Wicked Becomes You (29 page)

He slid his hand up her arm, and her startled attention flew to him. “Gwen,” he said softly, and ran a rough thumb over her mouth, pushing inside. She sucked it obediently, and then watched, wide-eyed, when he put it down between them. When he touched the space where they joined, she gasped and felt herself contract.

Inside her, he pulsed.

Her mouth went dry. She swallowed with an effort and tightened her legs around his hips. She wanted to lick him, devour him, wrap herself so closely around him that no inch of his skin was spared. But she had no idea of how to do it. “I don’t . . . what should I do?”

His finger probed gently, stroking, causing her to gasp again. “There is no way to do this wrong,” he murmured, his voice like banked coals, dark and hot. “Everything about you is right.”

The words struck her dumb. So simple, they were. But such a statement . . .

She seized his hair and pulled his mouth down to hers, and he began to move again. This time, it was different. This time, she tried not to hear her doubts, and his mouth and his hands did not permit her to dwell on them. His palm at the small of her back guided her so she was moving with him, and she found a way to rub against him that stroked the pleasure higher, so suddenly they were both moaning as they moved, together, as if they were in one skin, the sweat between them no barrier; she licked a bead off his chin and he sucked her earlobe as his thrusts quickened.

The final pleasure took her gradually this time, stealing up in bits and pieces; she imagined herself as a well, being filled to the brim—a drop here, a bucketful there, slowly, pleasure mounting so slowly—and then, all at once,
too much
, overflowing, pure bliss. She clung to him as she trembled, then felt him move hard into her, again and again, until his own climax took him with a groan.

He pulled her on top of him as he rolled to his back, keeping her joined to him, as close as their skins would allow.

She lay listening to the diminishment of their breathing, as beneath her cheek, his heartbeat began to slow.

Gradually the silence began to assume overtones. Someone needed to say something. The thought made her tense. She could think of nothing to say.
Love me, Alex, and I will never cling too tightly to you
:
it was the only thing she might say that was remotely close to honest. But it was still a lie.

In the end, it was he who filled the silence. He smoothed the hair away from her eyes, and then combed his fingers through her hair, an idle, contemplative gesture. “The Christmas you were eighteen,” he said. “Just before your debut. You and Richard spent the holidays at Caroline’s. I was about to make my first trip to Argentina. Richard spilled my plan to do that trek through the Andes. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she said absently. His eyelashes distracted her. They were long enough to grace a woman’s face. His eyes were purely beautiful. “The twins were furious.”

“Mm. They asked if you had any advice for their mad, suicidal brother. Do you recall what you said?”

She reached out, very tentatively, to touch his lashes. He did not flinch. He watched her, unblinking, as she ran the lightest finger across them.
This is trust
, she thought. “I said that I could have no opinion on such matters, as I was afraid of heights and knew nothing of mountains. And you made some irritating reply, of course—
That is why ladies don’t climb mountains
, or some such masculine nonsense.”

The lines bracketing his mouth creased in a smile. “Actually, your answer was slightly different. You never said you feared heights. You said, ‘I would be afraid to take some misstep and fall off.’”

“Oh.” She put her thumb to his brow now, tracing the rough arch, simply for the sheer pleasure of witnessing her entitlement. She could touch him as she liked.

His voice lowered. “And I said, ‘That is why
you
don’t climb mountains, Gwen.’ But now I wonder. You aren’t afraid of heights.”

“No,” she said. “Not particularly.”

“Only missteps.”

She paused midstroke. Did he mean to imply this had been a misstep? “I
was
afraid,” she said carefully. “For a very long time. But no longer.”

“So was I,” he said, and lifted her chin and kissed her.

The next morning, she woke twined around him, her face tucked into his shoulder, her leg between his, her arms wrapped around his torso. The hour was early; the ghostly glow of dawn barely lit the room. Alex was sleeping soundlessly, one arm thrown over his head, the other wrapped around her waist.

Disbelief moved through her, sweet as a strain of music. Her eyes fluttered shut, and she fell back asleep wondering how much she dared to dream.

When her eyes opened again, she found him sitting cross-legged beside her, fully dressed, his head bent over the maps she’d purloined from Barrington’s desk. His expression looked dark in thought.

Trepidation roused her to full alertness. “Alex,” she whispered, and he lifted his chin to meet her eyes, and smiled.

That smile was like the sunrise for her. She smiled back at him. Stubble darkened his angular jaw, and his brown hair was rumpled. She tentatively reached up to brush a stray lock from his forehead. Fully a wicked woman now, with license to do such shocking and unspeakable things as to lie around with a man not one’s husband, and handle his overlong hair with a tenderness too spiced by desire to be anything bordering on virtue.

“Good morning,” he said. He leaned forward to kiss her ear. His tongue curled around her lobe as he withdrew, sending a shiver through her. “Coffee?” he asked, and waved toward a small clay pot on the nearby table. “Madame Gauthier just delivered it.”

“No,” she said, and pushed herself up into a sitting position. The maps niggled at her.

He followed her look. “These seemed to alarm you last night. I can’t make heads or tails of them.”

“Oh?” She picked them up. She had not given them a long look the night before, but as she flipped through them now, her suspicions clarified. “They’re survey maps.”

“Yes,” he said. “I gathered that much. But why did you find them significant?”

She cleared her throat and selected two particular sheets. “This,” she said, lying the sheets out side by side.

He moved closer, his shoulder brushing hers. “Explain to me what I’m looking at. A map of some kind. Topographical?”

The proximity, the casual way he reached out to stroke the back of her neck, made her dizzy. She willed herself to focus. The map consisted of shaded lines and polymorphous shapes, colored variously to signify different qualities of land. “Yes,” she said, “it’s the typical surveyor’s map, the sort drawn up when assessing the value of a property, or proposing to alter it. They come in very useful when designing a parkland. You’ve got various pieces of information here: elevation, soil composition, water tables . . .” She pulled a desperate face. “
Drainage
and so on. Above all, drainage! After the first redesign of the gardens at Heaton Dale, the pond started draining into the Grecian folly. Put quite a damper on the classical feel. Athens as swampland.”

He laughed. “But there’s something amiss with these maps?”

“Not with the maps per se,” she said. “Only . . .” She spread out the maps in pairs, keeping aside the widowed seventh. “Do you see?”

He considered them row by row. “Only three properties here, with copies of each.”

“Yes. The same topography,” she said. “The same surveyor, as well—you see the name at the bottom, one Mr. Hopkins. But you see how certain of the shadings are different?”

His eyes narrowed. “Very good catch,” he said softly.

She smiled. “The swampland gave me a powerful motive to learn to read these things. Certainly I no longer trusted the contractors so blindly! At any rate, one of these is false. Only I don’t know the key for the shadings, so I can’t guess which element has been falsified.”

An unpleasant smile twisted his lips. “I can,” he said. “Soil composition, you say? Would that comprise information on mineral deposits?”

“Of course,” she said. “Oh. You think—”

“I think land without significant mineral assets would sell more cheaply.” He paused. “Heverley End, for instance, sits on some very rich copper and tin deposits. One would think that Gerry would know that, but then, perhaps that’s why he’s so damned stubborn in his refusal to discuss the sale. If he were given altered survey data that obscured the mineral wealth . . . and he
believed
it . . . then the price of the estate would drop significantly.” His smile faded. “Still doesn’t explain why he sold it in the first place, of course.”

“Well.” She hesitated. “Heaven knows men do strange things. None of us are perfect.”

“Oh, Gerry offers ample evidence of imperfection. But not in matters like this.” He lifted her hair away from her neck, idly toying with a strand as he gazed past her toward some invisible thought. “Death before dishonorable profit,” he said lightly.

There was some curious emphasis in his tone, which all at once she divined.
Gerry
would not stoop to profit. That was
Alex’s
role.

“Oh, dear,” she said sardonically. “However will you play the black sheep now that Lord Weston is in on the game?”

He flashed her an impish grin and rose off the bed. “My point exactly. But let’s put aside such philosophical debates until we’re safely out of Nice. Barrington will be expecting us to head east for Marseilles, so I propose we go instead to Lake Como.”

“Oh! Elma, of course.” She was on her feet the next second. Twinges registered in various delicious and very useful spots throughout her body, bringing a blush to her face. “Only give me ten minutes,” she said, “and I’ll be ready to leave.”

It was her fault, of course, that forty-five minutes later, as they lingered at the edge of the train station in wait for the southbound train, she stood wound around Alex like a vine. He had only offered his elbow; it was she who had threaded both her arms around it and hugged it to her like a rare treasure.

And this was the pose in which she was discovered.

“Why—Miss Maudlsey! Is that you?”

The greeting fell over Gwen like the shadow of an axe. She looked down the platform into the rapidly fading smile of Lady Milton. Her sister, Lady Fanshawe, was looking between Gwen and Alex. As recognition set in, she darted a quick, shocked glance to her sister, whose jaw dropped.

“Hello there,” Alex said pleasantly. “How’s Reginald?”

Lady Milton made a strangled noise and drew herself perfectly straight. She was a painfully thin woman, and she was wearing a triangular, flat-topped hat; as she turned on Gwen, she gave the impression of a quivering exclamation point. “Miss
Maudsley
,” she hissed. “
Where
is the rest of your company?
Where
is Mrs. Beecham?”

So, Gwen thought. Here it was: total and utter ruin.

Her spirits remained strangely buoyant. She looked the woman squarely in the eye. “I cannot say where she is, for I no longer travel with an escort.”

“And why should she?” Alex added smoothly. His hand covered Gwen’s and closed, lifting her fingers to her lips as he stared down the ladies’ glowers. “Mrs. Ramsey hardly needs an escort,” he said into her fingers, “when traveling with her husband.”

As a child, Alex had learned all the usual fairy tales about evil witches and beautiful princesses lost and trapped and cast a-slumber. Princesses pricked by maleficent needles; princesses stranded behind hedges of thorns; princesses poisoned on sweet apple slices. It had never occurred to him until this morning that so many of these princesses were notable chiefly for the way in which they passed out, and woke up. Had this pattern been pointed out to him, no doubt he would have noted that these women were invariably awakened by the hands or lips of some sickeningly humble but aggressively competent prince—and that the awakening itself was a sanitized metaphor for the good rogering the prince had probably delivered. Indeed, which he
did
deliver, in the less treacly versions that circulated in old French manuscripts.

But after this morning, Alex would never be able to view such tales so cynically. This morning, he had watched Gwen Maudsley wake from sleep, and there had, indeed, been something magical about it. He’d sat beside her, his thoughts strangely quiescent, and watched consciousness steal over her, spreading first as a faint blush across her pale cheeks, and then in the twitch of her lashes, and the soft sigh that stirred her dark red hair. She came to life like a character from a place far sweeter and less cruel than anywhere he’d ever traveled. The half-conscious brush of her knuckles over her mouth had reddened her lips. When she’d shifted, the scent of her had perfumed the air around him.

He might have mocked himself if he hadn’t been tired of always mocking at what others took seriously. It was easier to mock, of course, but other people refrained, and not always because they lacked the imagination or sense of humor required to mock. Sometimes they refrained because they dared to long for something that was not easily grasped, something that might slip away if one did not pay it the proper respect—prayerful respect, the sort that moved one to remove one’s hat by the side of a grave, or to bow one’s head to soldiers marching off to war, even while damning the fat MPs that sent them to die. Life was not all for mockery. Nor was laughter. But it was harder to spot the prayerful moments when they called for laughter instead of tears. Tears spelled an end.