Days of Rakes and Roses (7 page)

“I do.” She battled to sit up without success.

“You’re driving me mad,” he groaned.

“Then go away where you’ll never see me.” Even as she spoke, her heart clenched with denial. She didn’t want Simon to go away. She wanted him to stay close. As close as he was now.

Closer.

“I’ve been away too damned long.” His hands held her firmly against him.

“At least go back to your seat.”

“No.”

“I’ll scream.”

White teeth glinted in the shadows above her face as he smiled. “Then by all means scream.”

He gathered her up and rolled until she half-lay against the seat, captive beneath him. Lydia told herself she felt constricted, confined, uncomfortable, at risk of spilling to the floor with the coach’s jolting.

It wasn’t true. She felt desired.

She sucked in a breath redolent of Simon and flowers. His body crushed the white roses pinned to cascade gracefully from the shoulder of her gown. The heady scent filled the carriage, heavy with sensuality.

His lips brushed hers, gently this time. Arousal flooded her, melted any ice lingering in her veins. Awareness tightened her skin and made her reach for him. Whether to push him away or drag him nearer, she couldn’t have said.

For a second that seemed to last an eternity, his lips rested on hers. Undemanding. Warm. Silky. As if testing his recollection of kissing her. As if waiting for her consent. The carriage’s lurching slid her against Simon’s body, tormented her with the promise of a surcease of longing.

Without taking the kiss deeper, he raised his head. Frustration coiled in her belly like a hundred snakes. “You said you’d scream,” he taunted softly.

How dare the rapscallion challenge her? She opened her mouth, ready to caterwaul her lungs out. If she called, Jenkins would stop the carriage and she’d be safe to return to Grenville with only a slightly tainted conscience.

She felt Simon tense as he waited for her to summon rescue. Their bodies were entwined so intimately that he must count her every breath, just as she counted his. She’d never been so near to him, even when he’d kissed her in the hayshed.

Blast his importunity. He wouldn’t have everything his own way. True to her word, she opened her mouth. Deliberately the low cry that emerged reached no further than Simon’s ears. A soft sound of surrender.

Lord above, she was bold. She deserved to be condemned.

Tomorrow she’d repent her weakness. She knew that to her bones. She’d see Grenville and hate herself. But this chance to kiss Simon once more before she resigned herself to a lifetime of unimpeachable behavior was irresistible.

Simon laughed softly. “Objection noted.”

Before she could scold him for mocking her, his mouth descended. Forgetting anger, forgetting duty, close to forgetting her name, she drowned in dark rapture. Her hands curled into his broad shoulders and she kissed him back with all the anguished passion she’d suppressed since he’d left her.

“Lydia, Lydia, Lydia,” he murmured, his grip crushing the breath from her. She didn’t mind as long as his mouth conjured such wonderful sensations.

Trailing heat, his hands slid up to cup her breasts. She jerked when his thumbs brushed her nipples through her bodice. A deep pulse set up between her legs, a pulse of demand that only Simon could satisfy.

He touched her nipples again, more deliberately, with more incendiary effect. She shook in a fever of desire and pressed closer, never mind the danger of what they did.

His kisses flared from subtle exploration to red hot insistence. Even through her inexperience, she realized he intended to take her. Now.

That knowledge doused her recklessness like a bucket of freezing water. However he made her burn, she couldn’t allow this madness to reach its conclusion. If she jilted Grenville, it would only remind the world of her mother’s lapses. And she owed her betrothed better than this betrayal. He shouldn’t suffer because of her fatal weakness for Simon Metcalf.

Lydia went rigid and whimpered against Simon’s seeking mouth.

“What’s wrong?” His breath glanced across her face, reminded her that only inches separated them, inches she could bridge in an instant. After tonight, they’d never be this close to one another again. The thought set up a new rift in a heart that she’d believed had already been thoroughly broken.

A hollow laugh escaped her, closer to a sob than humor. “You know what’s wrong. I’m engaged to Grenville.”

“But you love me.”

She struggled out from beneath Simon’s body, surprised he let her go. Trembling and angry, she curled against the corner of the carriage. “You’re so presumptuous.”

Slowly Simon rose to sit at the other end of the bench. It wasn’t far enough away for her. Guilt beat at her, made her feel ill.

In the space following her accusation, she heard Simon’s uneven breathing. They’d verged dismayingly close to the point of no return. And so swiftly. Years of perfect virtue, then one kiss from this scoundrel and she lost her head.

“But you do love me.” His voice lowered into softness. “Just as I still love you.”

Heaven help her. Appalled denial vibrated through her, robbed her of breath. This was the last thing she needed to hear a week before her wedding to Grenville.

Once she’d have cut off her right arm in exchange for the merest possibility of Simon Metcalf declaring his affections. Now she told herself that this was only another ploy to gain her attention, even as she yearned uselessly for it to be true.

“You don’t even know me,” she said in a flat voice.

“Devil take you, Lydia, of course I do,” he said stubbornly, and for the first time he sounded genuinely disgruntled.

She realized that up until this instant, he’d been sure of winning her to whatever purpose he intended. Definitely coaxing her away from Grenville and into an affair. But surely not into marriage—even at Fentonwyck, he hadn’t mentioned a proposal.

His self-confidence rankled. “Curse you, Simon. I’m not surrendering my maidenhead to a footloose rogue in a carriage in the middle of Mayfair.”

Unforgivably he laughed. “We don’t have to stay here. I’ll take you to my rooms. Hell, I’ll take you to the moon if it means I finally have you.”

“Don’t be crude,” she snapped, frustration bubbling up into rage. She was so angry, she had difficulty drawing in a full breath.

This time when he sighed, she heard the desolation underlying his humor. Her renegade heart fisted with regret as anger receded without disappearing. She’d been wrong when she’d thought that what occurred between them left his emotions uninvolved. An iniquitous yen to give in to him, to ease his sorrow surged, but she forced it back.

“Take me home, Simon.” Absolute despair bolstered her command.

“Will you tell Berwick you won’t have him?” Simon didn’t sound like the lazy, charming, amused man she knew so well. His brief vulnerability had vanished. He sounded like a displeased tyrant quizzing a rebellious subject.

His autocratic manner made Lydia seethe with renewed resentment. “I most certainly won’t.”

He turned on the seat and gripped her arms with unlover-like firmness. “You can’t kiss me like that and marry another man, God damn it.”

“Just watch me.” She wrenched free, bruising herself in the process. Her voice broke and thickened. She wasn’t far off crying. Simon’s return had left her feeling ripped into two ragged, bleeding halves. Tonight had capped off a horrible week with the noxious revelation that she’d never be free of her first love. “I’m going to marry Sir Grenville Berwick next Wednesday and you can’t stop me.”

She waited for more outrage, more demands, but Simon slumped against his corner with another sigh that caught at her heart, much as she wished it didn’t. “How can I change your mind?”

She glared at him through the gloom, wishing this fraught encounter would end. The longer this quarrel lasted, the more they’d hurt each other. She already felt torn to shreds. “You can’t.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

She bit back a tirade about Simon waltzing back into her life and expecting her to receive him with open arms. She bit back a rancorous reminder that she was a woman of her word and she’d given her word to another man.

She’d already said more than enough. What was the use of berating Simon? He wasn’t for her. He’d never been for her. She’d be safe with Grenville, and if in the secret reaches of the night, she dreamed of another man’s touch, well, who was to know?

“Please take me back to Rothermere House.” She paused to dislodge a lump in her throat that felt bigger than the Rock of Gibraltar. “If you have any pity, you won’t come near me again. You say you love me. I’m not sure about that.” She gestured to stem his automatic protest. “But we were friends once, good friends. For the sake of that old friendship, please find the compassion in your heart to leave me alone.”

Silence crashed down between them with the force of an ax. She knew Simon struggled against arguing. Against, God help her, sweeping her into his arms and persuading with seduction where he couldn’t persuade with words.

Don’t let him touch me.

The deplorable reality was that she wasn’t sure that she could resist his touch. So weak she was.

He remained unmoving at the far end of the bench. The young man she’d known so well had harbored strong principles beneath his light-heartedness. Moments ago, the man he’d become had released her upon her request, although she knew it countered his deepest instincts. She knew it countered his deepest instincts now when he raised the blind over his window and turned to give her a short nod. The light from the carriage lamps outside shone on his face and turned his stern features into fine-carved stone.

“As you wish, Lady Lydia.”

Chapter Five

Across the crowded supper room at the Merriweather musicale, Simon watched the way the candlelight gleamed on Lydia’s hair, its color richer than the rubies circling her throat. Seeing her, he couldn’t help reliving their passionate encounter in the coach, as he’d relived it over and over since he’d left her to return home alone. He hadn’t trusted himself to remain in that confined vehicle without touching her, whatever promises he made.

For five days since then, he’d struggled to conform to Lydia’s request for peace. Now he sipped his lukewarm champagne without tasting it and wondered yet again if he’d been a fool to agree.

But she’d sounded so weary and lost, how could he refuse her? Even if it broke his heart to obey.

He still clung to a shred of honor, damn it.

Scruples had come near to disintegrating in the carriage when after so long, he’d held the woman he wanted. The discussion that night hadn’t gone as planned. How he cursed himself and his impatience. Simon had intended to speak calmly, sensibly, convince Lydia with reason alone that she shouldn’t marry Berwick but should instead give herself to the man who had always loved her. That hadn’t quite worked out, he remembered grimly. He swallowed more champagne, wishing it could wash away the sour taste of defeat.

For a brief instant that night, he’d thought he’d won. Lydia had kissed him with a hunger that almost matched his own. Her beautiful slender body had softened in surrender. When he’d tasted her desire, triumph had thundered through him like a volley of gunfire.

But then, bugger it, she’d remembered where she was. And God knew she was right to demur—he couldn’t tumble the Duke of Sedgemoor’s sister in a carriage, like some doxy he’d picked up in Covent Garden.

Hell and damnation, how could he bear losing her? In two days, she’d walk into St. George’s on Cam’s arm and pledge herself to that odious fellow who treated her as a distant second best to his political cronies. Simon gritted his teeth against the crying shame of it all. Devil take it, if Lydia was his, she’d never suffer the least doubt that she was the center of his life.

When Simon had received Cam’s letter asking him to return, he’d assumed that his battle was already won. Why else would his friend take the trouble to track him down in distant Anatolia? The moment she saw Simon, Lydia would admit that she’d waited for him.

What a blasted ass he was. How unforgivably bloody arrogant.

Now here he stood as grumpy as a tiger with a sore tooth, glowering at the woman he loved and couldn’t have. The woman who hadn’t spared him a glance all night. She stood mere yards away with her fiancé. In less than forty-eight hours, she intended to make that puffed-up toad the happiest of men, sod Grenville Berwick’s soul.

As the concert’s supper interval ended, Simon hung back. He should go home. He’d be no happier away from Lydia, but at least on his own, he didn’t have to hide his anguish. Maintaining a careless façade over grinding misery became more onerous with every minute so close to her, yet so impossibly far away.

With a surge of futile resentment, Simon watched Lydia take Berwick’s arm. Heads lowered in conversation, they crossed the floor toward the ballroom.

Yes, Simon should definitely go. Watching Lydia only made him feel like he punched old bruises, doubling the ache.

Still, he found himself transfixed at the sight of her, tall, slender and graceful in Nile green silk. The subtle color made her skin look enticingly white. Her auburn hair was pinned high in a style that emphasized the slant of her cheekbones and the glitter in her amber eyes. Call him an over-optimistic fool, but those eyes seemed shadowed. The sadness seemed incongruous in a woman due to marry in two days.