Chapter Eight

 

She rang the bell and waited for Pepper, pacing and walking off the fog of her emotions. Phillip Warrick’s presence was so much more potent than she’d allowed herself to remember. God help her, in the middle of all those invectives, she’d nearly begged him to kiss her again—came within a breath of pressing her body against his.

Her desire for him had not faded.

Worse, it had grown over time.

Pepper came through the door with a peppermint striped satin skirt draped over her arm. “Are you changing early for tea?”

Raven shook her head. “I want a bath. Have it drawn and then I’ll send a note to Delilah that I won’t come down until dinner tonight.”

“A difficult afternoon then?” Pepper asked shyly. “I may have been watching from the windows but even downstairs there’s word that Sir Warrick was seen storming from the garden toward the stables not long ago.”

“Fascinating.” Serena crossed her arms but her pacing halted. “I’ll wear the gold tonight at dinner.”

“The gold?” Pepper hung the skirt in the wardrobe. “Making a statement are we?”

“We are.” Serena pressed her cool fingertips against her temples. “A declaration of war.”

“I have never seen anyone affect you like this.”

“It is no matter. I’ve frightened him off and he will stay out of my way after this.” She began to pull the pins from her hair to drop them on the table. “I abandoned subtlety but it’s better this way. He’ll lick his wounds and be on his best behavior from now on. Especially since he has no ally in his family. Mr. Osborne is too socially ambitious and greedy not to howl if I miss another meal and point at Sir Warrick as the cause. Phillip dare not make any more scenes and I will be free to concentrate on our true purpose here.”

“Frightened him off?” Pepper shook her head in disbelief but began to retreat to arrange the bath. “I may not know men as well as you, but by the looks of his face when you marched off from him in the garden…”

“Yes?”

Pepper shrugged. “Didn’t look like terror to me. Looked like he’d just lost something precious to him.”

Serena turned away, unwilling to hear more. “Good! He needs to be acquainted with loss for if I have my way, it is all that man will ever know.”

Pepper closed the door behind her and Serena laid her head on her hands and let the tears come.

***

Phillip rode hard as if he could outrun himself.

He didn’t want to give her words credence, didn’t want to believe anything she said. Because if she weren’t lying then it was possible for him to drown in his own guilt. The buried memories resurrected but with new force and a strange new power.

The agony of Trent’s accusations had blinded him to any study of them. Like a fatal wound, his spirit had instinctively shrunk from pressing his fingers into the rift. He’d spent all this time savaging Raven’s memory for her part in the earl’s petty revenge against him.

Now there was no avoiding it.

He abandoned his ride, unwilling to risk the animal in a selfish tantrum of his own making. The stallion’s sides were coated with sweat, lather dripping from his mouth and Phillip cursed his thoughtless cruelty. He dismounted to walk the horse, cooling him off gradually to preserve his legs.

What if I am at heart nothing but a cruel and thoughtless man?

He drank it in. He let the teeth of it cut into his skin. He’d loved her. He’d always thought he’d once loved her completely and without reserve. He’d fallen in love with a girl who had been as wild as a colt and sweetly eager for his every touch. He’d said that despite her betrayal, he had been the better man for going back and searching for her.

He’d comforted himself with the idea that he would have taken her back despite her flaws. Despite the failings in her character that swarmed his senses and made him forget everything else but having her.

Despite them.

Despite everything. And nothing.

He’d searched for her for months but there had been no sign of her and his fear of scandal had robbed him of allies. There’d been no one he could talk to for fear of admitting to her murder.

Then he’d grieved because she was surely dead.

The wound had deepened and never healed.

He had never reached for it because a man couldn’t survive it if he kept looking at the blood on his hands. Phillip had survived as one last flimsy stand against Trent, as if to say, “I live therefore I am not defeated.”

As if he could ward off failure by insisting on breathing.

Lady Serena Wellcott looked through him with those smoke colored eyes that did not shy away from carnage. Lady Serena Wellcott simmered and bristled and then leaned in close to bewitch him with her beauty and whispered, “That blood on your hands is mine.”

If she were as innocent as she claimed all those years ago, then he couldn’t retreat. Every wrong he’d committed was now tempered in a renewed forge with every cutting accusation she made.

Lady Serena Wellcott taunted him about being blind.

And he was.

But no longer.

There had to be a way back.

He’d stopped looking for Raven Wells years ago. But as Phillip turned back toward the house, he was a man inspired. He would find her again and he would heal the wounds of the past.

 

Phillip didn’t knock before he came into her room, winded from his return. He dispensed with all the pleasantries as quickly as a man tossing aside useless trash. Just like the first time he’d seen her in the salon downstairs, he had mud on his coat and clothes and Phillip decided that it was fitting.

But when he realized that Lady Wellcott was reclining in a large copper bath in the midst of the room, his momentum faltered.

“Get out!” she screeched in surprise.

He shook his head. “You don’t hate me.”

“Don’t I?”

“The fire and venom you throw at me betrays you, Lady Wellcott. Love and hate are sides of the same coin.” He knelt next to the bath, forcing himself to look only at her face. “I know because I am in the same inescapable bind. For better or worse, there has not been a single woman since you. Not one who has occupied my dreams, distracted me beyond a passing conversation. Not one who ever came close to comparing to the shadow of you. I have refused to say your name aloud. Seven years, Lady Wellcott. What would you call that? Abject hatred? I am no longer so sure of that.”

She shook her head slowly, as if dazed.

“And what of you, Lady Wellcott? Seven years and I have the feeling that you never forgot me either but that you also have done everything in your power to deny that I ever existed. For I wasn’t in hiding. If you’d wanted to confront me publicly or see to my destruction, then why wait?”

“Perhaps I was biding my time until the right moment.”

“Here I am then. Tell me you hate me if you can.”

“Get out.” It was a whisper this time, a breathless powerless thing.

“You want to destroy me, Lady Wellcott? I wonder if you haven’t already accomplished it. You want me to fight you? I won’t. I am…a fool. But I have decided that if there is redemption to be had in this world, then you alone can provide it. I don’t know what tortures you have in mind but you were right in guessing that I wouldn’t run. I will never run from you again. Do what you must. But I am going to stand my ground and earn my way back to my humanity.”

“I hate you. Go regain your humanity somewhere else and leave me to my bath, Warrick.”

He shook his head. “You win. Do you hear me? Scream the house in and tell Delilah what an ass I am. I’ll recount every sin and suffer any humiliation you dictate but I—I am yours, woman.”

“All well and good,” she whispered. “But I shall never be yours. Never.”

God help her, after so much time of wanting the man at her mercy, she was at a loss. If his ‘surrender’ was sincere, then here was the moment when she crushed him, cried out for the servants and had him banished from his beloved cousin’s home—but she couldn’t. Because the notion of sending him off, of never seeing him again or touching him had become a strange torture for her; and it was a weak excuse to alter her plans. “I should bed you just to break your heart, Phillip. I should indulge myself for selfish wicked pleasure alone, to have my fill of you before I cast you off on some roadside, you bastard. What do you think of that?”

His eyes were sad but there was also a new heat there. “Break me then. Break me if you can.”

“Phillip.”

He leaned over, gripping both sides of the tub to effectively hold her in place, but there was nothing menacing in his stance. “Serena.”

She gasped at the sound of her chosen name on his lips. Her head tipped back as he loomed over and across her, and Serena knew no fear. She reached up with her arms to encircle his neck and drew his lips down to hers, in an invitation of demand and desire.

At the first touch of the rough silk of his lips to hers, something in her unleashed with a speed and fury that ended thought. It was a hunger so sharp it stole her breath and made her cry out. Oh, god. Too long. It’s been too long!

The kiss deepened, her mouth opening quickly to taste him, to use all her senses to drink him in. His mouth was a pocket of warm velvet and he met every move she made with his own, equally hungry, until she sighed and groaned at the delicious surrender of her body to his. Electric flares of heat shimmered down her spine to pool between her hips, her arousal so fierce she could feel the molten slick begin to escape her body and slide down her inner thighs.

“Phillip, hurry.”

“No.” He shook his head, giving her a lazy grin. “If I remember it right, all we ever did was rush. I have waited seven years for this and if you think I’m going to race you to the finish; you have lost your mind, woman.”

“Really? My maid will be back to get me out of this bath, Phillip Warrick, and that will be that.”

“To Hell with it! We’ll go slow next time.”

Her eyes widened at the blatant confidence the words ‘next time’ betrayed but there was no time to do more than smile before he was kissing her again, this time with an urgency that matched her own.

For Phillip, she was a water nymph after all. Wet warm hands gripped his collar and began to send rivulets of soapy water down his back, anointing his skin with every caress. His hands roamed over the inviting landscape that was all woman.

Kissing her was ambrosia, but her breasts beckoned for his attention and Phillip growled at the age old dilemma of realizing that it wasn’t possible to taste all of her at once. It was simply a problem that demanded a man to patiently sample what he could. She was curvier, her appeal so potent just the sight of her body was pushing him over the edge. She was still a creature of lean lines but the reality of Raven surpassed his dreams. His hands were filled with the ample weight of her breasts and she arched and writhed into his every touch, increasing the pressure of his fingers, sliding her body into his hands, urging him on.

He teetered on the edge of the tub’s rolled metal sides and the fight for freedom from buttons and cloth was on. It was that or accept that he was about to climb into the copper bath fully clothed.

She laughed at his struggles, trailing her mouth down his bared chest, the low feminine vibration of it making his cock so hard it nearly pained him.

It was nearly a lost cause as he momentarily considered just diving in but within seconds, his clothes ended up in a soggy pile on the floor next to the bath. He lifted her up out of the bath to hold against him before he stepped into the water. The contact between them was electric. Slippery friction yielded ripple after ripple of pleasure and when she wrapped her bare legs around his waist, the silk hot folds of her sex meeting the rock hard jutting tower of his erection.

“Look into my eyes, Serena.”

She complied, locking her focus onto his face and absorbing the shift in his expression as he slowly entered her, lowering her masterfully downward until her tight slick channel enveloped his flesh, stretching to accommodate him, squeezing him to pull him in deeper and deeper until they were one.

She held her breath and savored it, holding very still but she was too impatient to draw the moment out. He knelt slowly in the bath until they were in the water up to their waists. He closed his eyes and Serena smiled with a sigh. She wriggled her hips to heighten the sensation of fullness and was surprised when he gripped her waist to stop her.

“Don’t move. I…need a moment.”

She leaned in to kiss his throat and then leveraged herself up using her thighs over his to reach the sensitive shell of his ear. She flicked it with her tongue and then playfully bit his earlobe. “I know what I need, Phillip, and it does not involve sitting here quietly until the water grows cold.”

He groaned as she planted a hot kiss in the sensitive well behind his ear. “As you wish, wicked lady.”

The bath was not necessarily built for what he had in mind but Phillip wasn’t about to let a minor inconvenience get in the way. He shifted back until he was kneeling at the farthest end of the tub to give her room. “Lean back.”

Her eyes fluttered with a question at the command but she obeyed him readily, eager for the movement she craved. With her legs wrapped around his waist for ballast, he slowly lowered her back until she was floating on the surface of the water. Serena smiled in delight as she realized that there was no possibility of her face slipping beneath the water, but instead that the warmth held up her—the water, her natural buoyancy and the fact that she was completely impaled by Phillip Warrick’s throbbing manhood.

At the first withdrawal and thrust, the world fell away.

She couldn’t touch him, could do nothing more than grip the rolled metal sides of the tub and ride the sensations of being at his mercy. Serena unhooked her ankles from behind his back to press the soles of her feet against the back rim of the tub for more leverage, deepening the contact and pushing out to extend the length of his strokes. He kept one arm wrapped around her hips, his hand splayed at her lower back to guide her body but the other hand was free to explore, to tease and to touch her as he wished.

She boldly caught his wrist to show him where her desires demanded his attention. He slipped his fingers downward to the small hardened nub of her clit, his touch dancing over it, rubbing her in concert with the press of his hips until she couldn’t hold back. Her hips bucked and lifted as an arc of white hot tension exploded through her frame. She grit her teeth to keep from crying out as her release began to ricochet up from the touch of his hands and his cock until she wasn’t sure where her flesh ended and his began. Spasms rocked her and she gave in to all of it, caring nothing for control and giving nothing to hold back.