Wherein Giles’s Hands Could Carry the World
As soon as the bedchamber door locked behind them, Audrina understood why she had requested the same room she had stayed in two weeks ago, when first arriving at the Goat and Gauntlet. It was for the unspoken hope of a moment like this: to replace the shame and fright of locked away from with the delight of locked away with.
She turned from Giles to remove her boots, feeling nervous and powerful at once. It was an unlikely setting for a seduction, this simple, clean bedchamber with a small desk and a privacy screen—and a pencil post bed, covered in a pale piecework quilt that seemed, in its elegant jumble of patterns, an apt reflection of Audrina’s feelings.
The walls were blue as Giles’s eyes; the fireplace was of white-painted brick. It was like being in the sky, unmoored and free.
But this was hardly a moment to go flitting off into fancy. This was a moment for locking the door. Building up the fire. Pulling back the counterpane on the bed, making a cocoon of crisp sheets and heavy bed-curtains.
This whole journey was a cocoon, and soon enough she would have to leave it and stretch her wings. For now, though, she was wrapped in lost time, and when she turned back to Giles, tall and solid and smiling, he cradled her face in his hands.
Gently, he brushed her lips with his, then pulled back to look at her. “All the times I said I was not going to kiss you, I couldn’t bear for that to be the end of the sentence. The word yet always followed in my thoughts.”
“Yet you seemed so determined not to.”
“I had to be very determined indeed. When a beautiful, brave, curious, passionate woman wants to kiss a man—well. It seems like the best thing in the world.”
“I’m not such a fool as to argue with that description of me. But what’s different this time? Are you going to stop?” She covered his fingers with hers, holding his hand to her cheek. “Tell me now if kisses are all you want, or if you want to stop.”
“I never wanted to stop.” His thumb traced her cheekbone. “The difference this time is why we are doing it.”
“What it means.” Her voice was quiet over the desire that began to flow and pool, liquid within her.
“Yes.” He seemed to look deep into her, sifting through her every thought. It was different for her this time, because she chose him as her partner: not because he was at hand, but because he was Giles.
When he kissed her again, she rose to her toes to meet his lips. A deeper kiss, and she threaded her hands through the short silk of his hair to pull him closer. Sipping, tasting, a pressure of lips melting into a sweet clash of tongues. The heat of his mouth on hers made winter fall away.
Was this wrong? Too much or not enough? She couldn’t ask what passion meant to him; not now. Not when she was all stammering need, halting and wanting and hoping. She did not even know what she hoped he would say.
So they kissed: deep kisses that made wetness slick between her thighs, gentle ones that made her strain for more. Laughing kisses as his mouth danced over her cheeks and nose; then demanding kisses that crushed their bodies together until she could feel his solid shaft, pressed between their bellies.
When she sank down from her tiptoes, breaking their link, he was breathing as hard as she was. A hot flush colored his cheekbones. God bless the complexion of a redhead, which proved he felt as much desire as she.
“We must get you undressed,” she said. It was the work of two to tug free his boots and strip off his heavy woolen coat. His cravat, he untied with steady hands and a slight smile as she watched, hungry for every fraction of skin exposed.
Then he worked free his cuff links, smooth jasper set into gold.
Audrina smiled and laid them on the wooden desk for him. “When you removed these in the kitchen yesterday, I had a treacherous urge to take them away from you so that you couldn’t put your sleeves back down.”
“You liked that, did you? I never guessed at the time. I took off half my clothes in that kitchen and you didn’t seem to turn a hair.”
“Yes, well, I’ve been told more than once that I’m not as proper as I pretend to be.”
“I am delighted to hear it.” He made a great show of rolling up his sleeves, shifting his hands to make the muscles of his forearms jump and flex. “Look at that. Do you find yourself overcome by lust? I’m not the slightest bit tempted to put my cuff links back on.”
“Are you tempted to take your shirt off?”
He blinked. “I like this improper mood of yours.” Within a minute, he had unbuttoned and removed his waistcoat, then tugged off the braces of his trousers.
Audrina caught hold of one and tugged it toward her. “Is this a handle for retrieving a Giles?”
“He is fair and fully caught, my lady.” With an are you ready look, he pulled free the tails of his shirt. Audrina gave a quick, breathless nod, and at last, he bared himself.
Well. Half bared himself. But it was more of a bare man than she had ever seen before. Her dark fumblings with Llewellyn had been quick, relegated to slivers of time and corners of dark rooms. More pleasurable for the knowledge of their forbiddenness than the intimate acts themselves.
This felt like a different act entirely, though, with an intimacy never imagined. She drank in the sight of him: golden hairs dusting his chest; strong lines of collarbone and shoulder, of pectoral and rib. His trousers slipped at the waist, granting a glimpse of a delicious angle of hip.
With a step and swoop, she wrapped her arms around him, tightly, surprising a laugh from him. Oh, he was so big and solid and warm that she felt she could lean on him forever.
But he was not for leaning on, and she was not for leaning. This time was for being together: the pleasure of the moment, taken and shared as equals.
“Take off the rest of your clothing,” she murmured against his chest. “Please. I want to look at you.”
“My, my. The world has tipped on end.”
She turned to the desk. Locks of hair began to tumble as she plucked free one hairpin, then another and another, laying the metal pins in a neat pile beside his cuff links. “Because I said please? Do you think me so impolite?”
“Not impolite at all, princess. No, the world tipped when you told me what I’d wanted so long to hear.”
“That I want to look at you?”
“That you want anything from me within my power to grant. That you want something from me that can please you. You—for your own sake, because you know I think you are worth pleasing.”
This, she supposed, was why he would say yes now. Why they could claim each other in intimacy, not a fleshly transaction.
“I am worth pleasing,” she said, “and so are you.”
The muscles of his shoulders bunched and shivered, even as he glanced at his hands with some trepidation.
“You are,” she said again, and she knew what to do. “Come, sit by me.”
She crossed to the bed and sat upon the neat white sheet. When she patted the spot next to her, he took a seat there. And she took his hand.
Not for holding in quiet peace. No. She was going to turn this hand from pain to pleasure. Cradling it palm up in her hands, she sank her thumbs into his palm and pressed. Spread. Stretched the skin and the sinewy muscle beneath.
His legs shifted, still clad in their trousers. One bare foot twitched.
“All right?”
He made an incoherent sound low in his throat. This seemed adequate permission to continue.
So she pressed again, working her thumbs into the tender heel of his palm. Pressing inward with her own hands, then tugging out, to flex and bend every one of his troublesome joints.
Pleasure can be found where you least expect it. That was what she wanted him to know; that was what she now believed. If she had not been drugged and tossed in a carriage, she would not be here now, working her fingers between those of Giles Rutherford. A kind man, a great stone who let everyone batter themselves against him and who denied himself the shape he most wanted to carve out.
Who asked her what she was worth, but put no price on it. Who wanted her to see the moon and stars, not because he gave a damn but because she did.
She understood him, as though they had known each other a long time ago and only just met again. As though they’d each been waiting for someone to see them—not as better or worse, but as different. Different from how she ever thought she might want to live or be.
She was coming to love that word, different.
Or—was it the word she was coming to love? Might it instead be a love for Giles, who had first seeded her thoughts with that word?
How could one tell the difference between loving a person and loving the way a person made one feel?
She shuddered off these thoughts, refocusing her attention on his hands. Lavishing attention on each in turn, she rubbed the fingers, rolling and stretching them one by one, pressing at the skin between fingers and thumb. Each tug and movement pulled a small sound of pleasure from him: a whimper, a moan. Sometimes just a choked-off moan, his eyes shut. “Yes,” he groaned, and her nipples went tight against the inside of her stays.
When she found the hollow at the base of his palm and worked at it, up his wrist and into the base of his forearm, his head began to sag. “Audrina. Lord.”
“Are you all right? Are your hands hurting you?”
“My hands,” he said in a ragged voice, “could carry the world if they needed to.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Her mouth curled with delight. “Try this instead.” And she placed his hand on her breast.
He jerked upright in an instant, all languor forgotten. They worked quickly together to strip her bare of gown and stays and shift. She crouched on the bed, nipples hard in the cool air of the room. There was no shyness; not with Giles facing her, his expression warm as he stroked her gently, up and down the sides of her rib cage, as though learning the shape of her by touch.
But she wanted to touch, too. “I like to make things,” she told him. “Paper springs”—she danced her fingers up his inner thighs, still clad—“and terrible drawings”—she clutched at his thighs with a hard, flat palm—“and delicious things.” She stroked the long length of his erection through his trousers.
“If you keep being delicious yourself, you’re going to make me finish before I even get my clothing off.”
“Why do you still have anything on?”
“I have no idea.” He slid from the bed, yanked off his trousers, and rejoined her within a few seconds. His whole body was large and tight-corded, all solid angles and lean lines, with faint freckles on his skin as if he’d been spattered by sunlight. The copper-gold hair of his chest trailed down, turning dark as bronze about his shaft.
Had she thought the room cool? Her skin felt hot, tight; her folds slippery.
She remembered what he could do with his hands, how just the gentle plucking of his fingertips on her nipple had cleared her mind of every thought but more. But his mouth—oh, that mouth. Just as it so often teased her with words, now it tormented her with touch. Tasting and pulling, a deep undertow of pleasure that made her wetter, more eager. Somehow she had climbed atop him, rolling her hips against the hard line of his thigh.
He eased himself back, lying flat on the bed. His other leg nudged between hers, spreading her wide over him. “Is it all right if we do it like this? The view is beautiful. I could not ask for better.”
“My view is more than fair, too.” Kneeling above him, she eased him into her inch by inch. The pleasure of taking him in, that slow slide of heat and hardness, was made even better by being able to watch his face. By seeing his eyes fall half-shut, an expression of ecstasy on his strong features.
Neither of them had words for the moment they were fully joined. It was completion, a togetherness that made Audrina’s heart twist. She was not brave enough to hold his gaze; it was too deep and raw. And so she folded herself over him and began to move.
She had never felt such sensations: closeness and power and vulnerability at once. The thrust and slide of their bodies, the pressure of his hips against her pleasure spot, and his hardness within—already, this was shockingly intimate. And then he eased her upward on his chest, so his tip worked the entrance to her passage with a greater friction, the sounds of wetness an erotic background to the tight-coiling pleasure.
In this new position, she was raised over him, her fallen hair making a curtain over them. He brushed it aside, lifting his head to catch one of her nipples in his mouth. Sensation thundered through her, making her gasp.
Raggedly, she worked herself over his length while he palmed her breasts and tasted and nipped. It was too much; it was perfect. She was tightening at both ends, so many points of pleasure at once, until she unraveled with a gasping cry.
“Oh, my Lord. Oh, Giles.” She sank onto him in a boneless, pleasured heap.
“Not a lord. Just a commoner,” he teased—and he thrust once, twice, more, then pulled free with a groan. Heat marked her thigh, and she realized he had spared her the risk of a child.
“Thank you,” she murmured against his chest, and she meant it for so many things.
“Wisest, I thought,” he said, his breath still coming quickly. He stretched down an arm for his discarded trousers and found a handkerchief in a pocket, then cleaned Audrina’s leg.
And then they settled: she atop him skin to skin on chest, breasts, belly; his arms wrapped about her. Perspiration had dampened them both, and on her back it dried cool where his touch did not shield her.
“Are you cold?” He pulled up the sheet and quilt, wrapping them together. How often he noticed what she wanted before she thought to ask.
“Thank you,” she said again, then pressed a kiss to his chest.
His arms tightened about her. “I want you to be comfortable so I can keep holding you. I’m not strong enough to let you go yet.”
Her thundering heart began to quiet. “Why is letting me go the choice that takes strength?”
“Because I want you so much,” he said simply. “You, with the prickly courage and the ready laugh. Who bakes things and makes things and . . .”
She put a finger to his lips. “If you don’t want to let me go, why not stay?” An hour. A day. Next year and all the ones after.
“Because I can’t have you. Between the two of us, you’re the one with more choices. You could live in the country, you could return to London. You could marry.” His embrace about her loosened, one hand stroking her back.
“If I have so many choices”—she trailed her fingers down the spring of his ribs—“then you must realize what it means that I chose you.”
“Now, yes, but—”
She put a finger to his lips again. “Yes. Now. No but. If I could choose anything, anyone, and I chose you, then you must be precious to me.”
He nipped at her finger, and she laughed and drew her hand back. He didn’t return her smile, though. “And you are to me. The fact that we have only today is—difficult for me.” The gravel in his voice revealed the truth of these words, though his face turned away.
Bracing her hands on either side of him, she pushed away from his chest and slid to the mattress beside him. “You are more maudlin than I ever imagined.”
He cut his eyes toward her. “I’m good at hiding it.”
“You have many talents.” She trailed a finger down the line of his nose. “Why shouldn’t we have more time, if we both want it? If we both choose it?”
“Because I’m an American with no future.”
“Is that all? Your mother married one of those. Well—an American with a future different from anything she knew.”
“You would marry me? You would leave everything you know?”
She raised herself onto one elbow and studied the stern lines of his face. “Are you asking me to?”
“No, I don’t have the right.”
“But if we didn’t come from separate continents, would you ask me to?”
A deep breath made the sheet rise and fall over his chest. “And if I didn’t have to work for my living, and if my hands were healthy, and—”
“No. I did not ask you all of that. I asked you if you would want to marry me—if we could.”
His laugh was short and bitter. “Would I want to marry you? It’s something I want so much that I never even dreamed I could dream it. But I don’t get the things I want, Audrina.”
“I beg your pardon. I am not a thing.”
His forearm jerked up to cover his eyes. “Marriage. Marriage is a thing. Not you. You are a marvelous person.”
Oh. “You’ve said a lot of nice things, but that might be one of my favorites.”
He lifted his forearm from his eyes, capturing her with a sapphire stare. “Do you believe it?”
“I want to.”
“Then do it. Believe it. Who better than you to decide what kind of person you are? What you’re worth?”
“No, Giles. I’m the one to ask the awkward questions.”
His gaze turned to the ceiling. “There are awkward questions enough for both of us.”
“That’s life, I suppose.” Heat prickled at the corners of her eyes. “What is your own answer to who decides what you’re worth?”
“Me, I suppose. I decide that.”
She mulled this over. “Yes, that makes sense. You are the one who has decided you cannot have the things—or the people—that you want. You are the one who has decided that because your future may be crimped, you need not bother with the present.”
“The present is all there is,” he said faintly. “It’s the future I dare not plan.”
Her shoulder was beginning to ache where she had braced her arm, and she let herself sink back to the bed. “I don’t suppose either of us had the future on our minds when we came into this room.”
“I’m damned glad for it. For everything we did.”
“I am too.” She already felt as if she were losing him, and her throat closed. They were side by side, yet so terribly distant, as though an ocean already lay between them. “We will have this fond memory to carry when we go our separate ways.”
“Our parting was always inevitable.” There was something careful about his voice, as if these words covered a well that he dared not look into.
He was wrong, and she knew it, and maybe he did too. It wasn’t inevitable that they go their separate ways—or at least, not because of circumstance. No, nothing made it inevitable but their own choices. But if Giles could not see himself with a future, how could he arrow the present toward it? And if she didn’t know what she was worth, how could she know what to value?
Her past reckless behavior had come not from courage, but cowardice. If nothing was serious or permanent, then nothing could really matter. No mistake would be lasting, no hurt would strike to her heart.
But this did. This did.
She summoned her bravery. “I want you to stay as long as you’re able.”
“Just now?”
“If that’s what you can offer…then yes. Just now.”
He slid an arm beneath her, gathering her close to his side. When she dashed an impatient palm across her damp lashes, he kissed her hand.
Once upon a time, Giles had told her that she did not need to change the sort of person she was. She could love him for that alone, if she allowed herself.
She could love him, too, for the kiss on the hand. For pulling the quilt over them both. For peeling apples and traveling with his father and diapering a vegetable. For all the ways he watched and noticed and helped.
But she wanted him to take, too. To expect love, to see the hope for himself as he did for others. She wanted him to plan and dream, and to make her a part of it. She just wasn’t quite brave enough to insist.
And if all he could offer was now, maybe he too wasn’t as brave as he wished.