Chapter Five
I must become your lover. He made it sound so simple.
When she had not touched a man—had not looked at a man—in the last fifteen years.
Louisa slid her hand along his arm as he pressed her into another turn.
A warm, firm arm, clad in dark blue velvet, the fabric soft beneath her touch, the muscle beneath as hard as a cushion stuffed with horsehair.
The hoop of her skirt pulled at her hips, making her feel womanly and seductive.
She noticed his gaze kept falling to her breasts.
After years of swathing herself to appear matronly and respectable, she’d almost forgotten she had breasts.
Certainly, she’d forgotten the way they could bewitch a man if put on proper display.
“Do you often go about parties inviting strange women to become your lover?” she asked, striving to keep her voice light.
Once she had known the art of small talk, of being scintillating and coquettish at the same time.
It had won her invitations to the best salons across Paris, to the best drawings rooms of the best patronesses, and any amusement was preferred to her husband’s company.
With this man, she felt every art had deserted her. She trembled in his arms like the flame in the oil lamp when a draught swept by.
“Do I?” He pretended to give her question thought.
She noticed the subtle way he drew her closer, closer.
Her skirt brushed his thigh, clad in a dark velveteen that matched his coat.
The fabric clung to the muscles of his thigh as his silk stockings clung to his calves. He wore his clothing like a caress.
If they were lovers, she would be at liberty to caress him.
“Not often. Hardly ever,” he said finally, in response to her question. “Do I invite strange women to my bed. Now. If you ask me how often I invite bewitching, alluring women to my bed.” He moved them in another wide turn, and she felt off balance, dizzy.
“Women with skin like liquid gold, who smell of cinnamon and honeysuckle.” He bent his head close, and his warm breath gusted over her neck and shoulders, bold as a touch on her skin. How could he smell the honeysuckle? It had been morning when she bathed her face in her favorite toilet water.
“Those kinds of women I invite to my bed whenever I can find them,” he said.
“One a ball, I suppose,” she answered, trying to pretend his lips near her neck did not give her shivers. “Perhaps two.”
“Alas for me, such woman are rarer than I could wish.”
“If I dally with you, sir, my blackmailer will have even more with which to reproach me. By day, I am a respectable woman.”
“That,” he replied, letting his gaze roam with keen interest over her face, then down to her breasts, “is a waste.”
For the first time, it did feel like a loss that she had given up love and passion.
She had found refuge, safety, and comfort at the Benevolence Hospital, a sense of purpose and fulfillment, and her first real friends. But she had forfeited any hope of romance. This man was the first to make her feel she might be missing out on something.
What harm would it do to take a lover, just once?
Great harm, Louisa reminded herself, catching herself leaning closer to him. She tried pulling away and couldn’t quite manage the feat. “You, sir, are a roué.”
“As often as the opportunity allows,” he admitted.
All the more reason to steer clear of him. He wouldn’t only damage her standing at the Hospital if she were discovered in an affair. A man like this might destroy her.
And yet here she was, nestling closer, irresistibly drawn.
He was taller than she was; her nose came to the level of his chin.
He smelled of expensive brandy and fresh cream and ever so faintly of cedar.
She liked his boldness, truth be told. That self-assurance was attractive in a man.
He knew his attributes and he wore them well, and he made no apologies for who he was.
Even if apologies were owed. In that respect, he might be like her husband.
She pushed memories of that dark time from her mind.
“I hope your silence means you are considering my offer,” he said.
The musicians switched to a new tune, another waltz, and he kept on without missing a step.
The man was a marvelous dancer, graceful and light on his feet.
For all his size, he was not a bulky man.
Not an enormous, clumsy broadsword or a chopping cutlass but a rapier, slim, lethal, and made of unbreakable steel.
“Would you consent to help me if I declined your proposal?”
He took time to consider, and Louisa’s sense of euphoria, stimulated by dancing in the arms of a handsome, virile man, diminished. Her heart was sinking in her chest when he spoke, his dark eyes resting on her face.
“Let me say that a deeper intimacy between us would go a long way toward ensuring my commitment,” he answered. “Having a personal interest in your welfare would make me all the more inclined to be your protector.”
Protector. As if she’d ever had one of those.
As if she’d ever been more than on her own, reliant on her own two feet to support her, employing her own bare wits to find her shelter from the cold winds of the world.
She lifted her hand from his arm and tried to step back. “I see.”
He held her other hand, still clasped in his, and kept his arm firm at her back. His black silk domino mask couldn’t conceal his eyes, which were keen as a hawk’s. “Stay.”
“I won’t. If these are your conditions, sir, I cannot meet them. You are no better than my blackmailer.”
He scowled. “I’m a damn sight better than a blackmailer. I gave you the option to decline. And I am on your side, Reinette.”
“I am the only one on my side. Let me go.”
She pulled away from him and plunged through the crowd standing on the edge of the room, nibbling on refreshments, displaying themselves, talking, flirting.
For the people around her, this night was one more entertainment in a life filled with pleasures.
Only she stood in a storm that did not seem to still, but grew stronger with every breath.
She had never felt so entirely alone as she did now, when she fled the glittering room and its music and the artful and empty promise of something better, something more, when her own life stood on a precipice.
She pushed through another drawing room, another crowd, hearing the exclamations and reproofs as she trod on trains and knocked loose decorative feathers in her mad, blinded flight.
No one knew who she was. No one among these people would care about her plight in the light of day.
By the time she burst through the tall French doors onto the porch, her chest was heaving and she thought she might faint.
She had not one single person to help her.
The one ally she was meant to meet was as much a cad as the others.
From here it was almost as if she could see the broad, tall outlines of the Hospital shimmering in the darkness, dissolving into shadows, disappearing from the city.
From the Earth. Because of her. Because she had failed.
“Hell’s ankles.”
He’d followed her. His scent hit her first, and then the knowledge that he was on the porch with her, the light of the torches lining the balcony casting shadows on his jaw.
Outside, alone, he was larger than he’d seemed in the crowded ballroom.
He moved with a feral grace, a man of action, a predator.
“I’ve never had a woman run quite so far from me simply because I requested a kiss.” His voice was a low rumble, dangerous, and it sent that awakening shiver across her shoulders and down her back, curling into her belly.
She knew what that shiver meant now. Part fear. Part alarm. Much more something else, something she’d felt in the most distant way in girlhood but which she’d never known as a woman. And never would know, because after tonight, she had to disappear.
“A kiss.” Her voice was a growl in return. He’d demanded much more than a kiss.
He loomed, a tall shadow at her side, but a solid shadow, of gleaming dark hair and glossy thick fabric, of blood and muscle and bone. His voice, his nearness called up something wild within her. She felt mad.
Desperate, unhinged, entirely mad, and uncaring of whatever else happened beyond this moment—beyond the two of them alone on this stone porch, stars above and torchlight behind, the music of the ball a distant echo in her head, and the scent of night-blooming jasmine burrowing into her brain, uprooting all the careful barriers and warnings and common sense she had shielded herself with for the last fifteen years.
He was as beautiful as a fallen angel, and he was everything she’d never had in her life, and what she’d never be granted, now.
He drew near, his head close as if he were trying to peer into her eyes. Into her soul. “Didn’t you wonder—”
She rolled onto her toes and pressed her mouth to his.
Time slowed into a drip of molasses as her world telescoped inward and shrunk to this moment. This man. This meeting of mouths.
She swung like a pendulum outward, outward, hardly able to breathe at her boldness. He held entirely still, though his lips met hers, catching, questioning. His mouth was soft and warm and firm all at the same time, the strangest and most delicious combination.
He made a small sound in his throat, like a grunt of satisfaction, and all of a sudden the pendulum yanked her backwards and she was flailing, off her feet, lost. She threw her arms around his neck to find an anchor and was crushed as his arms swooped her against his chest, as if she were a shipwrecked sailor being hauled onto shore, dragged from the clutches of death.
He dove his tongue into her mouth and she startled at the sudden mass of sensations. Heat. Pleasure. Hunger. She moaned and pressed closer. She’d never known this delirium, this excitement. She was in the grip of a fever.