That Scandalous Evening Read online

She started, and the tendons on the back of his hand bulged as his fingers tightened over hers to hold her still. “Blood siblings,” she said, trying to lessen the meaning of his action.

  “No, darling. I have a sister, and I promise you, whatever I feel for you, Jane, is not brotherly. In fact”—with his other hand, he lifted her chin and smiled into her face—“what I feel for you is quite carnal. I will show you now.”

  Chapter 18

  “What do you want?” Jane whispered, paralyzed with fear and desire.

  “You. You and clear vision and an end to Napoleon and safe streets and…you. If I can have you, that’ll be enough for the moment.” Blackburn kept their bloody palms together, and with the other hand cupped the back of her neck and dragged her face to his.

  His kiss. The same lips, the same tongue, the same touch as eleven years ago, yet it was different. Events had come between them, shaped them separately, and now circumstances and his determination had brought them together.

  His kiss. No longer greedy. Hungry, instead, with an edgy anger he could not have displayed eleven years ago. Then he’d been infuriated because she’d made him a laughingstock. Now he was incensed because…because…

  “Why?” she found herself murmuring against his lips. “Why?”

  “Because someone needs to keep a leash on you.”

  Holding her close, he tumbled her backward, and she beheld a brief flurry of sky now packed with gray clouds, of hedges seen sideways and ground much too close. Then she came to rest against a hillock of grass that supported her back and head like a settee, and he sank to his knees beside her like a supplicant before his queen.

  A foolish image, for this tyrant didn’t beg. He leaned over and, without giving her a chance to regroup, kissed her again. The questions were still there, rampaging through her mind, along with a vast indignation. How dare he think she needed a leash, and what gave him the right to wield it?

  But they had exchanged blood. Now they exchanged breath. She had freely given of this intimacy eleven years ago. This time she resisted it, no longer the ninny she had once been. But he exhibited none of the same impatience, either, wooing her with kisses so insubstantial they might have been no more than the breeze—except for his smooth lips, and his enveloping warmth, and her body’s response.

  She’d called him mad, but what madness cursed her that she would soften and yearn, and open her lips to him?

  A kiss. Only a kiss.

  As he slanted his mouth against hers, the taste and wetness made her breath catch, and catch again. He touched her. His fingers molded her shoulders and swept the sides of her body with an urgency that hadn’t changed in eleven years. Now she understood better what it meant, for she had warned Adorna against succumbing. Jane was older, of course, and a woman; surely the passions of the flesh should have subsided.

  One thumb, soft as a mink brush, grazed her nipple, and the provocation resonated through her chemise and light wool bodice.

  Older women, it seemed, could want as desperately as any randy boy.

  And for all his experience and world-weary manner, Lord Blackburn gave a passable imitation of a randy boy who frantically wanted her, Plain Jane Higgenbothem.

  Jane didn’t understand him. Not anything about him. At least eleven years before, she had been able to read him, to know what he was thinking…because he’d been so shallow.

  She cut off that thought, new and treacherous, but it recurred.

  He had been shallow. Shallow and careless and uncaring.

  That had changed. Something had changed him. Now depths swirled within him, and if she strained, she could catch glimpses of his thoughts, of his soul. But nothing was clear in those murky depths. He did not welcome her there, and if she observed too much, she feared she might find pain and loneliness just like hers. Where their blood joined, so might their minds, and not only would she know him, but he would know her. Her dreams and ambitions…and then he’d laugh.

  Everyone always laughed.

  “Don’t stiffen. I’m not going to hurt you. You poker up when I’m not kissing you. I need to kiss you all the time.” Fleetingly he smiled into her baffled, frustrated face. Punctuating his speech with light touches against her demure collar and along the length of her sleeves, he said, “I like that sage color on you. Your eyes…so green. The color of the moss.”

  He frowned as if displeased with himself, but she knew exactly what he meant. On Lord de Sainte-Amand’s street, moss grew in the shade, and it was the kind of luscious green only Mother Nature could create. Jane itched to bring it forth from her palette, yet she envied it, and appreciated Lord Blackburn’s compliment.

  “This gown, however lovely, is in the way.” His palms smoothed the cords in her neck, massaging as he might have gentled a cat. “Let me unbutton you. Darling, just let me see…”

  Far, far away the ocean surged, and the sound of it surged in her veins, and in her womb. Nature’s rhythms existed in Lord Blackburn’s caress.

  Desperately she tried to call forth her resistance. Did he still hate her? Was he still intent on punishing her? Why had a simple sketch created this fervor?

  Did she care?

  This man with his magical blue eyes and resplendent physique had slept with her in her bed, walked beside her on the street, haunted her for eleven years.

  Arching her neck, she allowed him easy access to the buttons right under her chin.

  As he descended, he fumbled and said, “I should be better at this, but it’s been too long since the last time I touched you.”

  She never considered Blackburn a delicate man. Arrogant, always. Beastly, on occasion. But although she knew he had loosened a myriad of buttons in his career, he didn’t talk about that. He spoke only of her, as if he’d been as celibate as she for the past eleven years.

  He acted like it, too. The grace that characterized his every movement had vanished, leaving him listing on one hand and a flush streaking across his cheekbones. “I desperately wanted to see you then. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t know anything that day.” She’d been a fool. Was she being a fool again? “But I know better now.”

  He opened her bodice and loosened her chemise, and he stared as if he couldn’t look enough. “Beautiful,” he whispered. “Just as I imagined.”

  Scalded with chagrin, she tried to bring her hands up to cover herself, but he caught them. Caught them, and kissed the fingertips, and placed them beside her head.

  “I wish the sun were shining.” Glancing up, he frowned at the dreary sky. Then he looked at her again, at the pliant rosy brown of her nipples. “But it’s still warm enough, isn’t it, darling?”

  The edges of her bodice and the raised waist thrust her breasts toward him as he leaned over her. A tremor shook him. He wet his lips.

  She found herself wetting hers.

  “I will kiss you, here”—he dabbed a touch on her chest, on the underside of her breast, and almost, almost on her nipple—“and the pleasure of it will be so great, you’ll beg me for more.”

  “No…” She wouldn’t beg.

  “Yes. I promise.”

  He was right. She knew he was. Each of his caresses rippled like a great work of art through her eternity. She would do anything to be his sculpture—even beg.

  But he released her, and reached for one of the torn and dangling rose branches. From it he plucked a blossom flushed with the inner gloss of a rosy sea-shell. He snapped the thorns from the stem, then raised it to his nose and sampled the fragrance. His eyes closed in sensuous delight, his lashes spikes of amber against his golden skin.

  Then his eyes opened, and he smiled whimsically. He held the flower to her nose, and she inhaled the scent, laden with the warmth of sunlit afternoons and intense with the threat of rain. As he withdrew the rose, she saw that each petal curled in a graceful curve.

  “The colors remind me of you.” He wet his finger, used it to caress the soft rouge of the outer petals, then probed the heart where they became
a tender shade of apricot.

  She watched his motion, comprehending as he wished, yet now beyond discomfiture, beyond anything but a wash of desire so vehement she trembled from the force of it. Pressing her thighs together, she tried to control passion, but she knew she grew damp, and she ached as if she were swollen.

  He lowered the blossom again, but to her mouth this time. The velvet petals barely brushed her, making her lips tingle. He followed each contour, the lush fragrance rising to her nostrils. “Such a pretty mouth,” he said.

  “It’s too wide.” She could barely move her lips, so enthralled was she with the velvet texture, the sensual play.

  “No. A man likes that. He can speculate how it would feel, kissing his face, his chest, his hips…and anywhere else a woman might kiss a man.”

  She forgot to breathe. She forgot everything but his eyes, roguish and attentive. He knew too much, she knew too little, and she had never, ever imagined the things he was doing. The things he insinuated. Not even in her deepest dreams had she…or had she?

  “You’re blushing, darling, and not just on your cheek.” With the rose, he swept her cheeks, her forehead, her chin. Like dabs of silk, each petal brushed only a tiny patch of flesh, yet response vibrated through Jane’s every muscle.

  Under Blackburn’s expert guidance, the blossom lingered along her jawline. As if he commanded her, she arched her neck away and sighed, and the flower progressed irrevocably toward her ear. Still on his knees, he leaned close. The rose…no, his tongue slid slowly along the outer shell, probed the center. She brought her hands up to clutch his hair.

  “Jane.” He whispered so softly, his breath cooled her damp flesh. “Put your hands back.”

  She was almost beyond understanding. Almost. But when he remained unmoving at her side, she gradually perceived he wouldn’t continue with this exquisite torture until she obeyed him. And although she quivered as if she suffered from the ague, she didn’t want him to stop.

  Unkinking one finger at a time, she opened her fists. Languidly she slid her hands through his hair, down his neck, down his arms, and finally, reluctantly, she took them away.

  She hadn’t known that touching him would make her want more, make her more pliable, and never would she have realized he was affected, but for the tiny moan she heard close against her ear. Compelled, she tried to return her hands to him, but he sat up.

  “No.”

  She reached out to him.

  Shaking his head, he brushed the rose across his own lips.

  A velvet promise. His midnight eyes glittered with daytime stars as she lowered her hands again.

  “Put your arms over your head.” His lips moved against the petals, and she could imagine those lips against her skin. “I like to see your breasts thrusting up so proudly. Did I tell you how beautiful they are?”

  Even his voice was an aphrodisiac, deep and quiet, as if the secrets between them were too important to share even with the frisking breeze. She brought her arms up alongside her head once more, and as a reward he stroked her inner palm with the blossom, then drew it out over each fingertip.

  How did something as mundane as Jane’s hand, callused and scarred, become a thing of delicate sensation? This voluptuous agony surely couldn’t grow greater, or she would lose all restraint. She would cry out as great spasms of joy overtook her, and such an exhibition would reveal the most sensitive part of all.

  Holding the rose by its stem, he swirled the blossom across the width of her collarbones, from one shoulder to another. “You’re fine and strong. I had the good sense to admire that about you even long ago.”

  With a single sentence, he confirmed the confidence her stature gave her. With a single stroke, he brought her skin in contact with the plush rose petals. With elaborate care, he dragged the flower down her breast-bone to the place where the high waist of her gown concealed her.

  But he hadn’t yet touched her where she wished most to be touched. He watched her breathe; his eyes widened, then narrowed, and he wanted to caress her, she felt sure. Instead, he played this waiting game, and tormented them both.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Won’t you please?…”

  He laughed, melodious and sure. Then when she took a deeper breath, his amusement wavered and dipped. “Wait. Let me…” Plucking a petal, he allowed the wisp of a wind to take it. It fluttered in circles, then drifted to rest on her chest. Another followed the first, nestling in the hollow at the base of her throat. Another followed, and another, and another, each floating down on a current of air to land on a special place on her body. One decorated her lips, another settled in her hair. And at last, apparently deciding he dared not trust the errant wind, Lord Blackburn plucked the smallest, sweetest, firmest inner petal and deliberately placed it on her nipple.

  He didn’t touch her; only the petal did, and he said, “Watch.”

  Lifting her head, she stared down at herself, brazenly nude, clad only in rose petals. They rippled, almost weightless, unstable in the breeze and the movement of her chest as she inhaled. The one, perched on the peak of her breast, clung to her smooth skin.

  “Velvet to velvet,” he said. Then, by infinitesimal increments, he reached out and barely brushed her skin with his fingertips.

  The petal wavered on the sudden peak as her nipples contracted.

  She arched up, into his hand, wanting more, wanting now. She waited for him to touch her, really touch her, and it was time. Past time.

  His diverted, absorbed expression disappeared, vanquished by a surge of masculine demand. Sliding down beside her, he lay on his side. Holding himself above her, he kissed her fiercely, demanding the response he previously demanded she subdue. She answered him gladly, openmouthed and questing, requiring current satisfaction in exchange for previous restraint.

  Her hands tangled in his hair once more, taking pleasure in the clean locks, in the firm skull. She wanted to direct him, but he needed no direction. He had said he looked at her and knew what she thought; perhaps it was true, for he lifted a breast in each hand. Supporting them, he kissed them, too, smoothing his lips across flesh made receptive by the breeze, the rose, and the man. When he suckled her she could no longer keep her excitement to herself. She whimpered and moaned, twisting beneath him.

  “Lift your skirt for me, darling,” he murmured against her skin. “Show me you want me.”

  She did. She wanted him acutely. She wanted him now. Gathering a handful of skirt and petticoats, she tried to jerk them up.

  He stopped her with his hand on hers. “Slowly. We have all the time in the world.”

  He was smiling, stroking her with leisurely, casual gestures that didn’t fool her a bit. His bright eyes watched her with febrile fervor. His legs moved restlessly, and he took elaborate care not to touch her with any part of his body except his hands.

  He wasn’t teasing. Not anymore. He was as frantic as she was, but for some reason he kept himself under severe harness.

  Well, he wasn’t the only one who could tease. So could she.

  With tormenting indolence, she inched her skirt up, and secretly smiled as he looked everywhere but there. He purposely didn’t see her white silk stockings, nor the garters that held them, nor the ruffle of her drawers where they buttoned at the knee. Yet when she stopped short of her hip, too abashed to bare herself to the leaden sky, she found his gaze fixed on her face with an intensity that scalded.

  “All the way, darling. Please.”

  She would do anything for him when he called her “darling” in that tone of voice. With a twitch of her fingers, she raised her hem to her waist.

  This time he looked directly, and whatever virginal uncertainty she experienced died. The skin stretched taut over his perfect features, and only his eyes looked alive. But they burned with the fires of the heavens, enthralled and compelled by the sight and proximity of her.

  Of Miss Jane Higgenbothem.

  His hand stretched out as if irresistibly drawn, and with the flat of his palm
he smoothed the thin cotton across her belly. The heat of him across her sensitive skin made her toes curl, and when he opened the slit of the garment and barely brushed the dark, curly hair hidden therein, she had to bite her lip to contain her exclamation. Such a light touch, but it promised more. He moved in one direction, toward the center of her body, and now his finger touched flesh.

  The top of her cleft, nothing more, but she pressed her thighs together to stop their shaking.

  He misunderstood. “Don’t close me out. Not now.”

  She wanted to protest, but her voice would tremble if she spoke. So what could she do but raise one knee?

  “Oh, Jane. Oh, darling.”

  She had lifted one knee, and he sounded excited as Zeus when he created his first thunderbolt. Blackburn did worship her, she realized. She was a goddess worthy of her god. She wanted to exalt, but when he opened her concealed femininity, and touched her, she forgot why. His fingers performed a slow slide up and down, each time almost entering her, then skimming away. Since the moment he’d thrust her full-length on the lawn, she’d remained almost motionless, transfixed by his demands, by her own amazement at the deluge of stimulus.

  Now she couldn’t. Her hips lifted, rotated, trying to tempt him inside.

  He was smiling again, fiercely pleased and fiercely enraptured. “Do you want me there, darling? Tell me. Do you want me?”

  His fingers stopped moving. She stopped moving. She could hear nothing but the sweep of the wind outside the hedges, the rasp of his breath, and her own light, rapid gasps. Even in the warmth of the maze, goose bumps slid over her skin; warnings of danger or harbingers of pleasure, she didn’t dare guess. Did she want him? Yes, too much, for too long. If she said so, admitted it, gave in to him, he would have a triumph greater than before, and her personal disaster would transcend any she’d experienced.

  The question was, had he really changed? Did the new depths she perceived hide a previously unplumbed passion…for her?

  Or was she once again falling prey to Blackburn’s endless ravaging need for revenge?