“Lack of innocence?” she finished for him.
He nodded curtly.
She gave a mirthless laugh. “I was unaware there
were
any men of my rank and breeding who would ignore a maid’s ‘lack of innocence.’”
To her satisfaction, he looked decidedly uncomfortable. “There are…ways for a woman to…disguise—”
“What a grand idea,” she snapped, infuriated that he’d even suggest such a beastly thing. “With Griff’s money and Rosalind’s help, I can sell myself to some paragon of virtue who would take me despite my lameness. Then I can deceive this paragon about my chastity to ensure marital bliss.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “And if I should happen to find myself with child by you, I can always fob the baby off on him.”
His shocked gaze swung to her. “Good Christ, Helena—”
“That is, as long as Griff and Rosalind find me a husband quickly enough.” She planted one hand on her hip, the other gripping her cane so tightly it was a miracle she didn’t crush it. “Or have you forgotten talking about the possibility of children after you made your ‘mistake’ last night? Made it
twice
, I might add.”
“I took precautions,” he protested. “You won’t find yourself with child.”
That hit her like a physical blow. True, he had not spilled his seed inside her. Had he been thinking even then that they had no future?
No—he wouldn’t have proposed marriage if he hadn’t wanted to marry her. “Are you sure your ‘precautions’ are foolproof?”
He blanched, his eyes flitting over her belly as if considering it. “No. But if by some rare chance you should…become pregnant, that would change matters, of course.”
“You mean that forcing a child into ‘shackles’ is all right, but forcing me is not?”
A dark flush spread up his neck. “Damn it, you don’t underst—”
“You’re saying that if you haven’t sired a child on me, it won’t bother you in the least for me to marry some other man. Even though I gave myself to you, and you claimed to want me.”
She went on relentlessly. “Or perhaps you’re assuming that a marriage to another man needn’t stop me from taking you for my paramour. I understand that such things are acceptable as long as one is discreet. Then your ‘past’ wouldn’t cause us so much trouble.” She swallowed, wondering if she was just torturing herself with this little speech. “Is that what you were hoping for all along? To be my paramour while some other man keeps me?”
“You know I wasn’t!” he gritted out.
She did know it, but she was determined to force him into considering the possibilities. “For you, it would be no different than going to one of your tarts, except that you’d not have to pay me, since I’d rely on my husband for my allowance—”
“Stop it!” Catching her by the shoulders, he shook her. “You know I don’t want you to be my ‘tart’!”
“I’m not good enough for that?” she said, deliberately pretending to misunderstand him, determined to goad him past his irrational nobility. “No, I don’t suppose there are many men who’d want a crippled strumpet.”
“Don’t talk about yourself like that, d’you hear?” he shouted. “You could be blind, deaf, and dumb, and I’d still love you, damn it!”
The words rang very clearly in the room, the most poignant declaration she could ever have wanted. Hope leaped in her chest. “You…you love me?”
Raw emotion flashed over his features. “I shouldn’t have said it, but yes, of course I love you. Why else do you think I don’t want you to marry me?”
She caught his face in her hands and whispered, “I won’t let you get out of it, my darling.”
He shut his eyes as if to block her out. “Oh, Christ, Helena…you know I’d marry you this instant if…if…”
“If what? You were a different man? You’d had a better
upbringing, a nicer set of parents, a less complicated past? Then you wouldn’t be who you are, and I wouldn’t want you.”
His eyes shot open. Powerful hands gripped her shoulders, and a powerful need shone in his face. “I want to protect you, is all.”
“From what? Happiness and a future with the man I love? Thank you very much, but I can do without that kind of protection.”
“You are so bloody stubborn,” he growled, but he did not thrust her away.
She wound her arms about his neck so he couldn’t. “I certainly am. How do you think I managed to live when the surgeon said I would die, to regain the use of legs he swore would never work again? And I shall be
very
stubborn about marrying you. Because the possibility of having your shady past occasionally overshadow our lives is not nearly as fearsome to me as the possibility of losing you.”
“Then you’re as daft as you are stubborn.” He was weakening—she could see it in his face, in the hint of hope that he kept trying to banish with a scowl.
“If I am, it’s all your fault. You made me see that being the soul of caution and propriety has merely brought me a lonely bed and a cold future. So if you think I shall let
you
turn into the soul of caution and propriety all of a sudden, you’re more daft than I.”
“Propriety?” he said, arching one eyebrow. “Me?”
“In one respect, yes. Like a proper gentleman, you’re trying to protect me from things I don’t wish to be protected from.” She tugged his head down until his mouth was a mere inch from hers. “I really wish you’d stop. I like you much better as a wicked rascal.” She brushed her lips over his.
With a groan, he grabbed her head to hold it still. His
hands cupped her jaw, and he shook her head just a little, as if to shake her wild ideas from her brain. “So you think to marry a wicked rascal, do you?”
“Yes,” she whispered fiercely. “I’m very set on it.”
“Last night you weren’t.” He dragged his thumbs roughly down her throat. “Last night you barely dipped your toe in my wicked past, and it sent you running. But if you marry me, you’ll be swimming in it. You won’t be able to banish it with your tart tongue. I can’t change what I am and what I’ve been. So you either swim with me or you drown. And I don’t know if I could bear to see you drown, love.”
“Ah, but I’m a very good swimmer.” She tightened her arms about his neck. “You might as well give up this ridiculous resistance, you know. I’ll become as wicked as you if that’s what it takes.”
Untempered need flared in his face. “You couldn’t be wicked if you tried. A little naughty, p’raps, but not wicked.”
“What about that night at the inn, when I practically threw myself at you?”
“You were drunk, that’s all. People are different when they’re in their cups.”
“Are you sure that’s all it was?” She dropped her hands to his waistcoat and began undoing the buttons. “Shall I tell you what I was thinking just now, while Mr. Seward was shackling you? It wasn’t about your criminal, past or your free-trading uncle or anything like that, I assure you.”
“What, then?” he said hoarsely.
Opening his waistcoat, she slid her hands inside. “I was thinking how I wished he would shackle me to the bed with you. I was anticipating you and me, naked and trapped together, unable to do anything but make love all night long—”
With a groan, he brought his mouth crashing down on hers. He tasted of brandy and desperation—wild, hot, urgent—and oh, how she reveled in it. She had him now, whether he knew it or not.
His kiss teetered between anger and desire as he drove his tongue deep, taking what he wanted with a single-minded purpose that made her give her heart to him with complete abandon. He loved her. He might not want to, but she would change that. Tonight, now. And once this nightmare with Juliet was over, she would make him marry her if she had to hold a pistol on him to do it.
Suddenly he jerked back to stare at her with glittering eyes. “All right, prove it to me.”
Dazed by need, she murmured, “What?”
“Prove you’re wicked enough to be married to a man like me. Last night I had to seduce you. You wanted none of it at first—admit it. You came to my bed because you were coaxed, and afterward you regretted it—”
“I did not!”
“You acted like you did.” His eyes searched her face. “But if you marry me, I want you to be damned sure you chose it freely. So prove that it’s your choice.” Abruptly, he dropped his hands from her and stepped back. “Seduce me. Coax me into
your
bed. Show me you want me badly enough to throw out all the rules of your fine upbringing, and act like the wicked woman you claim to be. Do that, and I might be convinced that you mean what you say.”
She gaped at him, taken utterly by surprise. Seducing him would indeed mean throwing out all the rules. She was sure a Well-bred Young Lady
never
seduced a man, probably not even her husband. And certainly not a man to whom she wasn’t married.
Well, here stood the man she loved, and if the only way to show him that they belonged together was by seduction, then by God, she would seduce him.
If only she had any idea how to go about it without looking like an utter ninny. It had been one thing to allow his attentions, to follow his guidance in lovemaking, to never take the initiative except when drunk.
But seduce him? What did she know about seducing a man who was clearly determined to resist her?
His lips curled up in a grim smile, as if he knew how his suggestion had flustered her. “Not feeling so wicked after all?”
The taunt firmed her resolve. “How little you know me,” she shot back. She dragged her hair loose of its pins, letting them tinkle on the floor like so many raindrops. Striving to hide her self-consciousness, she shook it out to tumble about her shoulders,
“Taking down your hair hardly counts as being wicked,” Daniel rasped even as desire blazed in his face.
That was true. If she wanted to seduce him, she’d have to be bolder. “No, but this does.” Trying not to blush, she unfastened her gown, which thankfully buttoned and laced in the front. She hesitated a moment, feeling open and exposed to him in a way she’d never felt before.
Then she caught him watching her skeptically, and that was all it took. Swallowing hard, she shimmied out of her gown, then her petticoat. As they drifted to the floor, leaving her in her chemise and stockings, she glanced up to find pure hunger sharpening his rough-hewn features.
It gave her confidence, as if by shedding her gown, she’d shed some of her usual reserve. Perhaps she
could
seduce him. Certainly it didn’t seem so difficult when his fiery gaze ardently raked her scantily clad body.
Her blood thundered in her veins, and a decidedly wicked smile crept over her face. “Do you wish to see more?” Without waiting for his answer, she undid the ties of her chemise, then pushed one sleeve off her shoulder.
“That’s not seduction, that’s teasing,” he choked out, though she noticed that he clenched and unclenched his hands as if trying to keep from tearing her chemise off.
It encouraged her even more. “Isn’t it seduction when I make you want me?” She slid the chemise off both shoulders and let it whisper down her body to the floor baring her breasts to him shamelessly. Feeling bolder, she dropped her gaze to his trousers. “Because judging from that bulge in your breeches, I’d say you do want me Danny,”
“Wanting you and acting on it are two different things, remember?” he ground out. “You have to make me act on it.”
“You’ll act on it, never fear,” she replied, buoyed by a sense of feminine power beyond anything she’d ever known. “But first I need you naked.” She stepped closer and tugged at his coat lapels. “Come on, darling, take this off.”
He arched one blond eyebrow in challenge, “A wicked woman would do it for me.”
He did have a point. A wicked woman like that Sall creature would brazenly take what she wanted, not wait until it was offered. And to Helena’s surprise, she found the idea of taking what she wanted more intriguing by the moment.
“Very well.” Shoving the coat off his shoulders, she tossed it to the floor, then removed his waistcoat and shirt. An admiring smile curved up her lips at the sight of his bare chest, so broad and firm and deliciously male. “You were right, you know, when you said I liked seeing you half-naked at your lodgings that day. I did. I liked it a great deal.”
He groaned. “You said you didn’t.”
“I lied.” She smoothed her hands over the hair-
roughened skin, relishing the way his muscles bunched and flexed beneath her curious fingers. Teasing the flat male nipples with her thumbs, she whispered, “I wondered even then what it would be like to touch you.” She slid her hands up to his shoulders and leaned forward to rub her bare nipples against his chest. “To have you touch me.”
At his sharp intake of breath, she smiled. He stared down at her, stiff-jawed, tight-lipped, remote, but his ravenous gaze belied his control. She locked her gaze with his as she let one hand drift down to the fall of his trousers. Profound feminine satisfaction swept her to find him hard as stone beneath the fabric. She fondled him shamelessly, glorying in his ragged breathing.
Quickly she bent to remove his boots. It took her longer to divest him of his trousers, drawers, and stockings, since she couldn’t entirely remove them off the shackled leg, but had to shove them down past his ankle onto the chain. Nor did it help that he stood as rigid as a stone Zeus, letting her do it all, making no move to touch her.
So he was determined to make this difficult, was he? She would make him pay for that. Now that she had him quite naked, she stepped back to look him over the way he’d looked her over in the horse stall yesterday. She took her time about it, prolonging his agony purposely. Trailing her gaze down his well-formed chest, muscled ribs, and lean, hard belly, she let it skitter to a halt at his jutting shaft and ballocks.
“My, my, but aren’t you the perfect figure of a man,” she said. When his pego bobbed in response to her words, she laughed and stepped forward to catch it in her hand. He muttered something under his breath, half oath, half groan.
“Hmm,” she went on, “what would be the most wicked thing I could do with this, I wonder?”
“If you have to wonder, then you’re not very wicked, are you?” he choked out.
“It was a rhetorical question, Danny. I know precisely what to do with it.”