A Gentleman Undone (39 page)

A cog slipped somewhere in the workings of her brain. The teeth of one wheel failed to meet the teeth of another, or perhaps a spring leaped free of its mooring, and suddenly she was all too conscious of the unseen muscles that would be stretching up and down his near side, from his waist to his skyward-pointing elbow.

Leave him alone. The only good you can do him is by staying here in this seat and playing on
. But her next breath brought with it the scent of bay rum, and then
cards and numbers receded the way the room’s sounds had already done.

Very well. She tapped her lips and set to scooping up her counters with outward calm even as one unsteady impulse after another chased through the tangled pathways of her nerves. She’d abandon a favorable deck to go await him in that corridor, if he insisted. But if he thought to corner her into a painful and profitless discussion, he had better think again.

W
HAT THE
devil had gone wrong between them? Obviously it had coincided with that visit to the Talbots, but what, precisely, had made his company so unbearable to her?

Will clenched and unclenched his hands as he drew nearer to that side hallway, site of the last time their partnership had foundered. He’d told her he hadn’t lied regarding his connection with the widow, and she’d said she believed him. What, then, could account for the stone-like impassivity into which she’d sunk since this afternoon’s call?

She’s guessed
. A cold whisper down his backbone, frosting each vertebra in turn. The details, she wouldn’t know. But she might very well have divined the general nature of his wrong, and his ill-disguised unease during the visit would only have confirmed whatever dark suspicions she entertained.

He rounded the corner. No sign of her. He went a few steps deeper into the hallway and paused. Might she have tired of waiting for him and gone back to the table? No, he would surely have passed her. A sudden uneasy memory flashed through his muscles: the late-night chill as he’d waited for her, looked for her in the streets outside before grasping that she’d left in the hackney without
him. Had she quitted the table only to fetch her cloak and forsake him altogether?

“Here.” The syllable just reached him from the dark far end of the hall. The nape of his neck prickled. What was she doing all the way back there, and why hadn’t she announced herself at once?

He made a straight path to where he’d heard her voice, only to put his hands against empty wall. Now his scalp prickled as well.

“Here.” She’d moved. She was to his left and behind him. His eyes hadn’t adjusted enough to make out her shape, though he was surely visible to her.

A faint rustle of muslin told him she was moving again, circling him. The air between them was thick enough to stir with a spoon. “Lydia, will you tell me what’s the matter?” He flung those words out into the thick air, before he could forget the purpose with which he’d come here.

“Nothing, just now.” Her silken murmur sank straight through his skin, and a hand crossed the darkness to land on his arm.

“I think you’re angry.” His words nearly caught in his throat on the way out. He knew exactly what she was doing: she meant to avoid this conversation and she would use every weapon in her arsenal to divert his attention. Certain susceptible parts of him were diverted already.

“Am I?” She spoke from directly before him. Her hands took hold of his coat and she went up on her toes, giving him a noseful of rose-petal soap before her lips found his in the darkness.

She tasted of unalloyed temptation. He knew this because his tongue was in her mouth. Likewise his arms had gone round her and he’d crushed her body to his, entirely without conscious thought. To give in to her manipulation, to forget himself and to bury once more
the secrets he’d meant to tell, would be the easiest thing in the world.

But she wasn’t … his brain groped blindly for a handhold on reason … she wasn’t doing this out of honest desire. She strove only to use his own lusts against him, and that wasn’t the way he wanted to … “Lydia, wait.” He caught his breath, his mouth just far enough from hers to allow speech. “This isn’t … I called you away from the table that we might speak.” He grasped her at the waist and eased her from him, opening up space between her body and his.

Obstinate anger poured off her to fill up that space. She loosed her grip on his coat and laid her palms flat on his chest. For a moment she stood just so, defiance pulsing in her touch. Then her palms dragged down his front as she sank right out of his grasp in a whisper of skirts. “Speak all you like,” she said from where she knelt. “I shall be unable.”

Bloody hell. “This isn’t what I intended.” But his treacherous hand had already found its way to the first button of his breeches. “This isn’t what I want from you.”
Liar
. He was fumbling from one button to the next as he spoke, and his hand was nearly shaking with how badly he wanted it.

He hadn’t had her since that last morning at Chiswell. Nearly three days, now. And he’d never yet known the secrets of her mouth.
She can suck a man into next week
.

Confound him, was he no better than that coarse bastard who’d kept her? No. He
was
better. He could still stop this. “For God’s sake, this is madness. Someone could pass this way.” His fingers met hers: she’d been unbuttoning from the other side of his frontfall, which now dropped away. She wore no gloves. She’d shed them, no doubt, in expectancy of his capitulation.

“Don’t worry.” Her voice carried that easy assurance that came with the upper hand. “We won’t be seen. It’s dark, and I can work quickly.”

He still held her fingers, adept and devious and naked in his grasp. He let two breaths pass in silence. “No.” His hand loosed her fingers. “Go slowly. Make it last.”

Linen tormented him with its delicate friction as she freed him from his drawers. She tugged down his breeches and he braced his outspread hands against the wall at his back. He could discern her shape in the darkness now, and he watched with unholy greed as she leaned close and took him inch by inch into the merciful heaven of her mouth.

And now nothing in the world mattered—not his sins, not his promises, not the things he’d meant to tell her or the duel he must fight in a few days; not anything but her lips and her tongue and the expert way they coaxed him into madness. Or perhaps her hand mattered too, as it came up to cradle his balls and send jagged bolts of pleasure to the middle of his brain.

“Not too fast. Not too much.”
You’ll make me lose my mind
. His body clamored to thrust but he was not quite so lost, so bereft of decency as to use her that hard. He fought the urge and moved his hips instead in slow circles, grateful for the darkness that prevented his being seen like this, given up to sinuous gyrations like some Amazon queen’s slave-dancer. She stayed with him as he moved. Her free hand settled behind him, fitting itself to his bunched muscles while one careful finger teased just at the edges of where he was cleft.

Could a person die of pleasure? His heart felt as though it might batter itself to extinction on his own ribs. What an ignominious end that would be, and what an embarrassment for his family. Home safe from Waterloo only to be discovered on an out-of-the-way gaming-hell floor, his breeches down to his knees and a grimace of agony
etched into his face. She’d better have the good sense to leave him where he lay if it happened.

He brought one hand off the wall to set it at the back of her head, to caress her in meager recompense for the tempest of sensation she’d set going. Devil take it. He
was
her slave. And better than any Amazon queen, she was mistress of all his flesh. Her hands steadied him, and her tongue drove him, and her finger no longer teased but tortured, boldly stroking where it had no business to be.

She would turn him inside out. She would annihilate him and he didn’t care. “Harder,” he muttered as her tongue slowed and he felt the soft pull of her mouth. “Suck me harder.”

Her favorite word. And she took the command as readily as she gave it. He clawed at the wallpaper, his head tipped back, his teeth bared in a feral grimace. He’d spill in another minute. He ought to warn her. She wouldn’t want—

Oh, but ruthless torrents of pleasure rocked him and he couldn’t find the words. It was her own fault, with her hand tightening on his balls and her mouth taking him in so deep and her finger doing unspeakable things. Her other fingers splayed themselves on his arse and she pushed, gently. Then again. Inviting him to thrust.

He didn’t need telling a third time. He set his hands by either ear to hold her steady, to keep her just where she was, and he gave it to her in small pulses. Not too hard. Not rough. Just enough to bring the relief of that primal motion she’d known his body so desperately craved, and all the while the words he ought to say, the warning that would spare her, slipped further and further beyond his grasp.

No words. Hands. He fumbled to push her away as climax came thundering toward him. She didn’t move.
“Lydia!” he gasped, and she only held her ground and pleasured him harder, harder, until he shuddered and staggered and finally sank down into the sweet, sweet shame of flooding a woman’s mouth with his seed.

She sank with him: when he came to his senses he was sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, and she crouched beside him, just lifting her head.

“I’m sorry.” Shame washed over him, not an ounce of sweetness to it now. He’d meant to speak to her; to discover what had gone wrong and to repair their understanding, and he’d pitched all good intentions aside at the chance to get his cock in her mouth. Then he’d befouled her into the bargain. “I tried to spare you—”

“I know. You tried to be a gentleman to the last.” She wiped the heel of her hand across her lips. “You forget I haven’t any use for a gentleman.” Her hand fell on his thigh, still bared above his tugged-down breeches. “Take me to your rooms. Let’s cash in our counters and go.”

She was a stranger again, all appetite and command, no interest in addressing the rift that had opened up between them. And Lord help him, he didn’t care, so long as she wanted to fuck him.

“Yes,” he said, and covered her hand with his. “Let’s go.”

S
HE COULD
not repent. Days from now she might look back on this night as a dreadful mistake, as one more source of pain when
that
river had quite enough tributaries as it was. Never mind. This was
what should be
, a whore and the man she’d collared walking wordless through the midnight streets of St. James’s.

Once, he stopped to press her up against a lamppost and kiss her, with a hunger he made no effort to conceal. A multitude of convenient shadows and he chose the place where they would be most visible to anyone who
happened to look. If he’d bid her lift her skirts then and there she would have done it. That was her mood.

They gained his rooms and he undressed her, deft and silent, pausing only to transfer his roll of banknotes from his pocket to a drawer. Not one stitch of his own clothing did he remove, not even his boots. He put her on her knees before the pier-glass in his bedroom and he knelt behind her, his dark infernal eyes watching over her shoulder as his gloved hands wandered with utter liberty over her naked form. Shoulders. Elbows. The curve of her hips. One hand cupping her breast; one fingertip stroking across her belly and catching in her navel. Again he made her think of a sculptor, studying all her dimensions and committing them to memory for future use.

“Mine.” It was the first word he’d said since they’d left Oldfield’s. He dipped his head and whispered it with a breath that tickled her ear. His hands slipped down to her thighs. “All of this is mine.”

“For tonight, yes.” That much was true. If she could be nothing else to him, she could certainly be all the wanton he desired for one night.

“That’s not enough.” His eyes found hers in the mirror. His fingertips trailed through the curls at the juncture of her thighs. “Tell me you’re mine entirely.”

Yearning scalded the back of her throat, but the answer he wanted wouldn’t come. She hadn’t enough imagination to push aside a future that might see him perish, or see him prevail in the duel and bind himself to Mrs. Talbot. Whether he loved her, whether her heart answered him, was nothing to the purpose. They could not belong to one another.

“I can make you tell me.” Undaunted by her silence, he took hold of his right glove and tugged it loose.

Not one spark of protest rose within her. “Do your worst,” she said, and it was not defiance but invitation.

His glove hit the floor and his hand went straight to work. Both his hands. The left one, still gloved, slid up to tend to her nipples while the right, bared and deliciously warm, slipped between her thighs.

She closed her eyes and forced them open again. She would store up this sight. She would watch the way his hands pinned her, possessed her; she would watch the perspiration on her body catch the candlelight when pleasure made her flinch, and she would watch the look in his eyes as he watched her.

“Show me you like it, Lydia.” He could persuade her to throw herself into a blazing hearth when he used that voice. “Show me how good it feels.”

A half-formed joke shimmered in the remoteness of her rational mind, something about him finally having his erotic spectacle, but to complete the thought, let alone voice it aloud, was more than she could manage. She writhed, all abandoned, and that was the answer he wanted anyway. In the mirror they looked like a tableau from some ancient myth, a nymph escaping a demigod’s rude grasp by turning into smoke, or a dancing fountain, or moonlight on uncalm waters.

But the demigod in this myth possessed her all the same. He was tireless, and staunch, and he would follow her through every metamorphosis with his unswerving will and his divinely clever hands. “Have I enslaved you, Lydia?” he said by her ear, and his fingers quickened to coax out the response he desired.

“Yes.” That was the beginning of surrender.