Chapter 32
It was later than Wolfgang liked when the landau trundled out of Maidstone.
The trip home was also less chaperoned than he intended, because when he’d finally pried Charlotte away from the third floor, where he’d found her half-buried under a pile of velvet samples and thread, he’d discovered that Ivy was also reluctant to go.
The young maid said so many long, mournful goodbyes to her mother that Charlotte had laughed and thrown up her hands.
“Ivy, you’d better remain behind for a few days,” she’d suggested, and Ivy had scampered off faster than a young lieutenant let out on leave.
Which left him alone with Charlotte.
Sitting across from her in a closed carriage, with fifteen miles of open road ahead of them.
He swallowed. Only God can save me now.
“Tell me, do you have any competent chaperones?” Wolfgang muttered as the landau rumbled out of town.
“Not if I can help it.” She peeked over at him, and what she saw made her smile go wicked. “Why? Do I need one? Don’t you trust yourself to be alone with me?”
“You’re safe as a nun.”
“Really? What a relief. Because I seem to remember that when we were in the forest together, you pushed me up against a tree and—”
“An error, Lady Charlotte. One I will not repeat.”
“You already did,” she muttered, half under her breath, and Wolfgang gritted his teeth. What the hell had happened in his bedchamber?
Charlotte slowly untied the riot of ribbons beneath her chin and removed her hat.
“My goodness, it’s warm in here! Do you think it could be my bonnet, Your Grace?” She let her head fall back against the squabs, exposing the pale length of her neck. “I suddenly feel as if I’m wearing too much.”
Wolfgang shifted in his seat.
It’s just a neck! It’s just a bloody bonnet! She didn’t want you to come with her and now she’s punishing you.
“What a day! I confess, I’m exhausted.” Charlotte lifted her hands above her head in a long, slow stretch that pushed her breasts forward until they threatened to pop the buttons of her spencer.
Wolfgang’s fists clenched and he turned his head to stare doggedly out the window.
God, she had glorious breasts. In fact, all of her was glorious, especially with the late-afternoon sun pouring gold over her profile and causing the tips of her curls to catch fire.
It would be the work of seconds to haul her onto his lap, relieve those poor straining buttons of their duty, and have a hand down her bodice to trace her creamy curves and coax her nipple to a pert little point, ready for the heat of his tongue.
Were her nipples stained blackberry, like her wretched mouth? Or would they glisten a softer, sweeter pink when he licked them?
For Christ’s sake, you won’t be able to leave the house if you go mad every time a woman removes her bonnet.
But she wasn’t any woman.
She was Charlotte.
All she had to do was hiccup and he stripped her naked in his mind.
Wolfgang shifted in his seat. His head was pounding hard enough from the day and he didn’t need any other body parts throbbing.
Damn it, how was he meant to understand that Charlotte was running a silk mill? And something niggled him about it.…
“Lady Charlotte, did I see you have only women working for you? They’re widows, aren’t they?”
Her half smile disappeared and her eyes narrowed to slits, like a cat about to swipe. “You went around interrogating my weavers?”
“Interrogating? No, but I did talk to them. Imagine how surprised I was to learn that Mrs. Cordelon had strict instructions to find her weavers from among the women in Spitalfields whose husbands didn’t come home from the war.”
“Yes, well, someone had to think of the women. You men go off to fight, and rush around with all your great affairs of state, and you seem to believe it’s got nothing to do with the rest of us.
But when you break things, we’re the ones who pick up the pieces.
” She turned her attention to the passing landscape.
Wolfgang stared. Occasionally, when he and Lysander both had enough to drink, they acknowledged what it was like to watch the rest of the country declare the war over while they carried it like a stain.
He’d never once considered that Charlotte, of all people, might feel the same way. Might do something about it.
You ought to have considered it. She told you as much three years ago with her bayonet lace.
Charlotte whirled back to him. “Do you know what bothers me? You’re a duke and a war hero, as my grandmother’s so fond of telling me, but what does any of that matter, without action?
You haven’t even taken your seat in the House of Lords yet, have you?
” She shook her head. “All that power, and you can’t even bother to use it.
Has it ever once occurred to you that perhaps you’re the frivolous one, and not I? ”
She ought to have been an artilleryman, because her aim was dead accurate.
“I—” Wolfgang tried for words. “I don’t know what to—”
“Oh, never mind! You’d be astonished at how little interest I have in your opinions.”
He frowned, his head dry and barren, as if it were filled with sand. “I respect your silk mill. Why have you never mentioned it? It’s almost as if you try to hide—”
Her eyes flashed. “We’re not friends, you and I. Why should I tell you anything? You’ve made what you think of me clear, always staring at me, as if—”
He barked out a laugh, and even to his ears it sounded desperate. “I stare at you, damn it, because I can’t help myself.”
Her lips parted, perhaps in shock, or perhaps to say something that would ruin him.
Wolfgang didn’t know, and he was too far gone for it to matter anyway. Somehow he’d edged closer to her, their knees almost touching across the divide. “I warm each time you walk inside a room and wither when you leave it. Tell me you don’t feel the same.”
Her pupils were big and black and threatened to swallow the green of her eyes. He could feel her hiss of breath, half anger and half a helpless fight against the draw between them.
Wolfgang held her gaze and leaned in, but Charlotte didn’t back away.
“Damn it,” he growled. “Tell me not to kiss you.”
Wolfgang didn’t breathe as he waited for her answer, and she surprised him by slowly lifting her hand to his face, raising her lips to meet his.
Her mouth was so warm and slick he wanted to drink it, the tip of her sweet little tongue, that pouty bottom lip that so often taunted him.
Each lick and suck made his heart pound and his blood run thick and heavy, until the whole world seemed to narrow into the shape of her mouth.
Fuck. Slow down, he thought, his head dazed and dizzy.
But she made a desperate sound and bit him, so of course he bit her back and crossed to her side of the carriage, lifting her onto his lap.
Everything dissolved except for her heat and the thick, frustrating fabric of her spencer beneath his hands, and her curves, and all the little gasps that Charlotte—his fucking Charlotte—huffed against his mouth.
He wanted his hands everywhere—in her hair because he adored it, on the sinuous lines of her back so he could feel each time she shuddered, on her ass so he could cup her hard against his cock, on the ridiculous gold buttons of her spencer, which had mocked him long enough.
She rocked in his lap and it felt like the best kind of agony, so he broke the kiss and murmured all his weaknesses into her neck, and her collarbones, and then unbuttoned the damned spencer and helped her shrug it off so they could torture each other with just the thin muslin of her dress between them.
Charlotte twisted, nearly as frantic as he was, and her eyes were glazed but full of challenge as he traced a finger along her neckline, her bodice just loose enough that he could dip his hand down, teasing them both.
Oh, Christ. Now he remembered what happened in his bedchamber.
Mine, growled a voice inside, loud enough to alarm him but not loud enough to wake him to any sense as his other hand tugged at the ties at the back of her dress until they went slack.
He eased the dress slowly down over one shoulder, down over the swell of her breast, and at last to her pouting nipple.
Better than any fucking blackberry, he thought before he lowered his head and licked it.
His mind blanked at the needy cry she gave, how soft she was, how the orange blossom scent of her skin made him want to throw his head back and yowl, how much he wanted to strip every single piece of clothing off both of them and position her over his hot, straining—
“Christ,” said Wolfgang, putting his forehead against her chest, closing his eyes and feeling his jaw work as he forced himself to remember who the hell he was and what he was about to do.
His heart beat frantically, but so did hers, and each thump of it felt like a hammer, knocking something loose that he’d been holding on to inside. Wolfgang didn’t know what it meant, but he knew that he felt changed.
For good.
Charlotte was confounding, maddening, the terror of his life. But she was his, God help him.