This Wicked Gift (5 page)

But when he pulled away, she followed.
When he hesitated, she set her hands under his shirt. Her fingers slid up his
abdomen, over his ribs. Any good intentions that might have entered his mind
flared up in smoke, illuminating William’s path to hell. He pulled off his
shirt. The air was cold against his bare skin, but Lavinia was warm, and she
was caressing him. Her hands slid to his waist. Her mouth found his again, and
he could think of nothing but having her skin against his, her flesh pressed
naked under his. He pulled his breeches off and pushed her onto the bed.

She landed and looked up at him. And
then—time seemed so slow—she lifted off her chemise. Every fantasy he’d ever
had compressed into this one moment. Lavinia Spencer was naked in his bed, lips
parted,
eyes
shining. He spread her knees with his
hands and leaned over her. He had a thousand fantasies, but only this one
chance. He positioned his member against her hot, wet cleft.

He should not have been able to think of
anything
 
except the pleasure to
come, but she looked into his eyes. Her look was so clear, so devoid of guile,
that he
stopped,
arrested on the edge of consummation.

You don’t have to do this.

He didn’t know where the thought came
from—perhaps some long-atrophied sense of right and wrong had exerted itself.
The tip of his penis was wet with her juices. Her nipples had contracted into
hard, rose-colored nubs and she lay beneath him, legs spread.

The next step would be so easy.

It was not just her innocence he would
take. Lavinia’s beauty was not a mere accident that arose from the fall of hair
against shoulder, the curves of her breasts, the petals of her sex. No, even
now, spread before him like an offering, she glowed with an inner light. Her
appeal had as much to do with the innate trust she placed in those around her,
in the way she smiled and greeted everyone as if they were worthy of her
attention. If he took her, like this, he’d shatter her trust in the world. He
would show her that men were fiends at heart, that there was no forgiveness in
the world for sins committed by others.

You don’t have to do this.

But men were fiends. And there was no
forgiveness. He had never been granted any forgiveness.

He didn’t have to do it, but he did it
anyway. He slid into her in one firm thrust, and it was every bit as awful—and
as good—as he’d imagined. It was wonderful, because she was sweet and hot and
tight about him.
 
It was
wonderful, because she was his, now, in the most primal sense. But it was
terrible, because he knew what he destroyed with that single thrust. Her hands
came involuntarily between them, and he tensed and stopped.

“William.” She touched his shoulders
tentatively, as if he were the one who needed comfort. As if even his vile
penetration could not shake her absurd trust in the world.
And
so he took her, thrusting into her.
She clenched around him, the walls
of her passage tight around his erection. She brought her hips up to his. And
by God, that heat, that pulsing heat that wrapped around him, that cry she
gave—it couldn’t have been. She could not have come. But she had, and then he
was pumping into her, loosing his seed into her womb and crying out himself,
hoarsely.

As his orgasm faded and his mind cleared
of lust, he realized what a despicable man he was. He’d taken her like an
animal. Oh, she’d let him—but what choice had he left her? He should have
stopped. He should have let her go. Instead, he’d been so intent on himself
that he hadn’t cared what she wanted at all. He was as sorry a specimen as had
ever been seen.

He pulled out of her and sat on the edge
of the bed, his back to her.

The mattress sagged as she rearranged her
weight.
“William,” she said.

He could not bring himself to turn around
and see what he’d done.
Would her eyes reflect the
betrayal of trust?

“William,” she said. “You must look at me.
I have something to tell you.”

He knew already what a despicable
blackguard he was. He’d taken her virginity, and damn, he’d enjoyed it. But
everything had a price, and the price of William’s physical enjoyment would be
this: her cold
censure,
and a speech that he hoped
would cut him to ribbons. He deserved worse. And so he turned.

There was no judgment in her eyes—just a
quiet, unfathomable serenity.

“When I told you my brother was not yet
one-and-twenty,” she said, “I did not intend to engage your sympathies. I was
trying to point out that he is legally an infant. He is incapable of forming a
contract. That promissory note is unenforceable.”

William’s mind went blank. Instead of
thoughts, his head seemed to fill with water from the bottom of a lake—chilled
liquid, dwelling where light could not filter.

“You had nothing to coerce me with,” she
continued. “You could not have done. No magistrate would have compelled my brother
to pay the debt.”

Her words skipped like stones over the
surface of his thoughts. Hadn’t he coerced her? He was sure he’d forced her
into his bed.
He deserved her condemnation. Damn
it, he
 
wanted
 
it.

Instead, he was as empty as the wick of a
candle that had just been extinguished. “Oh,” he said. That one bare word
didn’t seem enough, so he added another. “Well.” Other thoughts flitted through
his mind, but
 
they were also
single syllables, and rather the sort that could not be uttered in front of a
member of the gentler sex.
Even if he had treated her in a
most ungentle manner.

There was a vital difference between lust
and love. It had been lust—desperate lust for her body—that had brought him to
this point. Lust did not care about the loss of a woman’s virtue. Lust did not
care if a woman’s feelings were wounded. Lust howled, and it wanted slaking. It
didn’t give a fig as to how the deed was accomplished. Lust was a beast, and
one he’d nurtured well with a decade of resentment.

William thought of his four pounds ten a
quarter—eighteen pounds per year of drudgery—and of the many years ahead of him
while he garnered the recognition and the recommendations he would need so that
he could one day become a man who earned…what, twenty-three pounds a year? He
thought of the hole in Lavinia’s glove, and her brother asking when she’d last
had a new dress.

“Lavinia,” he said carefully, “I don’t
deserve such a gift.”

“Nobody gets gifts because he
 
deserves
 
them.” She stood up and shook out her
wrinkled chemise. “You get gifts because the giver wants to give them.”

She wasn’t arguing. She wasn’t throwing
herself at him. She wasn’t weeping and carrying on. If she had done any of
those things, he could have borne it. But she exuded a calm, cool competence
that lay entirely outside William’s understanding.

“I can’t support a wife,” he continued.
“And even if I could, I’m not the man for you, Lavinia.”

She reached for her dress. “I knew that
the minute you tried to coerce me into your bed.”

He shifted and fixed his gaze past her on
the blighted tree outside his narrow window. “Then why did you agree to it? You
had no need.”

She had not trembled when he’d threatened
her, when he’d made his horrible proposition. She had not shivered, not even
when he’d claimed her body. But her hands betrayed the tiniest of tremors as
she fastened her dress and reached for her cloak.

“No need? You said that everything
worthwhile had a price. You were wrong. You are absolutely and without question
the most completely misinformed man in all of creation. Everything really worth
having,” she said, “is
 
free.”

“Free?”

“Given,” she said, “without expectation of
return.” And she looked up at him, a fierce light in her eyes. “I wanted to
show you.”

That clear trust in her eyes was unbroken
yet. He’d taken her virginity. How had she managed to keep her innocence?

“I have no notion what love is,” he told
her, almost in a panic.
“None at all.”

She picked up her cloak and shook it out.
It flared about her shoulders and then
fell,
obscuring
in thick wool the figure he had seen in such heartbreaking detail
 
mere minutes before. “Well,” she said.
“Perhaps one day you’ll figure it out.”

And like that, she slipped past him. He
listened, unmoving, as she stepped down the stairs and out of his life.

T WAS LATE AFTERNOON
 
when Lavinia
slowly climbed the stairs to the family rooms above the lending library. She
ached all over, a vital, restless throb that twinged in every muscle.

“Lavinia?”
Her
father’s weak call came from across the way. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Papa.”
She
took off her cloak and hung it on a peg by the door. Half boots followed. “I
went out on a…constitutional after service. I’ll freshen up and join you
shortly.”

She ducked into her own room.

As far as the basics went, her small
chamber was not so different from William’s. The walls were whitewashed, the
furniture plain and simple, and almost identical to his: washstand, bed, chair
and a chest of drawers. Lavinia crossed to the other side of the room and
poured water from a pitcher into the basin. As she washed, she examined her
reflection in the mirror.

She knew what she was
 
supposed
 
to see. This was the face of a girl
who’d been ruined.
A woman of easy virtue.

The face that peeked back at her looked
exactly the
 
same as the one she’d
seen in the mirror this morning. There was no giant proclamation writ across
her forehead, denouncing her as unchaste. Her eyes did not glow a diabolical
red. They weren’t even demonically pink. And her body still felt as though it
belonged to her—sore, yes, and tingling in ways that she’d never before
experienced—but still hers.
Perhaps more so.

He didn’t love her.

Well.
So?
The
reckless infatuation she’d felt hours before had been transmuted into something
far more complex and…and cobwebby. She wasn’t sure if the emotion that lodged
deep in her gut was love. It felt more like longing. Maybe it had always been
longing. In the year since he’d first started coming to their library, he’d
looked at her. Until recently, however, he’d always looked away.

It had been an unpleasant surprise when
he’d put his proposition to her so baldly—and so badly. But it hadn’t taken her
long to understand why he’d chosen to approach her in such a fundamentally
uncouth manner. She’d realized with an unbearable certainty that he was deeply
unhappy.

In generalities, her room was not so
different from William’s. But the specifics…There were nineteen years of
memories stored in this room. A blue knit shawl, a gift from her father, draped
over one side of her chest of drawers. A lopsided painting of daisies, a
present James had given her two years ago, hung next to the mirror. A pine box
on her nightstand contained
 
all
of Lavinia’s jewelry—a gold chain and her late mother’s wedding ring. These
were not mere things, of course; they were memories, physical embodiments of
the nineteen years that Lavinia had lived. They were proof that people loved
her. Her brother had similar items in his room—a stone he’d picked up years ago
on the beach in Brighton, the pearl pendant he’d inherited from his mother, to
one day give his
wife,
and the penknife Lavinia had
scrimped to buy him.

Where did William keep his memories? There
had been nothing—not
so
much as a pressed flower—in
his quarters. Not a single physical item indicated that he passed through life
in contact with others. He must hold his memories entirely inside him.

It seemed a dreadfully lonesome place to
keep them.

Things
 
had emotional
heft. Lavinia did not imagine a man avoided all mementos because he had been
blessed with an inordinate number of good memories. That William had felt
compelled to resort to blackmail, when she’d been so giddily inclined to him, said
rather more about the light in which he saw himself than how he saw her. For
all the harshness of his words, he’d touched her as if he worshipped her. He’d
caressed her and held her and brought her to a pleasure that still had her
limbs trembling. He might claim to have had no notion of love, but he’d not
approached her as if her touches were credits on a balance sheet.

“Vinny?” James swung her door open without
so much as a knock.

Luckily, the same absorption that led
James to ignore Lavinia’s privacy meant he did not notice her dress was
overwrinkled. He did not look in her eyes and see the telltale glow that lit
them.