Chapter 18
Jasper Deverell was, quite frankly, in a state.
Not dramatically, of course—he had not yet thrown a glass into the fire—but he felt very close to it.
He had spent the better part of the evening in his rooms. He had dismissed his valet, poured a brandy, and selected the dullest book on the nearest shelf, trusting that agricultural improvement might succeed where moral fortitude had failed.
It had not.
The book might have contained the secrets of eternal life for all he knew. He had read three pages and retained nothing before finding himself staring at the fire while the word dandy lodged in his side like a very small knife.
Miss Tolliver, damn her, had struck nearer than she knew.
To many, meant no more than silk waistcoats, polished boots, and an unfortunate devotion to one’s own reflection. Jasper could have borne that easily enough. Indeed, he had gone to considerable expense to invite the charge, for he adored beautiful things.
But there were implications beneath the word, which he knew too well.
He liked women, certainly—their softness, their laughter, their sharp little cruelties—but his eye had never been so well-disciplined as other men pretended theirs to be.
It strayed often—to a gentleman’s mouth, or the line of a shoulder beneath a coat.
Perhaps it was the pleasure of wanting what one ought not to want.
In the circles where Jasper moved most freely—those over-perfumed, half-mad little worlds of actors, artists, rakes, widows and poets—such appetites could be indulged, provided one did so carefully and quietly.
The law itself was not so frivolous.
A man who wanted other men placed his neck beneath a very different blade, so Jasper had become the thing they expected him to be: a rake, a dandy, a laughing, glittering, unserious creature who desired too much and meant nothing by it.
And because he was a fool—because he was vain, because he was all the things his father despised in a man—some treacherous part of him would rather be hurt by Charlotte Tolliver than praised by anyone else.
That, perhaps, was what enraged him most. She had seen through his performance.
And what was Miss Tolliver, after all, but a performance of another sort? A young lady who wore her brother’s clothes and made wagers and rendered herself impossible? They had both made costumes of their sins. His was silk and insolence; hers was charm and defiance.
He admired her. He wanted her. He hated her.
He did not know what he felt at all.
And so, Jasper spent that night lying in bed like a man possessed. He really should have gone to a brothel, but he did not want another woman. He did not want another man. He did not want any easy, laughing body that would leave him unchanged by morning.
He wanted Charlotte Tolliver in her brother’s trousers and riding boots, flushed from fencing and grinning like a pirate.
He wanted her unpinned and untamed and utterly, gloriously willing.
He wanted to scandalise her and soothe her in the same breath.
He wanted her to win the next wager, and the next after that, not merely for the sport of it, but because every victory seemed to take her one step farther from the obedient little life Society had prepared for her.
He wanted to see what she would dare to ask for next. He wanted to know how far she would go. And, God help him, he wanted to be the place she went when she did.
When he finally pulled out his aching cock and began to pump furiously with his eyes shut and jaw clenched, he scarcely lasted two minutes, and even that required remarkable restraint.
His release came with a stifled groan and her name, bitten back and buried somewhere between his clenched teeth and the hollow of his throat.
It wasn’t satisfying in the least. No amount of spent frustration could conjure her in truth, or replicate the feel of her in his arms, or the whip of her tongue, or the wicked glint in her eyes as she called him out for what he was too proud to admit.
Like a man defeated, he rose from his bed in a state of thorough discontent.
With his hair in disarray and his shirt discarded somewhere at the foot of the bed, he pulled on a pair of loose-fitting trousers and stalked to his study, where the windows stood cracked to the early morning chill and the desk bore the disorder of a man who used it primarily for avoiding correspondence.
He dropped into the chair, swung one ankle over his knee, and poured himself a generous glass of whisky. It burnt as it went down, but not nearly enough.
Miss Tolliver had also called him a coward. She had not said it outright, but the implication was there, carefully packaged within one of her barbed little provocations: “You did not have the courage to claim what you wanted.”
He had smiled at the time, of course, and continued dancing.
He dragged a hand down his face and downed another glass. He had told her to expect a note, and yet he could barely remember what the next wager would entail.
Ah yes, cards.
Would it be such a terrible thing, he wondered, to let her win? To place the fate of the next forfeit in her capable, maddening, lovely hands? It would be simple enough. He could fold early, sigh theatrically, and surrender the victory.
She would gloat, of course. She would ask for something wicked, something indecent and outrageous and entirely her—and he would bear it like a martyr. He would suffer every exquisite second with the expression of a man doomed by his own good fortune.
God, he was drunk.
It occurred to him rather suddenly, in that slow, bewildered manner unique to men who have been drinking whisky instead of sleeping, that the sun had risen.
Dawn.
The hallway tilted as he passed through it. Somewhere below stairs, the household was stirring to life, and as he rounded the corner to his chamber, he very nearly collided with his butler.
“Mr Deverell,” the man said.
Jasper paused, blinked at him, then inclined his head with what he hoped passed for decorum. “Morning, Gibbons,” he slurred amiably. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my dignity anywhere?”
“I believe you left it in the gallery, sir,” Gibbons replied without missing a beat. “Alongside your good sense.”
Jasper grinned, pointed vaguely in acknowledgment, and then staggered the last few feet to his chamber. He collapsed onto the bed with all the grace of a falling statue, one arm flung across his eyes.
He thought, briefly, of Miss Charlotte he-did-not-know-her-middle-name Tolliver, of those damned red lips and the way her eyes dared him to break, and then, mercifully, he slept.