My Lady, My Lord (10 page)

He gripped her beneath the arms, encompassing her sylphlike form, pulling her close and she released a tiny moan as their bodies met, thighs, hips, her soft shape pressing to his.
Willingly
. He caressed the sides of her breasts with his thumbs and his cock stirred. Warmth gathered in his groin, heavy and tight, and he welcomed it like coming home. She leaned into him, trapping her palms against him, and Ian’s control unraveled.

He took her mouth harder, deeper. She tasted of sun and fire and need so profound it rocked him. His hands swept along her slender waist to her behind, dragging her against him. She whimpered in pleasure, her fingertips digging into his chest.

He must have more.

He cupped her jaw with one hand and tilted her head back, breathing in her scent, caressing her satiny throat and the column of her neck with his lips and tongue, hungry for the flavor of her, her light sighs, her curves melting more securely to him. He shifted his hold and passed the pad of his thumb across her taut nipple. She gasped, and moaned softly as he caressed her.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, her voice thick with desire.

“Kissing a woman.” He returned his lips to hers and drank her in, her soft, fervent response, inexpert yet all the more intoxicating for her eagerness. Seducing him as no practiced touch could. “It’s been forever.”

Her palms flattened on his chest, pressing. She broke away from his mouth. “It has only been four days.”

“Seems like forever.” He nuzzled her neck.

She shoved him hard. He released her and she sprang away, her mouth gaping.

“This is some sort of addiction for you, isn’t it? Like cards and horse racing.” Her voice shook and her eyes were dark in the shadows, colored with distress. And condemnation.

Ian’s spine stiffened even as his blood pounded in his chest and hard, so hard, in his groin. “It must be.” It was not. He’d gone without a woman for weeks sometimes, occasionally months. He hadn’t liked it, but he’d never craved the touch of a feminine mouth and hands like he had in the past few days. Something about living in a damn pretty woman’s body, seeing it naked and not being able to enjoy it the way a man should, must be the cause.

Her fingertips moved to her lips, reddened and tender from his kisses. “You disgust me.”

Ian forced his voice to smoothness. “Your actions a moment ago tell a different story, Corrie dear. As I’ve long suspected.” His neck grew hot. Light flickered at the corner of his vision. He glanced at the statue. It glowed.

Corinna backed away. “I don’t—” Her hand went to her brow just as Ian’s head split with pain. “I never—” she stuttered, but he couldn’t hear her finish. His vision clouded, then light shot across it, sharp and searing.

“What’s happening?” she cried, her eyes distraught.

Ian struggled to right his thoughts. “We must leave. At once.”

He grabbed her hand. They bolted for the door.

T
HEY RAN, CORINNA BARELY KNEW
in what direction, Ian’s hand clamping hers so brutally her bones hurt. But the physical pain was nothing in comparison to the ache of shame filling her.

What had she done?
He had kissed her and she responded like a wanton, as though she were one of his highbred lightskirts. As though she had been longing for his kiss for ages, just as he said. Tears scorched the back of her throat.

They burst out of the museum. A hackney coach clattered by, so banal on the lamp-lit street that it jolted Corinna into clarity. She gasped for air, shoving away the tumult of emotions and tearing her hand from his grip and holding it to her belly as though burned. His clear gaze fixed on the action, then lifted to her face. She forced her arms to her sides, and his eyes shuttered. Without a word he pivoted and headed for his carriage parked at the curb. Her feet would not move.

He opened the door and looked over his shoulder.

“Come now, or I will leave you here to find your own way home.” His voice was hard.

She moved along the pavement as though in a dream, a terrible dream in which she put herself into the hands of a man who despised her, who used her for his own ends without care, and she allowed him. She
encouraged
him
.

Self-betrayal spiraled through her, sharp, nauseating. He offered his hand to help her in and she shied from it, treading upon her skirts as she struggled up the step and barely wondering at the incongruity of the gentlemanly action and his threat to abandon her. He climbed in after. She turned her face away, glad of the dark that hid her hot cheeks.

She was back in her own body, herself again. She ought to be celebrating, singing in gratitude to the sky, God, Aphrodite or whoever took responsibility for returning her life into her keeping. She felt at once light and yet constricted by her stays and sleeves and tangled skirts.

Her emotions were no less wretchedly tangled.

If it had been any other man she might have enjoyed this moment, reveled in the heady aftermath of finally being kissed the way she had dreamed of a man kissing her. Touching her. For years she had imagined it and thought she would never experience it. Lady Corinna Mowbray, salon hostess and eminent spinster bluestocking, did not receive stolen, passionate kisses. Gentlemen occasionally flirted. At one time a few had even courted her, but they never trifled with her. They
respected
her.

Ian Chance respected nothing but pleasure and diversion.

Then why on earth had he kissed her, the woman for whom he had professed a marked aversion more times than she could count?

Corinna’s cheeks went from hot to cold. She gripped her hands together to still their trembling. The carriage trundled along on flawless springs behind a matchless pair of blood bays. Only the best cattle for the Earl of Chance. The very best.

Just like his mistresses. No Birds of Paradise or tawdry courtesans, however expensive and well kept. Lord Chance, gifted with his family’s notoriously striking combination of black hair and blue eyes, not to mention a vast fortune from lands and stables, could afford to be choosy. And he chose only the most stunning, the wealthiest, the most sought-after women of the
ton
. Women who possessed wealth of their own, who wore jewels given to them by titled husbands now in the grave, and whose beauty and style ladies throughout England, even Paris, envied and mimicked.

“Why did you do that?” she asked into the darkness. “Why did you kiss me?”

For a moment he did not respond.

“You are conversant with scientific experimentation,” he finally said. “Figure it out.”

She choked back the swell of mingled outrage and hurt. “To test whether you were truly a man again. To assess your reaction to touching a woman.”

“Just so.”

“I think you are lying.” He had done it to shame her, to prove that he had the upper hand. As always.

“Cheating. Bribery. Now lying. My sins seem to be accumulating.”

Her eyes snapped up. His voice sounded less than even.

“That is the response of a guilty man,” she said. “You don’t like it when I accuse you of wrongdoing.”

He met her gaze stonily. “I don’t take the least notice of your accusations, Corinna. I never have.”

She held his icy stare as long as she could. Her heart beat so swiftly and hard it must be audible to him. The carriage shrugged to a halt. He opened the door and let down the steps before the groom could climb from the box, then moved onto the street and extended his hand.

“Take it,” he ordered, his jaw tight.

She wished she could refuse, but her legs seemed ready to buckle. She set her fingertips on his palm and he gripped them for her descent. Her head felt heavy, her limbs sluggish now. She tugged her hand free and touched her aching brow.

“What did you—?”

“Brandy. Quite a lot of it.”

Corinna’s hands trembled. “Well, now you may go abuse your own body to your heart’s content.”

He frowned.

She hurried up the steps. Behind her the carriage drove away, but when she glanced back he was walking toward his house, broad shoulders rigid, glossy hair and top boots glinting in the moonlight.

A footman gave her entrance. A note from her father rested on the dish on the foyer table atop at least two-dozen calling cards. Corinna pushed them away. Scandalmongers, most of them, seeking fodder for gossip. She unfolded her father’s missive.

Corinna,

At the club today I approached Pelley concerning your interest. Begrudgingly he has agreed to speak with you. He will attend Lady Fairchild’s musicale tomorrow night. I shall escort you there unless you have made other arrangements.

— M.M.

His tone was never so cold. He must be very upset over her close-run scandal with Lord Abernathy. The morning’s events now seemed eons ago to Corinna. Even the news of Lord Pelley’s reluctant acquiescence gave her little comfort.

For the first time in a long time she wished for her mother. She needed the warmth of a woman’s embrace, soothing words and petting that her father, for all his sympathetic interests in art and politics, could never offer.

She dragged herself up to her bedchamber. It was exactly as she had left it four days earlier, cozy, beautiful, a fantasy of luxury and play. Everything the rest of her life was not. Ian had seen this, her secret inner self, her longings exposed. And he had felt it when she melted into his kiss, when she fell to pieces in his arms. His horrible words proved it.

She pressed a palm to her clenched belly and summoned a maid to assist her in preparing for bed. Curling beneath the satin coverlet, she finally allowed the tears to come, running along her skin into her tightly braided hair, dampening the bolster.

She fell asleep crying, and awoke with a head heavier than she had laid it down. In Ian Chance’s bed.

H
E MUST HAVE DRUNK
a trough of brandy the night before. Corinna’s skull pounded, her stomach felt leaden, and the inside of her mouth was sticky. It comforted her some to know he must have been more disturbed by events than he let on to drink to such excess. But perhaps men of his stamp always imbibed excessively.

With a groan of misery, she rolled over and pressed her face into the bolster. It smelled of him—of man, brandy, and ever so slightly of horse, as well as some subtle hint of cologne she recognized. She didn’t often think to smell gentlemen. But she knew Ian’s scent now. And, God help her,
she liked it
.

Which was a good thing, since it seemed that she was stuck with it.

She groaned again, wanting to cry, but suddenly it seemed inappropriate in her large, man’s body.

The statue had tricked them. Aphrodite had not accepted their truce.
Staged
truce. However much of a tease, the goddess of love, it seemed, was no featherbrain.

Corinna scrubbed her palms across her whiskered face. How long would this continue? Another four days? A fortnight?
Forever?
It was unbearable.

Her eyes shot open. Lord Pelley expected to speak with her at the musicale this evening. Finally he would allow her another opportunity to plead her case for purchasing his publishing company. It would probably be her final opportunity. He was an astounding snob, and wished to sell to a noble buyer only. But the last Corinna had heard through friends, he was impatient to have the business done with. He would not wait forever for her.

She called Ian’s valet.

“Andrews, did I receive an invitation to Lady Fairchild’s musicale this evening?”

“You receive invitations to every fashionable event, my lord. You are what the young ladies’ mothers call A Catch despite your questionable morality.”

Corinna gaped at the servant’s familiarity. Perhaps Andrews assumed his master was muzzle-headed from the night’s debauchery and would not note the impertinence. Or perhaps Ian simply allowed it. It seemed the sort of inappropriate behavior he would encourage.

“Have I accepted this particular invitation?”

“Certainly not. You abhor musical evenings, my lord.”

Corinna dressed and went to the study. The pile of correspondence that had accumulated on his desk over the past several days had disappeared, including his secretary’s notes on various matters. Ian must have taken care of them all the previous night.

Rather than ordering a horse, she went to the mews herself. The groom greeted her with deference but no surprise. Apparently the earl appearing in his stable was not unusual. Corinna stroked the muzzle of Lady Chance’s sweet mare, then moved to the next stall. An enormous black beast angled its aristocratic head over the partition and snuffled.

It was a beautiful animal, tall and well proportioned, with intelligent eyes and a gentle air. Corinna pushed back her shoulders. Yesterday’s antics on St. James’s Street had proven that she could put the strength of Ian’s body to use. Perhaps, if this horse were as well behaved on the street as he seemed in the stable, she could manage him. If she were to live a gentleman’s life indefinitely, she may as well live it without continually shaming herself.

The groom saddled the horse while she slipped its bridle on, then she mounted without too much trouble and road to St. James’s Street. Ian would no doubt need time to come to terms with their situation. She didn’t wish to be present while he was doing that.

She left her mount with the club’s boy and went into Brooks’s, her mood considerably more level than on the previous occasion. The club bustled. Gentlemen nodded as she passed, most of whom she recognized. But she wasn’t interested in idle conversation.

She found the Baron of Grace sitting alone, holding a glass in one hand and a journal in the other.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

“Of course not.” The baron folded the paper and set it on the table. He seemed to assess her. “Interesting day for you Saturday, wasn’t it? And night.”

Corinna had no idea how Ian would respond to his friend’s prying. “Rather run of the mill, I should say.”

Lord Grace frowned and leaned forward. “You are not yourself lately, Chance.”

Not remotely.

“I heard that you gave the lovely Lady Weston her walking papers.”

Is that how gentlemen termed it? And what word had Ian employed the other night—
congé
?

“Patterson has already wheedled his way into her dressing chamber,” Lord Grace said with a lifted brow.

“Patterson? Father or son?” Corinna nearly cringed awaiting his response.

Lord Grace frowned at Corinna over the rim of his glass. “The lad is only twenty.”

“But Amabel has strong appetites.” Where had that phrase come from—
strong appetites
? She must have heard it somewhere, perhaps on her travels.

No. She’d heard it from Ian.

At one time, when they were both younger, he had delighted in trying to put her to the blush with scandalous language. He’d been on the town then, cutting a swath through society as a dashing young hedonist, and she was just out. Occasionally, when their families met, he sought her out simply to make her suffer. No different than at the museum a sennight earlier, but now youth no longer excused him.

The baron shook his head. “The father. But he won’t succeed. Just as you’ve said, she’s not interested in a married man.”

“She is hoping for a higher title.” A safe guess.

“Aye. She has her eye on Abernathy now.”

Corinna stiffened involuntarily. Lord Grace’s gaze sharpened.

“Did you have something to do with that business the other night, Chance?”

Corinna leaned back in her chair, affecting nonchalance. She hadn’t expected this. She thought gentlemen only conversed on politics, cards, and the hunt. Not on this sort of thing. Not on
her
.

“What business would that be?” she said, gesturing to a footman to bring her a glass of whatever Lord Grace had. She would not drink it, but she needed a prop just now to wrap her quivering fingers around.

“Lady Corinna, walking alone in the middle of the night, seeking entrance to your house.” The baron met his gaze squarely. It seemed that gentlemen did
not,
in fact, discuss this sort of thing. At least not Ian and his friends. Lord Grace’s emerald eyes were grave, as though he anticipated resistance.

When Corinna did not respond, he sat forward. “Ian—”

Not
Chance
. This was serious.

“—you would be unwise to trifle with that lady unless you wish to end up in parson’s mousetrap. Corinna Mowbray is not Amabel Weston.”

She most certainly was not. Ian Chance would never in a lifetime call beautiful, vivacious, seductive Lady Weston a prude.

“While I appreciate your concern for my welfare,” she replied, “I have not sought you out to speak about either of those ladies.”

The baron settled back, lids lowering partially. “Then what?”

“Tell me what you know of Gregory and the game the other night that lost my horse to Joseph Sparks.”

Lord Grace nodded. “Sparks had it in mind the moment he saw your brother in the place, I suspect.”

“Where?”

“Falstaff’s. But the play was light until he arrived.”

Corinna had heard of Falstaff’s, a club exclusively intended for gaming if she remembered correctly. “What do you think he intends to do with the animal?”

“Have you given him over yet?”

Corinna nodded. Last night Ian must have seen to the note from his secretary concerning the horse, included in the pile on his desk.

“Sell him to Markham or Jeffries, wouldn’t you say?”

Lord Jeffries bred hunters. What would he want with a thoroughbred racehorse, unless it was to begin his own stock of racers? Which meant Bucephalus meant a great deal more to Ian than he’d let on, as Corinna suspected. “When?”

“Soon enough, I suspect.” The baron shook his head. “Sparks won’t sell him back to you. You thrashed him too thoroughly for him to ever forgive it.”

She studied him. “You told me that at the time, didn’t you?”

The corner of Lord Grace’s mouth crept up. “I did. And you are a fine fellow to admit it.”

Corinna allowed herself a grin. The baron was an extraordinarily handsome man, though more serious than his friend, it seemed, with a shadow behind his eyes that Ian’s clear blue did not share.

She stood. “I must be going.”

“You haven’t touched your drink.”

“Enjoy it. I have elsewhere to be.” She left, tipping the boy who brought her horse around and climbing into the saddle. The beast was well behaved, with a sensitive mouth and an even gait. Corinna hadn’t ridden London’s streets on horseback often, but her mount made it easy. She knew exactly where she must go next, but she made no hurry. It was one thing to pretend to be a man with his friends. It was another altogether to affect it with the woman who had given birth to him.

~o0o~

She found Lady Chance precisely where she expected: with her elder son, as Corinna had planned with the countess more than a sennight ago. She had no desire to converse with Ian’s mother, but the rustic farm at Green Park seemed the perfect situation for speaking with him alone.

His mother was mounted on her pretty mare and Ian on Corinna’s own sweet gray. He turned, his gaze sharpening, then going swiftly blank. It unsettled Corinna to see him wearing her body again, after what he had done to it the night before—strangely, more so than when she first looked at the hands that had done it to her, now her own again.

She bowed from the saddle. “Hello, Mother. Lady Corinna.”

“How nice to see you, Ian,” Lady Chance said with a smile so genuine Corinna’s shoulders prickled with discomfort. The countess was a lovely woman, in appearance like her second son with fawn-colored hair and dark blue eyes. “I don’t recall telling you I would be here today.”

“You did not, ma’am. Your companion did.”

Ian didn’t even blink. Lady Chance looked between them. A thoughtful expression creased her brow beneath the brim of her hat.

“We were speaking of you just now,” the countess said. “I heard about your altercation with Abernathy yesterday morning.”

“I suspect everyone has,” Corinna murmured, casting Ian a quick glance. His expression remained unchanged.

“Ian, I am very pleased with what you did. That you and Cora were able to put aside your antipathy toward each other and behave instead as long-standing friends speaks well of the both of you.”

Corinna could find no words worth speaking. Ian’s expression grew—if possible—more inscrutable.

“If you had not intervened when Corinna requested your help,” Lady Chance continued, “Lord Mowbray would have been obliged to confront Abernathy, a younger man with experience in dueling that Corinna’s father lacks. You prevented that. Marcus told me earlier that he intends to call upon you later today to express his gratitude.”

“It was my honor to assist.”

“No doubt it was. You’ve never liked Abernathy, have you?” Lady Chance’s dark eyes sparkled.

“Mother, I should like to speak with Lady Corinna in private.”

The countess’s gaze widened. She looked to her companion. “Cora?”

Ian nodded. Corinna released a silent breath of relief. She pulled the big black horse alongside her gray and they moved away from his mother. He didn’t speak until they were some yards distant.

“How are you enjoying Blackie?” He perused her mount.

“Blackie? You named this horse
Blackie
?”

“It was better than the alternative.”

She lifted her brows.

“Muffin.” A grin lurked at the corner of his mouth, so unlike her own smile she imagined she actually saw
him,
only behind a mask.

“Muffin,” she repeated, a frisson of hilarity tickling her.

“My nephew’s choice. He was present at the foaling and I allowed him to choose the name.” He shrugged like no lady Corinna had ever seen. “He was three at the time, I believe.”

A giggle caught in her throat. Bothersome nerves. But something else, as well. He was speaking to her so differently from the night before. She had not anticipated this, and it released the constriction in her chest like a spring uncoiled. “Oh.”

“But you haven’t come here to discuss my horses, have you?”

“I need your help.”

“No preliminaries. How gratifyingly consistent you are.”

“I didn’t think you would appreciate preliminaries. You weren’t particularly friendly last night.” Except briefly, more than friendly, but that had been a mirage of sorts. “And by the way, I have a horrid head today. Do you always drink so much?”

He fixed her with a steady stare that Corinna had no idea how to interpret despite the fact that it graced her own face. Her heart tripped, unaccountably, then sped.

“It does not signify.” She waved an airy hand. “Drink what you will. Scoundrels always do, of course.”

He shook his head, a look of incredulity replacing the stare.

“Bottles and bottles each evening, I suspect,” she added, her breath refreshingly light for the first time in days, though quivering just a bit. How irrational.

“Corinna.” His brow creased. “I admit to having some difficulty reconciling your current ebullience with our present circumstance.”

“I have good reason to be ebullient. So do you. I have an idea.”

“Do you?”

“She teased us.”

He paused. “Apparently.”

“She wishes us to truly reform.”

He rubbed his hand over his eyes, a thoroughly masculine gesture performed by a slender hand gloved in dove gray kidskin with tiny pearl buttons at the wrists.

“Corinna, please—”

“No. It is always like that in mythology. Homer is full of such lessons. We must prove ourselves—repent—in order to triumph through this adversity. And don’t try to tell me you have nothing of which to repent, because I know you do.
Personally
. And that is precisely her point.”

“‘Mythology’ is the operative term here. Aren’t you supposed to be a respected lady scholar?”

“I study literature as well as science and politics.” She struggled not to raise her voice. “Ian, this is real. You cannot pretend otherwise, no matter how fantastical it seems. But I believe I have determined a method for escaping it. And,” she bit her lip, “we can begin immediately.”