She wrinkled up her freckled nose. “A secret?”
“Yes, right now. Right off the top of your head.”
“I can’t swim.” She bit her bottom lip.
“What?” She kept surprising him, again and again. “You’re joking. A woman who spends as much time around water as you, and you can’t swim? And I’ve put you in a house surrounded by water. Oh, Christ. We’ll have to change that. I’ll have to teach you straightaway.”
“Will you?”
“Yes. I can’t have you here, of all places—There’s a pond just across the bridge and over that way.” He twisted to point out the window to the east. Images of her floated across his brain, wet and clinging to him.
“Will you tell me something no one knows about
you
?” She was still smiling, wanting her share of the secrets. “Not even Emily, or Commander McAlden.”
Del would much rather stick to the thought of her naked, or as close to naked as he could get her, lying in his arms in the water. Sodden bliss. “I adore chocolate gateau.”
She laughed at that. He felt a smoldering of pleasure at the sound, and at her smile beaming across the table. His eyes dropped to her mouth, still bitten and chapped. He wanted to stop her worrying at her lips with his own mouth, covering hers, soothing away the anxiety and tension.
“So did Emily. Adore gateau. Did you know that? But you must have had a family cook who made excellent cake when you were little children, for you both to have such a preference.”
They had, hadn’t they? A tall, rather string-beanish woman, who—though she was called Mrs. Cook, as every good, English Head of Kitchen must be—was no one’s image of a typical, apple-cheeked butterball. But what Mrs. Cook lacked in personal excess, she more than made up for in the excess and excellence of the sweets. However she had routinely turned out innumerable, perfectly adequate joints of roast beef and lamb to his father’s bland specifications, she had been brilliant at baking. Cakes, pastries, scones, fruit tarts, and, oh God, the chocolate. He began to salivate, just thinking about it.
Funny how Celia could have strung such an accurate conjecture out of nothing more than air and insight. “You’ve very insightful.”
“Not at all.” Her smile faded slowly. “I don’t seem to have any insight into you. Or what you want, Viscount Darling.”
He wanted to touch her. He wanted to inhale her, devour her, take her. She was his wife. He was her husband. Perhaps she did not love him, but he could make her desire him. That was at least a place to start, wasn’t it?
“What I would like, Celia, is for you to stop calling me Viscount Darling, as if we’ve never met before. We are married.”
She swallowed. “Yes. I am sorry.” She shifted back in her seat and fidgeted with the serving cloths. “This is wretched, isn’t it? I seem to be terribly awkward around you again.”
He rose and poured a tumbler of brandy. It was too early for alcohol, but she had wondered what he would taste like, and he meant to let her find out. “I daresay, you never thought to find yourself married. Especially not to me.”
“Well, I did expect to marry, eventually, but no, not to you. I imagined doing other things with you, but not getting married,” she admitted with an embarrassed laugh.
Ah. This he understood. This he could use to his advantage. “What other things did you imagine?”
“Oh. Well . . .” Two spots of high color bloomed on her cheeks.
“Celia?”
She sprang up from the table and paced away and back. “The things you had talked about. But you needn’t be concerned. I understand now, it was just talk. I understand now, you don’t even like to touch me.”
“Is that what you thought?” He hadn’t planned for his voice to move that low, or take on that rasp. It just happened.
It brought her to a near shocked standstill in the middle of a shaft of sunlight pouring over the rug. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Can you not think of an alternative reason I might have kept my hands from touching you?”
She was as still as a deer in the forest. “No.”
“Ah, well. You are very wrong. There is an altogether different reason.” But he made no move to show her the error of her ways, or otherwise prove her wrong. He took a slow swallow of brandy. And he watched her.
One hand went up to her throat and he could see the beginnings of a magnificent flush flare up along the side of her long neck. She cast about for a distraction and found one—the tray, where she went to busy herself. Poor girl, she’d find no refuge in a dish of tea. He was in his own home, and he was married to The Ravishing Miss Burke and he meant, finally, after all his bloody dithering, to have her. To ravish her.
And he knew exactly how to do it.
He rose as well. “Yes, very wrong. Because my aversion, as you think of it, is due to the fact that if I touched you, I would not stop there. I not only want to touch you, but I am going to touch you. Now. I’m going to make love to you, Celia. I’m going to fuck you.”
The teacup, a piece of fine bone china, hand painted with intricate designs in gold leaf, leapt like a live thing from her suddenly graceless hands and smashed unceremoniously into the assorted plates and pots on the tray. Hot tea and other things—honey and icing, he thought—clattered and spilled to the floor, spattering the front of her dress. There was a dash of the sticky stuff on the skin along her jawbone, just begging to be licked off. He’d get to that later.
Bains came rushing in. “Miss! I mean, my lady, what has happened? Are you hurt?”
“Your mistress has only dropped her teacup in surprise, Bains. You may go.”
“But my lady’s gown, sir, will stain.”
“Why don’t you go up and prepare a change of clothes for her? You may go.”
Bains departed but Del never took his eyes from Celia’s face while he spoke. The heat that had crept across her skin like sunrise had vanished, replaced by an almost porcelain pale demeanor.
“You shouldn’t say . . .” Celia’s words were barely a whisper.
He finished for her. “Such filthy things to my wife? I shouldn’t shock you? But I wanted to shock you, Celia. I wanted to let you know my intentions. I wanted you to be prepared. For what’s to come.”
“To come?”
“Yes, definitely to come.” He sat back down in his leather wingback armchair and took another drink, enjoying his private little joke.
“When?”
“That all depends upon you, I suppose.”
She swallowed hard before she attempted to answer. She was beginning to understand, or at least she felt it—the dark almost inexorable tide of desire between them. All he had to do was fan the flames and they would both ignite.
He let the thrill of anticipation begin to fill him. He took another drink with the satisfaction of knowing his wait—God’s balls, but he had waited such a long, long time to have her—was at an end. He was finally going to peel the layers of clothing and undergarments from her body until she was naked before him and he could lay her down and do unspeakably blissful things to both their bodies.
Celia stood rooted to the same spot as if she were planted there.
He helped her on. “It all depends upon how you want it to go. Do you want it to happen quickly, or slowly, your seduction?”
“Slowly,” she answered instantly. There was no hesitation, only breathless wonder.
Del smiled with a relief he had not known he would feel.
He leaned over to place his drink on a nearby table and turned so he was facing her fully. Then he sat back, stretching out and crossing his booted legs negligibly, like a man intent on making his wife see him as clearly and lustfully as he was seeing her.
“Ah, that is the scientist in you, no doubt, wanting to do everything—and I do intend to do everything—in its correct order. Thoroughly. With great attention to detail and a minute observation of the results. Yes, I can see how you would prefer that. I confess, I think I shall like it, too. Very much.”
“But I don’t—”
“Don’t you? But I do. I most fervently do.”
“Then why do you not touch me? Why do you sit all the way over there, looking at me like that, like some awful, all-powerful despot? Like the sultan waiting to tell Scheherazade if he was going to cut off her head,” she cried, frustration and confusion coloring her voice.
Her lips were parted and he could hear her breath begin to shorten and tighten within her chest, which rose and fell with percussive—or punctual—regularity, pushing the front of her stays against the flimsy confinement of her muslin gown.
“Shall you be my Scheherazade? My favorite harem girl, my
houri
? I confess, the images that spring to mind and the sensations that accompany the thought of you dancing naked before me, your tall, pale body gleaming as you turn and twirl in the sunlight, brings me great pleasure.”
She gasped at him.
“Or perhaps, I should prefer to be your Scheherazade? Perhaps I should promise to tell you things that will keep you up until the sunrise? I think I should begin by telling you how pleasing it is for me to look upon you. To see the innate loveliness of your face, the architecture of your beauty, you once said. But it is more than arched brows and large eyes, your beauty. It is who you are when you look at me.”
Her lips parted on an exhalation and it was all he could do to keep from leaping upon her, from taking that full lower lip into his mouth.
“I want to map that architecture with my hands and my mouth and my tongue as well as my eyes. I want to feel the curve of your cheek under my palm and taste the curve of your lip. I want to part your lips and delve deep into your sweetness with my tongue.” He smiled at her again through half-closed, lazy eyes. “Perhaps you won’t be sweet at all. Perhaps you’ll be tart and piquant like tropical fruit, but I want to know. I want to know everything about you, everything about your body.”
Her breath rose and fell rapidly. He let his gaze linger on her breasts, caressing her with his eyes, until he could watch her reaction. Her nostrils flared delicately and her eyes became lidded and heavy.
“Oh, yes. Contrary to your assertion, I do like to look at your body. I like to watch you move, to see the flowing lines and the graceful economy of everything you do. How you react. How susceptible you are to my words. Oh, yes, I like to look at your body. And at you.”
She kept her eyes fastened to his with a concentrated focus that spoke of anticipation.
He did not mean to disappoint her. “After all this time, after all this looking, I still have to wonder what glories lie hidden beneath all that delightful sprigged muslin and petticoats. But I’ll know soon enough, when I take them off you. I’ll know what your stays look like. Most likely they will be plain and unadorned, as I always thought—practical, with a short, plain busk, with no carvings or secret messages from lovers. I know you haven’t had any other lover. Apart from me. And we have shared only three kisses and exactly one real touch of your hand in mine. Though you have had your hands on the clothes covering my body.”
Her hands were twisted into a tight little knot in front of her.
“But you may surprise me with some very well-hidden bit of feminine vanity, by having beautifully made stays with satin lacings. Maybe you’d look so enchanting in lacy things that I shall have some made for you to my order. I really can’t say, can I, until I peel that dress off you?”
He rose and she took an involuntary step back, poised on the threshold of her desire.
“Then I’ll have a much better idea. A better idea of exactly what your body will look like, naked and moving with the pleasure I will give you with my hands, and my mouth, and my body, while we fuck.”
“Don’t say that.” She staggered a bit from the impact of his words. She put a hand out to the back of a chair to steady herself, but it only served to give him more ideas. Ideas about bending her forward over the back of the chair. Ideas of watching her hands flex to find purchase in the upholstery. To anchor herself, as he dragged up her skirts and filled his hands with the perfect roundness of her bottom and took her from behind, sliding his cock deep inside her heat.
But he was getting ahead of himself.
Another filthy, private joke. God, he was a bastard. He kept his laugh inside his head. The last thing he needed to do was scare her. Not when he was so close. “Don’t say ‘fuck’? But I like it. It’s a good Anglo-Saxon word, visceral and real. As real as you are. As real as what we’re going to do. As real as the pleasure we will feel.”
But Celia wasn’t being so easily led. Her voice was light, and a little shaky, but she held to her purpose. “I don’t want to think and talk and dream and hear about it any more! I want to . . .” Courage failed her, or perhaps she didn’t have adequate vocabulary to express the feelings careening through her body.
“You want to experience. You want to feel. To touch and be touched. To kiss and be kissed.”
“Yes,” she admitted, “but—”
“Then go.”
Her eyes darted across the room and back to his face. “Where?”