Like No Other Lover (16 page)

Against his better judgment, Miles did lean toward his sister.

She caught hold of his coat sleeve, tugged him abruptly down, and whispered confidingly and somewhat regretfully close to his ear: “Becaush we
need
it, Milesh. The champagne. If you’re to keep talking with Lady Georgina, we shall need champagne. Becaush the sherry’s nearly gone.”

Miles gently freed himself from his sister’s grip and was upright again just as the footman approached with the sherry decanter.

Only to run into the great seething dark wall of Miles’s gaze, turn on his heel and smoothly leave the way he’d come in.

Mr. Goodkind had opened a few buttons on his waistcoat to allow his stomach to billow forth. Milthorpe was scarlet-nosed and brilliantly scarlet veins webbed his cheeks. Lady Windermere was red and blotchy from the clavicle upward. The color clashed badly with her plum-colored gown and matching plumed turban, which for some reason was now listing badly, though it had been most decidedly upright on her head when the evening began. The plume of it now extended horizontally, and whenever she turned her head just a little, it inserted itself into Mr. Goodkind’s ear. Mr. Goodkind brushed at his ear and smiled in a faintly pleased but puzzled manner every time it happened, but by the time he managed to turn his head, the plume was gone.

Miles watched this happen twice in the matter of seconds.

“Are you enjoying your evening?” he addressed the entire group. Some mischief in particular was collectively being enjoyed.

He disliked being excluded. He disliked not knowing what was afoot. And he had a strong sense it had something to do with him, and this he of course would ferret out easily enough.

“Oh, yes!” came an angelic chorus from the card players.

Then silence.

“What card game have you been playing?” He directed this pleasantly to Cynthia. He couldn’t identify it from the number in their hands or the arrangement of the cards on the table.

Cynthia couldn’t answer him, because Violet was speaking.

“Are
you
having a nice time, Milesh?” Her eyes were limpid with poignant concern. “
Are
you? You ought to have a good time every now and then, you know. And not just with
native girls
.”

Violet clapped an appalled hand over her mouth and gazed up at him with mock innocence. She removed the hand carefully.

“Hic,”
she said.

Miles felt his internal barometric pressure dropping to thunderstorm levels. He was furious at Violet, and furious at Cynthia, and furious at his circumstances, and furious because he was bored by Lady Georgina and furious because he was almost
never
furious.

“Forgive me, Miles,” Violet apologized sadly. “It was jusht in there, I suppose, and out it came.”

Miles turned his head slowly to look at Cynthia Brightly. Suppressed mirth was vibrating her like a leaf in a windstorm. Her eyes were watering and brilliant pink at the edges. Both of her hands were covering her mouth now, overlapping like palm leaves on the roof of a sturdy hut: wonderful for keeping out typhoons, when done properly. Or so he’d learned. She appeared to be attempting to keep a typhoon of laughter
in
.

“
Are
you having a nice time, Milesh?” Violet pressed, sounding a little belligerent now, as he hadn’t answered her.

“Yes, Violet. I’m having a very lovely conversation with Lady Georgina. She is speaking to me of ant colonies, and I was sharing a few of my South Sea stories with her.”

There was an instant, palpable hush. All those glassy eyes and rosy faces gazed at him for a fraught moment, studying him with unholy glee.

It was Mr. Goodkind who finally said it. In a falsetto, no less:

“Oh, Mr. Redmond. You’re so
interesting
!”

The table exploded into laughter so uproarious Miles actually leaped backward.

Cynthia Brightly laid her face on the table sideways, her back jumping with such violent mirth she began to cough from it. Milthorpe sounded like a frantic donkey fleeing from a branding-iron-wielding farmer:
haw haw haw haw haw!
Goodkind’s head was thrown back and his mouth was a perfect wide O from which issued long hoots of laughter. He gave the table a series of good hard slaps, which caused Lady Windermere’s turban to at last vibrate from her head entirely, sending the plume fluffing into his eyes. His hoots stopped abruptly and he flailed at the plume in terror, then lost his balance and toppled from his chair, dragging down the tablecloth, all the sherry glasses, and finally, Lady Windermere, whose hem he’d seized in desperation on his final descent.

Lady Windermere went pop-eyed with alarm, flung her arms skyward and vanished below the table as though a shark had pulled her underwater.

Her hand cards sprayed up like sea foam then and rained down.

It was the funniest thing Miles had ever seen in his life.

He’d also seldom known such towering anger. Split neatly in half by the two poles of emotion, cleaved as if by lightning, he was speechless.

The rest of the table, however, was still crippled by laughter. Cynthia decided she ought to investigate her toppled comrades, but she began to topple when she bent over.

Miles bent over and began sorting them out. He reached into the melee and carefully seized the proper limbs—arms not legs, because Lady Windermere was involved—and got them upright and propped back into their chairs, where they slumped like marionettes. He was forced to retrieve Lady Windermere’s turban as well. The plume had been crushed. Mr. Goodkind’s flap of hair was vertical now, too, sitting like a little wall atop his head, a plume of sorts of his own.

“Shinthia is shooooo clever!” Violet said mistily. “God
bless
Shinthia.
Where
ish that footman with the sherry?”

Miles knew the best way to obtain information was to pretend near indifference to it. “
Why
is Miss Brightly clever, Violet?” He got the words out through clenched teeth.

Cynthia Brightly, with her instinct for self-preservation, had abruptly stopped laughing and was now waving her hands at his sister in some sort of frantic warning. But Violet was lost in admiration and eager to give her friend credit where credit was due.

“For thinking of the game.”

Goodkind fell asleep with his chin balanced atop his hand atop a billiards cue.

The footmen were enlisted to help get everyone to their rooms; Miles’s valet did double duty to pull off boots and pour large men into their beds. Miles instructed the maid to put the chamberpot next to Violet’s bed, and knew that his sister deserved every bit of what she would likely feel the next day.

Lady Georgina was given a rote explanation for the rowdiness. She had brothers and a father; she was familiar with these types of events. She indulgently went up to her rooms.

He was about to do the very same as he left the billiard room. And later, he would never be certain why he paused near the library door on the way up to the third floor, fourth door on the left. When his faculties were finally returned to him, he would, of course, speculate in terms of the properties of physics: magnetic attractions, atmospheric disturbances, things of that sort, because analysis was what gave order and meaning to his world.

Regardless, pause he did.

And in that dark room, two things created light: the dying fire, and the shining head of the person bent toward it from a perch on the settee. An
unmistakable
head.

For an instant he went still and admired it the way he might the moon: with a helpless, impartial wonder. All those burnished shades of—

Oh, for God’s sake.
Brown
. Her hair was
brown
. Her dress was some shade of
brown
. And the fact that Cynthia Brightly was still wearing it meant that she hadn’t yet gone up to bed.

She was perched on a settee, her body curled forward toward the fire, her face cupped in her hands. Something about the pose implied…Was she…could she…could she be
weeping
?

He froze, instantly restless and panicked. He took a step forward.

A step backward.

And then her body slowly curled upright again, as lyrical as a flower blooming, and one hand dropped to her lap, and—

For God’s sake. She’d been leaning over to light a damned
cheroot
in the fire.

She balanced it at her lips with a disconcertingly practiced motion and was clearly about to suck it into full flaming life when he spoke.

“Where did you find a cheroot?”

Her head whipped toward him and she launched her cheroot-holding hand the entire length of her arm away from her mouth, looking like a chaste maiden fighting off a zealous suitor. She froze that way, her eyes round and white as eggs.

Miles tried and failed to turn his laughter into a cough.

She reeled her arm back in. “I nearly swallowed this thing whole,” she said peevishly. “I searched the house over for it, too.”

“You went…searching…for a cheroot.”

She stared at him, her head at a slight tip, dark brows diving toward the bridge of her nose. And then with pointed theatricality she slowly, slowly—
pruriently
slowly—inserted the tiny cigar between her lips, pursed them around it. And sucked until the tip was a tiny, angry red dot.

Miles was undecided as to whether he was fascinated or repelled. Though he was certain he was aroused. Out of genuine curiosity, he waited to see if she would cough or tear.

Instead she sagged elegantly against the generously curved arm of the settee, cast her head back and released a slim geyser of smoke toward the ceiling.

The elegant sagging shifted her bosom in the confines of her bodice, which was suddenly beautifully illuminated by firelight, soft, round, inviting. He stared.

And he was, in just about a thrice, hard as a rock.

“I searched the house over, and at last I found three of them in the humidor in this room. Fortunately this room already smells of cheroots.”

“Muskets, sherry, and a room that stinks of tobacco. The stuff of every young lady’s dreams.”

“I find cheroots relax me.”

“I suppose hunting heirs
can
ride roughshod over the nerves.”

She rewarded this terse witticism with a duck of her head and held the cigar out before her to study the burning tip reflectively.

“The thing is…I find being incessantly…
good…
and sparkling leaves me strangely depleted. And as I will be allowed no habits at all when I am married—or rather, honor dictates that I continue with the habits I’ve demonstrated thus far—the urge suddenly overcame me.”

Miles was silent. He didn’t know which part of this revelation to address.

“‘Honor,’ Miss Brightly?” he decided upon.

Her head turned sharply toward him. “I’ve more notion of honor than many of the people sleeping under this roof tonight, I’d warrant, Mr. Redmond.”

She left her gaze level with his. He wondered suddenly whether he was included in the remark. Thinking of Lady Middlebough. Third floor, fourth room from the left. Which is where he should be right now.

She took his silence for the apology it was.

“What precisely was the nature of the game tonight?” he genuinely wanted to know.

“We were all to drink when Lady Georgina said, ‘Oh, Mr. Redmond. You’re so
interesting
.’”

He was struck. Imagine Cynthia noticing such a thing. And once again he was torn between hilarity and anger.

Georgina did say it rather a lot.

“Perhaps she thinks I’m very interesting.” He said this dryly.

“That could very well be,” Miss Brightly allowed skeptically.

He couldn’t help it. He smiled. She shifted again on the settee, and her dress pulled at the swell of her breasts, and his smile vanished, and he felt that familiar difficulty with his breathing.

“She’s very nice,” she added. It sounded almost like an accusation.

“That isn’t her fault,” Miles said quickly.

Which then struck both of them as funny, and they both smiled this time. The smoke she’d released now hovered over them like a net about to drop.

Leave now, you bloody, bloody fool
, the voice in Miles’s head said.

“Have you considered that you’ll spend your entire wedded life ‘depleted,’ as you say, Miss Brightly?”

She turned to look at him. “Depleted but
rich
,” she corrected slowly, deliberately.

He went still.

And then the fury was instant and seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.

It propelled him into the room and down on his knees next to her so swiftly she didn’t have time to gasp: he gained an impression of her wide blue eyes and of the cheroot tip glaring between her fingers like a third accusing eye.

And then he plucked it from her fingers and hurled it into the fire. They stared, astonished, toward where it vanished, devoured with a pop and a hiss.

Silently they sat. Miles watched the flame inexorably reducing the log to ashes, feeling oddly spent. After a time, he became aware of Cynthia’s breathing beneath the groans and pops and hisses of the fire. The logs sounded as though they were objecting to being consumed.

He turned slowly. She wasn’t staring at the fire.

She was staring at him, and some expression that haunted him fled her eyes when he turned. Shadows of flame leaped and shivered over her throat, as though she herself were being consumed.

As if to test whether this was true, he watched his hand move toward her. His fingers landed softly, softly, beneath her jaw.

Her breath snagged audibly. And so did his.

He couldn’t stop.

She didn’t stop him.

With two fingers he slowly, purposefully, gently, followed both the clean, fine line of her jaw and the unthinkably soft skin beneath, marveling at this contrast in textures.

Like a vigilant chaperone, he watched his own fingers as he drew them slowly, slowly, down, down, down. Her throat was satiny and hot, frighteningly delicate. Her pulse bumped hard there, sending blood rushing through her veins, flushing her skin with a heat that transferred itself to his own skin. The surface of it felt feverish, every cell of his body alert to, craving, sensation.

Onward his fingers journeyed. They made an almost whimsical figure eight over those bones at the base of her long neck.

“I don’t want you,” she said. It was a cracked whisper.

Miles, the truth seeker, sought proof of this. Lower, just a little lower, just above the pale round give of her breast, his fingers found again her rapid heartbeat. He paused them there to savor, with vindication, its tempo, and levered his head up to meet her eyes.

It was the only warning he gave her before he eased his forefinger into that alluring crease between her breasts.

Her head jerked back; her lips parted on a silent gasp; her rib cage gave a minute leap.

“I don’t want you, either,” he whispered, too. It seemed the proper language for the dark, the language to use when touching bare skin.

And at that, she smiled faintly: that was the lies out of the way, then.

And when Miles slowly withdrew his finger from its silken berth, desire dragged a slow, rapier line down his spine, and he was tense and shaking with it.

Ah, but he was a man of method. He retraced his path, lightly up over her chest, her throat, to her face.

And there at last he tipped his fingers up, creating a little cradle for her jaw.

Cynthia turned her cheek into his palm. And as he once suspected, it fit into his hand as though carved for the purpose.

Her eyelids drifted closed.

His thumb ran once over her cheek. Oh, God. There were no words for how soft her skin was.

They were creating something dangerous and foolish that could never end well.
Pleasurably
, perhaps. But not well.

But it felt like gamesmanship. Miles disliked the quality in people; he disliked
strategizing
. It reminded him a bit too much of his father. He resented that Cynthia brought out the quality in him, and he resented the tremble in his hands, because it made him feel foolish, naive, for thinking that anything he’d felt for any other woman before now qualified as desire. He now knew he’d only known…appetite before. The one he could satisfy at whim.

This…
this
had him at its mercy.

And implicit in surrendering was the fear he would simply never sate himself.

To hell with gamesmanship. He knew how to be direct.

He took his hand abruptly from beneath her cupped chin, fitted it around the back of her neck, and sought with his fingers that column of tiny buttons that closed it up.

In a thrice he had the top one undone.

Shock stiffened Cynthia’s spine. He undid another. She possessed a voice, he reminded himself. She could use it if she wanted him to stop. She possessed the ability to fly up off that settee in indignation or deliver a stinging slap.

She showed no signs of doing any of that.

Still, he felt obliged to offer her those options, and did so by raising his brows in a query.

Ah, but she’d turned her head away from him ever so slightly just then. He suspected—no, he knew—it was so she could pretend the choice hadn’t been offered. And with this realization, suddenly lust was a riptide. And as for his erection…well, it was hardly poetry, but the words “ax handle” sprang to mind.

He easily and quickly thumbed open the remaining tiny buttons; the holes were loose from being done up and undone over and over during two seasons worth of balls and soirees. Those loose buttonholes were a reminder of Cynthia Brightly’s straightened circumstances. But he didn’t pause to reflect.

He wanted. He wanted.

And then they were open, all of them, and the fabric of her bodice loosened and sagged, and her throat moved in a swallow. He felt her head turn again to watch him. Flickering firelight tended to distort expressions; the glance he cast made him think he saw uncertainty in hers. But he promptly buried his face into the crook of her throat so he wouldn’t need to wonder about it.

A few threads of her hair came down to brush his cheek; he breathed her in, sweetness and smoke. He considered then that he ought to have begun by kissing her mouth. In truth he was working his way toward her lips because he now knew he could lose himself entirely there, and the idea of experiencing that sort of vertigo again unnerved him.

He surprised himself by licking her instead.

Given how rigid she went, he wasn’t the only one surprised by the licking.

Still, he’d begun, and he felt compelled to commit to it. His tongue continued in a slow line up the cord of her throat. Cynthia remained unnervingly still, tense as a harp string.

He began to feel a trifle uncertain. Was she…shocked? Frightened? Horri—

She exploded in a muffled giggle.