A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) (31 page)

He groaned softly as he filled her. “God, Eve. My God.”

They were motionless for a time, savoring that moment of joining. The sway of their breathing, as her breasts rose and fell against him. His breath fell hot against her throat as he ducked his head. And then she moved over him, rising, sliding down again as he cupped her face for an invasive, soul-seeking kiss, then slid his hands down and filled them with her breasts, his thumbs dragging with exquisite roughness over her ruched nipples.

She jerked from the shock of the pleasure. “Please. God. Like that. Yes,”

His hips arched up, his hands guided her up, then down again. The friction inside her was exquisite; every thrust ramped her pleasure; she was frantic with it. She moaned low in her throat, begged him with his name.

He ducked his head to circle her nipple with his tongue, to take it lightly in his teeth, and she arched backward in his arms.

Lightning coursed everywhere through her. “Adam.”

She’d had lovers who had approached her body as though they’d a compass and map; she’d known where they would touch her and how and when. There was no strategy here. The totality, the purity, the instinct of Adam’s hunger and demand was more erotic than anything she’d known before. All was frenzy now, and carnal rhythm, and the roar of breath, his hands urging her to ride him hard, their bodies colliding, rocking, greedy for deeper, more, harder. So. Good.

She saw it in his eyes when he was lost to only the pursuit of his own bliss. Distant and hot. His jaw tightened. His breath ragged. “Eve … I’m …”

He was rigid now, so close to his release. But her own pleasure consumed her steadily, like flame to tinder, until she was more pleasure than human, then only pleasure. Every cell of her skin lit with it until the bliss was unbearable; and then he thrust a final time.

She tucked her head against his throat to muffle a scream as she shattered into glittering shards of bliss.

They held each other until breathing settled. She became aware of the room again as a series of sensations: her hands against the breadth of his back beneath his shirt, the lift and fall of his breath as it settled. Perspiration cooling on her skin. The silkiness of his hair against her forehead. He’d rested his own forehead there. His fingers glided over her back, along her spine.

She had a suspicion they were both postponing the moment when they needed to look each other in the eye. The thought set her in motion; she gently slipped from his arms, slid away from him, and stood.

She felt him watch her as she moved, her limbs still feeling like rags, humming with satiety. Her head floated. She retrieved her crumpled night rail. She lifted it over her head, thrust her arms in, let it drop over her body, like a curtain on an act.

And then she drew the ribbons of it closed as if she could rein all desire in with just one tug.

She watched him reassemble himself somewhat awkwardly; standing to button up his trousers, stuffing his shirt back into them.

And then they stood to look at each other, quietly. His face was sheened with sweat. He’d pushed his hair back.

And Henny breathed evenly in the other room. Evie glanced at the clock.

Only fifteen minutes had passed since last she looked.

Someone would need to say something.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” she said almost formally.

Oh, God. They both heard it precisely the same way at the same time.

And for the very first time, she saw the vicar blush.

And then, so did she.

He didn’t reply. He was studying her almost somberly, disguising awkwardness and uncertainty with his usual self-containment. The two of them knew the language of tension and longing very well, they’d done the dance of desire and banter, but now that they’d come apart in each other’s arms, tasted each other’s sweat, been inside each other as deeply as two people ever could, neither of them had the language for what happened next. Everything she considered saying seemed too inadequate or too fraught.

At last he stepped toward her. And then gently hooked a finger about a strand of hair clinging to her lips. Drew its silkiness out, that look of faint wonder visiting his face again.

And then he almost whimsically tucked it behind her ear.

A tenderness that was in some ways more intimate than the lovemaking itself.

Everything in her being rushed toward him then; she was suffused with light.

And then, like a wave, it swelled into a terrible panic.

She suddenly wanted to him to leave immediately.

Her mind was too full and her body too sated, and fear throbbed at the edges of her very soul. When she’d been a mistress, a man might bid her farewell with a slap on the bottom or an affectionate buss. Never had she given herself to a man simply because she wanted him: never had she felt the need to be joined with him or perish. Her entire survival had depended upon her ability to plan. Not on her ability to feel.

And never, never could she afford to allow herself to be at the mercy of any man. Particularly a man with whom she could never have any sort of future.

The nameless enormity of what she felt, the beauty and totality of it, was in direct proportion to the pain it could bring.

“I’ll just go in to see Henny now,” she said quietly.

And turned for the room, knelt next to Henny’s bed. Crouched down behind it as if it were a fortification.

Resting her head against the bed, in an attitude of prayer, though she didn’t know what she’d pray for.

She’d left him standing next to the fire. She looked up from her place of protection and saw him looking in at her, the expression on his face as though he’d at last seen something truly holy.

It was the last thing she remembered before she fell asleep.

Chapter 22

EVIE WOKE WITH a jerk and a stifled shriek when she realized her pillow was undulating beneath her cheek.

A rat! The damned rats are at it again! She heaved her body backward back and prepared to give the bed a good pounding.

A blinking, disoriented moment later she realized she’d nodded off not in her old rooms above a St. Giles whorehouse but kneeling on the floor next to Henny’s bed, her head resting against Henny’s great round blanket-covered calf, which was rotating as Henny turned in her sleep. Rats were of her past.

She supposed it was useful to know her reflexes were still alert, however.

She squinted in the pallid light squeezing between a gap in the curtains and shoved the weight of her hair from her eyes. It was then she smelled him: on her hands, in her hair. She froze. Male, musky, overwhelmingly erotic and unnerving, so him her heart contracted. Desire spiked through her again, fresh and shocking, as her body awakened to a new craving; now that she’d given it a taste, it wanted more. Now. She indulged the craving for a dangerous second, allowed in memories: his hands threaded in her hair, then reverent and demanding and so confident on her body. His eyes burning into her, his face buried in her throat, the fierce pleasure of possession and searing pleasure in his blue eyes, how it felt when he moved in her.

Joy and panic rushed at her again. She batted the joy back sternly.

Mother of God, what had she done?

She became aware of a weight about her shoulders; she reached up and she touched wool, not lawn. She brought his coat down into her arms.

He’d covered her and gone home in the cold dawn without it. She cradled it, eyes blurring.

“I didn’t die, then?” came a croak from the bed.

Evie instantly whipped the coat behind her and propped her elbows up on the bed to get a look at Henny. She was pale as kneaded dough and none too fresh-smelling, but her eyes were bright and shrewd.

“Do I look like an angel to you, Henny?”

Henny scrutinized her. “Well, I’m not certain at all ye’ll be goin’ to Heaven,” she said quite sincerely, if apologetically. “And I would have thought the same was true fer meself. But an angel sat next to my bed last night, and held me hand, and I canna say I would ’ave been sorry to die then, for I knew I was going to Heaven of a certainty. A beautiful angel, mind you. A man,” she said with relish. “Ye should try nearly dyin’ just once in order to see what I saw.”

“That was no angel. It was Ad—the vicar.”

Henny pondered the implications of this. And then her eyes widened. “Ye’re quite certain of this, now.”

“Yes. Unless an angel came and joined the two of you whilst he was in here with you.”

“There was only the one cove,” Henny confirmed. And then it dawned on her:

“If the vicar was here, then it was … I was …” It seemed not even Henny could add “going to die.”

To her horror, Evie felt her eyes beginning to well again.

Henny saw this, and her jaw dropped. She stared at Evie, so horrified and fascinated that Evie’s tears evaporated instantly in indignation.

“I willna have ye weeping like a ninny over me, now,” Henny ordered uncomfortably. “I lived.”

Evie sniffed with great dignity. “More’s the pity.”

Henny patted her hand, then squeezed it hard, and they both pretended nothing of the sort was happening.

“The vicar, he held me hand?” Henny smiled dreamily. “D’ye know, I knew everything would be all right when he touched me. I just knew. I may never wash it again.”

“You most certainly will if you ever hope to ride in a carriage with me again.”

Funnily enough, this wasn’t far different from how Evie had felt when he’d touched her. She’d been unaware of the weight of her life until his arms had gone around her, and suddenly she was … a river flowing into the sea. It had seemed the most natural, necessary, inevitable thing she had ever done in her life, and for the first time in her life, searing pleasure had launched her from her body

It had been disastrous, in other words. What now would he expect from her? What did he think of her?

What did she want from him? How could any other moment in her life compare from now on?

What could possibly happen next?

“And ’e prayed over me. I heard voices saying “Oh, God’ again and again.”

“Part of your fever dream, I imagine,” Evie managed steadily enough.

And there was that. She wasn’t a shouter or moaner in the throes of passion; she left that to the men. She’d never before called upon the deity with any sincerity since she’d never before lost herself, given that her existence had depended upon ensuring that the man in question lost his own mind in passion.

Henny’s eyes were narrowed now, inspecting her the way a bird inspects a worm.

“I imagine I’m not a picture a’tall, but you look dreadful. Yer eyes are red and ye’ve crusty bits at the corners of ’em, and a bit of a rash on yer cheek, looks like, and yer hair is like a tower of snakes. Isn’t Lisle arriving today?”

Oh, God! Frederick! And a rash? Evie brushed the back of her hand against her cheek. Tender from where the beginnings of his whiskers had rasped her. She tasted again, relived ravaging kisses. Another little bonfire of desire lit; she ruthlessly stamped it out.

“Frederick does arrive today. I can dress myself and do my own hair. Not as well as you can, mind you,” she hastened to add, “but I forbid you to leave your bed. We’ll have broth and bread and tea sent up. But tell me, what shall I wear?”

Henny mulled it. “White. Wicked innocence is the trick, you see. Something a bit drifty, like fog. And be sure to wear that cross.”

“You are a genius,” Evie acknowledged in a rare compliment. She didn’t say “And I will never take off the cross.”

“I do me best with the tools what God gave me,” Henny told her humbly. “Though Lord knows ye don’t make it easy for me.”

“I’ll show myself to you before Lisle arrives.”

“Verra well. I’ll just sleep then, won’t I?” Henny said, and promptly did just that.

HE SLEPT LIKE the dead. Or, more accurately, like the newly born.

He was already smiling when he opened his eyes. It was another few moments before he realized why: He became aware of a loose-limbed languor, the noticeable absence of the ever-present tension that had pulled the very fiber of his being so tight one could have plucked a note from him.

He’d had explosive sex with Evie Duggan the night before.

The smile grew.

He closed his eyes again, just for the pleasure of seeing only her in his mind’s eye, of filling his hands with her breasts, of her gasps of pleasure, of her soft mouth crushed against his, of the way his hands slid over the silken contours of her as she rode his—

His cock was stirring to attention again.

It had been … a culmination, a miracle. Bloody fantastic, thoroughly satisfying, bone-melting. Though he doubted it was the sort of miracle Mrs. Sneath sought.

He simply didn’t know what it meant. Had it been an extension of the moment, the dark, the firelight, the fear of death? Did she regret it?

Did he regret it?

He didn’t want to think it away; he only wanted to feel.

But he was never casual or careless; he was never frivolous. And he was not a coward. He would need to think about it.

He sighed and rolled over, tipped himself into an upright position, sat on the edge of his bed. And he wondered if she was still asleep, what she looked like in the morning. What it would be like to open his eyes and see her.

He wanted to know—he needed to know—what she was thinking this morning. She, after all, had been an experienced courtesan. Perhaps it had all been a bit of a yawn to her.

And then he smiled with smug satisfaction at his own private joke.

He knew she’d been out of her mind with pleasure, too. And no matter what, it would remain one of the privileges of his life to know he had given that to her.

The thought of seeing her was a spiked pleasure. The freckles, eyelashes, silken spirals of hair, eyes lit with a smile …

He was dressed and bathed and shaved and out the door before noon.

He stole the wildflowers from the vase in the vicarage entry, the way he had before his first visit to Eve.

If he did it one more time, perhaps Mrs. Dalrymple would begin thinking of it as a miracle.

BY NOON EVIE was pacing the downstairs drawing room.