Tempting Fate

by Kerrigan Byrne

  “It doesn’t matter who I am,” he whispered, distracted by the light gilding the soft moisture on her lips with an ethereal sheen. “Not tonight.”

  All the reasons he shouldn’t touch her disappeared into the darkness, fleeing before the creature of primitive instinct the moon and the music seemed to make of him.

  His blood roared. His cock filled. His muscles tensed and built into a straining, pulsing machine, overwhelmed with the need to find other, more primal rhythms.

  But he would rip out his own heart before he succumbed to any of that.

  Because the soft cling of her fingertips against his shoulder was enough to keep the entire monster leashed with unbreakable chains.

  Everything that was hard and horrible about himself, rough and possessive, selfish and violent, he beat back with all the considerable strength he possessed.

  Which left him powerless to resist her.

  Only when her hand left his grasp to rest against his jaw, did he notice that they’d stopped moving. That her mouth had parted, and his shoulders had already curled forward.

  His head lowered.

  Her toes lifted.

  The breath that feathered across his face was warm and vaguely flavored of fruit from the punch. Her intricate coiffure gleamed like gilded braids of gold and he imagined her skin was as smooth as cream whipped to a froth.

  But it was the way her lids became heavy across eyes darkened with the very same need roaring through him, that unraveled the last of his sanity.

  The invitation he read there.

  His mouth hovered above hers for the last futile moment, if only to give her a chance to pull away. To deny him. To retreat.

  Because once he tasted her, he wasn’t certain when he’d be able to stop.

  Her response suffused him with absolute shock.

  She placed the shortest, gentlest, barest of kisses on his lower lip. One little, encouraging sweep accompanied by the scarcely audible click of her mouth puckering and releasing.

  It was all he needed to seal his lips to hers.

  Gabriel had always known that Felicity Goode was crafted of equal parts warmth and softness. But he could have never imagined what those seemingly innocuous words even meant until this moment.

  With a sibilant sigh, her lips pillowed his with an excruciatingly sweet welcome.

  Within the very structure of him, parts softened and weakened, threatening to give way beneath the onslaught of hunger ravaging him from the inside out.

  Other parts— one other part in particular— became so instantly rock-hard, he moaned at the glorious ache of it.

  He did not crush her to him as he yearned to do, not when his every instinct screamed at him to find a way to meld with her. To crawl inside her warmth and stay there, until the cold world forgot he ever existed.

  Instead, he cautiously cupped her face in his hands, mindful of the delicacy of her bones, holding her as if she were made of spun sugar.

  For surely, she must be to taste so unbearably sweet.

  The kiss didn’t remain frozen or still. Their lips moved without skill or haste, even as tendrils of disquieting emotion unfurled through him like ribbons of quicksilver, settling into the sinew of his muscle and meat.

  With this one small press of flesh, this melding of mouths and breath, Felicity Goode claimed him as her own.

  There was no woman before her, and he could imagine no one after. He’d looked upon others with desire plenty in his life, but never with the hope to have them. Never with the instantaneous pull she’d had over him from the very first time they’d met.

  She’d been standing right next to her twin, a mirror image in beauty and bearing.

  But just as she’d described, he’d been struck as if by lightning, and somehow knew that this sort of lightning did not strike often in this world.

  Probably because women like her rarely existed, if ever.

  Eyes closed, he indulged in her flavor, sampled the edges of her mouth, sucked her lower lip with the slightest pressure. Without thought, drawn purely by wicked impulse, his tongue ran across the lip, and once again at the seam between the two.

  Her cheeks heated beneath his palms, and he worried that fear or humiliation summoned the sudden flush.

  Just when he might have pulled away, she leaned closer. Stepping her feet between his, curling her fingers in his lapels.

  And, like a miracle, her mouth opened beneath his, lips parting to reveal her own tentative tongue, which lapped at him with a delicate, kitten-like motion.

  The sensation unstitched him completely, until a flood of lust pounded at the seams of iron will he’d constructed within.

  And still he stood against it. Against the demons that screamed to have her, pleaded to be purified in her angelic presence.

  Never. He could only have this.

  This moment.

  This kiss.

  A kiss worth waiting three decades for.

  Chapter 7

  Never had a book been written that could aptly describe the magnitude of a kiss.

  Felicity’s romances spent all kinds of time describing what the act might entail. How it might feel. But nothing had prepared her for the onslaught of masculine desire that was Gareth Severand. No one ever wrote about the little indescribable things.

  How could they?

  The flavor of heat. The glide of a tongue against another, the top textured and beneath unutterably slick and smooth. The comingling of breath that was at once damp and dry. A chill on the inhale, and a tickling warmth after.

  Pressure everywhere. Gentle from his lips and exploring tongue. More insistent from other places. Secret places gone soft and disconcertingly liquid. As if a hidden dam of desire had been perforated, threatening to flood her with pleasure.

  More.

  She wanted more. She craved what came next, though she only had a vague sense of what that might be.

  Felicity knew how physical passion culminated in the mating between a man and woman, but it was the dance in between she’d never learned the steps to.

  The kisses and courtship. The how and when and what and why of it all.

  Strange and outrageous urges flooded her body. She wanted to slip her hands into his jacket and test the tense ridges beneath with her fingers. Yearned to slide over and around him like a cat, rubbing every part of her flesh against his in lithe, permissive caresses.

  She had the odd urge to bite him. To nibble and suck and nip and lick… to score him with her teeth and her nails. To—

  An odd gleam and a dull thud stunned her, as did the abrupt broken seal of their mouths when he all but leapt away.

  Blinking her eyes open, Felicity caught a glimpse of the knife embedded into the wood of the trellis beside them, still vibrating with motion.

  Whereas time had seemed to stand still during their kiss, everything now raced to catch it up.

  Felicity’s joints were no more substantial than jelly and her brain made of little more than porridge. The air might have been quicksand for how it impeded her responses and movement.

  Gareth, in contrast, reacted with twice the speed and ease of someone half his size.

  A metallic flash in the lanternlight barely registered before he shoved her roughly to the ground.

  Felicity landed hard, the breath knocked out of her with a startled grunt. He crouched over her in time for another blade to sail through the space their standing bodies had only just occupied. When it landed in the garden, she stared at it for a moment, imagining where it might have found purchase in her flesh.

  Her chest, possibly? Or her throat.

  Trying to capture control of her empty lungs, she watched her personal guard leap up like a cat, yank the first blade from the trellis, and toss it back into the direction from which it sprang.

  A low grunt told her he’d hit the mark, but that didn’t seem to mollify Gareth.

  He whipped the tails of his coat back, pulling a dagger from some unseen sheath.

  “Stay do
wn,” he ordered.

  She could do nothing but.

  Two men materialized from the shadows of the corner of the garden. Gareth lunged for them, leaping over the railing only to duck another thrown dagger upon landing. He crushed pansies and geraniums as he charged, and Felicity couldn’t imagine the courage it must have taken for the men to stand against him.

  Courage or madness.

  One of them, a tall, pale fellow with thick arms for his lanky form, limped slightly, the blade in his hand dark with his own blood.

  Served him right.

  Though her protector wielded his own knife, he didn’t use it, not immediately. Instead, he kicked out at the pale man’s injured leg. It buckled beneath him and, with a strangled sound, the assailant dropped to the ground in a heap.

  Gareth stood over him like the very angel of death. “Who sent you?” he demanded.

  “Go to the devil, savage!”

  The man’s neck made the most sickening sound as Gareth stomped on it before quickly turning to his next victim. This time, their blades flashed and flickered in the dim night as they circled each other, neither of them speaking a word.

  She’d never expected violence to be so quiet.

  It occurred to her to go for help. To run inside and make someone contact the authorities, but her struggling lungs kept her pinned to the ground.

  A third man melted from the shadows, placing his stocky form between her and Gareth. At the sight of the blade he lifted against her guard, Felicity finally found the strength to draw a frantic breath.

  To warn him.

  Air screamed into her lungs with agonizing labor, and the pitiable sound drew the notice of this third interloper, who turned and advanced upon her.

  Panicking, Felicity remembered the knife that’d sailed past them into the garden, and struggled to her hands and knees.

  She heard the clomp of a boot on the opposite end of the pergola, and looked behind her. Gareth was still across the garden, applying his blade to his opponent. The stocky blighter smiled the smile of a shark, one of a predator who knew he’d cornered his next kill. He made a sound of perverse delight as he lifted his dagger.

  Felicity scrambled to the bed of moss, finding the abandoned blade.

  She hadn’t the slightest notion how to use it, but she had to try. Fingers wrapped around the hilt with a death grip, she thrust it in his direction.

  Just in time to watch as Gareth rose behind the villain.

  His fingers splayed over one side of the stocky man’s face one moment before Gareth smashed his skull into the column of the pergola.

  Which shattered.

  The pergola and the skull.

  Felicity turned away from the sight. Her hand clamped over her mouth as her guts rolled and bile clawed its way up her esophagus.

  Blood. She hated her body’s reaction to it, but knew it couldn’t be helped.

  “Felicity.” Gareth’s voice was barely a growl above a whisper. “Felicity, look at me.”

  She shook her head, convulsively swallowing as the punch she’d enjoyed earlier threatened to make a ghastly reappearance.

  Not now. Not in front of him.

  She convulsed several times, retching all over the moss, shuddering as her body rejected everything she’d had to eat or drink over the past several hours.

  A hand splayed across her back as she did so, another one supporting her, and she heaved again and again. Once she’d finished, she pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it to her mouth, just in case.

  “It’s over,” he said in a jagged tone, this one bleak and resigned. “I need to get you out of here.”

  She nodded, unable to do more than that. Her lungs rebelled. Her stomach revolted. Her legs had somehow disappeared.

  Rather than help her up, Gareth scooped her into his arms, and plunged into the darkness of the garden corner. They escaped out a back gate and Felicity thought she heard him mutter about undone locks allowing the brigands inside.

  Once in the street, Felicity clung to his neck as he identified three horses in the alley between one great house and the next. They were not the sort of beasts any nobleman would pay a penny to own.

  No question as to whom they belonged.

  Before she could contest, he’d tossed her upon the back of the tallest steed, and mounted behind her.

  Clinging tenaciously to the saddle, Felicity shrank back against his chest as he spurred the horse into a lurching gallop over the cobbles. They rode thunderously into the London night, their way illuminated by pallid lamps and a smattering of carriages idling in wait to convey the revelers to bed.

  Felicity wasn’t the horsewoman her sisters were. Despite receiving lessons from her intractable mother, she’d always had an uneasy relationship with the beasts. Prudence had once told her a horse could sense her fear, and it responded in kind.

  Unable to suppress her fear, she’d decided horses were best appreciated from the ground.

  Gareth, however, had no such compunctions. He rode expertly with one hand on the reins, and the other secured around her waist, cinching her to his body.

  Anytime her life had been in danger, she’d obsessed over the worst outcomes, picturing herself over and over again the mangled casualty of a thousand fates.

  Tonight, all she seemed to be able to focus on was the roll of his hips against her backside as they rode. The ridges and swells of his torso molded against her. It was like being buttressed by warm granite.

  Her home wasn’t far, and when they dashed into the courtyard, Gareth leapt from the saddle before the horse had quite stopped, reaching up to pluck her down without a modicum of assistance from her.

  Once her feet were planted on the earth, he stabilized her with one hand, while turning to give the beast a hearty slap on the flanks.

  The horse snorted and started before trotting back out the archway and into the London night.

  “Holy Moses,” she finally managed.

  Propelling her toward the house, he wrenched open the door— this time unlocked— and roughly pulled her inside, slamming it behind him and throwing the latch.

  “We— I— you…” She’d begun trembling in earnest now, unable to stop the deep tide of horror that threatened to tumble her beneath the waves. “We should summon someone— the police? What are you doing?”

  His hands were on her, roughly turning her this way and that. “Did they hurt you? Did anything touch you?” He tested her joints and what he could see of her skin, inspecting her like some sort of rag doll.

  “No,” she answered immediately, then took a moment to really examine her own body, to clench and unclench each muscle. “No. You never let them get close enough to touch me. But, Gareth… your head.”

  Oh no, she felt another swoon come on… or perhaps worse.

  She clapped a hand over her mouth.

  Blood seeped down the brutal planes of his face from a gash near his hairline. He reached up to touch it and seemed surprised to find the wound.

  “I’d forgotten,” he said by way of disgruntled explanation.

  She whirled away from him, lurching in his grasp, grateful he didn’t let her go. A second hand joined the first over her mouth as dark spots crept into her vision.

  “Miss Felicity?” Mr. Bartholomew and Mrs. Pickering rushed from below stairs, the plump housekeeper reaching for Felicity. “Dear God, child, what’s happened?”

  She pointed back at Gareth, the tears streaming from her eyes because of her physical reaction to the blood rather than any sort of emotional distress. “He’s hurt,” she croaked, hoping they’d help him.

  “Mr. Bartholomew, you must send for the carriage,” Gareth said as if she hadn’t spoken. “It’s still on Barclay Street and must be retrieved quickly. It is imperative that we appear to have left with the rest of the crowd.”

  “Bodies!” Mrs. Pickering exclaimed.

  “They… they tried to kill me.” There’d been blood spilled in the dark. Her own rushed around, threateni
ng to drown her.

  “Who tried to kill you?”

  “Hired thugs.” Pulling a handkerchief from his coat, Gareth pressed it to the cut above his eye, bracing against her stumble. “Take her,” he commanded.

  Mrs. Pickering’s pillowy arms surrounded Felicity, and she sagged against the woman, fighting to remain conscious. “She’s right, Mr. Severand. You are bleeding rather a lot. Should I call for a doctor?”

  “Care for your mistress,” he clipped. “Get her out of that corset so she can breathe properly, and find a cold rag to put to her head. I’ll tend to my own wound.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Felicity wanted to call to him as he took the stairs more than two at a time, seeming to escape her without a second glance. Oh, that she could go with him, that she could clean his wounds and stitch him back together.

  Why must her body be so treacherous? So weak?

  “Do you think they were after you, specifically, Miss Felicity?” the housekeeper asked as she guided her through the house.

  “We’ll never know,” she murmured. “Someone threw a knife. He… Mr. Severand. He fought them, he…”

  He’d killed them all. In front of her. Two of them with his bare hands. Well… boot, in one case.

  He’d done it for her.

  “Thank God he was there,” Mrs. Pickering exclaimed. “Thank God. If something happened to you, Miss Felicity, our hearts would be fair broken.”

  “Thank you.” Now that the storm had passed. That she was safe in her home, her bones began to quake, and her teeth chattered as the imprint from his body faded.

  They’d been after her. Somehow, she knew it. Once again this seemed more like a targeted attack than simple random violence.

  So who had known she’d be at the ball? Who had the motive to do something so terribly violent as to send three men with sharp knives and clear intent?

  “Let’s get you some brandy and put you in a nightgown.” Mrs. Pickering helped her up the stairs toward her bedroom.

  Felicity peeked at the dark doorframe of the washroom behind which she could hear water running from the pumps.

  Gareth. “Someone needs to tend to him.”