Although what he was saying didn’t sound inviting.
“I’m going to kiss you,” he said briskly. “Someone has to do it the first time, and it might as well be me because I’m very good at it. But Josie—” He caught her around the shoulders.
“Yes?” She knew her eyes were round.
“I’m in love with Sylvie, you know that.”
She scowled at him. “I take it you think I might fall in love with you because of a kiss.”
His smile was crooked.
“Don’t worry. Since we are being frank, I shall tell you that I have no intention of falling in love with anyone who is as old as you are.” His smile disappeared. “My sisters have done nothing but throw men of your age at me since the season began, and while it was most kind of them to dance with me, I…”
Her voice trailed off. He actually looked a little hurt, but perhaps that was just her imagination, because he said easily, “You want to marry someone your own age, which is absolutely appropriate. Although I would recommend that you look for someone who has actually reached their majority.”
“I have a list,” she told him.
He grinned at that. “What’s on your list?”
“I shan’t tell you all of it, as it’s private. But I did decide that twenty-five was quite old enough, after Imogen pointed out that Rafe fit nearly every item I had written down.”
“Someday, I would love to see that list,” he said, his eyes gleaming with amusement. “But now the night grows toward dawn and your sisters will be wondering where I’ve taken you.”
Josie shrugged. Her skin was prickling all over and she was acutely aware that the two of them were alone, both half-clothed. “Imogen has presumably left with Rafe on their wedding trip,” she said. “Tess has gone home with Felton, and Annabel had already left the ball when I encountered you. She has a new baby and she misses him after a mere half hour, or so she says.”
“Motherhood takes some women like that,” he said. “Like an illness.”
He took a step closer and tipped up her chin. “You have beautiful skin, Josie, did you know that?”
“It’s my best feature,” she muttered, mesmerized by his eyes. They were looking at her in such a way, as if…as if…
His hand cupped the back of her neck and fingers curled into her hair. “Your hair is beautiful too.”
“Brown,” she said, trying to break the spell of his liquid voice.
“Bronzed in the sunlight,” he corrected her. “There was one afternoon on the way to Scotland when you sat in the carriage window and the sun played with your hair for hours: it was all bronzed deep tones, bewitching and soft.”
Josie knew she would never feel the same about her hair.
Then he bent closer. This is it, Josie thought. She knew what to expect, of course. She’d seen Lucius Felton brush kisses onto Tess’s mouth. She’d seen the Earl of Ardmore drop kisses onto Annabel’s hair, and her shoulder, and wherever the poor deluded man could drop a kiss. She’d even come around the corner of the corridor once and seen Imogen in Rafe’s arms, and he was kissing her, and their bodies were touching.
But it wasn’t at all what she thought.
Mayne’s mouth didn’t brush her adoringly, the way Felton’s had Tess. Instead his mouth came down on her like a crushing weight, hard and demanding. She had no idea what was being demanded, and had to stop herself from struggling. No wonder Mayne’s affairs lasted only two weeks, she thought dimly. The man doesn’t know how to kiss!
He was probably as bad at the whole of bedding as he was at this.
But it would never do to make him feel bad, not when he’d been so kind as to try to—whatever it was he was trying to do. Give her her first kiss so that she could walk better, and if that wasn’t a stupid notion, she’d never heard one.
The hand he had in her hair did feel rather nice, as if he was coaxing her to do something, to do what? His tongue too…he was running his tongue along her lips. A strange thing to do. Josie filed it away in her mind as yet another substantial reason why the Earl of Mayne had remained unmarried until the ancient age of thirty-five.
And then suddenly it all changed.
How or why, Josie didn’t know.
All of a sudden, she could smell him. He smelled wonderful, a spicy male soapy smell. She looked up at him and his eyes were heavy, and suddenly she could feel his thumb rubbing against her neck, and it all felt very queer. As if—As if she’d just taken off her corset.
“That’s my girl,” he said against her mouth. His voice was dark as the room, dark as a wine god’s own purr. She opened her lips to answer him. And that was the biggest surprise of all. Because in one smooth movement he pulled her up and against his body, and at the same moment his tongue came into her mouth.
She went rigid with surprise. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t hygienic. Surely it wasn’t—
But she lost the thought in a haze of sensual feelings, because somehow her arms were around his neck and curled in his hair. And those breasts that she so despised were pressed against his chest and it felt exquisite, like torture and pleasure at once. And he was in her mouth, speaking to her without words, his hands holding her tight so that she couldn’t move back. Except she didn’t want to. All she wanted was to be crushed against his big, solid body, feeling small and sensual, and all the things she never felt.
Which was exactly what he meant her to feel.
As if the thought and the truth of it came in the same moment, a pulse of liquid flame swept over her body, weakening her knees, making her feel as if she couldn’t stand without him. He was driving into her mouth, fierce, demanding strokes, and she knew why women wept when he left them.
As if he could read her thoughts, he pulled back and stared at her. His eyes had darkened, or perhaps the room had darkened. They didn’t look blue anymore but black, and for a second she thought she heard the breath rasp in his chest.
“Well,” he said finally. “Josephine Essex, that was your first kiss.”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She just stared at him, arms around his neck, her mind a dark, muddled place of desire—aye, she was not so stupid as to not recognize it. Then she took her arms down, and fought to regain her mind as well.
There was something odd in his eyes. “Was it acceptable?” That growling purr was gone from his voice now.
“Absolutely,” she said, her hands trembling as they tightened the knot of his dressing gown at her waist. “Will”—she cleared her throat—“Will I be able to walk correctly now?”
“I hope so, Josie.” He said it almost as if it were a prayer. “I-I believe so.”
She managed a little smile at that. “You have a lot of faith in your powers of seduction, Lord Mayne. I suppose it comes from years of practice.”
“One is always capable of being surprised,” he said, rather obscurely. And then backed away. “Let’s see if I’ve made an ass of myself, shall we?”
So she turned away from him and walked to the opposite wall. He hadn’t made an ass of himself. She could feel it in every movement of her legs, in the brush of her breasts against his dressing gown. When she turned around to walk to him, she was ready.
She stopped for a moment, in the pleasure of performance. Smiled at him, at the beauty of his eyes, and the way his hair, even now, looked as if it had come from the hands of a master. He looked a bit pole-axed, so she smiled again.
These smiles were a world away from the grimaces she’d used as masks in the last weeks of the season. She could feel the plumpness of her bottom lip, the smile in her eyes, as if she were seeing herself from the outside.
And then she started to walk toward him. Plump full hips curved naturally, beautifully, to a waist marked by a man’s silk sash. Her breasts swelled above, and for the first time in her life she knew that they were right for her body: balancing her hips, carrying themselves proudly, beautiful in their generosity.
“Not quite,” he said. “Watch me again.”
/> She thought she saw what he meant this time. Even in the absurdity of that muscled body, and the frail pink gown, she could see that he was slightly rolling from the hips. Rather than walking the way she normally did, by putting one leg briskly in front of the other, Mayne was swaying forward. There was a swing in his gait, a promise, a ridiculous promise given the bursting fabric—but she saw what he meant.
He was on the other side of the little turret room. “Again,” he commanded.
She walked toward him slowly, listening to her body, walking almost on tiptoes because it felt right and because her legs were still trembling a little from the kiss. She walked to just before him, and paused.
“Garret,” she said. And raised an eyebrow.
“I think—you have mastered the art,” he said. His voice was strangled, dark, and she loved that.
So she tightened the cord around her waist even tighter, and sure enough, his eyes dropped to her breasts.
“Josie!” he said sharply.
She grinned at him. “You did say that men would slaver at my feet, didn’t you?”
“Not old men like myself,” he said, with a reluctant bark of laughter.
“I believe I shall stop being doctrinaire about age. Look how much I have learned from you.”
“Nothing that you couldn’t have seen in the eyes of men of any age,” he said. His voice had that low rumble again.
She smiled at him, a little crooked smile. “We’ll see whether I’m able to bamboozle these men with my new walk.”
“And no corset.”
“No corset,” she said, sighing.
“None of which has anything to do with the beauty of your face,” he said, turning up her chin with his hand.
“It’s too full,” she whispered.
He rubbed a slow thumb down her cheek. “Not all women were designed to be angular. Your cheek has the slightly sulky, round beauty of a Madonna.”
“Annabel said that too,” she said, feeling a little breathless.
“Your eyelashes are sinfully thick,” he went on. “And your mouth—” He stopped. “I’ll leave your mouth to the tremulous twenty-year-olds whom you desire so much.”
Josie digested this while looking at him. Of course he’d swept through the ton like fire through straw. Thinking of the discontented, skittish faces of most of the matrons whom she’d met in the endless round of debutante balls comprising the season, she would have been surprised if there was one among them who didn’t fall on her back at his approach. It gave her a peculiar sinking feeling, as if she were in danger of committing some sort of folly that she hadn’t thought possible.
“Garret,” she whispered.
His straight black brows snapped together and he dropped her chin. “Better not call me that in public, little witch,” he said, turning away. She watched him quickly pulling the pink dress forward. His skin was brown and the curved muscled shape of it made her feel queer. In danger. So she flashed back: “I hope you’re not afraid that people will think I’m hankering after you?”
He pulled on his shirt, and to her faint—but quite obvious—pulse of disappointment, a flutter of elegant white linen fell to his waist.
“God no,” he said, turning and giving her a wry smile. “I’m afraid they’ll think I’m hankering after you.”
Josie’s heart beat loudly in her ears. “Well, that would never happen.” His jawline was just faintly shadowed with beard. He looked like a black-browed pirate, although even as she watched, he tamed the shirt, cramming it into the waist of his trousers.
“Don’t watch me,” he muttered to her, pushing the shirt down so it didn’t leave a bulge in his knit pantaloons.
I’d like to do that, Josie thought to herself. But she was sure the thought didn’t show in her eyes. “It’s interesting,” she told him. “Who knew that it was so hard to control a shirt?” He wrenched on a jacket. It sat perfectly across his shoulders, turning him in an instant from a bold, derisive pirate to a sleek earl whose midnight blue jacket echoed his insolent blue eyes. Suddenly, instead of radiating a dangerous sensuality, he looked like an assured member of the world’s greatest aristocracy.
Josie sighed. It was a painful transition to watch, the more so because of her vivid knowledge of all the women who had seen Mayne turn from private to public, from hers to no one’s, and that in the turn of a coat.
“Well,” he said, “I’d better sneak you back into your house. Shouldn’t be too difficult.”
Not for someone with his experience sneaking in and out of houses, Josie thought. But she kept it to herself.
Her hair was down her shoulders and tumbling down her neck. She bent to pick up the corset, but he laughed and snatched it away, tossing it against the wall. “You’re not wearing that again. You go out tomorrow and buy yourself gowns that celebrate the body God gave you, rather than shaping you into a different one, do you hear?”
Even pale with exhaustion and champagne, hair tousled, jaw shadowed, he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. “I will,” she said, filing the memory away. She walked past him.
“Go to that modiste Griselda uses,” he said, catching her hand.
She looked up at him inquiringly. “Don’t call you Garret. Don’t use my corset. Do use Griselda’s modiste. Do walk as if I were a man in skirts. Do consider men over thirty, but allow the younger ones to slaver at will.”
Mayne stood looking at her, feeling as if he’d been knocked off balance. Josie was so beautiful, with that cloud of witchy hair around her shoulders, her beautiful curved, laughing mouth and her intelligent eyes. “Christ, you’re breathtaking,” he said.
He could see in her eyes that she didn’t believe him. There was no question, though, that a decent gown would take care of that. If she would only prance into a ballroom wearing his dressing gown, the male part of the room would fall to their knees. He kept having to make himself stop looking at the way her breasts swelled seductively under the heavy silk.
“Will you be coming to the Mucklowe ball at the end of the week?” she asked him.
What was there about Josie that made a lump rise in his throat every time she looked anxious? “Mucking around with the Mucklowes,” he said, putting a hand on her back to lead her down the stairs. “I suppose I’ll be there, if Sylvie wishes to go. She has eclectic tastes when it comes to the ton.”
Josie reached the bottom of the stairs and waited for him. “It would be wonderful if you could be there.”
“If you want me to, I’ll be there.”
Her face eased into a smile. Those crimson lips of hers were dangerous. And he was a man in love with another woman.
“Sylvie and I wouldn’t miss it,” he assured her. And then took her back to her house. It was amazing how easy it was to return her to her room without being seen.
All those affaires of his had taught him something, he thought as he wandered back down the street toward his house, having sent his carriage trundling off before him. There was a thick fog settling as dawn came up, and he felt like walking. The trees looked blurred and furry, as the fog drifted in, until he found himself moving along in a small room walled by cloud.
It was a remarkably lonely feeling, as if he carried a small patch of ground with him, and all the rest of the world was unpeopled.
10
From The Earl of Hellgate, Chapter the Sixth
I told her that I would like to pass all my Nights with her, and she responded that she had only Days to give. I taxed her with being ungrateful to never have lent me a single one of her nights, but wasted them in the solitude of her bedchamber. She said…
Griselda took the news that Josie intended to visit her modiste that very morning and order an entirely new suite of clothing extremely cheerfully, although she had to miss a promise to ride in Hyde Park. Josie noticed that she was extremely vague about who she had promised to meet.
“I’d much rather come with you,” she said. “You know I’ve loathed that corset contraption that Madame Ba
deau fashioned for you. Yes, the corset forced you into gowns that were approximately the same measurements as Imogen. But neither one of us, darling, has Imogen’s body. And frankly, although I have never said so quite so openly, I believe that the two of us are blessed.”
“How can you say that?” Josie asked, more amused than anything else. This morning she seemed to have a new acceptance of her figure. It wasn’t perfect, but it no longer felt repulsive.
Griselda was wearing a fetching morning gown of light lawn scattered with posies. It came a little short, in the French style, and showed an enticing pair of slippers. She looked beautiful.
But of course, Josie reminded herself, Griselda’s figure wasn’t as plumpy as her own. There was nothing stout about Griselda. She was—
“You and I have precisely the same figure,” Griselda was saying. “And Josie, as I have told you from the moment you entered this house, our figure is one adored by men.”
“So much so that they’ve called me everything from a piglet to a sausage,” Josie pointed out.
“Crogan was an unpleasant fool, forced into courting you by his brother. And I do believe that Darlington was responding more to your corset than to your figure. You had no figure with that corset.”
Josie was starting to think the same herself. “Do you think it’s too late?” she said, her voice growing rather thin as she said it.
“Absolutely not.”
“Wait a moment!” Josie said. “What happened with you and Darlington? Last night?”
A smug little smile danced on Griselda’s lips.
“You did it,” Josie breathed. “You seduced him!”
“Well, not in the strictest meaning of the word,” Griselda said, a frown creasing her brow. “I certainly hope that you didn’t form the opinion that I am in any way easy, Josie. That was a most improper conversation. I’m afraid that Sylvie is French, you know.”
“I know that.”
“The French like nothing better than to talk of naughty subjects,” and that was obviously all Griselda was going to say of it, because she was gathering her reticule and her shawl. “We must go now. Madame Rocque grows more sought after every season. We shall have to pay her at least double to give you a gown on the spot. But I ordered an evening gown from her three weeks ago. If she has it ready, she can simply adjust it for you.”