Chapter 9 #2
Hart lowered his brow to hers. “If you aren’t careful, Fleur, you’re going to find yourself in some hidden corner, backed against a wall with one of those scoundrels rutting between your sweet thighs,” he squeezed out between his clenched teeth, enraged that he imagined himself in that place.
But then he was overcome by a haze of bloodlust thinking about someone else there.
Fury burned through the sheen of tears in her eyes. “I would never encourage your courtship!”
This time an honest laugh left him. “As if I would.”
“I would not be with you if you were the last man in the world and my life depended on it. Not if you built me the biggest library in the world.”
Ah, yes, his well-read, little bluestocking. She’d put her love of books above all else, and he was ruthless enough to use it as a weapon against her.
“What about if I gave you my copy of Don Juan?” he jeered and jibed like the bullying boy he became around her.
Her shriek threatened all the crystal in the showroom. “You insufferable buffoon. Every moment I spend with you is miserable.”
With a snarl, Hart drew her up by her shoulders to meet his eyes. “Every moment spent with me is miserable?”
Fear was any rational woman’s response. “You may not require a monocle yet—”
“I do not,” he snapped.
“But if you need me to repeat myself, a visit from one of your Tremaine family physicians is in order. So let me clarify: you make my life bloody miserable.”
“Well, that makes two of us, Fleur. For you are hardly a stroll in the Pleasure Gardens, yourself.”
Her eyes reflected his own frustration, confusion, and anger. Their chests surged powerfully from the force of emotion.
And then, Hart finally took what he had been longing to since she’d climbed up on a knee to look him in the eye at Chilton’s. A low growl worked up his chest. Cupping a hand about her nape, Hart drew her in, angled her close, and kissed her.
Hart didn’t kiss virgins. He steered clear of them altogether. She was the first. She would be the last until he married. And whichever woman he chose from that list, he would stake his life on not a single one of them responding the way Fleur did.
Fleur kissed him eagerly, unabashedly, letting out little mewls. She pressed herself against him, writhing and twisting like she wanted to climb into his skin.
And more than he needed air in his lungs, Hart wanted to be inside her.
And he did not need anything or anyone.
At some point, he had released her from his hold. At some point, her long, graceful fingers found purchase in his jacket front.
Hartwell kept up his siege of her mouth.
Since that stupid auction, she had driven him bloody mad. She had teased him. Laughed at him. With him. Duped him. Then made a fool of him.
And yet, the greatest grievance being every little moment of camaraderie that had come that day, before the Byron mess.
“You are a witch,” he rasped, backing her up, until she collided against a crystal case.
Curling his large palm around her fragile nape, he kept her in place while he ravaged her mouth. He didn’t kiss her like the lady she was. He kissed her like he owned her. Hart needed only this from the impertinent chit. To show her who held the power. Who was in control.
She clawed her way inside his jacket and dug her fingers into his lawn shirt. The bite of her nails pushed him further towards insanity.
Parting her mouth, he buried his sinner’s tongue inside her innocent mouth and kissed her the way he had wanted to since that bloody auction that made rivals of them. She kissed with the same boldness he’d tormented himself thinking about during dinner.
Then there had been last night. Him seated down that bloody table while she turned her heart-shaped lips for every other man present and jeered at Hart with her taunting eyes.
“All the fun you’re having baiting me. Taunting me. Tempting me.”
She moaned. “I-I tempt you?”
“You like that do you, you impertinent minx,” he jeered, at himself as much as her.
“Yes.” Fleur packed several syllables into that plaintive groan.
Hart let his hands do their own exploration; he learned the generous curve of hips he’d conceived as narrower, the natural arch of her back. This is what he needed. She was like any fine feast. After he had a taste, he could quench his craving.
He moved his journey elsewhere. Angling Fleur’s head right, his fingers becoming twisted in the corkscrew curls he’d previously mocked, but now luxuriated in, he threaded his fingers through the silky strands.
The fringe of her lashes that she had batted flirtatiously at other men now lay like a golden curtain, weighted down with passion.
And Hart, like all men since the beginning of time, triumphed over her complete surrender.
She had leveraged every insult there was at Hart, but in the end, his wasn’t a one-sided passion. She didn’t simply yield—she curved her body eagerly against him, seized his mouth like it was hers to take.
Theirs was a shared madness.
If purging was the point, savoring every drop of her was the key.
Hart kissed and licked the place where her swan-like neck met the hollow of her shoulder. Licked and nipped a path along her collarbone, and with his mouth, he charted a path to remembrance to mark what was rare, familiar.
Then, he made a fatal error; he buried his face in the deep crevice between her breasts.
Not that it was a mistake because it was any less than he wanted.
No, as Hart filled his palms with the surprisingly heavy weight of her flesh, the Devil taunted him.
Do you think you’ll be content with only this, you stupid man? How could you be when you haven’t explored all of her satin-soft skin? Have a peek at her nipples.
Hart didn’t even put up a fight for morality and danced all too happily down the path of sin.
The hands he used to drag her neckline down shook. Then shook even more as he had his first look at the massive curve of her breasts and the enormous, swollen tips that crowned them. All of him shook; his legs, his arms, the very thumbs and forefingers he swept over the dusky peaks.
Pleasure bolted through him.
And Fleur. God help him, Fleur combed her fingers through his hair. She moaned incoherently, something that resembled four names rolled together into one. “William Henry Edward Charles.”
Fleur clasped his head, anchoring him while he worshipped her; she curved her body into his, but then his muscles were growing useless and making his legs useless. The hoyden was saucy even in passion. His pulse thundered in his ears. He knew she would be. Had thought it. Dreamed it. Imagined it.
His breath came in deep billows and he gave her something he had never given another—his name. “Henry Edward William Charles.”
Hart gave it to her so the name she was keening wasn’t a tangle of his that, when uttered, formed someone else’s. After all, what red-blooded man wanted to hear a fiery hoyden coming undone while breathing the wrong name?
He waited for her to use it. Lusted for the sound of it rolling off in her lilting voice, now heavy with passion.
“Henry!”
Nothing could have prepared him. Hearing her sultry voice curl around his name in plaintive yearning pressed Hart to the edge of madness. And it also yanked him back to the point of reason.
He’d have rather surrendered food and drink for the remainder of his days than stop. Somehow he managed to drag forth enough restraint.
Bathed in a red blush from the gentle swell of her bosom to the tips of her curls, eyes closed, Fleur was left with her mouth searching for his in the air when he broke the kiss and righted her garments.
Hart knew what came next. The tears. The charged accusations.
The indignant fury. All of which the lady would be entitled to—Hart had conducted himself abominably, in no way an honorable gentleman would.
Granted, he had no regrets, aside from the desire to have found completion in her arms and bring her to her first climax.
He was unprepared for the dreamy little smile that teased her lips. “I knew it.”
His brow dipped before he remembered that with her eyes closed, she was still halfway from the clouds.
She forced her long lashes up. “Henry Edward William Charles.”
A weird sensation settled around his ribcage, an entirely too-serious feeling.
“You had the order wrong,” Hart said with all the bloody wryness he wanted to feel.
“I never professed to having them in the right order.”
No, she hadn’t.
“Henry?”
Hart stiffened. Having never been addressed so, not even by his brother, it took a moment to realize Fleur spoke to him, but then when he did register her usage, his head got heavy again from the foreignness of it spoken in her lyrical voice.
“Yes?”
Fleur sighed. “I don’t hate you.”
“No, you don’t.” He was glad she couldn’t see the smile twitching at his lips. He had shown enough weakness this day.
She stepped out of his arms, and he didn’t miss the feel of her. He found it better, his head clearer without the feel of her against him mixing everything up.
“I-I want to hate you.”
Hart made the mistake of looking down. Her mouth, swollen, bruised, and wet from the force of his kiss, trembled—not with fury, but sadness. Her sadness was far worse. It made his chest uncomfortably tight and his thoughts scattered.
“I know.” Hart rubbed the back of a suddenly very cramped neck. “Because I want to hate you in the same way.”
And for reasons unknown, he somehow bloody couldn’t.
Fleur lay her cheek against his chest. It was the act of a trusting child who sought comfort—and yet, in the course of his entire life, he had never himself done, and a comfort he only ever conferred for Tremaine.
Which surely accounted for Hart why he simultaneously wanted to shove her off like a flea and close his arms around Fleur and drag her closer.
Except what he felt was as far away from brotherly as he was from the moon.
“Hart?”
He stiffened. He knew the ways of women. They were always up to some trick or another. Perhaps this had been another of Fleurs.
“You know, we can.”
There were so many “we cans” that could be filled in.
We can lose our minds in a second embrace.
We can go even further. Further being her sprawled on the nearest wood table and jewels draped all over her.
He took a silent breath in through his nose. “What is it we can do?”
Fleur picked her head up. “We can be friends.”
That was the last thing they could be—especially after this. A fellow didn’t call any woman friend. It just wasn’t possible. The sheer nature of the differences between them ensured when it came to a man and the fairer sex, sex ultimately prevailed.
There was nothing friendly in the thoughts currently occupying every corner of his lust-crazed brain.
She moved a single finger along the buttons of his champagne waistcoat. From another woman, the move would have been practiced, meant to seduce, but she didn’t want marriage or sex. She wanted…friendship. He would have laughed if he could manage amusement past a lust that wouldn’t quit.
Fleur tapped that same maddening finger where his heart beat at an embarrassingly quick speed.
“You even pointed out to Mr. Rundell that we are family,” she reminded him.
“No,” he said bluntly, staying her busy hand. “If you were listening, I pointed out to Rundell that you and I and your entire family are as far from family as we can get.” A point that needed greater emphasis, given his erection wouldn’t quit.
That lower lip of hers trembled.
Curse her. Curse him. Curse every bloody thing this day.
“Since when did you become a weepy female?” he demanded. “Never mind. I don’t care. Just stop.”
“I am not a weepy female.”
Her eyes glittered with tears. Ones he knew better then to point out, lest he send her into a full fit—of crying or rage.
And annoyed or bothered with the way her tears made him feel, he bloody conceded. “Fine. We are friends. Are you happy?”
And by the soft smile that brought her lips gently up, he had his answer.