Bridal Favors (20 page)

“Ah!” She hurried over to a barrel that stood by itself, its lid tipped upright beside it. She set the lantern down on the ground and reached in. She was so small that her upper torso disappeared inside.

“Drat!” her voice echoed from the interior.

She gave a little hop, kicking her feet, and, making sounds of strenuous activity, rustled inside the barrel.

“Can I help?” Justin asked.

“No!” Her voice drumrolled up from the depths. “I almost . . . There!” She emerged triumphant, a pair of wine bottles held aloft in each hand, her face smeared with dust, and cobwebs caught in her fast-escaping locks.

“And what have you there?”

“Here, Mr. Powell? Here I have two of ten bottles of Château Lafite-Rothschild. Bottles your grandfather hid here just prior to your father’s visit to the abbey in 1886.”

“I say, sounds like something the old dog would have done. But how did you know about it?”

“I read his journal. He was very much the military man, wasn’t he? Everything accounted for, each tactical action—particularly domestic ones—documented, even those that following generations might consider reflected poorly on him.”

Justin laughed. “I doubt the notion that anyone would disagree with his reasoning, let alone see his actions as being other than shrewd, ever occurred to him.”

Evelyn hesitated, slowly setting her prizes down. Her expression was difficult to read, a little anxious, a bit resolute, a trace embarrassed. “Do you . . . It must be so difficult. Being you. And him. Being him.”

“A great deal less difficult than the other way around, I imagine, say if he was me and I—” Justin started jocularly but broke off when he saw her expression. By God, she was truly troubled.

“My dear girl,” he said softly. “It really isn’t a family tragedy, you know.”

“But he expected you to be someone different than who you were. It couldn’t have been easy knowing you didn’t measure up to his idea of what you should have been.”

Justin frowned, seeking some way to comfort her, bemused and startled that she was so troubled. His own family didn’t know about the odd turn his army career had taken, but though they had been disappointed he’d cut with the tradition of generations by ostensibly leaving the army, they had never forsaken him. The only one for whom it seemed to truly matter had been the Brigadier General and his potty old army mates.

He had to make Evie understand that. Because there was more to her concern than simple empathy. She’d a personal stake in his answer. And he wanted to reassure her. He wanted that very much.

“I never cared what the General thought, Evie.” Justin leaned over the barrel toward her, bracing his hands on the rim. She moved closer, searching his face.

“How could you not care? He was your grandfather.”

He considered. “I was lucky. My father stood between us. He wouldn’t let his father-in-law browbeat me, make choices for me, or humiliate me into acquiescing to his ambitions.

“My father had spent years trying to make his father-in-law proud, you see. Succeeded, too. But he made himself miserable in the process. Then one day, or so he says, he woke up and realized that, in the process of being what the General wanted him to be, he’d nearly lost track of the ideal he held of himself.”

“Ideal?” Her lips had parted a bit, like a rapt child listening to an amazing story.

“Yes. The person we know ourselves to be if we can only find the courage and honesty and strength to become that person.”

She’d moved incrementally closer as he spoke, drawn as if by a magnet. “And your father taught you to hold to this inner vision?”

He reached out, barely aware he did so, and brushed that errant curl from her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Her skin was warm and smooth. “Yes,” he murmured.

Her eyelids drifted partway closed, her lashes brushed her cheek. He started to reach out again, to turn that gentle brush into a full caress.

Her lids slowly raised. Her revealed gaze was sharp and assessing. “And this inner image you hold of yourself is that of an indolent, affable, supercilious fainéant?”

His hand dropped. He’d given away the game.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Powell,” she said. “In fact, I don’t think you’re what you appear to be at all.”

Chapter 15

SHE’D CAUGHT HIM out. She’d used his need to comfort her in order to decipher him and see behind his mask. In the process, he’d all but confessed to having ideals, principles, and values for which he would fight.

Unfortunately, in order for him to do his job, the world needed to assume that Justin Powell had a dearth of those things. He had to embody the quintessential eccentric English gentleman: a dilettante and dabbler, overbred and faintly ridiculous. Thanks to his blunder, she’d never believe that of him. Not after that charming and impassioned little soliloquy.

Unless he did something to prove otherwise.

Though it felt as though he’d faced her probing gaze for minutes, in reality his hesitation lasted only a few seconds. Then, like ice dissolving under a warm rain, he lolled back against one of the kegs. He turned his hand over, studying his nails. “Can you think of a worthier goal?”

“Sorry, m’boy. It doesn’t wash.”

“Oh? What’s that?” he asked mildly.

“The old Irwin the Idler act. You can’t be all huffy moral superiority one minute and an easygoing noodle the next.”

“I don’t take your meaning.”

She tapped him lightly on the chest, her eyes sparkling with exultance. She was utterly adorable.

“Oh, you know,” she said, dancing back. “‘Jumping being my only recourse, given the goings-on I unwillingly witnessed,’ ” she said, imitating his earlier speech.

“Gads! Did I really sound so pompous?”

Her lips stretched in a sweet, victorious smile.
“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I would hate for you to think I’m a prig.”

He pushed off the barrel rim and came round its side. He loomed over her, his pose suddenly, subtly predatory. He angled his head slightly, as if he were trying to scent her, dissect her with senses other than sight. His gaze slipped down her features, her throat, to her bosom, and rose to her face again. His lips parted as if tasting the sudden change in the atmosphere between them.

It worked. The assurance in her expression wavered. Her eyes dilated behind her lenses. She backed away a half-step, and her hand stuttered to her throat and fidgeted with her collar’s top button.

His success was bittersweet. He’d needed only to reveal more of the truth in order to obscure it. He needed only to let her see how much he wanted to touch her, kiss her, in order to make her forget what he’d told her about himself. He’d thoroughly rattled her. He should let it drop at that. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t stop, not yet. He had an excuse now, a reason to do what he wanted to do.

“If I seemed outraged, Evie, it was solely on your behalf.”

“Mine?” she whispered, her eyes riveted on his, big and worried. So damned worried. She shouldn’t be. He wouldn’t hurt her. He didn’t want much.

“Yes,” he said, moving a step closer. “That kiss Blumfield gave you. What a poor piece of work.”

A flicker of affront darkened her eyes. Her lashes beat against their glass lens cage. Her lips pursed. They shouldn’t purse, they should be soft and relaxed.

“You had no right to watch,” she said. “And don’t hand me that feeble excuse about not wanting to startle your drat bird.”

She was even more delicious vexed and combative, her skin blooming with ire, her eyes flashing.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “But then, I’m a cad, don’t you remember?”

“A cad,” she scoffed, but she countered his forward step with one backward. His conciliatory smile turned vulpine.

“Yes,” he affirmed softly, stalking her across the small wine cellar.

“You’re no more a cad than Ernst.”

The name sent a tremor of jealousy through him. He hated the intimacy implied by her use of his Christian name. “Oh, I agree Ernst is no a cad,” he said. “Why, I’ll bet he even apologized for kissing you, didn’t he?”

She stopped, her back against the chill, damp rock wall. The light played in her dark clouds of hair, lacquered her profile with amber light. Her nervous fingers had worked the button at the top of her high-necked dress free, unwittingly teasing him by revealing the vulnerable little hollow at the base of her throat.

“He said he was carried away,” she declared.

“Carried away?” Justin laughed. He didn’t need to feign amusement. The poor bastard didn’t know the first thing about being carried away.

An irresistible torque of attraction dragged him nearer until he’d cut off any chance she had of escape. He bent over her, breathing in the sweet, clean talc scent of her, every last shred of common sense demanding that he back away. She should have at least tried to dart past him. Instead, she stayed, foolish girl, her expression filled with wounded pride.

“Why are you laughing? Is it inconceivable that someone could be carried away because of me?” Her voice quavered. “Well, perhaps it is. But that is what he said, and I’ll thank you not to laugh at it. Or him. Or me.” Her mouth, her gorgeous, lush, ripe mouth, trembled.

God. She didn’t know. She didn’t have a clue. He shouldn’t take advantage. He mustn’t. But even as he thought this, he clasped her shoulders, his head dipped down, and he muttered, “Carried away?
That
was carried away? Oh, no.
I’ll
show you ‘carried away.’ ”

He swooped down before she could react, covering her mouth with his. Pure sensual pleasure burned through his veins. Her lips . . . Lord, her lips were pleasure, her mouth a feast. He heard her sigh, a little exultant, inarticulate exclamation of wonder, a womanly sound of surprised gratification.

It shook him, how deeply that sound affected him. His body seemed a tuning fork, vibrating with the reception of that sweet, pleasured sound. He drank it from her lips, telling himself to go slow, to move gently, but ardor rolled through him, setting its own tempo. His hands slipped down her arms and wrapped around her waist.

She was small, delicate as china and just as refined. But resilient. Like a willow wand, green and supple and feminine. So beautifully accommodating. He pulled her nearer, felt her slight resistance and the second she yielded.

He stroked up her back. She moved and her shoulder blades lifted like wings beneath his palm. His other hand smoothed a trail along the inward curve of her waist. She didn’t stop him. She didn’t back away. She stood with her head thrown back, accepting his kisses. Not yet involved. Not yet a partner. Like a beggar or a goddess, accepting alms or homage. He couldn’t tell. He doubted she could.

His mouth opened over hers, burnishing her lips with tender, velvety strokes. Back and forth. His lips caressed, clung. Pressed deeper. The blood surged through his body, quickening him.

He counted to ten, letting his mouth play over hers, certain he could control this. He could keep his head. He
would
keep his head. He was a man who stood fast in any situation. But there’d never been
her
before. Never been anything like her, or the demands made by her sweetly relinquished mouth or her slowly awakening desire.

His hands glided up her sides, stopping just beneath the first soft swells of her breasts. She arched. Just an increment. Just a degree. Just enough to shift her breasts against his fingers.

He tore his mouth away, snatched his hands away from the temptation, and wrapped them around her upper arms. He looked down into her upturned face. Her lips were voluptuous and rosy, the seam between them a darkly sexual provocation.

“Is that carried away?” Evie asked in a bemused voice.

“No.” His response was harsh, unlike any tone she’d heard him use.

She nodded, accepting his words as a well-deserved reproof. It had been a stupid question. Twenty-five years old and she didn’t know anything, so untutored in the . . . the amorous arts that she didn’t even know what to do with her hands when a man kissed her. They hung from her shoulders like the weights on a grandfather clock, while the rest of her body canted toward his, wanting to be absorbed by him.

His face was set in a hard, unreadable mask. Anger? Yes. She tilted her head, her thoughts swimming futilely against a riptide of impulses. Why was he angry? She’d never seen Justin angry. Annoyed. Irritated. But not angry.

His beautiful blue-green eyes were shuttered, his mouth drawn into a taut line.
Why
did she have to be so ignorant?

He flicked open her collar. Somehow it had come unbuttoned. His thumb slipped under the lace and settled over the pulse at the base of her throat, while his fingers curled around her neck beneath the thick, uncoiling mass of hair. He tipped her head back, reading her giddy pulse with the pad of his thumb.

Never had she felt so womanly, yet at the same time been so maddeningly aware of her inadequacies as a woman.

“You were right,” she said, striving for an objective tone and succeeding only in sounding breathy. His thumb swirled in fire-inducing circles against her breastbone. Her lashes fluttered like a captive butterfly’s wings against the insides of her lenses. “He wasn’t carried away.”