He staggered forward with her in his arms until she was pressed hard against the alcove wall.
“Delilah.” He delivered her name in a desperate whisper in her ear. It was a sigh, nearly an accusation. As though she’d enchanted him against his will.
She filled her hands with fistfuls of his shirt and pulled him up against her. Then slid them up to loop around his neck.
The kisses were frantic, savagely deep. Their lips met and parted, caressed, feasted, dueled. They drugged him. He slid his hands down and filled them with her breasts; he slipped his fingers inside her bodice and dragged the tips of them across her ruched nipples.
She arched with a cry that he covered with the next kiss.
When her head went back in pleasure, he kissed her throat.
Her lips found his ear, and her tongue traced it. He turned his head into it. It maddened him, deliciously. She moved her hips against his hard cock. Vixen. Anyone could come upon them any minute.
“Come to me.” His voice was a rasp, a whisper, a command, a plea, against her lips, her throat, her ear. “Come to my room. Please. When you can. Today. I need you.”
This was madness. Surely he was possessed. The sound of his own voice, hoarse and urgent, half command, half beseeching, all raw hunger—he didn’t recognize it. He had never asked for a thing in life, let alone begged. He had fought for everything. He was ashamed of how all the tortured conviction of the previous night had gone right out the window at the first glimpse of her. But not too ashamed to get down on his knees if he had to.
“I will. I promise. I will. I need you, too. Oh God help me, I want you, too,” she moaned against his mouth, his ear, his throat.
He let her go abruptly then, as though he’d extracted a blood vow from her.
Readjusted his hat.
Shifted his trousers. A few thoughts about the Gardner sisters and missing smugglers ought to make short work of his erection.
He stared at her, her hair mussed, her breathing like a bellows. As though she was a siren in an apron who had lured him into the alcove.
She smiled at him, and it was like the heavens had broken open.
He smiled at her and bolted down the stairs.
“You danced?” Massey was almost incensed when Tristan told him about the previous evening, he was so envious.
“A sort of waltz.”
Massey stared at him, in resentful wonder.
Then he sighed. “Well, you’re the captain.”
“That I am. We also sang.”
Massey sighed, then he resettled his shoulders resignedly, manfully absorbing his wistful envy. “Well, the jewelry sales are confirmed, sir. A Mrs. Angelique Breedlove did indeed sell some nice pieces to a broker named Reeves on Bond Street. Here are the figures.”
He slid a little sheet of paper over to Tristan.
“We’ve also spoken to some workmen who helped clean and repair the place. Weren’t paid unduly, saw nothing untoward, said nothing but nice things about Lady Derring and Mrs. Breedlove. ‘Right bossy,’ I think one of them called Lady Derring, but he made it sound like a virtue. Here is a list of the work they did and what they claimed they were paid.” He slid over another sheet.
“Good work, Massey,” Tristan said absently, relieved. Here was a record of Delilah and Angelique trading one sort of life for another. Two ropes of pearls. A necklace of rubies. Diamond earbobs. And more. Not a king’s ransom, but certainly enough to get The Grand Palace on the Thames off the ground.
Had Delilah any jewelry left now? Then again, pearls against her skin would be redundant.
“I actually had a reason for instigating the waltz, Massey.”
“You . . . instigated it?” His jaw dropped.
“Yes. And I plan to go with you today to ask a very specific question of a few vendors. A new approach.”
“No one around here wants to tell us from whom they purchased the cigars, sir. They’re getting used to our faces and they’re bound to get suspicious.”
“They will talk to me,” he said simply.
This was likely true. He had his ways.
“What is this question?”
“I would like to ask them . . .” Tristan paused. He almost didn’t dare say it aloud. “. . . if they’ve purchased cigars from a large man, built like a bear. Scar beneath his ear. Or a small man, with a pointed face.”
“Sounds like the Miss Gardners’ brothers, sir.”
Tristan regarded him grimly.
Realization dawned on Massey’s face. “You don’t mean . . .”
“A suspicion. It’s been growing for some time. The larger one doesn’t speak in company. Perhaps because it’s a struggle to disguise his voice. Always looking down, ostensibly shyly but likely because they don’t want anyone to look very closely at their faces. And they both tried to lead a waltz last night. It was disastrous.”
Massey’s face twitched, picturing this.
“They hadn’t a notion about what to do. They retired for the evening the moment the music stopped. I wonder if they know who I am.”
“They must be getting desperate about now, if so, Captain Hardy.”
“That’s my concern as well. And furthermore . . . think about it, Massey. People come and go from the stables all the time with carts and carriages. Perfect way to distribute contraband. No one would give it a thought. Do you remember the gang in Kent?”
“Tunnels?” Massey said, after a moment of mulling.
“Tunnels,” Tristan confirmed.
Massey gave a low whistle. “You don’t think . . .”
“I don’t know. But I want every man to ask around, save the ones watching The Grand Palace. Visit again the merchants we spoke to. Any locals you see smoking.”
“Done, sir,” Massey said.
“Something still troubles me about that room on the low floor, however. I think Margaret Gardner was trying to get into it the night I saw her in the hallway. But she—or he—has failed all this time, too.”
They sat in silence apart from chewing and the noise of the pub around them, men, smoking and spilling and sweating. Tristan yearned for a bath. He felt like the detritus of this hunt for smugglers—the smoking, the spilling, the sweating of all the men in pubs like this one—was beginning to settle on his skin.
Come to me, he’d begged. Would she? The very thought of his hands against her skin made his entire being contract with a barbed longing.
A few moments later, he said, “Massey?”
“Yes, sir?”
“How did you, er, know?”
Massey’s brow furrowed. “Know, sir?”
Tristan considered saying “never mind,” but it would be unlike him to back down from something he’d started. “About . . . Emily.”
Massey stared at him, wonderingly, eyebrows diving.
And then something in Tristan’s expression, in his demeanor, made it clear.
“Ah! Know. Well. That I loved her?”
Tristan held very still. Didn’t Massey know the word love belonged in a class with words like grenade or typhoon? It was not to be bandied about lightly.
“I knew straight away, somehow,” he said. “She was always on my mind, like. At first. And then one day we were at a house party and after dinner she had a little sauce on her cheek and she didn’t know it and . . . I just knew that I loved her. Takes you that way sometimes, doesn’t it?” Massey said mistily.
Tristan didn’t know.
The “straight away” part. He wasn’t certain whether he was relieved or more unnerved than before.
Delilah had spent the morning in a fever of sensual indecision. She’d finished chores and gone over the books with Angelique and was grateful for the ceaseless activity.
Given that they now had six (six!) guests to feed, as well as themselves, all hands were needed in the kitchen. Delilah reported to the kitchen late in the afternoon to do her share of potato peeling. Helga had gotten some good fresh fish and some shaffling and she was planning to make a
hearty chowder, with bread and cheese and a tart for dessert. Delilah’s stomach quite rumbled thinking of it.
She took up a potato and was just about to shave a curl off it when a scullery maid crashed into her with a bucket, running toward Dot, who appeared to be directing this enterprise. She tipped boiling water into it.
“Begging your pardon, Lady Derring! So sorry!” the maid yelped.
“No worries, my dear. Dot, what’s going on? Why all the scurrying about?”
“We’re preparing a bath, Lady Derring!” Dot made it sound like a gleeful celebration, not the hard work it indeed was. They were fortunate enough to have their own well, a miracle indeed, but heating enough water for even a hip bath was no small undertaking.
But this was the first time any guest had called for such a thing. Oddly, it felt a bit like a baptism for The Grand Palace on the Thames.
“How lovely! Who rang for the bath?”
“Captain Hardy. Paid us in good coin for it, too.”
Delilah hoped no one noticed when she abruptly stopped peeling her potato.
And then merely stared at it, dreamily, for a few moments.
Then, much more slowly, a little languidly, resumed peeling it, as though the air had become softly molten, a little thicker, like a blancmange, perhaps.
She got that potato done.
And then the next.
And then she chopped them. Slowly. Very carefully.
And then the next.
And when she was certain the bath had gotten up the stairs to Captain Hardy, she laid down the knife and breathed a moment.
The words were out of her mouth before she knew she’d made the decision.
“I’ll just be a few minutes,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Her heart was pounding so fiercely the blood was ringing in her ears by the time she reached his room. She tapped, just twice, with her fingertip. “Captain Hardy,” she said, mouth nearly pressed to the door.
She nearly toppled in when he opened it. He tugged her gently inside, closed the door and locked it.
An enormous towel was knotted about his waist. Water sheened his thighs and chest. It clung in beads to the slopes and angles and gullies of him, the smooth mountains of his shoulders, the ditch created by muscles along his spine.
The blood left her head and headed straight for her groin.
“I only have a few minutes.” Her voice was a shred.
Doubtless he noted that her expression was probably somewhere between Mr. Delacorte’s at the dinner table and an appraiser of antiquities who’d been handed the Grail.
He unfastened the towel and dropped it.
She’d unlaced her dress on the way there and now pulled it over her head and dropped it. Then divested herself of the rest of her clothes.
His expression in response to her sudden swift nudity suggested he’d taken a mallet to the head, and she exulted while she feasted unabashedly with her eyes. He was like a slightly nicked and dented idol unearthed from a chamber of a pharaoh’s tomb, perhaps, beautiful, carved from good sturdy metal rather than precious: from the cut of his calves, the hard curve of his thighs, the pale taut buttocks with convenient little scoops where her hands fit when she was gripping them. The flare of his torso from them.
The white slashes and dents of old scars made her stomach contract with an odd sort of desperation: How dare they shoot at him as though he were expendable?
It seemed impossible that anyone had ever gotten the better of him.
Nothing about him appeared soft or vulnerable, apart, perhaps, from his eyelashes.
She crouched to seize the towel he’d dropped, and followed the terrain of his body, first with the towel, then her lips, then her hands. She slid her fingers down the trench of his spine. She lightly scored her nails across his chest. She made him tell his story.
“This scar . . .”
“Pirate . . . boarded our ship . . .” His voice was an enthralled rasp.
“Did you kill him?”
“It was that . . . or . . . be killed.” His answer, swift, staccato, riding out on a ragged breath.
So she kissed him there, on that scar. “I’m glad you killed him.”
“Delilah . . .” he half choked, half laughed.
“And this one?” She’d dropped to her knees to drag her fingers along his hip, where she could guess at how he’d come to sport that puckered scar.
“Shot. I was ill for weeks.”
“And you lived through sheer cussedness.”
“Because I had a fever dream of you on your knees before me, literally licking my wounds. It kept me alive.”
She did lick that scar. Then she dragged her tongue from his hip to where curly hair surrounded his swelling cock and kissed him coyly, near and yet so far.
“Delilah,” he groaned, as surely as if he’d been shot again. “Your mouth. Please. Take my cock in your mouth.”
“Not yet, Captain,” she said.
He called her a string of muttered oaths. She merely smiled, drunk on power, and arousal.
“And this . . .” She’d found a scar across his arm.
“. . . was a child . . . stole an apple . . . from a costermonger.” He was sweating now.
She didn’t ask for details. She understood that the only reason Captain Hardy was invincible now, was standing here before her, complicated and passionate and desirable, was because he’d been caught a time or two. So she kissed that scar.
And when she took his cock into her mouth, his head fell back, and his hands dropped upon her hair as a long, low animal moan was followed by a string of curses and deities he clearly felt the need to call upon to support him in this time of untenable pleasure.
Now this. This was wicked. She allowed her tongue to play over the smooth dome of it. His hands laced into her hair. “Oh God. Whatever you do . . . don’t stop . . .”
She paused. “This is apparently called the Vicar’s Hobby.”
He gave a short half laugh, half moan. “Your hands . . . your hands, too . . . use your hands, too . . .”
She obeyed. The taut cords of his neck, the tension in his jaw, how his head dropped back as he took in and savored the pleasure she gave him, his sighs of near desperation—it was so unbearably erotic that when she stood suddenly, she swayed as though drunk.
He seized her hips, spun her about so swiftly she toppled forward, bracing her palms against his blue coverlet. His palms skated down her spine as he urged her thighs apart with his knee. And then he brought his hand around to where she was aching and wet and stroked a rhythm that wrought from her moans of astounded, ramping pleasure that she muffled with her forearm. “Tristan . . .” she whimpered. “Please . . .”
She came apart into a million cinders when he thrust into her. The counterpane took her raw scream. Her fingers clenched and unclenched in it as he drummed into her swiftly, his breathing gusting. “Delilah . . . dear God . . .” His voice was shredded. “I’m . . .”
He went rigid, his own raw cry stifled and wave after wave of bliss wracked him.
Before she slid like a melted thing down off the bed, he scooped her up into his arms and pulled her up onto the bed. She reclined in his arms as his chest rose like a choppy sea beneath her head.
Her hair was a mess, so he unpinned it, one pin at a time.
Laid them all on his night table.
“You can pin it again before you leave,” he said drowsily. Never had pleasure so owned him. So fully consumed him. Never had it so thoroughly relieved him, if momentarily, of the burden of being himself, the man who held up the world.
“I must leave soon,” she murmured. She gave a somnolent, stunned laugh. “Never in my wildest fantasies did I think I’d need to repin my hair in the afternoon after having been ravished.”
“And after having ravished.”
“Fair enough.”
He smiled. He threaded his hands through her hair. As soft as he’d dreamed it would be, full of hidden mahogany light
s. “Have you wild fantasies?” He was tremendously interested in these.
She hesitated. “Promise you won’t laugh?”
“I’m too sated to laugh.”
“Angelique and I once talked about what we would do if the king came to The Grand Palace on the Thames.”
“The king? Because now that you’ve conquered me, he’s the only challenge left?”
“Because it would madden the Duchess of Brexford, who can never get him to come to one of her dinners. She is terribly rude to me and tried to steal my cook more than once. She thinks I’m quite beneath her.”
“I think we’ve time,” Tristan said thoughtfully, “for you to be beneath me once again.”
She smiled and shifted to throw a leg over his thigh. Her hands were idly roaming over his chest, following the trenches made by his muscle. He shifted, restlessly. Mad hunger was an echo, but already ramping again. “Why were you stealing an apple?” she asked.
“I was hungry.”
“Tristan,” she said. She stopped the caresses and propped herself up on her elbows. Her hair fell down over his chest, across her face. He parted it like a curtain onto his favorite musicale. Her face was an ache.
“The difference between me and the drunk man at the entrance of your boardinghouse is pigheadedness and fortitude.”
“Yes. I’m certain that’s all. Had naught to do with courage, or intelligence, or skill.”
“Flatterer. You must be trying to seduce me again,” he said hopefully.
She was quiet, however. “You must have been so frightened.” It was a near whisper.
She was worried, that was clear. She was hurting for him now, and the boy he was. And somehow he didn’t mind. He had never realized these untold stories possessed any encumbering weight, any ballast, until he began to tell them to someone who thought they mattered.
“I was afraid. But I think when fear becomes a part of your everyday experience that you cease to think of it as fear. You either harness it, and turn it into a source of strength, or it harnesses you, and destroys your soul. I’ve seen examples of both.”
“I think it’s a question of character, too. And while I’m glad you’re here now, I’m sorry you endured that.”
Lady Derring Takes a Lover Page 24
