Chapter 4 #3
Tremaine placed his lips against the shell of her ear and spoke in the softest whisper. “Do you want to watch them, sweet?”
She frantically shook her head.
He nipped lightly at the delicate shell of her ear. “Methinks you doth protest too much, love.”
“N—”
Biting back a curse, Tremaine swiftly placed his palm across the lady’s mouth and swallowed any hint of sound before she could alert the intruders of their presence.
Not that they need fear. Ladies Featherstone and Catriona were fully committed to their own pleasure, so much so the masquerade could’ve been moved into the Rutlands’ art space and they’d have remained oblivious.
“Shh,” he ordered. “That is, unless you want to draw their attention, in which case we’d both be discovered and required to join in. Or maybe that’s what you want?” he tempted. “To join them. It would be easy enough to arrange,” he continued in the same subdued way to ensure they weren’t found out.
Frantically, his guileless beauty shook her head.
Good. The last thing he wanted was to join in. Oh, he’d bring himself to do it for this one’s sake, but he’d rather have her all to himself first.
The tableau across the room erased completely from his mind, he put all his attention on the lithe, breathless woman in his arms.
Her gown still gaping, he availed himself of her breasts, filling his palms with the soft flesh.
She sighed, and he let that faint audible transgression go.
Tremaine pressed his lips against her neck.
“Do you wonder what they are doing?” he whispered, lightly kissing and licking and biting her.
She hesitated long enough that her silence stood as an affirmation.
“The baroness is seated, and Lady Catriona is on her knees before her. She has her mouth buried in Lady Featherstone’s center,” he said hoarsely and reached under her skirts. He threaded his fingers through his innocent lover’s drenched curls.
Her breath caught.
“Here,” he explained. With a single digit, he teased her entrance. “Where you’re all wet.”
She moaned.
His cock throbbed against the flat of her belly. God, a fresh blend of innocence and boldness. Had he ever hungered for a woman more than he did this one?
“I could do that for you,” he whispered, as all the while he threaded his fingers in her downy, soft curls.
“Someone is coming,” the baroness panted.
Someone is coming . . .
Bloody hell.
Tremaine ceased playing with his nameless beauty.
“It is Tremaine,” Lady Catriona said. Her breathless voice came muffled, no doubt from having her face buried between the other woman’s legs. “Let him find us so.”
The baroness moaned low and long.
It most certainly was not Tremaine.
He narrowed his eyes.
Which meant . . .
Fuck. Glaring at the temptress in his arms, Tremaine yanked his hand out from under her skirts and had her neckline back in place, just as another guest entered the increasingly crowded art room.
In a frustrating testament to Jeremy’s rabid desire for the chit, even in the face of potential discovery, he remained rock hard.
“Hello?”
Tremaine’s cockstand withered.
That voice—that deep, familiar voice—came as if down a tunnel.
It was a voice Tremaine knew as well as his own. It belonged to the man who’d been close as any brother, and who’d then become his betrayer.
A wild, stentorian rage briefly left Tremaine blind.
“Linnie-Lou, are you . . . Oh.”
“If it isn’t Captain McQuoid,” the baroness purred.
His nostrils flared.
If it wasn’t the fucker indeed. Hate twisted Tremaine’s muscles into taut knots.
“Forgive me for interrupting,” the gentleman murmured. “I was looking for someone.”
Lady Catriona giggled. “And now you have found two.”
Through a deep-seated, all-consuming abhorrence, Tremaine glanced at the wide-eyed beauty whose skirts he’d had his hand up moments ago.
Linnie-Lou Smith pulled a face. “Horrid,” she mouthed to him, like she and Tremaine were in some way partners and not the enemies her blood made them.
While the two tarts set about seducing McQuoid, Tremaine seethed.
His gaze locked on the delicate dusting of freckles on either side of his almost-lover’s cheeks—those faint little specks that fanned the under portion of her eyes and further drew a man’s attention to her unnaturally bright-green irises.
Linnie bloody Smith?
Tremaine’s nostrils flared and he barely suppressed hissing explosively from between his clenched teeth.
How had Tremaine, in this entire time he’d been bent on seduction, failed to recognize her until now?
Because she’s all bloody grown up. That was how.
A fucking McQuoid relative.
At that, Linnie McQuoid Smith.
Under Linnie’s entrancing costume, she was in every way a woman, and a desirable one.
Gritting his teeth, Tremaine did a quick sweep.
He needed to get the hell out of this room and away from this woman, her cousin, and the impending discovery, yesterday.
His gaze landed on the gilded door handle.
He waited until the pair of women’s pleasure-filled moaning filled the room, indicating Linnie-Lou’s devoted cousin had given up his search and decided to occupy himself, and then let himself into the adjoining room.
Tremaine made to press the panel shut behind him.
He glared down at the minx with her white leather boot wedged in the door.
“Get out,” he ordered.
“Are you mad?” she whispered.
He brought his face close to the slight crack between himself and Miss Linnie Smith. “Would you close your bloody mouth before you bring your bloody bastard of a cousin over?”
“Not unless you get me out of this bloody nightmare I’m stuck inside,” she rejoined, her eyes flashing.
And let her join him? The hell he would.
“And Arran is not a ‘bloody bastard,’” she tossed in a full-throated defense.
God, the chit was stupid, intrepid, or a healthy combination of the two. Except he’d known her since childhood; the answer was decidedly both.
Tremaine narrowed his eyes. “My, what a generous defense of your loyal, protective kin, given McQuoid abandoned his search for his ninny of a cousin so he could tup some—”
“Polite, respectable ladies whose company you were going to enjoy?” Fire flashed in her eyes.
Ah, he remembered that look.
Funny that in spite of all his loathing, he found himself as diverted by her feisty display as when she’d driven her brothers and cousins batty.
Entertained by the chit or not, the last thing he intended was to spend a bloody minute more with Linnie McQuoid Smith.
The minx anticipated his next move. Just as he gave the panel another firm push, Linnie wedged the entire lower portion of her leg in the opening. With that very athletic limb he’d been admiring before, she widened the gap.
From behind Linnie, there came the elevated cries of two ladies in the throes of being well pleasured.
Linnie blanched. “So help me God, Jeremy, if you don’t open this door right now, I’m going to scream your bloody name so Arran knows exactly whose company I’m stuck w—”
Swallowing another curse, Jeremy reached out and yanked Linnie in.
After all, when faced with the unpleasant prospect of alerting Arran McQuoid and two of London’s most prolific gossips as to Tremaine’s companion this night, he’d invariably take spending more time alone with the blasted hellcat.
The moment he had her inside, Tremaine waited for another one of the baroness’s lusty cries, and then shut the panel.
Linnie promptly slapped her palms over her ears and glared. “Here I thought you intended to leave it open so you could continue listening,” she said icily.
“To a McQuoid fucking?” Tremaine snorted. “That horror is only first to the nightmarish prospect of being discovered with an unmarried McQuoid or Smith lady, Miss Smith.”
Her cheeks flushed, her luminescent green eyes stricken. Linnie stared at him with such hurt that, another time in his life, Tremaine would have flagellated himself for having so wounded the lady—any lady.
His body might have survived the flames that’d danced upon the wild ocean waves, but the man he’d once been had perished.
“You didn’t know me,” she whispered, more to herself.
Tremaine curled his lips in a hard, mocking smile. “Cheer up, Miss Smith. I know you now.”
Her pouty lower lip trembled. “Given your tone, ours is not a happy reunion.”
Once he’d have sought to restore a smile to her full mouth. No more. Now, he’d rather suckle and consume that pouty flesh.
“Oh, I was more than happy with it moments ago,” he purred.
“Ah, so that is why you were attempting to . . . How did you say it? Fuck me? Because you did not know it was me?”
God, the pluck of this one.
Enflamed and furious at himself for hungering for her still, he ran a fingertip along Linnie’s ruffled neckline.
“I’d begun to wonder with your naivete that you hadn’t been ruined long before this.
It is unfortunate you haven’t,” he said coolly.
“For I might have overlooked my enmity for all your rotten family to get between your legs, Linnie-Lou.” He curled his lip in a sneer.
“Might have. You see, I’ll bed any grand beauty. ”
Determined to get a rise from her, he scraped a derisive stare over her frustratingly delectable body. “That is, as long as she isn’t a McQuoid.”
Instead of taking offense—as he’d intended—and crying, as any other woman would, Linnie stared at him with a curious gaze, so long that it was he who found himself shifting.
“I barely recognize you,” she said softly. “You’ve become repulsive, Jeremy.”
He chuckled. “I always was, Miss Smith. You just never knew the real me. I’m the worst rake. The man you thought you knew to be a gentleman only treated you and your family with respect out of loyalty.”
Hatred coursed hot in his veins. “Though my devotion proved misguided. You and yours are a treacherous lot who put your desires before all. As such, I don’t expect you to know a bloody thing about that sentiment.”