The expression on Adam’s face when he saw her walking into the attic almost caused Desirée to flee. Either he was…no, he was devastated by something. She saw two envelopes and some sheets of paper in his hands.
He turned from her. “Please, if you know what’s good for you, go away—quickly.”
Only half an hour previous he’d left her carriage when Barnes pulled up in front of Number 17. With barely a nod and a muttered goodbye, he strode away through the gardens in the center of Mayfair Square to reach Number 7 on the other side.
Desirée had exchanged pleasant words with Meg and sworn Anne to unwilling silence about her mistress’s plan to leave her brother’s home again, immediately. Desirée had slipped out through the gardens at the back of the house in hopes of avoiding being seen by someone who might report to Jean-Marc.
Cautiously she closed Adam’s door and advanced. He’d removed his cloak and thrown it across a chair. His hat rested on top and his hair was tousled.
Adam didn’t face her. He stood like a man made of marble.
On tiptoe, Desirée approached until she stood immediately behind him. She settled her hands on his back and stroked him, bracing herself for him to shrug her away.
She didn’t speak and neither did he, but he bowed his head.
Adam was deeply upset and Desirée couldn’t bear it. How easy it was to push her hands beneath his arms and reach as far as possible around his chest. As easy as it was to rest her cheek on his back and just hold him.
She recalled with chagrin how before she had entered her carriage at the King’s Arms she had misheard, or translated to her better liking, what he said to her yet again. Despite her best efforts, this continued to happen but usually she did not blurt out her reactions to the foolishness. “You will take me at home?” Horrors.
Paper rustled and he pressed one of her hands tightly to him.
Desirée thought they stood there, exactly like that, for a long time before Adam said, “You have a kind heart, but you need to be at home now,” in a strained voice that unnerved her. He moved out of her arms. “Off with you.”
“Off with me?” she repeated. “No. No, absolutely not. You need me.”
“I do not need you.” And now his voice was terrible. He swung around. His flaring nostrils and tight lips caused her to take a step backward. “I don’t need anyone. I never have. Need is a liability. The wise man is alone and I am wise.”
She crossed her arms.
“You would be wise to leave me,” Adam said. “This is no time to parade that stubborn will of yours.”
“Tell me what is wrong.”
“Don’t you know when it’s dangerous to be with someone?” He tossed the papers among paints and brushes, bottles and jars on a table. “Are you so sheltered that you don’t imagine you could be harmed?”
“You would never harm me,” she told him, but her throat was dry and her heart beat faster. “Stop being unreasonable and let me help you. Is it those papers? Are they a letter? Who are they from?”
“That is not your affair,” he thundered. “By God, must I be pestered even when I’m already desperate.”
Desirée pressed her hands into the folds of her green striped kerseymere skirts. Her palms were moist. “If I were desperate, Adam,” she said in barely more than a whisper, “would you abandon me because my pride would not allow me to accept your help?”
He drove the fingers of both hands into his hair. “I would not. But that would be different.” He sank to sit on the sofa. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Your life and mine could not have been more different—could not be more different now.”
“Because no one can have suffered as you have suffered?” Distracting herself by swinging the cloak from her shoulders and putting it with Adam’s, she willed the beating at her temples to stop. “You have had a difficult life whereas mine has been simple?”
His response was to rest his elbows on his knees and shake his head, slowly, wearily.
Desirée heard Halibut complain for attention and saw him curled on Adam’s bed. Should she try to persuade Adam to lie down?
“You deserve happiness,” Adam said. “And you shall have it if only you will allow Jean-Marc to guide you. Stop rebelling and do as he tells you to do.”
“And then I shall be happy?” She laughed when she felt like crying. “How does that happen? I attend all manner of boring, meaningless affairs and smile at prancing gentlemen as if I find them fascinating and desirable? Then from among those who ask for my hand, the one who is richest and has the most exalted title will be given permission to take possession of me?” The choked cry that escaped her throat didn’t please her.
Adam looked up at her, his eyes shadowed. “Yes. That is the way of it and it is your duty to accept the wisdom of others more able than you to make such decisions.”
“I see.” Helplessness she could not accept stole her composure entirely. “But your lot is more difficult. Hmm, I see. And will you allow others to make your decisions, and tell you what must happen?”
“My dear girl, we are not helping each other. I need to think. Please leave me alone and when my head is clearer, I will ask if you would be kind enough to let me visit you.”
“Ooh!” She made fists and whirled away, marched as far as the bed and back again. Bending over him, she said, “You know I cannot—and will not—leave you like this. I ask you again, what has happened?”
Adam fell against the back of the couch and looked at her directly. “I will never have what I truly want. It isn’t possible.” His throat moved sharply as he swallowed. “But I will do anything to make sure you find happiness.”
“I asked you a question.”
“Aye. And I should tell you that I have a note from my brother Lucas asking if you and Miss Williams will join us for luncheon tomorrow at the Clarendon Hotel in Albermarle Street. Naturally Jean-Marc will not agree, but I don’t subscribe to the notion that a lady should be ignorant of her own affairs.”
She did not believe that an invitation to luncheon with Lucas Chillworth was the reason for Adam’s low mood. “I should like to go,” she told him. “And I’m sure Jean-Marc will agree unless you tell him he should not.”
Adam raised an eyebrow. He had placed his hands beneath his legs on the couch.
“You won’t tell him I shouldn’t go, will you? After all, Anne will chaperon me, and you will protect both of us.”
He laughed and she did not at all like the way that sounded.
“You cannot know how bored I am,” she told him, then closed her mouth and sat sideways on the couch where she could watch him closely. “No matter about my feelings—except I do want to go tomorrow. There were two envelopes. Was the other nothing more than a pleasant invitation?”
“You do not stop. You press and press as if you are certain you will have your own way in everything. Princess Desirée asks, and she must be told, and she must get whatever she wants.”
For a moment words failed her. She glanced at his mouth and, angry as she was, recalled how heavenly it had felt against hers. His black hair, so unfashionably long and curling, had an effect on unmentionable places within her. She barely restrained herself from touching it, and from kissing that mouth of his.
“Good afternoon to you, Desirée,” he said and rolled his face away.
Desirée abandoned caution and knelt on the sofa beside him. She observed him with narrowed eyes and resolved to be silent until he spoke again.
A pulse beat hard in his neck and a muscle beside his mouth twitched. He pulled his hands from beneath his legs and curled them on his thighs. Adam had the most beautiful hands she’d ever seen. Large hands, but so well shaped and with long fingers. A dusting of hairs showed dark against his white cuffs.
With one finger, Desirée touched each of the whitened knuckles on the hand nearest to her. She followed the raised bones all the way to his wrist. With the backs of her fingers, she stroked the hair to discover how it felt and was surprised to find it soft.
The sharpest tightening pulled between her legs. She ached and wanted the ache to stay forever.
With great care she pulled his fingers out straight and chafed skin that was too cold.
Still Adam didn’t speak but the muscles in his face constricted harder. His eyes were not only closed, but squeezed tight shut.
“Let me help you,” she murmured. “Perhaps you should rest on your bed. Yes, that is what you should do. I will help you get comfortable and then I will watch over you while you sleep. You are not alone, Adam, because you have me. You always will.”
He drew his lips back from his teeth.
“You are suffering and I cannot bear it,” she told him. “You have often looked after me, now I shall look after you.” With that she loosened his neckcloth and undid the top button of his shirt. She found she shook terribly, and she knew she should not be so familiar, but he had no one else to do these things for him.
She saw him open his eyes and stare straight ahead as if he saw something she did not see.
“Take off your coat,” she told him. “I will cover you with your quilt. Come, Adam, lean forward.”
“Why must I be tortured?” He cried out so suddenly that Desirée started to tumble from the couch until he grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her so close only inches separated their faces. “You will help me be more comfortable? You will have me rest on my bed while you watch over me?” His laughter was awful this time. “Your naiveté frightens me. You would be helpless in the hands of an unscrupulous man.”
Oh, yes, you may be an unscrupulous man with me if you like. To be helpless with you would be heaven.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he roared. “What do you want of me?”
To be your love. To live with you for the rest of my life. To have your children, to make you happy always.
“Desirée?”
If she told him her thoughts, she would lose him, lose what little she could share with him. “All I want is to ease your sadness.” She lowered her voice. “And chase away your anger.”
He moved and she could not have escaped even if she’d wanted to. With a strength that rendered her helpless, Adam got to his feet, hauling her with him. She was crushed against him, her breasts flattened to his chest, her shoulders raised by the force of his grip.
A rage in his eyes faded to hollowness, as if he was besieged by questions he either couldn’t or wouldn’t ask.
Slowly he took his hands from her shoulders, but only so that he could wrap her in his arms, wrap her in an embrace so wild she felt him shudder again and again.
Desirée slipped her hands about his waist and raised her face. She stood on tiptoe and settled her lips on the place where the pulse throbbed in his throat. She nuzzled him there, and held him tighter.
“No,” Adam said. He set her feet flat again, but he didn’t withdraw from her, rather he settled his chin on top of her head, and he used his palms to massage her back, jerky caresses from her neck to her waist, and the spreading of a hand over the back of her head, fleeting passes on her neck.
Adam pressed himself into her, into the cradle of her belly and she blazed when she felt That Part of him, the hardness of it, the way it pulsed—its size. Her face throbbed and her breasts prickled.
She wanted him to kiss her. “Kiss me, Adam. The way you did before.”
Once more he studied her face, touched her face, but his kiss when it came was firm and closed, and delivered to her forehead. He rocked her, kept his lips on her brow, and each breath he took sounded labored.
From her face, to the sides of her neck, over her shoulders and to her elbows and, finally, at her waist, he stroked her, and when he held her waist, he urged her even more tightly to him. Desirée could not help but return his pressure with an urgent thrust of her hips.
Holding her beneath her arms, resting his thumbs beside her breasts, Adam pushed his face into the crook of her neck and Desirée laid her cheek against his hair.
His thumbs were beneath her breasts then. She could think of nothing but how it might feel if she wore no clothes, if Adam wore no clothes, and they stood like this, and he covered her breasts completely, and she could feel That Part of him hot, heavy, seeking on her belly, between her legs.
She gasped aloud. She had pored over books not intended for her eyes, studied diagrams and explanations. Still she was not entirely certain what the details of the act of love might be, but she grew moist. The temptation was to part her legs against his thigh, to rock back and forth on the hard muscle there, but not even that would be enough. There was more and if she understood it correctly, as she thought she did, then he would put himself inside her.
Desirée kissed his cheek, did her best to reach his mouth only he did not help her. If he entered her body, they would be one, with no beginning and no end and she knew she would feel whole as she never had before.
“I am so wrong,” Adam said against the skin of her neck. “I have made it impossible not to explain the cruel facts of our situation. And when I have finished, you will understand that we cannot be together again. My fault, not yours. I should have resisted—only I couldn’t. It was impossible from the moment you returned and I could tell you felt at least some of what I feel.”
Desirée kept her eyes closed. “I feel weak. It is from wanting you and I shall always want you. If you try to keep us apart—well, I shall not allow you to do that.”
“Silly, passionate girl. You will do what’s best. Don’t tremble so. Desirée? Oh, I have done you damage. Don’t faint. The emotion is too much for one who has no experience.”
“I shall not faint,” she told him, but her limbs didn’t want to hold her and she sagged against him. “I do have experience. I have kissed and been kissed, and I have been held.” She had been held so that she felt her womanhood flower yet it had not and never could quench her thirst for him.
Adam muttered something that sounded like a curse and picked her up. “I have failed your brother, and Meg. You are not for me yet I have…I have awakened you and that was not for me to do.”
He took her to the bed and stretched her out on top of the quilt. She smiled up at him and moved away from the edge of the mattress.
“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he asked her.
She lowered her eyelashes.
What she’d craved happened then. Adam sat beside her and settled his hands over her breasts. When she looked at him, he watched his fingers as he passed them back and forth over her flesh. Through her bodice, he squeezed the tip of each breast between finger and thumb. He grew pale then paler. The squeezes became a gentle pulling and her bottom arched from the bed. Adam pressed between her legs and even through her heavy skirts there was a raw and needy response, an ecstatic response.
“Why?” Adam said and the pallor had reached his lips. “You were made for me, but not meant for me.”
Gathering her courage, Desirée caught him by the hair at his neck and pulled his face to her breast. And she reached between his big thighs to finally feel the true shape of him. Adam cried out and grew still. His body seemed to leap within her probing fingers and the heat in him amazed her. There he was like molten iron.
It was not enough. “Come to me,” she said. “Lie with me and show me everything.” As she spoke, she urged him to climb on the mattress with her.
“God forgive me,” he said in a strangled voice, and kissed her. He leaned on her and he was too heavy, but his weight thrilled her. He kissed her as he had the day before, but with more force. She could only respond as he allowed her to do so. The power and the control were his. Her mouth was forced wide open and filled with his tongue. His searching rocked her face and turned her head this way and that, and she continued to hold and stroke the evidence of his virility.
He paused to breathe, rested his head on the pillow beside her.
“Let’s stay here,” she told him. “There is plenty of room for two in this bed. We can hold each other until it grows late and I must return home. I will comfort you like this and you will comfort me. Lie down.”
The only sound he made was a sort of moan that faded at once. He released her hold on him and stood up, taking her arms from around his neck.
“Adam?”
He stared at her while he backed away, didn’t stop staring as he gathered up his cloak and threw it around his shoulders. “I must leave you because I don’t trust myself to stay. I am only a man and I am already tried beyond endurance. We must talk so that I may explain what I can’t expect you to know otherwise. After that, we must not be alone again.”
Moving was out of the question. Desirée had turned cold and stiff. Even Halibut, who had roused himself to sniff her face, could not distract her or make her limbs work.
“If you wish, we shall have lunch with my brother tomorrow,” Adam said. “Anne Williams must be there. And when I return you to Number 17, I will ask Jean-Marc’s permission to visit with you there. Only in your home can it be safe. I will have to make you accept what I have been forced to accept.”
He left her then.