Seduced by Stratton (The English Brothers Book 4) (13 page)

She grinned, pulling her computer onto her lap and showing him mercy. “Really, you can’t go wrong. I’m Italian. I was practically born with a piece of pizza sticking out of my mouth.”

He didn’t say anything, but she caught him nod out of the corner of her eye.

“What are you reading?” he finally asked, rotating his neck to glance at her.

“Right now?”

“Mmm,” he said, standing up. He straightened his glasses as he settled back in his chair.

“Letters,” she said, cocking her head to the side and grinning at him. “Seventeenth and eighteenth century love letters. I’m teaching a class on Tuesday.”

“Your own class?”

“No. For Professor Moreland. I teach a secondary section.”

“About love letters?”

She nodded. “Yes. Letters are an amazing insight into the courtship practice. They tell us so much about what was acceptable to say, how men wooed women, how women accepted advances, whether the passions shared in the letter led to marriage or scandal.”

“It’s a shame that letters are a lost art,” remarked Stratton.

“I disagree!” argued Valeria. “Well, handwritten with a quill, maybe. But emails? Texts? They’re all modern versions of written communication. Just as valid. Just as important. Only the conveyance is different, not the feelings.”

“Read me one,” he said, holding her eyes.

Surprise made her mouth drop open lightly, and her cheeks felt warm as she smiled down at her laptop, opening the syllabus. “Oh, I don’t—”

“Why not?” he asked.

“They’re surprisingly hot,” she said, wetting her lips and sneaking a glance at him as she teased, “I don’t know if you can handle it.”

“I can handle it, Val.”

His voice was low and gravelly, his face hot and focused. The electricity snapping between them—a current, a cord—was so taut, sizzling with heat, it was sucking the air out of the room.

She forced herself to break eye contact with him and took a deep breath, looking down at her laptop. “All right.”

“Should I close my eyes?” asked Stratton.

“Only if you want to.”

His lids closed slowly behind his glasses, focused on her until they finally shuttered. Valeria sighed, drinking him in, the way the low light from the fire bathed him in gold, the hard lines of his thighs under denim, the veins on his forearms, highlighted by flickering flames. In her wildest dreams, she could not have conjured a more beautiful man.

“Go ahead,” he encouraged her.

“Um, okay. Here goes . . .”

Her voice broke and she cleared her throat. Calming her nerves with a small sip of wine before reading, she began:

“Could I see you without passion, or be absent from you without pain, I need not beg your pardon for thus renewing my vows that I love you more than health, or any happiness here or hereafter.

Everything you do is a new charm to me, and though I have languished for seven long tedious years of desire, jealously despairing, yet every minute I see you I still discover something new and more bewitching. Consider how I love you; what would I not renounce or enterprise for you? 

I must have you mine, or I am miserable, and nothing but knowing which shall be the happy hour can make the rest of my years that are to come tolerable. Give me a word or two of comfort, or resolve never to look on me more, for I cannot bear a kind look and after it a cruel denial. 

This minute my heart aches for you; and, if I cannot have a right in yours, I wish it would ache till I could complain to you no longer.”

***

As she read such desperate, tormented, passionate words of love in her smooth, low voice, Stratton realized something very important. What he’d said to Kate this morning wasn’t accurate. He’d told Kate that he “liked” Valeria, and while that was true, it wasn’t the complete truth, and he faced an uncomfortable reality. In the two years that Amy had been coming to Stratton’s apartment to watch chick flicks and drown her sorrows in ice cream, he’d never once felt the violent, terrifying surge of emotion for her that he felt right now, staring at Valeria Campanile’s bowed head as she read the words “This minute my heart aches for you.”

Something was happening to him. The more time he spent with this woman, the more he longed for her, the more he wanted to know about her, the more he wanted to touch her, make her smile, make her laugh—Christ, make her
come
—to be anything and everything to her heart. It was becoming a terrible ache, an all-consuming burn.

Was his heart, as Kate had suggested, free to love her? For so long, he’d believed that Amy owned him, and yet, in four short days, Valeria had infiltrated his life with her interests and smarts, her beautiful smile and wild hair and sexy curves. He’d tried to turn her away today and failed. He feared that, after tonight, whatever willpower he’d possessed would be gone.

“Stratton?” she prompted, and he suspected by her tone that it was the second time.

“Who wrote that?”

She smiled shyly. “A man named Thomas Otway, in 1688. He was terribly in love with an actress named Elizabeth Barry.”

“And did they . . .?”

“End up together?” Val shook her head sadly. “No. She was with someone else. Mrs. Barry was the mistress of a Lord, in fact, while Thomas Otway was just a poor poet and playwright. He died in poverty—of starvation, according to most reports. But
I
believe he died of a broken heart. He’s quite clear about it in this letter.”

“That’s a terrible ending,” said Stratton. The parallels between his love for Amy and Thomas Otway’s love for Mrs. Barry weren’t lost on him, but he didn’t feel like exploring them, so he changed the subject. “You’re great at reading aloud.”

“Thanks. I’ve never been uncomfortable speaking in front of crowds. Professor Moreland calls it moxie. My mother calls it being loud-mouthed.” She chuckled softly. “Got me my teaching job, though.”

He thought of all the young men in her class that would hear her honeyed voice read those words of passion, and his eyes narrowed with jealousy. “Will you be reading that letter in class on Tuesday?”

She nodded. “Most likely. And others. Reading aloud helps students imagine the letter in a voice other than their own.”

“Maybe—” He’d been about to say, “Maybe I’ll stop by the university and sit in,” but his phone buzzed, and it broke the moment between them as he drew it out of his pocket and swiped the screen.

Amy Colson:
Mean Girls! Yes! You get a gold star. Miss you too. Xo

He stared at the message for an extra beat, re-reading it twice and processing Amy’s words with disbelief.

Miss you too. Xo

His heart, which had surged for Val just a few minutes ago, flipped over as he thought of Amy’s face, her small white fingers typing the words. What had she thought as she wrote back to him? Did she picture his face as he was picturing hers now? Could absence and distance possibly be making her heart grow fonder? He took a deep, ragged breath, re-reading her words for a fourth and fifth time.

“Maybe . . .?” asked Valeria.

He looked up at her, almost surprised by the sound of her voice. “Uh, nothing. I, um, I think I’ll go order the pizza now,” he answered, standing up quickly and heading for the kitchen.

He stared at the small screen for several minutes, agonizing over his response before typing quickly:
You do? You miss me?
Amy, can we talk when you get back?

He straightened his glasses and waited, leaning against the sink as the minutes ticked by with no response, occasionally peeking around the corner to see Val still curled up on the couch reading from her laptop, and wondering how the hell he had gotten himself into this situation.

Morning light streamed through the windows of Stratton’s living room apartment, shining directly into Valeria’s eyes and waking her from a deep, warm, comfortable sleep. The first thing she processed was that she was lying on Stratton’s couch facing a blank, royal blue TV screen. The second thing she realized was that Stratton’s arm was thrown over her chest, holding her tightly against his body. They were spooning.
Spooning
.

Because she didn’t want to
stop
spooning with Stratton, she took a careful breath and otherwise remained completely still, trying to figure out how they’d ended up this way.

She’d read the Otway letter. He’d gotten a text and headed for the kitchen to order pizza. He had checked his phone distractedly throughout the evening, though less and less as they polished off more Merlot. He’d suggested a movie. They’d decided on
Easy Rider
to continue with their Jack Nicholson tribute, and he’d sat beside her on the couch, handing her a blanket as the movie got started. She remembered fighting sleep, and in her lightly drunken state, she remembered letting her head rest on the arm of Stratton’s couch. But how had she gotten from there to here, lying stretched out beside him with his arm curled possessively around her waist? Not that she was complaining, but damn, she hated that she couldn’t remember exactly how it happened.

She still had all her clothes on, and from the way the bulge behind his jeans was poking against her backside, she knew he had his clothes on too. Plus, she had no memory of them making out. She must have fallen asleep and then he—

Oh, God!

All coherent thoughts scattered as his lips grazed the back of her neck, and he adjusted in his sleep, pushing his erection lazily into her backside and sighing. Her eyes fluttered closed, and, determined not to squander this precious moment in the half-life between sleeping and waking when it was a truth commonly held that all conventional rules were suspended, she turned in his arms to face him. Opening her eyes, she found his still closed, his lips slightly parted, his breathing deep and even. She stared at his face, examining it, memorizing it, feeling sad and excited as her heart throbbed with intense, new feelings.

They’d spent the night intimately pressed together, their dreams mingling during sleep, and the sheer tenderness she felt for him made her dizzy and giddy, made her lean forward recklessly to touch her lips to his.

He didn’t react at first as she kissed him, but sensitive nerve-endings in her lips made waves of pleasure roll from her mouth to her throat to her belly, where they pooled, fluttery and warm. She gently nipped and tugged on his lower lip, pulling it between hers once, twice, and then . . . and then his arm tightened around her body, and his lips, which had been asleep to her touch, awakened. With a low, strangled groan, they came to life, meeting hers gently, then more urgently. He tilted his head so he could press his lips flush to her mouth, touching her tongue with his. Her hands, trapped between them, flattened on his chest, fingers curling into the taut expanse of T-shirt-covered muscle beneath.

“Stratton . . .” She sighed as his lips slid to her neck, licking and nipping as she arched her back and raised her chin.

He pressed his pelvis forward, the rigid length of his sex intimately seeking her corresponding softness, and finding it, he gyrated slowly, insistently, against her.

Eyes closed and heart fluttering wildly, she raised her hands to his hair, plunging them into the silky blond strands as his mouth burned a path to her ear. He caught the lobe between his teeth, and Valeria arched and trembled, whimpering softly as he chuckled lightly from deep in his throat, the vibrations making goose bumps rise all over her body. His lips slipped from her ear to her throat, and she felt the hot, velvet flick of his tongue grazing her skin.

“Stratton,” she moaned again, and his lips were so close to her ear, she felt the heat of his breath as he rumbled . . .

“Amy.”

Her breath caught and her body froze.

Then . . .

Her eyes flew open, blinking in shock as her fingers opened reflexively in his hair, releasing it.

His eyes fluttered open, as if waking from a dream, to find her staring at him. In an instant they widened, and she saw the realization of what he’d just said pass over his face.

“Val,” he panted.

“Val,” she murmured, leaning back from him, swallowing the lump in her throat. “Not Amy.”

“Did you sleep over?”

“Apparently,” she managed, though her heart thundered with hurt feelings. “I assume we fell asleep during the movie. Somehow ended up like this during the night.”

“Oh,” he said, taking his bottom lip between his teeth. He held her eyes, looking uncertain and immeasurably sorry.

“You just called me Amy.”

“I know,” he replied, closing his eyes and releasing her to roll onto his back. He put his hand on his forehead, looking stricken at the ceiling. “Sorry.”

“God, I’m so stupid,” she said softly, trying to catch her breath as she sat up. Between the pounding of her heart, her breathlessness from their make-out session, and his soul-crushing error, it was a challenge.

“Val . . .” he said, his knuckles reaching out to stroke her lower back. “I was half-asleep. I didn’t mean to—”