A Lady Awakened (24 page)

Good Lord. He’d finally found his way. All it wanted was darkness and silence and infinite restraint. Nothing he couldn’t do.

He kissed her jaw, dotting a line from under her ear to her chin. Her body rippled beneath him. His thumb marked the corner of her mouth and then his lips took the place of the thumb.

She didn’t invite his tongue, and he didn’t impose it. Time enough for that later. He went back to her jaw, the side he’d neglected on his first pass. Somewhere between the sounds of his breath and hers, he heard her lips part, and he might have heard her tongue flick out to sample where he’d been.

“You taste like liquor,” she said. He could feel her muscles stiffen everywhere they touched.

“Brandy, yes.” He whispered, to make his voice the voice of any man. “I needed it for courage tonight.”

“Mirkwood.” Her whisper sharpened. “Are you drunk?”

“Drunk on your scent, I am. Drunk on the feel of your skin.” But even as he fought to keep the game going, he could feel how she was shrinking into her cool, brittle shell. The tilt of her hips changed and she sank into a mere passive posture, her responsiveness gone like an evanescent dream.

“You’re perfectly acquainted with my scent and skin. I think the brandy has addled your brain.” How badly must she have wanted an excuse to flee her own desire, that she would seize at one so flimsy as a mere drink of brandy?

He was acquainted with her indeed. He ought to have known better than to suppose he could lure her into pleasure through a pantomime of virtue. She wasn’t the woman for that, and he wasn’t the man. Small wonder she couldn’t believe him in the role. What did he know of innocence? He’d flung his away at fifteen, the very day he’d finally grasped the import of those glances and stares cast his way by a neighbor’s dissatisfied wife. It was long gone and irretrievable, and he’d never even thought to regret it.

Nor would he regret it now. “To business, then?” He didn’t bother whispering anymore.

“As soon as you like.”

And that was that. He raised up on straight arms and sought his own pleasure, like the careless wastrel he was. Devil take shyness. Devil take shy men, too. With one hand he clawed to the top of the headboard and gripped there to brace himself, panting or hissing between clenched teeth when he wanted to shout. Climax rushed up to meet him and he threw back his head and shook like a sapling in a gale, silently, because the servants mustn’t be alerted, and he would show her even a brazen man could know something of self-mastery.

F
OOL
,
SHE
reproved herself in time with his carnal rhythm.
Fool. Fool. Fool
. She’d known, not so long ago, all the reasons to resist a man. All the great and small ways a person could find herself betrayed. Appetite could cause a lady to give herself away until nothing remained but a shell of regret. Everything that had been hers would belong to the man on whom she’d bestowed it, and she would never have it back again. Nor would he prize it at all.

Trickery. Brandy-fueled trickery had come so close to undoing her tonight, with the crafty sweep of lips along her collarbones, the perfidious machinations of his hips. But she’d pulled up in time, and now she could remind herself of what she did and did not want.

He finished and lay panting beside her. She waited only until certain he would hear her over his own labored breaths. “I wish and hope you will not come to my bed drunk again.” Her voice sounded stiff; brittle. Of course it did. “That habit offends me.”

“I’m not drunk.” He sucked in more air. “Just pleasantly fortified. And as to habit, one can enjoy a drink of brandy without making a regular practice of it.”

Bitter laughter boiled up in her and she had to fight it down. “Men always think they control their habits, and never see that the reverse is true.”

“I tell you it’s not a habit.” Now she heard some irritation. “I had Granville up to the house for a glass or two. I thought to be sociable. That’s the first time I’ve indulged since the day I met you. And if you need further reassurance, I’ll abstain before I come to you tomorrow. Now can you cease to address me as though I stood before you in the dock on charges of public dissipation?”

She turned his words over in the darkness. He might be telling the truth. Admittedly she lacked objectivity on this topic. And she’d never known him to be drunk before, though of course some men were skilled at hiding it. Maybe she should suspend judgment until tomorrow, when he would keep or break his word. She drew a clean breath. “I’m sorry. I have very little tolerance for any form of inebriation.”

“So I apprehend.” His voice went mild as he turned his body toward her. “Who had that intolerable habit? Your father? Your husband? The brother with whom you don’t care to live?”

Her insides recoiled from the forward question, but her tongue had already got started. “Andrew?—that’s absurd. He’s so strict as to make me seem lenient.”

“Then I hope I never meet him.” He spoke in a calm, pleasant, conversational tone. “Is his nature, and yours, a reaction to growing up with an intemperate parent, perhaps?”

None of this was his concern.
None
of it. She sealed her lips into a tight line. But if she chose this juncture to keep quiet, she would encourage him to a conclusion that wronged her father. “How can you ask?” She couldn’t bear that injustice. “John Blackshear was a serious, Bible-reading, abstemious man.” She ought now to make a defense of Mr. Russell. That would logically follow. She stayed silent.

“Ah.” The syllable was lush with comprehension. He thought he knew all, now. She could feel the way his mind worked in the silence. Reviewing every scene they’d played together, with this as the secret subtext. As though this one facet of her marriage could account for everything he’d previously found unaccountable in her. “Do you care to speak of it?” he said after a moment.

“No.”

“Have you ever, to anyone?”

“No.”

She heard his mouth doing something mobile, perhaps making a false start or two before he spoke again. “Did he beat you?”

“No.” For Heaven’s sake. “I told you I don’t care to speak of it.”

“Did he have an evil temper?”

“Nothing of the sort. Nothing like you’d read of in a novel.” He would conjure a melodrama of Gothic proportions if she didn’t give him some better idea of the truth. “It was a kind of absence, more than anything. And an impediment to my feeling that degree of respect that a wife would like to feel for her husband. Because I believe a man ought to be dependable, and have some command of himself.”

“Not much chance of that, with a man in thrall to the bottle.” His words drew a soft underscore to her own, encouraging her to go on.

“Precisely. The drink made him changeable. It put great gaps in his memory. He would forget whole hours and everything that had passed in them.”

“But he remembered the way to your bed.”

Her breath caught. He’d gone right to the core of it, surely as though he’d sliced her open and laid a finger on her beating heart. For all that she framed Mr. Russell’s habit as a bothersome inconvenience, something that could not truly touch her, the fact had remained:
he
, her husband, could touch her. Whenever he wished, he could. A man who made himself a stranger to his wife still had that right. A wife had no right to refuse.

It could have been worse. He didn’t beat you. He wasn’t cruel
. That stern self-reproach never did have the bracing effect one would wish. Her eyes were blinking with loathsome rapidity, their will to expose her frailty luckily thwarted by the dark. She breathed in, sharply, and dug her nails into the meat of her palms.

“Martha.” Across the distance of a pillow his attention flowed, a warm, buoyant bath inviting her to linger.

“Mr. Mirkwood.” She made the words like a hand held upright, commanding him to halt. “Your kindness and concern do you credit, I’m sure. But I’ve said all I care to on this subject. I suggest we go to sleep now.”

The air stirred with movement. Unerringly through the dark, his hand came and set itself against her head, palm at her ear, fingers spread and sunk into her hair. Just for a moment his hand remained there, just long enough to hold her steady as he brought his lips to her forehead. “Good night, then,” he said, and she felt his warm breath at her hairline. He lay back, with nothing more to say, and she listened to his breaths as they lengthened and turned to light snores.

S
OME TIME
in the night, turning over, she collided with part of him. His arm snaked promptly across her and pulled her close, as though she had belonged on that part of the bed all along, and had somehow wandered. She held her breath, waiting for what would come next, but nothing did. His arm had acted of its own accord, perhaps as a reflex honed from countless nights spent with a woman in easy reach. Or perhaps her presence beside him coincided with a dream of some other lover.

That was not her business. He could dream whatever he liked. Only she’d prefer not to be drawn in as some kind of surrogate, her body ensnared in so many places by his. His legs tangled with her own. His arm across her, high on her chest. His chin and throat making a space just right to fit the top of her head. She could feel his pulse through her own scalp, and again through her shoulder where it rested against the middle of his chest. His breathing too: the soft rise and fall of his ribs; the slow, faint rush of air from somewhere over her head. Soon, surely, he would turn the other way and release her, but for the moment she lay there, trapped in bonds all made up of him, and there was nothing to do but consider the predicament.

If one loved a man, one must wish for this. Such a strange notion. One would wish for this clasp of the arm. This space his body made for hers. This little song, hushed and rhythmic, played by his pulse and his breath as though for the purpose of lulling her to sleep.

But what lady could ever sleep this way, surrounded by so much male? She could feel the appendage, slumbering against her hip. Her breathing, and his, might create movement enough to wake it. And from there, to wake him.

Slowly she drew her leg out from under his, and worked her way in a lateral slither toward her own edge of the bed. Scarcely had she gone six inches before his arm tightened and pulled her more firmly against him. He grumbled something incoherent; twined his leg again with hers. His lips pressed once to the top of her head. The appendage didn’t stir.

“Mirkwood,” she whispered. He couldn’t possibly do all that while asleep, could he?

He made no answer, and in the quiet she shaped her mouth, her lips and tongue and teeth and palate, to something new. “Theophilus.” The name floated out like milkweed fluff blown from her palm, wayward and ephemeral.

He grumbled again—she felt the thrumming of it in his chest—then fell silent save for the breaths, in and out.

She closed her eyes to wait for sleep or sunrise. Probably the latter. Her breathing arranged itself in soft accord with his own. Well, if she didn’t sleep, they would at least be assured of catching that early-morning hour at which he must rise and make his quiet departure. She’d speak to him then about schooling his limbs in restraint.

W
OMAN
Some
base animal part of his brain gave him the news.
Woman, not two feet distant
.

His nose confirmed the report. Sweet scent of naked woman, with an overlay of something floral. Lilac. A powder made to smell of lilacs. Ah, yes.
That
woman.

His eyes eased open. Faint gray, in the strip of window between the curtains. No sunrise colors yet, but they’d come. Then he must be off.

He had time. He needn’t even wake her.

Her back was to him, her hair spilling all ways over the pillow and one shoulder exposed where the covers had slipped down. He tugged at the sheet and draped it over her shoulder, restoring her modesty. In trade, he took away every inch between them. His chest met her back—
gently
—and he draped an arm over her rib cage to keep her there. His knee pushed—
slowly
—between her knees. His hand grasped her thigh, lifting it up and back to rest atop his leg. His cock brushed against her, lingering on the threshold of where she opened to him, and—
quiet as snowfall
—slipped in.

“What are you doing?” Awake and alert in an instant. “You did this already, last night.”

He cursed softly. “Can’t you just sleep through it?”

“
Sleep
through it? Are you mad? You could wake a churchyard with that thing.”

“Good Lord. If I’d known you awoke with a sense of humor, I should have been spending the night long before this.” He thrust once and then twice. Christ, but he ought not to do this. The things she’d told him last night were coming back now, as was a vague, ardent resolve to respect her bodily reticence, and prove himself a better man than her husband.

And now here he was imposing himself on her—in her—and demanding she go back to sleep. Still, she hadn’t stopped him. She would, wouldn’t she, if she really objected?

He thrust once more and drew almost all the way out with a shuddering breath. “Truly, do you want me to stop?” He sounded like he’d just run from Vauxhall to St. James’s.

Her ribs expanded into his chest, slowly, while she thought it over. “I don’t suppose there’s any harm. And this might be the right bit of seed.”

“Good thinking. This might be the bit.”
I’ll do my best to make it the bit
. A place, after all, for worthy intentions. He paused to set his lips to her shoulder, careful to keep his rough cheek clear of her smooth one, before he resumed.

Chapter Eleven