As he watched through the white-tinged haze of lust, Lily’s head fell back, and her hair spilled in a loose, tangled fall to her waist. Her eyes were tightly closed, and for a moment they just hung there, suspended in that instant of joining.
Then she rose up slowly on her knees, and her body dragged along his whole length, so tight and wet, so hot, he groaned at the sensation. He felt that familiar tingling at the base of his spine and knew he wouldn’t last long. He needed to slow things down, draw them out. Pleasure her until he did make her forget.
But Lily didn’t seem to want slow. She slid her body back down onto his until their hips were pressed together. Her nails scored his back, raking down the groove of his spine.
“Fuck me, Aidan,” she whispered. “I need you to. Just like in my office.”
“I never want to disappoint a lady,” he managed to rasp. He wrapped his arms tightly around her waist and swung them both down to the floor. Still joined, Aidan laid her on his hearth rug on her hands and knees, facing away from him. He thrust into her, hard, and she moaned his name.
He wondered for an instant why she didn’t want to look
at him as he took her, why she wanted it this way, but then she pushed her bottom back, driving him in deeper, and he couldn’t think at all. He could only let the familiar fog of lust close over him and drive him toward his climax.
“Harder,” she whispered, and he was happy to oblige. He thrust again and again, each time harder, deeper, until he knew he had found that one secret spot inside her, the one that made her scream his name. He slid against it, over and over, until he felt her convulse around him.
She threw her head back, her whole body as taut as a drawn bowstring. Aidan tangled his hand in her hair again and held on as he drove himself into her until he knew he was about to come. He pulled out of her just at the last second, and he shouted with the force of his release. It was as if all the violence and energy, the lust and need, of the night flew out of him.
He collapsed to the floor next to Lily and covered his face with his arm as he struggled to breathe and to think. Lily lay flat on her stomach beside him, her breath uneven, her body shaking as hard as his. As if they lay together in the eye of a terrible, inescapable storm.
Slowly, when the spinning of the room had eased, Aidan slid his arm away and turned his head to look at her. She lay on her side now and studied him through the tangle of her hair.
She said nothing and neither did he. There could be no words, nothing to put aside whatever upheaval had happened tonight. Something had shifted between the bar fight and their lovemaking. Something had moved between them, and he couldn’t even begin to fathom what it was. He was too exhausted and beginning to feel the bruises of the fight.
“You’re bleeding again,” Lily said quietly. She reached out and brushed her finger over the bandage. “You should be in bed.”
Aidan caught her hand in his and kissed it. “Only if you join me there. I believe after our encounter in your office, I promised you the next time would be in my bed. I fear we didn’t quite get there.”
A ghost of a smile fluttered over her lips. “Almost.”
Aidan pushed himself to his feet. Yes, he could definitely feel the bruises now. He would be a right old mess in the morning. He held his hand out to Lily. “Come with me. I think we both need to sleep on a soft bed for a while.”
She slowly sat up, staring uncertainly at his hand. “I should get home. I can’t be caught coming in looking like this.”
But Aidan found he didn’t want to lose her just yet. Something in him, some part he didn’t understand, wanted to keep her close for a little while longer. “Just for an hour or two, and then I will take you home. It’s a long time until dawn.”
Finally she nodded and took his hand. Aidan led her through the doorway into his bedchamber. The gaslight from the street outside cast shadows over the carved bed, making an undulating, inviting haven of the piled-up quilts and pillows. It was a small room, plainly decorated and furnished with old, unfashionable pieces from his family’s country home attics, but he usually didn’t bring women here. It was his own space, a place for escape, for writing and thinking. A place where he was only Aidan, not the son of the Duke of Carston.
But Lily seemed to belong there, a quiet, watchful
presence that didn’t mar the peace. He pulled back the bedclothes and drew her down beside him onto the soft sheets. She still wore her disheveled dress, and the fabric rubbed over his bare chest as she slid into the angle of his body. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and she rested her head against him with a sigh.
Slowly, slowly, she relaxed until at last he felt her arm slide over his waist. They just lay there together, still and silent.
Aidan wound her hair around his wrist, combing the tangles from the long strands with his fingers. She traced a light pattern over the skin of his chest. It was a gentle, soothing touch, a connection in the darkness.
And it was much too intimate, too close. Aidan knew he should take her home now, push her away, but he couldn’t move. It felt too good to have her next to him. Tomorrow would be soon enough to move away.
The back of his hand rested on the soft, vulnerable nape of her neck. “Tell me why you were so frightened tonight,” he said quietly.
Lily stiffened against him, but he tightened his fingers in her hair and held her still. “Anyone would be frightened in the middle of a fight,” she said.
“Of course. Yet there was more than that. I saw you earlier, when I put you up on that table. You fought like a Valkyrie. But when I found you at the end, you were almost paralyzed. You can talk to me, Lily. You can tell me what happened, tell me how I can make it up to you.” Aidan knew even as he said the words and asked her to let him in that he was only digging himself deeper into a place he did not want and could not have. A place of real intimacy and understanding. A place where he could truly
see a woman and let her see him. But that romantic notion was something that could only be found in plays.
Still he asked her that. Still he lay there with her, his body wrapped around hers.
She was so taut against him, and he saw her again as a delicate, trapped bird, her wings spreading to take flight and disappear.
“I don’t want to talk, Aidan,” she said. “It’s late, and I’m tired.”
She sat up with one hand on his chest and slid her other hand softly over his face. She made him close his eyes and then leaned over to press her lips against his.
“Just sleep now, my warrior,” she whispered. “And tomorrow you will see that you don’t really want to know anything about me at all.”
Aidan felt himself falling down into a dreamless sleep, her hand caressing him. And when he awoke with the sun on his face and his head pounding, she was gone.
“Y
ou seem distracted today, Lily my dear.”
Lily glanced up from her account book and rubbed at the bridge of her nose as she smiled at her mother. Katherine St. Claire was arranging a large vase of roses at a table by the drawing room window. It was a dismal, gray day, the fog rolling down the London streets to banish the sun they had enjoyed for the last two days, and the dampness seemed to have seeped into the cheerful pale yellow room.
Two days had passed since she had seen Aidan. Two days since she had slipped from his bed in the predawn light, stealing one last glance at his gorgeous face as he slept.
The sight of him in his bed, his muscled torso glowing a pale gold on the white sheets, his hair tousled, had lingered in her mind every time she closed her eyes. She felt his hands on her, heard the murmur of his voice, saw the flash of his smile. She remembered how they had talked, how tempted she had been to confide in him. So, yes, she was a bit distracted today.
“I suppose I’m just tired,” she answered.
Katherine looked at Lily over the red flowers, a worried frown on her brow. She looked like a bright flash of summer in the gloomy day, with her pale blue dress and her hair the same red-gold as Isabel’s, only lightly touched with threads of silver. The frown seemed foreign on her pretty face, yet it had been there too often lately when she looked at her children.
“You’ve been working too hard, Lily,” she said. “You do the accounts for that club and the theater, and who knows what else Dominic and Brendan drop on you. You should let someone else help. Hire a secretary.”
Lily laughed. “I doubt we would want a secretary, an outsider, to pry into our accounts.”
“Then your brothers should help more.” A wry, affectionate smile touched Katherine’s lips. “My dear William is brilliant at many things, but the practicalities of numbers is not one of them.”
Lily shook her head. Her father was often off on flights of fancy, deeply into a play or a piece of music, or off talking to people. “I like doing the accounts. That is not what’s making me tired.”
“We wouldn’t be where we are if not for you, Lily,” Katherine said. “We wouldn’t be so secure financially. You have been a blessing to us, and if we ask too much of you…”
“You have been
my
blessing, Mama,” Lily protested. “I’m only happy there is something I can do for you. I would be dead now if not for you and Father. Or worse—I would be like my mother.”
“No, my dear! No, you must not say that.” Katherine hurried over to Lily’s side, dropping onto the satin slipper chair by the desk to take Lily’s hand. “You are strong and
clever. You would have found a way to save yourself even if we hadn’t come along when we did. But I am thankful every day that we did.”
Lily smiled at her mother. Katherine held so tightly to Lily’s hand that her rings bit into the skin, but she didn’t care. Her mother’s soft touch, the rosy smell of her perfume, was always a comfort. “I’m thankful as well.”
Katherine nodded. They never spoke of that day so long ago, when Lily had been caught trying to pick William St. Claire’s pocket as he and Katherine walked past in the Covent Garden crowd. Rather than box her ears or shout for a constable, rather than leaving her to Tom Beaumont for another beating or worse, Katherine had knelt beside her and stared deeply into her eyes. She had smiled at Lily and spoken softly, until Lily let William lift her in his arms and carry her away.
When Beaumont tried to get her back, William’s men gave him a thrashing, and she never saw him again. Her life of dirty streets, hunger, crime, and beatings was over. Instead there were lessons with a governess in a clean, cozy nursery, with new brothers and a sister, pretty clothes, the theater, books.
She heard that Beaumont was transported to Australia soon after. Until now. Until he held her against that barroom wall and smiled that terrible smile.
Lily pressed her other hand to her eyes and tried to swallow back the cold nausea that rose up in her throat. She couldn’t worry her mother with Beaumont. It was her own problem, her own past, and she would find a way to take care of it. But how she hated Tom Beaumont for what he had done! Such burning, violent hatred she had thought—hoped—was long banished from her life.
“Lily, something
is
wrong,” Katherine said. “Is it that man? The one who sent you violets?”
Lily sat up straight and pulled her hand away from her mother’s. “Why would you say that?”
Katherine laughed. “Because you haven’t said anything about him. Whenever you turn all quiet and cautious like that, I know something is amiss.”
“He is just someone I met once or twice. We… talked a bit.”
“And he sent you flowers after talking?”
Lily shrugged. She tried to be casual, careless, but she didn’t meet Katherine’s watchful green eyes. Aidan was her secret, just as the return of Beaumont was. She couldn’t let her family know she was actually seeing a Huntington. They would explode with fury. Except Isabel, sweet, romantic Isabel, who she knew would keep her secret.
Lily owed the St. Claires far too much to do anything to hurt them.
“Come, my dear, sit with me on the settee. I’ll ring for some tea,” Katherine said, letting the subject of secret admirers drop for the moment.
Lily glanced back at the open book on her desk. “I should finish these…”
“Later. It’s teatime. And I want to ask your advice about something.”
Lily nodded and went to settle herself on the settee as Katherine rang the bellpull. It had begun to rain, cold, hard droplets that battered against the window glass and made Lily shiver. Her mood felt just as gray, and even her mother seemed affected as she sat next to Lily. Her beautiful oval face, so much like Isabel’s, was creased with some secret worry.
“What is it, Mama?” Lily asked, her concern growing. Had she been so preoccupied with her own troubles that she had missed something going on in her family? “Are you ill? Is it Father?”
Katherine shook her head. “Oh, no, we are perfectly well. It is James I’m worried about.”
“James?” Lily said, her mind racing. She thought back over the last few weeks and realized that it was true—James had not been his usual lighthearted self. She saw him only at breakfast and in quick snatches in passing, as he didn’t seem to be home very much, and when he was, he seemed quiet and brooding. Even Isabel had appeared a bit worried about her twin.
Lily almost cursed aloud. How had she not noticed before? “What is wrong with him?”
“He won’t talk to me. He is gone so much, and he won’t say where. Not that that should be anything unusual—he is a man now, and his brothers at that age never wanted to tell their mother what they were about either. But he won’t even talk to Isabel, and they have shared everything since they were born. I think she is rather hurt by that.”
“What of his friends?”
“There were the young men he knew at school, but he never mentions them now. He won’t go with us to the theater or the assembly rooms, and he shows no interest at all when your father tries to involve him in the productions at the Majestic.” A blush touched Katherine’s cheeks as she added, “I do think Dominic and Brendan tried to take him to… to a place they know for gentlemen, but I don’t know how that went.”