Suzanne Robinson (16 page)

Jocelin sat back against the leather cushions of the carriage. As his muscles relaxed, he realized how he’d shot from tranquillity to fierce unease and back again. The contrast showed him how great a toll his self-appointed crusade had taken on him. He hadn’t thought about the cost in a long time, and now, with Miss Liza Elliot here in front of him, a gentle, compelling reminder, he longed for more of that tranquillity.

She hadn’t noticed his silence, for she was busy arranging a blanket across her lap. Taking up another, she handed it to him. He leaned forward to accept it, and caught a whiff of lemons. His gaze strayed to the lace in her bonnet, to the kid gloves that encased her hands. She moved, and her skirts rustled again. His glance took in her dark blue gown and matching mantle. Her eyes had turned blue-green when he
could have sworn in the milliner’s shop they were brown. Hazel eyes, that’s what they were.

“My lord, is something wrong?”

He blinked at her. What was he doing?

“No, no. I was just thinking that few ladies I know would trouble to provide custom to local dressmakers and milliners.”

“Oh, but they need my help,” Miss Elliot said. “Both women have families to support, my lord. Gentlemen don’t realize how many women have to provide for their children all by themselves. It isn’t a rare occurrence, you know.”

She went on, but he wasn’t listening. He was too busy castigating himself. What was wrong with him? He’d allowed himself to take on over a woman. A woman! He’d been sitting here languishing and smitten, like some fool in one of those poems by Byron. Disgusting. It was on account of Sinclair. Yes, that was it. He’d never been with a woman so soon after completing one of his tasks, and after all, Liza Elliot was a compelling distraction. Yes, no wonder he’d become distracted. He wanted her. That was it, just another symptom of his lust. No doubt he’d lost control because of the delay in acquiring Miss Gamp.

Jocelin smiled at Miss Elliot as he remembered the scent of lemons. Perhaps he needed a diversion. After he’d recovered from the wounds he’d gotten in the Crimea, he’d gone off to America, taking that monster Tapley with him. He hadn’t really rested. Obviously he was in need of diversion. Nick said so. Loveday said so, though his recommendations to Jocelin regarding activities were much more staid than Nick’s.

Miss Birch was ensconced at an inn in town, but somehow Miss Birch’s expertise repelled him at the
moment. He’d grown tired of Octavia and the rest. Jocelin watched Miss Elliot’s lips move as she spoke softly to him. They were a pale rose color.

It suddenly occurred to him that he’d never been with an inexperienced woman. Always before he’d been interested in diversion, and in proving to himself that what Yale had said of him wasn’t true. But since he’d come back from the Crimea, he’d come to realize what Nick and his friends had been telling him for years. Efforts at luring women on his part were superfluous. They swarmed to him, like fireflies on a hot night in Texas.

Having come to this realization, the excitement of conquest faded. More and more he found himself dissatisfied, restless, uninterested in the women who courted him. Some lusted after his person, some after his title; none cared about his heart. No, that wasn’t true. Those who might have cared he had avoided, thus opening himself to the rest—the predators. So he had only himself to credit for his own unhappiness. Perhaps his thoughtless course had brought him to this point, where he was at last able to appreciate the unique Miss Elliot.

Appreciate. That was the word. No need to plunge into the use of words of excessive emotion. Still, he’d never met anyone who could make him feel as if he was riding on the tip of a lashing whip, snapping from tranquillity to swollen lust until he was dizzy with the rapid shifts. Perhaps he’d been wrong to think they wouldn’t suit. What was wrong with him? He never vacillated like this. If he wanted a woman, he pursued her with no thoughts of the future or of marriage. And yet … they might suit. He knew how he could find out.

“Miss Elliot, did you like Baudelaire’s verses?”

He loved the way she started and turned pink.

“What?”

“Come, you needn’t fear appearing unmaidenly.”

She stuttered, then straightened her shoulders and glared at him. “Your manners, my lord.”

He chuckled and moved to sit beside her. They engaged in a tug-of-war for her blanket. She lost, and he slid under it. Miss Elliot burrowed into a corner of the carriage, but he followed her.

“My lord, you forget yourself.”

“I assure you. I don’t.”

Slipping an arm around her waist, he drew her to him. She protested as he lifted her, and her voice grew so loud, he put a hand over her mouth.

“Shh. Do you want to alarm the coachman?”

She scowled at him over his gloved hand and shook her head. He lowered his hand, but replaced it with his mouth. She gasped, pushing her sweet breath between his lips. She had responded to him before, and betrayed her desire for him. Her ignorance placed her at a disadvantage. Unfortunately for her, he had no conscience when it came to taking a woman he wanted, not even an innocent, it seemed. And how else was he to discover if they would get on well together?

He sucked on her tongue, but she was pounding on him. He managed to capture both her hands, yet she kept squirming in his lap. The movements ground her bottom into his groin. She twisted violently, up and down, side to side, until his sex felt as if it would burst.

He lifted his mouth. “Be still!”

Not giving her a chance to reply, he kissed her again. This time he nibbled his way from her mouth to
her temple, then blew in her ear. As he did so, she arched her back and gasped. He smiled as he slid his hand up to her breast. There were a thousand little buttons at the back of her gown. He loosened them one by one while nuzzling her ears and whispering to her of how she made him feel. When he began speaking, she froze and stared at him as if she’d never had a man speak to her before. Perhaps she hadn’t. Not like this. He kept her attention on his words, told her how soft she was, how different from himself.

Placing her hand on his chest, he whispered, “Feel me. Feel how hard.” He cupped her breast. “So soft, incomparably soft.”

He squeezed, touching the tip, and at last her eyes closed. She was breathing rapidly now. He loosened her gown, slipped his hands inside, and gently pulled it down. To distract her, he began kissing her, but she still tried to stop him.

Another distraction then, the legs. He slipped his hand beneath her skirts and touched her ankle. She gasped and twisted, and her gown slipped down below her shoulders. Her hands came up to her breasts. He moved his fingers along her calf to her knee. She moved her hands to her legs. He returned to her buttons, loosening several more. When she chased him away, he found her knees. She pursued him there, only to find that his mouth had fastened on her neck.

She was lying under him now, chest heaving, fighting him while at the same time trying not to make any noise. She had decided her legs were in more danger than her breasts, and both hands had fastened around his wrist to keep him from touching her thighs. He whispered reassurances to her, then kissed her throat, then tongued his way down to the neck of her
gown, nuzzled aside the material, and found her breast. At the touch of his mouth, she cried out and clawed at the hand that stroked her thigh, but when he sucked on her, the clawing stopped.

Sensing victory, Jocelin grazed his teeth over her nipple, making her whimper. He took advantage of her confusion and sucked hard, moving his hand higher and higher on her thigh all the while. In a few moments she wouldn’t want him to stop. Knowing this made the slowing of the carriage all that much harder to take. She didn’t notice, but he could tell they were turning down the road that crossed the Stratfield Court lands.

He lifted his mouth from her breast. Murmuring in her ear, he stroked her thigh while he pulled her upright.

“Liza, Liza, sweet, come to me tonight.”

He could barely hear her.

“Wh-what?”

Cupping her breast in his hand, he kneaded it gently as he put her from him. He kissed her, and between kisses he talked to her, carefully drawing her back from the brink of surrender.

“Liza, I need you. Are you listening, sweet? I need you.”

Her eyes weren’t focused. He drew her gown up and began buttoning it. When she felt the material cover her breast, she blinked and looked at him directly. He held her with his gaze and put all the force of his newly gained power over her behind his glance.

“I need you, Liza.”

“My lord, I don’t understand.”

He buttoned the last button, drew on her mantle, and kissed her again. Withdrawing, he rubbed
the pad of his thumb over her lower lip while he kissed her ear and spoke quietly to her so that the spell still imprisoned her.

“I need you, sweet, sweet Liza.”

She frowned at him in bewilderment, so he touched his tongue to her lips, bathing them and making her press her body to his.

Then he whispered, “Listen to me. I need you, Liza, you, your enchanting sweetness, your soft body. ‘Full nakedness! All joys are due thee, / As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, / To taste whole joys.’ ”

He should have known she’d hear only one word. She bolted upright.

“Nakedness!” She catapulted out of his arms and across to the other seat, where she clutched her mantle to her chin and glared at him. “You … you … you.”

Grinning at her, he nodded. “Yes?”

“You, you—”

“Beast?”

“No, you—”

“Scoundrel?”

“Monster!”

He laughed. She was so outraged over so little a sin. He hadn’t encountered anyone so innocent in years. He couldn’t remember a woman’s cheeks turning that shade of violent pink. He was beginning to think they’d do quite well together. He captured her hands while she sputtered at him; then, as the carriage slowed in approaching the house, he spoke even as he chuckled.

“Now calm yourself, Liza, my sweet, or you’ll betray yourself to the servants and everyone else. One look at that pretty red face, and the coachman will
spread it around the county that I took your virginity while he drove us home. Shh!”

She wriggled in his grasp, and tried to kick him.

“God,” he said as he dodged her foot, grinning all the while. “And I thought you a biddable, complaint little thing.”

“You’re a monster! Don’t touch me.”

“Accustom yourself to it, Liza, my sweet. I’m going to touch you, and touch you, and touch you, and you’re going to let me.”

He kissed her when she gaped at him, speechless.

“You’re going to let me, Liza, sweet. If you think after this small taste of you that I’ll ever be satisfied with less than all of you, you’re more innocent than I thought.”

L
iza played the piano while one of her guests, Lady Honoria Nottle, sang. Liza wasn’t paying much attention to Honoria, for if she did, the poor girl’s habit of speech would drive her mad. Honoria couldn’t pronounce the letter
l
. For the last two weeks Lady Honoria had been calling her “Wiza.”

Honoria Nottle was one of those women designed to try Liza’s forbearance to the utmost. She counted a summer evening lost if she couldn’t stroll about a garden looking for “wee bunnies, the wittle deaws.” Her life was filled with sentiment, oozy, drippy sentiment. If Liza hadn’t needed her as a shield against Lord Jocelin, she would have poked Honoria in the nose for her intolerable mawkishness.
At the moment, however, she needed Honoria, because the gentlemen had returned from shooting and would be coming down to tea.

She’d suffered two weeks of playing the dutiful daughter. Two weeks of watching her words lest she betray her discovery about Jocelin Marshall. The day of their carriage ride she’d followed him down Larch Lane, intent upon knowing what he was about, and had been shivering behind the arbor when he cornered Lucius Sinclair. She heard Jocelin’s accusations with stunned surprise and horror. Horror had turned to disgust and outrage as she comprehended the magnitude of Sinclair’s perversion. And then there was Jocelin Marshall.

She’d always known the viscount was a killer. Tales of his deeds on the American frontier spoke of saloons, whiskey, and gunfights. Never had a word been whispered about his pursuits in England, and they were far more dangerous. She was still disturbed by what she’d heard. Obviously Lord Jocelin had discovered a coven of evil in that so-called boardinghouse and had set out to rid the world of the infestation.

He was evidently bent on rescuing those children and assuring their safety by tracking down as many of their abusers as he could. In doing so he’d taken himself outside the law. What law? Liza knew all too well how people overlooked sins against the forgotten children of the slums. Indeed, according to Toby, much of the property on which such perversion took place was owned by bulwarks of Society.

She could still feel the reverberations of shock when she realized what Jocelin Marshall was doing. She still felt as if someone had dumped a tub of snow on her head. This man, who rescued children and
tracked down muck like Sinclair, this man was no murderer. And so, at last, without meaning to, she had discovered the truth.