Not Proper Enough (A Reforming the Scoundrels Romance) (34 page)

He was overcome with the sinking conviction that his success with other women was all illusion, a conclusion he’d drawn about himself that sprang from his position and status and not any innate charm. Eugenia had been heinously accurate when she’d suggested to him that his vaunted powers of seduction had never been tested.

She studied the hallway decor, and his doubts deepened. He stopped walking, and that made her give him an inquiring look. The usual pull of his attraction to her kept him witless. From somewhere in the depths of his brain, he found words.

“You will also have the opportunity to tell me what mischief Lane has caused you now.”

She shot him a wide-eyed glance over her shoulder. That was panic there.

“I saw you speaking to him just now. You did not look happy. Nor did he. I’ll shoot him dead this time if he’s insulted you again.” Completely the wrong thing to say, since if Lane had done so, she’d hardly tell him now that he’d threatened murder.

At least now she was looking at him. “It was nothing.”

“Don’t lie.”

She faced him, and a hundred different reactions passed over her face, but the final one was exasperation. “All right then. I’ll tell you.”

“Do.”

“He asked me to marry him.”

“What?”

“Thank you.” Her reply was overtly accusing. He deserved it.

“Was he serious?”

“Yes.” She plucked at her skirt. “He was very sweet about it. He said he’d already been all the way to Bitterward and back to talk to Mountjoy.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” The parlor door was open, and he had the presence of mind to head them in that direction. Inside, Eugenia slowed and then took her arm away from him. The room was empty. He closed the door.

“No doubt I’ll have a letter from Mountjoy soon,” she said.

“You didn’t tell that fool yes, did you?”

She went to a display cabinet near a heavy mahogany desk. He followed, and at the last moment she turned. Her skirts whipped around her legs. “How could I? Under the circumstances?”

“If circumstances were different, would you have accepted him?”

She crossed her arms underneath her bosom. “I don’t know. I’d want to know him better.”

“That lobster-headed dunce?”

She examined the desk, to hide a smile, he hoped. “Well. I don’t think he’s quite as dull a boy as I’ve assumed.”

“Indeed.”

“He began by asking me if I was in love with you.”

His brain emptied of rational thought. And, it would seem, circumspection. “You told him you were not.”

She quirked her eyebrows at him.

“You did, or he’d not have offered for you. Not even Lane would propose to a woman who’s just told him she loves someone else.”

“He’s not stupid, but he isn’t very bright.”

“Do you love me?”

She gazed at him, mouth open and at such a loss for words that he took pity on her. In a way. He closed the distance between them and put his hands on either side of her face. He tipped her head back and lowered his mouth to hers.

He kissed her. While he did so, he told himself there was no bigger fool than him right now. That he’d better make love to her now because he might never get the chance again. He did not want to one day be on his deathbed thinking of this moment and wishing he’d kissed her one last time before she ground his heart to dust. He did not want to spend the rest of his life wondering what would have happened or if he could have turned her opinion of him. If there came a time when he did give up his suit as hopeless, he wanted to be sure he’d done all that he could to make his case to her.

She didn’t push him away, so he kept kissing her until he realized she wasn’t kissing him back. He drew back and focused on her mouth at first, so kissable. Eventually he looked at her face. Her eyes were open wide, and he could not for his life tell whether the anger he saw there would win out over the desire.

“Honestly. You’re not to be borne.”

“You can’t marry Lane.”

“I know that.” She put her hand on the fall of his breeches, and to his delight, while she smiled so very smugly, she curled her fingers around his mostly erect cock, which, being
a dutiful sort of male member, came to greater attention. He sucked in a breath, and her eyes went just that much wider.

“Fox,” she said softly. “What am I to do with you?”

His good sense vanished, but then he hadn’t started this encounter with much. He pushed his pelvis forward and covered one of her hands with one of his, and then he kissed her again while she pressed against him, pushing up and then down, and she was the one to work her hand to the side and unfasten one of his buttons. Another button and another, and, God yes, she slipped her hand underneath the flap and found her way past his smallclothes.

What was left of his mind melted away.

He kissed her again and, still kissing her, spun them both toward the desk, and then he came close to saying a word that wasn’t proper at all, because the damned door had come open. He broke away from her and strode to the door. He closed and locked it this time, and she was still there, standing in front of the desk looking lost. Her gaze swept over him, over the disarrangement of his trousers, and that was quite enough for him and any hope of sanity.

In three steps, he crossed to her, and he pushed aside the blotter and the sextant on the desk. She made no protest. Not a single word did she utter. No objection. He turned back to her, grabbed her around the waist, and lifted her onto the desktop. Lust burned through him. Selfish, selfish lust. Whatever was going through her head right now, he didn’t intend to waste his chances.

Her eyes were wide open, her lips parted, and he fell into her eyes and drowned. She leaned forward and kissed him hard, and now both of them were lost to each other. He gathered handfuls of her frock and stepped between her spread legs. He slid his hands along the tops of her thighs and turned his fingers inward. Warmth, there, between her legs, the slickness of her arousal. He got a hand behind her and pulled her forward, to the very edge of the desk.

With the froth of her skirts and petticoat around them both, he unfastened enough buttons of his breeches to free himself completely. With one long, fast stroke, he was inside
her. He shouted, a raw sound, incoherent. The breath left his lungs. Every damn time it was like this with her.

The sound that came from her as he seated himself was part moan, part groan, and she said, “God, yes. Fox.”

Some part of his brain told him he ought to slow down, but she had one arm thrown around his shoulders and her other hand propped up on the desk, her thighs tight around his hips, and she pushed toward him with her hand on the desk and met his second thrust and the third, and all the ones after that, too.

He had one hand on the desktop, too, the other around her bare thigh, and he tried to time his strokes but he couldn’t think of anything but the clench of her around him, all that softness and the slickness as he moved in her, and he was going to come very soon. He would have worried about that, about coming far too soon, but he did manage to angle himself just right and she came apart in his arms. The sight and feel of her climax set him off. Not that he would have lasted much longer in any event. He withdrew just in time.

“Ginny.” He had just enough presence of mind not to shout, but it was a near thing. In his last coherent moment, he was shaken to his core by the knowledge that this was Eugenia, that she was as taken away by this as he was, falling with him, too, and it just wasn’t possible that she did not feel something for him. His climax hit, shook him out, and by all rights ought to have killed him. How he managed to stay on his feet afterward remained a mystery.

When he opened his eyes, he found her gazing at him, and if he’d possessed the power of speech, he would have told her he’d never seen a lovelier sight, never felt that sex was worth all the mess and emotion until now.

They were quite close; her arm remained around his shoulder, his fingers still spread out and gripping her thigh. She had her hand around him, and he pushed forward one more time and savored the shiver of orgasm that lingered. He kissed her again, slowly this time, and she kissed him back, reluctantly, he fancied, but then she wasn’t the sort of woman to deny what they’d just done.

He fished out his spare handkerchief and cleaned up as much of the mess as he could, and while he did that, he slid a finger along her nether lips, then two, over the nub there. Her head dropped back, and he felt her contract.

“I can’t,” she said, whispered, murmured. Moaned.

“I think you can.” And he brought her again, very quickly, her with both hands propped on the desk, and at least this time he had mental acuity enough to enjoy watching her. His first handkerchief did the rest of its duty.

Slowly, she opened her eyes. “We’re both mad. Mad.”

“Not madness,” he said. “I want to do this again, Ginny. Don’t you?”

“No.”

He slid two fingers inside her. Despite that he was standing between her legs, despite that he had his fingers inside her, despite that she’d come apart with him, he was wracked with doubt. She’d submitted to him, yet he was no closer to what he wanted than ever.

“Fox, God.”

He stroked inside her with his fingers.

“I think it’s best if we pretend this never happened.”

“When I’m done bringing you again, you may pretend all you like.” He slid his fingers along her. “But not until then.”

Bring her he did, and if they’d been anywhere a man could decently make love, he’d have put Ginny flat on her back and done so again and again until his cock refused to rise. But alas, they were not any such place, and it was bad of them to behave like this in their host’s home. They righted their clothes, helping each other.

At the door, both of them with their clothes arranged, hair smoothed back, and all the outward signs of illicit sex brushed or cleaned away, he paused. “I’ll escort you and Miss Rendell home.” He lifted a hand. “Pray do not argue.”

As it happened, it was a good thing he’d insisted, for the smell of smoke was thick in the air even before his carriage arrived at Mountjoy’s town house. He brought the horses to a halt. The scene was chaos, with men shouting and the staff
and residents of nearby homes clogging the streets, some in varying states of dress.

Men stripped to their shirtsleeves formed a line, passing buckets to one another or manning the fire engine, taking turns at the pump. The entire staff of Number 6 was outside on the street, some of them with only their coats over their nightclothes, because it was Mountjoy’s town house that was burning.

He turned to the two women, both of them white-faced with shock. “I’ll take you to Bouverie.”

Two days later. Bouverie.

I
T WAS PAST NINE IN THE EVENING BY THE TIME
E
UGENIA
came home—not home, for the town house was currently uninhabitable, but to Bouverie, where she and Hester were staying until repairs to the Spring Street town house were completed. She was exhausted, physically and mentally, having spent the day and a good portion of the evening going through the contents of the house with some of the staff to compile an inventory of what had been destroyed or damaged and to recover what necessary day-to-day items they could.

She’d been to Mountjoy’s banker and received funds sufficient to assist the staff in replacing lost possessions and to find lodgings for the staff that had nowhere to go until the house was repaired. She nodded to the Bouverie butler and headed upstairs. Her intent was to return to the room she’d been given, undress, and fall directly into bed. Her feet took her in a completely different direction.
Only a few steps more
, she thought when she reached the corridor that led to Fenris’s quarters. A few steps more, and she would see him. She didn’t know why that seemed imperative to her, but it
did. He would be true. Truthful with her. He would listen to her and not just
tut-tut, don’t worry your pretty head
the way Mountjoy’s banker had done, for example.

When she stood before his closed door, her hand poised to knock, the sheer lunacy of what she was doing washed through her. She froze. Her body felt as if it did not belong to her. She ought not be here.

And yet she knocked.

The door swung open in response, though there was no reply to her knock. There were lights inside. She whispered, “Hullo?” and told herself she’d escaped a situation she ought never to have considered getting into in the first place.

Then she heard distant voices and recognized the cadence of Fenris’s speech, the dark and honeyed timbre of his voice. He really could not help the way he sounded. She took a step inside, still with that sensation of her body not belonging to her. Some other woman was walking into a gentleman’s private apartments. Alone. Eugenia Hampton Bryant would never do such a thing.

She found herself in an anteroom, though not the one she’d been in before. That one she’d reached through the back stairs. Like everything in Bouverie, this room imposed. Here was wealth, it said. Position. Nobility.

Faint light shone from the bedchamber, and she, acting on instinct alone, on selfish desire, if she were to be truthful, followed that inviting glow. No one was in the bedchamber, though the fire was up and there was a glass of some liquor on the table. The door on the opposite side of the room was half open.