The Taming of the Rake (13 page)

With only the small light from the fire to break the darkness and Chelsea’s arms pulling him back to her each time he attempted to move away, undo his buttons, remove her night rail, he was becoming increasingly frustrated as he attempted to undo the tie at her waist.

He was bumbling like some raw youth. He might not lump himself in a class with the famous Casanova, but damn it all to hell, he was competent! He hadn’t bumbled in fifteen years.

Finally, as Chelsea nipped at his earlobe—where had she learned that!—Beau gave up, sat up and looked down at the last barrier to seeing this woman half-naked in the firelight.

“A
knot?
You tied this damnable thing in a
knot?
What
is
this?”

“A drapery cord,” she told him, running her fingertips down his bare chest, setting off small fireworks in his groin. “I borrowed one of your aunt’s night rails. It’s the only way to keep it up. Oh, for pity’s sake, Oliver, don’t look at me like that. Just untie it.”

He pushed determinedly away from her and sat up. Even using both hands, he couldn’t seem to get the braided silk cord undone. That might be because his hands were none too steady—he’d have to think about that at another time, as well. Because he damn well wasn’t going to tell Chelsea to stop running one curious finger along the inside of his waistband; he wasn’t that much of an idiot. Besides, he was having trouble
concentrating on the knot when the sight of the night rail ruched up and partially exposing Chelsea’s bare thighs was diverting his attention.

“Honestly, Oliver, you’d think it was the Gordian Knot,” she said as he continued to fumble. “Anyone would suppose that you were the virgin in the room.”

“Stay there,” he ordered, getting up from the bed.

“Where else would I go?” she asked as he stubbed his toe against the bootjack while searching his jacket for his knife. “Oh, for pity’s sake, Oliver. You’re not going to
cut
it off me, are you? What will I use to hold up the night rail?”

“Don’t worry about it, because you’re not going to be wearing nightclothes again in my lifetime,” he told her as he neatly sliced through the silken cord before tossing the knife onto the floor.

Chelsea laughed as he moved to cover her with his body, figuring he needed to build her passion once more after leaving her. He should have worried instead that he might not be able to keep up with her, for she was already wriggling free of the night rail as if she undressed in front of men every day.

“You…you are a virgin,” he half said, half questioned as he joined her again on the bed, unable to rip his gaze from the sight of her perfect breasts, her flat stomach, the seductive flare of her hips…and lower.

“And destined to remain one, I’m beginning to think,” she told him, tugging at the buttons on his buckskins. “What have I done or said in these last days that would lead you to think I am at all shy or missish?
Really, Oliver, if you are to be condemned as a seducer of innocents and I’m going to be ruined for all time, don’t you think we should at least enjoy it? I know my sister-in-law vows it is the most terrible of God’s inventions, but my maid told me that’s because Thomas probably doesn’t do it right, and she herself can’t think of anything she likes better, except perhaps marzipan.”

He gently slapped her hands away from his buttons. “You mean this, don’t you? You’ve cast aside shame, modesty, all of that—and you’re seducing me? You’re not frightened? Nervous? God, woman, at least a little apprehensive?”

“Oliver,” she said, speaking slowly, as if to a backward child. “I am a practical woman. Until a few short days ago I was going to spend my life with a mean-eyed bastard by nature, with a wet mouth, grabbing, pinching hands and a mind probably crawling with maggots. But I like you for some reason, and your mouth is rather wonderful, and you’re a bastard only by birth, having behaved as very nearly a knight in shining armor over these past days.

“Losing my virginity was a foregone conclusion. It has been waiting these past days, always wondering
when
it would happen that might make me, as you said, nervous, as I could tell whenever you looked at me you were wondering the same thing. And it needs to be done, Oliver, before Thomas catches up with us.”

This time when he took her hand, he kept it, settling in beside her, face-to-face on the thin pillow. “It needs to be done,” he repeated. “Don’t I think we should enjoy
it. Better than everything save marzipan, if done right. Oh, and
very nearly
heroic. Suddenly I’m feeling about as amorous as that tub over there.”

“Really?”

He smiled, moved her hand back down to his buttons. “No, not really. But I probably should be. Luckily for you, men aren’t made that way. We hardly ever ignore a beautiful woman lying naked in bed with us. So, if you’re quite sure you’re ready…?”

“Quite sure,” she said, her voice only trembling a little, at last showing her nerves. “I’ve thought about it and thought about it. Thomas, the run to the border, everything. It’s the only way, really.”

“We do this, and there’s no going back, Chelsea. Until now, even now, I could probably work something out with your brother, arrange to have you transferred into his custody somewhere. It isn’t as if anyone has been running through London handing out broadsides alerting everyone that we’ve run off to Gretna Green. You could go back to London with no one the wiser, and perhaps he’ll agree that you don’t have to marry this Flotley fellow. But we do this? We do this, Chelsea, and there’s no more going back.”

“One, Thomas won’t change his mind—he’s fairly dotty over Francis Flotley and is convinced my soul needs saving, which it may well do, but I’ll save it myself, thank you. Two, I would have put you in Thomas’s sights again and you wouldn’t have gotten your revenge out of the thing. And three, my hair is still rather damp and I’m starting to feel the chill. So if you’re going to
keep talking, and not
do
anything, then I think you should just tell me, rather than to try to wriggle your way out of…of
doing
this because I don’t really attract you.”

Beau put his hand on her stomach and began walking his fingers up to her breasts. “Where, in anything that I’ve said or done this evening, Chelsea, have I shown any indication that you don’t
attract
me?”

“Well…I don’t know. I suppose I was just saying that because I couldn’t think of a good number three. Oh…I really do like that,” she breathed as he lightly pinched her nipple between finger and thumb. “Should I really like that?” She swallowed visibly, her breath catching in her throat. “Yes, again. It makes me feel all…all I don’t know what. My sister-in-law was always a goose…”

Any worries Beau might have had that his manhood had turned in for the night fled his mind as Chelsea began moving against the lumpy mattress, her body seemingly unable to keep still as he maneuvered his own body lower so that he could take her other nipple in his mouth, where he teased it with the tip of his tongue.

The damn woman all but began to purr. He’d expected a reluctant virgin, not a virgin reluctant to remain one. If she’d been experienced, he’d know what to do next, how to proceed. But she wasn’t, and he didn’t; he’d never bedded a virgin.

But then she raised her hips again, nature taking the reins from both of them in that ancient invitation neither of them could ignore, and he slid his hand back down over her belly and insinuated it between her thighs.

And found his own small private heaven on earth.

She was just reluctant enough, just interested and aroused enough. She held her legs tight together long enough for him to feel a surge of protectiveness, and then let him in, let him touch her, and he knew he was now feeling some primeval glory at having roused her to the point where the unthinkable became not only logical but desired.

She was going to be his. She was his. His for the taking. He would teach her, show her, pleasure her, tear away the fragile veil of her girlhood and introduce her to the pleasures of a woman, the pleasures he would give her. Him, and him alone.

She was so tight, so amateurishly eager, moving against his rubbing, stroking fingers as her hips rose and fell, as her breathing became quicker, more shallow. Her eyelids were squeezed tightly closed as if she was concentrating, learning each new pleasure, feeling as much as she could feel. And wanting more. She drew up her legs and pressed her heels against the mattress, her thighs wide and open and yearning.

For him.

She was ready. She wouldn’t become more ready without toppling over the edge all alone. If she was going to fall, take that plunge, she wasn’t going to do it alone. She would know that they fell together.

He had to do it now. Her pleasure would be his pleasure, and much as he longed to linger, learn her, watch her as passion overtook her, something told him he had
to take her now, while the newness of what she was feeling overshadowed everything else.

Somehow, he managed to rid himself of his buckskins and levered himself up and onto her, hovering over her, suddenly unsure of himself yet again.

But he who hesitates is probably damned to fall back, regroup and start all over again…so he plunged into her, all at once, his breath catching as he met and conquered the resistance her body offered.

He didn’t apologize for the pain but caught her small cry with his mouth, sealing them together everywhere, his bent arms on either side of her, holding himself away from her even as she reached up and clawed at his sides in an attempt to pull him down to her.

He pushed himself deep, ground their bodies together so that he knew he was touching her everywhere, that the small, hard bud of her desire would feel his every stroke. And then he began to move. Deep, deep inside her. Slowly at first, still trying to keep most of his weight off her, the bastard taking her virginity trying to play at the gentleman…and losing badly.

The ancient ropes holding the spindly four-poster together creaked and strained as Beau drove into her, again and again and again. Faster. Harder. Deeper. Until he felt her body nearly melt beneath his, then turn taut, grow still, as if waiting on the precipice for something it knew was finally within its grasp.

And then it happened. Dear God, it happened. Chelsea cried out, in wonderment—he was certain it was wonderment—and her body began to buck against his,
clench around him, over and over and over, until his own release shattered any thought he’d ever had that he was master of his own body.

It was done. He had deflowered a virgin.

“I never want to do that again,” he said, mostly for his own benefit, as he lay on top of Chelsea, trying to recapture his breath and possibly his sanity.

She didn’t respond for a moment but finally asked quietly, “Excuse me?”

Beau immediately realized his mistake. “No, no,” he said quickly, carefully rolling off her and then pulling her close against his side. “That’s not what I meant. I meant, I never want to be anyone else’s first—that is, I don’t want to be the one to take anyone else’s—oh, God. I remember a time when I thought myself at least halfway intelligent, and at times even passably articulate. Did I hurt you? That’s what I meant, what I was trying to say.”

She put her palm against his chest, her fingers splayed as she moved them through the mat of hair she’d commented on earlier. “Well, yes, I think you did. Hurt me, I mean. But not very much. I really don’t remember. You have to marry me now, Oliver. I’ve well and truly seduced you.”

He looked down at the top of her head, the mass of loose ringlets that bound him to her tighter than any stout rope. Was she about to cry? Such a thing wouldn’t be unexpected, not in the circumstances. She’d been all bravado, even eager, just a few minutes ago. They’d both been.

But, now that it was over, now that they’d done what both of them knew needed to be done, he was caught between pleasure and his conscience, and she was—well, he didn’t know what she was thinking. Probably that she wished he’d simply go away for a while and give her time to figure it out. After all, that had been a very large step she’d just taken. She couldn’t go back, but that might only beg the question of where she would now be going.

Beau tried to recapture some of the way they’d been before this new intimacy, which might have, in reality, broadened any distance between them.

“Yes, you did, didn’t you? It will be something to tell our grandchildren. I’ll tell them all about their sweet gray-haired old grandmother sitting over there, her feet up on a stool, squinting over her knitting, and how she was once a wanton woman who chased me about until she caught me, dragged me into her bed and had her wicked way with me. Ouch!” he ended as she managed to take hold of a few short hairs on his chest and give them a sharp tug.

“We do get along well, don’t we?” She sounded nervous. Why, after all of this, was she nervous? “My parents rather detested each other, which is completely expected in arranged marriages. But we shouldn’t be too much trouble to each other.”

“Says the woman who has me on the run to Gretna Green with her brother in hot pursuit, plotting my demise. Not that I mind,” he added quickly, also quickly removing her hand from his chest. “Now come on, let’s
get you settled and sleeping, while I prepare for the rest of the night.”

Seeming to have suffered a moment’s modesty, belated as it was, Chelsea sat up, dragging the threadbare sheet over her body. “What are you going to be doing the rest of the night?”

“Why, that should be obvious. I’m going to stand guard over my lady while we must remain in this thieves’ den, as would any knight in armor. Or, in my case, damp shirt. I want to leave here in a few hours, so it would hardly be worth my while to sleep. Do you…blast, how do I say this? Do you want to wash again?”

She nodded, avoiding his eyes. “Would you mind not watching?”

“No,” he said quietly, wondering if she still hurt, if she’d bled at all. She probably had. She was probably also sore, now that she had time to notice. “No, I don’t mind at all.”

He busied himself dressing, pulling on his boots, and when he finally turned around again Chelsea was tucked into the bed, even the coverlet replaced. She was lying on her right side, with her back to him.