Season For Desire (19 page)

Petra had found happiness, too.

That just left Audrina, sitting on the hard wooden floor of a ballroom in a York inn.

“Charissa. Audrina.” Giles ticked the names off on his fingers. “Petra. And who else?”

“Romula and Theodosia are oldest.”

Giles whistled. “Your parents certainly didn’t give you ordinary names.”

“They did not want us to be ordinary.”

“What’s so bad about ordinary? Ordinary is the way most people live.”

“That alone makes it unacceptable.” She stretched out her legs, keeping her focus on the glossy toes of her boots. Blinking too often by far, but there was no help for that. An occasional tear must leak out with these words. “And yet I am just like everyone else, Giles. There are five of me within my own family. I could do nothing that had not already been done first or better. So I could only do things last and worst.”

“Not worst.” He spoke low and gently. “Different. I guarantee you none of your sisters has done anything like what you’ve done over the past week or two.”

She could make no response but a tight smile. Tense, to hold in feeling that trembled like a plucked guitar string.
Love and joy come to you . . .

A man like Giles could only have come from a family where he was loved enough to stretch, to go his own way and come back. A land where buildings were new and snow scrubbed the sky clean and blue and white. None of these gray winters, these gray people in ossified buildings.

Maybe he was not her equal by birth, but she was not his by behavior. She was the one who had been foolish and weak and tricked.

But he had never held that against her.
She
was the one who had chosen to dwell on it. She had agreed, meek and tired, to stay away from London. She had let her father tell her she was not welcome at a family wedding. That she was an embarrassment.

Because she believed him. Because she had put her trust in the wrong person, and he had betrayed her, and therefore she deserved to be punished.

Once upon a time, maybe, there had been bravery in secretly doing what she ought not. Oh, what a clever girl to take a lover. To slip from the house to call on a scandalous friend. Oh, how cunning and sly to do these things and smile demurely over dinner, no one the wiser.

But there was no such thing as a secret. Any interaction—from conversation to intercourse—involved at least two. Though she might guard her tongue and her speech and her behavior, that other person had the power to make a different choice.

Had power over her.

And now she was eaten by the idea that no one on earth was proud of her, not even herself. To be different was to be unacceptable. To be ordinary was to be unacceptable.

To hold oneself at a chilly distance was intolerable, but to mingle with servants would never do. To bake was improper; to be idle was insufferable.

She was familiar with every negative prefix the English language had to offer, but she did not know their converse. What to put in their place? How to fill the gaps in her time and her heart?

“No,” she said quietly. “None of my sisters has done what I have.” None of them had wondered like this. None of them had needed to.

Giles Rutherford seemed to like her the way she was. Not as a reflection of her family, or a purse to be dipped into. As fellow travelers, they were on their own, divorced from the outside world.

But the world waited. It crouched outside the snowbound inn, with the sharp claws and teeth of rumor and ticking time. It would tear apart Charissa’s wedding, and that would tear apart their family.

So what was Giles’s opinion worth if she knew he was wrong?

And if he was wrong about her, why was it so reassuring to be near him? To breathe in his scent, soap and starch and something sweet, like sugared coffee or a stolen apple tart. To study the map of freckles over his cheekbones; the thin slice of a scar through his lip, permanent proof of his devotion to a younger brother. To admire his hands, his strong-fingered, broad-palmed hands, and to want them tracing every line of her body.

Not worse
, he had said.
Different
.

Maybe different was better—or could become so.

The air between them was thick and vibrant as crystal.

“Giles. Will you come to my chamber?” she asked.

Eyes closing, he took a deep breath; a breath that looked as though it hurt him or scoured him clean. She could not tell which, and her heart tottered, ready to fall into despair or delight.

When he opened his eyes, they looked like a warm summer sky. “Lead the way, princess.”

As soon as the bedchamber door locked behind them, Audrina understood why she had requested the same room she had stayed in two weeks ago, when first arriving at the Goat and Gauntlet. It was for the unspoken hope of a moment like this: to replace the shame and fright of
locked away from
with the delight of
locked away with.

She turned from Giles to remove her boots, feeling nervous and powerful at once. It was an unlikely setting for a seduction, this simple, clean bedchamber with a small desk and a privacy screen—and a pencil post bed, covered in a pale piecework quilt that seemed, in its elegant jumble of patterns, an apt reflection of Audrina’s feelings.

The walls were blue as Giles’s eyes; the fireplace of white-painted brick. It was like being in the sky, unmoored and free.

But this was hardly a moment to go flitting off into fancy. This was a moment for locking the door. Building up the fire. Pulling back the counterpane on a bed that seemed very large. A cocoon of crisp sheets and heavy bed-curtains.

This whole journey was a cocoon, and soon enough she would have to leave it and stretch her wings. For now, though, she was wrapped in lost time, and when she turned back to Giles, tall and solid and smiling, he cradled her face in his hands.

Gently, he brushed her lips with his, then pulled back to look at her. “When I said I was not going to kiss you, I couldn’t bear for that to be the end of the sentence. The word
yet
always followed in my thoughts.”

“Yet you seemed so determined not to.”

“I had to be very determined indeed. When a beautiful, brave, curious, passionate woman wants to kiss a man—well. It seems like the best thing in the world.”

“What’s different this time? Are you going to stop?” She covered his fingers with hers, holding his hand to her cheek. “Tell me now if kisses are all you want, or if you want to stop.”

“I never wanted to stop.” His thumb traced her cheekbone. “The difference this time is why we are doing it.”

“What it means.” Her voice was quiet over the desire that began to flow and pool, liquid within her.

“Yes.” He seemed to look deep into her, sifting through her every thought. But she could not read his, and what it meant to him, she did not know. Again, she wanted to lose herself. To let the outside world fall away with its troublesome past and future; to live only in the pleasure of the moment. But it
was
different this time, because she chose him as her partner: not because he was at hand, but because he was Giles.

When he kissed her again, she rose to her toes to meet his lips. A deeper kiss, and she threaded her hands through the short silk of his hair to pull him closer. Sipping, tasting, a pressure of lips melting into a sweet clash of tongues. The heat of his mouth on hers made winter fall away.

Was this wrong? Too much or not enough? She couldn’t ask what passion meant to him; not now. Not when she was all stammering need, halting and wanting and hoping. She did not even know what she hoped he would say.

So they kissed: deep kisses that made wetness slick between her thighs, gentle ones that made her strain for more. Laughing kisses as his mouth danced over her cheeks and nose; then demanding kisses that crushed their bodies together until she could feel his solid shaft, pressed between their bellies.

When she sank down from her tiptoes, breaking their link, he was breathing as hard as she was. A hot flush colored his cheekbones. God bless the complexion of a redhead, which proved he felt as much desire as she.

“We must get you undressed,” she said. It was the work of two to tug free his boots and strip off his heavy woolen coat. His cravat, he untied with steady hands and a slight smile as she watched, hungry for every fraction of skin exposed.

Then he worked free his cuff links, smooth jasper set into gold.

Audrina smiled and laid them on the wooden desk for him. “When you removed these in the kitchen yesterday, I had a treacherous urge to take them away from you so that you couldn’t put your sleeves back down.”

“You liked that, did you? I never guessed at the time. I took off half my clothes in that kitchen and you didn’t seem to turn a hair.”

“Yes, well—I’m not as proper as I seem.”

“I am delighted to hear it.” He made a great show of rolling up his sleeves, of rolling his hands to make the muscles of his forearms jump and flex. “Look at that. Do you find yourself overcome by lust? I’m not the slightest bit tempted to put my cuff links back on.”

“Are you tempted to take your shirt off?”

He blinked. “I
like
this improper mood of yours.” Within a minute, he had unbuttoned and removed his waistcoat, then tugged off the braces of his trousers.

Audrina caught hold of one and tugged it toward her. “Is this a handle for retrieving a Giles?”

“He is fair and fully caught, my lady.” With an
are you ready
look, he pulled free the tails of his shirt. Audrina gave a quick, breathless nod, and at last, he bared himself.

Well. Half bared himself. But it was more of a bare man than she had ever seen before. Her dark fumblings with Llewellyn had been quick, relegated to slivers of time and corners of dark rooms. More pleasurable for the knowledge of their forbiddenness than the intimate acts themselves.

This felt like a different act entirely, though, with an intimacy never imagined. Facing him, she drank in the sight of his firm, rangy frame: golden hairs dusting the chest; strong lines of collarbone and shoulder, of pectoral and rib. His trousers slipped at the waist, granting a glimpse of a delicious angle of hip.

In a giant step and swoop, she sprang to wrap her arms around him, tightly, surprising a laugh from him. Oh, he was so big and solid and warm that she felt she could lean on him forever.

But he was not for leaning on, and she was not for leaning. This time was for being together: the pleasure of the moment, taken and given and shared. Equals, right just as they were.

“Take off the rest of your clothing,” she murmured against his chest. “Please. I want to look at you.”

“You said ‘please.’ My, my. The world has tipped on end.”

She turned to the desk. Locks of hair began to tumble as she plucked free one hairpin, then another and another, laying the metal pins in a neat pile beside his cuff links. “You make me sound so impolite.”

“Not impolite at all, princess. No, the world tipped when you told me what I’d wanted so long to hear.”

“That I want to look at you?”

“That you want anything from me within my power to grant. That you want something from me that can please you. You—for your own sake, because you know I think you are worth pleasing.”

This, she supposed, was why he would say yes now. Why they could claim one another in intimacy, not a fleshly transaction.

“I am worth pleasing,” she said, “and so are you.”

He turned his head away; the muscles of his shoulders bunched and shivered. He would not argue with her at such a moment; he would not refuse pleasure offered and sought. Not now, though she caught him glancing at his hands with some trepidation.

“You are,” she repeated, and she knew what to do. “Come, sit by me.”

She crossed to the bed and sat upon the neat white sheet. When she patted the spot next to her, he did as she asked. And she took his hand.

Not for holding in quiet peace. No. She was going to turn this hand from pain to pleasure. Cradling it palm up in her hands, she sank her thumbs into his palm and pressed. Spread. Stretched the skin and the sinewy muscle beneath.

His legs shifted, still clad in their trousers. One bare foot twitched.

“All right?”

He made an incoherent sound low in his throat. This seemed adequate permission to continue.

So she pressed again, working her thumbs into the tender heel of his palm. Pressing inward with her own hands, then tugging out, to flex and bend every one of his troublesome joints.

Pleasure can be found where you least expect it.
That was what she wanted him to know; that was what she now believed. Had she not been drugged and tossed in a carriage, she would not be here now, working her fingers between those of a kind man, a great stone who let everyone batter themselves against him and who denied himself the shape he most wanted to carve out.

Who asked her what she was worth, but put no price on it. Who wanted her to see the moon and stars, not because he gave a damn but because she did.

She understood him, as though they had known each other a long time ago and only just met again. As though they’d each been waiting for someone to see them—not as better or worse, but as different. Different from how she ever thought she might want to live or be.

She was coming to love that word,
different
.

Or—
was
it the word she was coming to love? Might it instead be a love for the person who had first seeded her thoughts with that word, where it flowered?

How could one tell the difference between love and need?

She shuddered off these thoughts, refocusing her attention on his hands. Lavishing attention on each in turn, she rubbed the fingers, rolling and stretching them one by one, pressing at the skin between fingers and thumb. Each tug and movement pulled a small sound of pleasure from him: a whimper, a moan. Sometimes just a choked-off groan, his eyes shut. “Yes,” he said, and her nipples went tight against the inside of her stays.

When she found the hollow at the base of his palm and worked at it, up his wrist and into the base of his forearm, his head began to sag. “Audrina. Lord.”

“Are you all right? Are your hands hurting you?”

“My hands,” he said in a ragged voice, “could carry the world if they needed to.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Her mouth curled with delight. “Try this instead.” And she placed his hand on her breast.

He jerked upright in an instant, all languor forgotten. They worked quickly together to strip her bare of gown and stays and shift. She crouched on the bed, nipples hard in the cool air of the room. There was no shyness; not with Giles facing her, his expression warm as he stroked her gently, up and down the sides of her rib cage, as though learning the shape of her by touch.

But she wanted to touch, too. “I like to make things,” she said. “Paper springs”—she danced her fingers up his inner thighs, still clad—“and terrible drawings”—she clutched at his thighs with a hard, flat palm—“and delicious things.” She stroked the long length of his erection through his trousers.

“You’re going to
make
me finish before I even get my clothing off. Is that what you want to make?”

“The first part, yes. I want you to finish. But I don’t understand why you still have anything on.”

“I have no idea.” He slid from the bed, yanked off his trousers, and rejoined her within a few seconds. His whole body was large and tight-corded, all solid angles and lean lines, with faint freckles on his skin as if he’d been spattered by sunlight. The copper-gold hair of his chest trailed down, turning dark as bronze about his shaft, long and thick.

Had she thought the room cool? Her skin felt hot, tight; her folds slippery.

She remembered what he could do with his hands, how just the gentle plucking of his fingertips on her nipple had cleared her mind of every thought but
more
. But his mouth—oh, that mouth. Just as it so often teased her with words, now it tormented her with touch. Tasting and pulling, a deep undertow of pleasure that made her wetter, more eager. Somehow she had climbed atop him, rolling her hips against the hard line of his thigh.

He eased himself back, lying flat on the bed. His other leg nudged between hers, spreading her wide over him. “Is it all right if we do it like this? The view is beautiful. I could not ask for better.”

“My view is more than fair, too.” Kneeling above him, she eased him into her inch by inch. The pleasure of taking him in, that slow slide of heat and hardness, was made even better by being able to watch his face. By seeing his eyes fall half-shut, an expression of ecstasy over his strong features.

Neither of them had words for the moment they were fully joined. It was completion, a togetherness that made Audrina’s heart twist. She was not brave enough to hold his gaze; it was too deep and raw. And so she folded herself over him and began to move.

She had never felt such sensations: closeness and power and vulnerability at once. The thrust and slide of their bodies, the pressure of his hips against her pleasure spot, and his hardness within—already, this was shockingly intimate. And then he eased her upward on his chest, so his tip worked the entrance to her passage with a greater friction, the sounds of wetness an erotic background to the tight-coiling pleasure.

In this new position, she was raised over him, her fallen hair making a curtain over them. He brushed it aside, lifting his head to catch one of her nipples in his mouth. Raggedly, she worked herself over his length while he palmed her breasts and tasted and nipped, and she was tightening at both ends, so many points of pleasure at once, until she unraveled with a gasping cry.

“Oh, my Lord. Oh, Giles.” She sank onto him in a boneless, pleasured heap.

“Not a lord. Just a commoner,” he teased—and he thrust once, twice, more, then pulled free with a groan. Heat marked her thigh, and she realized he had spared her the risk of a child.

Had she thought, she would have asked him to do this. But she hadn’t thought; she had only wanted.

“Thank you,” she murmured against his chest, and she meant it for so many things.

“Wisest, I thought,” he said, his breath still coming quickly. He stretched down an arm for his fallen trousers and found a handkerchief in a pocket, then reached to clean them off.