Irresistible (30 page)

But she rolled closer and tightened her arm about his chest. “Not yet,” she said. “Oh, not yet. It must be very early.”

“I must have made you very sore,” he said. “I have been insatiable, I am afraid.”

“Not too sore,” she said. “I feel wonderful—there. There, where you have been. Sore and sensitive and aching for more. Come there again.”

She spoke—she had spoken all night—quite unlike the Sophie he knew. She had told him quite graphically what pleased her, what might please her more. She had asked in the same way what she might do to please him better and had done everything he had suggested, apparently quite un-shocked by the more shocking intimacies he had been unable to resist asking of her.

He had been quite right in what he had said to her last night. She had been in hiding for as long as he had known her. Their small and seemingly rather plain Sophie, their cheerful, placid good comrade Sophie, was in fact a beautiful, slender, passionate, vibrant woman.

It was a startling discovery.

“If you absolutely insist.” He turned onto her and slid deeply into her warm wetness while she wrapped herself about him and held tight. “I’ll come to you again tomorrow night—or do I mean tonight?—if I may, Sophie, but I cannot promise that all my body parts will function efficiently. You may have worn them out for a while.” He grinned down at her before lowering much of his weight onto her and going to work in her.

But she was not in the mood for a gentle loving with humor. She tightened inner muscles, increasing his own desire, and moaned to his every stroke. She climaxed very quickly and then lay still and relaxed while he completed his own act.

He wondered if
she
would be able to let
him
go at the end of the Season. Was he merely receiving the benefit of the long-pent-up sexual appetites of a passionate woman? Or was she making love to
him?

One thing had become disturbingly clear to him. She had had anything but a good marriage with Walter Armitage. They had always seemed content with each other, but then perhaps that was the key word—
content.
Sophie was made for far more than mere contentment. And he had always admitted that there was no way of knowing what went on in a couple’s relationship in the privacy of their own home.

It had not been a good marriage.

“Mmm,” he said, realizing that he had allowed himself to relax the whole of his weight on her. “One squashed Sophie. You should have pushed me off.”

But when he went to lift himself away from her, she tightened her arms about him again.

“Not yet,” she said. “Not just yet. I like your weight.”

He sighed and relaxed for a few minutes longer. But she did not relax, he noticed. Her arms held him to her as if she would never let him go.

Perhaps she would not let him go at the end of the spring either. And perhaps he would not mind. Perhaps it would be mutual, as everything that had happened this night had been.

“There,” she said, letting her arms fall to her sides at last, “you must be eager to be gone. And it is time. Go then.”

He kissed her and smiled before drawing free of her and lifting himself off her and off the bed. “Not eager,” he said. “But it
is
time. I do not fancy bidding Samuel a good morning as I leave.”

She had tears in her eyes as she let him out of the front door ten minutes later. But she was also smiling that radiant smile he had never seen on her face until last night.

“Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you, Nathaniel. You were always my favorite, you know. Always.”

He pondered those words as he walked along the street after kissing her one more time. Her favorite? Among whom? Ken and Rex and Eden—and Walter? All men? He had been her favorite. In what way? Sexually?

Yet she had only ever been a dear friend to him. How could she so effectively have hidden for so long? How could he not have seen in her from the start the woman who could mean more to him than any other woman, than any other person, who would feel as close to him as the beating of his own heart?

Was this, he wondered uneasily, what being in love felt like? Was he in love with Sophie? And did he also
love
her?

Could he live without her? That was surely the test. Could he live without the air he breathed? Could he live without the beating of his heart?

Could he live without Sophie?

 

“Nat had better keep his eyes hidden beneath the brim of his hat,” Kenneth said. “They are bloodshot.”

“The question is, Ken,” Rex added, “whether the ladies would consider they looked more than usually as if they belonged in a boudoir.”

“The lady who caused them to be that way probably does,” Kenneth said, and the two of them chuckled as if they had been the authors of marvelous wit.

“One can merely hope,” Eden said, reining in his horse so that he would not lose a tittle or morsel of the conversation, “that Lady Gullis does not sport a similar beauty feature this morning. It would not suit her as well as it does our Nat.”

“One must similarly hope,” Rex said, “that no one but us made too much of the fact that the lady was absent from last night’s ball while Nat left indecently early.”

“But everyone would doubtless be as charmed as we are,” Kenneth said. “Not that Moira is charmed, it is true. She believes you can do altogether better for yourself, Nat. I was forced to remind her that you are not exactly setting up a wife. In her opinion, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” He grinned.

“I wonder,” Nathaniel said at last, gazing about him at the trees and feeling nostalgic for the countryside, “if everyone in town suffers from the same mathematical malady. Does everyone add two and two together and come up with five?”

His three friends simultaneously roared with laughter.

“Protecting the lady’s reputation, are you, Nat?” Eden asked. “We are all agreed that you have impeccable taste, old chap.” He cleared his throat. “But I beg leave to remind all here present that it was I who selected the lady for you.”

“Doubtless,” Nathaniel said, “you will receive your reward in heaven, Ede.”

“I have an idea for how we may help Sophie,” Eden said, changing the subject abruptly as he often did. “At least, the idea was not mine exactly. It was your cousin‘s, Nat. She cornered me last evening and deprived me of my supper. But she had a deuced good idea.”

“I have the best idea,” Nathaniel said grimly. “I am going to pick a quarrel with the bastard and force him to challenge me. I can remember just how we all did it for Rex when there was Copley to deal with. I am going to kill him and it is going to be the one killing in my life that I will enjoy.”

Rex spoke up sharply. “Don’t talk yourself into thinking that, Nat,” he said. “I remember feeling the same way, and I still do not really regret shooting Copley instead of wasting my bullet on the air as I might have done if he had not shot before the signal. But I still see him in my sleep and probably always will. I still feel that I have him on my conscience even if my reason tells me that I did what was right. Pinter is guilty of blackmail, which is evil enough, I grant you. But not quite as evil as what Copley was guilty of. Besides, I did it for the sake of my wife. Sophie is only our friend.”

Nathaniel’s lips tightened. “Nevertheless,” he said, “I am going to kill him.” He turned to Eden. “What did Lavinia have to say? I wish I had not allowed her to become involved in this. She helped me find the pearls and the ring, you know. It is hard to say no to Lavinia, and it was Sophie herself who made me see that perhaps I ought not simply because she is a woman.”

“She thinks we should blackmail Pinter,” Eden said.

Kenneth and Rex both laughed.

“With the threat that Nat will hang him and draw and quarter him if he does not leave Sophie alone?” Kenneth said. “It might work too, by Jove. Did you ever see an officer direct his men from behind them as often as Pinter did? He is undoubtedly a cowardly bastard. And even some stouthearted men would quail at the thought of having Nat let loose on them when his temper is up.”

“But what the devil can she have
done
?
”
Rex asked of no one in particular. “One cannot imagine Sophie doing anything that might even remotely make her prey to a blackmailer.”

Nathaniel had been thinking about it. The answer had been staring them all in the face, but then the answer seemed almost as unlikely as their first assumption.

“Perhaps it is nothing
she
has done,” he said. “Perhaps it was Walter.”

“Walter?” Eden sounded incredulous. “There was no one more solid, more respectable, more thoroughly dull than Armitage. He would not have recognized temptation if it had met nose to nose with him.”

“Is it more unlikely than that it was something to do with Sophie?” Nathaniel asked.

“The whole thing is a mystery to me.” Eden shrugged and turned his horse to begin the ride back to the park entrance. They all followed his lead. “But blackmailing Pinter, having him sweating and shaking in his boots appeals to my sense of justice. Not just the threat of Nat, though. Miss Bergland had me blushing from the tips of my toenails up when she blurted out her conviction that Pinter got sexual thrills out of watching whippings.”

“The devil she did!” Nathaniel was appalled. “And she actually said it to you, Ede?
Aloud?
” He grimaced.

“But she was right,” Eden said. “We all knew it. I can remember Ken’s saying it more than once. The thing is, can we gather enough of such muck to make him dread having us make our opinions public?”

“Do we need any more?” Nathaniel asked. “I could make a very colorful story indeed out of just that. With a little embellishment and a whole parcel of innuendo we might create a nice balance to whatever it was Sophie—or Walter—did.”

“There might be more,” Kenneth said with obvious reluctance, turning all attention his way. “A new recruit complained to me once that Pinter had made advances to him. Sexual advances, of course.”

Silence succeeded his words.

“I had a talk with Pinter,” Kenneth said, “and assured him that the boy had doubtless misunderstood and should probably be whipped for so criminally misunderstanding an officer—but it might be less humiliating to let it pass that one time and give the boy a chance to redeem himself. It seemed the only way to save the poor blighter from punishment on one of the usual trumped-up charges.”

“And you never reported him?” Rex asked.

“Pinter?” Kenneth said. “No. I knew a few boys at school with the same preference, as you all probably did, and in the army too. The law notwithstanding, I never felt the need to hate them or root them out or bother them provided they did not make themselves obnoxious to me or anyone under my command. They were created that way, I have always thought, and no one can help the way he was created. The fact that Pinter was a thoroughly unlikable character did not seem excuse enough to report him.”

“We have him, then,” Nathaniel said grimly. “Dead to rights. It is a capital offense, by Jove.”

“I rather think we do,” Eden agreed.

“And so we save Sophie whether she likes it or not,” Rex said. “She need not know it was us, need she? She can think for the rest of her life that the bastard developed a conscience. I wonder if she will ever talk to any of us again?”

“He threatened her to make her stay away from us, you may be sure,” Eden said. “Especially in light of what you have just told us, Ken. He knows that you know that about him, or at least have reason to suspect, and that the four of us are close friends—and deuced fond of Sophie. Once we have explained his options to him and he has kept his distance from her for a while, I think she will realize that she can speak with us again. Good old Sophie. We will have to wait a while not to make it too obvious that we have interfered, as she puts it. But we should be able to start inviting her about again before the Season is over.”

“We had better go about this in a way that will impress itself properly upon Pinter,” Kenneth said. “Shall we agree upon tomorrow morning? Today I will write a few things down and we can all sign. I’ll make several copies and we can all have one. We will have to make it obvious that he has a lot of us to get rid of if he is to be free to continue tormenting people like Sophie.”

“I’ll find some other way of convincing him of that,” Nathaniel said. “I may not be allowed the pleasure of killing him, but by God, I’ll be rearranging his features for him before I have finished with him.”

“Perhaps you had better let me do it, Nat,” Eden said with a chuckle. “Lady Gullis may not like you with a battered face.”

“Perhaps we should draw for it,” Kenneth said. “You two cannot horde all the pleasure to yourselves.”

“If you all want a go at him too,” Nathaniel said, “you are going to have to stand in line and await your turn, I am afraid. This one is going to be for Sophie, and I am going to be the one doing it. Just as Rex did for Catherine.”

He spurred his horse into a gallop and left his friends temporarily behind him, looking after him in some surprise.