More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (14 page)

“I have never in my life,” he said, “heard such a lovely voice. Or one that adapted itself so perfectly to the music and the sentiment of the song.”

She was pleased despite her discomfort.

“Why did you not tell me,” he asked her, “when I had
you play for me and gave you an honest assessment of your talent? Why did you not tell me that you sing?”

“You did not ask,” she told him.

“Damn you, Jane,” he said. “How dare you keep yourself so much to yourself? A talent like yours is to be shared, not hidden away from the world.”

“Touché,” she said quietly.

They sat side by side in silence for a while. And then he took her hand in his and held it on the bench between them. Suddenly half the air seemed to have been sucked from the room.

“You ought not to have come down,” he said. “Or you ought to have crept into the library and chosen your book and ignored your curiosity. You have caught me at a bad time.”

She understood his meaning. It was a bad time for her too. They were firmly caught in a situation that was unfamiliar to them. In a mellow, somewhat melancholy mood. Alone together—as they often were, of course. But entirely alone this time, with no servants moving about beyond the door. Late at night.

“Yes” was all she could think of to say. She stood up then, drawing her hand free of his. Yet everything except her common sense yearned to stay.

“Don’t go,” he said, his voice unusually husky, and he swiveled around on the bench until he sat with his back to the pianoforte. “Don’t leave me yet.”

It was a moment—and only a moment—of decision. She could listen to common sense, say a firm good night, and walk from the room. He could not—and would not—stop her. Or she could stay in a situation that was charged with tension and against which her defenses had been lowered. There was no time to debate
the matter with herself. She took the couple of steps that brought her directly in front of him.

She lifted both hands and set them on his head as if in benediction. His hair was silky and warm beneath her fingers. His hands came to rest on either side of her waist and drew her toward him. He sighed and leaned forward to bury his face between her breasts.

Fool
, she told herself as she closed her eyes and reveled in the physical sensations of his touch and his body heat and the smell of his cologne.
Fool!
But the thought was without conviction.

When he finally lifted his head and looked up at her, his dark eyes fathomless, she went down onto her knees on the floor between his spread thighs. She did not know why she did so, whether at the guidance of his hands or from some instinct that did not require thought. She set her arms along the tight fabric over his thighs, feeling their firm, muscled strength, and lifted her head.

He was leaning over her, and his fingers touching her face were feather-light and tipped with a heat that scorched its way into the depths of her femininity. He cupped her face with his hands before kissing her.

She had been kissed before. Charles had been her beau for four years as well as her dearest friend forever. On a few occasions she had been alone with him and had permitted him to kiss her. She had liked his kiss.

Now she realized she had never been kissed before. Not really. Not like this.

Ah, never like this.

He scarcely touched his lips to hers. His eyes were open, as were hers. It was impossible to lose herself in sheer physical sensation even though every part of her body sizzled with awareness and ached with desire. It
was impossible not to know fully what was happening and with whom. It would be impossible afterward to tell herself that she had been swept away by mindless passion.

This was not mindless.

He feathered kisses over her cheeks, her eyes, her temples, her nose, her chin. And returned to her mouth, which he touched softly, teasingly, with his lips, coaxing her to kiss him back in the same way.

A kiss was not necessarily just lips pressed to lips, she discovered in growing wonder. There was the warm, moist flesh behind her lips, which he touched and stroked with his tongue. There was her own tongue moving lightly across his top lip and back over the bottom one. He touched its tip, sliding over the top of it deep into the cavity of her mouth. There were sucking and stroking and soft, wordless moans in her voice, in his.

And then his arms closed about her as he leaned farther over her, half lifting her against the taut strength of his chest, and they shared a deep, hard, openmouthed embrace that had her clinging and pressing and yearning for more.

At last she was down on her knees again, his hands spread over her own on his thighs, his dark, heavy-lidded eyes gazing down into hers.

“We will have to punish each other for this in the morning, Jane,” he said. “It will be amazing how different it will all seem then. Forbidden. Impossible. Even sordid.”

She shook her head.

“Oh, yes,” he insisted. “I am just a rake, my dear, with nothing on my mind except covering you on the floor
here and taking my wicked pleasure deep inside your virgin body. And you are the wide-eyed, innocent dove. My servant. My dependent. It is quite impossible. And definitely sordid. You think that what has happened is beautiful. I can see it in your eyes. It is not, Jane. That is merely what an experienced rake can make a woman think. In reality it is the simple lustful, raw desire for sex. For the quick, vigorous mating of bodies. Go to bed now. Alone.”

Both his face and his voice were harsh. She got to her feet and stood away from him. But she did not immediately turn to leave. She searched his eyes with her own, looking into the mask that he had settled firmly in place. The impenetrable mask. He was gazing back at her with a mocking half smile on his lips.

He was right. What had happened had been entirely physical. And very raw.

But he was wrong too. Her mind could not yet grapple with what exactly was wrong with what he had said. It just was. He was wrong.

But yes, it was quite impossible. And without a doubt this would all appear very different in the morning. She would not be able to look calmly at him tomorrow as she was doing now.

“Good night, your grace,” she said.

“Good night, Jane.”

He had turned back to the pianoforte by the time she had picked up her candle, left the room, and closed the door behind her. He was playing something quiet and melancholy.

She was halfway up the stairs before she remembered that she had come down for a book. She did not turn back.

ES, A STOOL WILL DO NICELY,” JOCELYN SAID
with a careless wave of his hand to the servant who had asked.

It would do more than nicely. He had come to White’s Club in his town carriage rather than riding, but he really ought to have used his crutches after descending instead of just a stout cane. His boot was pressing uncomfortably against his still-tender right calf. If he was not careful he was going to be compelled to have the boot cut off again when he returned home. He had already lost his favorite pair that way the day of the duel.

“And fetch me the morning papers too,” he instructed the servant, lifting his leg onto the stool without any outer appearance of effort but with a grateful inward sigh.

He had left the house early so that he would not have to encounter
her
before leaving, and she was herself an early riser. He picked up the
Morning Post
and scanned the front page, scowling as he did so. What the devil was he about, escaping early from his own home so that he could postpone coming face-to-face with a servant?

He was not sure which of two facts he was most ashamed of—if shame was the right word. Embarrassment might be more accurate. But neither was an emotion with which he had much recent acquaintance.

She had caught him playing the pianoforte. Playing
one of his own compositions. And he had kissed her. Damnation, but he had been alone and inactive for too long and had broken one of his cardinal rules and had sunk to a new low in his own esteem. If his leg had not been aching enough to distract him, he probably would have laid her on the floor and availed himself of the treasure that had lain beneath the flimsy barrier of her nightgown. She would not have stopped him, the silly innocent.

“Tresham? By God, it is! How are you, old chap?”

Jocelyn was happy to lower his newspaper, which he had not been reading anyway, in order to greet acquaintances, who were beginning to arrive for their morning gossip and perusal of the papers.

“Hale, hearty, and hopping along at roughly my usual speed,” he replied.

The next several minutes were taken up with cheerful greetings and jocular witticisms about the Duke of Tresham’s leg and the elegant stool on which it reclined and the stout cane propped beside his chair.

“We were beginning to think you were enjoying playing court at Dudley House, Tresh,” Viscount Kimble said, “and were going to settle to it for life.”

“With the delectable Miss Ingleby to minister to your needs,” Baron Pottier added. “You are wearing your boots again, Tresham?”

“Would I come to White’s in my dancing slippers?” Jocelyn raised his eyebrows.

But Sir Isaac Wallman had picked up on an interesting detail. “The delectable Miss Ingleby?” he said. “The nurse? The one who screamed during the duel? Ho, Tresham, you rogue. Now how exactly has she been ministering to your needs?”

Jocelyn raised his quizzing glass and regarded the little dandy through it, looking him over slowly from head to toe.

“Tell me, Wallman,” he said in his most bored accents, “at what ungodly hour of the night did you have to rise to give your valet time to create that artistry with your neckcloth?” It would have been overelaborate even for the grandest of grand balls. Though maybe not for a soiree with the Regent, that prince of dandies.

“It took him a full hour,” Sir Isaac replied with some pride, instantly distracted. “And he ruined eight neckcloths before he got it right with this one.”

Jocelyn lowered his glass while Viscount Kimble snorted derisively.

The pleasantries over with, the conversation moved to the London-to-Brighton curricle race set for two days hence and to the somewhat reclusive presence in London of the Earl of Durbury, who had come to search for his son’s murderess. It was a major disappointment to several of the gentlemen present that the earl was not appearing everywhere in order to regale a bored
ton
with the macabre details.

Sidney Jardine, who had been elevated to the position of heir to an earldom on the accession of his father to the title a year or so before, had never been popular with his peers. Jocelyn’s only dealings with him had come during a
ton
ball a couple of years before when Jardine, in his grace’s hearing, had made a coarse remark fully intended for the ears of a young lady and her mama, who had both declined his invitation to the former to dance. Jocelyn had invited the man to stroll with him on the terrace beyond the ballroom.

There he had instructed Jardine pleasantly enough to
take himself off home without further ado or to hell if he preferred unless he chose to stay and have his mouth washed with soap. And when a furiously bristling Jardine had tried to issue a challenge, Jocelyn had raised his quizzing glass to his eye and informed his would-be adversary that it was an immutable rule with him to duel only with gentlemen.

“I am of the school of thought,” he said now, “that Lady Sara Illingsworth should be congratulated rather than censured. If she is wise, though, she will have removed herself far from London by now.”

“She did not go by stage, though, Tresh,” Viscount Kimble said. “I have heard that the Runners have done a thorough investigation. No one of her description has been traveling on any one of them.”

“She has learned wisdom since her arrival here, then,” Jocelyn said. “Good for her. I daresay she was provoked. Why else would any young lady bash a gentleman over the head?”

“You should know, Tresham,” Sir Isaac said with a titter, and won for himself another steady perusal through the ducal quizzing glass.

“Where is Ferdinand stabling his new horses?” Jocelyn asked of the group at large, though he was still looking at an enlarged and visibly uncomfortable Sir Isaac. “And where does he exercise them? I daresay he is busy preparing them for the race. I had better get over there and see if he is like to murder himself on Friday. He was never the world’s most skilled judge of horseflesh.”

“I’ll come with you, Tresh,” Viscount Kimble offered as Jocelyn lowered his foot from the stool and turned to grasp his cane. “Do you need any assistance?”

“Come within three feet of me at your peril!” Jocelyn
growled while he hoisted himself upright as gracefully as he was able and gritted his teeth at the needle-sharp pain that shot up his right leg. “And I don’t need your escort, Kimble. I came in the carriage.”

It was an admission that aroused a fresh burst of amusement and witticisms from his acquaintances, of course.

Jane would give him a royal scolding for this when he got home, Jocelyn thought, and was instantly annoyed at himself for even thinking of home.