Not Wicked Enough (18 page)

The only sounds in the house were the typical ones heard in a large and very old building. Syton House had inured her to such creaks and groans, the distant sound of the wind. She faced the door to the corridor, and tried to breathe, but the stale and thin air was suffocating in here.

She walked away from the door to unlatch and open the window. Night air whooshed over her, damp with the promise of rain. The hooting of owls stopped then started up again. She breathed in deep draughts of air and still felt she could not pull enough into her lungs and that she would never be able to catch her breath.

The sky was utterly dark. No moon, no stars, and no
promise of dawn, and that wet heaviness of impending rain. She leaned out the window and let the breeze riffle through her hair. Her skin rippled from the chill. It was spring, for God’s sake. Not winter.

She stayed at the window until she could bear the cold no longer. Or the solitude. She could not stay here with the walls closing in on her and the air going away and her wicked, wicked mind whispering that she could find Mountjoy’s room and settle entirely the question of what it would be like to make love to someone other than Greer. If she remained with nothing here capable of distracting her, she would reach a point where staying became intolerable, and she then really might search out Mountjoy’s room.

Self-denial, she’d found, was the unfailing precursor to overindulgence in the very thing one sought to avoid. Her father excelled at denying himself and those around him, and she had always rebelled against his strictures.

She closed the window and pressed a palm to one of the panes of glass until the cold seeped into the bones of her hand. Hers was not an aesthete’s character. That was, frankly, a truth to which she had long ago been reconciled. Her nature was, quite simply, not a proper one for a woman.

Lily picked up her sketchbook, pencil, and an oil lamp. She would wander the house looking for architectural details to sketch for her collection of oddities and grotesqueries and if, by chance or purpose, she and Mountjoy met? Well.

The moment she stepped into the corridor, the tightness in her chest released. Thank God. She walked to the Armory Hall, so called because the walls were hung with medieval weapons and there were at least ten separate suits of armor, including one for a horse. The door she’d entered through was at one of the short ends of the rectangular room. Three double-branched candelabra decorated a long oak table in the middle of the hall, gleaming silver in the lamplight. There were twenty-two chairs around the table and overhead a crystal chandelier, though with just the light of her lamp, there were no prisms of color to be seen.

A sideboard sat in the middle of the wall opposite the windows, but all along the rest of this long side were the suits of armor, in various attitudes of martial valor as was possible through the clever use of wire. Some held weapons: a sword, a dirk, or a pike. Another had a mace at its feet, yet another an axe.

According to Ginny, the Armory Hall was sometimes called into use as an informal dining room. The knights faced the windowed wall, and she fancied they had each come to know their separate views quite well. Every few feet opposite the knights were tall, multipaned windows inset in a bowed area topped by a small dome. Each dome contained a different carved ivory medallion: a face, a medieval beast, an open book with an inscription in Latin. One of the medallions was a swan with a broken chain around its neck, the very beast from Mountjoy’s coat of arms.

To a careless glance, the last wall appeared to be nothing more than a wall that ended without a passage into yet another room. But Ginny had shown her the concealed doorway there that opened if one knew just where to press.

She set her light on the table and considered sketching each of the windows. There were seven. Enough for one a night for a week. Or, perhaps she’d sketch one of the suits of armor. There were eleven of them. As she was deciding that she would begin with a sketch of the swan, the hair on the back of her neck prickled.

She turned in time to see the concealed door swing open.

Lily’s breath caught in her throat. Mountjoy had denied there were ghosts here, but if ever a house ought to have a ghost or two, it was Bitterward. But it wasn’t a ghost that entered the hall. It was far, far worse than any spectral apparition.

The duke halted when he saw her, and they stood there, she fancied, in mutual disbelief that they should meet. Again. At this hour. When they had agreed they must avoid each other at such times as this.

“You,” he said.

She curtseyed. “Your grace.”

He wasn’t wearing that lovely banyan of his. Alas, tonight he was dressed in his usual inelegantly fitted clothes. He put down his candle and pointed at the frescoed ceiling that, at the moment, was not possible to see. “Doyle tells me that in fourteen hundred something, my ancestor hired an Italian master to paint the ceiling.”

She looked up as if she could see that far in the darkened room. She did recall from her previous tour that the paintings were sublime. Her heart thudded in her ears.

Why encounter him now when she was not feeling at all virtuous? On a night when she’d been entertaining salacious thoughts about the man across from her? She was already weak where he was concerned. “Do you know who he engaged?”

“Family legend is that it was Fra Angelico, but I’ve seen nothing to prove that. The claim seems suspect at best.”

Lily stood close enough to the table to put her hand on it. The wooden surface had been polished until she could see her reflection. In her room, she had imagined herself taking actions that she was now barely able to contemplate. Not with the duke here in the flesh, with his guarded eyes and somber expression.

It seemed another time and place entirely that she had unfastened his trousers and his fingers had been buried in her hair.

But then, disaster.

Mountjoy left his candle where it was and crossed the room to her. He ended standing mere inches from her.

Oddly enough, her nerves settled. “Your grace.”

“I have decided,” he said in the manner of a man who was used to deciding a great many things, “concluded, that we cannot be lovers.” He drew a fingertip along the line of her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, but it just can’t be. You and I.”

She leaned in to him, and his eyes swept downward to fix on her bosom, which she found a gratifying reaction.
“I’m sorry, too.” She curled an arm around his neck, which required that her upper torso press against his chest. His arm snaked around her waist, and she gave a little tug of her arm and just like that, his mouth was in reach. She kissed the side of his jaw.

Mountjoy laughed, a low, velvet sound of ironic mirth, and he dipped his head toward hers. In return, she brushed her lips across his. So soft, his lips were. Again, nearly a kiss this time.

And then a kiss.

That was all the two of them needed. She’d known the moment he’d come in that she hadn’t the strength to continue in a ladylike manner. He was here, and she wanted him to stay.

His lips parted, and he nipped at her mouth, soft kisses that turned into heated kisses, and Lily melted against him. She adored the way he kissed. The Duke of Mountjoy knew what he was about. His other arm went around her waist, too, pulling her tight against him. His tongue dipped into her mouth, caressed, beguiled, turned her bones to jelly.

He lifted her up, and she did not know what he intended until she was sitting on the table, close enough to the edge that had he not stood between her legs she would have worried about falling off. He planted his hands on either side of her thighs and returned to kissing her mindless. Which he did very, very well.

Lily returned his passion, accepted everything he did, and tightened her arms around his neck. She pushed her fingers into his hair. She gave a moan of protest when he lifted her up a second time, but as she learned, it was only to lift her skirts and set her down with her bare bottom on the table. Cool against her skin. Thrilling. One of his hands ended up on her knee. Just above her garter.

“Lily,” he said, shaking his head. “You and that damned medallion. You’re constantly in my thoughts. My dreams. I can’t keep my damned hands off you.”

His fingers curved around her leg as potent proof of that.
Her belly tensed and a quiver of arousal spread upward from her breasts to her throat, and lower, too, between her legs. She felt her need for him there especially.

She gasped when his fingers slid higher. Oh, heavens, higher yet, until he was touching her exactly there. She was wet and slick, and he knew where and how to stroke her, and she angled herself into his hand. They weren’t kissing anymore; she hadn’t the breath for it now. For a time, he watched her face while his fingers were busy.

Mountjoy leaned in to kiss her once. Just once before he slid his mouth downward, along her jaw and then back to her mouth. He drew away, then kissed her ear and said, very low, in nearly a growl, “We can’t be lovers, but it wouldn’t be gentlemanly of me if I did not repay the favor you recently did me.”

“That’s so,” she managed to say. He knew what to do with his hands. He’d found that place that made her weak with need. Not weak, she thought, strong. Stronger because of her need and her determination to satisfy it, and stronger because he was so very close to fetching her. Stronger because she trusted her body and its reactions and welcomed the pleasure. Stronger because her feelings and reactions were true. She pulled him toward her, tightened her arms around his shoulders.

“You
are
wild,” he whispered. “Wild and lovely beyond words. I worship you for that. I thank God for that.” He slid a finger inside her, and this, this was the moment to allow her control to slip away. “You’re hot around me, Lily,” he whispered. He beguiled. Seduced, except she’d been seduced from the very moment she’d set eyes on him. A second finger joined the first, and while he stroked his fingers in her, he managed to keep contact with that spot that made her grateful for her wildness. “Every time I looked at you today I thought of your mouth fetching me.”

She could barely speak, but she managed to say, “I, too.”

He lay her back and, though she wanted to touch him and could not, except to touch his head and thread her fingers
through his hair, he used his mouth instead of his fingers. He kissed her sex, and that was not something Greer had ever done for her.

She would go mad. No woman would survive what his mouth demanded of her. One of his hands stroked her thigh, and she felt the coolness of the air on her skin, the warmth of his hands, the pounding of her heart when his fingers and palm followed the curve of her leg. She did not last long. His tongue flicked over her, and she was done. Climax washed over her, swept her away.

His name fell from her lips, but only his title,
Mountjoy
. Because that’s all she knew as she clutched his head and gave herself over to sensation. Pleasure rolled through her, wrung her out, and then, when she thought there was nothing more, when he’d slowed and then stopped, and she was breathing again, he blew on her, and it electrified her. He licked and waited, then kissed her there again, and she wasn’t finished after all. She came again, and she was his in that moment, his utterly, for as long as her heart continued to beat.

When she could think again, she opened her eyes and saw Mountjoy standing over her, one hand on her belly and the other resting on the outside of her thigh, and his green, so green eyes watching her. “What a shame,” she said, and she actually did mean every word, “that we cannot be lovers.”

M
OUNTJOY USUALLY TOOK THE SAME ROUTE WHEN
he returned to the house after riding out, but today he changed his mind. His horse, Fervent, fancied a gallop, so rather than take the road from High Tearing to Bitterward upon reaching the edges of the estate lands, he took Fervent over the stone fence into the field and let him have his head.

He was delaying the inevitable return home, he understood that, but it was also true that Fervent wanted a run. Since it was their mutual decision that they should not pursue an affair, he preferred to avoid Lily when possible. Fervent therefore got his way.

For a quarter mile, he and Fervent flew, taking a line that followed the river Tear and curved past the woods, and he hardly thought at all about her skin, the taste of her, the way she kissed, or the sound of her calling his name when she came. He and Fervent were both breathing hard when he slowed down. He put his horse into a trot and headed more or less in the direction of Bitterward.