Chapter 6 #2
“It’s true. Do you think a younger son in a family of eleven can do as he pleases? Oh, it helps that Father’s an earl, but Kit is the heir. The twins fit well into the law and the military. I fit nowhere. I tried everything and mastered nothing.”
“But you found the theatre. You chose it. And I should like to choose my path, too.” She traced a line of the chessboard with her thumb, picked at a chip in the gold paint with the tip of her nail.
“When you were younger, you wanted only to be a famous artist. Has that changed? If you had all the time in the world to draw your future, just as you please… would it still look like that?”
She pressed a hand against her chest, right over her heart.
Its beat had become erratic. No idea why.
Only… no one had cared yet to ask her that.
She closed her eyes and let the future come to her, taking shape like a painting—first wide swathes of splotchy color, then shadows and light, dimension and depth.
Foreground, midground, an entire composition. Then the little details.
“I don’t need to be famous. I just need to be free. To paint as I please. And I should like… should like…”
“Tell me.”
“To be loved. By a big family. A riotous one. Like yours.”
“If you marry Tilbury, will he let you paint? Does he have a big family?”
“I do not know.”
“I only want you to have what you want, to help you have it.” And he seemed to offer it to her in the hollow of that upturned palm.
The room was too hot, and she wandered to the nearby window seat, where one pane was pushed open. The breeze tickled the sweaty skin of her neck, and she sighed.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I am grateful the Belle is wrong after all, and you are not a heartless rogue but still my sweet Remmy.”
He stiffened, snatched his hand back across the table. “Your sweet Remmy. The way you say that,” he sneered, “you make me sound like a young boy not yet out of skirts.”
“It’s a good thing! If you were a true scoundrel, you would pull these curtains closed”—she grasped the edge of the large, velvet drapes to the side of her—“and seduce me, even with company nearby.”
He snorted. “They’re asleep. And half deaf. We might as well be alone.” But he stayed put, arms crossed over his chest. Not seducing even a little.
“I told you. Sweet as ever. I knew it.”
“I’m not falling for the same taunting twice, Tessa. If you try again, I’ll think you want to kiss me.”
Her heart stuttered. Kiss him. Kissing had been a mistake… “You were foxed. You did not mean to do it. You would not have, but you’d had too much wine. Besides, even brandy brewed, you’d never have gone farther than a kiss. And what is a kiss between friends, after all?”
“Stop, Tessa.”
“It is hardly significant, particularly not between us.”
“Not another word.”
“Why, kisses between us would be harmless. So, when I think on it, what happened at the rock wasn’t truly scandalous at all.” She gave him her brightest smile. She felt brighter inside.
And he almost knocked his chair down standing. His shoes clipped across the floor, and he stopped right before her, grasped the curtain’s edge, and yanked it across the rod, closing them in.
She couldn’t see his face in the dark, but she could feel his heat, hear his voice, somehow, in the bone and muscle of her body.
“You’re about to find out how wrong you are.” The words a low growl near her ear.
She jumped, squeaked, and turned with him as he moved around her.
Her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and she found his outline against the window, sinking toward the seat until it caught him.
His hands landed on her hips, and he dragged her forward between his wide-spread legs, the solid muscle of his thighs trapping her, the hot clutch of his hands circling her waist.
“What are you doing?” she whispered through a throat thick as mud.
His eyes seemed to glow in the dark. “I’m showing you.
There is no wishing I was different. I am who I am Tessa, and I’m glad for it.
Maybe I want you to see me differently.” His fingers cinched her waist. “Yes, I think I do. You kissed the rake back, after all. Should I tell you of the actresses? How I take them in my office backstage after their performance? How the intensity of the stage carries over into the enjoyment of a good fuck.”
“Remmy!” It was too hot. Outside. Inside. Between…
“What about the time I jumped naked into the Serpentine. Do you want to know about that?”
Yes. “No.”
“Would you like to hear—”
“No.” Yes.
“How I’d give up all of those liaisons and scandals for single touch of your breast, for a stroke of my hand between your legs?”
She couldn’t breathe. Her nipples had tightened. The same wetness she stroked into existence some nights between her legs had begun to dampen her sex. He groaned, smoothing his hands up her back and cupping her neck.
He tugged her downward so they were nose to nose. “Tell me you do not wish to be kissed.”
He was so close, smelling of some spicy cologne and peppermint, which he kept in his pocket always. He’d been the one to develop her own peppermint habit, had given her gifts of them for every birthday.
“Tell me now, Tessa, or I’ll do it.”
“You won’t.”
“Try me, sweetheart.”
In the light of the party with Tilbury, she’d felt nothing but numbing darkness, and here in the dark with Remmy, she felt nothing but alive. And maybe a kiss could remind him who he was. He didn’t belong to a long series of faceless actresses. He’d always belonged to her.
“Do it,” she said. “Kiss me.” He wouldn’t.
He did.
Remington Ives, the boy who would never let her down, set his lips oh-so gently against her own, as if afraid to ruin the moment. But Remmy the man jerked her hard against his body and caged her in with his legs and bit her bottom lip, demanded her attention, her submission.
The man, the boy, all of him wrapped up into one determined, muscled body, parted her lips and claimed her.
And she let him, letting the torrents take her.
The fine wool of his jacket was soft beneath her fingertips, suddenly sensitive when they’d never been before.
But the wool wasn’t him, and she rubbed her hands higher, across his cravat and the rough, new stubble of his jaw and into the hair at his nape.
Silky and warm with the slightest dampness of sweat at the scalp.
She made fists, trapping the strands between her fingers, and she tugged, pulling his face up and herself closer because her aching breasts felt heavy and needy.
He wanted her closer, too, and he stole the back of her neck with one hand, plundered the small of her back with the other. No space between them now, as their breaths heated, quickened, between slanted kisses. Too many to count.
Still not enough.
But he ripped away, broke the kiss, stared up at her, dazed.
She looked the same way. She must, and she raised a shaking hand to her lips.
Swollen, wet. No sound beyond the curtain closing them in but the crackle of a dying fire, and through the sliver of space between the curtain and the wall, she could just see the group by the fire. Most had left. The rest were sleeping.
This was wrong.
They could be caught.
He was turning her into a scandal, cupping her cheek, returning her attention to him.
When she caught him staring at her breasts, which were at the perfect height for him to study at his leisure, she was glad to be one.
Nothing felt so good as having this man stare at her décolletage as if he wished to devour it.
“You will not,” she whispered.
His only answer a wicked grin before he set his mouth to her skin just above the neckline on the swell of one breast, and she discovered this was better—the devouring.
She might not survive it, might not live past the way he made her feel—as if she were dying, as if she were truly alive for the first time in her life.
Everywhere he touched her, she leaned into his touch, feeling like a cat nuzzling for affection.
And when he slid her sleeve off her shoulder, she shrugged, helping him divest the strap of her stays, the sleeve of her shift as well.
When he placed a hot kiss on the skin he’d uncovered, she sighed and dropped her head back.
And when he slipped his hand into her bodice and cupped her breast, she bit her bottom lip to keep quiet.
“Holy hell,” he breathed, circling his thumb around her nipple. “Holy hell.” His rapt attention, the way he cursed and licked his lips. He held her breasts with both hands, squeezed and kissed them, laving his way around her nipple then sucking it into his mouth, teasing it between his teeth.
He proved her wrong with every touch, going further than she’d thought he would, and entirely sober. Not a hint of wine or brandy on his lips. On either of their lips.
This was them.
She wanted more. She writhed and rolled closer to him, tugging at his hair, begging without words for more.
Oh heavens, she never wanted him to stop.
She needed to be closer, and he somehow knew it, his hands wandering down her body and cupping her bottom, pressing her more tightly against him, lifting.
She yelped, and he kissed her quiet as she scrambled to make sense of her position in the air.
Her knees found the window seat, and she settled on top of him, straddling his thigh.
His hard thigh. Her own thigh was nestled in the center of his body, pressed against his groin, his long, hard shaft locked between them.
A window. A curtain. Another world entirely.
Six years. Six years she’d followed Lady Chattaway across the Continent tending to her needs. And six minutes to realize she had needs as well. And they were sorely unmet.
Not for long. Not as Remmy’s eyes flashed open and his hand gripped her hip. Beneath her skirts.
“You sneak,” she hissed. Her body directly contradicted her tone, rolling her hips to press her sex into his muscled leg. A moan—hers—as pleasure coalesced at her center, burning warmth throughout her body.
He squeezed his fingertips into her flesh. “You’re the sneak, hiding this bounty all these years. I can’t look at you and not touch.”
She grinded against his muscle again and moaned, knowing it was the sound of surrender.
She clasped her hands behind his neck, and her thumb brushed against something hard and cool.
The earring. A desire—sudden and startling—flashed through her.
She wanted to taste that earring, to tug it between her teeth until he hissed in pain.
A snore from behind the curtain ripped across her consciousness.
They jolted as far apart as they could with her still on his leg, then froze, their limbs still tangled together with linen and silk and each other.
More snores. Then the creak of a chair and the shuffle of footsteps. Then silence.
But the spell broke. Before she’d made the most of it.
Made the most of it? What she’d been doing… what he’d been doing to her… It proved he was exactly what he said he was—her friend no longer. The only person who’d ever loved her now wouldn’t hesitate to ruin her.
She bolted out from behind the curtain.
When she could finally speak, she whispered, “Why?”
“Why what?” His voice a low, raw rumble as he stepped away from the window.
“Why this? Why now? You’ve not had a drop to drink.”
“Likely because I hate myself.” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “I could ask you the same question. Why?”
She couldn’t explain. Didn’t understand.
“Why”—he stood and whispered hot next to her ear—“did you try to ride my leg to your climax?”
She jerked away from him. She had done that. “I… I do not know.”
“You liked it.” His knuckles landed on her cheek, and she could not deny it, could not help but lean into the caress. “I think I could seduce you.”
He could. God help her, he could. “N-no. This is wrong.”
He cursed and tore his hand away from her cheek. Only a few long strides took him out of the room.
But he remained. She could see impressions of him everywhere—by the fire singing, across the table playing chess poorly, in the window seat kissing her.
She touched her lips—sensitive and swollen, just as she was between her legs. Oh, she buzzed with unfulfilled need.
That cursed snore!
No, that blessed snore. Without it, she had no idea how far she’d have gone. With Remmy. She fled to her bedchamber, but she could not tell if it was to cry or to finish the work her friend had started and ease the ache between her legs. Too bad it would not ease the new ache within her heart.