Jemima had to fight off a light-headed feeling of disbelief as she made her way up to her room. She knew she should probably seek out Lovelace, now that Troy was no longer there to distract her, but she was too overset by her own worries to face the girl. And there was, in truth, a bit of simmering resentment toward Lovelace in her heart. If the girl hadn’t been wandering in the woods that first afternoon, Jemima would not now be under siege in this house—beleaguered by the unwanted stirrings her host aroused in her and frightened out of her wits by the prospect of seeing her nemesis again.
She had assiduously managed to avoid being in company with the man for close to a year, since the night she and Terry had stayed in Leeds during their journey to Scotland. The night an idle, harmless flirtation had turned into something ugly and degrading. Jemima still couldn’t recall the incident without a frisson of fear and a mortifying, deep-seated shame.
As she lay on her bed, trying to compose herself, she had a startling insight—she could enlist Bryce as an ally. He had vowed yesterday that he wouldn’t let any harm come to her in his home, and she knew she could hold him to that promise. At least where any outside threats were concerned. She suspected he hadn’t been referring to his own designs on her when he’d uttered those words of reassurance.
And there was also the possibility that Bryce would refuse his hospitality to Troy’s friends. He already had enough on his plate without the addition of three town beaux cluttering up the landscape. But she of all people knew how persistent Troy could be when he wanted something.
After she laid out her gown for dinner, she rang for the housemaid that Bryce had assigned to assist her. Prudie was a local girl with a merry face and deft hands. She prattled on in a soft voice as she skillfully arranged Jemima’s hair into a loose chignon.
“My sister and me,” she said, as she coaxed a few tendrils to whisper down along Jemima’s throat, “we can’t hardly sleep at night, what with this Frenchy on the loose.”
Jemima wondered how Prudie knew the man was French, in light of Mr. Fletch’s insistence on secrecy. But then she recalled how frequently servants knew of things that went on behind closed doors, oftentimes more than their masters themselves did.
“And there’s more, miss. My brother who works down at the mill swears he’s seen a strange man ridin’ about on the estate. Seen him more than once, he has.”
“I saw a stranger yesterday,” Jemima commented idly. “That is, I don’t know if he was a stranger to the estate or not. But he didn’t look like a farmworker, more like a sailor, with his blue jacket and beard—”
“That’s him!” Prudie squealed. “You saw the murderer!”
Jemima started to protest. “Surely he wouldn’t be riding about in broad daylight.”
Prudie merely pursed up her round mouth. “Who is to say what a murderer will or won’t do?” she said sagely. “Especially a French one!”
As Jemima made her way down to dinner, she wondered if the rider she’d seen was the same tall, bearded man Lovelace had described to Mr. Fletch. She shivered a bit at the thought. Though beards were uncommon in London, having been out of fashion since the Tudor era, some countrymen still sported them. And sailors, of course. But they were still enough of an oddity to occasion notice.
She’d best tell Mr. Fletch about the stranger when he returned from interviewing Sir Richard. The sooner the mystery was solved, the sooner she could drag her indolent brother away from the bucolic pleasures of Bryce Prospect and back to London.
As she entered the drawing room, Bryce curtly informed Jemima that they would be dining alone. Lovelace, he told her, was still upset by the news that the Wellesleys were mistakenly pursuing her and a phantom swain half across Kent and had asked to have her dinner sent to her room on a tray.
After that pronouncement, he went to stand at the window, gazing out at the dark sky while he toyed idly with his glass of sherry. Jemima noticed the tension in his shoulders and the taut line of his cheek. He’d been so mellow in the garden, playful and charming, and not at all high-handed when he had coached her with her drawing. But now he seemed distracted and remote. She had thought to show him the sketches she had so carefully—but loosely—toiled over, and had purposely left her sketchbook in the drawing room so she could demonstrate her progress to him. Now she moved to the sofa where the book lay and casually slipped it behind one of the cushions. He looked to be in no mood for offering criticism, or rather, he looked far too critical for her to risk another scathing string of “dreadfuls.”
During the meal Bryce still seemed preoccupied. Jemima attempted to fill in the frequent conversational gaps with a stream of amusing anecdotes, which even to her ears sounded brittle and forced. She wished once again that she possessed a smattering of Lovelace’s easy coquetry.
At one point, during a particularly convoluted tale involving Troy and the driver of a Greek donkey cart, Bryce stopped her and suggested brusquely that she “save her conversation for her brother’s friends from town.” He then motioned to the footman to refill his wineglass for the sixth time.
“Oh,” she said, feeling suddenly deflated. “So you have agreed to let them stay here.”
He shot her a look of exasperation. “Your brother didn’t leave me much choice. I was just riding into the stable yard as Troy was setting off to meet them. He insisted it was what you would want—something to distract you until this murder business gets sorted out.” He then added in a clipped voice, “I gather the present company is not stimulating enough for your tastes.”
Her eyes flashed. “Troy has a great deal to answer for. It was concern for his own comfort, not mine, that motivated his request.”
She expected that Bryce would snatch up this opportunity to elaborate on his favorite theme—Troy’s cavalier treatment of his sister, but he merely raised his glass to his mouth and drank deeply.
“More to the point,” she continued as she leaned forward, her elbows on the table, “why would you want a gaggle of idle coxcombs lounging about your home?”
Bryce shrugged and looked away from her. “Perhaps I do not find the present company stimulating.”
Jemima was too stunned to answer. He had never been overtly rude to her before. Something had riled him, and he was taking it out on her. She wondered, as she poked at her green beans, what could have vexed him so dreadfully in the relatively short space of time since they had been together in the garden. Maybe something had happened while he was on the coast to put him in such a beastly mood.
They subsided into an awkward silence until the port was brought in. After the footman had filled his glass, Bryce sent the man out of the room. Jemima started to rise, but he motioned her to stay seated.
“I’m sorry you don’t want Troy’s friends here, Jemima,” he said in a slightly conciliatory tone. “But it’s too late now for me to rescind the invitation. Besides, your brother claims he writes better with his friends about. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but who am I to stand in the way when his muse calls.”
Her glance swung to the glass of port he was raising to his mouth. “As does your own,” she murmured.
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t snipe at me, Jem. Not because Troy’s gotten one past you.”
She put her fists on the table. “You pander to him as much as I do. Perhaps even more. I feel like I am caught in the coils of some male conspiracy.”
He grinned then, a slow twisting of his mouth. “Most ladies would relish such a situation. And Troy’s friends are not a bad lot. in fact, I know Kimble slightly—he and my brother were friends at Cambridge. I don’t mind offering them my hospitality, and if you were thinking clearly—”
“Who says I am not?” she snapped.
“If you were thinking clearly, you would see that a houseful of guests will help to ensure Lovelace’s safety. She’ll be surrounded by men, the pink of the ton…excepting myself, of course. And if that doesn’t make her feel safe, it will at least make her feel vastly admired.
“And,” he continued as he refilled his glass, “they will furnish you with protection as well.”
“Me?” She blinked twice.
“Safety in numbers, pet. You’ll have all your familiar squires around you—and even a hardened rake has to admit defeat when faced with such daunting odds.”
Jemima wanted to lay her head on the table and weep. Bryce was being so confoundedly logical. He couldn’t know that she feared the attentions of one of those men far more than his own.
Instead, she put her head up and stated, “You are quite mistaken. Troy’s friends are not in the least interested in squiring a maiden lady. Their taste runs, as I am sure yours does, to women of another sort.”
Bryce leaned his chin on his hand and observed her through his long lashes. She thought it was a wickedly provocative thing to do to a lady—maiden or otherwise.
“You have no idea what my tastes are,” he murmured.
“And I haven’t any desire to be edified on that score,” she said in her most quelling voice.
He chuckled softly. “It’s the damnedest thing, Jemima. Most people mellow out after a good meal. You, on the other hand, turn waspish and bristly as a hedgehog. Three nights running, it’s been.”
“I wasn’t waspish last night,” she protested. He was a fine one to be casting stones, in light of his own crusty mood. “I was…a bit quiet, is all.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” he mused, “if you came down to dinner tomorrow night with a pistol in your reticule and started taking potshots at my dinner guests.”
Bryce could have no idea how much that notion appealed to her at that moment. She could at once rid the world of an impudent rake, a self-indulgent poet, and a loathsome, heavy-handed “pink of the ton.”
“Maybe you need to take a stomach powder before dinner,” he continued in the same teasing voice. “I have heard that spinsters of a certain age often suffer complaints of their digestion…”
Jemima rose to her feet and all but threw her napkin across the table. “I know I am not young, Bryce,” she bit out, feeling the angry color wash over her face. “I certainly don’t need you to point it out to me. Though I think it most unfair that you, who can give me only three or four years, are thought to be in your prime, while I… I am put on the shelf and considered an ape-leader.”
Bryce had risen to face her, his eyes dark as granite. “Yes, I bait you, Jemima. But only so you will see how ridiculous it is to think of yourself in such a way.”
“Oh, no,” she cried softly. “Not ridiculous…realistic. I am not blind. I saw how easily Lovelace won you over. Even Troy sits at her little lame feet. Her youth and beauty easily make up for any lack of intellect. Women of my age, on the other hand, have little to offer a man, saving the workings of their minds. A poor recompense, I think. But it doesn’t matter… I am well past the age where it is proper or fitting to have any illusions about myself, regardless of what I might feel inside.”
“What do you feel, Jemima?” he asked as he came around the edge of the table toward her. “Tell me.”
She shook her head, avoiding his eyes. And wondered what the devil had come over her, that she could be so pitifully maudlin in front of him. Whining about her illusions and revealing her creeping jealousy of Lovelace.
“I must ask you to excuse me,” she whispered hoarsely as she turned and hurried across the room.
“No, I will not!”
Bryce vaulted away from the table and caught her halfway to the door, blocking her path with his body, as one hand clamped hard on her wrist—harder than he realized. The sherry he’d drunk in the drawing room, the quantity of wine he had consumed with his dinner, and the two glasses of port he had just finished, were making only slight inroads on his senses. His head for liquor was legendary, but his head for long-limbed, chestnut-haired women with hauntingly beautiful azure eyes was notoriously poor.
Jemima glared at him. “What is this?” She raised her arm where his fingers still bit into the skin of her wrist. “Making your last stab at seduction before my squires appear tomorrow? Lord, Bryce, I’d have expected a defter touch from you.”
He released her wrist slowly, his eyes full of heat. “They’ve had their chance with you, Jem—Troy’s friends. A parcel of blithering fools they must be if they never saw what was beneath their noses.”
“Wh-what do you mean?” She took an involuntary step back from him. There was such intensity in his gaze, masculine power and raw hunger. The climate in the room had altered suddenly—she felt the air thinning out, so that her breath now came in tiny gasps.
“You, Jemima,” he said. He drew her closer until his body was mere inches from her own. “I see you, even when you try to hide in your brother’s shadow…your intelligence, your humor…and your spirit. They shine from you as much as the beauty in your face or the light in your dazzling blue eyes—”
“They’re green—” She sighed raggedly.
“Green as the verdant, patchwork hills of Ireland,” he replied, never taking his eyes from hers.
Something snapped inside her then. Roused her from the intoxicating haze that his voice had sent drifting over her like a seductive net. “Ireland,” she repeated sharply. “Yes, you’ve been to Ireland, haven’t you? To woo Harriet Travers, I believe.”
Bryce’s mouth curled into the semblance of a grin. “You sound almost jealous, pet. I had other business in Ireland. Harriet was just a…pleasant diversion.”
“As I’m sure all your conquests are to you. Now if you will let me pass…”
She tried to negotiate her way around him. He stepped back and leaned against the door, splaying his fingers behind him on the carved oak. His eyes challenged her as much as his provocative posture. As his glance raked over her, his mouth widened into a knowing smile. “Gad, Jem. You are hungering for this down to the tips of your toes, but will be damned before you let me see it. Do you know how much that tempts me? To wonder what you’ll be like once I’ve broken through that icy disdain?”
Her nails dug into her palms. “I am neither hungering nor icy, Mr. Bryce. I am extremely cross.”
“Oh, no,” he said with infuriating calm. “I’ve seen you cross, Jemima. This is a whole different animal.”
He reached out one hand and laid it for an instant on the skin above the low-cut bodice of her gown. She had to prevent herself from looking down to see if it had left behind a searing handprint, so fierce was the heat she had felt at that momentary touch.
“No,” he said, “I take back icy. You’re warm. And so soft beneath my hand. And there is a pulse beating in your throat…trip-a-trip, like a tiny drum…do you feel it, sweetheart?”
“I…” Her hand crept up to her throat of its own volition. Her body seemed to be floating now, held aloft by the soothing, melodic timbre of his words and the sensual promise in his smoky eyes.
“Bryce,” she said with a catch in her voice, “I can’t do this.”
“You don’t have to do anything, pet,” he said with an earnestness that even Jemima, in her bemused state, had to acknowledge. “You do enough for everyone else, God knows. This time, let me do for you.”
His raised hand drifted across the slight gap that separated them, his fingers spread wide as he sketched a light caress upon the peach-tinted flush that had colored her cheeks. His touch was swansdown soft and delicately arousing. Those strong, elegant fingers, that could control a team of high-bred horses or hold a pistol level in the face of outraged propriety, were now whispering over her face, coaxing, soothing, easing, and always with the gentlest hints of pressure.
She felt the room spin; time and dimension skewed breathlessly as his fingers traced over her ear. He touched the lobe fleetingly with his thumb, before his hand came to rest on the rise of her collarbone. A bolt of pure desire lanced through her, and she nearly groaned at the unfamiliar sensation.
“Let me, Jemima,” he coaxed as he brought his hand up to cup the soft underside of her jaw.
It was a revelation to discover just how many places he could stir to surface heat just by the touch of his fingers. But the surface heat wasn’t a patch on the growing fire that was licking through her insides. Jemima wanted to sink down into the blissful cocoon of pleasure that was curling all around her.
She heard Bryce utter a soft, ragged sigh, heard herself moan slightly in reply as his hand drew away from her. Her eyes opened—which surprised her a little, since she hadn’t realized they were closed. Bryce was gazing at her intently, his expression a mixture of guarded expectation and open desire.
“Yes?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she breathed, at that moment willing to do anything at his bidding.
He took her hand then and led her from the dining room. The paneled hallway was dimly lit, and she thought she saw a servant or two hovering back in the shadows. She spent an idle moment wondering if they would be shocked and decided she didn’t care. Bryce wanted her, and not because she was the sainted Troy’s sister, but because he thought her beautiful and clever, and even if those were the facile lies of a practiced rake, she needed for once in her life to believe they were true.
She followed him up the wide staircase, her hand still enfolded in his. He stopped before the entrance to her bedroom and opened the door, coaxing her through with a hand at her back. When he didn’t follow, she turned and looked up at him in confusion.
“Come to me, Jemima,” he said, bending low so that his voice purred against the side of her throat.
“I don’t under—?”
He raised one hand and placed it soft against her mouth. “No coercion,” he said gently. “Come to me freely. Or not at all.”
He was gone then, his footfalls lost in the thick Persian carpet that ran the length of hall.
Jemima leaned back against the door and stood unmoving for several seconds. He hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t so much as embraced her, and yet she was trembling as though he had made passionate love to her—with his warm hands, his silky voice, and his smoldering hawk’s eyes. She feared that any further demonstrations of his desire would send her over the brink of reason into a sort of honeyed madness.
She drifted into the room in a daze, wondering what the protocol of seduction demanded. Was she to array herself in her most alluring bed gown and douse herself with French perfume before she made her way to his bedroom? Should she comb out her hair into glistening waves and smooth lotion over her body before she presented herself to him?
It was too arch, she thought. Too calculated. Bryce could have taken her there on the floor of the dining room like a round-heeled housemaid, and she knew she wouldn’t have protested. But this enforced separation was giving her too much time to think. And that, she realized, as she sank down onto her vanity bench, was exactly what Bryce had intended. That she be an accomplice to her own deflowering. That she make up her own mind, without his compelling presence to sway her.
Was she brave enough to do it? Brave enough to put her heart at risk so that she might ease the overwhelming physical longing he had awakened in her? Could she abandon all caution, let herself be his plaything for an hour or two, and then return to the staid strictures of her everyday life?
A thought whispered through her brain, reminding her that she would never again have a chance to fulfill her fantasies with such a man. She had been sullied once, by a ham-handed lout, and perhaps she needed Bryce’s exquisite touch upon her skin to wipe away that wretched memory.
But then she knew it for the rationalization it was. She didn’t need any reasons to go to him other than the sureness in her soul that he would not hurt her or be anything less than kind.
Somehow that was enough.
Nevertheless, she thought defiantly, I will not present myself to him like a concubine preening before a Turkish pasha. If Bryce wants me, he can dashed well deal with hooks and corsets and hose.
* * *
Bryce looked up from his chair beside the hearth as she entered his room. He was holding a glass of tawny liquor in one hand and there was another filled glass sitting on the small table at his elbow. He had removed his dinner coat and waistcoat, but aside from that, he was fully dressed. He eyed her satin gown and said with a mock leer, “You must be very eager, my lady, that you didn’t take the time to change.”
“And you, sir, are very smug,” she said as she crossed over to the fireplace.
He rose and after taking a quick swallow, he handed her his own glass. “Not smug,” he said as he watched her sip at the cordial from the spot where his lips had rested. “Just very, very relieved.”
Her gaze darted to his face. In truth, he looked nearly giddy. “You didn’t think I would come?”
With a graceful shrug he replied, “I never know what to expect from you, Lady J. It’s one of your greatest charms.”
The inevitable spill of curls lay tumbled over his forehead; Jemima reached up and smoothed them back, delighting in the sensation as the silky strands whispered through her fingers. Lord, she had been longing to do that very thing since she had first seen him in the wooded grove.
He said almost sheepishly, “We Bryces are famous for our unruly hair. It’s a curse, I think, visited on the family for some ancestor’s misdeed.”
“I like it,” she said, as she combed her fingers through the soft, springing curls that gathered along the nape of his neck. “It’s one of your greatest charms,” she added with an impish grin as she tugged playfully at the dark waves.
She felt him tremble, a noticeable shiver that swept over his entire body. He knocked the glass from her hand, sent it crashing to the hearth, before he swung her back against the firebreast. His arms tightened around her swiftly, crushing her against his chest. She was overwhelmed by his power, by the tensile flex of his arms that revealed, she suspected, only a fraction of his true strength.
No man had ever drawn her full against his body, so she wasn’t prepared for the thrill of contact. His chest was an expanse of supple steel beneath the fine cambric of his shirt, and as his lean belly and muscular thighs molded to her, aroused her, she became mindless with the need to return the pressure.
He lowered his head, nudging aside the tendrils that danced along her throat, murmuring her name again and again. “Ah, Jemima,” he crooned. “Jemima. What a fine and lovely name. I whisper it each night before I sleep and hear it echoing back to me in my dreams.”
She tipped her face up and wriggled in protest. “You said it was a useful sort of name,” she complained.
His eyes danced down at her. “Did I really? I must have been out of my mind. Can you remember everything I’ve ever said to you, I wonder?”
“No, only the truly wretched things. Sly comments about my advanced age and slighting references to my being a piece of luggage in my brother’s train. Beyond that, I’ve hardly taken any note of you at all.” She grinned.
“Liar,” he said between his teeth. His mouth lowered at once and caught her still grinning. He curved his lips to match her smile and then when she gasped in surprise, he coaxed her mouth open slightly and drew her into a proper kiss.
Jemima hadn’t been expecting it—that one moment he could be bantering with her and the next be kissing her with such open-mouthed hunger. She had envisioned a more studied approach, not this sudden overtaking of her senses. But then he had never behaved in the unctuous manner commonly attributed to rakes. He was no perfumed coxcomb, but a man simmering with unbridled appetite.
Bryce shifted her abruptly away from the marble hearth, leaned hard into her, forcing her head back as his mouth urgently explored her lips, murmuring soft sounds of pleasure all the while. She felt the room dip, as he teased his tongue against her teeth and then let it dart deeper into her mouth. It felt so strange, so powerful, so amazingly right.
Her knees were warm toffee now, pliant and yielding. His strength alone was keeping her from melting onto the floor, his strong arms and the incredible seeking heat of his mouth, which she reached for, craning her head up and up, to find. The taste of him, all sweet wine and smoky port, the mind-numbing scent of him, a heady combination of sandalwood, tobacco, and potent, animal musk. Every particle of him invaded her senses, until she was shorn of any hesitation.
She twined her fingers into his hair, cradling his head between her hands. “Ah, Beecham,” she cried softly. His response was to deepen his kisses, thrusting hard against her willing mouth, marking his possession of her with his lips and tongue, and with tiny, exquisitely painful bites.
Jemima cursed her own lack of expertise—surely a man like Bryce required someone with more finesse, a woman who wasn’t awkward and unsure, with gangling arms and jellied legs. She made a tentative foray with her own tongue, thinking only to reciprocate the pleasure he was giving her, and she heard a deep groan erupt from the muscular cavern of his chest.
“Oh,” she cried, pulling back. “Wasn’t I supposed to do that?”
Bryce drew a breath to steady himself. He looked down at the woman in his arms, her face flushed with passion, her lips rose red and swollen from his kisses, and her eyes, her remarkable azure eyes, alive with light and quickening desire, and he knew he had strayed far into uncharted territory.
If only because, he realized with a shock, he was thoroughly content to keep kissing her. For a millennium or two. Not that his body wasn’t aching to take her. But his mind, and more specifically his heart, were entranced by her tentative but wholly passionate unfurling. He’d never kissed a woman like Jemima, who was so unschooled and yet so utterly responsive.
She stood now, quivering like a newborn foal in the circle of his arms, still a little afraid, but curious and full of wonder. And when he kissed her again, she would arch into him, her body liquid and supple. He didn’t know if he could stand to do more than kiss her. The thought of her slim body, naked beneath him, of her legs, drawing him into a sublime carnal embrace was more than he could bear.
“Beech?” she coaxed, tugging at his shoulders. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” he said, shaking off his distracting thoughts. “Nothing wrong, sweetheart. Only right. Only ever right.”
“Oh.” Her eyes brightened. “You made such an odd noise.”
He shook his head, as he drew one hand from the small of her back and raised it to stroke his fingers over her velvety lower lip. Then he slid one long finger past her lips and into her mouth. She caught it between her teeth and bit down gently until he groaned again.
“You see how easy it is, sweeting, to make me sigh for you. Say my name again…”
“Beech,” she crooned. “Beecham…”
He bent her back and laid his mouth on her throat, savoring the taste of her flesh, feeling less like predator than prey, as the scent of her perfume and her heated skin stole into his befuddled brain. He bit gently at the smooth white skin, wanting to mark her there, mark her as his own, so that any man, any festering pink of the ton, would know that she was his alone.
But prudence restrained him. Lady Jemima would face her peers on the morrow without having to blush for her indiscretion. She sighed as he lifted her into his arms and carried her to the brocaded chaise that lay at the foot of his wide tester bed.
The ideal piece of furniture for seduction, Jemima thought, still slightly irreverent even in the face of her imminent deflowering.
No arms to impede access to a woman’s body and just wide enough to accommodate two, providing they were lying very close together. Or one on top of the other. Jemima nearly moaned—the thought of lying beneath that lean body was enough to send her heart reeling.
He instantly busied himself at the back of her gown, undoing the myriad hooks, until the heavy satin fell away from her shoulders. Then he knelt beside her, one knee on the carpet, and lowered the bodice, drawing it down slowly, letting the fabric whisper over her skin. She watched his eyes darken, as he slid the lace sleeves of her chemise from her shoulders.
“You’ve made me work for this,” he remarked.
“You seem to be doing fine,” she answered boldly. “I fancy not all your conquests have come to you conveniently dressed in their night rails. You appear to know your way around a lady’s gown.”
He sat back on his heels, a frown surfacing on his brow. “You’re not one of my conquests, Jemima.”
“What then?”
He leaned forward, bracing his arms on either side of her. “You are a woman…who is wise enough to recognize the attraction between us, and who is brave enough and honest enough to respond to it.”
She touched his nose with the tip of her finger and then traced a path down to his chin, letting her finger linger a moment on the divine, sculpted arch of his upper lip. She wondered how she had ever thought him harsh featured. His face, ardent and full of earnest intensity, bore so much rugged beauty. And his eyes, deep-set and glistening like a lake of silver, were dazzling in their bright regard.
“Is that what I am, Beech?” she asked softly. “I suppose I understand now what you meant about women being…accomplices to their own seduction. The truth is, I wanted you to…well, do this…for some time now. Not very ladylike, I’m afraid, but there you have it.”
Bryce lowered his head and whispered a sustained kiss along the length of her throat. “Ah, Jem,” he sighed against her skin. “This isn’t a seduction… I… I’m not sure what it is.” He raised his head and met her eyes. “I almost wish that perishing poet of a brother of yours would come bursting in here and knock me about. But I’d still come after you. I think I’d always come after you.”
Jemima closed her eyes. They were only pretty words, she knew, and whether or not Bryce wanted to name it a seduction, that’s exactly what it was. But it thrilled her beyond measure that he could say such heartstoppingly lovely things to her. As though he meant them.
With his chin, he rucked down the bodice of her chemise, and before the cool evening air could assault her skin, he had covered her breast with his mouth. Any heat she had felt before was immediately supplanted by the searing fire that lanced through her as he drew on her nipple. Her low, wavering cry echoed up to the high ceiling. Bryce’s response was to increase the pressure of his mouth, until she was arching up from the chaise, fighting off the hands that pinioned her wrists to the cushions. She needed to touch him, his hair, his face, his lean, hard body. But still he held her down, heedless of her frustration, as he sated himself.
When at last he raised his head, after leaving a tiny love bite just below the carmine crest, there was still no surcease for her. He caught her mouth in a fierce, ragged kiss, bruising her already tender lips. She was gasping now, her need for him blinding her to any trivial considerations, like breathing or thinking. The ache that had spiraled up from her belly was keening for resolution. When he did release her hands, she immediately brought them up to grasp his shoulders, holding him there against her, not ever wanting to let him go. She cried his name as he ran one hand along her torso, his fingers discovering every curve and plane of her trembling body.
He gave a strange, stuttering moan against her mouth and then spun himself away from her. He sat there, crouched on the carpet, one hand still resting on the chaise. Jemima hiked herself up onto her elbows and watched him with anxious eyes, again fearful that she had done something wrong.
Bryce’s heart felt like it was ramming its way out of his chest. His body was taut as a bowstring, and the heavy ache in his loins was a painful reminder that he would soon be beyond any coherent thought. But he needed to stop, needed desperately to think. Jemima was the first gently bred woman he had been within three years, and furthermore, she was untouched. He desired her with every fiber of his being, but something was stopping him from acting on that desire.
He had marked her as he’d wanted to, in a place that only he could see. But he wanted to mark her in another manner, for all the world to see. He wanted to claim her, hold her, against any who would take her from him. And, sweet Jesus, he had never felt that way before. Not about any woman.
He turned to her, saw how still she was as she watched him.
There was confusion in her eyes, along with the fledgling fire of passion. He gave her an encouraging smile and raised his hand to touch her face.
“Sweet Jemima,” he whispered. “I wanted to go slowly for you. And look at me, I’m having at you like a cow-handed stripling.”
“No,” she said, covering his hand with her own. “It is…you are… I don’t know if there is even a word for the way you make me feel.”
He rose to his feet, needing to remove himself from her potent lure while he sorted out his thoughts. He began to slowly untie his neckcloth. Very slowly. Jemima gave him an impatient frown.
“What?” he asked, his fingers still twisted in the knot at his throat. “Hate to see me destroy all my valet’s hard work? I’ll leave it on, if you like…”
She laughed outright.
“One is not supposed to laugh during a seduction,” he uttered in mock affront.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, biting her lip as she tried to control her wayward humor. “I am only amazed that, along with everything else I am feeling, I have an overwhelming desire to grin.”
“Grinning is allowed,” he said. He realized he too felt like grinning. He was very, very pleased. About something. About her. Because she was quaint and charming and surprisingly self-assured. And more lovely than a sonnet. When Jemima Vale stopped fleeing, she was something to behold.
A little snippet of feeling stirred inside him then, like a salamander shifting beneath the fallen leaves of a forest. A tiny ripple of remorse. He tried to disregard it as he slid the length of muslin from his throat. She had come here, as he’d hoped she would on this last night before they were inundated by Troy’s pestilential cronies, of her own free will. Who was he to deny her any pleasure, merely because he had a passing concern for her honor? She had taken him up on his offer, and there was an end to it.
And how could he face the cold, empty night alone? She was surely the warmest creature on God’s earth. He recalled how much he had wanted to hold her in his arms the night he’d found her in the library, how he’d longed to avail himself of that warmth. But it wasn’t the voice of passion that had so stirred him that night, it had been something far more tender.
He let his gaze linger on her—she had tugged her chemise up over her breasts, but her lovely, magnolia-petal shoulders were still bare, still flushed from his kisses. As he watched her he knew, with a sinking feeling of inevitably, that he couldn’t take her. Not like a doxy or a woman of easy virtue, in spite of her willingness to be so used. Not here in his boyhood home with all its lingering reminders of a younger and as-yet untarnished version of Beecham Bryce.
But he couldn’t very well send her away, not without causing her a deal of pain. A man didn’t carry a woman to the brink of passion and then dismiss her out of hand. Especially not a woman like Jemima Vale, who would see his rejection as sure proof of her lack of feminine allure. But he had to think of some way to make her leave.
Conscience was a bloody nuisance; and he knew now why he’d never cultivated one before this.
She cocked her head at him, clearly puzzled by his long, silent scrutiny, and then said, as if she had read his thoughts. “Are you sure about this, Bryce?”
So, he was back to being Bryce now. That boded well for his cause.
“I only wonder that you should want me,” she continued hesitantly, “when you could have any woman in the ton.”
He raised one brow devilishly and condemned himself to the torment of celibacy as he said archly, “I’ve had every woman in the ton, sweetheart.”
With relief, he watched the shocked expression rise up in her eyes. Jemima Vale was about to experience the callous rake in action, and he prayed that such a display would send her fleeing back to bed. Her own bed.
“And modest to boot,” she remarked. “I forget that I am merely the last in a long line of women.”
“Hardly the last,” he observed with brutal honesty. “Let us say you are something new and fresh.” He might as well have called her useful again, so languid was his tone.
“Fresh,” she echoed slowly, wincing at his words. She then said in a reedy voice, “May I ask you something, Bryce?”
“You are chock full of questions tonight. Putting off the inevitable?”
“No. Well, maybe just a bit.” He saw that she had twisted the skirt of her gown into a corkscrew of satin. “I need to know if the reason you want me…is b-because I’m a virgin.”
He stopped unbuttoning his waistcoat, letting his hands fall to his sides. It was the last thing he’d expected her to ask. “I place no premium on that, Jem,” he said. “It would be the height of hypocrisy for someone like me to require that his paramours be untouched. I am hardly in a position to throw stones.” He gave a dry chuckle, but she did not respond, only sat gazing down at her lap. His voice lowered. “But then again, it would be the height of discourtesy not to acknowledge the rare gift you are offering me.”
She looked up swiftly. Her face had paled, the glowing peach of her cheeks now gone a stark white. There was a vivid emotion in her eyes, but it was no longer passion. Unless Bryce missed his guess, it was something very like shame.
He sat down beside her and took up her hand. “And in case you’re worried about unpleasant repercussions when it comes time for you to wed, let me reassure you that I am the soul of discretion.” He said the words with just a hint of practiced ease.
Jemima tugged her hand back from his. “I… I do not intend to wed. Never. What occurs here tonight will make no difference to me.”
He raised one hand melodramatically to his breast. “Ah, you wound me to the quick.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said with a stern frown. “The fact of the matter is, I have no ‘rare gift’ to offer you, Bryce. Whatever happens between us will not alter my state—because I have every reason to believe I am not a virgin.”
His dark brows knit as he blew out a long breath. “Well, that’s possibly the oddest statement I’ve ever heard. And how, pray, could you be in doubt of something so…significant?”
She cast him a look of entreaty and then turned her head away. “Don’t make light of it…oh, please don’t. It’s not something I look back on with anything but disgust.”
“I take it you were not exactly a willing participant.” His tone was gentle now, all his feigned arrogance driven away by his concern for her.
She shook her head slowly. “No, I was not.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” He purposely kept his voice remote as he rose and moved away from the chaise.
“No. I’m sorry I even brought it up. It’s just that I thought you should know…in case it made a difference…”
“Tell me,” he urged her softly. “Don’t hold back, sweetheart. You know I am the last man on the planet who would condemn you.”
She sat in silence for a moment and then said with a sigh, “Very well. I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling you. It happened last summer while Troy and I were on our way to Scotland. We overnighted at a large, rambling country house. I couldn’t sleep, so I went looking for the servants’ staircase, to fetch up a glass of milk from the kitchen. One of Troy’s friends found me wandering lost in the hall. He…he was quite drunk. I thought he was only being playful at first—Troy’s friends sometimes flirt with me…in an innocent way. But then—” She choked slightly, and Bryce was glad he was no longer beside her—he’d have surely tugged her into his arms. “He…he dragged me into an empty bedroom. I fought back, but he was quite strong and…and I think he took me.” Her voice shook as she added weakly, “He didn’t even bother to lay me on the bed.”
Bryce barely restrained an oath. “Who was it, Jem? Roncaster? Carruthers? Who did this to you?”
She spoke from between her raised hands. “It doesn’t matter. He never mentioned it to anyone, thank God. And I hadn’t the heart to tell Troy. He thinks his friends are all such fine fellows.” She drew a steadying breath. “Now you see how impossible it would be for me to marry. Not after that.”
Bryce was gazing away from her, his face grown taut. He would discover who had used her in such a way. He still had plenty of connections in the ton who could ferret out where Troy had stayed on his way to Scotland and who had made up the house party at each stopover. He’d find the man and bring him to his knees. At this moment, he knew he could do murder for Jemima’s lost honor. But since he was a civilized fellow, he’d settle for horsewhipping the wretch and leave it at that.
And now, more than ever, he needed to end this charade. He saw how very fragile Jemima was, for one thing. And how misguided to think herself unfit for marriage. If Troy’s drunken friend hadn’t succeeded in taking her maidenhead, she could go to a husband untarnished. And if it was true that the lout had had his way with her, well, what man would hold that against a woman he loved? But in either case, Bryce was not going to make things worse by taking her virtue himself or, heaven forbid, by repeating the other man’s crime.
“I see now that this has changed things,” she said quietly as he continued to keep his eyes trained on the wall behind his bed. “You only wanted me because you thought I was untouched—fresh and new and ripe for deflowering.” She made an effort to sit up.
He returned to her side and knelt down. Placing his hand on her chest, just above the neckline of her chemise, he gently forced her back against the cushion. His hand stayed there, warm and intimate against her skin. “No,” he remarked silkily, returning to his role of heartless libertine in spite of his overwhelming desire to comfort her. “You are ripe, all right. And virgins are tiresome. On the other hand, women who have been broken, but not yet schooled, are infinitely intriguing.”
Her eyes narrowed as she said cuttingly, “Such as young wives whose husbands are off fighting Napoleon?”
He looked at her and blinked slowly. Jemima knew how to get in a body blow, right enough. He wondered if she suspected how much that particular episode still troubled him.
He forced an attitude of unconcern and shrugged negligently. “He also serves, who sits and waits.”
Jemima gingerly removed his hand from her chest, let it drop to the cushion, and then sat up. “I’ve changed my mind, Bryce. I choose not to be party to my own seduction.” Her eyes met his squarely. “At least not at your hands.”
He stood up at once. “I knew you weren’t hot-blooded enough for this sport,” he said under his breath. And then cursed himself for letting his wounded pride get the better of him.
The sting of his reproof jolted through Jemima and she flung her head back. The candlelight played over the angular planes of his face, darkening a portion here, highlighting another there. His eyes, however, were totally obscured. Then he moved his head slightly and she saw something that twisted her heart. The jaded weariness in those hooded gray eyes had been replaced by an expression of regret. Her heated retort died on her lips.
“And you are not cold-blooded enough,” she said evenly as she rose to her feet, “to take a woman for the wrong reason.”
His glance shifted to her face. “There is never a wrong reason, Jemima. Only a wrong time.”
She gathered her skirts in one hand, held up the bodice of her gown with the other, and gave him a brief nod. “Good night,” she said as she hastened to the door.