To Seduce an Angel (26 page)

She would torture him back if she knew how, but she only knew she wanted to love him. That was a true thing.

“I want to love you.”

He swore. His breath was ragged and his lids heavy over the gray gleam of his gaze. He pulled her closer and draped her arms around his neck and dipped his head to take her breast in his mouth and tease and taste. Emma held on to his shoulders, her face pressed to his soft hair, while the pull of his mouth went deep and made her body contract in aching spasms of need.

He lifted his head and nuzzled her breasts, and his hand reached between them, cupping her and touching lightly until she pressed into his touch, and he drew his fingers softly over her flesh while she arched and spread and pressed. And then he parted her and began to stroke the slick sides of her folds. His fingers lifted a little fold of flesh and found a tiny part of her that he was teaching her to know, a bud, a pea nestled in a slick silken pod. He touched the tiny place and her awareness contracted to just that spot.

With a desperate effort not to yield to her release, she reached to pay him back, taking him hot and smooth and pulsing in her hand.

She bent down to press her forehead against his shoulder and nodded, and he shifted so that his male part met her place. Where his fingers had been, she now felt the smooth round head of his shaft, a different sensation. Her body opened to take him in, and he pushed up inside her with a strong thrust. She felt her barrier give, a brief twinge, and then he filled her. She felt him go still with it, felt them joined, a perfect fit, the yawning emptiness filled, her body gloving his.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked.

She shook her head against his shoulder. He hadn't hurt her, but she wasn't ready for his loving to end. Her body felt expectant, on edge, full of longing. Swollen as a mushroom in rain.

He began to slip out of her, and she tensed.

“Move with me, Emma.” He spoke through gritted teeth.

She lifted her head and looked at him, brushing his hair away from his brow. His body wore a light sheen of moisture. His face had a drawn, anguished look so that she feared for his arm. But he grinned at her.

“Ready? We move together.” He rocked his hips down and up, showing her. She drew a swift hiss of breath at the exquisite pleasure of it. He tilted his head back to look at her, one brow cocked. She caught his meaning. Cautiously, she began to move, flexing her thighs to get a lift and relaxing them to press him deeper inside her.

Together they found an angle and rhythm that wrung little sounds from her wounded throat and set her free and soaring as if she had sprouted wings to catch the air and rise on its currents. He dared her to reach for more, and she pushed for it and it eluded her, tantalizingly within reach, one more slide, one more stroke, she didn't want it to end, but she needed to reach the elusive sensation that hovered, until she succumbed to bright shudders of ecstasy and he followed her.

She closed her eyes and collapsed against him, her body warm and limp and boneless as oil. Thought came back as her body cooled and a shiver passed through her and sharp awareness of her body stretched awkwardly over the chair. She would leave soon. She lifted her head and saw real pain in his face.

“Your arm—”

“Is on fire,” he admitted.

Emma lifted her right leg and swung off his knees. She tugged at his good hand to pull him up out of the chair, but he resisted, looking up at her.

“I still haven't seen you naked.”

She looked down at herself, surprised. There was a smear of blood above one blue garter. Underneath her shift she could feel the sticky moisture of their joining.

He came to his feet. “Come on.

He stripped off the silk dressing gown, and naked, he pulled her to his dressing room. Even one-handed he was efficient with towels and water, until they were both clean. He tossed her bloodied towel in the heap with the towels that had treated his wound, her blood mingling with his.

It was her turn to coax him into the bed.

Dav let her prop his injured arm on a pair of pillows and lay back with a sigh. She sat beside him, cross-legged, facing him, the covers about her waist. Her hands explored his chest and ribs and belly.

“Are you counting again?”

“Yes.”

He pulled a curling golden strand at the side of her face, stretched it long, and let it spring back. “I have wanted to do that for some time.”

She caught his hand and lifted it and kissed the puckered scar. “Tell me the story of the scar,” she said.

He was silent so long that Emma feared he could not tell it.

“A man took me one night. Xan and I were walking to dinner from a prizefight. Bound and gagged, I overheard another man telling the first to make me disappear. I thought he would kill me, but he moved me from room to room in London. Always my hands and feet were chained. I could not understand why my family didn't come for me. In time I learned to do what it took to stay alive.

“After my abductor died, I discovered that my family still looked for me, but it was too late. I was not the boy they were looking for. I had become someone else. If I doubted, I could look at my wrists. It made me feel too far from them to ever return.”

Emma pressed a kiss to his jaw, and he began again.

“But Xan never stopped looking, and when he met Cleo, they found me. I had the boys, and I knew someone still wanted me dead and would kill anyone close to me. Will and Helen discovered that my grandfather was behind my abduction through a man named Archibald March.

“When I met March, he was holding a gun to Helen's head. When I heard him speak, I knew he was the man who had wanted me to disappear. I killed him.”

Dav felt oddly light to have told her the story. She seemed to take it in to herself and consume its brutal, ugly details. Yet, she had such stories to tell, herself he knew, the stuff of her nightmares.

“Tell me about your brother.”

It was her turn to pause. “He was wild, like my cousin, and fearless and funny and fine in his uniform. He loved her from the time they were eleven.”

“And you?”

She shrugged. “As long as we had ponies, I could keep up with them. The grown-ups thought I made a good chaperone.”

“Did you?”

“Not at all.” She actually grinned at him, but there was a hint of darkness in the blue of her eyes. “I helped them to elope.”

“He died then?”

“Shortly after.” It dimmed the blue of those eyes for her to speak it.

He knew better than to ask in which uniform for which army in which battle her brother had died. He felt his eyelids droop, but he could sleep this night. He had her by his side, and guards stood on duty outside his room and house. An intruder could hardly get past Adam or the well-trained footmen around the house.

“You finished the boys' story without me.” He ought to be troubled by the tidiness of that detail, but his mind hovered between the lazy drift of her fingers over his chest and belly and the pain of his arm.

She smiled a little half smile at the new topic. “Well, you know the woodcutter's sons defeat the ogre.”

“But it's how they do it that matters.”

“With the birds' help, of course.”

“Tell me. I'm not going anywhere tonight.”

She slid down to lie on her side next to him, her chin tucked in the gap above his shoulder. “Do you remember that the woodcutter's sons left their mother's dishrags behind?”

 

 

EMMA woke in darkness. Daventry lay beside her, restless in his sleep, making the noises of a dreamer. She imagined the pain in his arm and the dreams of knives and attackers that must be his. She dared not touch him.

She let her eyes grow accustomed until she could see in the light of the setting moon the outlines of his room. She slipped from the far side of the bed, her flesh instantly cooled and roughened from the cold. Clamping her teeth closed, she pulled her discarded chemise over her head. It was time to put her plan into action.

Only, she did not want to leave Daventry with nothing.

If she had Leo's pin, she could leave that, but she didn't. She had nothing to leave him, except her love. She had given that. He must know. He must have sensed what she gave him. He didn't speak it, but he saw and heard so much that others missed. He would know.

She judged her path to his door, estimating the steps, thinking about how to turn the knob soundlessly, a thing she had practiced on her own door. The moonlight fell across his desk and caught a paper lying there as if he had intended to write a letter. Emma stopped. The temptation was too great.

She sat and took up his pen and lifted the stopper from the ink bottle. Dipping the pen in ink, she wrote:
I love you.

In the moonlight the letters lay like the shadows of bare twigs on frosty ground. A sudden thought bothered her. Only Daventry must find her message, not Mr. Creevey, not the doctor. Behind her Daventry stirred again, and fearing he would wake, she passed silently into his dressing room. A narrow shaft of moonlight illuminated the smaller room in which the bathtub hovered ghostly white, and the wardrobe yawned like black cave. But she needed no light to find his worn velvet coat that smelled of ash and stone and felt as soft and silken as skin.

She thrust her note into the right pocket. When he felt most betrayed, he would wear the coat and find her message and know its truth. She turned the doorknob with practiced stealth and slipped from the dressing room into the corridor. Adam for all his vigilance lay snoring, his legs sprawled across the carpet, his head against the wall. In her own dressing room she donned the layers of clothes she would wear and took the lightest of her bags.

DAV knew Emma was gone even before he opened his eyes. He felt her absence, not only in the bed beside him, but in his house.

He threw off his covers, his injured arm in instant protest, and stalked across the room. Sharp morning light fell into the room. He found no sign of her in that harsh light, as if she'd never inhabited his house, and he'd dreamed her only. Her feet left no prints on the rich gold carpet. Her side of the bed lay smooth and still as a field of snow. His gaze took in the floor where their clothes had fallen. For a moment he dared to hope that she'd merely retired through the open door to his dressing room.

It looked as it had the night before, the furniture arranged for Ned's impromptu surgery. His wardrobe stood open, which seemed odd, but probably Creevey had left it open when Dav ordered everyone out. The careless moment when he'd tossed the evidence of her lost virginity on the pile of bloodied towels in the bath came back to him as a moment when he thought he'd claimed her for his own. How easily undone his conquest. He felt his nakedness then, his burning arm.

But the fire in his arm was nothing to the ache in his chest. He could, with an act of his mind, separate the pain in his arm from the rest of his body. But if he so much as breathed, the other pain claimed him.

He summoned detachment. He knew how to shut down pain and cold and hunger, whatever made one weak and unable to act. Emma Portland's betrayal was just another discomfort he could endure. He pulled a pair of trousers from his wardrobe. His old coat hung there, and for a moment he considered putting it on, but he remembered holding her in its folds on the roof.

He turned back to his own room. A pen lay across his desk. He touched the nib, which left a black dot on his finger. She had written him a message. Instantly his heart leapt at what it might mean. He glanced around for the note on the desk or the floor. He crossed to the bedside table and found nothing. His mind narrowed to her sitting at his desk writing something while he slept while she planned to leave him. He should not have believed that message was for him.

In the hall Adam was awake and obviously unaware of Emma's leaving.

Her room gave nothing away—not the table with its porcelain pots and dainty papers, nor the untouched bed. The blue walls, an echo of her gaze, pained him.

In her dressing room she seemed to have left behind everything she'd come with. The trunk, the silk dresses, slippers, ribbons, shawls. He realized what he should have known all along that nothing she'd left behind had any connection with her true self, the self he had known naked in bed in the act of confessing to one another. He'd not lost her to another man but to the nightmares of her past from which she still ran.

 

 

A SEARCH of the woods turned up Ned Begley's dog, Hector, with its throat cut. After the burial Dav encouraged the boys to spar in the hall to lift their spirits.