Chapter 15 #2
“She wouldn’t do that,” Hannah said suddenly, frowning. “She wouldn’t have that much debt out in the city, if she couldn’t pay it out.”
He paused, his body freezing, and turned to look at her.
He laughed then, a dry, charmed little thing as he ran his hand over his hair.
“You’re right,” he said. “Half the slips I bought ended up being forgeries. I didn’t know that, of course.
I got to Blackcove and put them into escrow, intending to build them even more, and was not at all prepared when she showed up in the flesh. It gets worse, Hannah.”
“Does it?” she asked, her eyes tracking him as he moved. “It sounds as though nothing bad happened at all in the end.”
“Your friend Freddy Hightower,” he said, stopping and looking at her. “The earl? I hit him. He could’ve had me thrown into prison for that.”
“You hit Freddy?” Hannah replied with a gasp. “Why?!”
Beck gave a humorless chuckle. “Because Ember followed me to my rooms after I punched Woodville, baited me into an argument, and then here comes the toff raging about how unworthy I am to even speak her name. We were arguing about you, Hannah. I told Ember that it was her fault that Woodville even got the idea in his head to suggest such a vile thing. I put that on her.”
“Well,” said Hannah. “I hope you’ve apologized.”
Beck stared at her. “I have. That’s all you … Hannah!”
She blinked. “Why did you hit Freddy?”
“Because he hit me,” he replied impatiently. “He threw a punch at my jaw and I backhanded the poor bastard before I could even think. It was stupid, and I was horrified.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, no one can really blame you for that. Oh, I remember now! He did have a bruise on his cheek. He told me he ran into a tree.”
“A tree,” Beck repeated, staring at her. “What tree? We were on a seaside cliff.”
She laughed then, a little titter, shaking her head. “It was you,” she said, fluttering her lashes at him. “My mighty oak.”
“I can’t believe Ember never told you any of this,” he said, almost like he was frustrated by it, like he was annoyed that he had to do it himself. “Why wouldn’t she?”
“She keeps people’s secrets,” said Hannah with a shrug. “She never told you that I tried to sneak into your bedroom that night either. Did she?”
His whole body tensed then, like a full length of steel had shot up his spine. He turned on his heel, glaring at her like she’d just thrown a rock at his face. “That isn’t true,” he snapped.
“It is,” she returned mildly. “She had to stand in front of me and talk me out of it. I was fully prepared to climb right into your bed. To be completely honest, you having punched Mr. Woodville was the perfect excuse. I was ready to hand you my nightgown and my virtue almost immediately after seeing you at Blackcove. I was obsessed with you. Then you punched a man for me? Oh, Thaddeus.”
“Hannah!” He sounded broken, his voice jagged like he’d swallowed glass, looking at her with a desperate sort of glint in his eye. “Stop saying things like that!”
“No!” she returned. “They are true!”
He closed his eyes briefly, exhaling softly, then opened them again and came to her. It was only a few steps, just a couple of feet across the polished wooden floor of the gaming room.
He slid his hands over her knees, bunching up the material of her skirt along her thighs, his face inches from hers, those dark eyes boring down into her face as the heat of his touch melted through the fabric.
“Sometimes, I think,” he whispered, “that you don’t believe I will ever break.
That you can keep teasing me forever without consequence. ”
“Consequence?” she answered, her breath caught in her chest. “Or reward?”
He squeezed the soft flesh at her thighs, pressing his head forward to rest against hers, letting their breath mingle as his thumbs traced patterns through the white fabric of her skirts.
“Sometimes,” he said, his eyes tilting up to meet hers, even at this close proximity, “all it takes is a release, a physical moment of relief, and then a person comes to her senses. What if that is all this is?”
She gasped, his fingers inching higher, pressing her legs further apart. “Thaddeus,” she said, as evenly as she could manage. “I do not require you for what you are describing. I can provide that to myself perfectly well. It has never been enough to dispel thoughts of you.”
She heard his own breath stutter, heard it catch right in his throat. It sparked something in her. Something wicked.
“Yes,” she said, reaching up to link her fingers around the back of his neck, to toy with the ends of his hair, her heart blazing, her body burning for more of his touch.
“Do you think I haven’t touched myself thinking of you?
Why do you think I took your jacket from the tent?
I keep your scent in my bed. In that pristine, proper bed you’ve spent so much time telling me to go back to. ”
“Oh, Christ,” he muttered, his grip slipping forward, shoving her skirt higher as his thumbs collided with her hips.
“My fingers aren’t enough,” she whispered. “I need yours.”
He kissed her then, hard and firm, his lips as warm as the fire-heated room.
It was not a sweet kiss. It felt like a swat to the bum for an errant child, and as soon as he pulled back, he made a noise akin to a growl and scooped her up against his body, off the barstool, to carry her over to the chaise.
“This conversation was meant to temper you,” he chided as he tossed her onto the cushions, bracing his arms on either side of her and taking another hard, languid taste of her mouth, his tongue sliding out over her lips with a groan.
“To either scare you off or agree to do things properly. You never cooperate, Hannah.”
“I don’t?” she managed, breathless as those big hands returned to her legs, rucking her skirt up over her knees, trailing the pads of his fingers over her stockings as he revealed them, inch by inch.
“You don’t,” he confirmed, and kissed her again, pushing his tongue into her mouth, demanding a full, indulgent taste of her.
He pressed a knee into the chaise, fully caging her in as his touch reached the top of her garters, his voice breaking into her mouth when the pads of his fingers slid over the warm, bare skin of her thighs.
“You don’t,” he said again, twisting his fingers in the ribbons at her garter. “I’m going to touch you now.”
She nodded, arching her back and looping her arms over his neck, drawing him back to kiss her again as he dragged his hand higher, nudging her legs apart with the breadth of it.
She imagined she could feel the two white scars that he’d put on that hand for her, scraping against her inner thigh.
She imagined them kissing against her skin as she gasped and writhed under him.
“I didn’t think you … that you wanted … ah,” she gasped as he slid his fingers against her, her eyes flickering shut. “Oh.”
“You didn’t think I wanted to do this?” he asked, his voice low and thin. He inhaled sharply as he dipped a finger into her, smearing her warmth along the outside. “You didn’t think I lost sleep imagining how good my hands would feel under your skirt?”
She gasped as he sank his touch deeper inside her, her hips rising to meet him.
“You shouldn’t be this wet,” he chided softly, leaning down to press kisses down the length of her throat, nibbling along the ridge of her collarbone as he pleasured her. “You shouldn’t be half so sweet for me. You have no idea the things I want to do to you, Hannah.”
She dragged her hand down the middle of his chest, over the ridge of his waistline. “I have some idea,” she whispered, stroking her fingers along the outline of his arousal. “Some.”
His hips jerked, his voice churning like gravel beneath his throat at the surprise of it.
She thought he might pull away or tell her to stop, but even as he froze, his teeth grazing the skin at her collar, he did not do either thing.
Instead, he held very still and let her touch him, let her explore this forbidden part of him with her fingers, tracing its shape and weight through the velvet fabric of his trousers.
He breathed very carefully, like he was counting the seconds of each inhale and exhale.
He did not stop touching her, all the while. Despite whatever had elsewise paralyzed him, despite this deviation from his plan, the hand he held against her continued to pulse, to explore, to pleasure.
“Are we going to …?” she breathed against his hair, rocking against that hand of his, that delicious, pleasuring hand. “Thaddeus?”
He groaned, lifting himself up to look down at her, strands of his hair falling over his face. “If we do,” he said softly, “it will only be the first time. Not the only time. I will not have this be the only time, Hannah, half clothed on a sofa.”
She nodded, running her tongue over her lips. “Next time, you will take me home,” she promised. “You will lay me out and strip me bare. And I will see all of you too. Promise it.”
He stared down at her, those wayward strands of hair glinting umber and chestnut in the firelight.
“I promise,” he said, soft and rich. Those dark eyes, so dark, black and glinting like obsidian in the low light, scanned her face lovingly, even while his hand was still nestled between her thighs. “Hannah, I can wait if you—”
“Absolutely not,” she gasped, rising up on her elbows to capture his mouth again and pulling his full body back atop hers. “Now. Please.”
She felt his lips curve against her mouth, felt perhaps the first full grin she’d ever experienced in his company as he caught her, one big hand curving against the small of her back as he met her demand with his lips and tongue.
He withdrew his hand from her only to free himself from the confines of his trousers, flicking away the buttons with an elegant, mindless ease that made her head spin, and drawing himself out against her bare thigh, warm and vital and devastating.
He pulled back from kissing her, holding her gaze, watching her as he guided himself into her body.
He held her eye so intently, so completely devoted to witnessing the moment she became completely his, that she had no choice but to do the same.
She watched him; she watched his lips part, watched his lashes flicker, watched the air around him shimmer and bend as they joined.
And then she let go.
She dropped her head back, her eyes squeezing shut as she felt warmth and fullness and perfection. She felt that aching need that had hounded her for so very long finally, finally silenced, just for a moment. Just for a brief, beautiful moment.
And then he started to move.
Her eyes flew open. The ache reignited, flashing and sweeping through her body. She gripped his arms, her legs linking around him as she opened her mouth to cry out, to try to bottle it, to contain it somehow within her.
He cupped his hand around her head, burying his fingers in her hair, and kissed her, his hips snapping against hers in sweet, agonizing, perfect movements, flooding her with dizzying waves of sensation.
She hadn’t been lying when she told him she knew the way to release. She hadn’t exaggerated when she’d said she’d found it with his name in her mouth many times. But this? This was so much richer, and while she felt it coming, she could not quite account for its vastness.
“Thaddeus,” she whispered into his mouth, her fingernails scraping against his sleeves. “My Thaddeus.”
She broke apart with a cry, louder than she’d ever allowed herself to be in the moment of ecstasy before. She clung to him; she felt the waves of her pleasure catch on the fullness he provided inside her and heard the rumble of reciprocal enjoyment in his body.
His grip in her hair tightened, his breath thinned, the roll of his hips quickened. It seemed that her apex inflamed him, somehow. She watched through hooded eyes as he seemed to come undone, his elegant control cracking into raw physicality in these final, desperate thrusts.
“Hannah,” he whispered to her as he pushed himself past his own point of breaking. He cried out too, slowing and shuddering as he held her against him. “Hannah, my love. Oh, God.”
He did not leave her, afterward. He did not roll away or jump off the chaise or pace off muttering about mistakes, like she feared.
Instead, he nudged them to the side, bringing his back up against the tufted back of the chaise, and caught her against his chest, holding her with him. He did not even bother to fully withdraw from her, resting his cheek on top of her head as they clung to each other.
They lay like this for a time.
For a long time.
Until they could breathe again.