Vixen in Velvet (25 page)

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” she said. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t strike me as useful news.” She walked into her office.

He followed. He closed the door.

She went to her desk and began putting papers in order. Bills. Two letters canceling orders.

“Now I remember,” he said. “After a great labor of thinking, I brought forth an idea. Lady Longmore can’t come back to London yet because some people might confuse her with Longmore’s French widow and the great love affair from which he recovered with astounding rapidity.”

“He’s a man,” Leonie said. “What was it Byron said about men versus women in love?”

“Byron? I thought you weren’t literary.”

“We read
Don Juan
because it was reputed to be naughty,” she said.

“ ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘’Tis woman’s whole existence.’ Swanton worships
Don Juan.
And
Beppo.
He dotes on Tom Moore, too. And you have successfully diverted me from my objective.” His voice deepened. “Come here.”

“Certainly not,” she said. “I need to add two and two and make it come out ten or twenty. I need to see whether one commission can be made to keep us solvent for all of August, and perhaps into September. I need—”

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

At that moment, all sense flew out of her brain and all she needed was him.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. She hadn’t time for this, for being ridiculous and irresponsible.

“It’s been an age,” he said. “The balls and assemblies don’t end until dawn, and I know the seamstresses arrive at nine o’clock in the morning and the shop must open at ten, even though nobody comes at that inhuman hour. I knew I mustn’t disturb your rest.”

He didn’t have to be here to do that.

“It’s been scarcely more than two days since you were last here.” She took out her pocket watch. “I make it to be about fifty-four hours.”

“Can you not be more precise?” he said. “I love it when you’re precise.”

Her heart beat too fast.
Love
. But not love
you.
It was only a carelessly used word and it meant only that she amused him. Something she’d known from the beginning.

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,

’Tis woman’s whole existence.

Not hers. She had a life, a full, busy life. The life she’d had before he sauntered into it.

“Furthermore, customers do come at what your great ladies deem the crack of dawn,” she said crisply. “They are not great ladies, but they pay their bills promptly. So bourgeois of them, I know, but—”

“I considered standing in the street beneath your window, and howling like a dog at the moon, the unreachable moon,” he said. “But I didn’t like to spoil your sleep. And perhaps people would throw shoes at me, or empty their chamber pots on my head. And I wasn’t sure which was your bedroom window. We never reached it, you may recall.”

She went hot all over.

“And so I went quietly home,” he continued, “to my bed, and imagined you in your bed, your face a little flushed. Perhaps you’d thrown off the bedclothes, because the night was warm. Or perhaps you thought of me, and that made you overwarm. I pretended you thought of me, the way I was thinking of you . . .”

He trailed off, and she was amazed to see color climb his neck to his jaw and as far as his cheekbones. “Devil take him! That cousin of mine is contagious. What am I saying?”

“Poetry,” she said. “Of a sort. Of the wooing sort.”

As though he hadn’t already wooed her and won with practically no effort at all. She’d been infatuated from the moment she’d looked away from the painting and up at him at the British Institution. From infatuation to falling in love . . . how absurdly easy it was, even for a sensible girl who kept her feet on the ground.

Or perhaps it was easy for her because she wasn’t used to it.

Or maybe it was the sandwiches.

“I feared so,” he said. “Is it working?”

“Not at all,” she said. She turned her back to him and took up a bill and stared at it though the words and numbers might as well have been written in Greek or Arabic or Chinese.

She heard him cross the room. She didn’t look up. She didn’t need to. She could feel him behind her. The air became fraught—with the scent of a man and the tension between them or whatever it was he did to make the air seem to vibrate like harp strings.

“What have you got there?” he said softly. “A mercer’s bill?”

She made herself focus. “I shall have to speak to him. The quantities are odd, and I’m sure he’s raised his prices since last week. Nine shillings sixpence for lutestring?”

“How much lutestring?” his voice deepened another degree.

She could feel his breath at the back of her neck. It was all she could do not to shiver. She swallowed. “Fifty-six yards. This must be Sophy’s doing. She ever did—”

“Fifty-six yards of lutestring at nine and six per yard,” he said, much in the same tone he used when she was in his arms.

“Yes,” she said.

“What else?”

“What does it matter?”

“Read it to me,” he said.

She could feel his voice in the pit of her stomach. He wasn’t touching her, yet it seemed as though his hands were everywhere. His mouth, too.

“Ninety-eight ells of armoisin,” she said. “At eleven shillings ninepence per ell.”

“Per ell,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

“Sixteen yards of fine velvet at fifteen shillings threepence per yard.”

“Mmm.” His cheek brushed hers. “Don’t stop.”

“One hundred twelve yards—”

“One hundred twelve. So much.” He kissed a sensitive place behind her ear.

She trembled.

“Don’t stop,” he said.

“One hundred twelve yards of black princetta at twelve shillings ninepence per yard.”

She went on, reading the bill, while he went on kissing her, murmuring in her ear, encouraging her. “More numbers,” he whispered. “More numbers.”

He kissed the side of her neck while he moved his hands to the front of her dress and cupped her breasts. She went on reading, though her knees were dissolving.

Three hundred fifty-six yards of green Persian, twenty-seven yards of mode, and on and on, though she could barely see straight, because of his hands, his hands, everywhere.

“Leonie, Leonie,” he murmured. “When you talk in numbers, you drive me mad.”

He slid his hands lower, and fabric rustled as he drew up her skirts, and her eyes were crossing as she tried to read. She ought to stop him but she didn’t want to. It was too wicked, and she wanted to find out where it would lead. She wasn’t sure she could stop, even if she had to, because she was melting in his hands and under the spell of his voice. She felt him lift her skirt and petticoat. Then he had his hands on her thighs, sliding over her drawers.

“Silk,” he said. “Silk drawers, you naughty girl.”

“White sarcenet, three shillings ninepence.”

He was kissing the back of her neck. She heard sounds. She knew what they were. Buttons being undone, the whisper of wool against muslin.

He slid his hand between her legs and she moaned. “Keep counting,” he said.

“Satin, nine shillings sixpence per yard. Genoa velvet, twenty-seven shillings sixpence per yard.
Oh.
”

He’d slid his fingers into the opening of her drawers. He was stroking her and she was shaking. Warmth flooded through her as though she swam in a pool, and hot mineral waters swirled about her.

“Mon Dieu!”
A low, involuntary cry as pleasure raced through her and shot her straight up, into that place, that bursting joy.

He pushed inside her then and she braced herself on the desk. His cheek was against hers.

“Naughty, naughty girl.” His voice was rough, his breath warm against her neck. “I missed you. Wicked thoughts while I lay in my bed, wishing I were in your bed, in your arms. I thought of so many interesting things we could do, so much I wanted to teach you, and all I might learn about you, all the secrets of your skin and your mouth and . . .” He withdrew a degree and pushed in again. “And here. Inside you. I wanted to be inside you.”

And she wanted him there, inside her, though it was dangerous—perhaps
because
it was dangerous. She was who she was, and all the numbers in the world, lined up exactly in the proper columns and tallied correctly, couldn’t change that. She was the sensible one, yet she was a Noirot and a DeLucey, and they’d been sinners for centuries.

He took her here, at her desk, and she took him, too, shamelessly, gladly, almost laughing as the heat and urgency built and built. She laughed even when she groaned. She laughed at their half-stifled cries of pleasure. She laughed at the foolish whispered words between them and at the naughtiness of it all.

It was a great joke, and a great joy, and she was happy, and happier still, and happier again, until there was no farther to go, and everything became absolutely perfect for one, glorious moment.

She savored that moment for the time it lasted, and remembered it when it was over. And she knew she’d remember it forever, long after he was gone and he’d forgotten her.

Later

W
hat Lisburne had
meant . . .

. . .
when he still had a functioning mind . . .

. . . was to woo her—or seduce her—and by degrees lead her to bed or at least to the chaise longue upstairs.

But there she’d been, at her desk, frowning over a bill and reciting quantities and prices in her brisk, businesslike voice. And his mind went dark, abandoning thinking to the other, very small brain, much lower down.

Then, after the sort of lovemaking more usually associated with courtesans and knowing country wenches—most certainly
not
recently initiated young women—she laughed.

There he was, still bent over her backside like a dog, trying to catch his breath and recover his reason, and she planted her elbows on the desk and her face in her hands and laughed.

And the sound caught at his heart and what was left of his brain and he laughed, too.

She turned and came up from the desk and took his face in her hands and kissed him. He felt the kiss to his toes and to the ends of his fingers and the roots and tips of his hair, as though he’d been struck by lightning.

Then she broke the kiss and said, “Come upstairs.”

Later

L
isburne woke with a smooth, rounded backside pressed to his groin. From the silken shoulder where his face rested a delicious scent wafted to his nostrils: lavender and Leonie. His arm curved around her waist, his hand lay on her belly. Naked, entirely naked.

He didn’t remember clearly the undressing, but when he opened his eyes, the bed curtains, not fully closed, revealed the aftermath of an orgy. The flickering light of a single candle illumined scattered pieces of clothing, some flung over chairs, some on the floor, some tangled about the bedposts.

Then he remembered.

A hurried undressing, and a long, slow time of lovemaking.

He smiled.

He kissed her shoulder and she turned in his arms, and her arms came up and went round his neck. He kissed her, and his heart began to race, he didn’t know why. He ought to be content. Satiated. But the feeling wasn’t recognizable. It was—

She broke the kiss. “What’s that?” she said. She let go of him, and pulled herself up on the pillows. “Someone’s at the door.”

He had to strain to hear it, and mightn’t have succeeded had the window not been open. From far below came several quick knocks in succession, echoing faintly in the court. Someone was at the shop’s back door. Or at one of the doors facing the cramped court behind No. 56.

“It must be after midnight,” he said. “Who the devil calls on you at this hour?”

Before he could collect his wits, she’d leapt from the bed. She hurried to the wardrobe, opened it, and pulled something out. A blue velvet dressing gown, very like a man’s, embroidered with exotic flowers. It was nothing like the obscene wrapper she’d donned the other night. This was no wisp of a thing, but cut in a style that seemed oriental, and lined with silk. When she wrapped it about her, it concealed everything but her shape. For some reason, this struck him as lewder than the bit of gossamer.

He sat up. “You can’t be meaning to answer the door,” he said. “And not in
that
. Come back to bed. Let the servants deal with whomever it is. Unless you’ve another lover who calls in the dead of night.”

“When do you imagine I have time for another lover?” she said. “I barely have time for you.”

She hurried out.

He dragged himself out of bed and began hunting for his shirt. It took a while because he became distracted. He found her stockings and his, then her corset, and a garter. Only one garter. Where was its mate?

He couldn’t leave her garments where he found them. He gathered them up as he’d done the other night, and sorted them into his and hers at the foot of the bed. By the time he’d found his shirt and pulled it over his head and was wondering where his trousers had got to, she was back.

“Make haste, make haste!” she said. “We’ve not a minute to lose.”

He was still dazed. Her undergarments, draped at the foot of the bed, made his mind cloudy. He wasn’t ready to make haste. He didn’t want to. What he wanted to do was drag her back to bed. He wasn’t done with her yet. He wasn’t done with this night yet. He’d felt so comfortable. As though . . .

His mind shied away from completing the thought.

He said, “Who’s come? Must I climb out of the window? Is the house afire?”

“Afire, indeed. Don’t say that.” She flung off the dressing gown and began rummaging in the wardrobe again.

Her back, her beautiful back . . . the sweet curve of her bottom . . .

He made himself think. “Leonie, who was at the door?”

She turned her head to look at him. Her hair was a riot of garnet curls, touched by streaks of fire where the candlelight caught it. Tendrils dangled at her temples and trailed down her neck . . . down her back, her beautiful back. The fog swept into his mind again, and he was starting toward her, forgetting everything else but the warmth of her body and the feel of her skin against his and—