Chapter Twelve #2
She’d asked Drake about that, once, assuming Teddy’s family must have departed London on holiday.
“No, pet,” he’d said, a considering expression on his face. “Let’s just say Ted and the earl…that is…” He had broken off at Teddy’s approach.
It soon became evident Teddy had overheard her question. “What’s this? Never say I’m making a nuisance of myself, love?”
“No, not at all,” she’d hastened to assure him, then resisted the urge to kick her brother when she saw his disparaging eye roll. Only the fact Teddy’s back was to Drake saved his shin.
“Good,” came Teddy’s suave reply. “Suffice it to say, I prefer your cook’s culinary skills to my father’s, not to mention your father is far more generous with his cognac than is mine.”
She poured a large measure of the golden, sweet-smelling liquor and turned to see Teddy, tall and solid and so very beautiful standing before the window. Here. With her.
As if he sensed her stare, he turned to look at her and sent her a warm smile she felt all the way to her toes. “Let’s sit near the hearth.”
Teddy took his time, crossing the lushly appointed, utterly feminine drawing room to join Georgina, awaiting him before the sofa, one snifter in hand.
Her gaze, fixed on him, never wavered. There was nothing provocative about the way she looked at him, and yet, the closer he got the more his blood heated.
Something about the banked hunger lurking in the depths of those silvery eyes, the stillness within her, as if the mere sight of him thrilled her, called forth his every carnal instinct. He wanted her. Wanted to lose himself in her.
Yet she maintained her stated desire to rid herself of him.
At his approach, she handed him the snifter without a word.
“What? None for you?”
She shook her head, and a wry smile tugged at her full lips. “Unlike you, evidently, the spirits go straight to my head.”
He made no effort to contain his wicked chuckle. “Then we shall certainly have to share.”
Her delight at his words, which she tried to mask by lowering her eyes, utterly enchanted him.
“Sit with me.” He took one of her hands and helped her to the sofa before joining her.
Though he left a fair amount of distance between them, he mourned every inch. He liked being near to her. Liked touching her. Liked the sweet rose fragrance that clung to her and hovered ever in and out of range.
He wanted to kiss her again. Was nearly desperate to do so. Not to mention he’d made up his mind to push past her defenses, to access whatever magical essence she alone seemed to possess to unlock his past. So why was an irritating vein of self-reproach rearing its head?
He swirled the golden contents in his snifter, contemplated the rich spirits. Then he sipped and stomped down hard on the misplaced guilt. She was his wife. She had married him for better or worse.
“Darling, you do seem somewhat familiar.”
Her liquid-silver eyes widened. “I do?”
“Yes. I was thinking, it might help if you share an anecdote about our history. Something only the two of us would know.”
She swallowed, hard. “Such as?”
He handed her the cognac. Without a word, without looking away from him, she lifted the snifter to her lush mouth and sipped—and the answer came to him.
“I’d like to hear about our first kiss.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He took back the cognac and draped his other arm over the back of the sofa. With very little effort, he could brush the velvet trim of her sleeve, could trace his fingertips over the satiny looking skin of her bare shoulder to her nape.
“Tell me how it happened. Where were we? Surely, alone somewhere.”
She licked her lips and looked down at her lap where her hands fidgeted with her skirts. Then, she gave a tremulous smile and something in him shifted.
He realized this was not just a means to an end for him. He wanted to know. Wanted to experience the moment that had likely sealed their fate.
“We weren’t alone. Not really,” she began. Her dimples flashed into view. “We were at a summer house party, in the country. One where both of our families attended.”
“Go on.” He inched ever so slightly closer to her.
“After dinner, the hosts arranged a small dance. But it was ever so hot that year, and they’d opened the terrace doors, so that guests could dance indoors, and then slip out into the cool of the night between sets.”
“Mm. Very considerate hosts.” He considered asking the name of these illustrious hosts, then decided he didn’t much care.
She glanced at him, a slight smile playing at her mouth.
His groin went tight. Deliciously so.
“You hadn’t yet asked me to dance, though you had danced with nearly every other female in attendance, single or otherwise.”
“How uncouth of me.”
“Quite.” Her silver eyes gleamed with feminine mystique. “But I was not hurting for dance partners, either. I think you might have been a little jealous.”
Now he did trace the tender skin at her nape. It was every bit as soft as he’d imagined. A few curling tendrils had escaped her coiffure and he toyed with them, winding them around his fingertip, gently, so as not to pull a single strand.
When her lips parted and she drew a shuddering sigh, his cock pulsed to life.
He eased closer still, stretching out his legs before him and sliding down into a recumbent sprawl, head lolled back on the upper cushion. “Were you flirting with the other men, Georgina?”
“No, of course not,” she said, taking instant umbrage, which he hoped would distract her from his fingers, exploring her warm, supple skin.
“None of this tells me how we ended up kissing.”
Her chest rose and fell with the force of her breaths, which were coming faster.
“One of my dance partners offered to get me a glass of lemonade, and suggested I await him on the terrace. I informed my mother, who said she would join me the moment she saw him returning from the refreshment room with the beverage.”
“And I slipped out after you.”
She smiled and, once again, studied her hands in her lap. “You did. You called to me from the shadows from the path leading into the gardens, just off the terrace. I went toward your voice—”
“You little minx. What if it had been someone else?”
Her eyes met his. “I’d know your voice anywhere, Theodore Arlington.”
A curious warmth flooded his chest. “Would you? Go on, then.”
“I couldn’t find you. It was quite dark, as the gardens were unlit and supposedly off limits, and just as I intended to turn back, you called again.
” She grinned. “I said, ‘I must get back. Lord Rolston will be looking for me.’ That’s when you materialized beside me.
You said, ‘I’ll walk you back, in that case.
Only, I thought you’d like to make a wish in the faery fountain. ’
“You see, there was a folktale that held if an unmarried woman tossed a hair pin into the fountain under the light of a half-moon—”
“A half-moon? Not a full moon?”
She slanted him a suppressive glance. “Do you want to hear the tale or don’t you?”
“Oh, I do, darling.”
His easy capitulation appeared to mollify her, and, if he wasn’t mistaken, that banked hunger in her eyes was no longer so banked.
“You led me along the garden path, holding my hand the entire way as I could not see two feet in front of me.” Her eyelids drifted closed. “But soon I could hear the trickle of the fountain. Then I smelled roses. It seemed like a hundred blossoms scented the air.”
“Roses,” he murmured, reaching one hand to feather over her mound of springy curls. “Your favorite,” he stated, unequivocally.
She gasped and opened her eyes. “Yes. You gave me my first. A long stemmed, pink rose, when I was still a girl.”
“Is that why you always smell of rose petals? Why their lovely fragrance clings to you?”
She nodded.
As gently as he could manage, he brushed his fingertips over her eyelids, urging her to close them again. “What happened next, darling?”
“You positioned me before the fountain and stood behind me. I could feel the warmth of your body—and the tickle of your breaths, as you brought your mouth to my ear.”
“Wait,” Teddy said, unfolding from the sofa.
Georgina’s eyes blinked open just before he reached down and hauled her to her feet.
Then he turned her to face away from him. “Close your eyes, Georgina. Are they closed?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He moved very close, his body cocooning hers, almost, but not quite touching. “Go on.”
She, indeed, smelled of roses. The idea that she favored the flower simply because he had once given her a mere single-stemmed bloom filled him with an unbearable tenderness, and everything in him wanted to pull her into him.
To luxuriate in her softness, to snug her exquisitely rounded derriere against his groin, cup her enticingly full breasts in his palms. He was hard as a rock and hanging on her every word.
“I could smell your delicious, Teddy scent,” she whispered.
He choked out a laugh and, unable to resist, placed his hands on her shoulders, edging the capped sleeves down to brush her bare skin with his palms.
“I pulled a hair pin from my coiffure…” She mimed doing so, arching her back, and her bottom did graze him then.
He bit back a tortured groan.
“And tossed it, then heard the tiniest splash. And you said, ‘What did you wish?’ And I knew I shouldn’t tell you, but I did.”
His hands flexed on her shoulders. “What did you say?” But he already knew the answer.
Her words came out in a whisper he had to strain his ears to hear. “I said, ‘I wish you would kiss me.’”
He turned her, unresisting, to face him and her arms twined up around his neck as if they belonged there.
A shudder of exquisite need rolled through him. “Say it again, Georgina.”
She gazed up at him, pure longing and desire in her beautiful quicksilver eyes. “Kiss me, Teddy, please.”
In the next heartbeat, his mouth covered hers, feasting and ravenous.
She tasted so sweet, like sweet brandy, and her lips.
For the love of the saints, no woman’s lips had ever felt so right under his.
So…God, he couldn’t get enough of her kiss, her softness.
He wanted to feel those luscious petals on every part of his body.
He sucked her lower lip between his teeth and nibbled, gently, so gently.
She shivered in his arms—arms he had not meant to, had not made a conscious decision to, wrap around her. He couldn’t draw her close enough.
She seemed to be suffering with the same affliction. Her muscles quivered, straining to hold him to her.
Georgina, petite, curvaceous, Georgina. She was nowhere near his height, but she fit him, fit his hard frame as if she had been fashioned only for him.
This was right. She was right.
The glorious sense of being fully alive, fully present, fully seen, fueled a ravenous need in him—for this woman, and this woman alone, with the body of a goddess and the heart of an angel—to claim her as his.
You can have your way with as many women as you like, Ted, but you’ll leave off my sister.
He stumbled back as if she’d pushed him, and glanced about, looking for the owner of the voice who’d spoken so clearly he might be present in this very room, even though Teddy knew no one was here save the two of them.
But he knew who had said it, once upon a time.
What he didn’t know was why. Why would Georgina’s brother warn him from her?