How the Marquess Was Won (36 page)

C
harybdis had already recognized her footfall and came running for her, the marquess in pursuit. He came to such an abrupt halt when he saw her that he nearly toppled down the stairs.

She didn’t look at him at all. She dove for her cat and swept him up and wrapped her arms around him, holding on tightly, as if the cat was the thing that anchored her to earth. She rubbed her cheek against him. The damn thing purred. And purred and purred. Deafeningly. It did nothing by halves, clearly. It purred with the same gusto with which it growled.

Jules could watch her forever. He greedily drank in the sight of her, her eyes closed, her entire face luminous with joy and relief. At the moment he could think of no finer accomplishment, nothing else he aspired to.
I did that. I made her this happy.
He would consent to be clawed over and over again to put that expression on her face.

“Thank you,” she murmured. Her voice was muffled by fur. She hadn’t yet quite looked at him. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

He found he couldn’t speak.

She finally looked up and opened her green eyes. And before he knew what he was doing, he reached out and with a thumb brushed away one teardrop glistening in that mauve crescent beneath her eyes.

And then he looked down at his thumb, and rubbed the tear out of existence, right into his skin. As if he could erase any sadness or hurt she’d ever felt that simply. As if he could bear it for her.

She dropped her eyes again, abashed.

For a time there was no sound but absurdly loud purring.

She cleared her throat. “Are you very wounded?” Her voice was soft. Careful. Reminding him that the last they met they’d argued bitterly and parted on a stalemate. “Your man sent me up here with St. John’s Wort.”

“Mmm . . . D’you know,” he mused, “I’ve been bayoneted, before. But the Frenchman wielding it didn’t go
on
stabbing me. This creature is possessed. I would send a message to the archbishop. Perhaps he knows of an exorcist.”

She was struggling not to laugh. “Possessed of
tiny teeth and claws
.” She held up a great furry mitt illustratively. The thing allowed her to do it, as if it were a stuffed bear, and not a savage predator in an adorable cat suit.

“The beast is misnamed. It should be named for something with talons. A dragon or a phoenix or some such. No—minotaur. There. That’s what you should have named it. Minotaur.”

She laughed, and turned the now pliant fluffy thing around and kissed him on the orange nose while the marquess looked on with rank disbelief. And then she lowered the beast to the floor, whereupon it strolled over and wrapped his whole sinewy fluffy body, including that tail, around the marquess’s shin. And gazed up at him limpidly.

“He’s trying to lure me into complacency in preparation for another attack.”

“Now you’re beginning to sound like poor Colonel Kefauver in White’s.”

He blinked. “How the devil do
you
know about Colonel—”

“Oh, all the men. Waterburn and d’Andre and the like. They talk.”

A silence.

“All the men,” he drawled grimly.

She shrugged blithely with one shoulder.

He hesitated. And then he needed to know. “Phoebe . . . did you by any chance receive hothouse flowers today?”

She looked surprised, and there it was that soft, genuine pleasure again lighting her face. “Yes, as a matter of fact. And a bundle of sage, as it so happens.”

Which did you prefer?
he absurdly wanted to say.

They regarded each other, the air shimmering with unspoken things.

How could he tell her about the wagers? At this point, she might not even believe him. He couldn’t bear to be the one to do it. He didn’t know whether remaining silent was cowardly or altruistic.

It was definitely selfish. Her joy was his own.

“Go ahead, then. He likes his back rubbed. And his head scratched.”

“The creature inflicts grievous wounds upon my person and expects me to forgive it?”

“I expect a lot of creatures inflict grievous wounds and expect forgiveness.”

Well. Silence fell like an axe coming down.

They stared at each other again. Phoebe evenly.

The marquess somewhat warily.

“Are you being profound again, Miss Vale? Are you teaching another lesson to me? I expect that was an innuendo, but I am
bleeding
,” he said finally with great, and mostly mock self-righteousness.

She arched a single eyebrow.

He sighed. “If you’re going to use an
eyebrow
. . .” He bent down and dutifully scratched Charybdis on the top of his head. The cat launched into a fresh bout of purring and rotated his head to and fro so Jules could scratch beneath his chin. The Marquess was disgusted. “Mad, mad fickle beast,” he crooned as he scratched.

He stood again and Charybdis slinked under the bed, having satisfied his urge to be fussed over.

They were silent. Without a cat as a buffer, he wondered what there was left to say.

“Did it hurt terribly? The bayonet.”

Silly question, they both knew. But he knew when he looked in her eyes that she wanted to undo his wounds the way he wanted to undo hers. That she suffered from the very notion that he had ever suffered.

“It hurt,” he said simply. “For a time. And then it healed.”

She’d gone paler. She pressed her lips together, drew in a sharp breath.

“Would you like to see my scar?” he tried.

She bit back a smile. “I’m certain that sentence has worked on innumerable ladies.”

“Not innumerable. I can innumerate them.”

She was smiling in earnest now. “I’m terribly, terribly sorry Charybdis hurt you. But I’m . . . more grateful than I can ever say.”

He simply nodded.

And then she asked the most critical question of all. “How
did
you find him?”

He opened his mouth. Then paused. Clearly considering his answer.

“The creature was sunbathing in a mews. On its
back
.”

He said it gruffly, turning away from her, toward the window, where the lowering sun was aiming a final, potent golden beam.

The sun nicked sparks of red from his hair.

And she knew for certain: He’d bolted out the door in search of her cat. He’d abandoned Lisbeth, and his dignity . . . for her. Again.

She was making a hash of his life.

He turned back to her. His face inscrutable, apart from two faint furrows across his forehead. He turned to her with something like bemused entreaty on his face.
Save me from myself.

“Jules,” she whispered his name like a prayer of thanksgiving. She laid a hand softly against his cheek before she even knew what she was doing.

She remembered her first glimpse of that fascinating intersection of angle and hollow. She hadn’t yet kissed him then. He hadn’t been a person to her then, but a series of myths perpetuated by the broadsheets. Lord Ice. And now she knew how it felt when it was chilled, sandy with the beginnings of his beard, when he’d kissed her during their waltz.

Tentatively, almost experimentally, he turned his face into her hand. And raised his hand to cover hers.

And then he sighed.

She watched, mesmerized, the swell and sink of his broad shoulders with his breath, as he surrendered, momentarily, the weight of everything to her, and to the tenderness of her touch. Two people unaccustomed to taking comfort or giving it. And she was so afraid they would only ever find it in each other.

He closed his eyes.

She took the opportunity to hoard details about him while his eyes were closed. The emphatic dark slashes of his eyebrows. Lashes shuddering on his cheeks. A scar, just a nick of a white line, near his jaw.

This.
This
moment, this tenderness, was far more dangerous to either of them than passion. Her heart felt swollen. It wanted to open, to go to him. She kept it bound and tethered, of necessity. He couldn’t be trusted with it.

“You’re . . . such an idiot,” she murmured.

His eyes snapped open in surprise.

Then narrowed.

“You might live through this if you apply the St. John’s Wort.” She managed to be brisk.

He stared at her. Assessing the change in tone. His jaw was set.

“Very well, then.” With startling alacrity he unfastened the buttons of his shirt and shook it off his shoulders, and flung it onto the bed, very much like someone throwing down a gauntlet.

Oh.

It was like a blow. She stopped breathing. Instantly, her head floated off high above her body, and heat rushed her limbs, and her knees, well, they melted. She was grateful for her long skirts, because they disguised the sway nicely.

“Too sudden?” he challenged. He shoved both hands through his hair and pushed it back from his forehead. She watched the play of muscle, complex and poetic and heart-stopping, slide beneath his fair skin as he moved. The seam of dark hair that bisected the planes of his chest and disappeared tantalizingly into the top of his trousers, and cried out for a tongue to follow it downward. The eloquent curve of his shoulder, every valley and angle and slope, seemed designed for a hand to trace.

He still had a bruise on his forehead. It had acquired a greenish cast, but half of it was still purple.

Her voice was a thread, but still she managed to sound acerbic. “I believe it’s the
devil’s
job to tempt me. Not yours.”

“And the difference between the devil and I would be . . . ?”

“None that I can detect.” She opened the jar of St. John’s Wort and dipped her fingers in. “Show me where it hurts.” This was bravado. She wasn’t certain she could touch him without surrendering completely.

And now he was the one who looked uncertain. His bluff had been called.

But finally, like a boy, he tentatively extended his arm. She saw a few puncture wounds with bruised edges, puffing up a little now.

She touched them gently. “I’m terribly sorry he wounded you.”

He shrugged nonchalantly. He seemed to be holding his breath. She touched gentle fingers to each little wound.

“Better?” she asked.

He simply nodded.

“And here,” he said softly. Pointing to his chest.

She hesitated. For a fraught moment her finger only hovered close to his skin. The space between her skin and hers seemed to heat.

And then she moved. She lightly touched him, drew her finger across the beads of blood dried in a perfect little arc across his chest. A violent little rosary left by a little cat whose reflex was to defend himself.

When Jules hissed in a breath between his teeth, it felt like bands of steel going taut beneath satin.

Her finger was trembling. She slowed it. And then stopped. Oh, God. It was no use. It was all she could do not to close her eyes. Her senses were swamped. Sight was suddenly an intrusion. All she wanted was to lose herself in the feel of him.

And then she did close her eyes.

For a moment all she heard was breathing. Hers and his. A subtle storm. She could feel his heart beating, the steady thump of it, beneath her hand.

“Go on,” he whispered into the silence. “Do whatever you want to do, Phoebe.”

She hesitated only a moment more.

And then with one finger she traced, delicately, wonderingly, slowly, the defined planes of his chest, following the path etched by the swell of his muscles.

Gooseflesh lifted the hairs on his arms. And his nipples became little hard nubs. She fanned open her fingers and dragged her nails lightly, lightly, over them.

His breath snagged in his throat, and his head tipped back. The sound was as erotic as a tongue applied to the back of her neck.

Tension thrummed in him; his skin was fever-hot.

Her own breathing was more labored now.

She opened her hands, dragged them lightly over the swell of his chest, greedy for, wondering at the feel of him. She lingered over his heartbeat. A gratifyingly rapid bass drum inside him. But he kept his arms at his sides. Allowing her to take what she wanted, to explore. Even as she could feel his cock nudging at her through his trousers.

And she moved infinitesimally closer to him, so that her thighs brushed deliberately against him.
He
was a devil. She, apparently, was a vixen.

Her fingers traveled that alluring seam of hair down, down, down to where his narrow waist disappeared into his trousers.

She paused them at his waistband, just above that impressive bulge.

They breathed in swift and ragged counterpoint. She rested her forehead against his chest. He smelled, of course, like heaven, like sex, like temptation, like home. She shook her head helplessly against him. She thought she tried to move away, but he was opium and she was intoxicated. She almost whimpered.
Help.