Not Proper Enough (A Reforming the Scoundrels Romance) (19 page)

She sighed. “For a very long time after he died, I thought I’d never love another man.”

“And now?” His heart gave a hard thump. Had Aigen pressed his suit with her while he was away?

“I know I’ll never love anyone the way I loved Robert.” She packed away her sewing kit, and his eyes followed the line of her cheek, the sweep of her throat. With a sideways glance at him, a careless one, she said, “I’d love another man in a different way.” She dropped her etui in her reticule before she looked up. “Because he would be a different man, you understand. Not Robert. Someone else, and he would be worthy of me and I worthy of him in an entirely different way.”

He saw all his hopes for the future turning to ash, because she wasn’t ready to see him as her husband. What if she was thinking of Aigen? “You intend to remarry?”

She gave him a quick grin. “I’d like to.” Her smile faded. “In the vaguest sort of way.” Her hands fell to her lap and he let out a relieved breath. “I liked being married; I would like that again. But I’ve no one in mind.”

“No?” He heard himself speaking even as a part of him warned him he was making a mistake. Too late. The words he’d held back before flew into the air between them. He took her hand in his. “Then marry me. Marry me, Ginny, and we’ll learn how best to love each other.”

She folded her hands together, amused, and he didn’t know whether to be grateful, insulted, or crushed. “Now, why would I do that?” She touched the medallion hanging from his watch. “You’ve this now. It’s inevitable that you’ll find the woman of your heart.”

“True.”

She touched his other fob, the one he’d already had fastened to his watch, and turned it over. His initials were embroidered on the front of the rectangle. On the other side, the one she was looking at now, appeared the words
With Love.
“I’ve never seen you without this.”

“It was a gift.”

“From someone you cared for deeply. Who was she? Not Addolorata, surely. Or was it?”

“My mother.” He saw she’d not expected that. “She made
that for me shortly before she passed on. I was quite young at the time. An infant.” He touched it, too, and their fingers brushed. “Camber gave it to me when I went away to school.”

She looked into his face and, slowly, caressed his cheek. He held his breath. “I wish you wouldn’t make it so difficult to dislike you.”

This was an evening for indiscretion, for more impolitic words spilled from him. “Come back to Bouverie with me. We’ll visit the Turkish room and finish what we began.”

“I’d best get back to Hester.”

He tightened his fingers around hers. “Then, meet me there after this interminable opera is over.”

“Fenris.”

“I’ll give you a key.”

A
S SHE FOLLOWED
F
ENRIS BACK TO
C
AMBER’S BOX
, Eugenia lost her hold on the edge of her shawl and had to twist back to catch the trailing end. By the time she’d done that, she had to hurry to catch him up and then walk faster than she liked to keep pace with his determined stride. She took two steps to every one of his. “Fenris.”

“Don’t call me that.” The words were sharp enough to cut. “To you, when we are alone, I am Fox.”

She put a hand on his arm and pulled. “My lord.”

He whirled on her. “What?”

She took a breath, and his eyes flicked to her bosom. She did not want him to be angry with her, but she wasn’t about to dance to his tune, either. “Please slow down.”

He stared at her, hostile, and she glared back, breathing with her mouth open. He flushed. “Forgive me.” He started walking again, more slowly this time.

“Why are you angry? Because I won’t do that with you?”

“I am not angry.” He stopped walking and briefly closed his eyes. When he opened them, he spoke softly and without directly meeting her gaze. “I never say the right thing to you. I,
who’ve never failed to seduce any woman I choose, never say what I ought where you are concerned.”

After a moment spent unable to parse out what he meant, she frowned hard. “I suspect your powers of seduction are rarely tested.”

He glanced at her, and that was uncertainty she saw in his gaze. One of the candles in the wall sconce guttered out and left them in a dimmer light. “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

“Both.” She touched the button she’d reattached to his coat and wished she understood him better. She wished never to have to guess what he was thinking.

“You prove my point. You say you want a proper man—some vague fellow who meets some even vaguer standard, one I’ll warrant you couldn’t articulate for all the gold in Christendom.” His eyes darkened, and what she saw there made her think of mirrored rooms and wicked, wicked pleasure. “But, darling Ginny, you respond best to me when I’m not proper enough. By God, you do. Don’t deny it.”

She didn’t dare answer. She was very much afraid he was right. She didn’t want him to be, but he was.

He let out an exasperated sound. “Would you come away with me if Miss Rendell weren’t here?”

“You’re impossible.” She dropped his arm and walked away. He followed. How had things got so out of her control? “We aren’t lovers, you and I.”

He came even with her and stopped her with an arm to her elbow. All her butterflies came back. “With all due respect, that’s a lie.”

“There is a difference between a single past encounter and a mutual expectation of future ones.”

He snorted.

Eugenia plucked at her shawl. She was out of her depth here. “I can’t be your lover.”

“Why?”

“Because I couldn’t love you.” The wall behind him was white, but fingers from all the hands that had touched the surface had left smudges on that expanse of paint.

“How do you know?”

They were at the stairs that led to the entrance to Camber’s box, and she headed up them. Fenris took two steps up to her one, turned, and blocked her way. Remarkably, nothing changed in his expression. He seemed as calm, and two breaths from bored, as ever, but he bit off the syllables of her name. “Mrs. Bryant. How do you know?”

She hoped by all that was holy he couldn’t tell she was taken aback, both at what she’d said and by his reaction to it. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost the keen edge of her dislike. He’d defended Hester against Dinwitty Lane. He’d made her laugh. Even tonight. When he came into a room, every man but him disappeared. “I know it. That’s all.”

“You think I still hold you in contempt.”

“No, I don’t.” She tried to walk past him but he stopped her with just the sound of his voice.

“For God’s sake, Ginny.” He kept one hand on the wall, but his fingers curled into a fist. “You were married to my best friend, the finest man I’ve ever known.” Anger crept into his dark and velvet words. “Do you really think I could despise the woman he loved?”

She regarded him in silence. He waited her out, waited for some acknowledgment of that confession. What was she to say to that after so many years of resenting him for the awful things he’d said about her? “I don’t know what you felt then. I know only what you said. But that does not signify. It doesn’t. I’m not that young girl. You’re not that young man. That’s all past now. They were your words, and I didn’t know the man who said them any more than you knew the girl you said them about.” She went around him and started up the stairs.

He grabbed her arm and joined her on the step. Every bit of the charm he’d shown earlier was gone. “I do not despise you. You do know that, don’t you?”

She stared directly into his face. She wasn’t afraid of him, not at all, and she might have been of another man. “Listen to us. Fox. This is ridiculous. Let’s not fight. All that’s in the past. It hardly matters anymore.”

“Agreed.”

She didn’t
trust his quick assent, but she summoned a smile anyway. “Excellent.”

“Yes.” He came down one step. “And given that, why can’t we be lovers in the present?”

For a moment, words failed her completely and all she managed to say was, “Because.”

“Why, Ginny?”

She plucked out some of the very few emotions she did understand among all those swirling in her. “I would feel as if I were betraying Robert. That’s why.”

“Us being lovers betrays Robert? But not your remarrying some vague, dull fellow?”

“I don’t know you. I don’t know you at all. Not really.”

He moved closer, effectively pinning her to the wall unless she chose to push him. She didn’t, though. Why not? Why on earth not? “What do you want to know about me?”

“I won’t be bullied.”

“Bullied? Hardly. I’ve asked a fair question. What do you want to know about me? Besides that I adore your hand on my cock?” He leaned closer. “God, Ginny, don’t do this. Don’t push me away just because you’re afraid of what you’ll feel.”

She tugged her arm free and moved briskly up the stairs to the next corridor. He caught up, and she hurried toward the entrance to the box. In two long strides he was in front of her again. “Whatever you want. It’s yours.”

“Fenris. Don’t.”

“Let’s go somewhere private, you and I.” His eyes pinned her again. He lifted a hand, and she was momentarily breathless with the possibility that he would touch her, and why would she feel like that? She was mad to care an atom for Fenris. Mad, mad, mad.

“You wouldn’t fall in love with me. You know you wouldn’t.” The walls she’d constructed to contain her opinion of him continued their slow erosion, and she was helpless to stop it from happening.

He shook his head, smiling. “No, my darling Ginny, I wouldn’t
fall in love with you. It’s too late to worry about the barren landscape of my heart. I’m already in love with you.”

“You aren’t.”

“Ginny.” He used that dark silk voice, and chills raced up and down her spine from all that she heard in the way her name left his mouth.

“It’s too soon for me. I can’t fall in love yet. Not with you.”

“Why not me?”

“Not with anyone.”

He backed away, but he was still watching her. Too carefully, she thought, and it was flattering and appalling to think why. “What are we to do? You and I?”

“Return to our seats and enjoy the rest of the performance?”

“Very well.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned a shoulder against the wall. He sent a lopsided grin her way. Her heart eased at the sight. She didn’t want him to be angry with her. “Or, we could stay here.”

“No, we couldn’t.”

He looked around. “I have been admiring this corridor. The stairs are of an extraordinary craftsmanship.” That made her laugh, and he continued to grin at her. “If this fine corridor is not to your taste, come away with me.” He tipped his head her direction. “I’ll take you someplace wicked. Indulge your every whim.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.” He pulled his hands free of his pockets. “If the Turkish room is out of the question, then I’ll take you to Upper Brook Street.”

“Not now.” She walked past him, hardly able to believe she wasn’t sending him away, set down. “For heaven’s sake. Not here and not now.”

“Later, then,” he said, joining her.

“Are you mad?”

“An evening between gentlemen, my word of honor on it. I’ll give you whisky, blue ruin if you prefer. We’ll smoke
cigars, talk about the races, and lay wagers we can’t afford to pay.”

“You’re impossible.”

“No. I’m irresistible.”

“You’re not.” She looked at him sideways. He was right, blast him. He was irresistible.

“I am. You can play the man’s part with me. Until I take you to bed, that is.”

She stifled a laugh. “Honestly.”

“Do you like to have your ears kissed? The back of your neck?”

“If we were lovers, it wouldn’t last.”

His eyes twinkled with good humor. “My stamina is legendary.”

“Behave.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Look at the evidence. Whatever happens, one of us will spoil it.”

This time, he rolled his eyes. “Propriety never works with you. Make no mistake, Ginny, I mean to get you naked and on your back. Your hands and knees, too. Astride me. Up against the wall.” She clapped her hands over her ears for all the good it did. “You’ll know something about me that’s real and true before we do all that and more. I mean to have you screaming my name without any of that vagueness you talked about. You’ll know exactly and precisely who’s bringing you to pleasure.”

“Stop. You’re impossible.”

A gentleman came around the corner, heading for the stairs to the upper boxes. Fenris took a step back, which was an uncomfortable reminder that he had been standing too near. And of how strongly she’d responded to his being so close. When the man was out of sight, Fenris moved to her side, and she couldn’t feel the floor beneath her feet anymore. “Come away with me.”

Her mouth opened, but no words came out. She’d never heard a man speak as if the words themselves were made
of passion, but that was what she felt as Fenris spoke to her now, and that, that shocked her to her toes.

“Can you feel it? The heat? The desire between us? The air between us threatens to combust. I want more of that, don’t you? I want that fire between us. Don’t deny what you felt with me before. Don’t pretend you don’t want to know where that sort of desire will lead us.”