Authors: Nicola Cornick
“No,” Tess said, with feeling. “You should not.”
He laughed and came down beside her. “My darling.” He kissed her, deep and hot, his hand replacing his lips at her breast, fingers teasing the hard nipple until she squirmed.
She wanted to ask him to hurry. She wanted to beg him to make love to her. There was such a hot, demanding ache inside her. Her legs were all tangled in the weight of her skirts and the linen of her petticoats. The folds of material felt unbearably heavy, holding her down.
“Please…” The word slipped from her lips before she could prevent it and she saw his lips curve into a smile of delight.
“You like it.” He sounded relieved. He licked the un
derside of her breast and she gave a laugh that broke on a moan.
Liking
was far too small a word for what she was feeling. She reached out and unfastened his pantaloons, fumbling a little with the button. She heard his breath hiss through his teeth in shock.
“Teresa—” There was a harsh edge to his tone, a warning that if she really was not certain she should stop now. But she was not afraid. She tested her feelings and felt the triumph. The fear had been crowded out, banished by wicked, wanton desire. She wanted to touch him. She needed to touch him.
She raised herself on one elbow and turned towards him. She tugged stealthily on his drawers, pulling them down. His cock sprang free, smooth, hard and hot in the palm of her hand. No indeed, he was not impotent and she could not remember why on earth she had wanted him to be.
“Ah…” His gasp told her how close he was to the edge of control.
“Keep still.” She pressed her lips to his ear. She could feel every muscle tense in his body. “You have to be patient with me, Owen. Remember? You said I could explore.” She ran a hand along his length to emphasise her words and felt the shudder rack him. Such power she had. She loved it. She tried another caress, from base to tip. She squeezed.
His hand closed about her wrist like iron.
“Not this time, unless you want to kill me.” He did genuinely sound as though he was in extremity. His
eyes were tightly shut. He looked as though he were making some complex mathematical calculations in his head. His fingers gentled on her wrist. “You probably don’t understand,” he said, “but I will not last two seconds if you touch me again.”
Tess might never have experienced it before but she understood his predicament perfectly well. She put out a hand and cupped his balls, just to test the truth of his words.
“Liar.” She breathed the word against the hot skin of his neck.
“Ah…” The groan was wrenched from him. He rolled her over so that his weight held her down, drove his hands into her hair and kissed her hard.
For a second Tess felt a flicker of fear at the sheer physical power he was exercising over her. She felt her mind stray towards those dark places and the force and the compulsion that had been imposed on her before. But she was starting to realise that such domination, such taking without consent, had nothing to do with love. With Owen it was different; his kiss held a demand she wanted to meet. He was easing back now, cupping her face, kissing her gently, softly, with such persuasive seduction that she felt her tense body softening into acquiescence again, and from there sliding into eager, sensuous wanting.
He kissed her throat, the tender hollow beneath her ear, the sides of her breasts and then the valley between them. Tess wriggled. The knot of her skirts binding her
lower body was becoming intolerable. She was too hot, too constrained.
Owen’s hand slid down over the bare curve of her stomach until it reached the edge of her gown, bunched about her hips. The muscles jumped deep in Tess’s belly.
Now
. She had to be rid of these horribly constricting layers of material.
“Take it off.
Please
.”
She heard him laugh at the abject entreaty in her voice. She could hear it herself, so uneven, so eager. She would have been ashamed to give away the depths of her desperation had she not been so utterly desperate that actually she did not care.
He laughed. “Oh, all right then. As you ask so nicely.”
She felt anything but nice. She felt wanton and wild and full of shock and delight to be that way. Her feelings should have scared her. Instead she was stunned to realise that she felt hopelessly aroused. Her entire upper body was naked, exposed to the cool air, the candlelight and to Owen’s gaze. Below she was weighted down with silks and linens, unable to move except to shift restlessly against what felt like unbearable pressure.
Then, at last, she felt the ties of her skirt loosen. Something shifted, the tightness easing, and then she felt cool air against her legs.
“I’m afraid your gown is crushed.” Owen sounded polite but not particularly repentant.
“I don’t care.”
It had been a pretty dress but it was in the way.
Tess felt Owen’s hand warm against her ankle and then on the curve of her calf. She was still wearing her stockings; she felt his fingers reach the edge of her garter and pause. She wriggled. She could not help herself. Time spun out whilst she hung suspended in an agony of waiting, then Owen’s hand resumed its stealthy slide, inching up the soft skin of her inner thigh. He reached her drawers and paused again.
It was intolerable.
Owen kissed her, his tongue stroking hers, plunging deep, and Tess’s mind spun away, fracturing with delight. It took her a moment to realise that the drawers were gone now too. She had not noticed.
“Oh,” she said, as she realised, “you are very good at this.”
His lips twitched into a smile but his eyes were dark, his jaw tense, and she realised with a pang of shock just how much control he was exercising over himself. There was no haste, no hurry. He was waiting for her every step of the way. His fingers moved gently, persuasively, touching the very core of her. Tess arched again, cried out in shock and astonishment, cascades of sensation shivering through her body. He touched her again and again, such subtle strokes, and Tess thought she would come apart. She ached in the most delicious and wicked ways imaginable. Except that she wanted Owen, not just this blinding delight. It was her last thought
before the light exploded in her mind and her body was seized by wave after wave of raking pleasure.
When she came back to herself she was in Owen’s arms, skin against skin, lying along the whole length of his body, his lips against her hair. He gathered her close and held her slick body against his, kissing her with persuasive tenderness.
“Did you like that too?” Tess could feel his arousal hard against her thigh and she lay quite still, absorbing the thought that she was naked with a man for the first time in ten long years. She allowed herself to think about the last time, to think about it properly, when before she had always pushed the memories away before they were no more than half-formed. Tears stung her eyes, not for what had happened to her then but for the difference now, for the tenderness and the wonder. Owen brushed the tangled curls away from her cheek, his fingertips gentle against her face.
“All right?” he said, and Tess nodded. Now that the moment had come she realised that she had been wrong to think this might be easy just because she wanted him. But equally she had been wrong to think it would be bad.
He kissed the corner of her mouth. “It won’t be perfect.”
She smiled. “You do yourself an injustice.” It already was perfect no matter how it ended.
His lips moved to claim hers fully this time. “We’ll see.”
Owen kissed her until she was hot and shaking again, reawakened to the need between them, and then he kissed her some more until she could not think straight anymore and did not want to. They were intimately entangled now, their skin damp and heated everywhere it touched. It felt so luxuriously decadent to be lying here naked with him that Tess wanted to sink into the feeling and let it devour her.
Owen’s hand came up to her breast, and her body, already stirring to his touch, restless for more, arched as another wave of need broke over her. She parted her legs and Owen rolled over between them. She tensed, waiting for him to move inside her but instead he slid down the bed until his head was between her thighs, the fall of his hair tickling her sensitised skin.
“Ah…” His voice was a whisper. “So beautiful. So silken.”
He spread his hand on her belly, pressing down gently with the heel of his palm to open her even more, then swept his tongue over the sweet centre of her. Tess’s body jumped and her mind splintered in disbelief and sheer sensation. Again he tasted her and she lost the last vestiges of all rational thought. She could only feel; feel the pleasure build over and over as his tongue plunged deeper and deeper. She groaned aloud, shifting beneath the renewed caress of his hands. It was impossible, she thought faintly, to bear more. And yet her body was rising to Owen’s touch; it seemed to have a will and a knowledge all its own, something she had
not known, yet now understood with an awareness as deep as time.
Owen moved over her and then he was there, resting against her. He raised his hips and stroked her core with the tip of his cock. Once, twice, a third time whilst she writhed under him. She grabbed him and tried to hold him still, and he, damn him, just laughed. Then she tried to pull him into her but he held back, bending to kiss her with such tenderness she thought she would melt.
“Patience,” he whispered, and there was mischief in his eyes.
Tess dug her nails into the smooth muscles of his shoulders and heard him groan before he slid into her, slow and deep.
It was not as she remembered. It was nothing like anything she had ever experienced. This was smooth and tight and hot and delicious. It was so gloriously intimate and so honest that she felt her heart contract with astonishment.
Owen paused to allow her body to adjust to his presence before resuming a long, slow stroke that seemed to draw the soul from her body. Tess watched his face as he moved, the strength and the concentration, desire distilled, and she wondered to be able to do such a thing to such a man. It filled her with awe to be able to give him so much pleasure.
Yet she knew that for her it was not going to work.
It felt marvellous but somehow it was not enough for
her to completely abandon herself now. She had come such a long way but not quite far enough. The deep, delicious pleasure started to drain away from her. Then she felt the first cold flicker of despair.
Owen sensed it at once. He swooped down to kiss her. “You have to trust me, Teresa.” His voice was a harsh whisper. “Don’t fight me. We’re on the same side.”
Tess wondered if she could surrender herself. It felt as though she was relinquishing everything, giving herself up to him utterly. She wanted to do it, she ached for it, but fulfilment shimmered so frustratingly just beyond her grasp.
She was within an inch of giving up. Then Owen bent his head and licked her nipple and the fire shot through her from her breast to deep in her belly and she forgot for a split second to think about anything. He did it again, his hair brushing the sensitive skin of her breast, his mouth hot and relentless on her and she moaned. His hand was there, where their bodies joined, trailing pleasure, igniting fire. And suddenly Tess did not want to fight him, did not want to deny either of them. She wanted to eclipse the past in the intensity of the present. She surrendered completely and in the next instant felt herself fall hard and fast into astonishing bliss. Her body clasped his and she heard Owen call her name and felt him spill his seed inside her, and they broke together, falling over and over into the joy of blistering-bright consummation.
Some time—some unmeasured time—later Tess woke. She stirred and Owen shifted, drawing her closer into his arms. She realised that he had been awake, watching her. His fingers stirred in her hair, caressing.
“I trust you have worked up an appetite now,” he murmured.
Tess smiled. “I do seem to be hungry,” she murmured. “How helpful you have been.”
“My pleasure.” Owen’s lips tickled the lobe of her ear. His teeth closed about it. He sucked on it. Tess felt the goose pimples cascade over her skin as she shivered with voluptuous sensation.
“We’ll send for some food,” Owen whispered. His hand was resting low on her stomach, warm and intimate. Tess could feel little ripples of sublime pleasure tightening her belly.
“In a little while,” Owen finished. “But first I understand your need to make up for lost time.”
This time he made love to her with such slow extravagance that the food, and indeed everything else, was completely forgotten.
“M
ARRIAGE SUITS YOU THIS TIME
around.” Joanna poured tea into Tess’s dainty china cup and offered her an equally dainty cake of sponge and cream. They were in Joanna’s drawing room, which glowed warm on this dull November day, bright with hothouse flowers and jewel-coloured porcelain. Joanna, Tess thought with more than a hint of envy, certainly had exquisite taste. Perhaps she might be the best person to transform the old Rothbury mausoleum in Clarges Street after all.
“You look radiant,” Joanna continued. A mischievous smile played about her lips. “Am I to assume that you have discovered certain benefits to being married that you had not been aware of before?”
“It has only been ten days but I like marriage very well,” Tess admitted, biting into her cake and feeling the cream and jam splurge. She licked her fingers. “Yes, I would say that being wed does indeed have something to recommend it.”
“I am glad,” Joanna said. She eyed her sister shrewdly. “That, I suppose, is the difference between a marriage of convenience and a love match.”
Tess almost choked on her tea. “I’m not in love
with Owen!” she said automatically. The idea seemed absurd, yet as soon as the words were out she felt strange, disloyal, as though she had committed a betrayal.
Love.
Now that the word was out it was like the genie from the bottle; she could not force it back in again. She went hot all over with panic. Her cup rattled in the saucer as she put it down. She could not be in love. It was impossible. She had never been in love in her entire life. She did not know how to do it.
“Yes, you are,” Joanna said calmly. “You are in love with him.”
“No, I’m not,” Tess contradicted. The exchange showed signs of degenerating into a schoolroom squabble of the type that had been all too familiar since their childhood.
“You are always running away from things,” Joanna complained.
“And you always have to be right.”
They glared at each other. “Well, you
should
be in love with him!” Joanna was looking as angry as Joanna could look, which was to say she looked pretty and disordered and really quite cross. “Why are you not? Because you think it is not fashionable?”
A cold void had opened beneath Tess’s heart with each denial. She felt very, very afraid. She knew Joanna was right. Now that the truth was staring her in the face she did not know how she had missed it for so long.
Somehow, when she had not been paying attention, she had lost her heart to Owen. She was no longer in control of her own emotions. She had thought that all she had surrendered was her body and she had liked that. She had enjoyed the discovery of physical pleasure. But all the time Owen’s seduction had not been merely to do with physical love. It had involved trust and reassurance, protection and comfort as well as desire. She had fallen hard. Owen had seduced her into loving him with all her heart and all her soul, and now she was terribly vulnerable. She had no defences at all and she was undone.
She picked up her cup again and took a delicate sip of the cold tea. “I’ve barely come to terms with the concept of lust,” she said lightly. She could hear the note of panic in her voice. “I confess I like it extremely. I’m in love with lust.”
“You’re in love with Owen,” Joanna corrected bluntly. “Admit it, Tess.”
“Nonsense,” Tess said. The sliding panicked feeling inside her intensified. “I
like
him. I like him very much. I feel about him much the same way that I felt for Mr. Chasuble, the dancing master, when I finally learned the steps of the quadrille. A sort of
tendre,
I suppose.”
Joanna made a very rude noise. “The two cases are very different and you know it. You light up like the Vauxhall Garden fireworks whenever Owen is near you.”
Tess stared blindly into the dregs of her teacup. “Are
you sure?” she said. “I mean, how would you know?” She had never known love. She had closed her life and her mind to it. She had never realised how terrifying—how exhilarating—love might be, how it meant giving everything that she had to give. But now she could not deny it. She felt torn between fear and excitement, lost and found at the same time.
“Believe me,” Joanna said. “I know.”
Tess felt a tiny shred of hope and warmth. It was a shock to discover that her emotions were engaged but that was only because she was so naive in the ways of love. She had trusted Owen with her body. She could surely trust him now with her heart. But only if he loved her in return, or the balance between them would be too unequal. She frowned. She did not know how Owen felt about her. He had been endlessly tender but that did not mean that he loved her. She was painfully unsure.
“I am glad for Owen,” Joanna said. “He deserves someone of his own—” She stopped abruptly.
There was a very curious, very long silence, as though time hung suspended on the thinnest of threads. Tess felt a little dizzy. Joanna was evading her gaze now, fidgeting with the teapot, filling up her cup although it was already almost brimming over. The pale November sunlight shone on the arrangement of hothouse roses in the bowl on the table. They were scentless. Tess could hear the clink of Joanna’s cup and the
sound of carriage wheels from the street outside, and somewhere in the depths of the house a door closed.
This was the moment when she knew she could simply draw back and make some remark about the weather or the winter fashions or Lady Meriton’s ball that night. She could ignore Joanna’s remark and pretend that it had not occurred. They would never refer to it again. And yet she could not do it because it was already too late.
“Owen deserves someone of his own,” she said softly, “as opposed to loving someone who is in love with someone else?”
A wave of guilty colour washed up from Joanna’s neck, staining her cheeks bright pink. Even in guilt, Tess thought sourly, her sister looked very pretty indeed. She wondered how she could have been so slow to understand. She had been aware that Joanna and Owen had known one another for years, since the days of Joanna’s first marriage, long before Joanna had married Alex. Owen had taken them to Spitsbergen aboard
Sea Witch.
Tess thought of the cramped accommodation on the ship and the enforced proximity and the adventures they must have shared…?.
Joanna and Owen. Owen and Joanna…
A wave of violent jealousy crashed over her. She was utterly unprepared for it and it left her feeling physically sick.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” she said slowly. “Owen was in love with you.” She remembered the day in the park
when she had asked Owen if he had ever wanted to wed and he had hesitated for one betraying moment before replying. She knew now; the answer had been, yes, he had been in love. Yes, he had wanted to marry.
He had wanted to marry her sister.
She waited for Joanna to contradict her. She waited with a slowly sinking heart where hope dwindled from a tiny spark to nothing at all. She wanted Joanna to deny it more than anything in the world because the lovely warm confidence she had started to feel in her relationship with Owen was so precious but so fragile. Against the odds she had come to trust him. For a few moments her mind had even started to accept that it might be safe to love him. Her feelings for Owen had been just for her, something new and unspoiled. She had only just started to find her way. Now, as she felt the happiness ooze from her, Tess wondered if it had all been based on shifting sand.
“It wasn’t really like that,” Joanna said after a moment.
“Tell me how it was, then,” Tess said. Her words came out flatly when in her head they sounded like a scream.
“Owen helped me when David treated me very badly,” Joanna said in a rush. “You know that my first marriage was not happy.” She paused and then as Tess nodded she hurried on. “David assaulted me and Owen paid someone to protect me, that is all. It was one of the boxers from Tom Cribb’s tavern. You may remem
ber that I was a Lady of the Fancy before I married Alex, and went to all the boxing matches.” Joanna was chattering now, the words spilling over Tess’s head and rushing past her unnoticed like a river in full flood. Owen had helped Joanna when she had been in trouble. Well, that was not so bad. Any decent man would surely have done the same. Except… Tess felt doubt nibble at the corners of her mind. Owen had protected
her
when she had been in trouble. Perhaps he had some sort of compulsion to rescue women in distress.
“But by then, of course, I was married to Alex,” Joanna was saying, and Tess realised that her sister was still talking, quickly, almost feverishly, avoiding her gaze, shredding the heads of the roses until they looked as though they had had a very bad haircut. “Owen knew I was not happy,” Joanna said, “and it is true that he did ask me to elope with him, but I refused and I am sure that he thought no more of it.”
Tess found her voice. “Wait,” she said. Another roll of sickness beat through her. “Owen asked you to elope with him
after
you had married Alex?”
Again she waited for the denial, because she knew that Owen and Alex had been friends and comrades for years and years, and surely no man would put a woman before that unless he truly loved her and believed her worth smashing to smithereens years of trust. Unless he loved her body, heart and soul, the way she now realised she wanted Owen to love her.?…
The deep blush in Joanna’s cheeks deepened fur
ther. Her expression was furtive but Tess thought there was also a hint of triumph there. She was sure of it. From the nursery Joanna had always wanted everything first, the prettiest clothes, the new dolls—not the books; Merryn was allowed those, since they bored Joanna—the attention, first from their parents and brother, later from men…?. Joanna had always been first. Tess simply had not expected her to extend this to being first with her husband, any of her husbands. But particularly not this husband since he was the only one she loved with all her heart and soul.
“I see,” she said. Her voice shook, echoing the tremor inside her. She stood up. Even her legs felt a little shaky. “And you were never going to tell me this?”
“I didn’t tell you because it was all over a long time ago,” Joanna argued. She had got to her feet as well. She put a hand out, took Tess’s hand in hers. Hers was warm, as warm as the gentleness in her blue eyes. Tess wished she could believe Joanna was sincere, but she was racked by cold doubt and fear now. It was horrible to imagine that Owen had married her only because he could not have Joanna. It was equally impossible not to think it. And even if he had not, he must have loved Joanna so much, so
very
much—and here the jealously scored her again with its deep claws—to have wanted her to run away with him.
“It meant nothing,” Joanna repeated.
Tess snatched her hand away. “It does not mean nothing for a man to ask you to elope with him,” she said.
She felt a spurt of anger. “Don’t belittle both of you by pretending!”
“Well, no.” Joanna was frowning, confused. Tess could see that she was groping for words, words to put matters right or at the least not to make the situation worse. Unfortunately there were no words that could do that.
“As I said, it was a long time ago and I daresay Owen has forgotten,” Joanna said.
“
You
have not forgotten!” Tess burst out. She smoothed her skirts in jerky little gestures, creasing and recreasing the lavender silk. Her throat burned with hot tears. She hated herself for her jealousy. She hated that she felt it, that she could not control it. It was like a canker eating away at her.
“Lady Martindale wanted you to decorate the house,” she said. It was another vicious little pinprick, the thought of her sister renovating the Clarges Street house that might under different circumstances have been her own. She gave a shudder. “I feel as though you’re present in every aspect of my marriage.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Joanna said, sharply now.
“How would you feel if you thought Alex was in love with someone else and that he only married you as second best?” Tess burst out.
A rueful expression touched Joanna’s eyes. “Perhaps I understand that better than you think,” she said. “When I married Alex I was haunted by the ghost of his first wife.” She spread her hands. “But my jealousy
was needless and that is how it is for you and Owen, Tess. Ask him. He’ll tell you the truth.”
Tess rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. That was what she was afraid of. Owen would tell her the truth because he always did. And she was not entirely sure she wanted to hear it.
She started to walk towards the door. It seemed a very long way.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Joanna said suddenly, from behind her. “Tess, all I want is for you to be happy.”
Tess stopped. Her chest felt constricted, as though it was bound very tight.
“Tess…” Joanna said again, and Tess could hear the tears in her sister’s voice now.
Her shoulders slumped. She turned. “I know,” she said, through the huge lump in her throat. She wanted to be angry with Joanna, wanted to blame her, but it was not possible. She remembered her sister giving her a home after she had been widowed for a third time, remembered Joanna’s dogged attempts to reach out to her even though she rebuffed her time and again. It was impossible to hate the sister who loved her and it was unworthy to want to.
“You didn’t sleep with him, did you?” she asked. “I don’t think I could bear that.”
“No!” Joanna looked horrified. “I never even kissed him! I promise you.”
Tess nodded. They looked at one another and then they grabbed each other and hugged very tightly.
“I’m sorry,” Joanna said, muffled. “Tess, I’m so sorry…?.”
They hugged again.
“Go to him,” Joanna said, loosing Tess, giving her a little shake. “Ask him.” She looked dubious. “Or don’t, if you prefer not.”
“I only wish he had told me of his own accord,” Tess said.
She felt miserable as she walked back to Clarges Street through the melting snow. The November wind was bitter even though the sun was out. Tess felt the raw chill on her feverishly hot cheeks. Her eyes felt gritty and sore with suppressed tears and the cold made them sting. Her nose was red. There was little to recommend marriage, she thought, when it totally ruined one’s appearance.