With a resigned sigh, he straightened, but before he could step back, Jessica hooked one arm around his neck and arched her body into his.
“Jess?” he said on a strangled murmur.
When she made a soft sound of arousal, he kissed her. He kissed her brows, her cheeks, her ears, and her husky voice saying his name made him wild to have her. His hand spread out on the small of her back, arching her hips, and he rhythmically ground himself into her. He undid her negligee and filled his hands with the weight of her breasts. He crushed her to him and she molded herself to his hard length. At each small surrender, his passion soared.
When he lowered her to the bed, he wasn’t thinking of the wisdom of what he was doing. This was the woman he’d wanted for more years than he cared to remember. It
had always been Jess with him. He’d been too blind to see it. So many years to make up for. He would never let her go again.
He was positioning himself to take her when the doorknob rattled and someone knocked on the door. Lucas groaned, and raised his head. His breathing was labored, as was Jessica’s. She blinked slowly as she came to herself.
“Jessica!” Ellie’s voice, as clear as a bell, came to them from the other side of the door. “I know you’re still up. I can see the light under your door.”
Lucas swore under his breath.
Dazed, Jessica looked around her, then she gave a gasp of horror. She was on the bed, flat on her back, her feet touching the floor, and Lucas was planted between her thighs. She could feel his hard shaft pressing against her. Her only protection was the thin folds of her nightgown. Beneath his robe, he was naked.
He stifled a laugh. “Don’t wriggle! For God’s sake, don’t wriggle, or I won’t answer for the consequences.”
“Jessica!” Ellie again. “Open the door. I want to talk to you.”
Lucas chuckled. Jessica’s face flamed scarlet. She moaned and shut her eyes.
Another voice joined Ellie’s, Lucas’s mother’s. Her words were too low to be clear, but her tone was unmistakably sharp.
“But Aunt Rosemary, I only wanted to apologize to Jessica.”
The voices receded, then there was silence.
Lucas was watching Jessica’s face. “You can wriggle as much as you like now,” he said.
She slammed her hands into his chest. It was like trying to move a brick wall. When he saw that she was serious, he frowned and rolled from her.
“Now what’s wrong?” he asked moodily. Unsated desire was riding him hard. He’d been only a moment away from burying himself in her warm, willing body, and he
didn’t understand why they couldn’t go back to where they’d left off.
Her voice was shaking. “I’m holding you to your promise, Lucas.”
“My promise?” he demanded incredulously. “My promise? After what we just did?”
Wavering between tears of mortification and a strong desire to run and hide herself, she swallowed hard and nodded. She was awed; she was horrified. She had practically begged him to take her. She had practically forced herself on him. If Ellie hadn’t knocked on the door, it would have been too late. Then she would be no more than a convenience to him. She wasn’t asking for his love, but by all the saints, she would have his respect.
He made a vicious swipe with one hand. “To hell with my promise! I want you. And you were willing, more than willing. It’s as simple as that.”
No mention of love, she noticed. Not that she expected it. Not that she wanted it. She stuck her chin out. “Obviously, it’s not as simple as that for me.”
He glared at her. “It could be, if you’d only let yourself forget that you’re a—”
“What?” she goaded dangerously when he hesitated.
He didn’t want to quarrel with her, he wanted to go to bed with her. “A nun,” he said mildly. “That’s what I was going to say.”
Her voice shook. “A dried-up stick of a nun is what you meant.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
“Mind your language!”
His frustration boiled over. “If you’d only come to bed with me, we wouldn’t be having this stupid quarrel.”
She ground her teeth together. “Bed! Is that all you can think about?”
“Yes,” he yelled, making her jump. “And if you had a grain of honesty in you, you’d admit it’s all you can think about, too.”
Her lips were still burning from his kisses; her pulse was still hammering. He was telling the truth and she knew it, but nothing on God’s earth was going to drag it out of her. “You don’t know what I want,” she said, trying to sound confident, wincing at the pathetic wobble in her voice.
“I do know,” he said. “Oh, not from your words, Jess. Words can say anything. But your body doesn’t lie to me.”
His gaze dropped to her breasts. She felt a peculiar tightening where his eyes lingered and she looked down. The soft material of her negligee was stretched taut, and the tips of her breasts, like two plump strawberries, were straining at the seams.
“Yes,” he said, and his voice was dark with raw sensuality. “Your breasts are begging for my mouth, and I want to take them.”
She made a soft whimpering sound and folded her arms across her chest.
Lucas studied her for a long while and all his frustrations gradually seeped away. Her huge, expressive eyes were fear-bright and fixed on his face; her mouth trembled, her throat worked. He could see that he had made quite an impression on her, but not enough to overcome her virginal scruples, or whatever the hell it was that made her reluctant to surrender herself to him.
“It’s going to come down to it sooner or later,” he said.
She bit down on her lip.
He smiled grimly. “I’m not going to break my promise to you, but I’m not going to keep my hands off you, either. Not after this. That is asking too much.”
No response from her.
He sighed. “Drink the wine,” he said, “it will help you get to sleep. Good night, Jessica.” And pushing past her, he made a leisurely exit.
Once he was in his own chamber, he poured himself a small measure of brandy and drank it back in two gulps. His heart was still pounding; his body was still primed to
take her. He didn’t know why women had to make everything so complicated.
When he started to pour another drink, he realized what he was doing and set his empty glass down with a thunk. Jess was the only woman who had ever driven him to drink.
He thought about the mother superior then thought about Adrian and he shook his head. Moments later, grinning ruefully, he poured himself another measure of brandy and began to sip it slowly.
It was her own panicked cry that awakened her. She lay there trembling, her heart racing, the blood pounding at all her pulse points. Realizing she’d been dreaming, she sobbed in relief and hauled herself up.
She’d been dreaming about a children’s game, a game that had turned into a nightmare. In a few minutes, the dream would recede and she would go back to sleep.
But the dream didn’t recede. It was still vividly etched in her mind, and she could not shake herself free of it. Resigned, she threw back the covers and swung her legs over the edge of the bed.
The room was almost in total darkness except for a sliver of pale light at one edge of the curtains. She didn’t bother trying to use the tinderbox to light a candle. It was just too difficult and time-consuming. Rising, she went to the curtains and opened them.
Her windows looked out on Green Park, and though the darkness was edged with a predawn haze, everything was blurred. Only the lights of Buckingham House on the far side of the park stood out clearly.
She rubbed her neck to ease the knot of tension that had gathered there. She’d followed Lucas’s advice; she’d drunk some of the wine before going to bed, and she wondered if that could be responsible for her nightmare. Even as the thought occurred to her, she discarded it.
Wine made people happy or it made them sick. It didn’t leave them with a lingering sense of unease.
It wasn’t unease. It was more dire than that.
Dread
was the word that came to her.
She found her negligee, slipped it on, and took a chair by the window. There was no point in going back to bed. She knew she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep until she’d tried to sort through what she was feeling.
Her dream had started out well enough. They were all on the front lawn of Hawkshill, she and the sisters and the children, and they were playing a game, oranges and lemons. Everyone was laughing and talking at once, then the scene shifted suddenly. Hawkshill became a church and the children and nuns faded away. There was a big stone cross,
her
cross, in front of the church, and they played their game around it. But the players had all changed, and so had the words of the nursery rhyme.
One down and two to go
, they chanted.
Lucas and Bella had joined hands to form the bridge, and everyone skipped under their joined hands. When she passed under the bridge, their arms descended, trying to catch her. She jumped away and when she looked back, she saw that they had caught Rodney Stone instead. Rodney Stone was led away, and the game started over.
She was panic-stricken. She knew this wasn’t a game. The people who were caught out really would have their heads chopped off. She cried out for them to stop, then went tearing after Rodney Stone, through the church door and into the dark interior. There was no sign of him, but she saw a set of stone steps going down into the bowels of the earth. And she realized she was in her own tomb.
Then they came for her, all the guests who had been at her wedding. “Who is next, Sister Martha?” they chanted. “Who is next? Who is next?”
She jumped to her feet. “Oh God, no!” She wasn’t aware she had spoken aloud. “Oh God, no!”
This wasn’t her dream. It was her Voice’s dream. And
she knew what it meant. Either her Voice had already murdered Rodney Stone, or he was planning to do it.
She stared blindly out the window as she summoned all her powers of reason to deny what her intuition told her. Lucas and Bella—that was Ellie’s doing. She’d made them sound like a couple, and that’s how they had appeared in her dream. As for Rodney Stone, she’d been thinking about him incessantly. And there was nothing sinister about the others. She’d seen them all earlier at her own wedding.
It was logical, but it did not convince her.
She took the chair again and stared into space. She hadn’t heard her Voice in some time, and never quite like this. Maybe it wasn’t her Voice. Maybe it was her own dream.
“Voice?” she whispered, opening her mind to him. “Voice?”
There was nothing there but a void.
CHAPTER
18
J
essica parted the muslin drapes and looked down on the front courtyard. The carriage was waiting to drive Lucas’s mother and Ellie to a musicale at Lady Bowes’s house in Manchester Square. At the last minute, she had pleaded a headache. She had a different kind of engagement in mind tonight, a secret engagement.
She’d chosen her moment with care. Lucas wasn’t here. He and some of his friends had gone out to Twickenham to take in a prizefight, and he wasn’t expected home till the wee hours of the morning. She was glad he was gone. Lucas’s eyes were too sharp. He wouldn’t have been fooled by her headache, and might have suggested staying home to keep her company. Then she could never have kept her appointment with Perry.
There was flurry of activity below. As Mrs. Wilde and Ellie descended the front steps, a footman hurried to the carriage and held the door for them. Mrs. Wilde was first to enter. Ellie was right behind her, and with Ellie was a page, dressed in the Dundas livery. This was Pip, the
ringleader of the boys at Hawkshill, and Sister Elvira’s answer to the letter Jessica had sent her. The girl needed something outside herself to focus on, said Sister Elvira, and the experience would be good for Pip, too. The odd thing was, Pip and Ellie had taken to each other right away. And now, Ellie had taken Pip under her wing and had made his welfare her personal concern.
Ellie was no longer the sullen, willful child she had been, but she still hadn’t warmed to Jessica. In fact, sometimes Ellie could be downright nasty.
Jessica was thinking about this when Ellie suddenly turned and looked up at the house. Jessica let the drape fall and took a quick step back, but not before she had seen the smile spread over Ellie’s face. It was almost as though Ellie knew what she was up to.
She couldn’t know. She and Perry had been very careful to make their plans during a walk in Green Park, when there was no one there to hear them. It was just her guilty conscience.
When the carriage drove through the front gates onto St. James’s Place, Jessica let out an audible breath, turned on her heel and made for her own chamber on the other side of the house. She had another two hours to while away before darkness fell and she could keep her appointment with Perry. She cursed the long summer evenings that seemed to go on forever.
She was pacing when the knock came at her door. Her first guilty thought was that Lucas had returned early. She dived into the bed and hauled the covers up to her chin before calling out a wavering “Enter.” It was only one of the maids with a supper tray for the “invalid.” Jessica thanked her and after she had gone sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the clock.
Would the time never pass?
She looked at the supper tray on the table beside the bed. The aroma of something savory filled her nostrils. She was sure she couldn’t eat a thing for nerves, but she
lifted the silver lid that covered the plate just the same. Cook had outdone herself. Thinly sliced beefsteak in a spicy wine sauce, tiny roast potatoes and buttered Brussels sprouts sprinkled with almonds were all artfully laid out to tempt her appetite. And for dessert, her favorite, fruit trifle and cream.
Her stomach churned, reminding her that she had hardly had a bite all day. She’d been too keyed up. She drew a chair to the table, seated herself, picked up a fork and began to eat.
At Lady Bowes’s musicale in Manchester Square, the guests were idling their way in to supper. There were fewer young men at this function than at balls, a fact that Ellie was loudly lamenting to her chaperon, Mrs. Wilde. They were filling their plates from side tables in the spacious formal dining room.