A Dream of Desire (10 page)

James glanced to where she stood across the room. She was speaking with Sir Henry in a low voice, her expression serious as she nodded in response to his remarks about the new Bethnal Green school.

James took advantage of Talia’s distraction to gaze at her for a long moment. Her chestnut hair was tucked beneath her hat, a few loose curls spilling down to caress her neck. She wore a dark blue gown that fitted her curves, but lacked any fanciful embellishments to attract attention. Her profile was lovely as ever, with high cheekbones and those full lips that had haunted James’s dreams. Only her green eyes had changed, a new guardedness concealing the warm innocence he remembered from a year ago.

He hated the idea that he might have been the cause of it, though he wasn’t arrogant enough to imagine Talia had been pining after him for all these months. Perhaps something else had happened to contribute to her new solemnity.

Perhaps she might even have told him what it was, if he’d deigned to write to her this past year. He smothered another surge of regret and turned back to the books.

A knock on the door preceded another man’s entrance. Thin and of medium height, he wore a plain black coat and hat, which shadowed his features. The gleam of his spectacles further obscured his expression. He paused at the doorway, his gaze passing over James to where Talia stood by the windows.

“Mr. Fletcher!” Talia looked up and smiled, crossing the room in a rustle of skirts. “I hadn’t expected…”

Her voice faltered suddenly as she caught James’s eye. She stopped.

“I hadn’t expected you to be here today,” she told the newcomer.

“I’d hoped to find you, my lady.”

The man removed his hat, revealing sharp, narrow features and dark brows. His hair was cropped very short, and he looked to be several years younger than James. Closer to Talia’s twenty-four than his own thirty-one.

“I received your message about Peter Colston,” the man continued. “I’d intended to visit Brick Street this afternoon and can—”

“Just a moment, Mr. Fletcher, please.” Her smile firmly in place, Talia turned to James. “Lord Castleford, this is Mr. Fletcher. Mr. Fletcher, Lord Castleford is an old friend of the family and recently returned from a journey to Australia.”

James almost gritted his teeth as he waited for her to tell the man he was “leaving again soon.”

“My lord, Mr. Matthew Fletcher is one of our teachers,” Talia said, her voice putting an oddly firm stop at the end of that introduction.

James shook Fletcher’s hand and spoke a few rote words of greeting. “What is your subject of specialty?” he asked, out of politeness rather than genuine interest.

“I prefer the sciences, personally, but our curriculum allows me to teach everything from reading to history and geography.” Mr. Fletcher glanced at Talia. “But about Peter Colston—”

“Yes, we’ll discuss it later, please,” Talia said.

Fletcher blinked at the order, then nodded.

James frowned. He’d never known Talia to interrupt so often. As if she feared what people were about to say.

“Lord Castleford is only in London for a short time,” Talia continued. “He’s leaving in June for another expedition to—”

“I’m here for the remainder of the month,” James interrupted. “And I’d hoped to be of some service to your organization during my stay.”

The words surprised him as much as they appeared to surprise Talia.

“You want to help the ragged schools?” she asked, as if the idea were absurd.

“You needn’t sound so shocked,” James muttered, irritation biting at him. “I’ve engaged in a number of good works myself.”

“How are you able to help, my lord?” Sir Henry asked.

“Well, I…I could assist Lady Talia with whatever tasks are necessary.”

Talia swiveled toward the door, her movements sharp and abrupt. “Sir Henry, Mr. Fletcher, please excuse us for a moment. A word, my lord?”

Feeling as if he were about to receive a scolding, James followed her from the room. His gaze moved to the tapered curve of her waist as she strode down the corridor in front of him. Talia opened another door and gestured for him to follow her into an empty office. She closed the door behind him, her eyes flaring with sudden ire.

“Who do you think you are, James?” she snapped.

He stepped back, startled. “I’m the same man I always was.”

“You are not.” Talia paced halfway across the room, her hands fisting into her skirts. “You’re offering your help because you told Alexander you’d
look after
me. Not because you truly want to help.”

James frowned. “You’re the one who is withholding information from Northwood, Talia. Perhaps if you’d been honest with him and your father, he wouldn’t have reason for concern.”

“Alexander
invents
reasons to worry about me, James.” She spread her hands, her shoulders tense with frustration. “Everything I do gives him cause for concern. Did you ever consider I might be protecting him by not divulging my every move?”

“How is that protecting him?”

“He’s happy now.” Talia spun on her heel and paced toward him, her skirts swirling about her ankles. “He has a lovely wife, a daughter he adores, and now a newborn son…certainly he doesn’t need unfounded concerns about me to tarnish his happiness.”

“And yet they are.” James grasped her arms to prevent her from spinning away from him again. A little gasp caught in her throat, and his entire body reacted to both the sound and the sensation of her warmth burning clear through the sleeves of her dress.

Then she looked up at him, and her green eyes seared past his defenses, as if she could see right into the place in his heart that was reserved only for her. James took a breath and tried to focus, tried to pull his mind from the growing knowledge that he wanted to do anything Talia asked of him.

“Why else would Alexander have asked me to look after you?” he asked. “If you don’t want him to worry, if you’ve nothing to hide, then you’ll accept my help.”

She glared at him, her features set mutinously. “I don’t want the kind of help you’re offering.”

“What kind is that?”

“The kind where you swoop in for a fortnight, make people
depend
on you, and then leave again.” Talia yanked herself from his grip and stepped back, her chest heaving. “Just like you did with Alexander’s Society of Arts exhibition last year. You do the same thing every time you return to London, and this time I won’t allow it.”

“Why the bloody hell not?”

“Because I don’t want to be indebted to you!”

“I would never consider you indebted to me,” James retorted.

“But
I
would.” Talia shook her head and stalked to the other side of the room again. “You can’t do this and run away again, James. I won’t let you.”

He stared at her. “Run away?”

Talia turned, sorrow darkening her eyes. “I meant—”

“You
said
run away. Is that what you think I do?”

When she didn’t respond, a foreboding filled his chest. He knew he’d hurt her—he’d spent the last year hating himself for it—but he couldn’t stand the idea that she thought him a coward. Not Talia, who had always looked at him with such admiration.

Until he’d shattered whatever illusions she’d held about him.

A moment passed with the beat of forever. They stared at each other, a palpable energy crackling between them. His pulse raced. Even across the expanse of the room, James could feel the heat of her green eyes, the warmth of her body. He could still feel
her
, all the emotions radiating from her. Determination. Anger. Passion.

In three long strides, James closed the distance between them. His throat tightened with irritation and another emotion he could not name. He stopped in front of her, staring down into her vivid eyes, fringed with thick dark lashes, and the succulent curve of her mouth that had haunted both his waking and nighttime dreams.

He lifted his hand to cup her chin, tilting her face toward the light. Her skin was fine as silk, pale but for the faint color cresting her high cheekbones. A visible tremble went through her as her lips parted to draw in a breath. Heat slid into James’s veins as he recalled the soft, hot press of her mouth, the crackling urgency as she fit herself against him and opened to let him inside…

A growl started in James’s chest as he grabbed Talia’s shoulders and pulled her to him. Before he could think, before he could stop himself, he lowered his head and captured her mouth with his. Talia gasped, a breathy little sound that jolted arousal through his entire body. Even now, even with all that lay between them, she folded herself against him without hesitation, as if she knew that their essential bond of trust was still strong and true.

James cupped her face, angling his mouth more securely over hers as the heat of her breath warmed him from the inside out. Her breasts pressed against his chest, their soft fullness evident even through the constriction of her corset. Lust pooled through his groin. Part of his mind still prickled with shock over the swiftness of his reaction—to Talia, of all people, the one steady feminine presence in his entire life—while another part of him wondered at how natural it felt, how easy.

She fit against him like a puzzle piece locking into place, her curves molding against the planes of his torso, her arms twining around his neck. She tasted sweet, like apples and sugar, and when she parted her lips under his and touched her tongue to his, all reason fled James’s brain. He deepened the kiss, his erection pressing hard against the front of his trousers, his mind filling with images of Talia naked beneath him, her gasps hot in his ear and her body opening for him.

He muttered her name, hearing it break between them on an exhale of breath. He grasped the back of her neck and fought the urge to bury his hands in her hair, to yank her hat off and tug her hair from the pins. He imagined her stripped bare, letting him caress every inch of her naked flesh, her pink-tipped breasts overflowing his hands, her hips pushing forward as she begged for his touch…

Talia moaned. The soft noise filled him with heat and the urgency for more. James gripped the nape of her neck and broke away, his chest heaving as he stared into her lust-dark eyes.

A sudden anger rose in him, mingling with his shocking urgency—anger at Talia for making him want her in the most lewd and carnal of ways. For making him feel things for her that he had no right to feel.

Talia lifted a trembling hand to touch his mouth, her fingertips light as feathers. With her forefinger, she traced the line of his lower lip.

“I’ve dreamed of you,” she confessed, her breath catching on a husky note.

James closed his eyes, fighting a resurgence of near-overwhelming urgency.

“Talia.” His voice was strangled. “I will not…”

“Yes, that’s what you said last time, isn’t it?” She swept her finger into the notch beneath his lower lip. A hard tremble coursed through him. “
This will not happen
, you said. And yet you were the one who surrendered.”

James swallowed hard against the rising shame. He may have rejected her, but he had the sudden and unwelcome sense that Talia had been the one to gain the advantage that afternoon at Floreston Manor. An advantage that brought him to his knees.

“Yes, my lady,” he said, forcing his heart to freeze against the heated look lingering in her eyes. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away from him. “I surrendered to your sweet kiss and enjoyed every instant. I haven’t regretted it either. Do you want to know why?”

He tightened his grip on her wrist, felt her pulse beating fast as a hummingbird’s wings against his fingers.

“I haven’t regretted it because that one kiss planted the seed for a thousand hot dreams of you,” James hissed, grimly pleased to see trepidation creep into her expression. “Yes, I’ve dreamed of you as well, Talia. And my dreams have been raw, stripped of all decency. I’ve dreamed of you writhing naked beneath me, of feeling your legs wrapped around my thighs, of stroking your breasts and touching you in places that would shock you.”

He lowered his head to look her in the eye, forcing himself to go on, to confess the unvarnished, crude truth so that she would know exactly what kind of man he was.

“I’ve dreamed of thrusting so far inside you I can’t tell where one of us starts and the other ends,” he bit out. “I’ve imagined your voice begging me to plunge inside you again and again until you cry out and shatter with a pleasure so intense the world spins off its axis. I’ve dreamed of you on your hands and knees with me taking you from behind. I’ve dreamed of you riding me, of us copulating on the floor, on the table, in the goddamned bath…”

He pried his fingers from her wrist and stepped back, his chest heaving. His heavy erection still pressed against his trousers. He pulled air into his lungs and tried to calm the fire raging in his blood.

“So if you have imagined sweet, romantic kisses and courtship,” he said through gritted teeth, “you will not get them from me.”

He turned away, unable to look at her glittering eyes and reddened lips. The air, thick with tension, vibrated between them. James dragged a hand across his face and through his hair, thinking that any one of Talia’s brothers would do well to beat him to a bloody pulp. He wished they would.

“I…I haven’t,” Talia whispered.

James turned, apprehension piercing him. “You haven’t…”

“I haven’t imagined sweet kisses…” Talia swallowed. A blush swept up from her throat to sting her cheeks. “Or, I have sometimes, but mostly I…I’ve dreamed about…about what you just described.”

Her voice trailed off into a husky murmur. Though her blush deepened, she didn’t take her eyes from his.

James’s fists clenched as he suppressed yet another wave of undiluted lust.
Goddamned bloody hell.
How did Talia, of all people, know about such things? And in the face of that confession, how would he ever muster enough self-control to protect her from himself?

Coward.

The accusation burned his brain. He straightened his shoulders, infused with new resolve. He’d muster the self-control because Talia deserved better. Because he’d had his chance when she’d declared her love, and he’d all but thrown the gift back at her. Because even though he knew they would generate unimaginable heat together, he could never give her all he wished he could.