After the Scandal (23 page)

And he had to take his time.

Lady Claire Jellicoe was in his arms. And he meant to keep her there.

Tanner carefully raised his hand and turned it, so the backs of his fingers caressed the sweet curve of her cheek. He had never thought the back of his hand could have been such a repository for sensations, but now he knew it could contain a world of feelings. Of softness and warmth, and fragile strength.

“Yes.” Her voice was all cotton wool, soft and tangled as if in sleep. As if she were suspended on the nebulous remnant of some dream. Open and guileless, and his.

His to hold. His to treat with wonder and care. His to adore.

Her look was slow and tentative. As if she could not make up her mind. But he saw the almost-imperceptible tilting of her head as her soft gaze fell to his mouth. He saw the parting and pleating of her lips as she made her untutored decision.

Her decision.

He said the words over and over in his mind—this was her decision.

Just as it needed to be. Just as it should be. Because it was a decision he could not have made in a hundred years, no matter how soft and plush and enticing her lips looked.

He could no more kiss her than he could ever have danced with her. The gulf was too wide. The chasm between them too deep.

But she was coming nearer. And nearer still.

He ducked his chin stupidly, trying foolishly to hide himself from her solemn, angelic regard. But on she came, and he made himself still before her, though the effort to control himself cost him, especially when she reached the soft tip of her finger to draw across the line of his lower lip.

But her touch was not a burden, a thing to be momentarily endured.

Her touch was exquisite, a feeling of intense pillowed pleasure that stilled his mind, and bound his breath up in his chest so that he could not have spoken if he had wanted to. But he didn’t want to. He wanted nothing but the warm contact of her hand against the side of his face, and the warming heat that spread rapidly from his chest throughout the rest of his body.

He opened his eyes to savor the moment, to take this small sign of her favor as the gift it was, before they fell shut—pushed closed on a wave of longing.

He had never done this—this intimacy, this kissing.

His carnal adventures had always been conducted as transactions—strictly business with no time or coin spent on osculation.

Ah, but what had he missed?

He felt the change in the air between them as the subtle heat of her body came ever nearer. He opened his eyes just in time to see her lids fall closed, and her mouth land like a butterfly upon his lips—soft, tentative, and fleeting.

Her kiss was light, the barest brush of her lips against his, and for a long moment he wondered if this was all that there was. If he had been right to think kissing, for all its storied mention in poems and novels and songs, was an overrated figment of the carnally excited imagination.

But her lips settled more thoroughly upon his, and a whisper of something more promising shuddered down into his chest when she took his bottom lip between hers, and tugged gently. And then again upon his upper lip. And again at the corner of his mouth, where the skin was surprisingly sensitive.

And he was following her lead, and kissing her back, moving his lips upon hers in the same fascinating fashion. And breathing in the fresh water-laden scent of her—summer and rain and lavender all in one.

And then she was within his mouth, and the taste of her, of wine and water and sorrow and joy, suffused his mouth, and he was lost to the rising need to take another taste, to take another kiss, another breath. His hands had moved from his sides to her arms, and up around her back, and into her hair—her soft, glorious halo of hair—pouring it through his fingers, surrendering to the need to touch and taste and experience all of her, every part of her small, supple body that he could reach without losing track of himself in the process.

Without losing track of the fact that he was meant to be a gentleman and treat her like a lady when all he wanted was push her down in the boat and take her six ways from every Sunday.

He had to loosen the fist he was beginning to make in her hair, and stroke down the silken length gently, softly.

It was only a kiss.

Only a new world.

He was no stranger to carnal knowledge. He had had many a game girl. And he remembered every last one of them, the Kaths and Bettys and Annies who gave and took comfort in the messy friction of their bodies. But he had always wanted to get to the heat of the matter instead of lingering over the soft curve of a lip or the sweet, tart taste of a tongue.

Kissing Lady Claire Jellicoe was nothing like he thought it would be, and everything he had dreamed. Every sense was engaged; every muscle in his body was singing with purpose; every part of his being was consumed with the sweetness and pleasure and pure, unstinting bliss.

Her kiss was everything he had never had, and always wanted. He had wanted to kiss her—soft, sweet Claire Jellicoe—and no one else in the world.

But he couldn’t lose control. Not now. Not with her. She must have had enough of men trying to do more than kiss her.

But it seemed not to matter. She was the one who was kissing him. She was the one to hold him. She was the one to run her agile questing fingers up the back of his neck, and around the contours of his skull, and pull him close. She was the one who made animal pleasure and seraphic delight course through him in a way that he never could have imagined—not in a hundred nights of dreaming of his soft, sweet Claire.

He could only be both grateful and jealous for however many kisses she had let other men steal in darkened gardens, if it meant she could kiss him so, in a way that nearly made his soul rise out of his body with sheer unbridled, unfettered joy.

He was stunned and helpless to do or say anything but look at her in wonderment when she slipped away from him on a sigh, and sat back upon the distant stern seat. He had to find his eyes, and look about, and realize that they had kissed their way down the river, drifting past the Custom House Quay.

“The bridge is coming up.” Her voice was small and quiet and a little shy, but her eyes were smiling, and she tipped her head just to the side again. As if she might be considering kissing him again.

But she did not. She sat still, and waited for him to take up the oars again, and steer them safely under London Bridge and onward.

“Are you disappointed?”

“No” was his immediate answer. How could she think he was disappointed in—

“In not finding the dies, in the lead yard?”

Ah. The truth was, he was disappointed at
that
. He would have liked to have found the dies. He would have liked to take them back to Elias Solomon, and let the old man’s knowledgeable eyes pore over them while he pondered who could have cut such dies.

But evidence was complicated. “Even if we had found them, we don’t know who owned them—it was certainly not Walker, who is just a skilled pawn.”

He paused for a moment to let the thought spin out in his mind, looping out to its conclusion. “This is somehow about money. And that is a skill I don’t possess—I can’t follow the money. But I have men of business who can hunt down a sixpence as if it were as obvious as a Bengal tiger.”

Tanner shook his head, wanting to explain his suspicions more fully but knowing he couldn’t. Not while the Earl Sanderson’s name was still tied up in all this.

“So I can’t follow the money. But I can feel it. And I can feel it flowing out of that decrepit yard, back down the length of this river, back to Mayfair.”

*   *   *

“So Mayfair it is, and the suspected Mr. Edward Layham?” Claire couldn’t exactly follow Tanner’s rather labyrinthine thought process, but she understood the end goal.

“If we can find him.”

“Well, I should think the best way to get information about any man is to find his club.” She was trying to be matter-of-fact. Clever and intriguing to cover her rushing pulse and heated skin in the wake of kissing Tanner. “So St. James’s Street?”

And it worked—Tanner was intrigued. “Ah. Very good idea. Except that I already know that Mr. Layham is not a member of the only club to which I would be granted admittance. And to put another damper on the idea, I should have to go to such a place as the Duke of Fenmore. Which at the moment”—he held out his hands to indicate their current raffish, muddy attire—“I am not.”

The truth was, he was the commanding, knowing Duke of Fenmore no matter what he was wearing. But he had a point. One that distracted them both from kissing. “To which club do you belong?”

“Brooks’s.”

Claire allowed herself the pleasure of a smile. “I should have known you would be a Whig.” She was teasing him, of course, but to make sure he knew it she added, “What else could Your Grace of Tanner possibly be? So our Mr. Layham is either a Tory, as might fit if he’s a countryman—and I could ask my father since he’s a member of White’s—or perhaps the Honorable Mr. Layham fancies himself a sportsman as well, and will be found haunting the halls of Boodle’s.”

“Ah. I thought we agreed to have no mention of fathers?”

“Did we? I don’t recall such a promise—only a suggestion to leave your name out of my correspondence with my parents. Which I have not done. I am contrary in that fashion.”

She watched the very edges of his mouth turn up with pleasure, but he said nothing in reply, so she gamboled on. “Well, Your Grace of Tanner, then there’s only one thing for it.”

She let him dangle off the end of her line for a long moment. Just to see what he would do.

He turned, and looked at her with that blazingly sharp focus, as if she were a species of animal he could not quite categorize. She loved making him ask. “And that thing is?”

“In advance of the Goodwood Race Meeting, and the general retreat to the country for the summer, any gentleman with pretensions to the
ton
will be at the yearling sales at Tattersall’s Repository. The only other place besides a club where London’s gentlemen can be reliably counted upon to gather in numbers in July is at the sales. I know my older brother was making noises that he meant to come to town to enjoy the afternoon there.”

“Ah.” His small smile broadened, razor sharp across his face. “Very good thinking. Actually, it’s perfect. I meant to go there for the sales myself.”

His delight and satisfaction hit her like a physical thing—a blossoming pleasure that knocked the need for air right out of her chest.

“But Tattersall’s will require another sleight of hand. And a change of costume. Tattersall’s is not the Almonry. We cannot stroll into the hallowed oval while in our current state of sartorial dis-splendor. Someone will be bound to call the constable if we do.”

The mental image of anyone calling a constable on the Duke of Fenmore brought another smile. “So what’s to be done? Back to Chelsea?”

“No. Too far afield.” The corners of his mouth curved deep into his cheeks. “Tell me, Claire, have you ever been to a rag trader’s?”

“No.” She knew what the rag traders were, of course. Her abigail, Silvers, went off to a specialized shop to sell Claire’s cast-offs—anything she had worn out in public more than a few times or that had gone out of fashion—but there were other, less exclusive shops that dealt in secondhand clothing all over London.

“It was a favorite ploy of my sister’s,” Tanner explained. “Nipping into a rag trader’s yard on the fly to change out her clothes in the constant running battle to stay at least one step ahead of both the constables and the kidmen. ‘Can’t find you if they don’t know who they’re looking for,’ she used to say to me.”

Claire could hear his admiration and his love for his sister in his voice, in the warm way he spoke of her. And how often. “How ingenious.” Claire decided she liked his sister, if for no other reason than her fierce cleverness in providing for her younger brother.

“Very,” Tanner acknowledged with that sly private smile he wore when he spoke of his sister. As if what they had done, the way they had lived, had been a great joke, a marvelous adventure. “As a consequence, I know no fewer than six excellent rag traders who would be happy to kit us out for Tattersall’s, and Tilly’s is up off the Strand at the Hungerford Stairs.”

“Excellent.” She smiled at him. Never mind that both their homes stood between the Strand and Hyde Park Corner, where Tattersall’s was located. Never mind any of that. “I’ve never been.”

The horse sales, as well as the rag traders’, was another place that had been off-limits to her. Not that a visit there had ever been expressly denied to her, but there was a sort of unspoken rule that a place such as Tattersall’s was the sole purvey of gentlemen, not ladies—a rule she had never sought to challenge.

Tanner rowed them easily on the inflowing tide back the way they had come that morning, under Blackfriars Bridge, and on to the great bend in the river to the Hungerford Stairs.

The stairs marked the entrance to a great open-air market where goods and produce from all over the city came to feed the households of the West End. It was busy and bustling, and no one paid them the least bit of mind as they left the stolen boat behind, and wove their way through the stalls.

“Hungry?” Tanner asked, picking up an apple.

“Famished.” It must have been getting on for noon. “Lord, yes.”

They bought food with money from the sueded pouch she returned to him. Apples and bread and cheese—simple foods for the simple people they were meant to be. But the apple was crisp and fresh and the cheese sharp and tangy. Ambrosia.

Ambrosia because she was sharing it with Tanner.

Who leaned against a wall and ate his bread and cheese as if he were the simplest, happiest, easiest man in the world and not a duke masquerading as a ruffian in order to catch a murderer.

How strange and unpredictable her life had suddenly become.

When they had eaten the bread and cheese and apples down to the last crumb—Tanner even ate the core—he led them onward, onto the Strand, and down a narrow street into the rag traders’ court.