Leslie Lafoy (25 page)

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“I’m sure you’ll find some like-minded men in the reform circle. Open-minded men who, while they have their own pet concerns, understand that not everyone feels the same sort of passion as they do, and appreciate the necessity of trading support for support. Take Thacker, for instance.”

His Grace went on, but Ian only vaguely heard the rumble of his voice. And to think that he’d asked the woman standing in the doorway to marry him simply because he’d resolved to pick a wife on the same night that she’d needed a surgeon for her cat. Fate had more than smiled on him, She’d handed him the most beautiful, most angelic woman in all Creation.

“I’m ready to go any time you are, Ian,” she said as he somehow managed to remember good manners and get to his feet. “Cook had the hamper taken out to your carriage while I changed my clothes.”

She wasn’t wearing green. For the first time since he’d met her, she wasn’t wearing a green dress of one sort or another. Why she’d chosen to wear a smokey rose–colored walking outfit with a matching short cape, he couldn’t guess, but he did know that somehow her eyes were larger and greener, her skin more alabaster, and the curls piled atop her head, and peeking out from under her hat, even more golden.

“Pick up your jaw and put one foot in front of the other,” he heard Drayton quietly instruct from behind him.

He snapped his mouth closed, slightly shifted his shoulders to adjust the sudden tightness of his shirt collar, and then drew a deep breath. Not that any of that did much to slow his racing heartbeat or calm the tremors in his knees.

For God’s sake, he railed at himself. He was a man of considerable worldly experience. He’d seen beauty before. More times than he could count. He’d seen innocence, too. Maybe not nearly as often as beauty, but still … Why, the sight of Lady Fiona Turnbridge wearing a perfectly respectable walking outfit and smiling happily, invitingly at him turned him into a … well, a goddamned bumbling, blushing schoolboy …

“Move.”

It wasn’t as much the quiet order that put him into motion as it was the embarrassment of it having to be issued. That and the desperation to get away from someone who knew all too well just exactly how flummoxed he was. Stepping forward, he presented his arm, said something stupidly inane about how good she looked in pink, and then suggested that they be on their way.

She arched a brow as she took his arm and there was no mistaking the effort she made to keep her smile under control. Looking back over her shoulder as they left the dining room, she assured her brother-in-law that they’d be back to collect Charlotte before tea time.

Charlotte. God, he’d forgotten all about his ward. He’d passed her off to Lady Ryland and promptly forgotten that she existed. He was a miserable excuse for a human being. Shallow and utterly thoughtless. Well, thoughtless as in not being considerate. He had thoughts all the time. Most of them having to do with leaving Fiona with only a vague recollection of carnal innocence.

“I hope Drayton didn’t badger you too badly,” Fiona said as he handed her up into his carriage. “He can be incredibly single-minded at times.”

Ian climbed in and took the rear facing, opposite seat with a shrug and a smile. “Actually,” he admitted as the driver moved them out into traffic, “it was interesting. And at least he was honest about the chances of enacting significant reforms in the short term.”

“What about the long term?” she asked as she reached up and removed her hat pin.

“Slow and incremental change seems to be the way things are done if Parliament’s involved.” She was taking off her hat? Why? “I got the distinct impression that politics is often like a shell game,” he went on, watching her place it on the seat beside her. “Put a pea under a walnut half, shuffle it around until everyone loses track of it, and then call for a vote while they’re all watching the card sharp slipping aces up his sleeve.”

She tugged at the fingers of her glove. “That doesn’t sound terribly above board.”

“It apparently gets things done, though. In small steps that don’t alarm anyone enough to mount an opposition that could derail you. In the end, it’s the results that matter.”

“I suppose you’re right,” she allowed as she put her gloves on the seat beside her hat. “Are there any health reforms under walnut shells at the moment?”

“Not that Drayton knew of,” Ian replied absently as she undid the frog at the collar of her cape. “But that’s not to say that I can’t propose one down the road.”

“After you’ve supported other men’s reform interests?”

“You’re a very perceptive woman, Fiona Turnbridge.”

She laughed softly. “Guessing at the hows of Parliamentary action isn’t all that difficult. Any group of men who play shell games and hide aces are likely to play tit for tat, too.”

Ian cocked a brow. They were discussing the nature of British politics while she … While she was practically undressing in front of him. Christ on a crutch; this was ridiculous in the extreme. “Can you really read minds, Fiona?”

She sat back in the seat, her smile instantly gone. “What?”

“Harry thinks you can see things that other people can’t,” he explained. “That you can read minds and see the future.”

“Well,” she drawled, clearly hedging.

“You can?” he pressed, exhilarated by the possibility and more than slightly appalled by it, too. The things he’s been thinking for the last few weeks …

“I don’t read minds, Ian,” she replied, her smile returning. “I’m simply observant. For example, I saw the look on your face when we were in the dining room and I suggested a picnic. I had the distinct impression that you were entertaining thoughts of sharing more than a companionable meal on a blanket in full public view on the lawn at the London Zoo.”

All right. He’d been thinking of a secluded spot and wondering just how daring he could talk her into being. But since she had apparently guessed that and it didn’t seem to offend her tender sensibilities … “Oh? Just what sorts of sharing did I have in mind?”

She sighed. “Considering the fact that you’re still on your side of the carriage and behaving like a perfect gentleman despite the fact that I’ve removed my hat and gloves and opened my cape, I was obviously mistaken.” She shrugged. “So much for my impressive mind-reading abilities.”

Damn. If he’d been any more thick-headed, she’d have had to send him an engraved invitation.
Lady Fiona Turnbridge requests that you stop being a tight-laced unnecessarily suffering idiot. She is wearing your ring, you know.

Ian chuckled and slipped across the carriage to sit beside her. Sliding his arm around her and drawing her close to his side, he whispered, “You know me better than I know myself.”

“Then I was right? You were entertaining more intimate thoughts?”

“Where you’re concerned, Fiona, I’m always entertaining intimate thoughts.”

“Really?” she drawled, looking up at him. “Would you be willing to prove that?”

“Here? Now? In the carriage, Fiona?” he teased, cocking a brow in feigned shock. “That would be exceedingly improper.”

“Well, of course,” she allowed as he felt her pulse quicken. “But is it really possible in such a small space? I have no personal experience in these matters, you know.”

“You’re presuming that I do?”

“Actually, it’s less presuming than fervently hoping.”

“We’d be courting scandal.”

Fiona laughed and twined her fingers through the hair at his nape. “By doing what,” she asked on slightly ragged breath, “precisely?”

“I can think of several possibilities,” he answered, tracing her lower lip with a fingertip. “One leading quite naturally to another.”

“Do you think I might enjoy them?”

“I’m certainly willing to find out,” he replied, lowering his hand and very slowly and deliberately skimming his palm over the curve of her breast. “Do you like that?”

“Yes,” she whispered, her eyelids fluttering closed. “But I think it would be even more pleasant if my dress weren’t in the way.”

God, she was his every dream come true. “Let’s see if you’re right,” he murmured, his voice husky as he lowered his lips to hers and began to undo her buttons.

Fiona quickly decided that if the measure of the heat consuming her was any indication, she thoroughly enjoyed Ian’s notions of courting scandal in a carriage. And that was just the first of several quick and exhilarating discoveries, not the least of which was the fact that she was capable of complete abandon. And that rows of bodice buttons and yards of petticoats and skirts weren’t much of an obstacle to a man determined to make his way past them. She also found, to her great delight and considerable pleasure, that coat and shirt buttons were undone with equal ease, and that it took almost no effort at all to get them slipped off broad shoulders and down well-muscled arms. And God, the feel of heated skin against heated skin …

Ian touched her everywhere, no part of her beyond his tasting and teasing. His lips followed the tracings of his hands, making her breathless, pulling gasps of pleasure from her soul and making her squirm in the delightful heat of ever-building desire.

And that she could do the same to him, that she could drag ragged moans past his lips and trigger an ever-deeper intensity to his explorations … To realize that giving pleasure could bring so much pleasure … She selfishly touched him with her hands and her lips and was rewarded with the most exquisite spirals of heady sensation and tiny, taunting glimpses of a mysteriously compelling summit. God, for the chance to spend every minute of the rest of her life feeling so wondrously, wickedly alive.

Ian’s conscience and good judgment tried to hold him in check, but the feel and taste of Fiona … Her lusciously deep-throated moaning sighs, the touch of her hands on his bare skin, the heat of her body and the unstinted expressions of her pleasure … She gave at his merest touch, her responses so instinctive, so honest that his every good intention was incinerated. He was on the brink of losing control. He knew it. And he didn’t care. All that mattered was making love with Fiona. Now. And then again. And again and again.

And then the carriage slowed, turned, and bounced over a rut. The sudden motion momentarily cleared his senses and allowed the shrill cries of his conscience to be heard above the rasp of their breathing. He blinked and swallowed as reality tore through the haze of desire.

Fiona lay on the seat, her eyes closed and her long blond hair cascading over the cushions. Her shoulders and breasts were bared for his feasting, her skirts bunched up around her waist, her shoes, stockings and garters somewhere on the floor with his coat and shirt. He knelt between her knees, his hands caressing the bare skin of her silken thighs and he knew that she wanted him to satisfy her hunger, that she would wrap her legs around his hips and welcome him into her. Ian also knew that she deserved more from him this first time than being ravaged on the seat of a carriage.

Closing his eyes, Ian gathered together the tattered remnants of his good judgment. He reminded himself that there would come a time when he could complete their union without a thought as to where they were and how fast he took her, a time when he could mate them in a breathless stolen second of wicked pleasure and smooth her skirts in the next. But that time wasn’t this time.

“Ian…”

He opened his eyes to find her gazing at him, her eyes large and shimmering with unfulfilled desire. Her lips, swollen from his kisses, were invitingly parted. Her breasts, firm and taut and hard peaked, rose and fell, tempting him to return for another taste. Ian groaned and shook his head.

“We’ve turned off the main road,” he said, his voice raspy with frustration and tortured resolve. “We’re almost to the zoo.”

“I really don’t care about a picnic at the zoo.”

“Me, either,” he admitted, his gaze slowly trailing over her, his conscience again struggling against his hunger and need.

“Do you think your mother might have gone on her way yet?”

“And taken all the workmen and my servants with her?”

“You could ask the driver to just roll around London for a while.”

He smiled as the solution flashed through his brain. “Or…” He rose from the floor, putting a knee on the seat and reached up to slide open the small panel in the front wall of the carriage. “Leon,” he called into it, “we’ve changed our minds. Please take us to the Mayfair house.”

“Mayfair?” she asked as he rammed the panel closed.

“The house that’ll be yours once you sign the settlement papers.”

“I really do need to do that, don’t I?”

He grinned. “If you wouldn’t mind too terribly much,” he said, leaning forward to suckle her breast for a long, languorous moment. She moaned and arched up against him, twining her arms around his neck and trying to draw him even closer.

Ian slowly released his claim and eased back to take her hands in his and murmur, “I think we should at least put some of our clothes back on before we get there.”

“If we must,” she replied, smiling up at him. She freed one hand and trailed her fingertips down his chest. “I never imagined.”

Ian caught her hand when she neared the waistband of his trousers and brought her fingertips to his lips. He gently nipped at them as he looked deep into her eyes. “By the time I’m done with you, my darling Fiona, you’ll have little left to your imagination and more than a passing acquaintance with a delightful range of carnal pleasure.”

She made a purring sound deep in her throat and her eyes sparked with a fire that sent searing waves of desire through his loins. Ian groaned again and managed to smile through his noble frustration. “I’m trying to be a considerate, sensitive lover, Fiona. But if you persist in looking at me like that, the driver is going to pull open the door and discover what an absolute cad I am.”

“Not to mention that your fiancée is a thoroughly, irredeemably wanton woman,” she laughingly added.

“Yes, and that, too,” he admitted, chuckling and pushing himself back until he settled on the opposite seat. “Dressing would give us a better chance of maintaining our reputations.”

She stretched and with a long sigh of resignation swung her legs over the side of the seat. “I suppose you’re right,” she conceded, sitting up and tucking her breasts back into her corset. “But I must admit that I’m not all that thrilled by the idea of having to start all over again.”