by Eloisa James
So she didn’t protest, not at all, not when he unbuttoned her skirt and there she was, naked in a forest glade. Not when his hand burned a trail down her stomach to her legs, and she—wanton that she felt—let him slip those fingers between her legs. The very touch of him made her shudder.
“Helene,” he said. He’d taken his hand away, and the absence was almost painful.
She blinked at him. “Yes?” She had to clear her throat. “Yes?”
“I’d like to make love to you. Would that be all right?”
“Yes, yes of course,” Helene whispered hurriedly, wishing that he hadn’t asked her. “Did you speak to Darby?”
His eyes seemed oddly unfocused. “What? Why would I speak to Darby?”
Helene could feel waves of sobriety cooling her body. “You had a question about a lady’s—” she stopped.
His face cleared. “No need,” he told her, dropping a kiss on her lips. It felt so good that he lingered, hungrily, but his hands dropped between her legs. “See, Helene? See?” His fingers sank into her warmth.
She gasped. Instinctively her legs opened a bit and he slipped deeper. “You’re ready,” he whispered. “We didn’t need any of those methods for ladies, whatever they are.”
“Oh,” Helene managed.
And then he was there instead of his fingers. Helene looked up at Rees. His face was dark with passion, jaw tight, and despite herself, despite the trembling pleasure she felt, she braced herself. There was no getting around the fact that bedding was something her body didn’t do well.
Rees felt that rigidity as if her body was an extension of his own, and even though he hadn’t entered her yet. “It will be all right,” he said, swooping down for a kiss. But he wasn’t sure, any more than she was. Would it be painful? By the end of the time they lived together, he was absolutely convinced that there was something about her body that prevented her from enjoying bedding. He’d heard of such things before.
She had her eyes closed tight. “It’s been lovely so far,” she said. “Go ahead, Rees. You enjoy this part.”
He didn’t move.
“Go ahead!” she commanded him, as fiercely as he told her to drink Cook’s remedy, that very morning.
And so he did, cautiously, slowly, holding himself to an agonizingly slow pace.
Her eyes popped open. “It didn’t hurt!” she said, obviously pleased.
“That’s good,” he said between clenched teeth. “Do you mind if I—”
“Oh, go ahead,” she said, with a wiggle that nearly undid him. “It doesn’t hurt a bit.”
So Rees did. There was something missing though. He was flying, plunging into her tight warmth again and again, his vision black, not thinking of anything, except—
Except he wished that she found more pleasure from it. Helene lay under him with a little smile, and the very sight of her skin gleaming in the sun coming through the branches made him feel maddened, crazed. He slid hands under her hips and pulled her up.
Her eyes opened very wide and her mouth slightly parted. He searched her face, trying to see whether she found any satisfaction in what he was doing, but the roar of raw pleasure in his own ears racked his body, driving him forward. His vision went dim and he poured everything he had into her with a groan that burst from his lungs and echoed around the empty wood.
Two minutes later, Rees was lying on his back in the flowers, trying to force air into his gulping lungs, trying to stop shaking.
Helene was eating some chicken with her fingers, and chattering about how it wasn’t bad, not at all, and if it had been like this, years ago….
Rees put his arm over his eyes. Foolish of him, to want anything else. To feel there was something wanting there. Stupid. Emotional. He had his release, and that was all that mattered. Wasn’t it?
Twenty-five
The Hunt Is On
Ambrogina Camden, the Duchess of Girton, was sitting in the garden of her townhouse, attempting to look regal. This wasn’t an overly difficult proposition: Gina had a dignity and grace that made her a natural duchess. She was sitting bolt upright, her head carefully poised atop her spine, her pale red hair pulled back into a gleaming mass, the better to frame her beautiful facial bones. “How much longer?” she demanded of the man who had been scrawling sketch after sketch in black charcoal for the last two hours.
“Hush,” the man said. And then, “Don’t move, Gina, for God’s sake!”
Gina quietly ground her teeth (duchesses do not show outside signs of irritation, even under extreme provocation) and straightened her spine again. If only Max’s nursemaid would bring him down into the garden to play, he would certainly toddle over on seeing his mama and she could pick him up and end this tedious business of sitting for her own sculpture.
“One more moment,” said the man, “this one is rather good. Lovely, in fact.” There was a tone of ripe satisfaction in his voice. “I think I’ve got it, darling. What do you think?”
Gina hopped up and went around the man’s shoulder to look. “No!” she said, on a rising shriek. “You promised, Cam! You promised!”
The Duke of Girton grinned at his wife. “What? You don’t like the shell?”
“The shell?” Gina squealed. “Who cares about the shell? You’ve done me without a stitch of clothing!” She tried to snatch the piece of foolscap from him but he held it out of her reach.
“It will look lovely on the front lawn at Girton House,” he said, his eyes sparkling. “I can’t think of a better use for that pink marble that was delivered last week.” With his free hand he caught his wife tightly to him.
“I won’t let you,” she promised, trying once more to grab the sheet of paper.
“It doesn’t matter if you rip up this sketch,” he said, lowering his other arm so she was trapped in the circle of his arms, and bending to kiss her neck. “I know your body, Gina…I could take a piece of clay from the riverbank and mold it in the dark, and people would call it exquisite.” His mouth hovered at the corner of hers.
“You’re naught but a rogue, to even think of sculpting your own wife without clothing.” He smelled so lovely, and she had got up quite early to visit Max in the nursery, and her husband did have the most beautiful eyes, and his hands…“We’re in public!” she scolded him.
“I could sculpt the curve of your bottom were I blinded,” her husband said into her ear, sounding rather drunken. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“I couldn’t,” Gina said, enjoying herself immensely. “Max might come outside at any moment.”
“He’s in the nursery being bullied into eating far more rusks than he wishes for nuncheon.” Cam had dropped the offending sketch to the ground and his hands were roaming freely. His mouth burned a trail across her cheek…Gina turned to meet his lips.
“Yes,” she whispered, opening her mouth to him, to the charcoal and chalk, the wild man whom she married. His tongue slid slowly across her lips, came to her with a sudden passion that made Gina fold into his arms in helpless surrender.
“Your Grace,” came a pompous voice.
Gina tried to tear her mouth from Cam’s but he wouldn’t let her, finishing his kiss, lingering there without regard for the liveried butler standing at a polite distance.
“Yes, Towse,” Cam said finally, not looking up from her face. He was tracing the line of his wife’s rosy mouth with a finger.
“Her Grace has a visitor,” Towse said majestically, his eyes fixed on a nearby bush. “The Earl of Mayne.”
“If Mayne thinks he’s going to add you to the notches on his bedpost, he’d better think again,” Cam said softly, and suddenly the urbane duke disappeared, replaced by a muscled wild man who had spent years in Greece and thought Greek husbands weren’t overly savage when it came to protecting their women.
“Mayne is wooing Helene,” Gina told him.
Cam thought about that for a second. “She could probably use his attentions,” he said with a wicked grin. “I always thought she was a bit too sobe
r for her own good.”
“Cam!” Gina protested, an instant scowl appearing on her face. “I won’t have my friends insulted by you or anyone else.” She turned to Towse and called, “Please ask the earl to join me in the garden.”
“I’ll give you ten minutes with that seducer,” her husband said, grabbing her slim waist again and pulling her back against his hard body. “Ten minutes only, Gina, and then you belong to this seducer.”
Objections trembled on Gina’s lips, and then she realized that there was no point to cutting off her nose to spite her face. She no more wished to deny her husband’s provocative smile than she wanted to kiss the Earl of Mayne, be he the most seductive man in London or not.
“All right,” she whispered. “Ten minutes.” Even meeting his eyes, seeing that sweep of smoky eyelash, made her stomach curl.
“Don’t be late,” he said, and the urgency in his tone had nothing to do with ducal responsibilities.
The Earl of Mayne found the duchess clipping roses and looking rather flushed from her gardening endeavors.
“How delightful to see you,” she said, smiling at him and holding out a delicate hand.
Mayne admired the lovely picture she made, pale red hair gleaming in almost the precise color of the blush roses she carried in a basket. “It’s a shame that you’re so happily married,” he said, dropping a kiss onto her palm. “May I say that I would be very delighted should that circumstance ever change?”
She chuckled, and the low, happy sound of it jolted his loins. If he could find a woman like her, marriage wouldn’t seem such an unenviable prospect.
“I suspect you have come to see me for reasons other than my supposed marital bliss,” she said, but the smile curling on her lips left him in no doubt that bliss was likely the right word.
“In fact,” he said, “I was hoping you could give me the direction of your lovely friend Helene.”
“Are you and Helene on terms of such intimacy, then?” she said, eyeing him with obvious curiosity.
“She was kind enough to give me leave to use her Christian name.”
The duchess obviously remembered the story she had been told to recite. “Helene has decided to take the waters,” she said piously. “She finds herself exhausted by the season. I’m afraid that I’m not at liberty to give her address to anyone.”
“Hmm,” Mayne said. “I would have thought the countess was one to eschew ill-smelling medicines. And when I saw her last…she was in the very pink of health.”
“Yes, well,” Gina said, conscious that at least eight minutes had passed since Cam went upstairs, “I’m afraid that I can’t give you her direction without betraying her confidence.”
He sighed inwardly and took a billet from his breast pocket. “In that case, would you be so kind as to forward this to her?” he enquired.
She gave him a beaming smile and began walking rather quickly toward the house. “I shall give it to a footman immediately,” she said, towing him along.
Two minutes later, Mayne found himself deposited, rather unceremoniously, outside the front door. He walked to the pavement and then paused, examining his watch fob until the Girton butler closed the door. The house, and indeed the whole street, were sleepily dozing in the unexpected heat that had struck London that morning.
The only sign of life was the servants’ entrance to the left. As Mayne watched, a greengrocer dropped off an order of cabbages. He nodded to the footman standing beside his carriage. “We’ll wait here a moment or two, Bantam.” If he wasn’t mistaken about the duchess’s character, she would dispatch of business matters at once.
Indeed. A footman, smartly dressed in Girton livery, emerged from a side door. Mayne smiled to himself. The footman passed a note to a groomsman; Mayne smiled again. The groomsman trotted sedately down the street on a placid old horse, and never noticed that he was being followed at some distance by a coach with an insignia on the door. Mayne smiled and smiled. He only stopped smiling when he realized precisely where the note was delivered.
What in the devil’s name was Helene Godwin doing at the Godwin residence? Why was she staying with her oh-so-estranged husband, to be blunt about it?
Twenty-six
Darling Girl
Helene’s stomach gave an odd lurch when she walked into the library before dinner and saw Lina sitting next to Rees on a small settee. Her shock was likely due to revisiting her youthful infatuation with her husband. All the better reason to forget she ever felt the emotion in the first place. It had only taken an hour after they returned from the picnic for Helene to remember that her husband had a beautiful young woman sleeping in the room next to his.
“Champagne, my lady?” Leke said now, bowing. Helene gave him a nod of assent.
“I should like to go to Vauxhall tomorrow night,” she announced in a high voice that almost cracked like shattered glass. “It’s the only place I can think of where I can go without being recognized, and I simply cannot stay in this house day and night.”
Lina looked up, startled, and Helene was gratified to see her spring further from Rees’s side. It was a sad thing indeed when one was grateful for the good manners of one’s husband’s mistress.
“Don’t have the time,” Rees growled.
“Make it,” Helene said, with a tone of pure steel in her voice.
Rees looked up from his papers. “What do you think I should put at the end of Act Two, when Captain Charteris has discovered the Princess in the Quaker village? All Fen has noted is ‘musical number.’ ”
“Some sort of dance, I expect,” Helene said, sipping her champagne. It was deliciously cold and icy, and made her feel almost as if she would sneeze.
“I could do a polonaise,” Rees muttered.
“I’d do a waltz,” Helene said. She would have wandered over to look at his paper, but she wasn’t going anywhere near the couch, even if Miss McKenna was a frigid distance from Rees’s hip now.
“A waltz? I have never written a waltz. Weren’t you working on one last summer?”
That was the odd thing about Rees. He never forgot a passing word said about music, although he had never remembered her birthday, not even during the first year of their marriage.
“Yes,” Helene said, finishing her champagne.
“How do you think the audience would take it?” he said, frowning. “I have quite a prudish contingent going to the Theatre Royal.”
“When did you ever worry about shocking someone?” Helene asked. Rees’s brother was taking Lina away to look out the far windows. That was diplomatic.
“You know I’m conventional. When it comes to music,” Rees replied with a lopsided smile. Helene’s heart skipped and steadied again. “Will you play me your waltz?”
“There’s no piano here,” she pointed out. And what if he didn’t like it?
But Rees was standing up. “We’ll go in the music room. Tom and Lina can dance for us. Tom!” he called. “You know how to waltz, don’t you?”
His brother turned around. “No, I haven’t the faintest idea how to waltz. The sight of their vicar trotting around the dance floor would likely give my parishioners apoplectic fits.”
“My father used to dance once in a while with my mother,” Lina said to him with a giggle. “Though not a waltz, of course!”
“Too fast for a vicar, isn’t it?” Rees said with satisfaction. “I can’t think why I didn’t write a waltz before. Come on, Helene. Lina, you show Tom the steps. It’s easy enough and there isn’t a single member of your godly flock here to disapprove, Tom.”
A moment later they entered the sitting room. Helene put her arm on Rees’s sleeve. “Did you forget something?” she asked, nodding at the floor.
Rees stopped and stared at the ocean of papers as if he’d never seen them before. “We can’t—” he stopped.
Helene picked up a sheet. It had three words scrawled on it: night dances past. She handed it to Rees and picked up another. It had three staves of cascading arpeggios.
Lina rounded on Rees. “Why are you keeping all this garbage?” she asked. “Do you honestly think there’s a good piece of music on the floor somewhere?”
He looked at her, his face unmoving. But Helene saw a spark of uncertainty in his eyes and cursed Lina inwardly. How dare she make him feel worse about his music than he already did?
“There might well be something marvelous here,” she said quickly. “This piece is breathtaking and fresh, for example.” She sang the little score she had picked up from the floor, adding a couple of minor aeolian triplets, for emphasis.
Rees snatched it out of her hands and then gave her a hard look. “Breathtaking after you got hold of it, perhaps,” he said. But he didn’t sound truly distressed.
“Supper is served, my lord,” Leke said, appearing behind them.
Rees dropped both sheets back to the floor. “Right,” he said briskly, standing back and allowing Helene, Rees, and Tom to pass before him. “You are spared the indignity of waltzing for the moment, Tom.”
“Tell the footmen to clear up all this mess,” Rees said to Leke, jerking his head at the floor.
Leke’s jaw literally fell open for a second before he snapped it shut. “Yes, sir,” he said hastily.
“I should like the room cleared by the end of our meal. And move that harpsichord to the side so that we have a dancing floor,” Rees said, striding after his wife.