Chapter 18 #2
He kissed the corner of her mouth, her jaw, the pulse point beneath her ear that made her gasp. His hands moved to her waist, drawing her closer, and she let him, her body softening against his.
His mouth trailed lower. He pressed his lips to the curve of her neck, tasting her skin, and Elinor’s head tipped back, her fingers twisted in his hair. The sound she made was quiet and unguarded, and she felt him shudder against her at the sound of it.
“Lucien.” His name left her mouth on a breath, half protest, half permission.
“Tell me what you want.” He murmured it against the hollow of her throat, his hands sliding up from her waist to the fastenings at the back of her dress. His fingers found the first hook and paused. “Tell me, Elinor.”
Her cheeks burned. Her pulse hammered in her throat. But she had asked for this. She had chosen this. And if she was going to have one night to learn what passion felt like, she would not spend it whispering safe things from behind her walls.
“I want you to touch me.” Her voice shook, but she held his gaze. “Everywhere. With your hands. And,” she swallowed. “And your tongue.”
Something shifted in his face. The tension in his jaw gave way to a slow, devastating smile, the one she had seen him aim at ballrooms full of women but had never felt directed at her with this much heat.
“There she is,” he said, his voice low and rough. “The bold one. I was wondering when she would show up.”
He unfastened the first hook. Then the second. His mouth followed where the fabric loosened, pressing kisses to the slope of her shoulder as the dress gave way beneath his hands. The firelight caught her skin, and his breath left him.
“You are extraordinary,” he said against her bare shoulder.
He drew back to look at her. Her eyes were dark, her lips swollen, her hair half fallen from its arrangement.
The dress hung loose around her arms, and she made no move to pull it back.
She watched him watching her, and the vulnerability of it should have frightened her, but the way he looked at her was not appraisal. It was reverence.
“I want to see you,” he said. “All of you. Not because I have earned it, but because you are choosing to let me.”
“You talk too much,” she whispered, and there was a tremor of laughter beneath the want in her voice.
He smiled against her mouth and kissed her again, deep and slow. His hands eased the dress further from her shoulders, down her arms, and she shivered as the cooler air met her skin. He pressed his palm flat against the bare curve of her waist, and she arched into the contact.
Then he lifted her.
She made a startled sound as his arms gathered beneath her, and he rose from the chair in a single, fluid motion. The chaise lounge beside the fireplace was narrow and worn, and Lucien laid her across it with a care that contradicted the urgency she could feel in the way his hands shook.
She looked up at him, her hair spread across the cushion, her dress pooled at her waist, her spectacles catching the firelight. Her hand reached for him, fingers curling into the open collar of his shirt, pulling him down.
“Stay,” she breathed.
He lowered himself over her, bracing his weight on one arm, and kissed the space between her collarbones. When his lips traced lower, following the line of her stays, her back arched off the chaise and she said his name again in that broken, breathless way that she could no longer control.
His hand slid to the bottom of her chemise and lifted it, his fingers finding the soft folds between her thighs. She opened to him, allowing his fingers to glide between the slick petals. His thumb found the hardened pearl and teased over it.
“Please,” Elinor gasped, arching against him.
Lucien needed no further invitation. He slid down until his mouth found the center of her pleasure.
He flicked his tongue against her pearl.
She writhed against him, and he gripped her hips.
He teased her with his tongue, again and again, tasting the honey that flowed from her as her pleasure increased.
She felt herself quiver as she reached a crescendo. He swirled his tongue and was rewarded with her body arching and shuddering as her pleasure peaked. When her cries subsided, he trailed kisses down the inside of her thighs.
He pressed one last, slow kiss to the inside of her knee, then lifted his head.
Elinor lay with one arm across her eyes, her chest still rising and falling in uneven drafts.
Her spectacles had been pushed up into her hair at some point, and without them the room softened to shapes and firelight.
Her lips were parted, and a flush spread from her cheeks down her throat to the skin he had bared.
She felt the fabric of her dress drawn back over her shoulders. He did not refasten it. He simply covered her, the way one draws a blanket over someone who has fallen asleep, and then he shifted onto the chaise beside her.
The narrow cushion was not built for two. He settled on his side, and Elinor turned into him without hesitation, her forehead pressing against his collarbone, her hand resting flat on his chest. His heart hammered beneath her palm.
Neither of them spoke. The fire crackled. The room smelled of wood smoke and something warm she could not name, and Elinor let her breathing slow against him.
Her fingers curled once against his shirt, then relaxed.
He pressed his lips to the top of her head and held her, and she let him, because the quiet of this room asked nothing of her, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, she did not feel the need to perform anything, not composure, not gratitude, not the careful smallness her stepmother demanded. She simply was.
When she stirred, he did not move. He let her be the one to pull back, to blink up at him, to reach for her spectacles and settle them on her nose.
The room came back into focus. So did the rest of the world.
“This cannot happen again.”
Elinor said it first. She sat in the chair with her cloak pulled around her shoulders and her hair falling in loose waves, and the words tasted like ashes, because she did not mean them.
But she said them because they were true, and because if she did not build the wall back now, she would never be able to.
Lucien stood at the window with his back to her. He nodded.
“It cannot,” he agreed. “Not if we wish to continue the ruse.”
The word ruse sat in the air between them and felt smaller than it once had. Thinner. Like a garment worn too many times.
“If this becomes real,” Elinor said, choosing each word with the precision she gave her lessons, “then when it ends, it will destroy us both. You said yourself that you cannot offer what a husband would offer. And I cannot afford to love a man who believes he is incapable of staying.”
She watched his shoulders tighten at the word love, and she knew she had found the wall he could not climb over. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. Vivian had taught him that love was the thing people used to leave, and no amount of wanting could undo eleven years of believing that in a single night.
“So, we continue as we were,” he said. “The engagement runs its course. You find a suitable match. And this…” he gestured at the room, at the chaise, at the space between them that was both too wide and not wide enough. “This was what you asked for. One night.”
“It was.” Elinor rose and fastened her cloak. At the door, she paused, one hand on the frame.
“Thank you,” she said. “For giving me what I asked for. And for telling me about Vivian. I know that cost you something.”
He turned from the window. His face was drawn, his eyes holding hers with an expression that looked like a man watching something precious slip through his fingers and choosing not to close his hand.
He nodded.
She slipped through the door and was gone.