Читать книгу Regency Pleasures and Sins Part 1 - Louise Allen, Christine Merrill - Страница 55

‘I do not think I do want to leave,’ she said with difficulty, searching his face. ‘I should, I know. Nick, why?’

‘I asked you to wait a month before you made your decision. I have shown you my family, my home, the house you can make our own. I just wanted to give you a glimpse of one of the other benefits of married life.’ He was smiling at her reassuringly, but the dark fires were in his eyes and she knew that, whatever he was feeling at this moment, it was not calm, not restrained. And yet he was holding all that back for her.

She knew she was blushing and suddenly did not care. ‘Yes, Nick.’

‘You trust me?’

‘I have always trusted you,’ she said simply and was rewarded by the flare of emotion in his eyes.

‘I think we had better dispense with this very beautiful gown extremely carefully,’ he said thoughtfully, letting his hands rest on her shoulders. ‘I look forward to seeing you wearing it again. Now, how does it fasten, I wonder?’ His hands drifted, explored while she held her breath. ‘Ah, I see, little buttons: one, two, three … four.’ The narrow shoulders of the gown slipped down under his palms. ‘If I hold it and you step out—or is the approved method over your head?’

‘Over.’ It was so hard to speak. She was suddenly blind in the rustling silken darkness, then blinking again in the candlelight.

Her petticoats were slipped off, then Nick was turning her in his arms, nuzzling softly at her nape while his fingers tangled with the laces of her stays. ‘These are tight. How do you breathe?’ Then the stays fell away and she took a deep breath, cut short as Nick’s hands came up to cup her breasts.

‘Nicholas.’

‘Mmm?’

‘You … oh!’ His thumbs were flicking lightly at her nipples through the thin fabric of her chemise. She wriggled against him and found herself turned again.

‘Do … not … wriggle like that.’ He seemed breathless and Katherine suddenly experienced a soaring, liberating sense of power. She had thought her body and will were reacting blindly to his knowing hands and mouth, but now she knew she could have as powerful an effect on him. And it was a power she would do well not to exercise, she realised. Which was easier thought than done, given her complete lack of experience with men. She slid her feet out of her kid slippers, then stood quite still, her heart hammering, wondering what he was going to do next.

With an expression of great concentration Nick was undoing the ribbons that secured the shoulders of her chemise, and with a little shiver she realised his fingers were shaking, just very, very slightly. And this was a man whose hands had been steady in the condemned cell, on the gallows, facing an armed highwayman.

She was so rapt in the thought that it was a second before she realised that she was naked except for her silk stockings and her long evening gloves. Instinctively her hands flew to cover herself. Nick was looking at her with an expression that took her breath away. There was desire there—however inexperienced she was, she could recognise that—but there was something else, something almost reverent.

‘Are you not going to take anything off?’ she ventured, anxious to break the silence that was racking her nerves.

Nick kicked off his shoes, tossed aside his jacket and waistcoat and tugged loose his neckcloth and the top three buttons of his shirt.

‘Is that all?’ Katherine was uncertain whether to be relieved or disappointed.

‘I told you I would never break a promise to you, Kat, but I have no intention of making it any harder than it need be.’ He took a step towards her, then another. With a squeak Katherine backed away until the edge of the bed caught the back of her knees and she sat down. ‘Am I frightening you?’ He stopped.

‘No. Yes. I do not know.’ She was wittering, she realised, and pulled herself together. How am I feeling? ‘Yes, I am scared,’ she admitted. He took a step back. ‘And I think I rather like it,’ she finished in a rush of honesty.

Before she knew quite what had happened she was flat on her back on the bed, her hands caught above her head in the grasp of one large, gentle fist, her legs, which she tried instinctively to curl up protectively, were trapped under the weight of his leg and Nick was looking down at her with a gleam in his eyes that made her swallow hard.

‘Brave, honest Kat. May I take off your stockings?’

He was asking permission to take off stockings when everything else had been so ruthlessly disposed of? She nodded. As soon as her hands were free, one arm flew to cover her breasts, the other hand spread palm open, protectively across the dark tangle of curls.

She had a lot to learn, she realised as his fingers began to play with her garters. Apparently it was possibly to make removing a pair of stockings last not seconds but long, long minutes, and to make the act one of exquisite, pleasurable torture.

Stunned, she wriggled up against the pillows so she could watch his dark head, bent attentively over the task of removing two ribbons and two scraps of knitted silk. How could the straying fingers following the slow descent of the stockings as he rolled them down create such shivers of sensitivity? Why, when he bent to kiss her knee, did she have to bite her lip to stop crying out? Why, when his long fingers reached her ankle and then her instep and stopped to trail slowly up and down, up and down, did she have not the slightest urge to giggle, to protest that she was ticklish? Why was she lying back against the pillows, her eyes closed, her breath short?

His mouth replaced his fingers; kissing, nibbling, licking its way up to her knees, which she instinctively drew together. His hands pressed them apart, open, and his mouth began to torment the soft flesh of the back of her right knee. She gasped, felt her body arch with some instinct she did not understand and he murmured, ‘Too soon.’

The mattress shifted and Katherine blinked and found he was lying beside her again, propped on one elbow. Everything inside her ached, yearned, needed … what? She had no idea. Nick had promised she would remain a virgin, so what could her untutored body be expecting?

He took her hand in his and bent over the tiny pearl buttons that fastened her glove from wrist almost to shoulder.

Removing her evening gloves with a button hook and great care took Jenny five minutes. Hazily trying to keep track of the passing of time Katherine thought it had taken Nick that long to undo five buttons, exposing enough of her wrist for him to kiss it with soft, nipping kisses. Slowly he worked his way up one arm, then the other, then peeled off the soft kid and threw the gloves aside.

Silence. Her eyes closed, arms thrown back on the pillow, Katherine waited, all thoughts of modesty utterly vanquished. Her body felt heavy, languid, yet her heart was beating like a mill wheel in the race and her breathing was short.

‘Look at me, Kat.’ She dragged her eyes open and found Nick was looking down into her face while the palm of his hand moved slowly down the swell of her breast until it was over the nipple. Her eyes fluttered closed.

‘Look at me, Kat.’ With an effort she opened her eyes again and his hand skimmed lower until it caressed the soft swell of her stomach, then down again until his fingers tangled with the curls beneath.

‘Shh,’ he whispered even as her lips parted in protest, then stayed parted in a gasp of shocked pleasure as one finger slipped through the curls into the secrets they hid.

It slipped, moved, teased until her body was tossing restlessly, her eyes wide and unseeing and her breath coming in short desperate gasps as she struggled to find whatever this aching frenzy was promising her. Then he closed her desperate mouth with his just as the tormenting pleasure burst in a shower of lights and spiralled her into darkness.

‘Kat.’

‘Mmm?’ It seemed that she was not drifting through space, but was being held, very gently, against a long hard body that smelt familiarly of limes and sandalwood.

Her cheek was resting on warm linen, her legs curled up against satin. ‘Come back, Kat.’ Nick was gently kissing his way along the sensitive line where hair met forehead.

Seized with shyness, she buried her face against his chest, curling her naked body against his clothed one. ‘I had no idea,’ she said shakily when she thought she could command her voice.

‘I am glad to hear it,’ Nick said so drily that she laughed and looked up at him.

‘You told Robert to give me champagne,’ she accused, suddenly seeing his tactics clearly. ‘You did not …’

‘Tell him why? Of course not.’

‘Then why should he do as you ask?’

‘Because I am his elder brother,’ Nick said with unconscious arrogance. ‘Forget Robert,’ he added callously. ‘Are you cold? Sleepy?’

‘No.’ Katherine shook her head. Did he want to send her back to bed? Her entire body was soft, glowing, alive with a new vibrant awareness. She wanted to touch him, explore his body as he had explored hers, and she knew that was impossible, forbidden.

‘Good.’ He bent over her, his lips and then his tongue fretting at her nipple.

‘Nick!’ The sensations her body had only just learned surged back, differently nuanced now with her newfound knowledge, every bit as overwhelming. He moved down her body, slowly tasting and savouring while Katherine, shocked, shy and in thrall all over again, surrendered to him.

His tongue flicked teasingly at her navel, making her laugh, then trailed down with an intent that turned the laughter into a gasp of protest, then a low moan of pleasure as Nick kissed her intimately, his hands caressing her flanks, his breath heating her already hot flesh into shuddering arousal. She knew now what that aching, building tension was leading to, but when it broke she broke with it into a thousand sparkling shards of pleasure, falling, drifting down into velvet blackness.

Nick lay watching the morning light build outside his windows, the discomfort of his unsatisfied body at odds with the deep contentment of his mind.

Kat was curled up against him, her head on his chest, one hand tucked confidingly in his, deeply asleep. He smiled, his mouth buried in the soft tangle of her hair. The most difficult thing had been not to tell her he loved her. Every instinct had urged him to do so; his mind had urged caution. Caught up in the emotional tumult of her first sexual experience, could she trust her own responses in the cold light of day? Could he?

No, best to let her think, to ponder on what his own abstinence might mean, wonder about his motives a little. On the night of the dinner party he had planned, that was when he would tell her and hope that she had fallen just a little in love with him—enough to agree to give up her desperate independence and take on what he realised, if his father and Robert did not, must seem an even more daunting responsibility.

She liked him, trusted him, that he had always known. She seemed, by her innocent responses to him, to find him attractive, but none of that would be enough for Kat. She wanted love and he had to make sure she saw it as genuine, not a trap to hold her to this marriage that was not a marriage.

The sun was edging higher: time to move. He slid carefully out of bed, hardening his heart against the small grumble of protest she made. With the care of a ladies’ maid he picked up discarded petticoats, hunted for stockings and garters, found an errant glove and began to ferry all of Kat’s clothing back to her own dressing room.

Then he returned to the big bed, reached under the covers and picked Kat up. She turned in his arms, half-waking, and her mouth found his neck just below the fading marks of the noose. Her lips moved slightly as if tasting and the caress almost undid his will power. Nick stood with her in his arms, breathing deeply until the urge to lay her down and rip off his clothes ebbed a little, then strode into her bedchamber and tucked her into her own bed, pulled the covers up snugly around her, turned on his heel and walked away.

He went and looked out over the park, shining in the early morning light. The chilly waters of the lake beckoned as a cure for his aching loins and overheated imagination. His mouth curled at the thought of what any early-rising guest might think if they saw him striding across the dew-soaked grass in the full splendour of a Chinese silk dressing gown and diving into the lake. That would be taking eccentricity a little too far.

But there was Grandfather George’s plunge pool, which the previous Duke had had constructed in the aftermath of his Grand Tour in imitation of a Roman bath house. Nick pulled on the heavy dressing gown, snatched up a towel and padded off along the corridors in the direction of the Duke’s suite.

The pool was concealed with heavy drapes further down the corridor from his father’s bedchamber. Nick slipped in and saw that it was full of clear, doubtless cold, water with a stand of towels by the side. It was a rectangle with a curved end set within a small pillared room with some of the statues the Duke had brought back from Italy and marble inlays on the floor. He remembered it as being perhaps four foot deep and just long enough to take two strokes from end to end, with a submerged bench all around the edge.

Too shallow for the dive he was hoping for to shock his system into some semblance of calm, but he cast off his robe, stepped down into the pool and ducked under the water. It was as cold as he expected and wonderfully effective. With a sigh of relief Nick struck out and took two plunging strokes to the apse end, turned and dived under the surface to glide back again.

As he surfaced, tossing the wet hair back from his face, the curtain opened and his brother and Roderick Graham appeared. They were still in evening dress, more than a little owl-eyed and dishevelled, and Robert had a champagne bottle by the neck.

‘Hello, Nick,’ he said amiably. ‘Didn’t expect to see you here.’

‘You are drunk,’ Nick observed. ‘If you’re coming in, for heaven’s sake get undressed first.’

‘What? Oh, yes, good idea. We’re a bit tired, that’s all,’ Robert announced, shedding clothes on to the marble with a fine disregard. ‘Not drunk, just a bit on the go.’

‘Aye, that’s the way of it,’ Graham announced, suddenly sounding extremely Scottish. He tossed his waistcoat on to the pile of Robert’s clothes and peered hazily at Nick. ‘Hurt your neck?’

Nick slid further down on the submerged bench until the water reached his chin. ‘Leather military stock,’ he said lightly, ‘Damn things chafe like the devil at first, I’ve never lost the mark.’ He choked as a slapping wave of water hit him with Robert’s uncoordinated tumble into the pool, followed by the lawyer’s slightly more graceful descent. ‘Will you have a care, you clumsy oaf?’ He slapped his brother lightly over his soaked head and suddenly found himself seized in a wrestler’s hold. The two of them struggled, laughing and spluttering in the cold water, all at once boys again. Graham fended off one, then another, and finally managed to duck both of them, at which they turned on him and pushed him under.

Nick surfaced, almost weeping with laughter, to find himself regarding the toes of a pair of Morocco leather slippers and the hem of a sombre red silk robe. ‘Oh, God.’

‘Inaccurate and blasphemous,’ his father observed frigidly. ‘Might I hope that one of you will be good enough to knock on my door and inform me when my bath is available? If, that is, there is any water left in it.’

From the swirling water Nick realised that the other two had taken cowardly refuge behind him. ‘Yes, sir. I mean, we are just about to get out now, sir.’

‘Then I will remove myself from what will doubtless be a thoroughly unedifying sight.’

The curtain swished closed and Nick hauled himself out of the pool with a rueful chuckle. ‘And how old did that make you feel?’ he enquired of Robert, who was clambering out the other side.

His brother considered carefully. ‘Fourteen,’ he hazarded. ‘Damn it, I wish I had his tongue—or is it that left eyebrow?’

‘I have no idea, they are both lethal.’ Nick finished a brisk towelling and pulled on his robe, which he had had the foresight to hang up. ‘How do you two intend to get back to your rooms?’ He prodded a saturated pile of cloth, then shook out the pile of towels. ‘It will take more than one of these to cover your blushes. I suggest you hurry before the upstairs maids are about.’

Katherine swam up out of a dream where she was floating in a mass of black velvet, sipping champagne while Nick caressed her body with peacock feathers. ‘Tickles,’ she murmured faintly and woke to find her own tumbled hair was tickling her nose.

‘Are you awake, Miss Katherine?’ It was Jenny, who stopped tiptoeing around the room and drew back the curtains with a swish. ‘It’s a lovely day.’

Katherine struggled up sleepily against the pillows, her brain fuddled by the incredible dreams that had filled her night. Then she saw Jenny’s expression as the maid waited impatiently at the end of the bed. ‘What happened?’

‘Happened?’ Katherine blinked at her.

‘After supper. The master told me I could go up to bed any time I wanted because he would look after you.’

‘He said …’ Katherine was suddenly very awake indeed. It had happened, it was not a dream. Nick had made love to her last night.

Jenny was positively fidgeting with impatience. ‘Is it all right now? You are staying married to him?’

‘No. No, nothing happened that meant I could not get an annulment,’ she said firmly, ignoring Jenny’s downcast face while she wrestled with last night’s events and what they meant.

Had anyone seen them leave? Had they been missed or had Nick’s timing been perfect? And if they had been seen, what then? Nick already had a reputation as a rake, possibly his actions would provoke nothing more than some tuts of disapproval. As for me, she reflected ruefully, I’ll soon be gone so they can think what they like of Miss Cunningham.

Nick had done everything he could to seduce her into staying short of breaking his promise to her. Why? Presumably because she had made it clear she was not going to change her mind because she liked his family or he had offered her a home less overwhelming than the house. But the only thing that was going to persuade her to stay was if he told her he loved her. And surely, Katherine thought, hugging the memory of last night to her, surely if he was ever going to say it, that would have been the time.

Even if he had, they would have had to consider long and hard whether it would be right to stay together. She could never forget Nick’s position, his inheritance and his father’s expectations.

But although he did not love her, he had given her a night she was never going to forget, a night filled with tenderness and ecstasy and trust fulfilled. Leaving him was going to hurt his pride, if not his heart, and she had so much to thank him for. How was she ever going to repay that?

Katherine swung her legs out of bed. One thing was certain, she had no intention of facing Nick over the breakfast table, so the sooner she went down the better. ‘What time is it?’

‘Half past seven, Miss Katherine. Surely you are going to have breakfast in bed?’

‘No, I will go down.’ She felt too restless, too unlike herself to stay in bed. Nick was not one of life’s early risers if he had any choice, so, if she was down by eight, she should be safe. ‘The dimity gown will be perfectly all right.’ Probably none of the other guests would be about either and she could escape to a corner of the Long Gallery after breakfast and try to think.

Nick was not in the breakfast room, but to her surprise both Robert and Roderick Graham were, both of them looking somewhat the worse for wear. They got to their feet as she came in and out of respect for their heavy eyes and sallow faces she helped herself quietly from the chafing dishes arranged on the sideboard and did not attempt to make conversation once the conventional greetings had been exchanged.

Then they were on their feet again as the Duke stalked in, looking as fresh as if he was fifty years old and had spent the previous evening reading by his fireside before retiring to bed at ten.

‘Good morning, Miss Cunningham. Mr Graham. Robert, where is your brother?’

‘Breakfasting in his room, I imagine, sir.’

‘Hmm.’ The old man’s inimical stare fixed on Katherine.

‘Possibly Lord Seaton is not a natural early riser, your Grace; some people are not,’ she ventured.

‘Modern affectations. I do not hold with them.’ The Duke sat down with his plate and engaged a nervous Mr Graham in meticulously polite conversation. That gentleman’s relief when the Duke finished his frugal breakfast was patent and he made his escape with Robert without a backward glance.

Katherine watched the Duke from under her lashes. His back was upright, his shoulders set, his expression calm and haughty. But under it she thought she could glimpse an old man. A tired, sad old man. Something caught inside her and she realised it was a pang of pity and compassion. But what could she do to help the Duke?