Читать книгу Regency Collection 2013 Part 1 - Хелен Диксон, Louise Allen, Хелен Диксон - Страница 22

‘Rest assured, I intend to make love to you for as long as is humanly possible, Miss Mallory,’ Max assured her, his attempts at a formal response somewhat spoilt by a gasp that was part laughter, part passion. ‘I cannot promise eternity.’

She realised that his hand was sliding up her calf under her light muslin skirt, beneath the fine linen petticoat and shift, up to her knee where he paused, tickling gently around the soft back, his fingers tantalising on the silk of her stocking. Bree gasped against his neck, spreading her palm flat on his chest, pressing against the tautly erect nipples and the flat pectoral muscles.

Was he going to go higher? She shifted restlessly in his embrace. He had said he would be careful. What did that mean? What did he intend to do? Could he possibly calm the raging, restless fire that was making her want to beg and plead?

Max’s hand found her garter, played for a second or two with the warm flesh that swelled around its tautness, then slid up the inside of her thigh.

‘Ah!’ She wanted to go limp and rigid in his embrace, both at once. She wanted to open her legs wantonly and yet she wanted to arch up, press herself against him. Confused, Bree buried her face in his shoulder.

‘Open for me, sweetheart.’ His fingers were nudging intimately. Blushing, stifling her gasp of shocked pleasure against his bare skin, Bree let her legs relax, felt his fingers slide up into the hot, damp, intimately secret part of her. It was torment, exquisitely embarrassing torment, and then his index finger touched part of her that had her bowing up against the curve of his palm.

He was waiting for her reactions, she realised hazily. He knew exactly what he was doing, how she would respond. He was playing her like a violinist playing an instrument. He knew the music; she could only try and sight-read.

‘Oh, so sweet,’ he was murmuring against her hair, his lips gentling her neck, her ear, her cheek, all he could reach as she burrowed into him, too shaken to let him see her face. ‘Let me in, love.’ That questing finger slid inside her, making her gasp louder. Restless, her head began to move on his shoulder until he was able to capture her mouth. His tongue slipped between her lips as a second finger sheathed itself gently. His thumb found the aching point that seemed to be the focus of all the sensation that screamed through her, and something began to build, a tension that racked her, demanding release.

Somehow, with some fragment of will she did not realise she possessed, Bree managed to focus. ‘Max.’

‘Mmm?’

‘Max … oh! … Max, what about you?’ Against her hip was the very obvious evidence of his arousal. Bree slid her hand between them and brazenly cupped it around the hard, hot swelling. One handed, he wrenched at fastenings, freed the fall of his breeches, and Bree found she was grasping hot satin over iron, heated flesh that throbbed under her grasp. She could not see, but she could feel, had enough room, just, to move her hand.

‘Harder.’ He gasped, resting his forehead against her head as she did as he told her, but his own relentless caress of her body did not stop. ‘Move your hand up and … oh, God! Yes, like that.’

Cramped, thralled, racked with an almost unbearable tension at war with her desperate desire to pleasure Max, Bree surrendered utterly to sensation. Something was coming closer for her, and, she could tell from his breathing, for Max.

Now, now, a voice in her head screamed and the tension exploded, shatteringly, destroying thought and sight, leaving a pleasure that was almost pain, and the realisation that Max was with her, his own body reaching the release she had brought it.

‘Oh,’ she breathed softly. He had shifted her slightly in his arms and she slowly began to come back from wherever the ecstasy had cast her. Hazily Bree realised that Max was using his long shirt tails to deal with the evidence of his own release, while still cradling her gently.

‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ He tipped her blushing face up to his and kissed her, lightly.

‘Mmm.’ She nodded, speechless with love and delight and shyness.

‘I know you said to make love to you for ever, but I do think we ought to rejoin the others.…’

Bree blinked at him, then sat up with a muffled shriek as reality slapped back the warm clouds of sensuality. ‘I had forgotten where we are!’

‘I rather thought you had.’ Max dragged on his shirt and tucked it in, then lifted his cravat with a grimace, before beginning to tie it.

Bree smoothed down her skirts and struggled to fasten her bodice. Luckily the hooks were few and easy to reach over her shoulder. She tugged the bodice about until it sat smoothly and found Max’s comb where she had dropped it on the seat. The only thing to do with her hair was to braid it tightly and bundle it under her bonnet.

Max, his coat on, was managing to look relatively respectable, although his neckcloth would have shamed Piers’s worst efforts. They looked at each other in silence for a long moment, Bree feeling the curling tendrils of satisfied passion and aching longing knotting in her stomach. She wanted to stay there, hold him, linger over the moment. The air was disturbingly musky, sending little messages of arousal through her nerves.

‘What is that scent?’

‘Sex,’ Max said bluntly. ‘Love making,’ he amended more gently, reaching out to touch her flushed cheek with one fingertip. ‘It is a good thing you are travelling back in this drag and not anyone else.’ He opened the door cautiously and looked out. ‘The coast is clear.’

‘But Rosa! What is she going to think?’

‘I’ll leave the door open. Either she won’t know what it is, or she’ll assume someone has taken advantage of the empty carriage—but she won’t know who.’

‘I’ll be looking so guilty, she’ll guess,’ Bree said glumly, taking Max’s hand and jumping down.

‘Do you feel guilty?’ Max peered round the side of the drag, without waiting for her answer. ‘Look, see that group just on the fringe of the wood? If you cut across the corner, down that little path, you can join them without them noticing where you’ve come from. They’ve got a telescope and they’re looking at the view.’

‘All right.’ Bree picked up her skirts and began to walk towards the path, then turned back. ‘And, no, I do not feel guilty.’

‘Neither do I, and I should. Bree, we won’t be able to talk again today, not as I’d wish. I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’

He was gone before she could respond. What will he say tomorrow? Will he want to make me his lover? Can I? Should I? He won’t feel he has to offer for me, surely? She stopped dead, appalled at the thought. She had as good as begged him to make love to her, convinced that marriage was out of the question. But what if he felt honour bound to offer it? I will have to refuse. I must be strong enough to do that, she told herself as she slipped into the fringes of the group clustered around a telescope.

Then she recognised the bonnet in front of her. Rosa. Of all the bad luck, the one person in the party who could be guaranteed to recognise that this Miss Mallory was not the same person who had set out so blithely that morning.

With the uncanny ability to spot wrongdoing that Bree was convinced all teachers possessed, Rosa turned and looked at her. Her eyebrows lifted, but all she said was, ‘Miss Mallory, do come and see this wonderful view.’ As Bree passed her, Rosa added brightly, ‘Oh, my goodness, do stand still one moment, there is a spider just gone down the back of your gown.’

The other ladies moved sharply away, the gentlemen averted their gaze, and Rosa rapidly undid the hooks on the back of Bree’s gown and did them up again. ‘There,’ she said. ‘All safe now.’ She bent close. ‘And in the right holes this time,’ she hissed in Bree’s ear, her expression promising a close interrogation, all the way home.

‘Nevill.’ Max emerged just behind his cousin who was standing, arms crossed, gazing belligerently out across the park.

‘Latymer’s gone, but I am keeping an eye out in case he tries to sneak back, the cur.’ He curled a magnificent lip, which drooped ludicrously as he took in his cousin’s appearance. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’ he demanded. ‘Have you seen the state of your neckcloth?’

‘Give me yours,’ Max demanded.

‘What?’

‘Your neckcloth. Don’t tell me you haven’t got a Belcher handkerchief in the pocket of your greatcoat. Put that on instead.’

‘But, damn it, Max, it isn’t the sort of thing you wear when ladies are about,’ he protested as Max propelled him ruthlessly towards the stagecoach.

‘You’re young, you are coaching-mad, they’ll excuse you.’ Max was unsympathetic.

‘Oh, all right.’ His cousin rummaged in a pocket and came out with a red handkerchief, lavishly spotted with white. He unwound his own neckcloth carefully and handed it over to Max.

‘Thank you,’ He squinted in the panes of the stagecoach-door window as he arranged the still-crisp muslin. ‘How’s that?’

‘Better than yours looked. But what on earth have you been doing? It was perfectly fine, even after you hit Latymer.’ He stared at Max’s impassive face, the thoughts chasing themselves across his countenance with vivid clarity. Max gritted his teeth and kept his face bland.

‘Oh, Lord,’ Nevill said sympathetically. ‘Did Miss Mallory cry all over you? It’s awful, isn’t it, when they do that? I can recall Janey when she last got upset over some beau or other that Mama forbade her to see. She wept buckets. Flattened my neckcloth and made my shirt all soggy. I don’t think I handled it very well, looking back. I think you have to pat them on the shoulder and go “there, there” or something.’

He panted after Max as he strode back up the hill. ‘I’m glad she didn’t cry all over me. Miss Mallory, I mean. I’m sure you looked after her much better than I would have done.’

With his cousin heaping coals of fire on his conscience, Max scanned the park. Everyone was gathering at the picnic spot again, the servants were packing up the hampers and folding rugs and the grooms were beginning to harness up the vehicles.

And there, chatting with apparent composure to the Misses Collins, was Bree, Rosa at her side. He veered off towards his drag, wanting to give Bree as much time as possible to gather her composure before confronting her again.

Tomorrow he would see her, tell her everything and reveal the uncertainties that lay ahead. He realised he had no idea how she would react, either to his declaration, his offer or his story.

He knew her too well, deep in his heart, to believe that she had gone into his arms expecting to trap him into marriage. She said that she wanted him, and wanted his lovemaking, with an innocent honesty that had held no calculation. She had trusted him not to go beyond the bounds of what was safe for her, and, thank Heavens, he had controlled the need to take all he wanted of her.

Honesty forced him to acknowledge that was partly because he dreamed of taking her on his own wide bed, seeing the swathes of her hair spread out on the dark green silk coverlet, watching her eyes on him as he loved her into ecstasy …

‘My lord?’ Gregg was standing patiently beside the off leader.

It was said that no man was a hero to his valet. Max had a feeling that that applied equally to head grooms. ‘Have I been standing here long, Gregg?’ he enquired mildly.

‘About two minutes, my lord. You didn’t say anything, but you had an odd smile on your face, sort of dreamy.’

‘Thank you. I am not sure I wanted such a vivid description of my doubtless ludicrous appearance, though.’

Gregg grinned. ‘No, my lord, sorry, my lord. Are we ready to go?’

‘Yes.’ Max swung himself up onto the high box. ‘Miss Mallory and Miss Thorpe are over there.’ He gestured with his whip. ‘Go down, present my compliments and enquire if they would find it convenient to leave now.’

‘Aye, my lord.’ The groom touched his forehead and strode off. Max gathered the reins, brought his team up to their bits and watched the other drivers doing the same. He did not want to catch Bree’s eye, not yet while that contact might undermine her composure. He had no illusions about how shaken she was feeling. He could not recall feeling this mixture of delight, uncertainty and anticipation since the time he lost his virginity to a willing and cheerfully experienced dairymaid, or since the first time with Drusilla.

No. Max steadied the leaders, who were becoming restive, and thought back into the past. This was not how it had been with his wife. With Drusilla there had always been that faint, nagging feeling of something not being right. At the time he had put it down to his own conscience pricking him for making a clandestine marriage; now he saw only too clearly it was an instinct of wrongness about the woman herself and his own feelings. He should have listened to it then. He should listen to his heart now.

Voices beyond his right shoulder brought him back to the present. ‘There you are, ladies.’ It was Gregg, ushering his passengers into the carriage.

‘Thank you.’ Rosa Thorpe’s clear and pleasant tones. Nothing from Bree. Max found he was tensed, waiting for her voice. The realisation shook him with something that was almost resentment: he was being dragged from his comfortable state of emotional neutrality. He was having to feel again, and with that came the potential for hurt.

Gregg climbed up and settled down beside him. ‘All tight and snug, my lord.’ Max touched the wheelers with his whip and joined the cavalcade of coaches making their way back to London.

Bree sat very upright in the drag. Both window shutters were fully down, sparing nothing of her expression from Rosa’s steady scrutiny.

‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’ the ex-governess asked with a half-smile.

‘Well, aren’t you going to ask me about why my gown was done up wrongly?’

‘If you want to tell me, I am sure you will. I am not your guardian, Bree, I am your employee.’

Bree flushed. ‘You are my friend, and just now it feels as if you are my conscience.’

‘You have a perfectly good one of your own, I am certain.’ Rosa was smiling now. ‘I may not be your conscience, but I can be your confidant. Or not, as you choose.’

‘I very foolishly went for a stroll with Mr Latymer.’ Rosa’s smile faded. ‘He attempted to kiss me. No,’ she corrected herself, ‘he did kiss me, he was trying to force himself on me, he demanded I marry him and he threatened to ruin me so that I had no choice.’

‘Oh, my dear!’ Rosa reached out and took her hand. ‘I was unforgivably lax. I should have been keeping an eye out. I should have gone with you.’

Bree shook her head. ‘I knew where you were, I just did not believe there would be a problem. I had not the slightest suspicion I could not trust him.’

‘But what happened? Your gown—’

‘That was not Mr Latymer.’ Bree gritted her teeth and pressed on—confession was supposed to be good for the soul, wasn’t it? ‘Max and his cousin Mr Harlow found us. Max hit Mr Latymer—’

‘Excellent!’

‘He knocked him down and called him out, but Mr Latymer apologised to me, very fully. He was overcome by his emotions, it seems.’ Rosa snorted. ‘Quite. But I felt I had to accept the apology, otherwise Max would have fought him.’

‘Oh. Disappointing, for I am sure Lord Penrith would have given him a very salutary lesson. Still, there was always the risk of scandal, or an accident, so I suppose it was best avoided.’ She frowned. ‘How long did this cowardly attack take? For him to have undone your gown …’ She hesitated. ‘But, no, you said that was not him.’

‘Um, no. Latymer did not do that.’ Rosa’s eyebrows soared. ‘I was feeling very shaken. I asked Max to let me recover here, in his drag. I asked him to stay and keep me company. One thing led to another.’

‘Indeed? How much of another?’

‘Not that much,’ Bree hastened to assure her. ‘More than kissing, though. Quite a lot more,’ she added in a burst of honesty.

Rosa brooded for a moment. ‘He has made you a declaration?’

‘No. No, he said he will call tomorrow, that we must talk. Rosa, I am not a suitable wife for him, not in his position, and I most certainly do not want to entrap a man into marriage just because things got out of hand when he was trying to comfort me.’

‘Poppycock! If Lord Penrith was intending to comfort you, that’s what he would have done. He isn’t a green lad like his nephew. He knows exactly what goes on between a man and a woman, and how he is going to feel and react, and he is perfectly capable of keeping things within bounds if he wants to.’

‘I suppose so.’ Bree twisted the cords of her reticule until they knotted and sprang free of her fingers. ‘But he did not take advantage of me. I wanted him to make love to me, and if he had wanted to he could have seduced me utterly. And he didn’t. I am definitely still a virgin,’ she added earnestly.

Rosa’s lips twitched. ‘I am glad to hear it. I have no wish to spend days anxiously watching the calendar!’ She pondered while Bree gazed out of the window and hoped her blushes were subsiding. ‘You know, I think Lord Penrith has sent you a very clear message. He did make love to you and yet he behaved with restraint and consideration. I think you may expect a perfectly honourable offer of marriage, my dear.’

‘But I cannot. That would be dreadful.’ Worse even than if he made her an improper proposal.

‘Why?’ Rosa demanded. ‘You have some highly eligible connections.’

‘When Mama remarried, James’s grandfather took him away from her and hardly allowed contact again, so shocked was he at the match. James treats us as an embarrassment he can barely trust not to disgrace him and even Lady Georgiana thinks I should aim for a younger son. She did say something the other day about Max, but I think her enthusiasm for matchmaking is getting the better of her.

‘And,’ Bree pursued relentlessly, as much to school her own wild fantasies as to convince Rosa, ‘we are in trade. It isn’t even as though I sit at home like so many merchants’ daughters, behaving genteelly and avoiding all contact with the business. I have been running it.’

‘I agree with everything you say. But Lord Penrith is a powerful man with his fair share of arrogance,’ Rosa observed. ‘I imagine that what he wants, he takes, and to hell with the consequences.’

‘Then I must make even more of an effort to do the right thing.’ Bree tried to find some inner tranquillity by watching the passing scene, but it could not hold her attention. ‘You know, Rosa, there is some mystery about Max. This afternoon he murmured something, just before he … just before. He said something about ten years and being free.

‘You don’t think he made some vow of celibacy after the incident that people whisper about? They do say his heart was broken. And at the ball he asked me what I would say if I knew he had some scandal in his life.’

‘A man like that, in his early thirties, will almost certainly have attracted some scandal along the way, I would have thought,’ Rosa pronounced.

‘James excepted.’

‘Yes.’ Rosa’s smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. ‘It is hard to imagine your half-brother indulging in anything reprehensible. But the remark about ten years is odd, I agree. I cannot imagine Lord Penrith remaining celibate for ten days, let alone ten years. Not with that mouth, those eyes. He is a man of very well-developed passions, I would judge.’

‘Rosa!’

‘I am not blind, am I?’ her companion enquired with dignity, which was somewhat spoilt by the twinkle in her eyes. ‘Your Max Dysart is a man of experience and I would judge his wife will be a fortunate woman.’

‘Not that I am likely to find out,’ Bree murmured. And whatever else he felt, he did not love her—if he did, surely he would have said so in the course of that passionate encounter?