CHAPTER FIVE #2
His arm came around her waist and drew her in, and he took her mouth properly, and the sound she made against him nearly finished him where he stood.
She tasted of the tea she drank instead of wine.
Her hands slid up over his shoulders and into his hair, and she pressed herself against him with an eagerness that had nothing careful in it at all, and Remy backed her two steps until her spine came up against the bookcase and kissed her until neither of them could breathe.
“Remy.” She said it against his mouth, open and unguarded, and it was very nearly the end of him. “Please.”
“Tell me what you’re asking for.”
“I don’t know.” Her fingers curled in his shirt. “I only know that I’ve been thinking about it for weeks and I can’t sleep for it, and if you send me upstairs tonight I shall lie there listening to you through that door again and I can’t—”
He kissed her before she could finish.
Whatever had been holding him together came apart.
He had spent seven weeks being more careful of her than he had been of anything since he was nineteen years old, and seven weeks came undone in the space of a breath.
His hand found the row of small buttons at her throat and worked half of them free before he had decided to, and when he put his mouth to the hollow beneath her jaw and then lower, to the warm skin over her collarbone, Laurell made a sound he felt travel all the way down his spine.
“Is this—” he began.
“Don’t stop.”
He got her bodice open. Beneath it she was soft and full and already tender, and when he closed his lips over one dark peak she gasped and arched off the bookcase, both hands buried in his hair, holding him there.
He was rougher than he meant to be and she liked it.
She said his name twice more, ragged. Then his palm slid down over the slight new curve below her waist and stopped, and she covered his hand with her own and pressed it flat.
“That doesn’t frighten you,” she whispered.
“Frighten me.” He raised his head. “Laurell, it half kills me.”
Her skirts were heavy and there were a shameful number of them, and he took his time, one hand tracing up the length of her stocking, past the garter, to the bare skin above—and stopped there, deliberately, until she was shaking against him.
“Say it,” he said. “Not please. Say what you want, in words, because I want to be able to repeat them back to myself for the rest of my life.”
“I want your hand,” Laurell said, and shut her eyes, and said it anyway. “There. I want you to touch me.”
He did.
She was hot and slick and utterly unschooled, and he learned her by inches, watching her face by firelight while his fingers moved—slow strokes at first, then something surer, circling until her breath broke and her head went back against the shelf.
Her hands scrabbled for his shoulders. He caught her weight against his hip and did not stop, and did not hurry, and when at last she came apart she cried out into his shirt front and would have gone straight down onto the hearthrug if he hadn’t been holding her.
Remy held her while it passed through her, his mouth in her hair, his own heart going like a hammer.
“Oh,” Laurell said, faintly, into his chest.
“Yes.”
“Is it always—”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
She lifted her head. Her hair had come down on one side and her mouth was swollen and she was looking up at him with an expression of such open, dazed generosity that Remy understood, with total clarity, what was about to happen and exactly how much it was going to cost him.
Her hand slid down his chest, and lower, and reached for the fastening of his trousers.
He caught her wrist.
“No.”
Laurell went absolutely still.
“I can’t,” Remy said. His voice came out wrecked.
“Not that. Not tonight.” He brought her hand up and pressed his mouth to the inside of her wrist, which was the single hardest thing he had ever done.
“You are in my house, in my keeping, with nowhere else on this earth to go. I have your name on a contract. I paid a woman eight hundred dollars for the right to do exactly this, and if I take it—if I take one inch of it for myself—then everything I have said to you since the night I brought you here is a lie, and you will never in your life be certain it wasn’t. ”
“You didn’t take anything.” She was pulling her bodice closed with hands that had begun to shake. “That’s rather the point, isn’t it. I stood there and let you—and you wanted nothing.”
“Wanted nothing.” There was no amusement whatever in the sound he made. “God Almighty, Laurell.”
“Then—”
“I am forty years old,” he said, “and I know what I look like from where you’re standing.
I am the roof over your head. I am the man who fed you and dressed you and put a doctor in front of you.
” He shook his head. “You cannot say yes to me, Laurell. Not honestly. Not while I hold every card in the deck.”
He watched her take it in. He watched, with the sick helplessness of a man doing the right thing badly, as her hand went to her own stomach in a gesture he was certain she didn’t know she made.
“Or perhaps,” Laurell said, very quietly, “you simply thought better of it. Halfway through.”
“That is not—”
“It’s late.” She was already moving, gathering her sewing with hands that shook. “Forgive me. I’ve had a great deal of your kindness and I’ve made you pay for it. It won’t happen again.”
“Laurell.”
“Goodnight, Mayor Vincent.”
The door closed behind her.
Remy stood in his library for a long time. Then he sat down in the chair she’d used, which was still warm, and put his head in his hands.
He had said no to protect her, and he had made her feel like something nobody wanted. He had been so pleased with his own restraint that he had not thought—not once, not for a second—how it would sound to a woman whose last honest offer had been laughed at in a garden.
Upstairs, through the wall, he heard the connecting door’s bolt slide home.
It was the first time in seven weeks she had ever thought to lock it, and he sat in the dark until three o’clock in the morning knowing precisely whose fault that was.