Chapter 7 #2
He didn’t look up, couldn’t see her nestled so close to that fool again. The food settled like bricks in his belly. He’d lost his appetite. He pushed back from the table. “Good day, Miss King, Mr. Tilbury.”
He was out the door and striding across the gravel drive to the stables before he heard her behind him, but he didn’t let it slow him down. He needed a scene to sell some seats. He could ride a horse wearing only his smalls. That would get the tongues wagging.
“Wait! Remmy, slow down!”
He didn’t slow down, but he did turn, marching straight up to her so she had to stop abruptly as they met. Chest to chest, toe to toe.
“Well?” he demanded.
“What was that? In the breakfast room with Miss Carter?”
“Playing Cupid. Or, as Aria calls it, playing Romeo.”
“It was kind of you.” Her bosom rose and fell above her modest bodice. Modest, yes, but even the smallest swell there made him swell, too.
He continued toward the stables.
“What are you doing now?” She still followed him.
“Not entirely sure. A leisurely gallop across the estate wearing only my smalls, or a day of drunken debauchery at the local tavern? Difficult to choose.”
“Only… Your smalls?” she asked, sounding much too interested.
“Goddamnit woman, you’re going to drive me completely mad.”
“As you are driving me!”
“Good to know I have some small influence over your moods.” He stepped into the shadows of the stables, her footsteps scrambling behind him as he made for Jeopardy’s stall and tugged at his cravat. “Why are you following me?”
“I’ve been thinking about the window seat. What happened last night… It holds me in a trance. I could not sleep.”
Had she touched herself while thinking about him and her in the window seat? Had she slipped those elegant little fingers between her legs and—
A pillar popped out of the ground and slammed into him.
Bloody hell.
He crumpled like a paper doll but with more cursing, then there she was, fluttering over him, her brow furrowed as she crouched next to him.
“Remmy! There was a pole there!” She brushed his hair off his forehead where a dull pain had begun to pound. “You never were so absent-minded before. Are you injured? You should be more attentive to your surroundings.”
He tested his nose. Hurt like hell but didn’t seem to be broken. He jumped to his feet, brushing her hands away as she rose with him. “You should leave. It will not be good for your reputation to be caught alone with me. What will Tilbunny think?”
“You are more important to me than him.”
Remmy closed his eyes and allowed himself to imagine, for one breath, that important meant something else, something more.
And perhaps it did. She’d enjoyed both their encounters, even if she’d fled from them after.
He yanked the cravat off and dropped it to the ground then began to unbutton all his buttons.
He shrugged out of his jacket and waistcoat at the same time.
“Don’t you have other things to do than figure me out?
Your future is calling, and you must make a decision. ”
“I do not like thinking of it!” Her voice, unexpectedly loud, echoed in the rafters.
Cursing, her pulled her into Jeopardy’s stall, patting the horse’s flank to soothe him.
“Thinking of what? Me or your future?” Remmy asked.
“Both.” She growled, sounding like an infuriatingly adorable kitten.
“You dislike the man before you, and the boy you used to be friendly with is gone. You are using me as nothing more than a distraction for your own problems. Decide what you want, Tessa, and leave me be.”
“No, that is not it at all!” Her face screwed up, eyes gleaming.
“Then what is it, Tessa?”
“You are mine!” She bit her lip as if she’d not meant to let those particular words in that particular order escape.
He was glad they had.
“Say it again,” he demanded.
She shook her head.
He stepped closer, his voice harder. “Say it again.”
She pressed her back against the stall wall, attempting to gain distance when there was none.
“All these years, I have been thinking of you a certain way, thinking of you in our woods, on our rock, in all our little corners, and even though I knew you’d moved to London and opened a theatre, I did not consider how that might change you, make you into a different Remmy than before.
When… when I need the old one so badly.” Her hands made little white-knuckled fists at her sides, and she lifted her chin.
“I need the boy who befriended a lonely girl and loved her like a sister.”
Like a sister. He’d reached the edge of his control, stared off the edge into the unknown. “You, sweetheart, are missing some crucial details where I’m concerned. Now go court a vicar and make your choice.”
When she didn’t move, he wrapped his hands around her upper arms, his knuckles scraping against the wood behind her. He held her gently, rubbing his thumbs back and forth. “Neither of us can be who we used to be. But that is not a bad thing. We never used to touch like this.”
Her breath hitched.
His too, but he kept talking because she kept following him and kept letting him touch her and kept enjoying it, and how could he stop himself when she—hell—might want him back.
He rested his forehead against hers. “I like to touch you like this, and”—he released her only to place his forearms against the wall on either side of her head—“I think you like it, too.”
Their heavy breaths mingled in the slim space—continuously shrinking—between them.
Her eyes closed, pressing tightly together, and when she spoke, her voice was strained, as if she barely contained a flood of emotions ready to drown them both. “I do.” The smallest whispered words.
But they swept him into a kiss, diving in with his tongue to taste her. Jam and tea and lemon. Summer sweetness. Her lips were more intoxicating than the wine that had led to the first kiss, and they opened so sweetly, so readily for him.
She slid her hands around his neck, holding him steady and close with no signs of letting go.
He yanked her bodice down and swept her nipple into his mouth, sucked to the music of her gasp.
“Do you like this?” he asked, teeth grating against her soft skin.
“Yes.” The word a shiver.
He dropped to his knees. “I wanted to do this to you last night, and I think you would have let me.”
She opened her eyes, and he saw the truth there. She would have let him.
“I think you crawled into bed with an ache between your legs.”
“I did,” she breathed.
“I was going to help you with that before we were interrupted. I was going to slip my finger into your cunny and stroke you till you screamed.”
Her eyelashes fluttered gold against her cheeks. Teeth sank into the plump curve of her lower lip. She was aroused.
“Did you sleep fitfully with that space between your legs buzzing? Because of me?”
A little noise caught in her throat.
“Tell me,” he demanded.
Her hands sinking into his hair as if she owned the very shape of his skull, a sweet, unconscious claiming. “I did ache. But I took care of it.”
“How?” He rested his forehead on her belly, every bit of himself unraveling.
“A little imagination. My own hand.”
“Are you trying to make me jealous?”
“Can I? With only… my own touch?”
He caught both her wrists, pinned them against the wall. “Absolutely.”
“I thought of you, though.”
His throat felt raw. “You’re supposed to run from me, Tessa, not entice me.” She was a torment talking like a tease, insisting he resurrect her old friend. “Run, Tessa, or I’ll keep going.” He held his breath.
She didn’t run.
Thank God.
He slipped his hands beneath her skirts and rubbed up her legs, around the outside of her perfect thighs.
“What are you—” Her words choked off, replaced by a moan as he kissed her seam, licked it.
He inhaled deeply, surrounded by her scent. Perfect. He nuzzled the inside of her thigh. Her shiver was a goddamn delight.
He shouldn’t do this. Really, he shouldn’t. Knew better. But he’d been looking to make a scandal. He found the pearl hidden in her curls and rubbed circles around it with his thumb, listening to the rhythm of her body all around him, letting that rhythm tell him what she liked.
She liked bright colors and quiet mornings.
And though she hid it well, she liked being a little naughty. Sneaking out of church on Sundays, stealing biscuits from the kitchen, sending art to London. Now this.
He kissed her sweet cunny, tasted it with a long, lazy lick. Her breath caught, his name on her lips broken in two.
“You… you shouldn’t. What are you…”
He wasn’t working hard enough if she could still talk.
He dug his hands into the generous meat of her hips and ate her up like a man starving.
The stables were a living thing, the horses’ whinnies hiding their own furtive noises.
His cock was hard and demanding, but he needed her pleasure first. Her breathing quickened.
He ignored his body’s need. It was that or come in his trousers like a boy of sixteen touching his first breast. Might happen anyway.
His entire body was hard with the taste of her on his tongue. “So sweet,” he murmured before lapping at her clitoris, nipping at it.
She tugged at his hair. Her entire body shivered, clenched. When a moan slipped between her lips, he shot a hand up to cover her mouth, to smother those throaty little cries she couldn’t seem to control. Or to keep them forever in the palm of his hand.
She mouthed his name against that palm as he slipped his fingers into her, rubbing his other thumb in patient circles.
It didn’t take long. He felt her shudder, felt the painful pleasure ripple down her body. She jerked, every muscle seizing, and the back of her head hit the wall—a hard blow.
He cursed, leaving the heaven of her skirts and cradling her head, kissing her face as she melted into his embrace.
She chuckled, her breath hot on his neck, her hands fists in the linen of his shirt.
“Better than your hand?” he whispered near her ear.
“Uhng.” She seemed for a moment like she might sink into him, stay forever cradled against his chest.
He released her—pulled up her bodice, fixed her sleeves, and stepped away.
“Remmy?” She wobbled, finding it difficult to keep herself upright without help.
He’d done that to her. He wanted to do it to her again, over and over and over again, and he was confident she’d let him with a very little persuasion. He was closer than he’d ever been to having her. He could still feel her against his skin, taste her on his lips.
“Leave,” he said, yanking his shirt off over his head and tossing it to the hay-strewn floor. He didn’t want to know what she would say next, how she would dismiss this interlude and him in one oblivious sentence. If she left now he could imagine…
Her fingertips coasted over her lips, and her gaze riveted on his mouth. The way she rippled so easily to life beneath his touch… Her body did not see him as a friend. If only her mind agreed. The hazel of her eyes shifted—like sunlight breaking through fog.
“Go,” he growled, hands fumbling at his fall where his cock strained the buttons.
He wanted to embrace her, tell her he loved her, but that might ruin this floating sensation, ruin the way her laugh was seeping into him, making him almost giddy.
Softer, he said, “Go, Tessa, before someone discovers us.” She wanted choices, and if they were found out, she’d have none but for him.
He wished he loved himself as well as he loved her, then he’d ruin her without compunction and take what he wanted most by forcing her hand.
She paused in the stall door, her gaze caught on his hands, his fall. Then she left, and God how he hated watching her walk away. But… after this morning, she could never use the word sister with him again.
And that made him unaccountably happy.