“Open your mouth, darling,” he whispered in a queer, raspy undertone. Eyes closed, nearly mindless in the grip of sensations she had never even dreamed existed, she obeyed. This time his tongue was a welcome guest, caressing her tongue and the softness of her mouth until she was gasping for breath. She thought, it feels so strange, to be kissed like this, and then she couldn’t think at all. The slow seduction of his mouth was driving her wild. Shyly at first, and then with increasing confidence, her tongue began to reply to his. Her untutored response seemed to set him afire. He kissed her over and over again, his mouth bruising her softness without meaning to, hardly aware of what he was doing. Megan gloried in his frenzied kisses, crying out against his mouth, clinging to him like a limpet to a rock. She could feel him shaking as if with a fit of ague. Her own body was at the mercy of similar tremors. When at last his mouth left hers to trail across the side of her cheek to her neck, Megan felt that she might expire at the sheer wonder of his lips against her skin.
His fingers were unsteady as they unwrapped the white silk stock from about her neck so that he might have better access to her skin. Megan felt his lips in the hollow of her throat, burning her, and her nails dug convulsively into the thick wavy hair at the back of his head, holding him to her. When he began to unbutton her white shirtwaist, greeting each centimeter of newly liberated flesh with a kiss, Megan arched herself against him, sighing with pleasure.
He unbuttoned the garment down to the edge of her plain white chemise, laying aside the edges of her shirtwaist so that a deep V of creamy flesh was exposed to his mouth. His lips and tongue stroked with rough insistence from the hollow of her throat to the first pale swellings of her breasts where they were just visible above the top of her chemise. At the touch of his mouth on her breasts, Megan felt the world begin to whirl around her. She moaned, tightening her grip on him, writhing against him in an attempt to ease the mingled agony and ecstasy that had her in thrall. Justin shuddered in answer, gasping out her name, and Megan felt the hot touch of his hand as it found its way up under her voluminous skirts. He slid the flat of his hand over her slim calves in their white stockings, exploring the curves of her legs, touching her knees; his fingers moved up beneath the hem of her pantalets to a soft thigh, running gently over the stockinged flesh until he reached her lacy garter. Then he moved on, lightly caressing the silkiness of her bare skin before his hand slid all the way around to the inside of her thigh. The touch of his hand where no one had ever touched her before shocked her. Her nails slid down his head to curve into the brown flesh of his neck, impaling him. As his hand slid ever higher, she squirmed uncomfortably. The increasing intimacy of his touch was bringing her back to an awareness of herself that brought waves of embarrassment in its wake. With a hot flood of color to her cheeks, she suddenly realized how she must appear, lying in his arms with her
shirtwaist half unbuttoned and her skirts pushed up around her hips while he pressed hot kisses to her breasts and his hands roamed ever higher on the bare skin of her thighs beneath her pantalets.
“Justin, stop!” she gasped, self-disgust thick in her voice as she pushed against his shoulders with her hands. For a moment she feared that he wouldn’t heed her, so caught up in his own rising passion that he was now deaf and blind to her pleas. But she was wrong. As she continued to push against his shoulders, he drew in a deep, shuddering breath; she felt his hands clench on her flesh, and then he was smoothing down her skirts. She couldn’t look at him; instead she looked down at the whiteness of her flesh above her chemise, marred now with rosy marks where his lips had been, and blushed furiously. Her hands were shaking so badly as they tried to do up her shirtwaist that she couldn’t fit even the first button into its hole. Justin, with a harsh sound, brushed her hands out of the way and fastened the garment for her. Megan blushed anew at the brush of his knuckles against her flesh.
“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly when this task was completed. Megan risked a quick look at him; saw the rigid set of his mouth and hooded glitter of his eyes. She looked away quickly. She wanted to scramble off his lap, but she feared that her quivering knees would refuse to support her weight and she would end up crumpled in a heap at his feet. What had taken place between them was her fault; she had not the slightest doubt of that. She had kissed him first. Her smiles
and gestures had encouraged him to kiss and touch her in return. He no doubt thought she was a wanton. Among the girls at school, it was common knowledge that it was a lady’s place to conduct herself at all times so as to keep a gentleman’s respect, because if he ever ceased to respect her he would try to take awful liberties with her person and then she would be ruined, which was the worst fate that could overtake any gently reared girl. Clearly she was well on the road to ruin; remembering how she had sighed and quivered in Justin’s arms, she thought she deserved to be.
“Megan, did you hear what I said?” Justin’s voice sounded more normal now, and was tinged with just a hint of exasperation. “Look at me!” His hand slid beneath her chin to enforce his command.
She met his eyes with a flicker of her lashes, then fastened her gaze obstinately on his tightly compressed mouth. She couldn’t bear to see the contempt he must be feeling for her reflected in those golden eyes. For years she had yearned for his affection, and now, just when she thought she had begun to earn it, when they had been such friends over the past week, she had ruined everything. She despised herself, and was very much afraid that he must despise her, too.
“For God’s sake, don’t look like that!” he said roughly, his hand tightening beneath her chin so that his fingers dug into her jaw. “It was my fault, not yours. Megan, do you hear me?”
It was kind of him to take the blame. Megan darted another quick, unhappy glance at him and saw
that he was frowning blackly. Her mouth quivered. Suddenly all she wanted was to get away from him, to go off somewhere by herself and cry and cry.
“Please let me go,” she said in a stifled little voice. Justin’s grip tightened for an instant, then he slowly released her. Moving like a sleepwalker, Megan got up and began to turn away toward the door. Justin tried to catch her hand, to hold her there, but she eluded him. Her eyes were almost blind with tears.
“Megan, come back here!” he ordered furiously as she continued to walk with careful, measured steps toward the door. “Megan!”
As she let herself out, Megan winced at the string of furious oaths that fell from his lips.
Over the next few days, Megan made it her business to stay well out of her guardian’s way. The visits to his room, the friendly card games, the intimate suppers were a thing of the past. She knew he roamed the upstairs corridors and guessed that he was on the lookout for her. Not wanting to confront him, she spent nearly every hour of the day on horseback or in the stables. At night, she took the precaution of locking her door, although she knew instinctively that he would not seek her out in her bedroom after what had passed between them. Whenever she remembered those moments in his arms, the way he had kissed and caressed her, the way she had responded, she blushed to the roots of her hair. Logically, she knew she could not avoid him forever; his very position as her guardian made that impossible. But with every ounce of her
being, she longed to put off the inevitable meeting with him for as long as she could. She thought that he was probably as embarrassed by her behavior—and his, although, being a man, he could not really be held at fault—as she was herself, and wished that she could feel confident that he would just ignore the whole deplorable incident. But, secretly, she knew he would not. Like the gentleman he was, he would apologize as he had tried to do before she so ignobly fled, and she didn’t think she could bear to hear him pretending that she was the blameless party. Besides, if just the thought of him could make her blush, what would his physical presence do to her composure? She had kissed his mouth, felt those long, strong hands on her body, dug her nails into the strong column of his neck. If she had to look at him, to speak to him, she thought she might die of shame.
The servants, particularly the Donovans, were clearly aware of the rift between their master and his ward, but they had no knowledge of its cause. Megan shuddered to think of how they would treat her if they ever learned the truth. She would be a scarlet woman; even the servants would feel nothing for her but contempt. Realizing this, Megan had never felt more miserable in her life.
To Mrs. Donovan’s discreet inquiries as to what had happened to make her refuse to spend even so much as a quarter hour in the Earl’s company, Megan said only that they had quarreled. Knowing how high-handed all the Brants could be when the mood was
upon them, Mrs. Donovan had no trouble believing this. But as she told her husband, it must have been a peculiar quarrel to have Miss Megan avoiding her guardian like he had the plague, while he paced and prowled his rooms and the upstairs hallways like a caged tiger. It was plain that he missed Miss Megan’s company; it was equally plain that Miss Megan was not going to relent in her refusal to see him until she was forced to.
Justin, for his part, could have cheerfully kicked himself down a flight of stairs. His behavior to his innocent young ward had been inexcusable. Telling himself that he had been unable to resist her did no good at all. No matter how charming or beautiful he found her, no matter how strong her onslaught on his senses, nothing should have been allowed to outweigh the fact that she was a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl in his care. That she had aroused feelings in him that he hadn’t felt in years was neither here nor there; it was his job, as her guardian, to protect her morals, not to allow her to be compromised or especially to compromise her himself. He had always heard that men approaching their fortieth year acquired a taste for very young girls. Remembering the intensity of his physical reaction to Megan, he began for the first time to believe that this might be true. Nothing else could account for the way he had quivered and moaned, ached and burned for her like some damned snot-nosed schoolboy; and for nothing more than a few kisses and gropes with a pretty—all right, very pretty—girl! Mentally he reviewed
all the elegant ladies of the
ton,
all the gorgeous actresses and dancers, all the coquettish demimondaines he had known, and shook his head at himself. He must really be getting senile, to let an innocent schoolgirl affect him in such a way!
Whenever he thought back over that scene with Megan—which he did, frequently—guilt rose to swamp even the incredible force of his passion. The fact that she had been willing enough, at least in the beginning, made no difference. Of course the girl had been willing! She was as innocent as a baby, with little idea of where a few sweet kisses could lead. But he had known full well, and he had kissed her anyway, to his everlasting discredit. He had told himself that he would kiss her just once, and he might have been able to keep to that resolve if she had not smiled at him so sweetly after he had first brushed her lips with his. That beguiling smile had tempted him past bearing, and he had thought to kiss her just once more. After that, it had been all over with him. At his age, with all his experience with women, he should have known what would happen. And yet he had no way of knowing how warm and tender her flesh would be, how like the inside of a juicy ripe peach her mouth was. Kissing her, he had lost control. What happened next was totally unforgivable. If any other man had used his ward as he himself had, he would have called him out, and been more than justified in doing so. Then, if he had managed to curb his anger sufficiently to wound rather than kill the blackguard, there would have been
a quick, quiet wedding whether the bride and groom were willing or no. A young lady’s virtue was her most precious possession; he, Justin, had hopelessly compromised Megan’s. An
amende honorable
would be in order, but, as he was already married, there was no possibility that he could make such traditional reparation even if he wished to.
The fervor of her response was something that he firmly refused to think about. She had been as overwhelmed with desire as he had himself; the knowledge still had the power to excite him unbearably if he did not keep a tight rein on his imagination. It would be fatal to allow himself to speculate on what she would be like in bed once she learned a little more of what it was all about, and had been coaxed past her first virginal shyness. Most of the women he had known carnally could be grouped into three categories: frankly cold, which described Alicia perfectly; cold but faking, something women often did to lure a man back to their bed; or frankly lecherous, which strangely enough could apply to as many fashionable ladies as to their less reputable sisters. Megan, he knew instinctively, would be none of these things, if handled correctly. Unless a cruel or clumsy lover frightened her, she would be a warm passionate bed partner, accepting and returning caresses with joyful abandon. Justin was aware of a crushing longing to be the one to initiate Megan into the rituals of lovemaking. Given the chance, he would be as careful and tender as he knew how. The images thus conjured up made his
loins ache. But it could never be, as he knew, so it was best not to allow himself such dangerous fantasies.
The one memory that had the power to cut him to the quick was of her face after she had very properly called a halt to their lovemaking. She had looked so—so ashamed. Her face had been frantic with embarrassment, and her long, silky lashes had veiled her eyes as she had steadfastly refused to look at him. Her mouth, red and swollen from the force of his kisses, had trembled pathetically, and he had been conscious of an almost overwhelming urge to soothe it with yet more kisses. With more restraint than he had ever credited to himself, he had managed to refrain from doing so, and had even permitted her to get up off his knee. But he had meant to talk to her, to tell her that she had no reason to blame herself for what had happened; that any fault, if fault there was, rested solely with him. But she had not given him the chance to say more than a few words. Instead, he had not so much as set eyes on her in the five days since. He was very much afraid that he had irreparably damaged their guardian-ward relationship, but he was determined to salvage what he could. They must agree to put the incident behind them, and he must school himself to think of her strictly as a daughter. But first, he had to find some way of getting her to listen to him. He did not want her to be eaten up with guilt for something that was none of her doing.