Dair Devil (7 page)

Discovering his blond friend flat on his back and being tickled into submission by two dancers was a delightful surprise, and Dair couldn’t have been happier for him. Not since before his marriage to that cold beauty Drusilla Watkins had he seen Grasby so carefree. So he decided to leave Grasby undisturbed, and made a move on the stage, alone. And when Consulata beckoned him with a sultry smile and the crook of one finger, it was all the encouragement he needed.

Dair made a flying leap for the stage.

The cheering, squeals and clapping was deafening.

And then the unexpected happened.

It was so unexpected that time slowed to allow the moment to be etched in the collective memory of those present. There was such disbelief that no one spoke and no one moved for a matter of seconds, wondering if it was all part of the Major’s display of outrageous bravado. He had not received the moniker Dair Devil for sitting about White’s playing at cards.

Dair was in full flight of his leap when into his path stepped the female in the mint green and lavender silk petticoats. Where in the name of Jupiter had she sprung from? Her timing could not have been more disastrous. Did she have a brain the size of a pea not to comprehend what would happen to her by such an idiotic move? It was impossible for him to stop mid leap. His soldier’s instinct told him that if he did not take immediate evasive action, his large beefy carcass would slam full force into this simpleton. Bones would be broken. Hers. She looked to be a quarter of his weight, was wafer-thin in fact, and with a walking stick in her gloved hand, must be as frail as eggshell. There was no time and no possibility of being heard, even if he did shout out a warning. The bevy of beauties, who only moments before had been jiggling and giggling and calling out encouragingly, now saw the disaster about to befall him, and they scattered, screaming, to get out of the way.

Dair took the only action left to him in the few seconds remaining to avoid catastrophic consequences. He tucked in his arms, twisted his body and braced, hoping this would be enough to alter his trajectory and throw him wide of the idiotic creature. His quick thinking would have worked had the female remained where she was and not turned. It was as if she sensed an ominous presence, and in trying to escape it she again stepped into his path. There was no option left to him.

He landed heavily on the stage, momentum carrying him forward, and scooped up the female, lifting her off her feet and pulling her hard up against his torso as he kept running. He held her fast against him as his bare feet scrambled to resist inertia. His thigh slammed into the corner of the chaise, startling its occupant, who flopped forward before sprawling backwards across the cushions with an involuntary screech when the tipped chaise fell back on all four of its spindle legs with a thud.

Dair judged the edge of the platform to be a few feet in front of him, that there was then a drop and a gap of some five feet before the plastered wall at the back of the studio. The last thing he wanted was to fall into the gap with his captive; she might land under him and be crushed. And even if he did leap the gap, there was nowhere to go. They would slam into the wall. While he might suffer a few bruises and abrasions, there was no guarantee he could prevent his captive from breaking bones, possibly ribs.

He needed to do something, fast. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the linen drapery, used as the painter’s backdrop. It was billowing in the breeze from the open sash window. He calculated it was within reach. With his captive in one arm, he stuck out the other, grabbed a handful of this material and prayed the curtain rod remained rigid. The material needed to remain stitched to its rings, and the rings looped along the curtain rod long enough for them to become entangled, which should stop them from falling off the edge of the stage.

His strategy worked. Speed coupled with motion spun them into the folds of linen. The curtain swung wide. Dair’s shoulder hit the wall with a thump, and then the curtain and its two occupants swung back to the stage and came to a halt. The couple were rolled up in the material, but remained upright and unharmed.

Pleased with his efforts at averting a disaster, he let out an involuntary chuckle. For several seconds, all he could hear was his own heavy breathing, and all he could feel was his heart thudding against his ribs. Far off, at the other end of the studio, there was a great deal of commotion, but here, wrapped in this linen cocoon, there was only silence… and breathing. His captive was breathing heavily, too. He could feel her breath on his bare chest, where her forehead was pressed, and she was trembling, no doubt from fright. But she was not screaming or moaning, which told him she was unhurt. No broken bones then. Good. He possibly had a nasty bruise to his thigh and to his shoulder, but that was as nothing compared to the bruise to his ego, courtesy of this idiotically unaware female wrapped safely in his arms.

Who the devil was she, anyway? Where had she come from? Why was she on the stage surrounded by dancers dressed as Grecian nymphs when she herself was dressed from head to foot? His wine-befuddled brain searched for answers. She must be a friend of Consulata, invited to witness his charade. Perhaps she was a singer, or an actress, or a high-class whore who catered to the needs of men of his social class? Mistress of one of Dorset’s cronies, perhaps? That made sense.

She was certainly not one of those delicately nurtured females, like his sister and cousins, and his mother, who wouldn’t dare dip an expensively shod toe into a painter’s studio without a male chaperone, and for fear of encountering the very women for whom he and Grasby had been performing. A drawing room miss would have fainted or be screaming her lungs out by now. The severe shock of being swept off her feet by a naked man playing at savage would surely bring on a fit of hysterics. Yet she was not hysterical. Perhaps his captive was too frigid with fright to put up a struggle? Which would explain why she was adhered to him as tightly as an eager bride clinging to an enthusiastic groom on their wedding night. He smirked. Well, as close as was possible without consummation.

He determined that she may not be idiotic after all, but rather a cunning little minx. Idiotic in the execution of her gambit—no one in her right mind threw herself in front of a dragoon whose chest was the width of a sedan chair—but cunning in that if she had been wanting to get his attention, she now had it, undividedly. And she was not backward in coming forward in letting him know what she wanted from him, either. Vixen.

What was that saying Cedric repeated
ad nauseam
after one too many bottles of claret?
Carpe
something? Carpe…
Carpe diem
… Seize the day! That was it. He certainly had something in his hands right now, warm and soft and no doubt, delicious… He grinned. And he wasn’t above seizing the moment. Be damned what was going on beyond their cocoon.

How convenient her petticoats were in disarray, bunched up to one side, the panniers concertinaed up off her hips, pinioning his left arm to her waist and his hand to her firm round derrière. Her light linen chemise was no barrier to the pleasurable tactile sensation of warm, rounded female flesh, and he wondered if she smelled as good as she felt.

He dipped his head, expecting one of the more sweet headier scents concocted by Floris and splashed about by his lovers, as if it were water and he with coins to pitch into the sea. But what price the bedding of a beautiful woman?

He was pleasantly surprised. This scent was much more subtle, and alluring…

He closed his eyes, and snuffled her, wondering at the component parts of such a beguiling fragrance. It was an indefinable, barely-there mingling of scents, of vanilla, and of lavender, and mostly of her feminine allure. It triggered within him a deep longing that he could neither describe or wished to acknowledge. All he knew was that he wanted more of her, then and there. His hand convulsed in her thin chemise, scrunching up the linen between his long fingers as he drank her in.

She lifted her head off his chest and he tilted away from her, but just enough to see her face, to see if she was as caught up in the moment as he. Her big blue eyes, limpid under heavy lids, blinked up at him, and when her lips parted, slowly and ever so invitingly, he needed no further invitation. He pressed his mouth to hers and gave himself up to the moment…

It was the wooden pegs in the plasterwork that gave way first. They held the metal brackets to the wall. One metal bracket came away and fell with a clang to the stage, just as the wooden curtain rod, bowing under the weight of its two entangled occupants, snapped in two. There was a great whoosh and clatter of wooden curtain rings as they slid off the splintered ends of the broken rod. Dair and his female captive found themselves drowning in drapery.

It was over within seconds. Caught unawares, the cocooned couple struggled to stay upright, now they were no longer supported by the curtain pulled taut by their weight. With lightning reflexes, Dair’s arms enveloped and tightened about his captive. And as they were knocked to the ground, he stuck out his elbows and took the brunt of the fall. Trapped in the drapery, they rolled over and over, fell off the stage and into the narrow gap between it and the plastered wall.

Dair landed on his back, his captive on top of him, clinging to him as if he were the only piece of flotsam in a raging sea. Both were shaken but unhurt. Both lay still, taking deep breaths, to recover their equilibrium, if not their dignity. Then suddenly both realized their latest predicament. As they had rolled off the stage, the linen unraveled, setting them free as they dropped into the gap. They were now a tangle of naked arms and legs, with breechcloths askew, panniers twisted and broken, layers of carefully-constructed silk petticoats crushed and disheveled, and all of it on display.

Dair thought it a great lark.

Grinning, he put an arm behind his head and settled in, not at all perturbed. His grin turned to genuine good humor watching his captive struggle to disentangle her limbs and her garments from his brawny form. And without his help, with not much success. He could see by her mulish expression his lack of assistance annoyed her, but when she managed to sit upright and rake her mussed blonde hair from her face with her fingers, he caught at her wrist. He had every intention of pulling her back down on top of him to continue where they had left off wrapped in the curtain, everyone else be dammed.

Then a voice boomed out across the studio, above the commotion. Dair stayed his hand around his captive’s wrist, a finger to his lips lest she speak, and rose up on an elbow to listen. It was not Cedric Pleasant declaring he had come to save the day. He did not recognize the voice, but he recognized the bark of command. It was accompanied by footfall. And that, too, was familiar. It was men in boots marching in synchrony. At best guess, he would say a dozen men, maybe more.

Soldiers.

F
IVE

R 
ORY
HAD
NOT
MEANT
for him to kiss her. On the contrary, she was one breath away from vocalizing her affront that it was the height of rudeness to sniff at her neck, at anyone’s neck! She should have been terrified, distressed, even hysterical, to be pressed up against a naked man with nothing between them but a flap of doeskin. And that was proving not much of a shield. A particular part of his anatomy was not behaving as it ought, or perhaps that was the dilemma, it was behaving precisely as it should, but without permission to do so. Not that she knew anything about
that
, except what she had gleaned from studying the tapestries in a folly temple on her godparents’ Hampshire estate.

Twenty-two years old and a complete ignoramus about matters of the heart, more precisely, matters of lust. Twenty
—two
. She could hardly believe her own ignorance!

As a spinster she had a duty to faint. If not, she should do everything in her power to fight him off and thrash her way out of the cocoon. Scream. Anything to get her virginal body as far away as possible from such potent masculinity. Her unsullied reputation demanded it. Her family would expect it. Polite Society would condemn her for not doing so.

But Major Lord Fitzstuart had shaken her well-ordered world as if it were a mesmerizing show globe. Afloat in a sea of colored liquid possibilities, she came to the realization that this impromptu visit to George Romney’s studio was turning out to be the most exciting night of her staid life. Nothing ever happened in her day-to-day existence that was not sanctioned by convention, considered acceptable, peaceable and
safe
for the unmarried granddaughter of a peer.

And now here she was in the arms of the handsomest, most wicked war hero of the age. What should she do? She knew what she wanted to do, but it was contrary to everything she had ever been told or taught. What was that saying Cedric Pleasant used at every opportunity…
Carpe
…
Carpe—Diem
. That was it! Well, she would seize it and the consequences could go hang!

What was the harm in a single simple kiss? One kiss and she would know one way or the other if kissing was overrated. She had never been kissed, and certainly never in the way females wished to be kissed by handsome men, ardently and without restraint. While alone in her Pinery one day, she had allowed herself to daydream about kissing, the mechanics of a kiss, and how it must make a person feel. She concluded that if two people thought about it before committing to the act, they would not do it. Her daydreaming had led her to completely cover a maturing pineapple plant with tanner’s bark, until the gardener alerted her to her abstraction. Two people with their lips pressed together? What was so special about that…?

He was so warm and so—so
male
. He smelled of pepper and musk, and—freshly squeezed limes… Fascinating how the skin on his face appeared smooth and yet, when she rubbed against it in an upwards motion, his chin was rough, like the sharp punched points of her grandfather’s silver nutmeg grater… His nose really was large and beak-like. She’d noticed that about him before… And his eyelashes… They were quite long and dark… She was sure her lips were swollen… He tasted salty and delicious… Had the windows been closed on the night air and a fire started in a grate…? She was suddenly hot and heady, and there was a tingling sensation, more a pulse, somewhere…