Someone Irresistible (30 page)

Nathan wanted to tell her to hurry it up and get to the point. He’d grown tired of such an abstract disclosure of past events in which he felt thoroughly uninvolved. He didn’t want to care. But something held him back, held his tongue from offering a terse retort. Something in her distant voice, her posture, her hidden strength that he’d always admired and felt even now, kept him centered on the conversation to learn the meaning behind it.

“Do you know what happened to turn my life around, Nathan?” she continued warily. “To make me realize what I wanted from my work? To make me continue where others said I shouldn’t?”

Suddenly discomfited, he shifted from one foot to the other, still leaning on the table but feeling the hardness of it cutting into his thighs.

“No,” he replied shortly.

She shook her head, her face tilted upward, her eyes still closed.

“I met you.”

He knew she would say that, and his initial reaction was to tell her to go to hell, that her girlish dreams and fantasies were not a matter of importance, especially to him. Her words left him agitated again, a part of his brain signaling a deeper warning, and acknowledgment escaped him. To be on the careful side, he said nothing, and she didn’t appear to expect him to answer, or join in the discussion. She instead carried on as if he wasn’t even in the room.

“I remember it rained that day, very heavily, and the streets were sloppy and muddy. My sister and mother had left to make a round of social calls, as they were supposed to do even on ugly days like that one.

I’d decided to hide myself away in the morning room, sitting by the grate and the warmth of the fire to sketch a Stegosaurus that my father had been hired to sculpt from the leg bone, partial jaw, and snout that sat in his workshop at that very moment. I couldn’t believe its sheer size and what it must have been like for the beasts at the time of their existence, and I remember wondering if the Bible was correct about the beginning of creation, or my father, who’d told me the dinosaurs walked the earth millions of years ago.” She smiled and opened her eyes again.

“Such heady thoughts for a thirteen-year-old girl.”

What is your point
? he wanted to shout in frustration, in anger and tightly winding impatience. And yet he didn’t. He simply stood there, in the chilly studio, staring at the lovely image of Mimi lost in memories of another time. Captivated, though wishing desperately he weren’t.

Finally she turned and faced him, rubbing her palms along her upper sleeves to ward off the chill, gazing into his eyes from across the studio.

His demeanor never wavered, but he felt a tenseness that had not been there between them before.

“That’s when you walked into the morning room, Nathan,” she maintained almost in a whisper. “Right in the middle of those thoughts.

You wore a dark blue suit and had perfectly cut hair. I thought you looked so handsome as a man of twenty, and I’m certain I gaped at you.

But you just smiled as you walked toward me and introduced yourself as a student of Professor Owen’s—”

“I remember this, Mimi,” he interjected flatly, though unwilling to add more. He didn’t want to discuss that he remembered her, too, and that she wore… yellow, he thought. And that her eyes—so beautiful and sharply intelligent for a girl, he remembered thinking—had jolted him.

He’d never taken note of their color until the night of the Crystal Palace opening, when she appeared before him as a fully developed woman, but he remembered vividly their brilliance in the child.

She began to stroll toward him, which in turn caused his nerves to jump in acute awareness. He didn’t want her close to him, didn’t want to detect her spicy scent, feel her warmth. It would be too much. But the arrogance in him kept him from retreating and he gripped the tabletop even harder, the cold wood slicing into his palms.

“Do you remember what happened next, Nathan?” she asked, her head slanted to one side as she watched him.

He straightened a little. “No, not precisely, but it certainly couldn’t be relevant to this conversation—”

“Oh, it’s quite relevant, I assure you,” she broke in, eyes focused on his as if searching for memories. “You sat beside me on the sofa for a few minutes, very properly, of course, and studied my artistic endeavor of the Stegosaurus, commenting here and there about my proportions, my attention to detail. I thought you were so knowledgeable and so attractive, smelled so heavenly—”

“Mimi—”

“And not once did you say anything to suggest I shouldn’t be sketching something for a man’s mind and knowledge. I’d found that so… odd, actually, and marvelous at the same time.”

She finally reached him as he now stood beside the table, legs spread wide, hands folded over his chest to keep her at a distance, to keep himself from reaching for her, refusing to back away, lest she think him a coward for running. But he could detect her scent, feel her warmth as he’d feared he would, and he fought the raging battle within that urged him to take her in his arms, steal the comfort, and forget the past.

“Why are you telling me this, Mimi?” he asked in a rough voice of caution, eyes narrowed as they remained locked with hers.

She didn’t move. “The most remarkable thing happened when you sat beside me on that sofa ten years ago, Nathan. I asked you, with a casual air, of your opinions of the dinosaurs and their existence in this world, if God created them to tempt us into straying from his written word, or if the earth is indeed perhaps millions of years old.” She dropped her tone to a mere whisper. “You said to me, ‘Miss Marsh, you have asked an ageless question. I don’t know.’ ”

Nathan tried to recall the incident to no avail. In reality, his response was likely an answer said to brush off serious discussion with an adolescent girl. And yet he’d never been one to make light of scientific theory, regardless of who posed the question.

“What is your point?” he pressed, gazing into her dark eyes, noting the seriousness to grace her fine-boned features. Her nearness in such total concentration put him at the verge of taking his leave for a final time, and to hell with his priceless stolen fossil, wherever it might be. To hell with all of it.

Before he could stop her, she reached out and skimmed her fingertips along his cheek. He jerked back in surprise, but it didn’t sway her.

Smiling softly, she admitted, “Your answer that day was a turning point for me, Nathan. For the first time, I felt true and complete admiration for a man, and it wasn’t for my father, even though I’ve always loved him dearly. I felt it for you.”

Nathan, considerably baffled now, reached up to grab her wrist briskly, pulling her hand away from him, though he held to it firmly, if for no other reason than to keep her at a distance. She didn’t even appear to notice.

“Just then my father entered the morning room,” she continued, stepping closer so that her black gown wrapped around his shoes and shins. “I sat there staring at you and thinking how handsome and smart and different you were, and you turned to my father and said, ‘Well, Sir Harold, your lovely daughter asks questions as thought-provoking as Professor Owen’s students. And she’s so artistically gifted I’m surprised you haven’t let her work with you.’ ”

She swallowed, and he watched the movement at her tapered throat, watched her visibly gain strength as she revealed what he could never guess.

“Don’t you understand, Nathan?” she asked in a fervent whisper, leaning forward so that her hot breath brushed his cheeks. “In less than ten minutes of time, you had done three things that were so astonishing to me they changed my life. You had first admitted that a philosophical conjecture perplexed you and you didn’t know the answer. I’d never been told that by a man before. Men in my experience knew everything or changed the topic. But instead of waving it off and discussing the weather or my health or society, or some such nonsense, you simply answered me up front and honestly.

“Then my father steps in the room and you tell him, to his face, that you considered me as intelligent as a man who studies paleontology

with one of the most forward thinkers in the world. Regardless of whether such a statement was true, which I’m sure it wasn’t, you said this to my
father
. Finally, when you have me completely spellbound, you tell him I have a great talent and should be doing what he does! Can you stop for a moment and imagine what these three things could mean to a thirteen-year-old girl who’d been told all her life that she would never be as smart as a man, that she would never be taken seriously as a dinosaur sculptor like her brilliant father, and that men had all the answers and to leave it at that without questioning them?”

She focused intently on him, slowly shaking her head. “You, Nathan, admitted all of these things that I knew were true, and you did it in front of me
and
my father, sincerely and without hesitation. I couldn’t believe it, and long after you’d left that day, I thought of you, wanted to see you again, to learn more about you. I thoroughly enjoyed your company each time you came to my home to see my father for professional reasons. You engaged me with your clever wit and candid charm, and over the years I began to ache for a time when I could know you as a woman.”

Nathan could feel his heart start to pound hard against the walls of his chest, could feel her speeding pulse beneath his fingertips as he clung to her warm wrist.

“I can’t say I was in love with you, Nathan, because I was so young and saw you infrequently. But I will say you mesmerized me, and I’d never admired a person so much.”

She took his hand with her free one, closing her delicate palm over his knuckles. He tried once to pull away but she held tightly to him.

“But the night I saw you again at the Crystal Palace opening, I knew your past didn’t matter,” she revealed in a passionate breath. “I knew your upbringing had made you the man you were, that your class had sculpted you into an intelligent, intense, driven person that I wanted as a woman wants a man. That’s why I came to talk to you while you stood alone by your display. That’s why I pretended to be hot so you’d suggest a walk in the outdoors—and if you hadn’t, I would have. That’s why I told you Carter had asked for my hand. And
that’s
why I wanted you to kiss me—to see if you held the same interest in me that I did you. And you
did
, Nathan. You
did
, and I
wanted
you.”

He couldn’t deny that it had happened like that. He’d felt it at the time, her interest, her persistence, the hoping within him that she’d desire him as a red-blooded man. And then, not an hour later, came the awful moment of his ruin, when he couldn’t look at her because he feared he’d witness her pity. But he’d felt her gaze on him that evening, as eager and wonderful as he’d felt when her lips scorched his with a

most marvelous kiss. It also explained something else, something that had troubled him from the day he’d come back into her life. If she told him the truth now, and he believed at gut level she did, she would not have been the one to initiate his professional disgrace. She’d wanted him, not Carter, and his ruin was Carter’s gain—in every way, including having Mimi for the first time, which suddenly enraged him as nothing ever had before. He should have been her first lover, and that precious part of her she could give to only one man had been stolen from him as well. He knew they’d shared something strong beneath the moonlit sky that night in Hyde Park, something different and life changing and wonderful. If only it hadn’t been for the person who had taken everything that mattered.

Rain pelted the glass in waves now as the storm outside grew violent.

As savage as the one inside of him. He gazed into her eyes, swimming with uncertainty, with desolation and sadness in light of his reaction to her confession. And in that brief half of a second, his wounded heart betrayed him.

He jerked her against him, releasing her wrist as his arm came around her waist, her breasts flattening against his shirtfront. She gasped in shock at his boldness, but she didn’t fight him. She breathed heavily, quickly, staring up to his hardened face, her gaze determined and begging with a hope that tore at him inside.

But instantaneously, and without warning, his desire for her ignited—stronger than his desire to push her away in defense of his fury. He felt the heat of her searing him, inside and out, her breath coming fast, her heart pounding against his chest, in tune to the desperate thudding of his own. The moment between them now enclosed them from the outside world, enraptured him, seized him, enraged him that he couldn’t get inside of her deep enough to make her understand, to make her trust. In a blur of frustration and anger, coupled with an ache so suddenly intense, Nathan groaned and covered her mouth with his own—a hard, frenzied kiss of lust, and longing for everything, and despair, above all else.

She responded immediately, as if expecting this reaction from him, with one little whimper, then gasping, clinging, as she frantically teased his lips and tongue. In a fierce drive of passion, Nathan grabbed her bottom covered with thick skirts, and pulled her harshly to him, leaning back against the table at his thighs, the softness of her in sharp contrast to the wood that cut as deeply as her secrets.

The heat grew intense, blurring the details, the thoughts and all too recent memories that warned him against his carnal intentions. He molded himself as tightly as he could to her clothed body, inhaled the

unique scent of femininity coupled with the smell of rain and hardwood, clay and cement dust, and the contrast inflamed him. He wanted her now, in the hard, cold studio, amid the bones and skeletons of an ancient past. And she knew it.

Quickly, holding her securely, he turned them both completely around so that her legs backed up against the table, then lifted her to sit upon it.

Their kiss grew fast and furious, swelling to a fervor of erotic taste and scents, of blended moaning and mingled breaths. Nathan caressed her breasts over her gown as she hurriedly reached for the buttons on his pants.

Hard and brimming with need, he felt her fingers on him, and he groaned, pulled back, gazed into her hot, burning eyes.