The Scoundrel and I: A Novella (15 page)

She threw herself upon his chest, pressed her face into his waistcoat, and a great sob shook her. He cupped his hands around her shoulders, wanting to grab her up entirely, to hold her. He’d needed her in his arms again like he needed air, but this was not precisely what he’d had in mind.

“Elle?” he said quietly.

“She is gone.” Another sob convulsed her body. “She is gone.”

“Gone?”

“In the night,” she said muffled against his coat. “I buried her this morning.”

“My God.” He wrapped his arms tight around her.

She wept and he ached for her. He longed to say something comforting or profound. He stroked her hair, held her close, and felt her sobs in his body.

“You made her proud,” he finally whispered. “I saw it, heard it in her voice. So proud.”

She sobbed harder.

Blast it
. He truly was an idiot with words.

Eventually the sobs subsided. With an enormous sniff, she lifted her sodden face. Stroking his thumb across her cheek, he wiped away tears.

“I’m sorry, Elle.”

She blinked, scattering teardrops from her lashes. And abruptly the glimmer in her eyes changed. Then her gaze dropped to his lips.

Every muscle in his body went instantly on alert.
Every
muscle. He was the greatest scoundrel alive.

She pulled away, her damp gaze now slightly fevered and skittering up and down him, lighting him on fire.

“I should not have come here,” she said.

“I’m glad you did.” His voice sounded far too rough.

She stared at him, lips parted, her perfect breasts rising and falling on sharp breaths. He wanted her against him again. Not weeping, though. Sighing and moaning would do.

He locked himself in place. This was not the time, not with her grief so fresh. He could wait. He could wait forever if in the end she would be his.

“Elle, I—”

“Are you betrothed yet?
Actually
betrothed, not only technically? Or—” Her throat constricted. “Married?”

“No.”
He swallowed hard. “I couldn’t.” Not as long as this woman walked the earth. “No.”

“You . . . couldn’t?”

“Of course not.”

She flattened a palm to his ribs and pushed him back against the wall.

She climbed up him. Mouth claiming his, she clung to his shoulders and he scooped his hands around her soft behind and hitched her thighs up about his hips, and they kissed like that, ravenously, fantastically. Her mouth consuming his was hot and tasted of lust and the remnants of tears, and her hands were all over him, in his hair, around his jaw, under his coat, then beneath his shirt, and
he had to have her
. Now. The devil take grief and gentlemanly restraint and waiting for vows or anything else to be said. She was his and she always would be.

He carried her to his bed.

First her long sable locks came down, cascading over the white linen like silk, as he had dreamed. Her bodice followed, unfastened and then tugged until her breasts were bared entirely.

Her eyes were spectacularly wide, her cheeks and throat flushed, and the perfect, pink peaks of her breasts tight with arousal. Nothing would come to his tongue, no words, not even sound. Wrapping his hands around her waist, he bent his head and rested his brow between her breasts, and breathed her in.

Her fingers threaded into his hair.

“Won’t you kiss me?” Her voice trembled.

“Everywhere you wish.”

“For what are you waiting?”

“Trouble with banquets, a man don’t always know where to begin.”

Laughter tumbled from her. “A man
does n
—”

He captured her lips with his. Then he took her breasts in his hands, passed his thumbs across the peaks, and felt her gasp into his mouth. He bent his head and with his tongue tasted one beautiful nipple.

Within a minute she was dragging at his coat with her eager hands, then his waistcoat, then his shirt, and groaning. When she arched her hips against his, he slipped his hand down her belly and between her legs and held her. The flavor of her skin was in his mouth, the texture of her beauty, her desire on his tongue, and he did not give her what she was urging him to give her swiftly.

This was his banquet. He would not be rushed.

Her body was strung like a leeward jib sheet, taut and straining. She whispered his name, then again more urgently. Her fingers scored paths along his arms, over his shoulders, into his hair again. He scraped his teeth over her nipple and she whimpered.

Now she was ready.

With the shift of his fingers over her skirts, he caressed her womanhood. She cried out. Thrusting her hips, convulsing against his caresses, she cried and cried again, sounds of desperation and ecstasy at once.

When her gasps subsided and her eyes opened, hazy and sated, she looked up at him. In all of his years sailing the seas, in every exotic land, upon every familiar shore, atop every magnificent swell and beneath every starlit night, her smile was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

He nearly took her then, immediately, half-dressed, wholly ready. He didn’t. She deserved more. She deserved everything. So instead he cupped his hands around her perfect breasts, lowered his mouth to the neglected nipple, and said, “Second dish.”

~o0o~

He undressed her one garment at a time. Between garment removals he made her wild with need. And he made her laugh. She had never imagined that there could be laughter in making love. But this was her scoundrel, so of course there was.

With kisses everywhere she wished—as he had promised—he brought to the surface all the longing and pleasure buried within her. Then, with kisses in places she had not even known
could
be kissed, he sent the pleasure deeper than she had known pleasure could go. It was all very new, delectably shocking, intensely delicious, and wonderful.

Just as wonderfully, he encouraged her to touch him, to undress him, caress him, and kiss him, also wherever she wished. By the time she was finally fully undressed, naked beneath him, and once again aching with need, she knew the contours of the muscles and sinews in his arms and chest and legs, the powerful beauty of his bared shoulders, and the thorough delirium of his skin against hers.

“Sweet Elle,” he said against her throat. “I am well-seduced, entirely at your mercy, ravished beyond ravishment.”

She laughed.

“Say you will have me now, Elle, or I’ll perish at once.”

Circling her hands around his arms, she smiled. “I will have you now, Captain.”

He took her mouth beneath his and kissed her beautifully, deeply. Then she had him.

She did not know what to expect. Her memory of intimacy was a fog of pain and frustration.

This was
entirely
different.

“Good God, Elle,” he said, his lips brushing her lips, his chest moving hard against hers as he grew still within her, a great big hot presence that was stretching her nearly beyond endurance. “It feels good to be inside you.”

“You used a subject pronoun.” She spread her palms over his shoulders. “You said
it
.”

“Overcome. Won’t happen again.” His hand found her breast. She moaned, his lips claimed hers, and she forgot all about discomfort and doubt and grammar.

“Now?” he said.

“Yes,” she whispered, and there was only languid, throbbing heat. And hunger.

His hand came between them. And then, with the caress of his fingers, he made her writhe. Pressing up to him, desperately hungry, she begged with her body.

Finally he moved in her, slowly at first, forcing moans of need from her. Upon a firm, quick stroke of his fingertip he thrust deep. Then again. Then again until she was seeking him, needing more, needing everything. His hands grasped her wrists and he met her again and again, faster, harder, until she was begging for release, and then crying out when it came. His muscles hardened like rock and he spoke her name, powerfully, then again as he grew still.

Their bodies hot and slick, their breathing ragged, he tenderly brushed damp silk from her cheeks. Then he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face against her neck.

For the first time since they had met in an alleyway at dusk, they said nothing for quite some time. Twining her arms around his waist and tucking her head beneath his chin, she wept a little more, then fell asleep smiling.

~o0o~

Having traveled hundreds of miles yet rested little over the previous five days, Tony was unsurprised to discover that he had slept past dusk. The bedchamber door was ajar and a lamp glowed on the stairwell landing. In the dim light he saw no woman tangled in the bedclothes beside him.

He tugged his breeches on. None of the feminine garments he had removed from her were strewn about the room. But she must be nearby.

He found evidence of her in his sitting room. The little print mistress herself was not, however, present. In the center of his desk littered with papers was a handwritten note. With a peculiar sensation scraping the back of his throat, he took up the page of closely penned words and read.

When he came to the end of it, he lowered himself into a chair, drew a long, shaking breath, and read it again.

Then he read it again.

Folding it carefully, he went into his bedchamber to dress.

Elle was not a martyr by nature, only vastly unlucky, cursed by Fate, and scorned by heaven. Simply because she had suffered a lot of misery in life did not mean she actually
liked
it.

This present misery, however, took the prize. She loved two people and they were both gone, one by death, the other by her own effort.

Still, she did not weep. She had done plenty of that three days earlier in her flat, in a hackney cab, in his arms, then in his bed. And it seemed, after all, that she was not really the sort of person to weep from sorrow, only in joy.

He did not call on her, and for that she applauded her newfound talent for writing utter falsehoods: that she had given it quite a lot of thought and, while she liked him, she did not like him quite enough to continue with him; that she had decided to move to America where her grandparents had known Important People who could make her a success in the printing business; and finally that if he sought her out again she would write to the Admiralty and tell them what she knew. Vile to write, the lies had obviously satisfied her purpose. Now he must dislike her excessively, which suited her plan no matter how wretched she felt.

Returning from halfway across town after a third endless day waiting in the employment agency to be interviewed—without success—she dragged her aching feet and heart up to her flat. The roses were in full, magnificent bloom, the whole place awash in glorious perfume. She had already given away so many to her neighbors they were beginning to think her a florist. Perhaps that could be her next post. She would look for signs in shop windows that read:
Broken-Hearted Flower Girls Apply Within
.

She went into her kitchen to make tea, and there were Minnie, Adela, Esme and Charlie, all in the tiny room.

“Good heavens, how are you here?”

“We walked over, of course,” Adela said.

“Sprout told us where you hide the key,” Esme said.

“I must find another hiding spot,” Elle mumbled. But she needn’t. Nobody would be visiting her grandmother here again. She was alone. It was her well-trodden path and inevitable, after all.

She had these caring friends, it was true; and for them she was deeply grateful.

“Elle,” Minnie said disapprovingly. “You have made a terrible blunder.”

Perhaps not so grateful
. They could not possibly know what she had done, though. No one could. Not even the captain.

It had been wrong to open the seal and read the letter from Jane Park that she found buried under documents on his desk—by far the worst thing she had ever done. But such was her giddy post-love glow that she had assumed she would eventually be reading her lover’s correspondence aloud to him anyway.

She could not regret it, nor taking the letter home to burn. He needn’t ever know the contents of it: that in her husband’s personal effects Jane had discovered the captain’s secret, and that, starving and desperate and fearing for her children, she had sunk into such despair that she must now offer him only two choices. She would either write to the Admiralty detailing how her husband had gone beyond his regular duties in serving the captain of the
Victory,
and demand that they pay her a second, larger pension to make it right. Or Captain Masinter could stand by his offer to marry her. In the letter Jane had apologized to him—again and again in sweetly pious prose—but she said she had no other choice. Elle felt for the poor widow and her tiny children, and she suspected that under the circumstances she herself might do the same. Of course, she might simply ask him for a loan until she recouped her losses.

Or not
.

One thing she had learned from adoring Jo Junior for years was that people did not always do what was in their own best interests.

On the other hand, it was definitely in Jane Park’s interests to marry a wealthy aristocrat. Under the circumstances, blackmail was understandable. Even more important than the blackmail, however, was that Elle knew the captain’s sense of responsibility and honor would not allow him happiness if Mrs. Park and her children suffered. Elle could not have borne that. Above all she wanted his happiness.

“What mistake?” she said to Minnie.

Charlie stepped forward. “You should not have given up so easily.” He proffered a letter. It was the stationery upon which Lady Justice sent messages to Brittle & Sons, with the name Gabrielle Flood above the address. “It arrived this morning.”

“What—What is it?” she said weakly.

“Read it,” Esme said.

“It has already been opened.” Cosmic retribution, no doubt.

“My brother’s doing, of course,” Charlie said. “I beg your pardon for that.” He was watching her thoughtfully, and for the first time she saw in his eyes that which for years she had denied: affection beyond anything she could return. She had never wanted to see it because she did not wish to then be obliged to reject it, and lose his friendship. Since her grandfather’s death, Charlie had been the only man she trusted other than Mr. Curtis. Now she knew what it was to love, to truly love, and she hurt for him.

“Read it, Gabrielle,” he said.

The hand was neat and firm: the hand of her hero, Lady Justice.

Dear Miss Flood,

Yesterday I received a letter from a gentleman claiming that, although he has no right to write to me on your behalf, he doubted you would do so yourself. He begged me to rectify the wrong that he and your employer did to you in the matter of fifty-three pieces of missing printer’s type. Given the narrative he offered, I agree: you should not be punished for this unfortunate mishap. Moreover, I am indebted to you for years of service to me, and therefore to all of Britain. My message is more effective because of your labors.

I have informed Mr. Brittle that if he does not reinstate you in your position, immediately raise your wages by thirty percent, and subsequently five percent per annum, I will find another publisher.

Your gentleman admirer also told me of your wish to collect within a single volume a selection of my work and letters of that pompous narcissist who continues to write to me despite my disdain of everything for which he stands. I think it a travesty to reprint the utterings of that elitist cretin, but if it will help spread the message of Justice into more parlors throughout Britain, I will encourage Mr. Brittle to make it so.

One more detail of this matter moves me now to speak to you as a friend. As all know, I often publish letters that I receive from members of the aristocracy, especially if they reveal injustices. In his letter to me your admirer exposed his heart as well as a vulnerability that, given his identity, could ruin him if made public, or at the very least open him to great censure. He showed no concern over this, only honesty in his wishes for your wellbeing.

I have destroyed his letter. I will not print it, for I believe that selflessness should be rewarded. Don’t you agree?

In sincere gratitude for your labor,

Lady Justice

Elle lifted to her friends eyes filled with tears.

“Will you return to Brittle and Sons, Gabrielle?” Charlie said.

“Yes.” It was a bittersweet victory. She had her work. She would never have her captain. God, it seemed, was merciful. But Fate was a vindictive tease.

~o0o~

Elle returned to the shop the following morning. Jo Junior, who still sported a bruised nose, glowered at her. But he offered her his own desk at which to work.

She declined. She liked her spot in the corner of the printing room, with its scent of ink and the big solid comfort of the press and its companion tray full of type.

Charlie brought her a cup of tea.

“What a nice surprise,” she said. He had never before brought her anything. That Captain Masinter had brought her a glass of ale—
and something extra
—within minutes of meeting her tweaked her heart with fresh aching.

“Welcome back, Gabrielle,” Charlie said only, and left her to the pile of paper that had accumulated in her brief absence.

Mr. Brittle Senior stopped by the shop midmorning, spoke to her cheerfully about the usual sorts of things, and never once mentioned what had passed. The missing type was forgotten. Lady Justice had prevailed. Rather, Mr. Brittle’s greed. But such was the nature of business, she supposed.

At lunchtime the clerk and the pressmen went off to the King’s Barrel, and Charlie and Jo Junior departed for a meeting across town. The shop was empty and Elle sat with her pen and a page of the latest edition of
Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine
and went through every line with her usual thoroughness, despite the lump in her throat. That she must work now on a nautical dictionary was simply more cosmic retribution. But at least she was learning interesting details about the life he had led for years.

The shop door jingled and Elle slid off her stool and went into the front room.

Jane Park stood there in all her sweet blond loveliness. She wore a yellow gown and a smart new pelisse and bonnet with shiny ribbons, and she carried a reticule made of silk.

Elle considered the disadvantages of becoming ill all over her employer’s floor.

“Good—” she forced over the grotesquely huge prickly ache in her throat. “Good day.”

Jane’s pale eyes blinked like a little startled woodland creature’s. There was no intelligence in those eyes, nothing interesting, nothing to make a naval captain laugh or scowl. The nausea in Elle’s stomach redoubled. She had thrown him into the arms of this woman and she wasn’t at all certain that it had not been an incredibly foolish mistake made at a moment when her emotions were far too agitated with grief and joy and so much love and probably exhaustion.

“You were here the other day when I came to find Captain Masinter, weren’t you?” the pale loveliness said.

“Yes. I—” She cleared her throat. “I work here. Everyone else has gone for lunch.”

“You have such a kind smile, like the captain’s,” Jane Park said sweetly. “You seem like a person who would help a woman in need.”

Tragically true
. “How may I assist you?”

“My husband recently perished, leaving me and our children all alone in the world. Since then, the captain has been so generous. I want to give him something special, a gift, now that the wedding is going forward.”

“A—”
Remember to breathe
. “A gift?”

“Oh, yes. A very special gift that he will cherish. I have an idea for it, but I don’t know if it is a good idea. May I have your opinion on it?”

Apparently Jane understood the gurgling noise that came from Elle’s mouth as assent.

“You see,” Jane continued, “Captain Masinter and my late husband were wonderfully fond, and they spent hours pouring over ship’s logbooks together. I found several pages from one of those books in my late husband’s belongings. I thought I might have a page framed for display, for the captain, to show him my eternal gratitude for what he has done for me and my children.”

Elle nearly sobbed.

“But I don’t know a thing about pages or paper or frames.” Jane offered a bewildered smile. “After he insulted me the other day, Mr. Charles Brittle apologized with such gentlemanly grace that I decided to come here and ask his advice. But I would be grateful for your thoughts instead. You must be very clever with books and paper.”

“A little.”
Although vastly un-clever with matters of the heart
.

“Also,” Jane added, a twinkle in her eyes, “my fiancé is waiting outside in the carriage with my children. I should not make them wait long.”

Elle’s stomach turned over.

“Your idea is fine,” she said slowly. “But I believe ship’s logbooks are meant to be confidential rather than displayed on the wall.”

“Oh. Yes. I suppose that is true.” A haunted shadow crossed Jane’s face.
Guilt
. Elle could read it in the woman’s guileless eyes like she could read a page: Jane was remembering her blackmail scheme and hating herself for it.

Elle did not know how much more wringing a human heart could endure. And the notion that if she turned her head and looked out the window, she would see him, made every part of her weak with longing. She must end this immediately.

“I recommend not pursuing this idea,” she said. “Instead”—she snatched up pen and paper—“there is a wonderful map shop at this address. It so happens that the proprietor sells beautiful nautical charts suitable for hanging on the wall. I am certain you will find one that is ideal for the captain.” She proffered the paper.

“What a perfect idea!” The twinkle had returned to Jane’s eyes. “Thank you, Miss—”

“That is not important, of course.” Swiftly she ushered Jane to the door. “What matters is that he is happy. Now, good day to—” Her gaze caught on the wheel of the fine carriage parked before the shop, then swept along its side, then over the three adorable little towheads in the back, then up to the box.

It was not his carriage. It was not his team of matched grays. And the man standing beside it and gazing with besotted eyes at Jane Park was not
her captain
.

Jane said, “There is my fiancé! Do you see how grateful I am to the captain? He has made possible for me such happiness.” Beaming into the man’s face, she allowed him to hand her up into the carriage.

For a paralyzed moment Elle watched it move down Gracechurch Street. Then she dragged shut the door to Brittle & Sons, locked it, and hailed a hackney.

~o0o~

Captain Masinter was not at home. No one was. Mr. Cob did not answer her knock on the front door, and when she went around to the rear entrance no one answered there either. Even the stable boy was not in sight. Neither were the captain’s big horse nor his new carriage and pair.

She found another hackney cab and went to Seraphina’s house. Penelope told her that Madame Étoile had gone to call on Lady Bedwyr to make alterations on a gown, and she gave her the address.