“You have to see to your wound,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to ruin your pretty face.”
“You like my looks, then?” he said. He slid his arm around her waist and helped her to her feet. When she stumbled, he picked her up and carried her.
The fight had died down for the most part. People slumped on the floor or argued by the bar amid the remains of splintered chairs and broken glass. Nick was nowhere to be seen.
As Aidan carried her out of the building and into the chilly night, Lily glimpsed some constables running toward the doors with their sticks at the ready.
Too late
, Lily thought. Aidan turned toward the opposite side of the street, and as he walked, she could feel the quiet stillness soak into her. The foggy night closed around them, and she felt calmer.
Perhaps it was all a dream after all
, she thought. An illusion born of the fight. Tiredness seeped through her.
“Where are we going?” she asked as Aidan hailed a passing hansom.
“Just rest right now,” he answered. “I’m sorry I got you involved in all that, Lily. Let me take care of you now.”
She nodded wearily and let her head drop onto his shoulder. She let herself hold on to him and to the illusion that she was not alone. That her life, her life as a respectable widow, as a St. Claire, had not changed.
But if “Handsome” Tom Beaumont was still alive and back in London, everything had changed.
A
idan closed his eyes and felt Lily’s soft fingers flutter over his face gently as she washed away the blood. The silence in his sitting room was so complete that he could hear the soft whisper of every movement she made, her breath, the rustle of her skirt. He could smell ale and dust, the coppery tang of drying blood, but underneath it all was the sweetness of her violet perfume.
He should never have taken her there tonight. She was a lady, and despite her cool wariness, he could sense the vulnerability she tried to hide. He should have protected her.
“You should send for a doctor to stitch this up,” she said quietly.
Aidan felt the touch of linen on his skin as she wound a bandage around his brow. He opened his eyes and looked up into her face.
The lamp was behind her, and its light cast a glow on her loose hair, turning the dark brown strands honey-gold. It looked like a halo, as if she were a saint in some Renaissance painting or a character in a tragic play, serene in the face of danger. But he remembered her raw, shaking fear in the barroom.
“I’ve had worse,” he said. “It will mend without stitches.”
A faint smile touched her lips. “That scar on your chest? Where did you get it?” She tied off the end of the bandage and shifted to step back, but Aidan wound his arms around her waist and held her close to him. Her pretty dress was torn and dirty, and he closed his eyes to rest his head just below the softness of her breasts and the boning of her corset.
At first she stiffened, but then he heard her sigh, and her hands threaded through his hair to hold him against her.
“What if I told you I got that scar in battle, defending a maiden’s honor?” he said. “Would your heart soften to me then?”
Lily gave a wry laugh. “My heart is too soft where you are concerned already.”
Really?
A bolt of foolish hope shot through Aidan. He didn’t want her heart, shouldn’t want it—he needed only her body, her company, for a time.
Her fingertips skimmed lightly over the nape of his neck. “But you didn’t get it defending a maiden’s honor, did you?”
“Oh, in a way I did, though she was no maiden. She was a prostitute in the West Indies. It was in a fight much like the one tonight, but my opponent drew his knife before I could.”
She stiffened in his arms, and her fingers went still. “You carry a knife?”
“Sometimes.” He wrapped his leg around her calf, pressing it close so she could feel the blade strapped close to his skin. “It’s a damned handy thing to have at times.”
He felt her turn her head. She didn’t move away but she
did go very still in his arms. “You go to a lot of places like that, know a lot of
people
like that.”
“I enjoy a wide variety of acquaintances, yes. But I promise you, Lily, such things don’t usually happen at Nick’s place. He runs a secure establishment; he’ll be utterly furious someone caused trouble tonight. I would never have taken you someplace I didn’t think was safe.”
“Oh, Aidan. Believe me, I’ve seen far worse.”
Aidan tilted back his head to look up into her face. For an instant, she was open to him, and he saw a myriad of emotions written on her pretty face—fear, sadness, anger. Her brown eyes were so black and deep, an endless, swirling pool filled with pain. Then she gave him a gentle smile and laid her palm against his cheek.
“When I was younger, I had little choice in my companions,” she said. “But you do—you are a duke’s son. How did you come to know music hall people, ex-pugilists, Irish bar owners…”
“Pickpockets and whores?” Aidan said. Her eyes narrowed, and he laughed. “Oh, yes, I know those too.”
“How? Why?”
“It’s a long tale, and what it comes down to is merely curiosity, I suppose. I’ve always wanted to know about people, about life, all sorts of life. About what makes us human, what makes us all do the sometimes insane things we do.”
She traced a soft, fluttering touch over his cheekbones, the arch of his brows, and he closed his eyes to feel her caress. “Curiosity can be a very dangerous thing,” she said.
Aidan laughed. “Don’t I know it. You saw what happened tonight.”
“Most men in your position have no curiosity at all about other people. They think everyone else is merely
there to serve them, to revolve around them in their own little world.”
“Perhaps that is because that’s how everyone treats them? They see nothing different, and they come to think that
is
the world, the whole of it.”
“Is that how your father is?”
Aidan shook his head, frowning. “My father certainly enjoys his share of high privilege. He was not a good father, but I have to admit he is a good duke. He takes on the responsibilities as well as the privileges, and he has never been one to shirk his duty. The respectability of the family name is everything to him.”
“But what of the family itself?”
“Producing sons was something my parents saw as their first duty, and they did it with admirable alacrity. My brother and I were born in the first four years of their marriage, even though the daughters that followed hardly lived to draw their first breaths.” Aidan opened his eyes to see her staring down at him with her dark, dark eyes. “But our nurse used to say we were changeling children, left in the nursery by fairies when they stole away the duke’s true offspring. Neither David nor I have ever really belonged there.”
“You sound so matter-of-fact about it all.”
Aidan shrugged. Truthfully he never thought much about his life; he just lived it. He had long ago accepted who he was, even though his father could not. He had never said these things aloud to anyone before, until now. Until Lily. “That is just how it is, right or wrong. My family must put up with me, and I with them. We rub along well enough. After all, I am not the heir. Thank God.” Though sometimes he had disquieting thoughts about his
brother abandoning his duties, leaving Aidan to take them up. That would be a disaster.
“I don’t understand you, Aidan Huntington.” Lily tried to move away again, but he wouldn’t let her. He closed his hands on her waist and drew her down onto his lap.
“We are quite a pair, then, Lily St. Claire, for you are a complete mystery to me.”
She wriggled against him as if she would fly away, his panicked bird. Her movements made his manhood stir and harden, lust suddenly hot in his belly, and he pressed himself up against her through her skirts. She went still.
“I’m quite dull,” she whispered. “There is no mystery in me to decipher.”
Aidan nudged her hair away from her neck and laid his lips to the soft, vulnerable spot below her ear. She smelled so warm and sweet there, and he closed his teeth lightly on her skin. He wanted to devour her, to fall into her and be lost. To make her reveal herself to him.
She gasped, and her head fell back as if in surrender. A surge of triumph rushed through him. At least he had her in this.
He tangled his hand in her hair and pulled her down to cover her mouth with his. He swept his tongue past her parted lips, claiming her, marking her.
Lily met his kiss with a need of her own. He could taste it, feel it in her body against his—she wanted to lose herself in their passion as much as he did. He had never felt such raw hunger for a woman before.
She wrapped her arms around his neck as her tongue slid over his. He felt her turn until she straddled his lap, her legs braced on either side of his hips.
Aidan reached down to grasp the hem of her skirt and
pull it up until he could touch her warm skin through the thin linen of her drawers. It wasn’t nearly enough; he was hungry for the feel of her bare against him. He ripped at the fabric until he could slide his palm over the heat of her naked thigh.
Her neck arched back, and she cried out at the sound of the tearing fabric. “Aidan! You already owe me new underthings.”
He traced his open mouth down her throat and laughed. “Go to any modiste you like, order whatever you want, and send me the bills. I’ll happily pay for anything. Black satin corsets, embroidered stockings, lace petticoats…”
“Just so you can tear them off me again?”
“And again and again.” He bit at the curve of her shoulder and pushed her short sleeve out of his way. He wanted to taste every inch of her. Even now his penis grew harder as he remembered the taste of her arousal in his mouth. The way her soft womanhood closed around him and drew him deeper and deeper until he lost himself in her.
His fingers deftly slid beneath her bodice and her stiff corset to the yielding softness of her breast. He pinched her nipple lightly and laughed at the curse that burst past her lips.
“Just take me now, Aidan,” she whispered hoarsely. “Make me forget. Make it all just go away.”
Make what go away?
A hint of cold disquiet pierced Aidan’s lust. He braced his hand on the back of the chair to peer up at her. Her cheeks were flushed a dark pink, her eyes glittering with desire—and with something else. Something frantic and violent, tinged with fear.
She had looked just like that when he found her slumped by the barroom wall. Like a wild creature caught
in a cage, desperate to get out. She had also looked like that with the little girl in the park. Flashes that came through her somber armor. He would happily make her forget, over and over, all night, but he wanted to know what scared her like that.
She reached between them to unfasten his shirt and push it off his shoulders. Her palms skimmed over his shoulders and down his bared chest, exploring every inch of him with her hands and her eyes.
“Lily…,” he groaned.
“I’ve never seen you without your clothes,” she murmured. “How can a man be so beautiful like this? So perfect, like a Greek statue in a gallery.”
“Believe me, I am no statue,” he moaned as she smoothed a caress over his ridged abdomen, just above the band of his trousers. His cock surged against the confinement of the wool placket.
Lily braced one hand in the center of his chest and slid the other one lower until her fingers cupped him through the fabric. She bent her head to kiss him at the base of his throat, and her tongue caught the drop of sweat there just as she wrapped her fingers around him and slid them down, hard.
“Lily,” he growled, but she only touched him again. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing, where to touch to drive him out of his mind, how rough he liked it.
His whole body was braced in the chair, his mind spinning out of control while she unfastened his trousers until his naked manhood was in her hand.
“Mmm, beautiful,” she purred. Her thumb pressed the throbbing vein on his underside, and she stroked him from base to crown and back down again. “And so, so hard.”
“Hard for you.” Aidan had to force himself not to throw her to the floor and thrust into her, to make her just as crazy as he was.
She swept a soft, tickling touch over his balls, and then he felt her slender fingertip slide lower to press on the opening to his ass. A hot bolt of sensation shot through him and his whole body arched up on the chair as he shouted her name.
Her hand moved from his chest to wind around his neck as she held on to him and stared down at him with her night-dark eyes. Her other hand, though, stayed where it was, her fingertip so lightly circling and teasing. The nerves along that tight ring of muscle seemed to vibrate at her touch.
“Haven’t you ever been touched there?” she asked.
“Not by you,” he said roughly.
“Hmm. Have you ever been with a man?”
Aidan prided himself on his unshockability. He had seen too much, done too much, knew too many people to be surprised by anything. But Lily had surprised him with her dark, daring words.
“No,” he said shortly.
She shook her head and lowered her mouth to his shoulder, sliding the edge of her teeth over his skin. Her hand slid away to lightly cup his buttock. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter what either of us has done before, not tonight. Tonight this is all there is.”
That sounded good to Aidan. Just him and Lily and sex, everything else closed away and lost in the gathering fog outside. He pulled her lips down to his for a hungry kiss as he spread her legs wider over his lap and arched his hips up into hers.
Lily took his cock in her soft hand and pressed his damp tip to her womanhood. As she braced her knees to the chair and slid down, he thrust up through her wet, tight folds until he was seated fully inside of her, all her tight heat surrounding him and drawing him deeper and deeper. He
was
lost in her. He couldn’t tell where she ended and he began.
“Aidan,” she moaned. She held on to his shoulders, and he felt her nails bite into his skin. The edge of pain just drove his need higher, hotter.