Let Me Be The One (15 page)

"Why will you not say it?" she asked. "That you are in my room now speaks to your thinking. You are not sitting with Miss Caruthers, pretending your presence has something to do with a thief. This is not Lady Martha's room. Or Miss Stevens's."

Northam held up one hand, stopping her before she named every young unmarried woman invited to Battenburn. He could have reminded her that all of these women were chaperoned by mothers or great-aunts or companions, and attending to them in their rooms would have been impossible, but this was also the argument that Elizabeth was bent on making. "I take your point."

"Then say it. Say why you have really come here."

Northam had no liking for being cornered and he had no intention of putting into words what he did not fully understand himself. She was correct that he would not have stepped beyond the doorway of Lady Martha's room, or that of the misses Caruthers and Stevens. He would not have even opened their doors without an invitation to do so, yet when his knock was unanswered outside this bedchamber, he let himself in. He could admit to himself, if not to her, that he suspected she was the room's occupant. Rather than making him take a step backward, it had had the opposite effect. He had stood over her sleeping figure, watching her, some part of him hoping that she would wake and...

"Coward," she said softly.

Northam's head shot up. He did not want to believe he had heard her correctly, but then he remembered she had called herself a whore. What inhibition would she have, then, from naming him a coward? "If your purpose is to provoke me, my lady, then consider that you have been successful."

Elizabeth took no satisfaction in it. She pressed on as Northam came to his feet, his back partially turned to her. "Would you rather I allowed you to seduce me? Should I have played the innocent for you then accepted your contempt as my due? What words would you have flung at my head? Tart? Harlot? Or perhaps you would have said nothing, and gone off to lick your wounded pride in silence, salving your conscience for taking me with the knowledge that there was at least one other before you. I am no innocent, Northam, and I will not permit you to pretend to my face that I am."

He took a step away from the bed, almost certain he meant to slap her if he did not.

Elizabeth kicked away the tangle of blankets and rose from the bed. She stood behind Northam, just inches to one side. Her hand lifted to touch his shoulder, and then she thought better of it and let it fall again. "I am not the sort of woman one marries."

Thou shalt not take a harlot to wive.

"Not if one has the ability to exercise choice. You must not be alone with me again, Northam. In any circumstances. It will go badly for you if you're discovered. I would rather you did not come to despise me for what is out of my hands."

He made no reply, and after a moment Elizabeth realized he would not. She stepped past him, the ache in the small of her back serving as a reminder of what she must do. She limped to her dressing room and returned wearing a fine wool shawl over her shoulders.

On the threshold, she stopped. She had expected him to use her brief absence as a way to excuse himself. Retrieving the shawl had been nothing more than a pretext to permit him a graceful exit.

"Can I do nothing to convince you to leave?" she asked.

Northam saw her glance toward the door as if she expected discovery was imminent. Perhaps it was, he thought, but he realized he did not care a great deal one way or the other. What he did care about was that she would not think him a coward, and taking the opportunity she presented to flee seemed a most cowardly act.

Elizabeth released the breath she had been holding as Northam walked to the door. She waited, drawing the shawl more closely about her shoulders, not because she was cold but because her tight grip on the fringed ends stilled the tremor in her fingertips. Her eyes dropped to his hand as he placed it on the brass knob, then lowered when his fingers drifted over it and fell to the key. Elizabeth's stomach twisted in the same motion as his wrist. Her breath was caught on the turn of the key.

Northam dropped the key on top of Elizabeth's vanity. From inside his jacket he removed the small telescope and stood it on end beside the key. He stared at them both a moment, studying their placement as if it held some significance, knowing it was not so at all but that what he required was time. He felt her eyes on him, regarding him with a measure of uncertainty now. She could not know what he intended, not when he remained undecided himself.

Turning, Northam saw he had been right about what he would see in her face. Though her chin had come up, her teeth were worrying the inside of her cheek and a small vertical crease had appeared between her brows. Her breathing was shallow. Neither her shawl nor the hand closing over it could hide the rise and fall of her breasts.

He advanced on her slowly. Her eyes flashed as she glanced to the window as though it offered some escape. "It's too far," he said, his voice both quiet and intense. "And too far to the ground."

Elizabeth could not see that she had anywhere to go. She held herself very still, framed in the open doorway to her dressing room.

Northam stopped, a long stride still required to close the distance between them. "Come here."

She did not, could not, move. Tension running just below the surface of her skin pulled it tight. Anticipation was like a heated coil inside her. At the first touch of him it would unwind with such force as to make her cry out. She tried to pull into herself, shrink the feeling that was both dread and longing.

"Elizabeth."

Her name came to her as if from a great distance. She could not properly say whether it was his command or rather the voice in her own mind, the one that chided her for hesitating. Without conscious effort she stepped forward into the room, caught herself, and once again resisted the urge to place herself in front of him. She looked down at the hand he extended to her, then back to his face, his beautiful face with the darkening eyes, both steady and patient, and she knew she was well and truly without defenses.

A bead of perspiration formed between her breasts and trickled along the curve of one. Between her thighs she was damp.

They moved at the same time. She let herself be backed against the wall. Her hand released the shawl. He caught the ends when they fell to the level of her waist, twisting them in one hand so that he could jerk her against him. She threw her hands to his shoulders and lifted her face.

The taste of him was splendidly satisfying. Salty. Sweet. Faint hints of brandy and mint. She opened her mouth for him before he pressed his entry. Her hunger was a thing unto itself, existing outside reason, outside shame.

Clutching his shoulders, she rose on tiptoe and arched. She ached for the weight of his palms on her breasts and the almost painful sensation of his thumbnails gently scraping across her turgid nipples. She accepted his chest as a substitute, and she rose and fell against him, rubbing, feeling his taut muscles shift and his breathing change. At her waist he gripped the shawl more tightly, yanking her hard, just once, and she felt the outline of his engorged penis against her belly.

He released the shawl but not her. His hands plowed into her hair, capturing her face and holding it still for his pleasure. In the midst of her dark brown hair were strands of pure gold. They lay along the length of his fingers like silken shafts of sunlight. The pads of his thumbs pressed into the hollows just behind her ears. She moaned softly, a sound he swallowed, his mouth working hard over hers.

Elizabeth's hands slid under his jacket. She was almost frantic to touch him, pulling at the tails of his linen shirt. Her knuckles brushed his midriff and she felt his abdomen contract. His tongue was deep in her mouth, thrusting. Her fingers splayed across his skin, every fingertip isolated by a separate point of heat. She sucked on his tongue, his lips. She drove her hands upward to his chest and around his back. She scored the flesh of his shoulders lightly with her nails. This time it was his hips that thrust into her.

Northam's grip loosened in her hair and she jerked her head back, breathing hard, and turned her face for the moment to the side. He bent his own head, his breath hot on the curve of her neck. His mouth opened over her tender skin and sipped on it with the delicacy of one drawing sweet cream from the top of the milk. All along the length of him he felt her shiver.

His hands rested on her shoulders while his fingers gathered the soft batiste of her gown into small folds. He slowly let his hands drift downward, pulling the fabric with them, widening the neckline until it slipped over one shoulder, then the other. The material was trapped between their bodies at the level of her waist. When he stepped back, it remained there, caught by the press of her buttocks against the wall.

For the first time he saw alarm cross her features. She was panicked enough that it penetrated the haze of her passion. She released him and made to grab her nightshift. He stopped her, covering her hands with his own larger ones.

"No," he whispered. He touched his forehead briefly to hers. "I want to see your breasts. I want to look at you."

A strangled sound came from the back of her throat, but she stopped trying to raise her hands.

Northam eased his grip and only circled her wrists with his thumbs and forefingers. His eyes never leaving her face, he slowly, deliberately, lifted her arms until they were just above the line of her shoulders and then he pressed her wrists to the wall. He laid his mouth over hers, teasing her lower lip with a single sweep of his tongue. He sucked on the lip so that when he released it there was the faintest sound of damp parting. She was trembling when he drew back.

His glance drifted over her features. She returned his gaze through eyes that were at once glazed and wary, as though she could not decide between passion and fear. There was only a hint of color in her cheeks. All the blood in her face seemed to have settled in her mouth. The line of her lips was swollen and cherry red from the pressure of their kisses.

A muscle jumped suddenly in her cheek. Her head jerked back again, bumping the wall as if he had pushed her with the heel of his hand. He still held her wrists in place. He hadn't released her or touched her cheek with anything save his glance; it was just that she felt it as something tangible, an index finger tracing her jaw or his knuckles brushing her chin. When she would have looked away, he caught her eyes, held them, and issued an unspoken challenge to watch him, to be as unafraid of his pleasure as she had been of her own.

Northam's lashes lowered as he shifted his study to the curve of her neck. He could make out the delicate beat of her pulse. A faint bruise had begun to darken her skin where he had suckled. She would have to cover it later with rice powder and a lace betsy, but he would know it was there, as would she. Its origin would also be no secret to them, the mark being as clear a stamp as his personal seal pressed in warm wax.

He felt tension return to her arms as his glance shifted again. A fine tremor moved from her shoulders to her wrists. Her struggle was confined to a single opening and closing of her fingers, and then there was surrender in her very stillness.

The position of her arms lifted her breasts toward him. They were full, achingly so. These were not the breasts of a young girl, but those of a woman, tipped with aureoles that were no longer a pale, blushing pink, but a deeper, and far more intoxicating, dark rose. The nipples were erect, thrust forward like twin buds and darker still than the corolla that circled them.

"You're beautiful." Then he heard her whimper softly as he lowered his head. He took one nipple into his mouth, drawing on it gently, rolling it between his lips and teeth, tugging, sucking. His hands on her wrists were holding her up now. The scent made his nostrils flare. He moved between her breasts and tasted the thin film of perspiration that made her skin glow. His tongue flicked the other nipple. He teased her, making her rise on tiptoe to try to offer herself up to his mouth. If not for the wall behind her, she would have thrown back her head. She tried to do it anyway, straining to arch, pushing up and out just once, only dimly aware that her legs were no longer supporting her, and that she owed her position to his strength and the brace of the wall.

Elizabeth's chemise began to slip. It hovered on her hips for only a moment, then slid over her thighs and calves like the trickle of warm water. The fabric pooled at her bare feet.

She closed her eyes. Her head rocked against the wall, the side-to-side motion not a negation of what was happening to her but an acceptance of it. His mouth was still on her breast, the tongue laving the sweet, dark aureole. When he sucked it drew on the slim fingers of fire in her belly so that they fanned out, leaping to places he hadn't yet touched, licking her skin in the hollow of her elbows and at the backs of her knees.

She cried out again, a soft mewling sound this time. It drew him away from her breast and brought him back to her mouth. He explored deeply this time, his tongue swirling around hers, hard and insistent, and he wrested another cry from her, this one a sob of frustration and tension. Her exquisitely silky skin pulsed with a static charge. The fine hairs on her forearms and at the back of her neck became erect.

With no warning he released her mouth and her wrists and dropped to his knees in front of her. He raised one of her legs and placed it over his shoulder, supporting her under the knee and then with his hands on her buttocks. He felt her stiffen and understood then that whatever her experience had been, this was new to her.