by Tracy Sumner
It seemed an ideal place to change course, for better or worse.
The bench behind them was an appropriate height. Perfect, tagging him right at the hip. And sturdy enough, he determined, when he kicked it. Lifting Emma to it, Simon hitched her skirt high, spread her thighs and moved inside her warm, welcoming circle.
She was his obsession, his ambition, his avarice.
And in that untamed moment, he both loved and hated her. Required and feared her like the blood racing through his veins, the oxygen spilling into his lungs.
Despite the fear, he plunged in with everything he had.
Chapter 14
Sometimes a kiss becomes more.
From the pale glow of a fresh flame to the white-blue of a raging fire in one second. An inferno. Blistering heat.
Emma was both present and not as he tormented her.
Fingers tweaking her nipples through layers she wished he’d ripped away, even though she’d asked that he not. Thumb covering the swollen bead at her core through her combination, flicking, circling. Knowing, in his vast experience, how to unlock not only pleasure but recklessness. Madness. Excitement escalating past what one could hope to manage and rationally think.
His teeth on her neck, her jaw, his words a delicious pirouette in her ear.
She raced blindly to keep up. Tangling her fingers in his hair, rubbing his scalp with her nails as he groaned into her mouth. Wrapping her leg around his buttocks and pulling him tighter against her. Digging her hand into the corded muscle of his hip, urging him to establish a rhythm.
Inside her. What was he doing down there?
She arched against his hand. “Now.”
“I’m trying, darling. Patience. What is this bloody undergarment you’re wearing,” he whispered against her lips.
“Ah,” she said, unable to string together enough words to tell him that her modiste had suggested the newfangled piece combining drawers and a chemise—after Emma had complained about the many layers required of a lady’s proper wardrobe.
With an oath, he released her lips, dropped to his haunches and whipped a knife from his boot. The blade glinted in the razor-thin band of sunlight puncturing the cracked slats. “Hide what I’m about to destroy in the kitchen’s rubbish bin in the morning before the staff empties it. You can get back today, the calamity being beneath your skirts, without anyone being the wiser.” Then she felt the whisper-edge of metal, an initial tear in her undergarment, his fingers widening the opening as the knife clattered to the stone floor.
A blast of chilled air hit her thighs before his mouth restored her warmth.
Her head dropped back, her hands going into his hair for balance, afraid she’d topple off the high bench. This, this, she’d never seen nor imagined. Not out of a bedchamber, not with him kneeling before her.
Simon’s mouth settled over her, his tongue doing vile, wondrous things. His hands were bracing her thighs apart, then moving to loop her legs over his shoulders as he edged in. Deeper. His tongue stroking, fingers thrusting, lips sucking. Moist heat, silken skin, the stubble on his jaw abrasive and glorious. The muscles of his back flexing beneath her heels, an experience she’d never in her life expected. As if it were a dream, she began to lose herself. The sounds coming from her throat were raw, uncontrolled. The movement of her hips as she chased pleasure unmatched, feral.
She would’ve been embarrassed had she time to think.
As it was, she let sensation ride as she rode him. Undulating, a jolting, shuddering journey to completion. His erotic demonstration was broken only by his words. Filthy and joyous. About her beauty, her scent, her taste…and the glorious feel of her body closing about him.
Tight, wet, perfect.
She could have come from those lyrics alone.
His arm snaked behind her back, steadying her, intensifying the exchange as she began to rupture into a thousand brilliant pieces. Flashes of light behind her eyelids, electric pulses along her skin. She cried out, palms slamming back to level on the bench as she arched into her pleasure. His muscles tensed beneath the legs draped down his back, his declarations of ecstasy almost as riotous as hers.
Relentless, he pursued her with his lips and tongue until she pushed him away in gratifying agony.
Removing her legs from his shoulders, he rose, staring down at her with an ardent expression she was too dazed to decipher. His eyes glittered, black as pitch in the hazy light. The surge of possession streaking through her was harsher, more wrathful, than love. A tempest. Like her granny would’ve said, a glitch of the nastiest kind. To want such as this could only spell doom.
She didn’t want this brutal yearning, a ferocious desire to reach the isolated parts of a man unwilling to share.
As Simon had stated, she’d be the ruin of him. Not his salvation.
He wiped her indecision away with a kiss. The taste of something foreign—her—on his tongue, a feminine scent she was unacquainted with clinging to his skin. With a wrenching motion, he unbuttoned his trousers, took himself in hand, and because he’d readied her so very, very well, sank into her in one deep, penetrating thrust. Circling his arms around her, calling hers to wind around his neck in response, her legs going high on his hips, ankles locking over his buttocks, he drove his thighs into the bench with a pounding rhythm as he sent them to heaven.
There was anguish in his touch, in his kiss. Impossibility. Longing.
And far beneath, hesitation that pained her to recognize.
When the bench shuddered and started to collapse beneath them, he laughed ruthlessly, ducking his head into her neck, circling his hands beneath her bottom and bringing her to his chest. The rounded bead he’d taken between his teeth, his lips, her center of pleasure, flared to life with the shift, her core rubbed against his pelvis in some magical way that lit her up like one of the duke’s infamous fires. Simon didn’t pause, sliding her along his shaft in gradual, leisurely strokes while she gasped and angled for purchase, under his control completely, delight misting over her like London’s dense fog.
Silence, except for two scattered heartbeats, savage moans, the faint creak of a loose shutter banging the wall.
And in the distance, the call of children.
“Now,” she murmured into his starched shirt collar, her tongue tracing the flaring pulse above the crisp fold, tasting salt and something uniquely Simon. “Before we’re interrupted.” Impatient, she sank her teeth into his neck, marking him. “Or I can take us back a few minutes—”
“No damned time travel,” he rasped and stumbled back, pressing her against the door, the beveled ridge bumping her spine. “I’m close. So close. And I know, from the tremors racing through your body, that you’re close, too. So let us be in this moment, please, without being in the supernatural.”
With a sense of urgency, he tilted his hips, his gaze centered on her as he recorded her reactions. She watched his keen mind house what was going to make her come. And come quickly. Hard thrust, slow glide, lingering until his tip met her entrance, then a robust return. Her startled catch of breath, her hoarse cry—yes, there—when he angled to the left, he followed like rose petals she’d scattered across a path she wanted him to take.
Suddenly, she had a violent urge for them to come together. Another experience she’d never imagined.
Emma had erotic weapons at her disposal; she’d recorded quite a few things he enjoyed as well.
Her touch was bruising, as he liked, nails scratching, fingertips pressed hard against his skin. A frantic kiss, her teeth taking his bottom lip and sucking, until his arms shuddered around her, her stance shifting with his shaking knees. Choking on each other’s moans. She swallowed the taste of their joining until it flowed through her like an enchanted essence.
When the fever hit him, he braced his hand on the door by her head and urged his hips against hers until she was pressed between scuffed oak and a long, damply glistening body.
“Yes?” he asked frantically. “I can’t…not another minute
.”
“Yes.” She groaned into his neck, closed her eyes to the extreme beauty of their intertwined bodies. Then she let pleasure catch her. Skin lighting as she twisted to capture every frantic vibration, like grabbing snowflakes in the wind. Her world tilted, years and minutes, ages, filtering through her like smoke. She held on to him, only him, letting time whisper past, race forward, slide back.
With a hoarse cry, he lowered Emma to her feet in an exhausted slide down the door. Gave her a lingering kiss, dusting her cheek and chin, his knuckles brushing her jaw. Then he went to his knee, crouching, hung his head and gasped for breath, his wounded exclamation echoing off the walls. She watched his fingers spread wide on the stone floor and marveled, amazed, at how attracted she was, still. With every beat of her heart, every throb of blood through her veins, she wanted him. Even after the most explosive orgasm of her life.
Now, this moment, wanted him, if he’d have her.
To hell with who should find them, she cared little.
And she knew, no matter how wrinkled and gray he’d become, that this wanting would never change.
With a sigh of defeat, she let the door guide her to the floor, her own collapse, knees coming high, chin resting on them. Her legs had announced, quite abruptly, that they would no longer support her.
How beautifully remote he looked, kneeling before her in the duke’s dusty spare room, weak from taking his pleasure, from giving her the most explosive of her life. Skin moist from their exertions, the scent of their joining filling the small space. His back rising and falling with his inhalations, a herculean effort to reclaim himself when she’d given up on reclaiming anything. At least, she’d stolen a piece of him this time, as he’d stolen a piece of her the last. Consummate thieves, both of them.
Only, he was the better thief, there was no disputing.
But the question laid out before them, a precarious gamble, was if Simon Alexander was going to allow this burglary or not. Looking at him, it didn’t seem like he wanted to.
As if he’d heard the question, he swiped his hair from his brow and gazed up at her. Dark eyes glittering, his lips, rosy and plump from their assault, flattening as he debated.
“Is it always like that?” she asked in a voice that betrayed every blasted thing she wished, upon seeing his sullen expression, to hide.
It was like watching a gas flame, a particular hobby of hers at the moment, flutter and die. Emotion flaring, then burning out. Until, before her sat a pillar of stone, his protective cloak cinched around him. “Sure, Emma. I fall to my knees, weak as a babe, every time I fuck someone.”
Emma picked at a notch in the stone slab she rested upon, erosion from centuries of living, maybe even loving of the kind they’d shared. Simple to see, Simon was pushing her away. Begging her to get exasperated enough to flounce back to the duke’s bloody mansion without a discussion they needed to have occurring. Fool, she thought, jackass.
What a life they could have together if they’d only chose to have a life together.
They understood each other, recognized the low-rent parts of the other, the rookery allure that clung like a curiously attractive scent. She knew him, whether he liked this fact or not. And he knew her. They were damaged, mystical souls, quite ideal for the other.
But that didn’t mean—
“Have you forgiven me?” she said, partly into the fist she’d brought to her lips. “For not coming back?”
His head came up from his inspection of his trouser close. “Have you forgiven me? For not waiting?”
Emma kicked her leg out with a curse, sending his knife spinning across the stone floor toward him. Her combination now housed a ruinous tear thanks to it—a tear letting in air that was, admittedly, cooling her fevered skin. “I trust you. That’s better than forgiveness where I come from. And years may separate our births, but you came from where I came from. We’re kin in this way. Nothing like these posh toffs you surround yourself with. That I’m surrounding myself with to survive.”
The sound of children’s laughter again sounded from the lawn, closer than before. Emma drew a breath scented with the fragrance of cut grass and the river, obliterating their magical mixture tinting the air. She blinked into the bright sunlight piercing the dim space, the life outside peeking in.
She dusted her hand down her bodice. “How do I look if they stumble upon us?”
He paused, assessing, his eyes going hot as he studied her. “You look like you’ve been abused in the duke’s conservatory. I’d take the servant’s stairs on the way back if I were you.”
Irritation flared, but she kept it contained. This learning to be a lady business assisting on multiple levels, she was coming to find. “Good. I’m glad fer it,” she said, letting her old accent flow through her words. If he thought he’d change her until she was unrecognizable, he had another think coming.
Dipping his head, Simon buried a caustic reply in the sleeve of his coat.
“You made me into this, and now you don’t like it?” Emma wrenched to her feet with a blaspheme she’d not uttered since leaving the slums.
Scrambling to grab his knife, he snapped it closed and jammed it in his waistcoat pocket, rising to his feet seconds after her. “I’m not trying to make you into anything. I’m trying to save your damned life! Hargrave—”
“Is going to find me and return me to my time. Someday, he will. He has no value, no purpose, other than this venture. You should take what time we have together, you foolish man.”
“Over my dead body,” Simon ground out between clenched teeth, his expression harsher than she’d ever seen it. A legitimate ruffian, someone to fear. This was the forbidding man he’d have been if he’d stayed in St Giles. If the lads in Tower Hamlets had faced him looking like this, they would’ve scampered into the night.
No fancy education or first-rate clothing could hide this brutality.
Crossing to him, she grabbed his wrist and squeezed as hard as she could to make him understand because it seemed he didn’t. “If it comes to that, I leave. If it comes to any of your family, anyone in the League, being put in danger to save me, I return to 1802 on my own, do you hear me? I’ll be gone like a vapor in the night before I put anyone besides myself at risk.”
He whispered a vile curse and whirled, yanking open the door, sending it into the wall with a dull thump.
Taking two steps for his one, she pursued him down the conservatory aisle, feeling his walls rising, brick by brick. How could she make him trust her? She’d only leave if it meant protecting him. She’d never leave otherwise. But her words seemed like another abandonment, a vulnerable juncture for the boy inside him.
Even if he didn’t realize it.
Halting abruptly, his gaze roamed the space until she realized what he searched for. With a sigh, she pointed to the far corner. “There, beneath the orange tree.”
Crouching, he snatched the earl’s cufflink from the floor. Then rising, bumping into her because she’d stepped so close, he slapped it into her hand. “You can return it at Epsom. Say you found it in the grass and mooned over it for days. Felt closer to him, having something of his with you. Tucked under your pillow with one of those roses I’m guessing he sent.”
“You daft man. Your gloves are tucked under my pillow! A blood-stained handkerchief you gave me weeks ago, too, if you must know.”
He blinked, processing this information as a man typically does, slowly.
She fisted her hand around the cufflink until the rounded edge bit into her skin. “After this, us, that”—she hiked her thumb over her shoulder, toward the utility room—“you’d send me off with Hollingmark? I should punch you in the nose. Or like my granny taught me, kick you in the nethers.”
He opened his mouth, closed it. Rolled his shoulders. Exhaled. Chewed his bottom lip until she feared he’d have it bleeding. His beautiful bottom lip. “Emma.” His hands went out in a gesture of surrender, then dropped to his side. “If I were a writer, and I started composing my t
houghts during my last life and continued straight through to my next, I still wouldn’t have enough time to put into words all I feel for you.”
Her heart dropped, her throat closing around her feelings. This was love, then, wasn’t it? Awkward and halting, shy and reluctant, but so lovely. All Simon. “Then be with me. It’s easy. Be with me. It’s what we’ve known we wanted since, well, since forever. I’m not asking for marriage, even, as I couldn’t care less about a silly slip of paper. And I have no family to care for me.”
With a snarl, he swept his hand over the shelf housing a variety of earthen pots, sending them to the floor with a clatter. Pieces of pottery danced around her feet, pinging off her slippers and her stockinged ankles. “I don’t know how to be with anyone. You don’t understand the corner I’ve painted myself into with you. How unfit I am to give you what you need. What I had to do to survive before Julian twisted me up inside. He doesn’t know. Finn, whom I’ve told my darkest secrets, who knows me better than anyone, doesn’t know. Not everything.” He glanced over his shoulder, and she caught the ominous flicker in his eyes. The chill hit her, racing toe to cheek like an icy bath. He wasn’t going to let her in. That’s what his expression said. Stay out. “I wake in the night with terrors. St Giles, the slums, right there, beneath me. Bloodied hands, shouts no one was there to hear. Not to mention the haunts, who are never going to leave me, Emma, not for one moment leave me. I walk into a room; they walk in behind me. Who but one imprisoned in such a world would want that?”
Affection was a soothing balm. Being afraid to love her was much better than not being able to love her. Or not loving her, which she didn’t think was the case. “You’re their savior; that’s why they come to you. They need you; they believe in you. You’re part of their journey. A safe part, I think. Maybe you’re the safe part of mine.”
