survive in the hellhole that was his brain.
In that seething pit, he discerned one glaring truth, the most humiliating: It was the “someone else” he couldn’t bear.
This was the most unfortunate truth for her, but it couldn’t be helped. She’d been so unlucky as to cross his path, and more unlucky still to pique his interest, and now…
He shouldn’t even think it because, of all the depraved things he’d ever done or thought of doing, what he contemplated at this moment took the prize.
Still, he was the last Mallory hellion, dissolute, conscienceless, et cetera, et cetera.
What was one more crime in a lifetime of sins and outrages?
He advanced to the study door, pushed through it.
He found her dumping the chemise’s contents onto her desk.
“I told you to go away,” she said. “If you have one shred of consideration—”
“I don’t.” He pulled the door closed. “Marry me, Grenville.”
Chapter 10
Ainswood stood before the door, looking like a shipwreck. His coat and waistcoat, both rumpled and dirty, hung unbuttoned. He’d lost his neckcloth—probably with Lydia’s help—and his shirt had fallen open, revealing the powerful lines of neck and shoulder and a tantalizing V of masculine chest. His snug trousers were stained, his boots scuffed.
“Marry me,” he repeated, drawing her gaze back to his face. His eyes were dark and his countenance had taken on the hard-set expression she’d seen before. It signified his mind was closed and she might as well talk to the door he was blocking.
She wasn’t absolutely certain what had put wedlock into his head, but she could guess: a belated attack of conscience, a misguided notion of duty, or the simple male need to dominate. Most likely it was a random mess of all three, with a dose of charity and probably several other noxious ingredients thrown in.
In any event, regardless what he meant by asking, she knew that marriage meant male dominance—with the unquestioning support of all forms of societal authority: the law, the church, the Crown. By everyone, in short, but the dominated gender, the women, whose enthusiasm for this state of affairs ran from strong (among the misguided few) to nonexistent (among the enlightened). Lydia had in her late teens taken her place among the latter and had not budged from that position since.
“Thank you,” she said in her coolest, most resolute tones, “but marriage is not for me.”
He came away from the door to take up a position across the desk from her. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’ve some high-flown principle against it.”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“You don’t see, I suppose, why a woman has to behave differently than a man does. You don’t see why you can’t simply bed me and leave me. After all, this is what men do, so why can’t you?”
“Women d
o it, too,” she said.
“Whores.” He perched on the edge of her desk, his back half turned to her. “Now you’re going to tell me that calling them ‘whores’ is unjust. Why should women be vilified for doing what men do with impunity?”
This, in fact, was what she had been thinking and what she was about to say. Lydia darted him a wary glance. His face was averted. She couldn’t read its expression.
She grew uneasy. She would have wagered a large sum that he hadn’t the remotest idea of what she thought or believed in.
He was not supposed to have any idea at all about what went on in her head. He was supposed to view all women as objects of varying degrees of physical attractiveness who had but one use, thus only one purpose for existing at all.
“I should like to know why I am the only woman who has to marry you,” she said, “merely to get what you pay to give other women. Thousands of other women.”
“Leave it to you,” he said, “to make it sound as though you’ve been singled out for punishment—cruel and inhuman, no doubt.” He left the desk and moved to the fireplace. “You think I’m a bad bargain. Or, more likely, it’s worse than that: It isn’t me specifically, but all men.”
He took up the coal bucket and replenished the dying fire while he spoke. “You’re so blinded by contempt for men in general that you can’t see any of the advantages of marrying me in particular.”
As though she hadn’t spent most of her life seeing for herself wedlock’s so-called advantages, Lydia thought. As though she didn’t see, almost daily, women wedlocked in heartbreak, helplessness, instability, and all too often, appallingly, in violence.
“What particular advantages do you have in mind?” she asked. “Your great wealth, do you mean? I have all the money I require and enough left over to save for a rainy day. Or is it the privileges of rank you refer to? Such as shopping for the latest fashions to wear to grand social affairs where the main entertainment is Slander My Neighbor? Or do you mean admittance to court, so that I may bow and scrape to the king?”
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