Barely a Lady (10 page)

Jack’s house.
Their
house, although it wouldn’t be for another week or so. It was just at dusk, and she was standing in the shadowy library looking out to where Jack’s family was gathered on the back terrace. The girls were battling with a shuttlecock, their bright shrieks muffled by the thick glass in the mullioned windows, the rest of the family lazily waving away the late afternoon heat from the lawn chairs and blankets that had been spread across the back lawn.

She’d been out there with them until just a few minutes ago, trying her best to fit into a family that wanted nothing to do with her. She stood here now thinking about what her life would be like in a week. Wondering if she would finally feel as if she belonged. Overwhelmed by the strength of her love for Jack and praying that would be enough to hold her through the difficulties she knew lay in store for them both.

She smelled him before she heard him. A breeze of his cologne, and then, stepping up to her, Jack. Just Jack, that special spice of heat and night and secret desires. She smiled to the window without turning. Her body exploded into life, just as it always did when he came near.

“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered into her hair, reaching up from behind her to pull out one of her hairpins. “Your hair is like corn silk, and you smell like apples and vanilla.”

“I’ve been baking.” She shivered down to her toes with the scent of him. With the barest touch of his fingers. “Stop that.”

Hunger woke, just like always, her heart racing, her breasts swelling against her stays. With only a scent. But, oh Lord, how it wove through her, promising sensations she still only imagined. Hoped for.

“I can’t stop.” His voice was strained, and he laid his mouth against the skin behind her ear. Another pin eased away and the heavy weight of her hair began to slip. “I love you.” Slipping his finger into her hair, he slowly unwound it. “We’ll be wed in a week. I just can’t wait, Livvie. I
can’t.
”

She found herself leaning back against him, just to feel the heat of his body against her.
Touch me
, she thought, too impatient, too suddenly hungry to stand still.
Love me.

They had been learning together, touching and whispering and kissing until they couldn’t breathe. Tucked furtively away in shadows where no one would see, once on the moors above the village. Olivia swore she could still feel the sun on her skin. She could taste the sharp frustration of stopping. Gasping, wide-eyed, resistance wearing thin.

It had been like that since they’d set eyes on each other. Ravenous for each other, obsessed by the need for privacy where they could ease their hunger. Consumed by the smell and touch and taste of each other.

He stepped up against her, his hard shaft pressing right against her bottom, his breath fast and hot against her ear. She groaned, leaning her head back. “You’re a very… bad man.”

She felt his smile against her skin. “
Very
bad.”

Licking the salt from her neck, he wrapped his arms around her, resting his hands just underneath the swell of her breasts. She jumped, gasped, his touch striking lightning, sparking a hotter need, a darker yearning. She wanted him to do unimaginable things to her, things she didn’t even know how to ask for. More than they’d managed in the stolen moments they had shared. More than was right, even this close to her wedding. She wanted.

She
wanted.

“They’ll see us,” she objected, knowing it was only a token protest. Afraid of this need that kept her standing where she knew she shouldn’t be. Wanting to experience whatever surprise Jack had in store for her, when she knew it must be wrong.

He was behind her.

Behind
her, so she couldn’t see his eyes to know he brought love with this heat. Behind her where she couldn’t touch him back, where he constrained her there against the window.

She couldn’t move. Worse, she didn’t want to, and it terrified her.

It was wrong. But it felt so right.

“No, they won’t see us.” He ran his tongue around the shell of her ear and sapped the strength in her knees. “Too dark in here. Besides, Maudie and Mad are making too much racket.”

He leaned closer, his lips brushing her skin, setting off another waterfall of chills. “Lean forward. Put your hands on the windows.”

She shook with the effort of trying to hold still. “Don’t be silly. They’d surely see then.”

He was shaking too. It made her smile.

“Not at all,” he coaxed. “Don’t you want to feel that cool glass against your palms?”

It would be the only cool thing she felt, she thought, and before she could talk herself out of it, she leaned forward just a little. She laid her palms against the slick chill of the windows at shoulder height, and opened herself up to his touch.

He began slowly, circling his thumbs along the bottom curve of her breast, nibbling at her shoulder, molding his body against her. “I want to take my time,” he murmured. “I want you to have the same pleasure I do.”

“I have… ah, pleasure,” she protested, her head falling back with the nip of his teeth at her shoulder. Lord, she swore she was melting, a terrible heat that poured deep into her belly, into the core of her, that place Jack had first touched with tentative fingers just the day before. That secret spot even she hadn’t known about.

“I want to give you more,” he insisted, sweeping his hands up to cup her breasts. “I want to give you everything.”

She arched against him, desperate for his touch. She moaned when he pulled her laces loose. She giggled when he slipped his hand into her dress, right there where, if they looked, his parents could see him pull her breasts free. She could see it herself, faint in the glass that was struck by a setting sun: her face, flushed and anxious, her arms stretched out before her, her breasts standing out like pale moons in the dusk, and Jack, a shadow behind her, his dark hands a compelling counterpoint to the white of her dress, of her breasts. A suggestion of sin in the staid library.

“This is not right,” she groaned.

He said not a word, just watched over her shoulder as he wrapped his elegant hands around her breasts. As he took her nipples between finger and thumb, as he rolled them and tugged them and aroused them to a tight pucker. She wasn’t going to survive this. She swore she wasn’t.

“Jack…”

“It is right,” he soothed, his breath fanning across her neck. “We love each other.”

He took away one of his hands, and she almost cried out. Until he slid that hand down her back, over her bottom, slowly, so slowly she thought she was going to die, because she knew where he was going, what prize he sought. Right there in front of his mother. Oh, sweet Lord, she was going to hell.

She didn’t think she could stop him even if his mother turned their way. If she leaped to her feet screaming and pointing. If her own father walked onto the lawn and condemned her for a harlot.

“Tell me you can’t wait, either, Liv,” Jack begged. “Please, tell me.”

“I can’t… wait, either, Jack. I love you so much.”

She tried to pull her hands back so she could touch him, too, but he stopped her. “No. No, stay just like you are.”

“What?” She laid her hands back against the window. “Why?”

“Do you trust me?”

Not at all,
she should have said. But he was working the buttons loose on the placket of his pantaloons. He was reaching for the hem of her dress and drawing it up. He was
behind
her.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think.

“I trust you.”

“You want this,” he said. “I promise.”

“I… I do.”

His hands. Oh, sweet God, his hands, one on her breast, one slipping between her legs, where she was so wet it mortified her. He dipped his fingers in her juices and chuckled.

“Oh, yes,” he said, pressing his naked shaft against her bare bottom. “Oh, yes, Livvie. Spread your legs for me, sweet. Let me love you.”

She couldn’t think to question. His fingers were
there
, and he was stroking her, setting off firestorms. Taking her vision and dimming her ears, her body reduced to the place his hands touched. She couldn’t tolerate much more. She couldn’t wait. Her eyes drifted closed, and she knew her legs wouldn’t be able to hold her upright much longer.

“I can’t wait,” he groaned, and she was the one who chuckled this time, her voice breathy and uncertain.

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. I’m sure. Look at me, Livvie. Let me kiss you.”

She never questioned him. Keeping her hands flat against the glass where anybody could see them, she arched her body, preparing to turn her face for his kiss. She opened her eyes, hungry for the love in his sea-soft eyes.

And then, somehow, the scene began to feel wrong. To slip away.

“I knew you’d finally come to me,” he whispered against her ear. “I knew you wanted me too.”

And even before she turned, somehow she knew. She opened her eyes and opened her mouth, even before disaster struck.

Because when she turned, it wasn’t Jack she saw smiling over her shoulder, his face sheened with perspiration, his hair mussed and his eyes dilated and feral.

It was Gervaise.

She screamed.

Chapter 8

O
livia? Olivia!”

Shaking, sobbing, Olivia flinched away from the hand that touched her shoulder.

“Dear, it’s me. Come on now, wake up.”

Breathe. She had to breathe. She had to get away from the images in her head. She had to…

Wake up.

Finally able to get her eyes open, she was mortified to find an anxious-looking Grace bent over her.

Grace. It’s only Grace.

“Everything’s all right,” her friend assured her, her soft eyes narrowed with concern. “It was only a dream.”

Olivia lurched up. Swinging her feet over the side of the bed, she laid her head in her hands. Grace immediately sat next to her and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. This time Olivia welcomed it. She was still feeling disoriented and nauseous.

Gervaise. Oh, God.

The door into Lady Kate’s bedroom swung open. Olivia looked up to see Lady Kate standing there in the most amazing dressing gown she’d ever seen, her glorious hair tumbled like a courtesan’s down her back. “Are you all right in here?” the duchess demanded.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Olivia assured her, completely distracted by Kate’s bright crimson attire. “Thank you. It was just a dream.”

Lady Kate gave a brisk nod. “Too much time in the medical tents.”

As good an excuse as any, Olivia imagined. Certainly she wasn’t going to tell them the truth. “Too much time in the medical tents,” she agreed unevenly. “I’m… I’m sor—”

“I sincerely hope you don’t mean to say you’re sorry,” Lady Kate genially suggested. “I live by the firm rule that guilt is pointless. If you can’t follow that simple axiom, I doubt you’ll last in my employ. Now, would you like to try again?”

Olivia hiccuped on a surprised laugh and wiped at her eyes with shaking hands. “Thank you, yes.” Gervaise lingered at the back of her mind, threatening her stomach again. But she’d survived that before. “At least allow me to hope I didn’t disturb your sleep.”

“Not at all,” Lady Kate assured her with a wave of the arm that set scores of bright red feathers fluttering madly along her neck and wrist. “Nothing like a bit of a fright to get the blood moving. Now, I will see you both in the morning.”

Even Grace grinned at that. “Of course.”

Lady Kate bid them adieu and disappeared back into her room, leaving the two women to stare at the closed door.

“Were those marabou feathers?” Olivia asked, her voice suspiciously high.

Grace shook her head. “I don’t know. They were certainly…”

“Outrageous?”

Grace giggled.
“Red.”

Olivia gave a sage nod. “Very restful.”

“If you’re a parrot.”

“Or an opera dancer.”

Grace shook her head. “Not one self-respecting opera dancer I’ve ever met would be seen dead in that thing.”

This time Olivia stared at Grace. “You’ve
met
opera dancers?”

Grace’s grin was unrepentant. “I was with the army. I’ve met a spectacular assortment of people.”

Olivia found herself grinning back. “Oh, how wonderful. I want to hear about every one.”

Climbing to her feet, she took a few moments to splash her face with cold water. She was just about to return to bed, when she heard a scratching on the door.

She opened the door to find Thrasher bouncing on his feet, his uniform half on. “Pardon, miss,” he said with a big grin. “But the earl’s askin’ f’r ya. ’Eard you, he says.”

Oh, Lord. She had woken Jack. Hoping she could keep Jack from disturbing the rest of the house, she shrugged into her own faded, worn dressing gown and followed Thrasher out the door.

She wished she didn’t have to see Jack yet. The memory of that day in the library was still too sharp: his touch, his scent, his power over her. She could still see him reflected behind her in those mullioned windows, a dream within a dream, and thought of how that day had really ended.

He had loved her. Oh, how he had loved her, teaching her how adventurous love could be. How surrender could be victory. How wonder could be woven with fingertips. She could still feel the moment he’d entered her, his chest tight against her back, his breath at her ear, the full, hot, hard length of him slipping into her as he’d held her captive against the window. It had been magic. It was only in dreams now that the memory was perverted.

Her heart galloping in her chest, she stepped into Jack’s room.
Please,
she thought,
don’t make me have to touch him. I won’t be able to bear it.

She was destined to be disappointed. The dolt was sitting up on the side of his bed looking as if he was a heartbeat from collapse.

“Are you all right?” he demanded, peering up at her in the uncertain candlelight. “I thought I heard…”

He was chalk white, with a sheen of perspiration on his forehead. He was also naked, the sheet covering only his lap. Olivia had helped bathe him and treat him. She had watched him while he slept. But after what she’d just been through, the sight of his well-honed body paralyzed her. Even five feet away, her skin had begun to hum, as if a swarm of bees had been caught underneath.

“A mouse,” she said, curling her fingers into her itching palms, unable to move from the doorway. “Ran over my foot.”

Even pasty white, Jack had quite a look of scorn on him. “Believe me, my love. I know the difference between a mouse scream and what I heard.”

There was such a wealth of meaning in those words. In his tone. As if he had screamed like that himself more than once.

Olivia didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to care.

It was all she could do to remain in the room with him. “Well, I’m sorry, but it was a mouse.”

Somehow the pragmatic words unfroze her feet, and she walked into the room.

“Lie down, Jack. Do.” Fighting her inevitable reaction to him, she reached out to steady him. “You’re going to go face-first onto the floor, and I won’t be able to stopyou.”

He grinned up at her, and she struggled even more. His pale green eyes seemed to glow in the dim light. “Forgive a man his pride, dear heart,” he begged, catching one of her hands and kissing her palm. “You know I can’t abide being helpless.”

She tried to quell the frissons his touch set off. “I know no such thing. You haven’t been helpless a day in your life.”

He closed his eyes. “A lot you know.”

Olivia heard that tone of voice again, as if dark sins had sullied his soul. What could they have been? She’d seen his physical scars, brands from injuries she’d never seen. What brands could have been burned into his psyche? What traumas had he misplaced inside that fractured brain that could have compelled him to don a French uniform?

“Besides,” he said, rubbing at his bristly chin, “I need to bathe. I smell worse than Tannus after a long hunt. I have a feeling I must look twice as charming.”

“But it’s after midnight, Jack.”

“And I’m awake. You’re saying your friend Harper wouldn’t like a healthy tip to help a man rid himself of his dirt?”

“I’m saying I won’t ask. He’s asleep. And you can wait.”

“No, I can’t,” he retorted, and leaned closer. “How am I supposed to make love to you when I smell like an uncleaned stable?”

It had never bothered them before. She almost made the huge mistake of reminding him.

“Well, don’t worry about that,” she said instead. “You’re barely up to kissing.”

He reclaimed her hand. “Then kiss me.”

She shivered. His touch seared her. “Tomorrow,” she said, pulling away. “After you bathe.”

He was about to reply when the sound of laughter and shouting drifted up from the street. He turned to it, frowning. “Is my head completely shattered, or do I keep hearing French being spoken out there?”

Olivia’s knees almost gave out on her. Oh, Lord. Couldn’t he give her even five minutes without turning her on her ear? She had no idea what to say. What to give away.

“I’m hosting émigrés,” she suddenly heard behind her.

Kate swept in, still clad in her crimson dressing gown, the feathers fluttering from neck to toe. “Hullo, Jack,” she greeted him. “I heard you were finally up.”

“Kate!” he cried, grinning like a schoolboy. “Don’t tell me I’m at
your
hunting box. I won’t believe it.”

She cast a look at the insipid pink walls and shuddered. “I should say not. Remember anything yet?”

“I remember guns,” he said, frowning, as if this were a surprise. He grinned at Lady Kate. “Good Lord. Murther didn’t mistake me for a quail, did he?”

“Maybe a buck.” She grinned. “Never a quail. But, no.”

“Well, good. It wouldn’t do his heart any good.”

Olivia saw a queer flinching in Kate’s expression that disappeared before she could wonder at it.

“I didn’t mean to wake anybody,” Jack said. “I just thought I heard Livvie.”

“And now you’re going back to sleep,” Olivia said.

“What émigrés?” he asked suddenly, as if it just occurred to him. “And how many? It sounds as if we’re in a city of them.”

Lady Kate hesitated just a bit too long.

Olivia sighed. “We are,” she said, not knowing how to keep lying. Even Lady Kate stared at her. “We’re in Brussels, Jack.”

Jack gaped. “Brussels? What the deuce are we doing here?”

“Visiting. Lady Kate has been kind enough to host us.”

Jack frowned, as if trying to solve unsolvable problems. “I don’t remember ever being in Brussels.”

“It will come back to you,” Olivia said. “Now, get back to sleep. That’s what you need.”

He gave her another sly smile. “I could tell you exactly what I need if the duchess weren’t here. No offense, Kate.”

“No offense taken, Jack.”

Olivia glared at him. “I told you,” she said. “No.”

He managed to catch her hand again before she could pull away. “Give me a kiss on account. You’re being very stingy, you know.”

Olivia started at his touch. She looked down. “Why, you’re warm, Jack,” she said, hoping to distract him.

He gave her a halfhearted leer. “Only for you.”

She laid the back of her hand against his forehead and then his temples, a mother’s sure gauge, and realized her ploy had revealed a real problem. “You’re running a fever.”

He scowled. “I won’t accept that as an excuse.”

She told herself she did it to shut him up. But when she leaned in to kiss him, it was all she could do to keep from wrapping her hands into his tangled hair and holding on. The bristles on his face tickled her cheek. His lips molded perfectly to hers. His scent enveloped her. Her body remembered.

Barely withstanding the urge to surrender, she yanked away. “There. Now, can we deal with this fever?”

He smiled slowly, looking thoroughly debauched. “Oh, you mean the other one.”

She almost pinched him.

“Might be my leg,” he finally admitted, looking down. “Feels like the devil.” Ruefully he grinned. “Sorry. The deuce.”

It didn’t take long to prove Jack right. Pushing up the sheet, Olivia cut away the bandage to find the stitches seeping and straining against angry swelling.

“Really, Liv,” Jack quipped. “You put me to the blush. Move that sheet another inch and Lady Kate will know all my secrets.” He made the mistake of looking down. “Good God, what
is
that? It looks as if I were gored by a bull.”

“Nothing so romantic,” Olivia said, struggling to maintain her poise. “Maybe I should get Harper.”

“Nonsense,” Lady Kate said briskly. “I’ll get Grace.”

Grace must have anticipated the call, because by the time Jack gave in and laid back down, she was there in a wrapper much like Olivia’s, her pale hair in a braid down her back. Not bothering with civilities, she flipped back the covers again.

“Ah,” she said, seeing the wound. “Harps warned me.”

It didn’t occur to Olivia to introduce Jack until Grace laid her hand against Jack’s thigh to test it for heat. Jack grabbed Grace’s hand. “My apologies, ma’am, but usually I’m at least introduced to a lady before showing her so many of my charms.”

Grace blushed a brick red. Olivia found herself staring and speechless. Jack never would have said that. Not in front of her.

But then, he’d lived an entire life without her.

“Heavens, Jack.” Lady Kate laughed, unconsciously echoing Olivia’s thoughts. “You’ve grown quite a smooth tongue.”

She got another smile. “Practice, Kate. Practice.”

Olivia just shook her head. Lady Kate introduced Grace.

“My pleasure,” Jack said, giving Grace’s hand a salute before letting it go. “You received medical training at which university?”

Busy evaluating his wound, Grace gave an absent smile. “The university of Peninsular Wars.”

Jack nodded. “My apologies, ma’am. My leg is completely at your disposal.”

“Honey,” Grace announced.

He cocked an eyebrow. “Sweetheart.”

Grace smiled. “No, I mean we should lather honey on the wound and wrap it. It works wonderfully against infection.”