Chapter 11 #2
His lips were smooth, with just the slightest bristle surrounding them at this late hour in the day. They parted slightly and she could taste—what was it?—apple.
She had not been kissed since her husband’s illness. But that lack wasn’t the reason for the fire that immediately licked at her core and at the peaks of her breasts. Enormous, yearning lust that pushed her lips open, welcoming, wanting, demanding a deeper kiss.
That deeper kiss never came. James’ lips did not open wider. His tongue stayed in his mouth. But he rubbed his lips against hers, at first lightly and then with a growing pressure. He made a grunting noise.
He was giving her a stage kiss. Catherine had had many stage kisses in her career as an actress.
A few had not been like this; they had been delivered by leading men who knew she was powerless to stop them from thrusting their tongues into her mouth while on stage.
But most had been like this—a simulacrum of passion with a minimum of contact. Respectful.
This kiss was an insult. A rage began to build.
She heard voices and footsteps, and James increased his pressure on her mouth.
“—it can’t be helped. We should leave tonight to be there by morning—”
“Hold.”
“What is it? Oh, yes, Lord Daventry. How unexpected.”
“Ha! Daventry, having it off with some whore!”
She knew that voice. Those voices. Too much was happening too quickly.
James let go of her wrists and put his hands on both sides of her face and broke the kiss and turned her still-hooded head away from the voices.
“Yes,” he slurred, “and iffen you,” he hiccoughed, “fellows might be good enough to go away, I might manage to get it hard enough to get the job done.” He took one of his hands from her face and fumbled with the buttons on the fall of his breeches.
This was met by jeers and cries of “Good luck with that, my lord!” and “See you on the morrow!” and the voices were fading, moving down the street, away from the alley.
James stepped back. She stayed pressed to the wall. Her heart was coming out of her chest. She hungered for the pressure of his body against hers, his mouth on hers, even if it was only pretense.
“Again, my apologies.” His voice was hoarse and strained. “We must get you away from this place. Even under normal circumstances, this is not a safe place for a lady—”
This time it was Catherine who heard voices, sensed movement.
She did not stop to calculate or think. She launched herself at James, climbing up his body to wrap her legs around his waist, screeching with laughter, and when her face was level with his, she began kissing him enthusiastically, moaning, humping him.
What’s fine for the gander should be perfectly fair for the goose.
She heard some male laughter and could make out the words lusty wench. Again, the voices faded.
She slowed her thrusts against him. She stopped her histrionic moans.
She could feel James’ hands on her haunches, holding her, pulling her into him.
She loosened her grip around his neck and trailed one hand up into the thick curls she had longed to touch for months.
Oh, yes. She filled her fingers. She softened her mouth as she pulled on his hair, and she gave him a kiss.
A real kiss.
And then his tongue was in her mouth, and she could feel his hard cock with only the fall of his breeches separating it from her wet, hungry cleft.
James had been deeply aroused by pressing Catherine to the alley wall and feeling her body against his.
He had found it extraordinarily difficult to keep his kiss as circumspect as it had been.
And, yes, there might have been a better way to hide her from the passersby, a better way to obscure his own reason for being in the alley, but it was her. He couldn’t help wanting to touch her.
He was genuinely startled by suddenly having his arms full of a noisy, squirming female, seemingly ardent, intent on reducing him to a pile of quivering mush.
But as she quieted, he began to realize the hands he had put under her cloak and her dress and her petticoat were cupping the naked skin of Catherine’s buttocks.
Like all upper-class women, she did not wear drawers, and he thrilled to have his hands on her bare flesh—so warm, so firm, so smooth.
And then an entirely different kiss than those that had come before.
So tender. Soft lips on his, the softest he had ever felt, like cushions of silk.
He had never had a kiss like this before.
Ever. Such a gentle thing that produced such a violent reaction in him.
Blood coursed, and his cock grew harder and strained his breeches, reaching towards her.
Momentarily, he wondered if her other lips were just as soft.
His tongue was between her lips, exploring her mouth, entering it and withdrawing. Her own small tongue excited ecstasy by dancing over his and pushing back into him. Her hands on his head drew their mouths even closer, and James answered by pulling her hips even closer to his waist.
He was not conscious of much besides her body and his own, but he knew they were in the exact position he had conjured in his mind a few weeks ago when he had imagined taking her in the modiste’s fitting room.
Holding her, he controlled her entirely in this position.
With the undoing of a few buttons on his breeches, her sex would be against his and he could enter her, draw her down on top of his member and plunge into her deeply, just as he had wanted that day. He could take her. She would be his.
But, no.
This was not what he wanted. This was entirely wrong.
For one thing, with both of his hands holding her up, he could not touch her breasts. He was greedy now and wanted all of her. But she was very light. Perhaps he could shift her weight onto just one forearm and free one of her breasts with the other hand.
For a second thing, he had not yet assessed her arousal—he was more than ready but didn’t know if she was ready for him, should he touch her, should he kiss her longer and harder first.
And third . . . what was the third thing?
The third thing was that he was not an animal.
He pulled his lips from hers and gently put her down.
Her breasts heaved. Her breathing was as rapid as his.
Her face was flushed, and her lips were wonderfully swollen from their kisses.
But her lips flattened now as she gritted her teeth.
She rearranged her skirts and backed away from him, one, two, three steps.
He thought she might turn to flee, so he reached out and caught her arm.
“I must beg your—”
His words were cut off by a slap.
He barely felt the blow, but it startled him into dropping her wrist.
No!
She was ready to have him, savagely, here in the alley, her legs around his waist. She was more than ready for him. She was ravenous for him.
And then he put her down. Made it clear he didn’t want her, despite the very hard shaft in his breeches.
Her own engorged sex ached. Her lips tingled, and her nipples were pierced with pain. And her pride hurt. Her vanity was in shreds.
He stood apart from her and looked at her with those gray eyes.
Eyes she had first thought so seductive and then so intelligent, but now she saw were merely judging.
He must be disgusted by her. She had thrown herself at him, participated in his game of deceiving the passersby, and then betrayed her own desire for him.
She had been ready to enjoy him in public like the most vulgar kind of whore.
She loathed him almost as much as she loathed herself, and she hated herself profoundly right now.
So when he tried to stop her from getting away, from escaping this hell she found herself in, when he grabbed her arm, she reacted as she would to an enemy trying to hold her captive.
She hit him.
She meant to hurt him. But she knew she hadn’t. She was small, and her arm was for taking gentlemen’s arms, for holding fans, for writing letters, for arranging flowers. Not for open-handed blows.
But the slap had its desired effect. He let go of her.
“I never want to see you again,” she spat out.
His cheek was red from where she had slapped him. He bowed to her and kept his eyes averted.
“There will be no difficulty with your request, Mrs. Lovelock.”
She swept past James, out of the alley, trying to remember the best way back to her cobbler’s.
She was definitely marrying Sir Francis.
As soon as possible. Before she was reduced to subjugation by her own weakness.
Before she ruined herself all over again.
Before lust became riddled with violence as it had been before.
Before her life became ruled by catastrophic obsession and dictated by the aching need between her legs.
She was on the edge of a precipice. She would not fall over.
She could not.