Like No Other Lover (22 page)

Imagine Violet observing
this
. And sounding reproving about it.

Unbidden came the image of a pair of shoulders almost imperceptibly squaring against the light of a window. As if adjusting a burden that had just awkwardly shifted.

He felt again that peculiar pierce in the vicinity of his breastbone, that familiar restlessness.

Who looked after Cynthia Brightly? Cynthia Brightly.

He didn’t think she was fearless. And this is what made her courageous.

And then he thought of what she might be doing now: doubtless toting up the assets of each of the guests in order to decide where to fully direct her charm in order to gain what she wanted. He’d been right from the very beginning: the two of them were not so very different in that regard. They would each do what they needed to do in order to get what they wanted.

“I haven’t yet decided what I think of her,” he said shortly.

This wasn’t a lie. And as this sounded very like something Miles would say, Violet accepted it with a one-shouldered shrug.

“I like Georgina, too,” she said, generously. “She’s very nice. Always has been. You’re going to marry her, aren’t you, Miles? She’d suit you.” She said this conciliatorily. “And that would certainly please Papa.”

Miles felt a pressure, an irritation, welling. An irritation encompassing every woman he currently knew, including Lady Middlebough, who’d been extraordinarily patient, and whom,
by God
, he would see—in her glorious bare entirety—tonight.

He ignored his sister’s question and pushed himself to a standing position.

“Well, then, Violet. Will you please think before you set off to do something rash?”

“I don’t think that I can promise that, Miles. Thinking takes a good deal of time. You do more than enough of that for all of us.”

She was flippant, entertained by herself. She expected him to laugh.

And suddenly he was
furious
.

“For God’s sake, Violet. Do you want to break my heart?” The words were out of his mouth before he could reconsider them.

His sister’s mouth dropped wide. Her eyes bulged with shock.

“
What…
what a thing to say, Miles! I’ve—I’ve never heard you speak of broken hearts before.”

Ah, poetry had other uses then: shocking his recalcitrant sister into stammering. It was admittedly very funny, but beneath his amusement sizzled irritation.
I’ve a heart, too,
he wanted to say.
I’m not just
gravity.
I can be furious. I could do something rash. I could suffer torments.

Violet remained speechless. She’d leaned back a little and was squinting at him, as if to draw him into focus. To ascertain that it was actually
Miles
speaking to her.

“Just think again before you do something, Violet. You’ve a brain, for God’s sake, and when you display evidence of it, I am equally shocked. Please recall your brain
can
be used for something other than preventing the wind from making a whistling noise through your ears. In other words:
think.
”

“Or I’ll…or I’ll ‘break your
heart?
’” She sounded as though she was quoting him, and she still sounded incredulous.

He sighed. Miles could not for the life of him imagine the man who could possibly manage Violet, or turn her into the woman he liked to think she could become. She had all the finest qualities of the Redmonds, magnified and run amuck.

“Very well,” he said finally. “Yes. You very well might break my heart the next time you do something rash. Would you like my broken heart upon your conscience?”

She continued staring at him, and suddenly produced a frown. Perhaps she was attempting to picture him as a broken man, he thought, stumbling about in a state of internal chaos she’d caused. As she stared, she almost unconsciously raised her hand to smooth the frown dents out from between her eyes.

She exhaled finally, resignedly, and turned away again, looking toward the horizon. “Very well, Miles. I shall endeavor to
think
. But only for you.” Her wryness was intended to disguise the fact that she meant it.

My bloody maddening sister loves me despite herself
. He disguised a smile.

“Oh, wait, Miles.” Violet peered at him. “Look at that. One of the buttons on your coat is loose.” She reached over and gave the dangling silver button a flick with two fingers. “You should have your valet see to it. Isn’t that a Weston coat? They normally sew buttons on with steel. What have you been doing to it?”

Writhing on settees with maddening, cheroot-smoking female guests.

Violet
would
notice his loose button. In some ways, her vision, her way of approaching the world, was like his own: precise, detailed. But channeled, obviously, in very different ways.

“Thank you for pointing it out. I’ll see to it, lest I offend your sartorial senses.”

She smiled a little, but the smile faded as trepidation set in. She cleared her throat. “You won’t tell Papa about…this?”

“No. And Jonathon probably won’t tell Father, either, of course. Do realize, however, that he will
know
you’ve tried to run off with the Gypsies, which means he now has something new with which to blackmail you.”

Violet snorted. “Jonathan hasn’t nearly as much on me as I have on him.”

This was interesting, and one day he might want to press his sister for details. Not today, however.

Miles stood and brushed at the back of his coat. He’d grown chilled simply sitting for a short time. He reached down, seized Violet’s hands and hauled her to her feet unceremoniously. Then he waited for her to shake out her skirt, took her hands back in his and rubbed them hard. They were very cold.

And then he released them, exasperated.

“How
did
you get here, Violet?”

“I walked for a time, then I paid a farmer going north a shilling to take me the rest of the way. I didn’t want to take a horse, you see, as I knew the Gypsies would make it their own soon enough, and Papa would have fits and have everyone quietly arrested. You rode, did you not?” Violet looked hopefully toward Ramsay. Then gazed eloquently off toward the long, long distance where the house presided, and limpidly back at him.

He rolled his eyes. He had to admire the attempt, but he wasn’t Lyon or his father.

“I certainly did ride. You, however, will be walking all the way back, while
I
ride. The walk ought to warm you up nicely. I’ll ride next to you. We’ll discuss gravity and other planetary properties the entire way home.”

In the end, he knew best how to punish Violet.

All, that was, except for Miles. He’d made himself scarce for the entire afternoon to see to business about the property and to attend to correspondence. At least this was the excuse he gave.

Eventually, in the laughter and flirtation of the day, Cynthia almost forgot her time here was growing shorter, her shoes and purse growing thinner, that no letter had yet arrived from Northumberland, and that Miles Redmond would allegedly be making love to Lady Middlebough this very evening.

Lady Middlebough sketched very well. If with an excess of passion.

But in the dark, after she’d retired from the evening, Cynthia had great difficulty forgetting all of these things.

A particular impulse gathered momentum, became unbearable.

She finally surrendered to it. She slid out of bed, because she had to see for herself. And she had directions, after all.

But now making love to her seemed a matter of honor, for heaven’s sake. So he waited, and held the image of her in his mind, and pictured what he might like to do to her and what she might like to do to him, and finally began to look forward to it
greatly
. To lose himself, exhaust himself, in mindless, obligation-free pleasure was very likely precisely what he needed to restore his peace of mind. Or so his formidable mind told him.

When the appointed hour arrived, he opened, very slowly, the door of his chambers to peer down the hall. In case Lady Middlebough knocked upon the wrong door.

“What the
devil
?”

Cynthia Brightlywas standing in the hall outside his room. Right where anyone strolling by—or rather,
slinking
by on the way to an assignation—might see her.

He seized her by the wrist and pulled her through the doorway before she could squeak. He stood looking at her, standing on the carpet, toes bare, and—

Wait—he couldn’t have her in his
room
, for God’s sake.

He reflexively furled her right back out into the hall so quickly her hair sailed behind her like a kite.

Good God. Such a
lot
of long, thick hair.

He left his hand indecisively curled around her wrist because she was bright as a ghost in her nightdress in the dimly lit hall, that hair pouring down the front of her managing to give off a gleam even in the dark. Lady Middlebough would appear nearly any second, and see her standing there, and—

Miles gave a tug and spooled her back into the room.

It occurred to him then that they were engaged in the world’s most absurd reel.

“Are
you
enjoying this, Mr. Redmond?” Cynthia whispered conversationally.

He made the mistake of looking into her face. The firelight made her nightrail nearly transparent.

“Bloody woman.” He furled her decisively back out into the hall again.

He didn’t yet let go.

It occurred to him that perhaps he
couldn’t
let go. Her wrist was narrow and so soft and cold in his fingers, and if he began to think of how soft her skin was—

He wouldn’t think of her skin.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he hissed finally.

“Why? Are you expecting another guest?” As innocent as blossom, those words. Her eyes, no doubt, danced pure deviltry, but he couldn’t see it in the dark.

He let his long, incredulous silence serve as an emphatic yes.

“Lady Middlebough?” she pressed on a whisper.

“What”—and he made the whispered word a veritable monument to sarcasm—“do you
think
, Miss Brightly?”

She was silent for a time. Apparently his waves of fury and exasperation and the sheer size of him were finally driving his message home.

“I should leave,” she suggested faintly.

“Oh, you should definitely leave,” he agreed grimly. He threw a nervous look past her down the hall.

But she remained standing where she was. Paralyzed with nerves now, and by his presence. Which somehow contrived to make her feel like an insect trapped in amber.

Miles muttered one final oath, pulled her into the room once more, released her wrist, closed the door as quietly as he was able, and slid the bolt.

It was perhaps the most final sound either of them had heard.

He slowly turned about to look at her. “I do not at the moment find you
witty
, Cynthia.”

Looking at her was a mistake. His eyes felt quite at home now ravishing her in the firelit dark, and it tempted his body closer and closer, and his entire being protested fiercely when he forced himself to look away.

He took five steps to the other side of the room. As if somehow those five steps would protect him from his inconvenient desires.

This is what he would do: he would wait for Lady Middlebough to arrive, he would send her away with sincere whispered regrets and promises of another evening in the
ton
one day, and then he would give Miss Brightly an earnest push from his room and bolt it against
all
women this evening.

“We’ll wait until she taps at the door, I’ll extend my regrets, and then I’ll send you away,” he said firmly. Still not trusting himself to look at her.

Cynthia said nothing. She was looking around his room with avid curiosity.

He’d thought to feel bolder in her presence. After all, he’d demystified her somewhat: he knew the texture and temperature and scent of her skin, the sweet hot taste of her mouth. He’d felt the chafe of her hard nipples arched against his chest, and her fingertips dragging over his scalp, and—

Desire cleaved him. He curled his hand around the bedpost as though it were shipwreck flotsam and he the lone survivor bobbing on the sea. Or perhaps a spear he could hurl into the gaping maw of the frustrating
everything
that was his desire for Miss Brightly.

Bloody
metaphors
. Here they were, of course. Unleashed by Miss Brightly, whose name itself was virtually an absurd simile.

She was quicksand. The more he struggled away from her, the deeper he sank.

Now, if Lady Middlebough had entered the room, he would have welcomed her with a warm kiss, plied her with brandy, undressed her with alacrity, and they would at this moment be mutually, enthusiastically, discovering each other’s charms. He would have been proving to her that everything she’d heard about him was true.

But now, instead, he stood hiding in the shadows. And Cynthia stood before the fire with her arms wrapped around her like a shawl.

He’d left his coat on the chair near the bed for his valet to look after later. He reached for it—it was a long reach—but walking toward it felt like he’d be relinquishing his position of safety.

“Put this on.”

He tossed it to her. It flapped across the room like a great bird, and she plucked it from the air before it could settle on her head. Gracefully, with a certain amount of aplomb, she arranged it over her own shoulders. And sent a bemused look in his direction.

“Thank you,” she said softly, uncertainly.

“Don’t talk,” he whispered irritably.

This for some reason made her smile.

There was silence. He wondered what she thought of his room: simple, dark colors, chairs enormous and comfortable and well-used, a carpet plush as a meadow, a bed that could comfortably fit an entire family. Miles was large. He liked large furniture, and he generally employed the entire bed when he slept.

“Isn’t Lady Middlebough married?”

It sounded dangerously as though she intended to make some sort of point, which did nothing to blunt the edge of his irritation.

He broke his own rule about talking. “She’s a grown woman. She can do as she wishes. She knows precisely what she’s doing. She wants only one thing, as do I.”

There was a pause.

“I wouldn’t,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t do it.”

He sighed with weighty patience. “We are two adults, she and I. And how do you
know
, Cynthia? How on earth can you possibly know what you will or won’t do once you’re mar—”

Three little taps sounded against the doorframe. He froze.

He truly did despise lying. He was terrible at it, really. However, if he claimed to be woefully indisposed, he wouldn’t be far wrong in this instance.

Emerging from the shadows, he slid the bolt and opened the door two inches. He saw in the dark a pair of dewy glowing eyes and the slow beginnings of what promised to be a sultry smile when it was completed. Sadly, what he was about to say would put an end to it.

“Victoria…please don’t despise me.” He was all soft contrition. The smile froze midway up. “I find that I’m feeling terribly…indisposed. I fear that I might…I might not be able to…”

He left his sentence incomplete, in what he hoped was a meaningful manner. He prayed she would be merciful.

“I can change that,” whispered the surprisingly confident Lady Middlebough. Without a second’s hesitation.

This gave him pause. But only for a moment.

“I fear it’s a very—” He cleared his throat discreetly, searched for a deterring sort of word. “—unpleasant…sort of indisposed.”

Absolute silence ensued.

His words hovered like a miasma, accumulating mystery and vileness in proportion to the length the silence stretched.

He and Lady Middlebough regarded each other through the space in his door. Miles realized then that his cheeks were actually
burning
.

He silently, floridly, juicily cursed Cynthia

“I do hope your health improves soon,” was what Lady Middlebough finally chose to say, with all the exquisite politeness born of her breeding.

He wondered what she would choose to say to the
ton’s
other widows.

“Thank you for your understanding, Victoria.” His voice was a silken apology. “And no one is more abashed or more regretful than I, given that you will be leaving in the morning. Please do promise me…another time?”

This at least was heartfelt, and Lady Middlebough knew it. She gave him a somewhat uncertain smile, but then touched her fingers to her lips in a gesture of a blown kiss, which he made a show of snatching from the air.

She backed away, then turned and headed back toward her chambers, her footsteps light, her posture slumped and thwarted, taking all of her luscious charms with her.

Miles waited until she turned the corridor corner. Then closed the door, slid the bolt, and whirled glowering on Cynthia.

“Perhaps you should have been more specific about your complaint from the very beginning.” She was struggling not to laugh. “You would not have then had to debate it.”

“
You
are my complaint,” he hissed.

“I—” she began to protest. Her voice rose in pitch.

He thrust his finger forbiddingly against his lips and frowned darkly.
Shhh
. “I’ll tell you when to go.” His whisper was vehement.

It was silent for a time.

“I wouldn’t,” she whispered, haltingly, as though they were resuming a conversation interrupted by his
invited
guest, “because it isn’t something I would ever take for granted. If I am fortunate enough to marry well,
I
will behave honorably.”

“Again: how on earth do you know what you would do? Perhaps it’s much more difficult than you can possibly imagine.”

“But isn’t that what makes it honorable? The difficulty?”

A sizzle of anger almost made him dismiss her for a naive fool. But he was honest enough with himself to concede that he was angry in part because her point was excellent.

And that in truth, he didn’t think he could have gone through with it with Lady Middlebough. And not necessarily because of honor.

“Perhaps it’s just that everyone expends so much effort upon making excellent matches without thought to the
suitability
of the pairing, and therefore much unhappiness is perpetuated.”

“Ah. And so you are a
philanthropist
to the likes of Lady Middlebough in that you ease, shall we say…unhappiness?” she asked politely.

Miles thought of Lady Georgina’s earnest gray eyes then. He wondered if she would have an affair with one of his friends or some other blood in the ton should they marry.

Doubtless
he
would. Have an affair, that was. The thought brought a peculiar desolation.

“Why are you here? To make a point, or to stop me?” He said it curtly.

“I thought…I thought you were a man of fact and truth.” It wasn’t an accusation. It was as though she was gently reminding him of who he was, because the essence of who he was mattered to her. He heard hurt, faint bewilderment in her voice.

“There has only been the one married woman,” he said softly, after a moment. “And not yet. And you just saw her leave.” The confession cost him. But her face eased, and somehow this was all that mattered in that moment.

“Would you…” she swallowed. “Would you have…if I hadn’t come?”

He waited. In the end, he of course answered truthfully, though it unnerved him.

“I don’t know,” he said softly. And the admission was a gift to her. Because the answer would have most certainly been an unequivocal “yes” only days ago.

Cynthia’s eyes widened, then she quickly dropped her gaze. Ah. So she understood.

Take for granted
, she said. He studied her. Oh, God. It struck him that there was no end to the way she could fascinate him. Her hair…her hair seemed a universe of colors. He’d seen her in an iridescent dress he’d confused with the wings of a tropical butterfly, and in a perfectly lovely, demure green dress that had somehow made him think of Tudor prostitutes, and now she was in her nightdress, which was large and loose and free of frills, but revealed a swoop of pale skin above the gathered neckline, between where her hands clutched his coat closed. He wanted to land his hands there, touch his tongue to the indentation between those fine bones at the base of her throat—

“All right, you should go now,” he said instantly.

Her presence and the conversation combined made him feel cornered. He could skillfully negotiate with
cannibals
, but this girl overwhelmed him because she intruded upon places in him he’d never dreamed existed, showed him undreamed of desires, raised uncomfortable questions his analytical mind could not dissect. He had no idea how to prevent her from doing it.

Or how to defend himself.

And there was one thing Miles Redmond hated more than anything in the world: not
knowing
.

He took two quick strides forward to take his coat from her. Something in his face must have told her he was quite serious about evicting her. She shifted the coat from her shoulders into her hands.

He meant to take it from her. Instead, it dropped to the floor.

And he watched his hand sink into her hair slowly, wonderingly.

What the bloody hell was the matter with him? A few nights ago he’d licked her like a spaniel, and he’d begun this evening by flinging her in and out of his chambers as though she were a bandalore.

Now he was pulling her hair.

Well, perhaps he wasn’t
pulling
her hair. But he did have his hand rather emphatically in it, and he was loath to take it back out again. The dense silkiness mesmerized him, and again, the sheer force of his wonder infuriated him even as it weakened him. He lifted his handful slowly up, let its weight waterfall down through his fingers, watching the dozens of subtle colors sparking in it: fire reds and coppers threaded through glossy mink brown. Combed his fingers back through it.

She was still. Either captivated by his wonder or, once again, utterly surprised by what the mad Miles Redmond had chosen to do to her. But then his coat slipped from her fingers and fell to the carpet, and he looked into her eyes. They’d gone hazy and soft, pupils large and dark, lids heavier now.

He slid his other hand through the other side of her hair, hair that now made her his prisoner. He gave a gentle tug upon it to tip her head back into his hands.

And softly, softly, he brushed his mouth over hers.

Her breath sighed out against his lips. Relief, or resignation? Or something of both?

Her eyes drifted all the way closed. And he could see in her throat the quick thump of her heart.

He touched his tongue to the corner of her mouth, to that surprising, sensitive little place, to remind her that he knew secrets about women and therefore about her. And then he made the kiss a real but leisurely one: gentle, drawing the carnal pillow of her lower lip between his own. Slowly, slowly, savoring the generous give of it, taking just a quick tantalizing taste of her mouth. Dark, sweet, rich as exotic fruit.

And just like that he was drugged. Drugged from one kiss.

He ended it as slowly as he’d begun it. Still, his lips hovered above hers. Loath to leave her.

“What do you want, Cynthia?” he whispered a scant inch from her mouth.

It wasn’t a demand, though he’d meant it to be. He was in fact no less angry or confused than he’d been moments earlier. But somehow the words emerged gently, because he was genuinely curious. He
genuinely
wanted her insight. Perhaps if
she
knew what she wanted, or why she was here, or what they did to each other or truly wanted from each other, they could be done with it. They could solve this for the both of them, and then he could resume the more or less peaceful life he’d enjoyed before her.