Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
“You are grinding your teeth again, Fairmont.”
Dominic said it without looking at him. He stood beside Lucien on the stone terrace overlooking Lord Ashbury’s gardens, a glass of wine in his hand and an expression of careful amusement on his face.
Below them, the guests of the evening’s garden party drifted between hedgerows and lantern-lit pathways, their voices mingling with the soft strains of a quartet positioned near the fountain.
Lord Ashbury had fashioned himself a patron of the literary arts this Season, and the evening’s entertainment was a poetry reading held among the rose arbors.
Lucien could not imagine a worse way to spend a night, but Elinor had accepted the invitation before he could invent an excuse, and the brightness in her eyes when she spoke of it had made refusal impossible.
She was down there now, seated in the second row of chairs arranged beneath the arbor, her celestial atlas tucked beside her on the bench. She had brought it as one might bring a talisman, and the sight of it had done something inconvenient to his chest when he noticed.
She was also, at this moment, being spoken to by a lord Lucien did not recognize.
The man stood too close. He leaned in when he spoke, his hand resting on the back of Elinor’s bench, his posture curved toward her with the calm confidence of a man who believed his attention was a gift.
Elinor was listening politely, her chin tilted up, her spectacles catching the lantern light, and Lucien watched her nod at something the man said.
His jaw tightened.
“Who is that?” he asked.
Dominic followed his gaze. “Lord Hargrove’s second son. Inherited a tidy estate in Hampshire last year. I believe his name is Frederick. He is reasonably handsome, tolerably wealthy, and apparently interested in your betrothed.”
“She is not—” Lucien stopped himself.
She is not truly my betrothed was what he had almost said, and the correction would have unraveled everything.
He clenched his fingers around his glass. “She is speaking with him out of politeness. She speaks with everyone out of politeness.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about.” Dominic sipped his wine. “And yet you look as though you are considering whether Lord Frederick’s head would fit through the garden trellis.”
Lucien said nothing, because the image was not entirely inaccurate.
Below, Lord Frederick touched Elinor’s arm. A brief, deliberate graze of fingers against her sleeve, and Elinor did not pull away. She smiled, and something dark and hot and entirely unwelcome coiled in Lucien’s stomach.
He set his glass on the stone balustrade and walked down the terrace steps without excusing himself. Behind him, he heard Dominic sigh.
The reading had paused between poems, and guests were milling about the arbor, exchanging pleasantries.
Lucien moved through them with the ease of a man who had spent a decade learning to navigate a crowd without appearing to hurry, though tonight his stride carried an edge he could not entirely smooth.
He reached Elinor as Lord Frederick was mid-sentence, something about the merits of Cowper’s verse. Lucien did not care about Cowper’s verse.
“Lady Elinor.” He pitched his voice low enough that only she and Frederick could hear. “I require a word with you.”
Elinor blinked up at him. “Now?”
“Now.”
Lord Frederick straightened, his hand finally leaving the back of her bench. “Your Grace. I was merely enjoying Lady Elinor’s company. She has a remarkable knowledge of poetry.”
“She has a remarkable knowledge of most things.” Lucien held the man’s gaze long enough to watch the confidence falter. “If you will excuse us.”
It was not a question. Frederick inclined his head and retreated toward the refreshment table, and Lucien extended his hand to Elinor.
She took it, her expression caught between confusion and the beginning of irritation, and he led her away from the arbor, past the rose beds, toward the quieter paths at the far end of the garden where the lanterns thinned and the hedgerows grew tall enough to block the view from the terrace.
He found a stone alcove set into the garden wall, half-hidden by climbing jasmine, and stopped.
Elinor pulled her hand free. “What are you doing?”
“What was he doing?” Lucien’s voice came out harder than he intended. “His hand was on your arm, Elinor. He was leaning into you as though you had invited him to.”
“He was being pleasant. We were discussing poetry. You are being ridiculous.”
“I am being—”
He stopped and drew a breath. He could hear how he sounded, and it appalled him. He was a man who did not lose control, who had built his entire adult life around the principle that feelings were weapons other people aimed at him, and he did not hand them the ammunition.
“You are right. I am being ridiculous.”
“Yes, you are.” Elinor’s chin lifted. The lantern light caught her spectacles, and behind the glass her blue eyes held a steadiness that made something crack in his composure.
“Our engagement lasts until the end of the Season, Lucien. You said so yourself. After that, I am free to speak with whomever I please, and he was perfectly civil.”
The words hit him in the chest. She was right. She was entirely, infuriatingly right, and that her rightness made him want to put his fist through the garden wall told him everything he had been refusing to hear for weeks.
“Until then,” he said, and his voice had dropped to something rough and low that did not sound like pretense, “you are mine.”
Elinor went still. Her lips parted. The irritation in her expression did not vanish, but it shifted, making room for something that looked like the same reckless heat he felt burning through his own restraint.
“That is not what we agreed,” she whispered.
“No.” He stepped closer. The jasmine brushed his shoulder, and the scent of it mixed with the night air and whatever Elinor wore that always made him think of clean linen and old books. “It is not what we agreed. But I am telling you what is true.”
Her back met the stone wall of the alcove. She did not flinch, did not look away. Her hands hung at her sides, her fingers curled against her skirts, and her breathing had quickened in a way that matched his own.
“Lucien.”
He cradled her jaw in one hand. His thumb traced the line of her cheekbone, and she pressed into the touch, a small, involuntary lean that undid the last of whatever he had been holding in place.
He kissed her.
Not like the first time, in the office during the storm, when the kiss had been fierce and sudden and fueled by panic.
This kiss was slower, deliberate, his mouth moving against hers with a patience that surprised even him.
He wanted her to feel what he could not say, the weeks of watching her and wanting her and pretending that the wanting was part of the act.
His hand slid from her jaw into her hair, tilting her head back, and Elinor’s fingers found his waistcoat and twisted into the fabric, pulling him closer.
She kissed him back with a hunger that stole the breath from his lungs.
Her spectacles pressed against his cheekbone, and he did not care.
Her mouth was warm and open beneath his, and when she made a small, desperate sound against his lips, something animal and possessive rose in him that he had no interest in controlling.
He broke the kiss long enough to look at her. Her eyes were half-closed, her lips swollen, her chest rising and falling in short, uneven breaths. The spectacles sat crooked on her nose. She looked wrecked, and so beautiful it hurt.
“I want you,” he murmured against the corner of her mouth, his voice rough in a way he could not have disguised if he tried. “Not as part of the act. Not because anyone is watching. I want you, Elinor, and if you do not tell me to stop, I am not going to.”
Her fingers tightened on his waistcoat. “Do not stop.”
His hand slid down her waist, gathering the fabric of her skirt, and Elinor’s breath hitched as his palm found the warmth of her stockinged thigh above her knee.
She trembled beneath his touch, her head tipping back against the stone, and Lucien pressed his mouth to the column of her throat, tasting her pulse.
“Lucien.” His name left her mouth like a prayer, broken and breathless, and it was the most dangerous sound he had ever heard.
He pulled back.
Elinor’s eyes opened, dazed and questioning, her lips still parted. She reached for him, but he caught her wrist and held it.
“Patience,” he murmured.
Above them, the jasmine tumbled in thick, fragrant ropes along the garden wall.
Lucien reached up and broke a trailing stem free.
It was slender and supple, dotted with small white blossoms that released their scent at his touch.
He brought it down between them, and Elinor’s gaze followed the movement, her breath suspended.
“What are you—”
“Trust me.”
He guided her away from the stone wall, one hand at the small of her back, and lowered her onto the soft grass beneath the alcove’s overhang.
The ground was dry, sheltered from the evening dew, and the jasmine canopy closed above them like a curtain drawn against the rest of the world. The distant sounds of the garden party, the quartet, the laughter, the clink of glasses, faded to nothing.
Elinor lay on her back, looking up at him, her hair fanning across the grass. Her spectacles sat crooked on her nose. Her chest rose and fell with the quick, uneven breaths of a woman who did not know what was coming but had chosen not to stop it.
Lucien knelt beside her. He gathered the hem of her skirt and drew it upward, slowly, past her ankle, past her calf, past the ribbon that held her stocking at her knee. The night air met her bare skin, and she shivered.
He brushed the jasmine stem along the inside of her ankle.
Elinor made a sound that was half gasp, half laugh, her fingers curling into the grass. The blossoms trailed over her skin in a whisper of petals and green, so light it was barely there, and her body responded to the ghost of it.
Her knee bent. Her thigh tensed.
“Lucien.” Her voice had dropped to something raw. “You are—”
“Shh.”
He drew the stem higher. Along the curve of her calf, over the sensitive hollow behind her knee, and then up the inside of her thigh in a slow, deliberate line that made her back arch off the ground.
The jasmine left a faint trail of scent on her skin, and Lucien followed it with his eyes, watching the way her body reacted to each inch of contact, the way her breath shortened, the way her hands fisted in the grass as though she needed something to hold onto.
“You are trembling,” he said. “Tell me, darling. Is it the flower, or is it my hand you wish were there instead?”
“You are insufferable.” Her voice shook, but her hips shifted toward him, betraying every word. “It is entirely your fault.”
He smiled. “Good. I intend it to be.”
The stem traced the top of her thigh, barely touching, a tease that promised everything and delivered only the ache of waiting. Elinor’s hips shifted, and the small, involuntary movement sent a surge of heat through him that nearly shattered his control.
He set the jasmine aside.
His mouth replaced it.
He pressed his lips to the inside of her knee, where the skin was soft and warm, and Elinor’s hand flew from the grass to his hair.
He kissed higher. Slow. Deliberate. Following the path the jasmine had traced, his mouth warm against her skin, and she made a sound that was no longer a gasp or a laugh but something deeper, something that vibrated through her body and into his.
His lips moved higher still, along the inside of her thigh, and Elinor’s fingers tightened in his hair, her breathing ragged, her body taut beneath him like a bowstring drawn to its limit.
When his mouth found her pearl nestled between her curls, he caressed it with his tongue.
When he heard her strangled gasp, he increased his ministrations.
He suckled her pearl and gently slid a finger into her slick entrance.
His tongue and finger worked in unison. Sliding in and out.
Flicking again and again. His rhythm increased as her muffled cries increased.
When he felt her tunnel clench and her hips buck, he gave one last flick of the tongue as she partially collapsed against him, her body quivering and breaths coming in short pants.
Afterward, he held her against him while her breathing steadied, her forehead pressed to his shoulder, her fingers still clutched in his waistcoat. The jasmine moved above them in a breeze that carried laughter from the terrace, distant and irrelevant.
Elinor lifted her head. Her spectacles were still crooked, and he straightened them for her, the gesture so tender it startled him. She watched his face as he did it, and he could see the question forming behind her eyes.
What are we doing?
He did not have an answer. Or rather, he had one, and it terrified him so completely that his mind did what it had always done when something threatened to breach his defenses: it retreated.
“We should return to the party,” he said. “Before we are missed.”
Something flickered across Elinor’s face. Not hurt, not yet, but the careful, watchful expression of a woman who had learned to read the distance in other people’s voices.
“Of course,” she said.
She smoothed her skirts and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and walked ahead of him back toward the lantern light, and Lucien watched her go with the sick, familiar understanding that he was already doing what he had sworn he would not: pulling away from the one person who made him want to stay.
He followed her at a careful distance. The quartet had resumed. Guests were settling into their seats for the next reading.
Dominic caught his eye from the terrace and lifted a brow that said more than any words could.
Lucien looked away.
That night, in his study at Fairmont House, he poured himself a brandy and spread the duchy’s ledgers across his desk.
There were accounts to reconcile, tenants to correspond with, appointments to arrange with his solicitor regarding the last of his uncle’s debts.
Enough work to fill every waking hour for a week, if he let it.
He let it.
This is what you know, he told himself, turning the first page. Business. Duty. The clean, predictable architecture of numbers and obligations. This is what keeps you safe.
But the brandy tasted like nothing, and the numbers blurred, and when he closed his eyes, he could still feel the press of her fingers in his waistcoat and hear the broken way she had said his name in the dark.