No Man's Mistress (14 page)

Her candle had been dazzling him the whole while. And she had been coming closer. When he looked at her, feeling still annoyed but also decidedly sheepish, he could see her clearly for the first time.

Good God! She had not stopped either to dress or to throw on a dressing gown. Not that there was anything particularly indecent about her appearance. Her white cotton nightgown covered her from neck to wrists to ankles. She wore no nightcap, but her hair was scraped back from her face and lay in a thick braid down her back.

She did not look indecent at all, even if her feet
were
bare. She looked like chastity incarnate, in fact. But still
and all, it
was
just a nightgown, and one could not prevent oneself from imagining what was—or, more to the purpose, what was not—beneath it. Nothing whatsoever, at a guess. Ferdinand's temperature soared and he rubbed harder at his bruised thigh.

“What is it to me?” she asked, repeating his question, her voice tight with self-righteous indignation. “It is the middle of the
night
. I am trying to
sleep.”

“It is a downright stupid place to keep a table—in the middle of the corridor,” he said, careful not to look fully at her and then noticing his coat and waistcoat on the floor. He was clad only in shirt and breeches and stockings himself. Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord, he could have done without this. They were alone together after midnight in the darkened corridor outside both their bedchambers—and he had thoughts crowding his mind that had no business being there at all.

Lustful thoughts.

She herself was safely armed with indignation—at least for the moment. She had probably never even heard of lust. “The table was standing against the wall, my lord,” she pointed out with cold civility. “The painting was hanging
on
the wall. If there was any stupidity involved in what has happened here, it was yours in lurching along the corridor without a candle while you were drunk.”

“Deuce take it,” he said, “I suppose that urn was worth a king's ransom.”

“At least that much,” she agreed. “It was also unspeakably hideous.”

He grinned directly at her when she said that and then wished he had kept his eyes averted. She had the sort of face—a perfect oval with high cheekbones, a straight nose, large eyes, and soft, kissable lips—that actually
looked more beautiful without the distraction of curls and ringlets to dress it up. Her usual coronet of plaits gave her a regal air. Tonight's loose braid gave her a youthful look, an aura of innocence and purity. His temperature edged up another notch as he determinedly returned his attention to the sad remains of the urn.

“Where will I find a broom?” he asked. Perhaps sweeping up the pieces would restore his equilibrium.

But she did exactly the wrong thing. She looked directly up at him and laughed, her eyes dancing with merriment.

“I am almost tempted to tell you,” she said. “It would be priceless to see you wielding a broom. But you had better forget that impulse. It is after midnight.”

Which fact he was trying diligently—and futilely—to ignore.

“What should I do, then?” he asked, frowning.

“I think you ought to go to bed, Lord Ferdinand,” she said.

If only the top could have blown off his head, some heat might have escaped harmlessly into the air above and saved him. But it did not, of course. And instead of taking her advice and scurrying off in the direction of his room and sanctuary, his eyes on the doorknob every step of the way, he made the mistake of looking down at her again and locking eyes with her and seeing that finally her mind had attached itself to the atmosphere that had been sizzling around them ever since she had ventured outside her room.

He did not notice himself taking the candlestick out of her hand, but it was definitely his own hand that was setting it down on the table. And then he was turning and cupping her chin with the same hand, which was
sending impressions of warm softness sizzling up his arm.

“Ought I?” he asked her. “But who is going to put me there?”

Even at that late moment he might have answered his own question and scampered off with all haste to put himself to bed. Or she might have helped restore sanity to them both by making some caustic remark about his supposed inebriation before effecting a dignified retreat. Or she might have delivered this morning's speech about the sanctity of her person again. Or she could simply have turned and bolted on her bare feet, leaving the candle to him as a trophy.

Neither of them took any of the easy—and sensible-ways out.

Instead she did something totally unexpected. Her teeth sank into her soft lower lip, and in the flickering light of the candle it seemed to Ferdinand that the brightness of her eyes might have been attributable to unshed tears. The words she spoke confirmed that impression.

“I wish,” she said softly, “you had gone away after that day and that evening. I wish I had never known your name.”

“Do you?” He forgot danger. He forgot propriety. He even forgot that they were locked in an insoluble conflict. All he saw was his lovely, vibrant lass, who had once worn daisies in her hair but who now had tears in her eyes—because of him. “Why?”

She hesitated and then shrugged. “It would have been a pleasant memory,” she said.

Had he been thinking rationally, he would have left her answer uncommented upon. But he really was not thinking at all.

“This
memory?” He lowered his head, touched his lips to hers, and was irrevocably lost in sensation. Sweet, wholesome innocence and beauty. The enticing smells of soap and cleanliness and woman. And the memories of firelight and fiddle music and bright, twining ribbons. And of the laughing, lovely face of the woman he had taken behind the oak tree to kiss.

This woman.

He kissed her for only a few moments before drawing back his head and gazing down into her eyes. The candlelight flickered across her face as the firelight had done on the village green. Her eyes gazed dreamily back into his. The tears were gone. She raised one hand and set her fingertips lightly against his cheek, sending shivers of raw desire coursing downward through his body to center in his groin. And yet the hunger he felt was not purely carnal in nature. She was not just any lovely woman with whom he had found himself alone under provocative circumstances.

She was Viola Thornhill, the laughing, lovely, vibrant woman who danced with joy, as if she had drawn all the music and all the rhythm of the universe into her body, the relative of Bamber's who had been promised Pinewood and then betrayed, the child who had run to meet her father and poured out all her childhood secrets to him.

“Yes,” she whispered at last in answer to the question he had almost forgotten asking. “I wanted that memory.”

“When the real man is right here to provide others?” He forgot for the moment that she would remember her every association with him after May Day with a bitterness that would last a lifetime.

He set his hands on either side of her waist and drew
her closer. She did not push him away. On the contrary, she cupped his elbows in her palms and arched herself in toward him, pressing thighs, abdomen, and breasts against his body. She was all soft, alluring curves. His arms slid tightly about her waist, and hers twined about his neck. Any doubt of the nakedness that lay beneath the virginal white of her nightgown was put to flight. So was any doubt that she was a willing participant in what was happening.

This time when he kissed her, he opened his mouth over hers and licked her parted lips and the soft, moist flesh behind them. He was consumed by sweet, raw hunger. Sweet because he knew with a deep, innate integrity that he would not take the embrace far enough to destroy her innocence—he would not take her virginity. Raw because he wanted and wanted and wanted. He wanted her beneath him on a bed, yes. He was already hard with arousal. He wanted to press himself deep inside her and bring her pleasure and himself ease. But more than that simple animal urge, he wanted… Ah, he
simply yearned
.

“Sweet,” he murmured, moving his mouth from hers, feathering kisses over her closed eyes, her temples, her cheeks, drawing the lobe of one ear between his teeth and rubbing his tongue over the tip, burying his face in the warm, soft hollow between her neck and shoulder. He wrapped both arms even more tightly about her, lifting her until she stood on her toes.

“Yes,” she murmured, her voice low velvet, her cheek rubbing against his hair, the fingers of one hand entwined in it. “Ah, sweet.”

They clung for endless moments.

He was releasing his hold on her at the same moment
as she set her hands against his shoulders and pushed him away, not violently, but firmly.

“Go to bed, Lord Ferdinand,” she said before he could speak. “Alone.” Yet she was not angry. There was something in her voice that spoke of a yearning to match his own. He knew that part of her—a weaker part—wanted him to argue.

“I was not headed down that road,” he said softly. “Seduction was not on my mind. Your maidenhood is perfectly safe with me. But it would be best for us not to meet like this again. I am only a man, when all is said and done.”

She picked up her candlestick. “I will have those pieces swept up in the morning,” she said. “Leave them for now.” She did not look at him again but made her way back to her room, her braid swinging back and forth across her back like a pendulum. She looked infinitely enticing.

He had lost all faith in innocence and purity and fidelity, and even love, long before he left his boyhood behind. He had never been in love or ever enjoyed anything more than a light, bantering sort of friendship with any woman. Women were for sex and children. He did not want children.

But perhaps, after all, Ferdinand thought as the door of her bedchamber closed behind her and the corridor was plunged into darkness again, there were such qualities as goodness and innocence and uncomplicated wholesomeness.

Perhaps there was even love.

And fidelity.

And perhaps he was simply tired, he thought as he located his abandoned clothes in the faint moonlight and picked them up before making his way toward his
bedchamber. It had been a long day, after all, and an extraordinarily busy one.

There was a way for both of them to remain at Pinewood, he thought as he stepped inside the room and closed the door behind him. But he would not pursue that thought tonight. Or tomorrow either, if he was wise.

He was a perfectly contented bachelor.

Ah, sweet
, she had just murmured to him, her voice throaty with passion, her cheek resting softly against his head.

Yes. Sweet, indeed.

He strode purposefully into his dressing room.

Viola greeted the absence of Lord Ferdinand Dudley from Pinewood the following morning with both relief and dismay. Through a long, almost sleepless night, she had not known how she was going to face him over the breakfast table. On the other hand, his absence was due to the fact that he had ridden out with Mr. Paxton to visit the home farm. It seemed that he was interested in the running of the estate, at least at present. Viola felt his absence on such a mission as a huge intrusion. From the first she had been personally involved in making Pinewood an efficient, prosperous concern. She had done rather well at it, with Mr. Paxton's help and advice. She had loved it.

There were no great schemes to put into effect today. Only the one this afternoon, which already seemed lame and doomed to failure. Just to accentuate her mood of depression, the lovely warm, sunny spell seemed to have deserted Somersetshire. There was a light drizzle misting the windows and heavy gray skies to darken the breakfast room.

The trouble was, she did not know for which of two evils she must blame herself more. She had capitulated to the enemy, allowing him to hold her and kiss her. And partly—oh, more than partly—that had happened because he had looked irresistibly attractive in his shirtsleeves, with his evening knee breeches skintight about his long, muscled legs, and because she had felt unbearably lonely and loveless. How could she excuse herself for giving in to desire for such a man? And yet she would prefer to accuse herself of unbridled lust than the other.

For even though she had been half lost in passion while she was in his arms, she really had been
only
half lost. The other half of herself had watched dispassionately as she arched against him, bringing her breasts against his hard chest, her thighs against his, her abdomen against the hard bulk of his erection. She had known the effect she was having on him, the power she had over him. She could have enticed him into bed with almost no effort at all. But though the passionate woman had longed for just that, to lie spread beneath him, brought to pleasure by his clean, youthful virility, the calculating woman had weighed the possibility of enticing him in an entirely different direction—toward love and even marriage.

Viola was deeply ashamed of that half of herself.

“Yes,” she said when the butler stepped closer to her, “you may clear away, Mr. Jarvey. I am not hungry this morning.”

She went to the library and seated herself behind the desk. She would write home. At least she need not fear interruption for the rest of the morning.

How could she even be tempted to try to make him fall in love with her? She disliked and despised him. Besides, it was impossible. Not to engage his feelings,
perhaps, but to marry him. Though it was not that practical consideration that made her feel slightly nauseated, but the moral implications of trying to trick a man into marriage. She picked up the quill pen from the desk, tested the nib, and dipped it in the inkwell.

Beware of a tall, dark, handsome stranger. He can destroy you—if you do not first snare his heart
.

Why had those words of the gypsy fortune-teller chosen to pop into her mind at this particular moment?

She would not do it, she thought with firm resolve. She would not do a single thing deliberately to attract his admiration—or lust. But what if she did not have to do a thing? What if his obvious attraction to her person developed quite freely into something deeper? What if…