Betina Krahn (14 page)

The clean, restrained lines of Hepplewhite furnishings, the soft drape of ivory brocade over interior shutters at the
windows, the muted tapestries, the cream watered-silk upholstery, and the thick ruby-colored Persian rugs underfoot surprised him. The room registered in his mind not as grand or fashionable, but as wholly refreshing in its texture-rich simplicity. More important, it had an air of ageless, timeless comfort about it, just the sort of place a man could take his friends for a drink and a quiet bit of conversation. His shoulders rounded and he began to relax all over at the prospect of—

Enjoying that comfort. He surfaced abruptly from that fantasy. This was
her
house. These were
her
delicious aromas. This was
her
comfort, not his. While he was bumping his head on rafters in a musty old loft, acquiring God knows what infestations from sleeping on moldy straw ticking and going delusional from lack of food, she was ensconced in this cozy little house, sleeping like a princess, eating like a queen, just waiting for him to give up and—

Like hell he was going home!

He charged out the door. For a moment, standing in the hall, he was unsure where to go. Then with sudden resolve he began to climb the stairs.

Determined to call her on her little game, he invaded bedroom after bedroom—four to be exact—before he found her. When he threw open the door of the fifth, there she was, standing before an open wardrobe with her arms full of garments.

“Your lordship! I was just about to bring the samples downstairs,” she said indignantly. She hurried toward him with an arm outstretched, intending to sweep him back out the door.

“No need to empty your wardrobe when I can see them here.” He deftly sidestepped her and began to stroll about the warm, sweetly scented bedchamber, peering into boxes on her dressing table and fingering the counterpane and curtains on her bed. Then he caught sight of garments tossed across a chair and strewn over the bed and swung around one thick bedpost for a closer look.

“What is this?” He picked up a long-sleeved cotton garment and turned it this way and that.

“A blouse,” she snapped. She suddenly realized that what she was holding in her arms was a
stack of intimate garments. Reddening, she pulled them protectively against her. “Really, your lordship—”

“I claim no expertise in female fashion, but this looks like a fairly ordinary blouse to me.”

“It
is
an ordinary blouse. And it is worn with an ordinary overskirt and trousers. Now, if you will just—”

He discarded the blouse in favor of a bit of muslin printed with soft geometric designs and trimmed with delicate tatted lace. Dangling the garment by a short puffed sleeve, he looked at her in bewilderment. “And what is this?”

“A dress,” she said through her teeth.

“Are you quite certain?”

“I designed it myself. It conforms most specifically to the Reform Dress Society’s guidelines for aesthetic and appropriate garments: classical lines, an unconstructed bodice, a high waistline, a simple neckline, a softly shirred skirt …”

“Looks more like a handkerchief to—”

She snatched it from him before he did something vile, like blow his nose in it. But a moment later he invaded her wardrobe, pulling out one garment after another until he came to a bit of brown wool serge.

“A divided skirt?” He held the garment up by its bifurcated bottom, staring at the place where the parts that covered her limbs were joined. He looked askance at her. “Good Lord, don’t tell me you’re one of those frenzied female bicyclists as well as a rampaging idealist. It’s got so a fellow can’t go for a stroll in the park on Sunday afternoon without putting himself at risk of being run down by Amazons on wheels.” He dropped it as if afraid of contamination and continued to pillage her closet, dragging out a long gored skirt, another high-waisted dress, and one of her Chinese-style tunics.

“And this—what in blazes is
this
thing?” He hauled out a combination garment made of fine pintucked cambric and held up one of the abbreviated legs. “Ye gods—it looks like one of those hideous Jaeger suits. Not his ‘sanitized woolen’
model, however. Where is the rest of the legs? the sleeves?” Suspending it in midair, he examined the garment visually, then transferred his scrutiny to her. “I confess, Miss Duncan, I am shocked by the thought of you gadding about in public in such scandalously flimsy foundations.”

“My ‘foundations’ are neither scandalous nor flimsy.” Madeline tilted her nose to ward off his stare. The bounder. She had dragged him there to prove her point, and he was turning the tables on her yet again, taking advantage of her professional attitude to indulge his juvenile curiosity about her undergarments.

But before she could elaborate, he was on to the next outrage.

“Ahhh, here they are! The infamous female trousers.” He turned back from the wardrobe with a pair of black serge pantaloons pressed to his waist, then held them up to the light for a better look. “Not much to them, I daresay.” When he looked at her, his face was bronzing and his eyes were beginning to glow. “Hold on, they aren’t red. I thought you always wore red.”

“Only in public. And only in mourning.” She refolded her arms defensively around the garments she held. “It is not my color.”

“Oh? I would say it suits you perfectly. Red hair. Red clothes. You’re the proverbial red flag … waving yourself before society’s horns.” He took a step toward her, and she jerked back, smacking into the bedpost. He struck a pose, holding the trousers out to his side toreador-style, and jangling them at her. A moment later he swung them out of the way with a flourish and an indecently handsome smile.

“Olé!”

“I am not waving myself or my garments before society’s horns,” she insisted frigidly.

“Of course you are.” He dropped the trousers and looked pointedly at the garments in her arms. “You’re challenging long-established standards of propriety … tweaking society’s
upturned nose.” One corner of his mouth quirked lazily. “Interesting of you, actually. It makes one wonder just what set you so at odds with all that’s considered proper and decent for a woman.”

“Clearly you haven’t understood the first thing about what I’ve been telling you.” She struggled not to react to that oddly unsettling smile of his.

“Just what have you been telling me, Miss Duncan?”

“I am trying to make the world a better place, Lord Mandeville.”
Trying desperately to think of a way to get you out of my wardrobe, my bedroom … my life!

“Come now, Miss Duncan, this is hardly Hyde Park.” He edged closer. “Climb down off that soapbox and talk to me human to human instead of saint to nonbeliever. Just what do you intend to get out of all this charity and humanity?”

There it was, she realized, the thorn that had been stuck in his paw since he first set eyes upon her. According to his cynical philosophy, no one did anything for nothing.

“I’ll not deny I want something from all this,” she said, feeling her heart racing as her gaze drifted toward his. “Contrary to your peculiar delusion, I am
not
campaigning for canonization.” She drew a deep breath and met his gaze full on.

“I make no secret of what I expect in return.… it’s the same thing I am providing for my workers. I want a reason to get up each morning, a chance to make my days count for something—in short, a purpose in life.” She searched his eyes for some glint of understanding. “Is that so terribly difficult to comprehend?”

Cole had allowed his gaze to meet hers, and from the instant he slid into that seductive blue, he knew he had made a fatal error. The truth was all there, written on her soul in large, indelible script. Earnestness. Honesty. Integrity. She truly wanted to use her fortune in a way that would give her life structure and depth and meaning. He did understand. He understood so well that an ache bloomed in his chest.

For a moment he felt drawn to her, drawn to the clarity
and certainty in her, the sense that here was something to fill the emptiness within. But then he banished that sentimental notion, deciding that what he really felt within was hunger. Only this time it wasn’t merely his stomach that was demanding satisfaction.

He reached for one of the garments in her arms and gave a slow, irresistible tug. The piece slid and finally popped free, and he found himself holding a sleek strip of ivory silk awash in lace. With eyes glittering, he looped fingers through two straps and held up the garment.

“What is
this
?” he demanded.

“Our first product. A bandeau bodice.”

“This little thing?” It was made of a fine silk foulard, a fabric considered by society’s arbiters as too indecent for undergarments. He held the garment up to the light coming from the nearby window and wriggled his fingers behind its translucent fabric. His voice lowered a full fifth. “What does it do?”

Madeline watched him fingering her favorite bodice, and a spurt of confusing heat shot through her veins. She snatched it away from him and shoved it behind her back.

“It covers and supports a woman’s—” She swallowed and tried again. “It’s very like a corset cover or a camisole, only foreshortened and with cleverly placed darts that make it conform to a woman’s …” She couldn’t have uttered the word “bosoms” if her life depended on it.

One of his eyebrows rose in comprehension.

“It has buttons down the front so that a woman can fasten it herself,” she said, pressing her spine harder against the bedpost and trying not to breathe too deeply of the dangerous scent of elemental male swirling around her. “All of our Ideal designs are predicated upon the notion that grown women in British society should be perfectly capable of dressing themselves.”

“And
un
dressing themselves?” His voice was suddenly
like Barbados molasses and his eyes were darkening in the centers.

“That goes without saying,” she whispered, feeling another garment sliding from the stack in her arms.

He raised a pair of short, flounced knickers between them and rubbed the light fabric slowly between his fingers. “Rolled silk. Very nice.”

“The Ideal ones will be made of a specially knitted cotton that will provide a healthful give against a woman’s … a woman’s …”

“Shape,” he supplied.

“Shape,” she echoed, feeling some of her tension slide. Or was it her defenses?

He was so close that the heat radiating from him seemed to be melting her knees. As he drew the clothing piece by piece from her arms, she was grateful for the support of the bedpost at her back. With each garment he examined and discarded, he edged closer, until both their hands were empty and the front of his coat rested against her tunic.

“So, it might be said that with an Ideal bodice and Ideal knickers, a woman might have an Ideal shape?” A deliciously wicked grin drew her gaze to his mouth. Bold, sensual lips … nubile and expressive … the texture of dusky sateen. “Like yours.”

“M-mine?”

“Half the women in London would give a year off their lives to have your thirty-eight, twenty-four, thirty-six. After seeing what you wear beneath your ‘reformed’ exterior”—he dragged his knuckles down the side of her cheek—“I am forced to conclude that those noteworthy curves have little to do with Ideal garments. Those curves, my mad little Madeline, are very simply you.”

She couldn’t respond on any level to his words; she was too busy responding on every possible level to his silky dark hair, his glowing eyes, and his rough-soft voice. When he
lowered his head, she lifted hers to protest, and their mouths met.

His lips poured over hers, softly at first, experimentally, and her surprised thought was that his touch seemed to somehow assuage the heated, tingling sensations that she had come to associate with him. That sweet burn of anticipation now muted into a ripple of warmth that spread slowly through her.

She had never been this starkly intimate with another human being in her life—pressed body to body, mouth on mouth. His arms slid around her waist and her senses filled with enthralling new perceptions. How could she have known that the feel of a man’s lips would change from moment to moment—soft, hard, flexing, slanting, parting, coaxing, commanding? How could she ever have imagined that a mouth—his mouth—actually had a taste of its own? It was salty-sweet, like buttered toast with jam. And how could she have guessed that he would smell like warm wool and sandalwood, spiced with a tang of male heat that resembled the aroma of Ceylonese tea. The man was a pure feast for the senses.

How long his lips explored, teased, and caressed hers she had no way of knowing, for it seemed as if the world gradually slowed on its axis and the normal motion of the cosmos came to a grinding halt. The moment stretched around her—extraordinary, brilliantly vivid, exquisitely infinite. And when the cogs of reality began to turn again, the universe had assumed a slightly different rotation.

Cole opened his eyes first, and the sight of her feathery lashes and flushed skin took a moment to register through the steam in his head. When they did penetrate, it took another moment to comprehend the ramifications of the jasmine and heliotrope filling his head and her mouth soft and pliant beneath his.