In My Wildest Dreams (18 page)

Lifting his head, he demanded, “Look at me.”

She did. She recognized him . . . yet she didn't. The ruffled hair, the burning gaze, the menace, the boldness . . . How could this man with his driving sexual demands be Garrick Throckmorton?

His knee pressed between her legs, opening them. “I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not going to take you. Believe me.”

“If you think that's reassurance, think again.” She slapped at his head.

He trapped her arms, held them close to her side. “But I want to see you when I take you beyond pleasure. I'll never have more than that, but that memory I will have.” It sounded like a vow. Sliding his lower body off of the sofa, he knelt on the floor beside her. He lifted her skirt, slipping his hand up her calf.

She twisted against him. “This isn't right!”

“That's one true thing you've said tonight. It isn't right, but you deserve the lesson. Of touch on silk”—his fingers skimmed along her stocking, then past her garter—“and touch on bare skin. Of pleasures muted and pleasures bold.”

His caress on her thigh gave her a sense of his implacability, but he sounded almost poetic. What moved a man like this to poetry?

Only this, she supposed. Only the physical. Trapped, rigid with resistance, she said, “I still don't understand why.”

“You need to understand the embers you've brought to flame.”

She tried to kick out.

He used her action to part her drawers. His fingers brushed between her legs.

The action, that fragile encounter inundated her in sensation. The power of speech fled; her vision blurred.

“So sensitive,” he said. “I'm learning, too. You're so sensitive to the slightest touch. You'll burn for me today. And I swear I will burn for you forever.”

“I don't want that,” she moaned. But she did. All the conflicting emotions of the last few days rose and battled within her. Mr. Throckmorton was a figure of authority and austerity. Garrick was a man of passion and warmth. She couldn't reconcile the two images, but the power of Mr. Throckmorton only added to the attraction she felt for Garrick, and she wanted them both.

How could he have made her hunger for him like this?

His arm now blocked her, holding her thighs apart, opening her to his exploration.

“A clumsy man would sweep in boldly.” He used his most intimate, deep midnight voice.

His thumb parted her feminine folds and slid upward, opening her to his artistry. Did he seek to plunge into her? The isolation of her virginity had never been so breached. She braced herself to reject him.

“You need time to adjust. You're shy, unused to a man's touch, unaccustomed to the feast of the senses.” He continued on, searching . . .

She perceived what he would do, and foreboding twisted in her gut. How did he know? How had he learned of that one place where the brush of a washcloth brought delight? Her heart rolled and rumbled. She couldn't catch her breath, and everything he touched felt swollen, almost painful, fully stimulated.

This was she, Celeste. Her body, herself. This was private, and with his skill he undermined her innocence and taught her, instead, the lore of desire.

She'd given up arguing; when? She should be defying him. Instead she waited in agonizing anticipation for his touch on that one, sensitive place . . .

She shuddered when his thumb lightly brushed her.

He chuckled, an unsteady sound that lacked mirth, and leaning forward, he kissed her eyelids. “Close your eyes,” he whispered. “Feel this. Just . . . feel.”

She didn't want to do anything he commanded, but if she didn't have to see him, surely it would be better. Surely she couldn't feel
more.

Above her, Garrick breathed heavily, a rasp of ardor unfulfilled. His thumb brushed her again, and again, increasing the pressure with each pass. Passion seared her veins, coiled in her belly, rode between her legs. He released her arms; she didn't fight, but grabbed at him, at the pillows, at anything which could connect her with the real world while this torturous pleasure built and built until she thought she would cleave from the force of her rapture.

She heard herself whimper. Clamped her lips shut in self-consciousness. Whimpered again.

“Let me hear you.” He was the bringer of the whirlwind, the center of the passion. “I want to know everything.”

She shook her head, trying to deny him one triumph, at least.

“Don't tell me
no.
Not when I can't . . . won't . . .”

With force and precision, his finger swept inside her. He rode easily on the dampness he had called forth; he turned the heel of his hand to press against her. The surprise, the motion, the rightness brought her to sudden and shocking climax. She convulsed, her voice the high, incoherent cry of a girl turned woman.

Garrick Throckmorton led her all the way through. He held her in his embrace as she recovered. And when she dared open her eyes, and she saw his face, taut and still with craving, he said, “Don't forget this. And don't ever forget me.”

Stanhope drew back, bumping into the pot that held the ridiculous little orange tree, knocking a few of the tiny green fruit to the floor. He ground them into the carpet in his hurry to conceal himself, but he needn't have bothered. The gardener's daughter ran past him, clutching her open bodice in her hands, blind with embarrassment and residual passion.

He feared Throckmorton would surely catch him lurking. He debated between running after Celeste and hoping he wasn't recognized, or standing here and acting as if he'd observed nothing, when in fact he'd seen Throckmorton giving the girl the kind of good time a man gives only to a girl he wants to impress.

Well, someone had been impressed, and that someone had been Stanhope. He hadn't believed
Throckmorton's story yesterday. When he'd had time to think about it, he had decided it had all sounded likely—all except the part where Throckmorton, the inimitable spy master and ever-proper autocrat, trifling with the gardener's daughter. And if he didn't believe that, the whole story stank, and maybe it was time for him to get his savings from under the floorboards of his room and make run for it.

But that scene in the conservatory . . . that was confirmation that he could stay and make just a little more cash.

How could he use this to his advantage?

Stepping to the middle of the hall, he pretended he had been strolling past for no good reason, and waited to bump into Throckmorton as he left. But Throckmorton didn't leave, and Stanhope glanced into the conservatory.

Throckmorton sat on the sofa, head on his hands.

Stanhope didn't understand why Throckmorton held his head. He'd be willing to bet it wasn't his head that ached.

Continuing on his way, Stanhope grinned. Now he had best find young Celeste, charm her and pry every last secret out of her empty little head.

17

“M
other, this is not going to work!”

Startled, Lady Philberta looked up from her writing to see her elder son storm into her sitting room.

“What won't work?”

“I can't continue this.” Garrick ran his fingers through his hair, ruffling the already ruffled strands into a telling whirlwind of madness. “She has got to go.”

“Who?”

“Celeste, I tell you!” His cravat dangled half-off, he'd torn the fastening on his collar and he sported a small, still-bleeding scratch above his eye. “She's got to go back to Paris, Ellery or no Ellery, spies or no spies.”

“Damn, son, lower your voice.” Lady Philberta stood and hurriedly shut the door. “Now sit down and tell me what's happened.”

He sank down in the chair she indicated. “She told
Lady Hyacinth how to entice Ellery.” He stared at Lady Philberta as if expecting outrage.

He got confusion. “Why would she do that? She says she wants Ellery.”

Leaping to his feet, he paced across to the desk. “Because she's a virgin, that's why.”

She was asking questions. He was answering. But somehow the questions and the answers didn't match. “Garrick, have you been drinking?”

“Not yet.” He shook his finger at her. “It's a conspiracy of virgins.”

Puzzlement battled with exasperation. “I suppose it's possible she's a virgin, I'll even admit it's probable, but—”

“Oh, she's a virgin, all right.” Picking up her inkwell, he held the bottle up to his eye and squinted at the liquid as if he were a jeweler and the ink a diamond. “No doubt about that. I just proved
that
to my satisfaction.”

Lady Philberta almost choked with horror. God help them, they were going to lose their head gardener.

Not only that—Garrick had lost his mind. “You just proved that . . . Garrick, did you take her?”

“No, I didn't take her!” He slammed the ink down hard enough she feared for the bottle. “What kind of man do you think I am? Do you think I'm as careless and unthinking as Ellery?”

“No, but—”

“I would hope not.
I'm
the responsible brother and I wouldn't despoil Milford's daughter, virgin or no virgin, although what I did do was . . . but she provoked me.”

Lady Philberta lifted her painted-on eyebrows almost to her hairline. “What did you do to her?”

“I just . . . she just . . . she also told Lady Hyacinth
what to expect on her wedding night.” He snatched up her best quill pen and waved it wildly about. “What do you think about that?”

“I think somebody needs to tell these girls what's about to happen.”

“You would think that.” He glared at her fiercely. “Some mother you are. If she hadn't been wearing that bodice. And she was nice to Lady Hyacinth. Nice. Genuinely . . . that girl . . . she's a scheming harlot trying to break up the suitable alliance I worked so hard to bring about. You should have seen how easily it opened.”

“The alliance?” Lady Philberta questioned carefully.

“The bodice!”

She was starting to find logic in this lunacy, and she didn't know what to think. Garrick, her Garrick, her shrewd, rational, bloodless son, had been carried away on a wave of passion for a girl ten years his junior and miles below his station. Because she'd been
nice?
“Celeste's kindness to Lady Hyacinth offended you?”

“I like my people to stay true to type.” He pointed his finger at her. “First there's Stanhope, spying for the Russians, then Penelope is tying up her nursemaid, and now Celeste is being pleasant . . . have you noticed this whole thing started when she arrived?”

“Penelope tied up her nursemaid?” Lady Philberta grinned. She had always thought her granddaughter was too solemn for a child of such tender years. “Good for her.”

“That's proof, I say! We'll have Lady Hyacinth flirting with other men and brushing her breasts against Ellery—”

“I don't understand this at all.”

“The thing is, Mother, I had my hand up her skirt.”

Lady Philberta was beginning to master this freewheeling conversation. “You had your hand up
Celeste's
skirt?”

“All the way. And she . . . she was so shocked, but at the same time, she”—his eyes had gone unfocused, and he brushed the pen's feather across his cheek—“she was sweet and passionate, and she's just as beautiful as I imagined. I would have . . . she made me so angry.” His attention snapped back to his mother. “Why the hell can't people act as they're supposed to act?”

“Because they act like themselves.” Her imperturbable son had actually sworn and raised his voice, all in the space of a few minutes. If it wouldn't have hurt her lumbago, Lady Philberta would have jumped for joy.

“Why don't I always know what that is?” Anguish sounded in his voice.

“Sometimes we don't read them correctly. That is an occupational hazard.” Something had gone very wrong in Garrick's youth. Looking back, she couldn't put her finger on the moment when he began to conceal parts of his personality. She knew when, at the age of three, he gave up that battered stuffed cat, his father had been pleased. When Garrick was eight and learned to control his rages, she had praised him. And when he came back from India at the age of twenty, she'd been proud of the logical, calm, controlled gentleman he had become.

Only recently had she realized that Garrick's discipline kept him apart from human emotions. Where did Garrick hide the passion, the temper, the emotion that had made him so alive as a child?

“We can't use Celeste. I'm going to have an escort take her to the train station and all the way to Paris. She's not going to ruin Ellery's marriage, and she's not
going to stay here making me do things that . . . I like women, Mother.”

“That gives an old woman comfort.” This whole scene was giving this old woman comfort. She had feared Garrick would never scale the heights of passion, but it appeared little Celeste had dragged him up there by her bodice strings.

“But I don't let women make me feel like I can't control . . .” He sank back down in the chair and put his head in his hands. “She's leaving
tomorrow.
”

The gardener's daughter wasn't the mate Lady Philberta would have chosen for either of her sons. The girl was beautiful and accomplished, true, but common. And what kind of ceremony would it be with the servants on one side of the church and the ton on the other? Lady Philberta's head ached at the thought.

She took a deep breath. Garrick's impeccable reputation would survive the scandal, and if Celeste shook that formidable discipline on which he prided himself, then Lady Philberta herself would deliver the chit to his bedchamber tied in a ribbon. “Dear, I know how you feel”—because she had fought her way to passion with her much older, unrespectable husband—“but you must think of our mission. Stanhope has done much damage, we can't tell how much yet.”

“Celeste has got to go.”

“Celeste is our only chance to rectify the damage.”

“Tomorrow.” His voice was muffled by his down-turned head. “As far away as possible.”

“We don't even know who Stanhope's accomplices are yet. Come, Garrick, we only have two days of the house party left. You can fight this thing for two more days.” With a little push from Lady Philberta, neither
Garrick nor Celeste stood a chance. He was shaking his head, so she played the guilt card, the one reserved for mothers. “Dear, until I handed this position over to you, nothing like this scandal with Stanhope had ever happened.” That she would admit to him. “I really think you should have seen the signs in your secretary. This is ultimately your fault.”

Slowly, he lifted his head from his hands and glared at her. “Mother, we will find some other way.”

A firm knock sounded on the door, and Dafty stuck her head in. “Lady Philberta. Mr. Throckmorton. I hate to interrupt you, but there's a messenger here, and it's serious. There's been an explosion.”

Throckmorton opened the door to the nursery, and breathed in the scent of camphor and chamomile, rocking horses and childhood memories. He'd always loved the nursery. His childhood had been of the best kind, with parents who adored him, a tutor who rose to the challenge of an inquiring boy, and a pest of a little brother who always tagged after him.

He didn't fool himself. Today's events had fractured the foundation of his assurance. He'd lost control in the most elemental fashion. He'd done things with—to!—Celeste, things he'd only imagined in his most secret carnal dreams. And just when he'd resolved to do the right thing, to save her, and himself, from this madness which possessed him, the news of the blast had arrived. Two Englishmen, one his agent, one a possible traitor, had been in the Crimea when a bomb had gone off.

Coincidence? Of course not. Now one man was buried on foreign soil. Another hung onto life while
rocking in a scrubby transport back to England. If MacLean lived . . . well, if he lived, it would be a miracle.

So Celeste would stay and, all unknowing, perform her duty to her country, and Throckmorton would have to dredge his soul for the discipline he usually commanded so effortlessly.

Now he'd come seeking comfort from the old familiar nursery things. The expanse of wood floor, gleaming in the late afternoon sunshine. The red and blue curtains, boldly patterned and thick, designed to keep out drafts. The shelf of books, some worn, some new.

His daughter.

Her face lit up, as it always did when she saw him, and some of his baffled misery faded.

The rocking chair creaked as Mrs. Brown knitted an unending brown scarf. An ample woman in clean, simple garb, she glanced up and saw him, and nodded pleasantly. Penelope sat curled into the corner of the shabby stuffed chair, reading his old copy of
Robinson Crusoe.

Just last week, before the houseparty had begun and all hell had broken loose, he'd been reading it aloud to both the little girls.
Both
little girls.

A curl of alarm rose in him as his gaze searched the nursery. “Where's Kiki?” he asked Mrs. Brown.

“I don't know. She's hidin', and she's a good little hider.” Mrs. Brown winked and nodded toward the big toy closet with its louvered doors.

There his old toy soldiers marched beside Penelope's dolls and Kiki's soft stuffed animals. A good place to hide—he'd hidden there many a time himself. He relaxed. He wished the children didn't have to have a
guard standing outside their nursery, but most of all, he was glad he'd discovered Stanhope's treachery and took measures to protect his own. As danger crept ever closer he worried about the girls, helpless and innocent. The men he opposed in this game of espionage had no ethics, no principles. Now that they had discovered his identity, they would not shy from taking the children and using them to manipulate him into doing their bidding. He loved Penelope with a father's unwavering devotion, and in the last few days of disillusion and confusion, he'd discovered how thoroughly Kiki had worked her way into his affections.

She might exasperate him, but she was his niece. In a deliberately loud voice, he asked Mrs. Brown, “Have you searched for her?”

“Ever so much, but she's just too clever for me,” Mrs. Brown said comfortably.

They heard a tiny giggle from the closet.

“Then we'll have to wait until she comes out,” he announced. Truth to tell, he was glad to have time alone with his own little daughter. Walking toward Penelope, he asked, “How are you, sweeting?”

Flinging the book aside, she ran to him. “Papa!”

Big girl that she was, he swung her into his arms and hugged her.

“I've missed you.” She kissed his cheek, then drew back. “But I didn't expect to have time with you until this dratted house party had ceased.”

He grinned to hear her sound so much like him. “No one cares whether I go down to gamble and dance. Your Uncle Ellery owns all the charm, and besides, he's going to be the bridegroom.”