Lydia flinched at the finality in Gideon’s tone.
Admittedly, she had behaved stubbornly by not sending word to him this past week of exactly why she could not go downstairs dressed in black, as he had said she should. But she had not thought to anger him so much by stubbornly remaining in her bedchamber that he was now contemplating sending her away altogether. Possibly to another of his properties, so that he did not have to be bothered with so much as looking at her let alone suffering her recalcitrant behavior.
She chewed on her bottom lip before answering him. “I apologize if I have offended you, Your Grace,” she said dully.
He looked at her coolly. “You have not offended me, nor in this case do you have reason to apologize to me when it is I, and to a far lesser extent my housekeeper, who should have realized before now how ill the décor in this room suits you.”
Lydia blinked her surprise at his having even noticed that clash of colors. So many gentlemen would not have done so. “The room itself is of lovely proportions, and that pleasantness is added to by the large windows that look out over the front of the house. It is only the pink color in here which is a little…jarring,” she concluded awkwardly before frowning.
“More than a little,” he rasped.
She winced. “I had thought your anger just now was directed toward me rather than the room.”
Gideon’s shrewd pale gaze leveled on her, his expression unreadable. “Should it have been?”
Lydia felt the warmth of color in her cheeks. “I have been…unrelenting in my manner this past week by remaining in my room, when what I should have done was send word down to you to explain that as I do not possess a black gown, I am simply unable to do as you instructed. I should also have arranged to send word to a dressmaker in the nearest town, so that she might call and measure me for new gowns,” she hastened to add. “If you are still determined I should wear mourning,” she added with her own reluctance to do so.
“You do not possess a black gown,” he repeated evenly.
Her gaze lowered so she no longer had to look into his accusing eyes. “Please feel free to look in my wardrobe to confirm I am speaking the truth.”
The silence which followed her admission grew increasingly uncomfortable the longer it continued. Nor did Gideon make any move to go to her wardrobe to confirm her claim.
So tacitly accepting she was telling him the truth?
All this was on top of the awkwardness Lydia already felt at being alone with Gideon again, for the first time since the night he had kissed and caressed her so intimately, she still ached with the need to feel that pleasure again.
She had not dared, during all that time, to venture downstairs in search of brandy or milk again at a time of night when she believed the rest of the household had retired. Not for fear of their intimacy happening again, but because she knew it wouldn’t.
She had thought of Gideon often during this past week. Of those intimacies they had shared in the kitchen that night, and of how her body had responded so readily to his touch.
This evening, he once again appeared handsome in black evening clothes. But from what else Lydia had taken in about him, before she lowered her gaze, this past week’s interim did not seem to have been any kinder toward him than it had to her. There were dark circles of sleeplessness visible about his eyes, and the lines bracketing his mouth also seemed to be etched more deeply than they had the week before.
She drew in a hissing breath now at the feel of the cool touch of Gideon’s fingers beneath her chin as he gently lifted her face until she had no choice but to look at him.
What she saw in his expression was regret, and something else in his eyes, something less definable that was quickly masked as his lids narrowed.
She chewed briefly on her bottom lip before speaking. “I admit to having deliberately kept to my bedchamber this past week.” She sighed.
“Why have you?” he prompted softly.
“I— You— When I came downstairs that morning a week ago after—after—” She once again avoided his too-knowing gaze. “You would not allow me to explain my choice of gown, but insisted I should not come down the stairs again until I was wearing black. As I could not to do that, I…I decided I would simply stay in my room.”
He eyed her knowingly. “And so forcing me to be the one to relent?”
“No!” Lydia instantly denied. “Well…perhaps,” she admitted with a grimace. “But mainly I was hurt by your refusal to even give me the opportunity to explain.” She fell silent as she realized how much of her own emotions she might have revealed by that statement.
Her physical response to Gideon was undeniable—even now, she could feel the desire for him rising within her once again, the slickness between her thighs, the aching of her breasts.
But these past days of seclusion, when her thoughts had often drifted away while Charlotte chattered about inanities, Lydia had also realized there were other things she liked about Gideon.
His intelligence was apparent in every word he spoke.
He was also different to every other man she had ever met. Tall and imposing, almost imperious, and yet that night in the kitchen, Gideon had not only warmed a saucepan of milk for her himself, but he had also talked to her of his dead wife and their unhappy marriage.
Before making love to me until I have ached with wanting him to touch and caress me again in the same way for every moment of this past week.
It was true, Lydia had ached for those things, but she had also wished for Gideon to confide in her again as he had done that night. To open up his scarred heart to her and then allow her to offer words and caresses of comfort and understanding.
“Did my ill-temper hurt you?” he answered her at last.
Lydia’s throat moved as she swallowed. “Your refusal to allow me to explain hurt me.”
“Surely that is confirmation your own reaction was caused by my unrelenting attitude,” he drawled.
“Perhaps, but I can also be very stubborn,” she acknowledged.
“Yes, you can,” he allowed. “It is one of your most attractive traits,” he added softly.
Lydia gave him a startled glance. “Being stubborn is an attractive trait?”
His lips twisted into the semblance of a smile. “I believe it to be one, yes. People rarely stand up to me or disagree with me, Lydia. They did not do so even before I chose to exile myself from London ten years ago,” he added in a hard voice. “But you”—his expression softened—“you do not hesitate to disagree with or challenge me if you think I have spoken or behaved incorrectly.”
“Oh, I hesitate,” she acknowledged self-derisively.
“But still choose to do so anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Confirming once again that you really are not frightened of me.”
“No.”
They continued to stare at one another for several more long and intense seconds. The very air seemed to crackle with the same heat as the flames in the fireplace the longer they looked at each other.
Lydia began to tremble as those moments grew longer and even more intense, making breathing difficult and causing her breasts to swell and ache inside the fitted bodice of her gown.
Gideon was finally the one to break that silence. “I will have the housekeeper remove the pink curtains and bedcover from here as soon as possible, along with the rugs, and replace them all with ones of a more suitable color.”
Lydia stared at him. The color of this bedchamber was the last thing she had expected Gideon to return to after these minutes of such emotional intensity between them.
Gideon could see his comment had caused Lydia confusion and some hurt. But the sexual tension between the two of them was such that he knew he had to defuse the situation, or he would once again take Lydia in his arms and kiss her. This time, he had no idea whether he would be able to stop himself from taking it further.
The aching throb of his engorged cock and the tight drawing up of his balls beneath warned that he wouldn’t.
“Do you have another color you would prefer?” he continued determinedly. “Green, perhaps?” He could picture curtains the same moss-green color as her eyes. “Or possibly peach.” He glanced at the gown which so complemented the rich color of her hair and pale complexion.
Then he wished he hadn’t, as his gaze was immediately drawn to and then captured by the creamy swell of her breasts visible above the round neckline of that gown. Soft and tempting breasts that a week ago he had caressed and fondled while he suckled on her pale pink nipples until they became as fat and red as strawberries.
Dear God, so much for his wish to defuse the situation!
And his hope that his maturity and control might keep Lydia at bay.
It seemed he only had to be near Lydia again to be so completely physically aware of her the mere sight of the plump tops of her breasts was enough to render him hard and wanting.
Even swallowing the saliva now flooding his mouth sounded loud in the otherwise stillness and quiet of the room. “I should go.”
“Why should you?”
He winced. “Because if I do not, then I am going to commit an even bigger folly than the one I did a week ago.”
“You consider kissing me to have been a folly?” Her cheeks were suffused with color.
The glitter in her eyes told Gideon that reaction was caused by temper, not embarrassment. “I did not mean to insult you—”
“Didn’t you?” she challenged.
He released a heavy sigh. “This…physical awareness between the two of us is the last thing I expected.”
“At least you acknowledge that is what it is.”
His jaw tightened. “Doing so does not change the fact I do not know how best to deal with it, other than trying to ignore it.”
“Has that been successful for you this past week?” she drawled.
“Not in the least,” Gideon admitted before turning away. “And because of that, the very last thing I should have done was come to your bedchamber this evening and then remained here alone with you after your companion has gone to her bed.”
Up to now, Gideon had been doing his best to ignore the presence of the bed in the room, but now simply mentioning that piece of furniture, even though it was in connection with Lydia’s companion, was enough to draw his attention to the comfort of the large four-poster. The pink drapes at its corners and matching bedcover would have to go too, but for the moment, all Gideon was aware of was the temptation that bed represented to his rapidly slipping self-control.
His hands clenched at his sides. “Help me to resist you, Lydia,” he encouraged throatily.
She regarded him through thick lashes. “And how should I do that?”
“Insult me. Or say something to anger or annoy me.”
“Something I do too easily without even trying, it would seem,” she teased.
His wince was pained. “Not as often as I might have implied you do.”
She tilted her head questioningly. “I do not understand.”
Gideon drew in a deep and long breath. “It is far easier to keep you at a distance if I seem angry or annoyed.”
“And you wish to keep me at a distance?”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“Because I am too old and cynical, and you are too young for me to think of you as anything other than my ward,” he rasped his frustration.
“A ward you did not know until a week ago, and certainly did not ask for but had thrust upon you,” she reasoned. “As for age, it is an irrelevance when two people…like each other.”
“Only the very young are foolish enough to make such sweeping statements,” he countered dryly.
“I shall not take offense at your words, Gideon.” Her expression was one of resolve as she took a step toward him, then another, until the two of them were standing only inches apart. She looked unflinchingly into his wary gaze. “Do you like me?”
Like was far too tepid a word for what Gideon felt toward Lydia.
From the very first moment he’d set eyes on her, she’d begun to breathe life back into what he now realized had been his previous shell of an existence. A life of loneliness and the prejudice of others, but which Lydia, in her youthful acceptance of him, had simply pushed aside as being, as she said, as irrelevant as their difference in age.
Even so… “You are less intolerable than many young misses your age, I have no doubt,” he answered her.
Her lips twitched before she smiled widely, that same warmth in the green of her gaze. “How like you it is to make an insult out of a compliment. As another means of keeping me at arm’s length, I would hazard a guess?”
He moistened his top lip before speaking. “You do not currently appear to be at arm’s length. Your own or mine.”
“No.” She continued to hold his gaze as she lifted her hand to place it against his chest, in the exact spot where she would be able to detect the rapid and pounding beat of his heart. “Gideon, will you please kiss me?”
Gideon’s knees almost buckled at the thought of it. His knew his heartbeat had increased rapidly. “So that you might compare our intimacy of a week ago and decide whether or not you had imagined your responses to me?” He tried to infuse scorn into his tone, but it sounded to him more like truculence. Damn it, if he had been as young as Lydia, he might even be pouting his disappointment as to that possibly being the case.
“No,” she dismissed calmly, her hand remaining firmly against the beating of his heart. “It is because I have thought of nothing else for this past week.”
Gideon drew in a hissing breath at her once again speaking with the absolute honesty she had applied to him from the first. An honesty which had once again rendered him both speechless and motionless.
Leaving him defenseless against her?
If anyone had dared to say such a thing to him before a week ago, he would have verbally reprimanded them, and in such a way as to leave them in no doubt as to his displeasure.
Before he met Lydia.
“A lady does not so frankly reveal her desires to a man who is not already her husband or intends to be,” he stated harshly. “Sometimes not even then,” he added bitterly.
“Then I must not be a lady,” Lydia dismissed, apparently undaunted by his attempt at an insult.
In Gideon’s critical gaze, Lydia was every inch a lady.
As she was every inch a desirable woman to his cynical and jaundiced eye.
A lady and woman whom Gideon desired more than he had any other in the whole of his life.