Love and Scandal, page 3
He was watching her face with an odd, intent expression on his own, his eyes still wide, his mouth slightly open, even as he caught her hand in his and held it against his red cheek. Collette felt a hideous telltale blush rising to her own and knew that he would misinterpret her blush and slap as maidenly alarm, when really it was her secret acknowledgment of what she had been thinking and wishing.
“Why did you kiss me?” she asked, her voice quivering.
“Why did you slap me?” he countered, indignant.
She tried to pull her hand away, but he held onto it. “I’m so sorry!” she said. He finally released her hand from his iron grip. She shook her head, cleared her throat and checked on the candle holder clipped to her seat back, making sure the wax was not going to spill and that the wick was trim, more for something to do than anything, more to avoid his eyes so he would not see the consciousness in hers. But she found she could not keep her gaze from returning to his face. “Why?” she repeated. “Why did you kiss me?”
His dark, thick brows drew down over the smoldering ash of his eyes. “One must never ask a gentleman why he kisses a lady. One might hear something that would shock or alarm.”
The truth was, he thought, he wasn’t sure why he had done it himself. He was responding to some signal, the permission she gave him with her confirmation that every man and woman must be true to themselves. He was being completely true to his nature and to a craving for her touch. The other passengers, the surroundings, all had melted away in the exquisite taste of lips, soft and yielding, plump and delicious like ripe summer berries from the vine. He tamped down his very earthy physical response to parting her lips with his tongue, as he had been on the verge of doing when he regained his sense of where they were and pulled away.
Think of something more abstract, his mind demanded, or you shall be unfit company. Even her resounding slap, delivered with a startled look of shock on her delightful face, had been enjoyable in some odd way.
“If I kissed you again, would you slap me again?” he asked, and licked his lips.
“I might,” she said, staring at him, watching his mouth.
“Why? Did you not say that men and women should be true to their desires? Or were you not aware of where that kind of thinking could lead?” He well knew because his life had been spent heeding the desires of his flesh and following his passions. And that vast experience led him to believe that, despite Collette’s evident innocence, within her burned a hot, scorching pool of molten desire. It had blazed forth in her kiss, searing him with intense sweetness until he could almost smell sugar burning. He had pulled away before she left him a charred cinder. He spent another long moment quelling his body’s physical responses, but with only partial success. He shifted, uncomfortably aware of the first pulse of arousal and how fortunate he was that gentlemen’s trousers were much less form-fitting than they had been in an earlier age.
Did she know anything at all about desire and where it led? Had she ever truly thought about what went on between a man and a woman? Virtuous ladies had cast discretion to the winds and ruined themselves for one moment of bliss. Governments had been brought down, holy men had renounced vows. Murder, mayhem and all manner of violence had been done for that primal, raging urge to find rapture.
She could not know and still be the innocent he took her for. She could not know that even her slap had made him think of delicious romps, of slap and tickle and sweet abandon, of playful spankings followed by amorous exercise. He bent his most seductive gaze her way.
“Collette, I kissed you because I wanted to and because you wanted kissing, whether you knew it or not. You invited it, initiated it, even though you said not a word. Women and men communicate on a much deeper level than with mere words. You were begging me to kiss you. Were you shocked? Did I disgust you? Be honest with me. And with yourself.”
“No,” she said, her voice a breathy whisper that threatened to shatter his willpower. “No, I was not disgusted. I liked it. I liked it very much indeed. I found it…invigorating.”
He raised his eyebrows. Invigorating? Well! “And so you slapped me?”
“I think it was reflex,” she said, with a tiny frown and furrowed brow. “I can’t imagine what else it could have been.”
It was worth the risk of another slap to kiss those lips again. He gazed steadily into the piercing emerald of her eyes and lowered his face to hers again, but this time, instead of slapping him she put her hands on either side of his face and leaned into the kiss, sealing his lips to hers with the sweet wetness of her delectable mouth. He felt his pulse accelerate as a rush of blood pounded through his veins in the age-old surge of procreative drive.
Her lips moved in a soft dance over his and her fingers threaded through his hair, tickling the small hairs on his neck until his body was screaming with desire. All the awkwardness of leaning over the arms between their seats melted away and he enfolded her in his embrace, pulling her slender body to his, finding in her kiss a blissful oblivion he had not experienced for years, since his first rapt encounter—
“London! All passengers alight at London!”
The loud nasal accent of the porter rang through the car, and Collette broke away from him, her eyes glazed and her lips moist and pouted from their joined passion. All around them people were awakening, their own glazed looks the expression of sleep interrupted abruptly. And so Collette and the man who called himself Jamie did not stand out a bit, even as they stared into each other’s eyes, the knowledge of what was pulsing in a torrent though their veins shared in that gaze.
“London,” she said, laughing softly. She licked her lips and he swallowed hard, bewildered by the thrum of sensations singing through him. “I have never been here, you know. This is my first time. A night of many firsts, I think.”
There was no other way to interpret that but that he had given her her first kiss. Had he ever done so before, ever given a lady her first kiss, or her first anything? He thought not. A night then of firsts for himself, too. He watched as she bent over and slipped her book into the heavy black valise at her feet, wishing they had had another few minutes alone in the dim pool of light cast by her candle. He would have given much to know how she would have reacted to other unforgivable liberties, a leg pressed against her thigh, a hand on her breast, a tongue thrust into her open, enticing mouth. Damn the timing of the trains! He wished London distant by another ten miles. Or twenty, or thirty.
The rhythm of the train shifted. She put her spectacles back on, blew out the candle and smoothed the skirt of her full, plain traveling dress. She pulled her valise onto her lap, snapped the candleholder into its own metal carrying case and assumed a serious expression, glancing out the window as they ground to a halt in the station, brakes squealing and steam engine releasing a chuffing hiss of pent-up power.
What should he say? What could he do? He had intended to flirt a little and then say goodbye to Collette, but he was curiously loath to follow the dictates of rakedom. She stood and began down the aisle. After retrieving his own valise he followed her, admiring the sway of her bottom, wondering how it would look with a filmier covering, or no covering at all, the rounded, smooth, pink cheeks naked to his gaze and his hands.
Damn!
They exited among the passengers from their carriage, down to the platform, little boys leaping down as their weary mother followed, an elderly couple clinging to handgrips and accepting the help of the taciturn conductor.
Jamie turned to Collette. “My man will be here somewhere. He will have come to meet me with my carriage.” That wouldn’t do; he sounded anxious, eager even. He forced a more casual tone into his voice and said, “May we carry you somewhere?”
She hesitated. The crowd swirled around them, two still figures in a moving, heaving mass of humanity. Summer heat had made the scent of humans in a hurry pungent, and the odor competed with the earthy fragrance of horse and smoke, sewage and river. His curiosity sparked. Surely the young woman who advocated following the dictates of desire would not balk at being seen accepting a ride from a fellow passenger?
She bit her lip, but then nodded, decision made. “Certainly, sir. Indeed, I would be immensely pleased to accept a ride to a hotel.”
He quirked a pleased grin. He would know where she was, and the choice of whether to follow up on this extraordinary night would be his. He would make his man, Mockley, sit atop with the driver so he could have her alone in his dark carriage for a precious half hour. Much could be accomplished in half an hour, even a complete seduction. He had done it before, from fully dressed to naked and fait accompli, though never in a moving vehicle. And never with a virginal country lass. He bowed. “I shall find my man. If you would stay right here, Collette, I will come back for you when I have located Mockley.”
He disappeared into the crowd. Collette set her valise down at her feet and watched him go, wondering if she should be allowing him to escort her like this. He was a stranger, and if her aunt knew about her behavior, the poor woman would be suffering palpitations of the most alarming kind. But this was not Listerwood-on-Sea, and she was anonymous in her scandalous behavior. The only one to suffer would be herself, and she had found an exhilarating sense of freedom in doing exactly what she wanted to do.
She might never again meet a man like Jamie, and she intended to allow fate to have its dance with her. It might be too late for her observations of a real live rake to do her any good, but it was still fascinating, and there was so much more to learn…and to experience, perhaps. Just a hundred miles or so from home, but already she had changed, metamorphosing from a village damsel into…into what?
“Miss Collette Jardiniere?”
A well-modulated voice designed to carry through the din of the London station sounded behind her, and she whirled. A young man, bespectacled and mild of countenance, stood a few feet away.
“I am she,” Collette said.
“I thought so. You had that lost look of a newcomer to London. I am David Stuyvesent, Mr. Bellringer’s assistant. You know, Mr. Bellringer, of Rosewood Publishing? I have come to escort you to your hotel. We have arranged a room for you.”
“How kind of Mr. Bellringer, and of you, Mr. Stuyvesent. I…” Collette looked around.
“We must go, miss. I have a hansom waiting and someone else is likely to bribe the driver if we do not hurry back. May I take your bag?” With youthful vigor he grabbed her valise and lugged it off, throwing over his shoulder, “Follow me, Miss Jardiniere.”
She had no choice. Jamie would not know where she had gone and she did not even know his real name. Carruthers and botheration, but that was irritating! What was he hiding? Was his reputation so very alarming? He must be a seducer and a scoundrel, but… She glanced around again and Mr. Stuyvesent was already disappearing, being swallowed up in the crowd that swirled around him in the weak light thrown from station lamps. Collette trotted after him. London was a huge, frightening city, and if she lost sight of the young man she would not have her luggage, her money, nor did she know at what hotel they had bespoken a room for her.
And what a pace he was setting!
She heard her name being called.
“Collette! Collette!”
She whirled. Jamie! There he was, standing quite a distance away with a genteel-looking gentleman’s gentleman. But Mr. Stuyvesent was disappearing, with her luggage, her money, her life! Her gaze swung back and forth between rational behavior and abandonment. She shrugged, feasted her eyes on Jamie’s face one last time and then whirled again, racing after the young assistant in the dim gloom of the gas-lit station.
“Damnation! Mockley, she is leaving, running away from me!”
“There is a first time for everything, sir, so they say,” the valet said, shifting his employer’s bag from one hand to the other.
“But I told her to stay right where she was. I told her I would come back for her!”
“It appears she is not accustomed to doing what she is told, Mr. Jameson.”
She was gone, Jameson thought, a strange desolation overtaking him. Why did she leave like that, running away? He had thought at the very least to kiss and cuddle her in the carriage, maybe even scandalize her with a little fondling, and then escort her to a hotel and perhaps take her to dinner one evening. If he found that the piquancy of her conversation needed the clacking noise and sway of a rail carriage to give it zest, he could drop the acquaintance. Or if he found, after all, that her sylph-like body was unpleasing to his sensual desires, then he could put an end to his seduction. Now the decision had been taken out of his hands and that was intensely irritating.
But then his accustomed mood of boredom settled over him once more and he shrugged. Did it really matter? He should not bed her after all. If he did there would surely be one of those horrible, squalid scenes at the end of their affair. Young women who did not have the required experience and degree of sophistication could be annoyingly emotional, he had heard, and he could not abide scenes and tears. It would have been interesting to be her first lover, but in the end this was likely for the best.
A bell clanged and the train pulled away from the station to be cleaned and stoked with fresh coal, but “Jamie”, as he had introduced himself to Collette stood, still staring, as the platform emptied. His manservant, used to his odd moods, perhaps, waited nearby.
No, thought Jameson, nodding to himself, he had ample reason for confining his affairs to mistresses—though he did not have a woman in his keeping at that moment, which might explain his strange fixation on a drab spinster of slender build and modest attributes—finding it more trouble-free to release himself, when bored, with money and gifts than arguments and tantrums, though he had occasionally had to endure both.
And so with some women he stopped at flirtation: a little kissing, a little cuddling, a caress here and there. Flirtation was not merely a means to an end with him. He had been called a rake and a wastrel at times, but a genuine enjoyment of women—looking at them, talking to them, kissing them—was not a crime in his philosophy. It seemed to him that with the advance of the century a growing seriousness was driving all of the playfulness out of relationships between men and women. It was all labored discourse with a view to marriage. Even widows and married women who in another age would have been free to engage in some lighthearted lovemaking were expected now to be serious and upright, morally correct, tediously virtuous. Men of his ilk were forced to resort to prostitutes or other women of easy virtue when he would have enjoyed a romp with a more elevated class of lady. Avoiding the insidious invasion of diseases transmitted by sexual pairing was a preoccupation—he was fastidious about such things—and it kept him chaste far more often than any moral worries ever could have. He had been careless but lucky in his youth. With his thirties had come more caution and fewer love affairs. The result was an occasional period of unwanted abstinence when no woman of appropriate habits and health was available. Such was his current state.
He sighed heavily. Unfortunately the lust that had been inflamed by the odd attractions of the spinsterish Collette would not be satisfied by any woman of easy virtue. It would be a cold and lonely bed for him that night. One night would suffice to erase her from his memory, though, he had no doubt.
The huge station reverberated with the sound of another train coming in, and he idly watched as more people poured onto the platform. Black-coated men, cinch-waisted ladies, squalling children. But not one who held his gaze as Collette had. Oh, for his grandfather’s time, when flirtation was a respected art and affairs considered no one’s business but the participants’! Earnest morality might be good for the moral health of the nation, though he would dispute that, but he felt sometimes as though humanus rakus was a vanishing species. The Last Days of a Rake had seemed to him to capture society’s relentless hunting down and eradication of men of pleasure.
He remembered Collette’s odd comment that she believed the author was condemning not the rake’s lifestyle, but his society-driven need to reform against his own inclination, against even his own nature. How did she understand that? He had expressed to no one his own interpretation, that the author’s point was that the hero’s reformation was an unfortunate capitulation to the prudish forces of the time rather than a true change in character brought about by inner transformation. He had thought that particular thread lost in the general outcry and titillated excitement aroused by the overt sexuality of the text. Though couched in the most delicate of phrases, it was evident to all readers that the central character enjoyed a robust freedom in his bedroom activities. The author had the delicacy to stop before detailing any of those activities in prurient detail, and he thought it saved the book from becoming mere smut. It was a wise artistic decision.
“Sir, are we going home or shall I secure you a bench upon which to lay your weary head tonight?” Mockley asked, his tone as close to exasperation as a good servant would ever allow. He stood close by, awaiting his master’s pleasure with apparent patience even as he hefted the valise from hand to hand.
“What? Oh, yes, certainly. Back to the carriage, Mockley. And home. It has been a long and frustrating journey.”
“You did not find what…or whom…you were looking for, sir?” he asked, unbending enough to speak now that he knew they were heading home.
“No. I certainly hope the young man whose services I have retained is having better luck in the search than I have had, for this lead was false. The road to Kent was a dead-end street, you might say. It turned out to be a disappointment in every single way…or almost every way.”
His valet turned and began threading through the crowds, and Jameson followed. His mind returned to Collette. Where did Collette come by her attitudes and understanding, and more important, her behavior? Surely her comportment was unusual for a gently-bred female; she had kissed back the second time with a surprising degree of enjoyment and vigorous lack of restraint. She learned quickly too, moving from lack of skill to finesse in the short period from first kiss to second. It was common knowledge that sexual feeling was incompatible with female morality, but was she one of those rare young women to whom sexual feeling was not anathema? The more he thought on it, the stranger her passionate response to a kiss—in an occupied rail carriage no less—became. And yet, the memory stirred his body to response. Jaded he might be, but one poky little country wren had heated his blood to the boiling point. He had sensed that he was giving her a treat, and that pleased him and made him think of other delightful experiences one could introduce a young woman to.
