A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) (34 page)

She sighed and slid her arms into her pelisse, and stuffed her feet back into her slippers. And then she hooked the lamp over her hand and carried it down the stairs.

Odd. For a glacier, her heart seemed to be moving at an inordinate speed. Pounding, one might almost say.

SILENCE, APART FROM the crunch of her footsteps over frosted grass and pebbles and the ringing of blood in her ears sent by her pounding heart.

She stopped just short of the arbor. They stood and regarded each other in utter silence for a moment.

“I’m not really lurking,” he said by way of greeting, finally. “Just experiencing a little … indecision.”

“Oh, I never thought for a moment you were lurking. The role of brooding hero doesn’t suit you.”

She said it lightly, but the sentence was edged all around with thorns.

“I suspect I need to be swarthier in order to brood convincingly.”

She denied him a smile.

He remained where he stood, just outside the gate, as though she were St. Peter or some other authority who could decide whether or not he would be allowed to pass.

“I behaved horribly,” he said abruptly.

She remained silent, which was her way of agreeing.

“I should like to apologize,” he added stiffly.

“Very well. Go right ahead.”

“I apologize.”

“I’m bowled over by your conviction.”

He took a sustaining breath. Released it. “I … hadn’t the right. It was unlike me.”

“How do you know if it’s unlike you? Have you much experience in playing the jealous swain, then, Adam?”

She enjoyed delivering the barb, and sweetly, too. mocking his inexperience. Despite the cold, which would become punishing very soon, she hadn’t any intention of making it easy for him.

“None,” he said evenly.

She couldn’t mock him with the truth about himself.

The words came, swift and clipped and taut and strangely formal. “It was … unlike me because I consider all of my words and actions, I endeavor to be fair and never to hurt. I think I succeed more often than not, for which I am grateful. But … I wanted to hurt you.”

Because I was hurt was unspoken.

A blunt and potent succession of words, even for him.

“You succeeded.” Her throat was tight; the word was low; the confession cost her.

He always managed to strip her to her truest self, left her no time for strategy or consideration, only truth, and that rattled her. She was vulnerable only to him. She wondered if he truly understood how this frightened her.

And so their confessions hung taut between them: They could hurt each other, which meant they mattered to each other.

“It felt monstrous,” he admitted.

She closed her eyes briefly. He’d thrown a fist at man who’d cast aspersions upon her questionable honor, for God’s sake. Of course it was killing him to know he’d hurt her. He’d been punishing himself for it ever since. And yet she knew a surge of impatience for the innocence of the man.

“Welcome to the life of nearly every other living, breathing human. We’re all only one step away from behaving like tantrum-throwing children when we’re feeling thwarted, particularly in matters between men and women. Isn’t ‘mine’ the favorite word of tots everywhere? We wouldn’t need laws against dueling and the like if we’d a prayer of being civilized.”

“I’ve never behaved that way.” Until you, was the unspoken accusation.

“Well, well, well. I hope you don’t intend to self-flagellate.”

“I intend nothing of the sort. But I do thank you for the lecture, Lady Wareham. Once again, I benefit from your … superior experience.”

Her head jerked back a little. She was tempted to tell him this bit of irony quite canceled out his apology, except for that she rather admired it and likely deserved it.

More silence. The stars were as crisply delineated as punched tin, the night was so clear. The cold was beginning to penetrate her slippers, numb her cheeks, and suddenly it seemed absurd to stand on one side of the arbor talking to a man who stood on the other in the dead of night.

“Well then. Is that why you’re here? Your tortured conscience drove you out of bed to my gate in the dead of night to apologize?”

“No.”

So definitively stated she almost blinked.

“Then why are you here?”

She wanted him to say it aloud. To say “I want you” so she could refuse him. He was a man, after all, of explosive passions, and now that she’d clearly unleashed him, she suspected it would be rather like trying to stuff a hurricane back into a box. She tucked her freezing fingers into the belled sleeves of her pelisse, turning it into a muff of sorts and symbolically barring herself from him. She stared coolly up at him.

He’d brought an offering of an apology in exchange for sex. Pity she never wanted to touch him again.

If, however, he should touch her, she could not be held responsible for what happened next, for she wasn’t fool enough to think her mind had any say in it at all.

He took a short hard breath, huffed it out at length in a white cloud.

“Lady Fennimore died tonight,” he said finally.

Surprise blanked her mind for an instant. Then came welling sadness. She waited. He said nothing more. But she knew him well enough now: His voice was at its most even, most unreadable, when his emotions were at their most fierce and untenable.

“I’m sorry to hear it.” She genuinely was. She hesitated. “Were you … with her?” she ventured gently.

“She died holding my hand. It isn’t the first death I’ve attended, mind you,” he added hurriedly, as if he wanted to spare her picturing it. “It’s my duty to usher souls out of the world, and if they should want prayer and absolution and ritual, I know precisely what to do. It’s always different, but there is comfort in time-honored rituals, sometimes even beauty in it, for them, for their families, even for me … it’s all life, the births and weddings and deaths. Such a certainty, such a trust they place in me to ease them into the afterlife. I’m grateful and blessed I can give them that, that I can be a part of that, even when I feel … uncertain or unworthy. Which,” he said ruefully, “is more of the time than I’d admit to nearly anyone.”

The planes of his face were harlequined in moonlight and shadow, betraying nothing of what he felt or needed. And she did picture it, for how could she not? This big man leaning forward from a chair likely too small for his frame, pushed up close to the bed of a frail, dying woman, his lovely voice murmuring the familiar prayers that eased countless people from life into death. She thought: Those blue eyes, the weary hollows beneath them, the beginnings of a beard faintly shadowing his jaw, his big sure hands, were the last thing Lady Fennimore saw on earth, were the last thing she touched. She’d trusted this man with something as profound as her life and the end of it.

An epiphany broke over her like a wave.

Evie had been courted by kings and pursued by princes; she’d married an earl who’d won her hand in an infamous card game.

And now … all of it, all of them, the men and their courtships and the flowers and jewels and duels, suddenly seemed like … so much Punch and Judy. Like little boys at their games. She suspected she looked upon greatness for the first time in the form of a dusty, weary, rueful, vicar, who did things like hold the hand of an old woman as she breathed her last breath and throw his fist into the jaw of a man who slurred her questionable honor and come in the dead of night to sit by the bed of her maid.

“I suppose I’m sorry she’s gone,” he said simply. “I quite liked her.” When it seemed she’d never say anything.

Awe and a terrible, beautiful fear muted Eve.

“Ah.” She finally said. All emotion, that syllable, whispered and wholly inadequate.

At last he cleared his throat. “Well.” His voice was almost threadbare with fatigue, and faintly, faintly ironic. “I’ll just be off, then.”

He bowed. And turned abruptly and began striding up the road. Lord, but the man could cover a distance rapidly with those legs.

And damned if she didn’t at last unfreeze and find herself running after him like a green girl, skirts hiked in her hands.

“Adam!”

He halted. He slowly turned. But he didn’t walk to meet her; he waited for her to run all the way to him. She stopped just short. And then tentatively, as though he were a skittish animal, she rested her hands flat against his chest. Apart from the sway of his breath, his body was as unyielding as the punishing backs of the pews in their little church. His hands remained in his pockets. He looked down at her; she couldn’t read his expression. She drew closer to him, and closer, so that her body just brushed his, slid her hands down, slipped them through his arms, hooked her arms around his waist. And held him.

After a moment, his breathing deepened, quickened. She closed her eyes and breathed him in, woodsmoke and cigar smoke and perspiration and mist and cedar and horse, his coat a veritable travelogue of smells, because likely he had only the one winter coat and no wife or valet to polish him up.

His hands remained stubbornly in his pockets. So she held him until he surrendered, which mercifully wasn’t long since, despite the fact she was pressed against a big man, the cold was insistent. He sighed, the tension eased from him, his body molded to hers. And after a moment, he rested his cheek against the top of her head, and he fished his hands out of his pockets, and his arms went around her. Surrender complete. He breathed in and out, in and out, and it felt like a gift to feel it, to ease the tension from him.

She pulled him closer. This strong man had come to her for strength, and she knew only gratitude that she was strong, too. She had courage and strength to spare.

Her only weakness was him, after all.

“It’s all right if it’s sometimes all too much,” she murmured, with some difficulty since her cheek was pressed against the wall of his chest.

He wasn’t about to agree with her or acknowledge anything of the sort. He had his pride, despite all that nonsense about its going before a fall.

But his arms tightened around her.

She suddenly wanted to look at him, to see him again in the wake of her epiphany. She leaned back in his arms and touched her fingers to his jaw, dragged them softly along the scrape of morning whiskers, traced the long, sensual swoop of his bottom lip. He tolerated her exploration for a moment or two, and then, with that thrilling decisiveness of his, grasped her wrists, raised them to his shoulders—she obeyed by looping them about her neck—and his mouth fell to hers.

The kiss bolted through her blood like raw whiskey; she moaned low in her throat from the sweet shock of it. He murmured something that might have been an oath or her name, and his mouth became demanding. Instantly, her universe was the silken heat and sweetness of his mouth and the rasp of whiskers over her chilled cheeks and the icy tip of his nose. The kiss was graceless, hungry; her mouth fell open beneath his, inviting him deeper in; it was never deep enough. She combed her fingers up over his icy ears and through his silky hair as his mouth traveled to the base of her throat, where her heart threatened to choke her with its pounding. He pressed his lips there, to feel her heart beat.

“You’re like silk, Evie.” He half laughed it, voice cracked in wonderment. As if he could scarcely believe his luck.

He made her new. Everything about her was new beneath his touch, God help her.

His hands slid hard down her back, pressed her against him, she hissed in a breath of bliss when she discovered how hard he was, how much he wanted her. His hands spanned her buttocks, and he lifted her up until she fit hard against his cock, her legs wrapped her legs around his waist.

“I want you.” He whispered it. As though it was his most precious secret.

And the woman who’d sworn she’d never have him again couldn’t speak for wanting him.

So it was just as well he didn’t wait for her reply.

Later she remembered the journey to the house, wrapped tightly in his arms, her legs locked around him, her face tucked against the warmth of his throat, the cold whipping past them as his long stride took him through the arbor at last, through the ajar door, where his hands fell away from him, and she slid the length of his body and her breath snagged in her throat.

A fire burned low in the drawing room where he’d first seen Frederick

He settled her down on the settee, gently. But swiftly, purposefully, he unbuttoned his shirt, flung it aside. The casual glory of the torso he revealed shocked her. She reveled in her extraordinary good fortune as he worked open his trousers, pushed them down, muttered a curse about his snug boots. He was lean, sinewy, pale gold, his beautiful broad shoulders angling down to a narrow waist, hard thighs scattered in coarse gold hair, and buttocks small and firm with a gorgeous scoop out of each muscle on either side, the perfect place to fit her hands when her legs were wrapped around him, as he rose up over her to plunge—

“Leave the boots on,” she ordered hoarsely.

She couldn’t wait. She wanted to feel the entirety of his smooth skin against her now. She wanted to discover the terrain of him with her fingers, her lips, her tongue. She wanted to know what it felt like to drag her hands over the those defined quadrants of his chest, the valley bisecting the ridge of muscle between his ribs, to tease the coarse gold hair that ran in a fine trail to his deliciously concave belly to where his swollen cock curved up.

He dropped to his knees next to her, seized her shift where it was bunched at her hips, and urged it off over her head, flinging it over his shoulder to join his shirt. She reached up for him, threaded her hands through his hair, brought his head down to hers for a kiss. He teased her lips with his, bumping them gently, sliding softly, then tracing them with his tongue until she gasped. His mouth covered hers then, and his tongue delved, tangling with hers. He planted his hands on either side of her torso, tantalizing her with the promise of the touch of his skin, hovering just a hairsbreadth above her until she arced, her nipples brushing his chest. His breath gratifyingly snagged in his throat. She slid her hands over his chest, hot and smooth, traced her finger down that delightful seam that seemed expressly designed to point the way to his cock. She licked his nipple, then nipped it, but he wasn’t done with her.