Claimed by the Rogue (23 page)

She pressed a staying hand to his chest. “We mustn’t.”

He lifted his head to look up at her, gloriously unbothered by her palm pressing upon his pectoral. “Mind I’ve seen you before.”

She bit her lip. “I remember.”

Snaring her gaze, he resolved to be unsparing for both their sakes. “That night in the garden when I slipped your gown from your shoulders and drew you into my palms, I only knew that I liked touching you, and I hoped you liked it too. But beyond coaxing a few kisses from country girls, I’d had no other experiences, good or bad, to compare. Instinct was my only guide, and I was desperately worried it wouldn’t be enough.”

A wistful smile sifted across her lips. “As I recall, you had…very good instincts.”

“Pity I didn’t trust them. Christ, I’d even talked myself into visiting a brothel beforehand so I wouldn’t make a hash of our wedding night. I probably would have gone through with it too, had Anthony not intervened.”

Her eyes widened at that. “
Anthony
stopped you!”
 

He nodded. “He dragged me to his club, sat me down with a bottle of port and gave me a lecture I’m not likely to ever forget.”

“What did he say?”

“That he’d bedded more women than he cared to count, some whose names he’d never even bothered to ask let alone remember. But that no matter how much pleasure the carnal act brought, it couldn’t begin to make up for the loneliness that followed when you awoke and saw that the head on the pillow beside yours was that of a stranger. But what truly persuaded me to abandon my plan was when he swore that he’d never made love to a woman, truly made love, until Chelsea. In every way that counted, she was his first and only as you would be mine.” He stopped, gauging her reaction.

She lifted her hand and touched his cheek. “Oh, Robert, I wish you’d told me then so that I might have reassured you how terribly honored I was to be your first, as you would have been mine.”
 

Yet another regret—only Robert was done with nursing them. “If the past six years have taught me anything, it’s that there’s no time to waste. Let us make a fresh start, today, this moment. Only don’t confuse me with the smooth-cheeked boy of your memory. I’ve told you he’s gone. A ghost.”

Her hand slipped away. She shook her head as though he’d said something foolish indeed. “What of it? Do you think me the same naïve miss who bid you bon voyage in her parents’ garden?”

He shook his head. “When I look upon you now, I hardly see a girl. I see a beautiful woman who tempts and torments me in ways that girl couldn’t begin to.”

Indeed, there was nothing naïve or missish about her. In the years since he’d left, her prettiness had ripened into a beauty of face and form that stole his breath and stirred his blood. Even clothed, the musk of her arousal reached him, the mouth-watering scent spinning his senses and wrecking his reason. But of one thing he was certain: her body was every whit as ready, as willing as his. And ready he was. His penis was granite hard, his balls heavy and aching. All the second-guessing, the waiting, the ruminating over the past—such obstacles suddenly seemed trifling in the face of his need.
 

Resolved, he used his free hand to feel for the buttons fronting his trousers. Beneath the buff-colored fabric, the hard ridge of his arousal thickened and thrummed. All he need do was open the front flap and Captain Robert Bellamy could finally and forever claim his lady.
 

Phoebe rested her forehead against his. “I haven’t had an attack of the vapors in six years, and now it seems I’m to have my second in a fortnight.”

Smiling, he lifted her into his arms as he had on his first night back only now there was no disapproving parent or fuming fiancé flanking them. Owing to their brush with Bouchart’s henchmen, for the next hour or so they were entirely, blissfully on their own, Phoebe not only wholly conscious but fully aware of his need and his love. And, it seemed, prepared to return both.

Slowly he bore her toward the bed, willing himself not to rush. “Go on and faint if you will. I shall catch you. From this moment forward, I’ll always be here to catch you.”

Chapter Nine

The close air, the overall meanness of the little room, even her anger at being manipulated by Robert yet again receded to the far reaches of Phoebe’s mind. Wrapped in his arms, she forgot to breathe, forgot to resist, forgot why she was even supposed to resist. For the first time in six years, she closed off her gainsaying mind and allowed herself simply to feel. And feel she did. Sensations rippled through her, physical desire resurrecting a young girl’s buried hopes and dreams.
 

“Robin,” she murmured, dragging a hand through the soft mass of his hair.

The pet name, one of the many memories she’d thought to forever put away, slid off her tongue as sweetly as clotted cream or honey. Like the biblical Wall of Jericho, the barrier she’d spent the last weeks upholding came crashing down, freeing her body to welcome him as neither her mind nor heart yet dared do.

He set her upon her feet beside the bed, and she slid her palms along his biceps and upward to embrace the breadth of his shoulders, refusing to be put off by his barely perceptible stiffening.
 

His stark gaze fastened upon hers. “Be forewarned, Phoebe, unlike six years ago I shan’t rest content only to look upon you.”
 

The remark was no revelation and yet still Phoebe paused. Could she truly break faith with Aristide? And yet how could she not? It wasn’t as though Robert was someone she’d met but recently. She’d spent the past six years pining for him. The nights she’d lain awake imagining what their lovemaking might have been like didn’t bear counting. And then there were those other nights, nights when her fevered fantasies had led her to do more than imagine, when she’d surrendered her last shred of decency and succumbed to finding release by her own hand. Finally she had the chance, a golden and perhaps even God-given opportunity, to live out her fantasies for real. After six years of desperate yearning, was it so very wicked to be with him this once?

Reaching for her courage, she whetted her lips and admitted, “I don’t want you only to look.”

His mouth eased into a smile. “Then, milady, we are of a mind.”

He slid a hand upward, his sailor’s hands worked deftly at her tapes and laces. In a matter of seconds he had her gown’s bodice open. Beneath it she wore only short stays and her shift, the fine lawn gossamer as gauze. With each bated breath, her breasts rose and fell. The motion seemed to mesmerize him. He lowered his head and took one coral crown in his mouth, laving her through the linen.

Phoebe’s fingers caught in his hair. Unlike the episode in the study, she arched against him of her own accord, a silent plea for more, for all. He gave it, palming her other breast and suckling her through the fabric until the dampened linen molded to her like a second skin.
 

“Please,” she moaned, clasping a guiding hand atop his, not as a lady would ever dream of doing, but more the actions of the doxy she was playing at being—only now every action, every sigh and catch of breath was nothing less than wholly true.
 

His fingers curled about her breast. Holding her gaze, he took her nipple between his thumb and finger and gently rolled it. Phoebe bit her lip against crying out as pleasure pooled inside her. When he slid her shift off one shoulder, baring it along with her breast, she was too fevered and fraught to feel anything but grateful.

A firmer pinch had her gasping. Before she could cry out, his suckling mouth moved in to ease the bruising. The flick of tongue, the pull of lips and the light grazing of teeth brought about a beautiful, terrifying trembling. She was beyond containment or control, utterly lost to Robert and her body’s too-long-ignored needs. Looking down upon his burnished dark head, she had the strangest sense that the world had stopped or at least suspended. Reality reduced to the four walls of their unlikely bower, to the scents of musk and sweat and sin rising up from their plastered-together bodies, to her own salacious surrender as she stood as still as she could whilst he fed upon her moist, quaking body.
 

He reached down and lifted her gown’s hem. A hand stole beneath, a warm palm and knowing fingers trailing circles along her thighs from front to back, stroking inward with maddening slowness. The pantaloons she wore opened at the front, the lacing held together by a single slim ribbon. Robert’s fingers fastened upon it. A gentle pull had the tie loosening. The unlaced flap fell open. What must be his knuckle scrubbed along her sensitive seam. She supposed she ought to stop him from going further, from going
there,
but then she was very weak. And very wet. And Robert’s fingers felt so very good as they slipped inside the epicenter of her throbbing, the delicious blunt pressure filling and opening her.
 

A knock outside the door stayed them. Cursing beneath his breath, Robert withdrew his hand and straightened. Phoebe’s hemline whispered back down over her legs to her ankles. Only then did she realize her spread-legged stance. Frustrated and aching, she pressed her thighs tightly together, belatedly aware of how damp she was, the honey of her arousal making a plaster for her skin.

His grimace assured her he was no happier about the interruption than she. Pulling her shift back in place, he said, “That would be the meal I so stupidly bespoke.”

“Leave it,” she begged, catching at his arm, loath for the protective cocoon they’d spun about themselves to risk unraveling.

“I can’t.” Robert set her from him with a heavy sigh and went to answer it. A moment later, he returned carrying a tray. A tureen of soup, an unappetizing half loaf of near-molded bread and the port—the proprietress had profited well this day.
 

He set the tray upon the table, his gaze veering from her to the bed. Standing outside his arms, she saw their bower for what it was—a narrow ledge covered with threadbare and grayed sheets.

“We can’t do this, not here.” His voice called her back to sanity, only Phoebe was not yet willing to return there. She’d lived by her own rigid rules for the last six years. Never had she imagined that casting them aside could feel so freeing.

“I don’t mind.” Throbbing, she took a step toward him.

He held out a staying hand. “But I do. We’ve waited six years for this moment. As much as I want you—and God knows I want you—I’ll not have our first time on a strumpet’s soiled sheets.”
 

“Then where?” she demanded, too eager and aching to care what a wanton she sounded.
 

“I want our first time to be in a bed,
our
bed. Thereafter, variations on the basic theme will be not only welcomed but encouraged.” A smile skated across his lips. Despite the regret in his eyes, she saw that he was resolved.
 

“I still have not consented to wed you. Indeed, I am not free to do so.”
 

A betrothal was a legally binding contract. If Aristide was even half the villain Robert made him out to be, he would not hesitate to bring a suit against her for breaching their terms. Along with ruining what remained of her reputation, he might well retain all or part of her dowry.

But such pragmatism was superseded by the one question that still stuck like a splinter in her mind.
 

Why had Robert allowed her to believe him dead for six years?

Until that was answered, wholly answered, she might be his lover, but she could never be his wife. Borrow her body he might, but she would never grant him her heart.

Doing up her buttons, she said, “We still have another hour or so before Mistress Dress Lodger returns with her next conquest. How do you propose we spend it?”

Robert looked from her to the abandoned meal tray and back again. “I propose we eat.”

Anthony was out with the children and Chelsea napping in their room when Robert returned with Phoebe and Caleb to Number 12 Berkley Square that evening. Upon leaving the lodging house, he’d called upon a hackney coach to take them back to the market. There he’d found Caleb, bloodied and wandering but otherwise none the worse for the robin’s-egg-sized knot upon his head.
 

“We’ve had a…mishap, Wilson,” he announced without preamble. “Lady Phoebe will require a bath, a change of clothing—and your absolute discretion. As for my friend here—” he looked over to Caleb leaning heavily upon his arm “—is there a physician, a discrete one, you may call upon to have a look at his wound?” Cutting a sideways look to Caleb, face a mask of mortification and broad hands madly messaging, he added, “Though as you can see he’s possessed of an uncommonly hard head, so like as not he’s fine.”

The butler nodded. “I shall send a footman to fetch him straightaway.” He peered past Robert to the empty foyer. “If I may be so bold, sir, where, er, is Lady Phoebe keeping at present?”

Girding himself, Robert admitted, “I’ve taken the liberty of loaning her my chamber.”

Not surprisingly, the butler’s jaw dropped. “
Your
chamber, sir? Are you quite certain—”

“I am. Whoever draws the bath shall believe it is for me. Lady Phoebe shall conceal herself within the dressing closet until they have gone.”

Risky as it was to have brought her back disheveled and unchaperoned, returning her to her parents’ half-dressed and reeking of rubbish hadn’t seemed precisely prudent, either.