The look on Mr Ambrose’s face was like nothing words could describe. It was like an iceberg spewing fire, like a volcano frozen in mid-explosion, and yet something entirely other and far, far more. It was completely hard and empty, and yet underneath that…
No. I really couldn’t describe it.
It was Mr Ambrose. Pure and simple, and yet incredibly complicated.
I moved towards him, until I was just a foot or two away. With every step, I was incredibly conscious of the fact that now there was nothing between my skin and the outside world but a thin, flowing chemise. Air brushed against parts of me that hadn’t been exposed since I was four and my mother had dunked me in the bathtub. And all in all, that had been a very different sort of experience.
Mr Ambrose’s coldly burning eyes watched my every step as I approached. When I reached up to touch his face, his hand shot up with incredible speed, trapping my fingers in a vice-tight grip, keeping me from getting any farther. The growl that ripped from his throat was the rumble of a cracking mountain.
‘Are you trying to drive me mad?’
I lifted an eyebrow. ‘You’re still fully clothed in this heat. You are already mad, Sir. I’m just trying to make it a bit more fun.’
Tentatively, I tried to move my hand. His grip tightened, so I simply stepped towards him, into him, and leaned against his chest.
‘Hmmm…’
His whole body stiffened - and that’s saying something! For Mr Ambrose, it was perfectly normal to walk around as if he had an iron rod up his arse. Now, though, it was as if he himself were the iron rod, or a statue carved from bedrock.
All the better! If he didn’t move, he was all mine to play with.
Standing up on my tiptoes, I leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to the corner of his perfectly sculpted mouth. No matter that he was standing as stiff as a board - the skin there felt soft, and incredibly inviting. I bestowed another kiss, a little closer to the centre, nipping at his lip.
‘Mr Linton…!’
His voice was strangled. The movement of his lips against mine was a delicious appetiser.
‘You know,’ I whispered, ‘if I didn’t know you, the fact that you want me to dress up in men’s clothes and keep calling me “Mister” when I kiss you might give me strange ideas.’
A choked sound of outrage came from the back of his throat, and hurriedly I raised my free hand, placing one finger on his lips.
‘Psht. Don’t worry. I know better. And if I didn’t know your tastes before-’ Mashing myself up against him, I pressed myself into his hard body. Hard everywhere. ‘-I know now.’
His eyes flashed like icebergs in a thunderstorm and, for a moment, I was tempted to reach down and drive home my point. But no. Not yet, anyway. I had decided that if I couldn’t go all the way, I was going to take my time, and enjoy every single minute of the journey.
‘Would you be so kind as to let go of my hand?’ I asked, in what was in my opinion a very sweet voice, considering he was almost crushing my poor fingers.
‘That depends,’ he growled, ‘on what you plan to do with it.’
‘Why, to play a little game. Nothing more.’
‘In that case,’ he told me, his grip tightening even more, ‘I think I’d rather keep hold of it!’
Spoilsport! He apparently hadn’t had the same epiphany as yours truly yet. He apparently didn’t plan to have a little bit of fun. Too bad. I would just have to change his mind for him.
‘You won’t let go?’
‘No.’
‘Not under any circumstances?’
‘None.’
‘A shame. Well…’ I sighed. ‘Then I’ll simply have to use my other hand.’
Before he could do a thing, I had slid my free hand around the back of his neck and pulled myself up until my lips were on a level with his. The kiss was swift, soft, and incredibly exhilarating. It was the first time that I had taken control, the first time I had really kissed him, not the other way around.
And he kissed me back. The rest of his body stayed hard as iron, but his lips melted underneath mine, allowing me entry into his secret world for just one moment. When that moment ended, we were both left breathless, staring at each other with searing intensity.
‘Why?’ he rasped.
‘Because I want you!’
His eyes grew even more intense.
‘Why?’ he repeated.
‘Hell if I know! Do you know why you want me?’
He thought about that for a moment. ‘No. Definitely not.’
I tightened my hold on his neck. ‘So maybe we should just try it and find out.’
His arms ensnared me, pulling me closer. ‘Maybe.’
Our lips brushed tentatively, testing the waters. Oh, and what sweet waters they were. It felt like tasting the fountain of youth, with water from the fountain of unbridled lust mixed in. Our arms and hands were tightly around each other, refusing to let go, but even they didn’t hold on as tightly as our eyes.
‘You,’ he informed me, a storm raging in those sea-coloured orbs of his, ‘are a lecherous, wilful, undisciplined little wench with the mouth of a tavern girl!’
‘And you,’ I told him, ‘are a miserly, chauvinistic bastard with a rock for a heart and a stone for a brain!’
There was a moment of silence - then our mouths clashed in a kiss so hard, so fast, that it would have caused a deadly accident on any road. It might still, here, in the middle of the jungle: with his arms tightly around me, I felt about ready to die and go to heaven. When we broke apart, we were both panting.
‘There!’ I smirked up at him. ‘Does that feel like the mouth of a tavern girl?’
‘I wouldn’t know. When we get back to London, should I do some comparative research?’
‘Don’t you dare, you…you…!’
His mouth silenced me. And mine did the same to his. I had never before realised how wonderful silence could be. I had always felt the need to speak out, to make myself heard, but right then and there, in Mr Ambrose’s arms, I wanted nothing but to silently sink into him. My shy fingers, exploring his chest, his back, the hard muscles of his arms, did all the talking that was needed without having to say a word.
One of my shy fingers, suddenly not so shy anymore, slipped into his tailcoat, traveling up the hard ridges of his abdomen, with only a thin shirt between us, and…
Coming from Behind
The muscles under my fingers jerked and petrified.
‘Mr Linton!’
‘What?’ My lips teased the corner of his mouth. ‘Is something the matter, Sir?’
‘What is your hand doing down there?’
Catching one of the buttons of his shirt between two fingers, I started to twirl it around. ‘Try to guess.’
‘Mr Linton-!’
His voice broke off abruptly when I undid the button and slipped my hand inside.
‘Mr Linton!’
‘No, no,’ I corrected him courteously. ‘Miss, remember? I’m a Miss. But you…’ My eyes widened as my fingers explored farther down. ‘You are “Mister” all right! Oh, yes, quite definitely Mister!’
‘You little…!’
Suddenly, I was airborne, my hand ripped from his shirt, my feet off the ground. It took a moment for me to realise that Mr Ambrose had swept me up in his arms and was carrying me towards a giant of a tree, some of its gnarled old roots reaching as high as my knees. With the eye of a man who knew exactly what he wanted, he headed straight for the right root and set me down so my face was level with his. Grasping my face with both hands, he claimed my mouth with hungry ferocity.
‘God!’ he breathed against my lips. ‘I have no idea why I am doing this. It is madness! It is waste and risk and irresponsibility - but I can’t stop! I-cannot-stop!’
‘Then don’t!’ I whispered. I didn’t want to think about him stopping to kiss me now. I didn’t want to think about him ever stopping.
Then something he had said earlier suddenly drifted back into my mind:
r />
When we get back to London, should I do some comparative research?
When we get back to London…
I stiffened in his arms, averting my face when his lips tried to find mine again. Good God! Was I stupid enough for this to occur to me only now? Of course we couldn’t keep doing this forever! Of course we would return to London, eventually! And of course we would be back in the office, where I would have to pretend to be a man. This thing…Whatever it was we had between us - would it have to stop when we returned to London? Could it stop? Could I?
Somehow, I doubted that jumping on Mr Ambrose and chewing on his lips would be compatible with my male disguise. If people found out - My aunt, my uncle, Ella…Oh God! Ella! She would die of guilt! She would think I had been seduced by a ruthless rake (never mind that it had actually been the other way around) and would torture herself for all eternity for not noticing earlier and putting a stop to it! And as for my friends, Flora, Eve and Patsy…
I swallowed, hard.
Patsy.
Oh dear.
Oh dear oh dear.
I remembered all too clearly the day when Patsy had attempted to hold a suffragist rally in Hyde Park, and had been steamrollered by Mr Rikkard Ambrose’s icy eyes and masterful rhetoric. If Patsy found out that I had succumbed to Mr Ambrose’s dubious charms…
Well, let’s just put it this way: I had better quickly discover a way to survive a stab wound through the heart from a sharpened parasol.
And then, of course, even worse than Patsy, there was the one person who would probably be most horrified if the truth about me and Mr Rikkard Ambrose came to light: Mr Rikkard Ambrose. He had made no secret of his disdain for women, no secret of the fact that if I wanted to work for him, I had to do so disguised as a man. If I were revealed as a woman, and, moreover, a woman with whom he was having an illicit affair, the scandal would be so enormous it would fill the newspapers from London to Kuala Lumpur. My heart picked up the pace. The mere thought of his reaction…!
Taking a deep breath, I fought down the rising panic and got a grip on myself.
No need to fret, Lilly, I told myself. What happens in the jungle, stays in the jungle. Tropical trees and monkey dung are more than enough proof of that. You’ll just have to hope that these unfeminist cravings you have are due to tropical fever and will vanish as soon as you set foot on good old English soil.
‘What’s the matter?’ touching my cheek with a gentleness I would never have believed him capable of, Mr Ambrose lifted my face until my gaze met his.
‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘Kiss me!’
*~*~**~*~*
‘Stop! We’ve arrived.’
Halting, I looked around. There was nothing but jungle to be seen. No sign of the landmark that was described in the manuscript. And it wasn’t really the kind of landmark that could be overlooked.
‘Are you sure, Sir?’
He gave me a level gaze.
Of course he was sure. He was Rikkard Ambrose.
‘But how do you know? How do you know we’ve travelled ten miles along the river yet, as it says in the manuscript?’
‘Because I counted my steps. A simple trick, if you can keep them steady and regular.’
Which he no doubt could. Regular as clockwork.
‘Hm…’ I gazed around, searching for the landmark. Oh dear. Maybe this was going to be a bit more difficult than I had imagined.
‘You mentioned some kind of landmark earlier,’ Karim said, with his customary atrocious timing. ‘What is it, anyway?’
I cleared my throat. ‘A mountain.’
There was a moment of silence. And, since it emanated from both Mr Ambrose and Karim, I hoped to hell it wasn’t pregnant!
‘Mr Linton,’ my dear employer finally said, his voice cold and controlled, ‘in case you have not noticed, we are surrounded by one-hundred-feet-tall trees on all sides. We cannot even see the ground a few yards away, let alone any mountains!’
‘I noticed!’ I snapped. ‘I’m working on it! I’ll find a solution!’
‘Indeed?’
‘Don’t act so…so…ice-cold all-knowing arse-like! Do you have any ideas?’
He just looked at me. That cool, hard, look told me everything without words: he did not need to have ideas, because that’s what he paid me for.
‘We can always climb a tree,’ Karim suggested.
‘Oh yes?’ I arched an eyebrow at him. ‘And who would be crazy enough to climb one of those monstrosities?’
This time, it wasn’t just one gaze I felt on me. It was two. And they were both extremely calculating.
‘Oh no!’ I took a step back. ‘No, no, nonononono, no, no! Forget it! Never in this life or the next!’
*~*~**~*~*
‘Bloody tyrannical, insufferable, domineering bastard!’ My hand gripped the branch above me and I pulled myself up, just managing to keep a hold of the slippery, wet wood. ‘Curse him to hell and back! Bastardo! Avaro!’
Accompanied by a cacophony of Portuguese and Spanish swear words, I slowly made my way up the tree. Now and again, an orangutan would watch me quizzically from a neighbouring tree, probably wondering what this hairless rat on two legs was doing up here. I was wondering the same thing myself.
‘Are you there yet?’ a familiar cool voice rose up to me from far below.
Halting for a moment, I looked up at the eighty feet or so of slippery tree above me. ‘Not quite.’
‘Well, get a move on! We don’t have all day!’
Clenching my teeth, I bit back the selection of favourites from my collection of international curse words that I would have liked to hurl at him. ‘Yes, Sir! Right away, Sir!’
‘And don’t fall off! A fall from this height would kill you, and I don’t want to waste any time on a burial!’
‘Very understandable, Sir. I will do my best to spare you the inconvenience…’
…you self-centred son of a bachelor!
I grabbed the next branch.
Do you want to know what was most annoying about all this? You might think that it was the fact that my chemise was torn in more places than I could count, or that I had leaves and twigs tangled everywhere in my hair, or even, oh, I don’t know, the fact that I was hovering in a tree fifty yards above the ground, ready to fall to my death at any moment.
But no.
The most annoying thing about all of this was that, while I was climbing this thrice-blasted tree and he egged me on from below with his maddening little comments, all I really wanted to do was get down there and shut him up. With my lips.
Yes. That’s how far I was gone. That bloody bastard was the one who had sent me up here in the first place, and all I wanted to do when I got down again was throw myself into his arms and kiss him senseless. Now, I ask you, is that a sensible feminist approach to things?
A monkey on the tree next to me offered his opinion on the matter, by turning its back on me and waggling its impressive red bottom in my face.
Even the monkeys thought I was pathetic. Fantastic!
After one hundred and twenty-one more branches, and three hundred seventy-two more are-you-there-yets, I was finally as high as I dared to go. The branch I was sitting on already creaked suspiciously under my generous derrière, and I had a suspicion that the branches farther up would be even less likely to approve of my favourite diet of solid chocolate.
From far below me, out of the nether regions where the devils of hell lived, came a cool voice: ‘Are you there yet?’
I counted to ten, then decided even counting to a million wouldn’t help to cool my temper down, and simply answered: ‘Yes.’
‘Adequate. Though you took your time about it! What do you see?’
For the first time since reaching the upper regions of the tree I looked around - and words failed me.
A steaming sea of green velvet stretched in front of me in all directions. We had chosen a tree for my little climbing exercise that was higher than all the others around it, and so I ha
d an excellent view of what people called ‘the jungle’. The word didn’t do it justice. Something more was needed. Something chaotic and beautiful and infinitely large and breathtaking. A colourful bird rose above a tree in the distance, calling out over the jungle with a mournful cry that tugged at my heart. Far, far away in the distance I could see a sparkling band of water glittering between the majestic trees and-
‘Mr Linton!’
-and I had better cut this description short if I wanted to keep my job.
‘Yes, Sir! I’m working on it, Sir!’
Ordering my eyes to stop staring in wonder and get back to work, I started searching the distant horizon for a mountain. It didn’t take me long. The peak rose high and solitary into the air, covered with luscious trees about halfway up its slopes, then slowly turning sparser until, at the very top, it revealed a jagged, bare stretch of rock. Pulling the compass Mr Ambrose had reluctantly entrusted to me out of its pouch, I let it snap open and levelled it at the distant crest.
‘Mr Linton? What are you doing up there!’
‘My work! Be quiet! That shouldn’t be too difficult for you, now, should it?’
I watched as the compass needle teetered and finally came to a halt. I took a good, long look at the face of the instrument to make sure everything was in order, then nodded to myself.
‘All right!’ I called down. ‘The mountain is to the west! Do you hear? We have to head westwards!’
‘Adequate.’
Blast him! Would it kill him to say ‘Good work’ just once in his bloody life?
Yes, he’d probably choke on it.
‘Now come down here Mr Linton, and stop wasting time! This isn’t a sightseeing tour!’
‘Yes, Sir! Right away, Sir!’
I tucked away the compass and was just about to start sliding down the tree again when something caught my eye. Some way off, in a patch of trees that wasn’t quite as thick as the surrounding jungle, a scrap of colour flashed. Freezing, I looked closer. There was movement there. Movement and-
Oh dear.
‘Um…Sir?’