Sin and the Soldier, page 8
“You will allow me to look around the rooms?” he said, his voice husky although he dragged his gaze and his person away from her, all but striding around the room, lighting candles, poking at the curtains with his stick, and then moving through into the bedchamber, where he went through similar procedures, and even looked in the wardrobe. She knew he did because she heard the doors open and close while she remained rooted to the same spot he had left her, listening to the quick, loud thuds of her own heart.
If she didn’t move, he would think she was just waiting for him to leave.
I am. I am waiting for him to leave.
He came back into the sitting room. “Better safe than sorry,” he murmured, approaching her. “Are you comfortable enough here without your own things?”
“I like it,” she blurted. “The bed smells of you.”
Appalled at her own words, she could only stare at him defiantly. But he didn’t seem offended.
His lips quirked upward in his characteristic almost-smile. “So does yours.”
An oddly tense and yet sweet silence stretched between them.
Then he stepped closer and bent his head, brushing his lips against her cheek, sending warm sensation scattering through her veins. “Good night, Natalie.”
She forced her voice to work. “Good night, Richard.” Greatly daring. She stood on tiptoe, aiming for his own cheek in return.
He cheated. Whether by accident or design, he moved, and her lips connected with his for the briefest moment. Instead of jumping back in alarm, she brought up her hand to touch his cheek, pleading, though for what, she could not have said.
“If I kiss you,” he said, low, “you will have to order me from the room because I suspect that is the only way you’ll get me to leave.”
“You have already kissed me.”
“No,” he said, incomprehensibly. “No.”
His mouth covered hers, seemed to sink into her lips, and fuse. A sound almost like a sob escaped her because this, this was what she truly wanted. A lover’s kiss, this lover’s kiss, one that invaded and worshipped, bringing pleasure and desire in equal measure. So lost was she in the experience that she didn’t know if she had pressed herself so tightly against him, or if his arm had swept her there. But every inch of her from breasts to thighs sang with delight to be so close to his hard, male body, to feel the wicked column of his erection against her abdomen while his mouth plundered and seized and demanded her response.
She gave it with helpless abandon, both arms around his neck, one hand clutching at his hair, the other roaming down his lean back to the swell of his rear. He began to move against her like a whole-body caress. His knee parted hers, and she gasped into his mouth as his thigh touched the hot tenderness that was suddenly the center of her need.
“Make me go,” he whispered against his lips. “Command me. Hit me. Or just ask, I’ll obey, but please, please do it quickly…”
“Stay,” she whispered back. “Please.”
He drew back, his breathing quick and uneven. “Do you even know what you’re asking?”
“No.” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Yes, sort of. I don’t… I only know it has to be you.”
He stared down into her eyes, still holding her to him with one arm. Then his head bent, and very gently, sweetly, he kissed her again. For a moment, she feared it was a farewell kiss, for his hand slid up to detach hers from his nape, but he didn’t let go, merely turned and led her to the bedchamber.
She knew another moment of panic when he returned to the sitting room, but then through the doorway, she saw the light fade as he snuffed the candles. She had no idea what to do, a realization that brought about a quite different panic. Until he walked back into the bedchamber, propped his cane by the bed, and blew out the candles, leaving only the pale glow from the lamp nearest the bed.
“I never felt this for anyone before,” she blurted. “Not even Gerald when I was at my most infatuated.”
He raised his hand and began drawing pins from her hair. “I don’t come to you a pure or chaste man,” he said. “There have been women, women I have cared for. Would you believe me if I said they don’t hold a candle to you, here with me now?”
She shook her head, smiling ruefully, and he ran his fingers through her loose hair, pushing it behind each shoulder before he touched her lips. “Then I shall have to prove it to you. Somehow.”
His lips took hers once more, while his fingers found the fastenings of her gown. It couldn’t have been easy one-handed, though the insight never entered her head until the gown sagged off her shoulders and he bent to trace the line of her clavicles with his mouth. While he kissed, he untied her chemise, and then, in a courtly gesture, he took her hand and urged her to step away from her clothes.
She stood before him naked but for her stockings and garters. Heat surged through her, much of it embarrassment, but also a strange, powerful arousal as his eyes drank her in so greedily. She stepped nearer him to hide. At least, she thought that was her intention, but somehow, she was unbuttoning his coat with trembling, determined hands, and pushing it off his shoulders. It landed on the floor, but he didn’t seem to care. His hand reached behind her and pulled her naked hips to him to let her feel his arousal through his pantaloons.
Another of those small, inarticulate sounds escaped her throat. She removed his cravat pin and tossed it on the dressing table before untying his cravat and letting it fall on his coat. Because she wanted to, she buried her nose in his neck, kissed his throat while his hand caressed her naked back, and his heart beat fast and strongly against her breasts.
Impatient now, she began tugging his shirt from his pantaloons, eager to pull it off and touch the rest of him, skin to skin.
But he caught her hand. “Wait. Let me douse the lamp.”
“Why?” she whispered, inhaling him, burrowing beneath his shirt.
“Because the sight will shock you more even than the touch. And I don’t want to stop.”
She paused, the meaning of his words penetrating her haze of lust and pleasure. His sheer vulnerability took her breath away.
“I want to see you,” she whispered. “All of you.”
“You don’t.”
She kissed his throat, her lips stretching into a smile against his skin. “I do.” With a little push, she persuaded him to sit on the bed, and then she drew the shirt up over his head.
His chest was broad, smooth, and muscled, with a faint scattering of coarse blond hairs, a tempting line of which ran away from his navel into his pantaloons. She swept her fingers over the expanse of his chest, over his thickly muscled shoulder and right arm. Awed, she smoothed her palm over to the other shoulder and down the short stump of his arm. He sat tense and unmoving.
She swallowed. “Does it hurt?”
He shook his head. So, she kissed what was left of his arm. He flinched, but she continued kissing up to his shoulder and chest until his tension seemed to leak away, and he lay back on the bed. She followed, stretching out upon him in languorous, decadent bliss. He smiled against her lips when she kissed him, and then rolled her beneath him.
Excitement soared in her because he was taking charge, because he would show her the way. There was a good deal of breathless wriggling while he kicked off his pantaloons and stockings, and then his fingers and his mouth were everywhere on her, driving everything but helpless lust from her mind. He pleasured her breasts with his lips, while his hand caressed her knee and thigh and swept inward and upward to her most intimate places.
If it had not felt so wonderful, so right, perhaps she would have been shocked. As it was the sharpness of the thrill made her gasp with delight. And from there, it only got better as he explored and stroked, and then it was not his fingers but something much larger that nudged and stroked and slid its way into her body.
She cried out in wonder and need. He pushed further, filling her, and then stilled, his breath coming in short pants as she tried to hide the discomfort.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he whispered, resting his forehead against hers. “Let me show you…” He kissed her, stroked her until she relaxed once more, and the glow of desire surged back with a vengeance. Only then did he begin to move inside her, tenderly, relentlessly guiding her through all the wonder and bliss of which her body was capable. Leading her to joy.
Chapter Eight
Since Waterloo, there had not been many women in Richard’s life. None before or after had given him such intense pleasure as the virgin he made love to in Renwick’s Hotel.
He had imagined, somehow, that she would be experienced to some degree, that she would have known some intimacy at least with her one-time betrothed. That Monck would have used physical pleasure, to say nothing of her ruin, to bind her to him. At first, Richard had even wondered if Monck had just been an appalling lover to teach her so little of fleshly delights. But then he knew.
Richard was her first lover. As he fell asleep in her arms, he wondered, vaguely, if he would have taken her had he known. If he should be ashamed. But he wasn’t. He was fiercely, gloriously glad.
She was his, and he would protect her and keep her.
I love her, was his last conscious thought. And his first when he awoke.
Since they had not bothered to shut the bed curtains, the early dawn light played across the pillow where she lay under his arm. She looked so beautiful and peaceful that his heart ached. His morning arousal tempted him quite sorely to wake her to a little more love before he left.
No experience in his life could better that of her coming apart in his arms, not once but twice. Her awakening to passion, her joy, moved him beyond expression. And he wanted to show her more. He wanted to take more. To spend the day here, just making love to her with the odd meal and drink to sustain them.
But she needed sleep and rest from him. And he had to think of the future as well as the intoxicating present.
He could not go on drifting and doing nothing except feeling sorry for himself, being only occasionally roused to pursue some goal, like Dominic’s innocence, before lapsing back. Natalie and her music had roused him from his torpor and given him a greater goal, though it was a largely selfish one. He had other responsibilities. He had to look after his men. There was a whole world of injustice and neglect out there. And he had to look after Natalie if he meant to make a life for them both.
While the sun rose, snippets of ideas that had been fluttering into his head over the last few days now joined and clarified in his mind. Slowly, reluctantly, he lifted his arm from Natalie. She made a faint, sleepy sound of disapproval, but did not wake. He slipped away from her heat, got out of bed, and climbed with difficulty into his clothes and boots.
Then he quietly left his room and the hotel and went to confer with the men at the cottage. Half an hour later, he begged a cart ride into town from a local farmer and was dropped off in town near St. Paul’s. After a conversation with the family solicitor, he set off in the direction of Dunne’s offices. Only then, he recalled he had changed his coat. The marriage lines were still in his evening coat in his room at Renwick’s.
Annoyed with himself, he changed direction toward the livery stable where two of his men had worked until last week.
“Where are the horses?” he asked the old man who lumbered down to greet him from the house behind the stables.
“Sent them to another stable to be sold. My buyer doesn’t want the horses.”
“Who is your buyer?”
“Name of Manners. Wants to tear all this down, including my house, which is a perfectly good house in a modest way, and build something new. Houses, shops.”
“Have you no one to carry on your own business?”
“Nah. Only the one daughter and she married a farmer over in Hertfordshire. Going to live with them once I get shot of this place.”
Richard pounced. “Then you are not yet shot of it?”
“Negotiating over price,” came the lugubrious response, from which Richard gathered that the buyer was offering a pittance. “And God knows how long the horses will take to sell. Most of them are getting long in the tooth, too.”
“Do me a favor,” Richard suggested. “Don’t sell for a couple of days. I might make you an offer myself, to include the horses. And I won’t pull your house down.”
*
Natalie could not recall ever waking with such a sense of well-being and happiness.
Richard.
Captain Lord Richard Gorse, her haunted soldier, was her lover. Her whole body tingled with remembered delight. With shy yet sensual languor, she turned over to embrace him. And found she was alone.
The disappointment was acute, though she supposed he might be preserving her reputation. On the other hand, they should probably be more worried about the damage caused by her staying in his rooms at the hotel, even if he was not in them at the time. It would only take one of his friends or a member of his family to come knocking and find her here.
She smiled because she found it hard to care. Rising from the bed, she went to find her watch. She would need to be quick if she wished to return to the cottage and prepare for the midday concert. She used Richard’s washing water, then slipped on her easily fastened old work dress, which she had left here for just this purpose.
The evening gown in which she had performed, still lay on the floor where it had fallen last night. Blushing with delicious memory, she picked it up and shook it out before rolling it up with her other things and bundling it into her shawl to make a parcel.
Then she tidied up the room, retrieving Richard’s tossed-aside clothing and putting them away. The man needed a valet. He must struggle unnecessarily with only one hand to fasten so many buttons and tie his cravat. But she suspected that was part of the reason he did without help. To force himself to learn. She would ask him when she returned to the cottage, for she suspected he was there, waiting to accompany her to the gardens.
Something rustled under her feet. A document that must have fallen from Richard’s pocket. She bent to pick it up, catching it by one corner and it flapped open. As often happens, her own name caught her gaze, and she stared in horror at the certification of a marriage between herself and Gerald Monck.
Her hand flew to her cheek. How long had Richard been in possession of this? At the very least, he must have had it last night when he took her to dine, when he came with her here. Was that why he had made love to her? Because he imagined she was, as a clearly unfaithful wife, available?
No, no, she would not let the beauty of last night be sullied by such a sordid explanation. Nor could she believe Richard capable of such cynicism.
Who are you trying to lie to? she lashed herself. Of course, he is cynical. Jaded, disillusioned, angry…
But not with me, a tiny voice pleaded inside her mind. Surely not with me…
And yet, why else would he have said nothing about this? Where had he got it from?
Gerald, of course. It had to be Gerald.
Her mind in a whirl, she managed to concentrate enough to leave the hotel with discretion and walk to the cottage.
It, too, was empty, although Daniels appeared at the door only a moment after she had closed it, to report that all was quiet and that the captain had gone into town. Frustration threatened to tear her apart. She wanted—needed—to see Richard, now. She had to know if Gerald had been able to pollute even this.
“I won’t let him,” she whispered fiercely to her harp. “I won’t.”
The question was if she had any choice in this either.
*
He wasn’t in his usual place when she waited just offstage. Smith and Havers had accompanied her to the gardens and melted away. She felt sick. She wondered if she would ever see him again, if he would ever know…
She walked onto the stage and curtseyed as usual before sitting at the harp. Another desperate glance showed her the still-empty seat at the front. There was only one thing she could do. Play.
And when, reluctantly, she came to a close and looked up from her harp, Richard sat in the seat at the far left of the front row.
She had to close her eyes for a moment as the emotion of the music clashed with the sudden flood of relief and fresh fear and sheer, overwhelming love. And then, forcing herself, she stood and curtseyed to the audience and to the orchestra, and walked off the stage. Her legs trembled so much, she all but collapsed onto the waiting stool beside Amy.
“Are you well, Miss Natalie?” the girl asked anxiously.
Natalie forced a smile, and then discovered she could not stop smiling. “Yes. Yes, I am very well, thank you. Just a little tired, I think.”
And then Richard was there, as tall and sardonic as ever. “May I take you for an ice?” he said incongruously.
She stood without a word and walked beside him across the rose garden to the awning where tea and ices and various sweet and savory snacks could be bought. They found a table, where Richard propped his walking stick and held a chair for her to sit. He took the chair opposite, and they ordered tea and ices from the waitress.
Richard leaned back in his chair, stretching out his bad leg in a pleased, relaxed kind of way that she almost resented. She took a deep breath to bring up the subject of the marriage lines.
“I’m thinking of buying a livery stable in town,” he said.
She blinked. “Why would you wish to own such a thing?”
“Oh, lots of reasons. I was a cavalry officer for ten years. If I know anything, I know about horses. And then, I could employ old soldiers to work there and even to run it.”
“Your old soldiers,” she guessed.
“I might also breed horses on my land.”
Her heart sank. “You have a large estate?”
“Lord, no. Very much a younger son’s portion, but it’s a pleasant place and has room for another venture.”
“Won’t you need to make a big investment in such a project?” she asked. “I suppose your father, the marquess, would help.”
“He might,” Richard said dubiously. “But I have no intention of asking him. I have a decent amount of prize money that I haven’t touched. That will start me off. And I have made up my mind to sell my commission.”
