Chapter Forty-Four
Kate carried Celine out of the Demi Lux, the long train of Celine’s dress like a glittering waterfall over her arm.
Quite overcome … Requires rest and quiet …
An overwhelming honour for any young woman …
Their exit perfected the evening’s success: It would give tomorrow’s gossips something worth getting out of bed for.
A wave of concerned well-wishers bore them to the door and down the front steps, and to Kate, it was all background noise.
Only one person could hold her attention, and that person was in her arms.
She climbed into the carriage and took her seat.
The door shut. The carriage departed. A deep peace came over her.
Pragmatically, she reached over to close the curtain, and as her shoulder dipped, Celine’s head went with it, all her weight fully taken by Kate’s body as though she had in truth fainted away.
Kate knew Celine was merely enjoying, as she was, the sense of every constraint having disappeared—even down to a certain individualism or physical autonomy.
It invited liberties, and she buried her face in Celine’s neck.
She remembered with amazement how distressed she’d felt on the drive here, sitting across from Celine, unable to properly make her out, sure something bad was going to happen.
She tightened her arms around the bundle of heaven in her lap, which was now her right.
How she had ever convinced herself Celine would become engaged to Lord Burnley, she didn’t know.
An expansive sense of time filled her, time without end.
It was a strange, twisted history that had brought them to each other, but she was grateful for all of it.
Celine was hers, and now nothing and no one could part them. She was taking her love home.
Celine made a long sound of acquiescence and put her hand around the back of Kate’s head, completing the embrace. Kate was still wet inside her breeches from the kiss Celine had given her. That thorough seeing-to.
She saw again Celine on her knees, felt the way her palm had encompassed the curve at the top of Celine’s spine, her fingertips pushing under the tight seam of Celine’s dress. Celine’s skin had been so soft, so unbelievably soft, and hot with blood.
In the carriage, the quality of their embrace changed.
Her breathing came faster as awareness stirred between them.
It wasn’t only love she felt. She wanted to explore every hot crevice, every wet hole; she wanted to make Celine’s thighs blush.
How had she remained apart from Celine these past weeks?
How had she not had Celine in her arms every minute of every day?
The physical drive to consummate began to overwhelm every other sense or thought.
Celine’s satin-gloved hand came to her cheek, gently urging her head up. Celine’s limpid green eyes sought hers.
“Shall I tell you,” Celine said, “what I felt when I walked into Bastien’s study and saw you, all those years ago?”
The words arrested her. She had so rarely let herself think of that long-ago night, but found she recalled the moment perfectly: The long, blue satin train of Celine’s dress sweeping an arc across the floor as Celine leaned forward to close the door without making any noise.
The stillness in Celine’s body when she turned and realised she wasn’t alone.
The first interesting look at Celine’s mouth.
Celine said, “It felt like someone had rung a bell inside my chest. Have I told you yet that I love you? I think I already loved you then.”
She had thought Celine must love her, at least a little, but hearing Celine say it made her whole body seize in pleasure. She used her teeth to draw off her glove and stroked her fingertips over Celine’s face.
“I mistook the feeling,” Celine said, “and thought I was afraid of you. You looked at me like you were looking beneath my skin, a sensation I had never felt before.”
Her sensitive fingertips drank pleasure from Celine’s skin; her sensitive mind drank pleasure from Celine’s words. Actively, she and Celine were taking each other deeper.
“I don’t think it a shallow love, for having coming upon me so quickly,” Celine said. “I think my clever heart simply knew.”
She slipped her hand into the place where Celine’s skirts crossed at the front and folded the uppermost layer back so that yards of Celine’s stunning dress pooled on the floor of the moving carriage.
A ruffled petticoat draped around Celine’s bent leg, its shape at once far more obvious and more erotically obscured. She lost another breath.
She ran her hand up Celine’s leg, underneath the petticoat.
Celine’s knee fell subtly outwards, a gesture of invitation.
Celine lay within her arm and looked up into her eyes, inviting a still more potent togetherness.
Kate recognised the feeling that had scared her so badly in Paris. It didn’t scare her any longer.
Celine said, “I don’t think you can have any notion how much I love you. I would do anything for you.” She shook her head, her eyes dark with feeling. “Anything.”
Kate felt the responsibility that love placed on her, and she welcomed it. Celine had no one else. Her family lost in time, her friends scattered to the winds. Kate would be equal to the love Celine had for her. She would return it tenfold.
Her palm encountered the ridge of Celine’s tied garter and then—Christ—the obliterating softness of Celine’s bare inner thigh. Celine took a sharp breath in and Kate was lost.
She grasped Celine’s whole thigh in her hand and Celine arched up to kiss her. It was the beginning. Where a moment ago Celine had still been coherently speaking, she was now wholly of the body, responding to Kate’s rough hold on her.
Kate’s hand sought—and found—the wet heat that echoed what her mouth was feeling.
Celine cried out. The sensation intensified as everything became hotter and wetter and Kate was gloriously animal, her powerful body working towards consummation.
She wasn’t aware, individually, of the enveloping way she held Celine, or that she was rubbing herself on her, using Celine’s body as an object, a means of release.
She wasn’t aware of Celine’s fingers tangled painfully in her hair, or the restless swaying of Celine’s knee, or the desperate noises; she wasn’t aware of the prodigious, randy thrust of her fingers or the passionate coupling of her mouth with that other mouth, the vulgar mouth, the clever tongue, the upper lip that would make angels weep.
It was all of a piece. It was heaven. Celine came apart and the warm chamber clutched Kate’s fingers.
She swallowed Celine’s cries, then went into orgasm, as though she’d swallowed that as well.
Afterwards, Celine threw her head back and lay across Kate’s lap, boneless and spent, her eyes in a daze.
Kate wasn’t done. She let Celine lie where she was, head tipped at a downward angle, hair beginning to unwind long skeins onto the carriage floor, and released Celine’s shoulder from its capped sleeve.
She pressed a kiss into the warm muscle, closing her eyes and staying there a moment.
Then she applied her teeth. As Celine gasped, rousing, Kate tugged the sleeve roughly down and released one heaving breast from the outermost layer of the dress.
She pulled back and stared at it, her mind gone blank.
The gauzy chemise strained against round flesh, and through it, she could see the broad, dark areola she remembered and the thick teat of Celine’s nipple.
Celine wasn’t wearing stays.
The whole night, while Celine had charmed and danced and made her maidenly debut, she hadn’t been wearing stays. The perfect structure of her dress had been held up by her natural form only. Kate …
Kate lost her goddamn mind.
When, sometime later, the carriage stopped, there were some fastenings to tie and button, some humid limbs to untangle, a stocking to find. They couldn’t find it. She carried Celine into Howard House, pausing for a moment on the threshold.
Even through her raging lust, she was aware of the significance: From this moment, she wouldn’t be alone in the inner sanctum anymore. She stepped inside with Celine in her arms.
The lady of the house was home.