Private Arrangements (22 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

T
he silence of a house settling into the night was first disturbed as Camden stood brushing his teeth over a basin of water. Then came a loud crash to his left, a heavy vibration that traveled up his ankles to his knees, followed by a muffled shriek.

The cottage had six bedchambers upstairs—Mrs. Rowland's at the eastern corner and five others, of southern exposure, lined in a row. Camden was in the chamber closest to Mrs. Rowland's and Gigi in the one furthest away.

The shriek came from Gigi's direction.

He spat the tooth powder out of his mouth and pulled open the door. Mrs. Rowland's door opened a second later. “Good heavens, what was that?” she cried.

“The ceiling, probably,” he said.

Gigi, too, was in the hallway, her face very pale against the midnight blue of her peignoir. “What's the matter with your house?” she said tightly to her mother.

Camden began opening doors. The room next to his seemed fine, except that several pictures had fallen off the wall. He opened the door to the middle chamber. A gust of debris greeted him. Almost the entire ceiling had collapsed, blanketing the floor and the furniture in dust-ridden chunks of plaster and timber. Above him gaped the cavernous void of the attic.

“Good heavens! How did this happen?” Mrs. Rowland moaned. “This is a most sturdy house.”

“I don't think anyone should sleep on this floor until the ceiling is repaired and the integrity of the entire structure inspected,” said Camden.

“You and I can share the governess's room on the ground floor,” said Gigi to Mrs. Rowland. “Do you have a spare cot for Camden?”

“Nonsense!” cried Mrs. Rowland. “Lord Tremaine is a first-time visitor to this house. I will not have him spend the night on a cot in the parlor like hired help. I will ask to be put up at Mrs. Moreland's cottage down the lane—she has two daughters who visit her, so she always has a spare chamber made up. You and Camden take the governess's room.”

“I will take the cot and sleep in the parlor,” said Gigi. “I'm not a first-time visitor. It doesn't matter where I sleep. Or I can come with you to Mrs. Moreland's.”

“Absolutely not to either of your mad propositions!” Mrs. Rowland recoiled in grandiose horror. “I will not have that kind of gossip bandied about. The two of you may divorce up a storm in London, but here I have my reputation to consider. I will not have people asking why my daughter would not share a room with her lawfully wedded husband. There, I think I hear Hollis coming up. I will confer with him about the arrangements. Mind that you do nothing to embarrass me, Gigi. No cots whatsoever.”

After Mrs. Rowland hurried down the steps with surprising energy and bounce, Gigi cursed under her breath. “Arrangements my foot,” she said, her voice seething. “She arranged for the ceiling to cave in! This house was inspected from top to bottom only a year ago because I was worried that it might be getting a bit decrepit. It
is
sound. Ceilings in sound structures do not just fall in like that, and certainly not so beautifully, exactly in an unoccupied room so that nobody gets hurt.”

“We have underestimated your mother's determination.”

“She should be having an affair with the duke, that's what she should be doing,” Gigi huffed. “Look at her, she is sacrificing the roof over her head to herd us into the same bedchamber when we already—never mind.”

Camden felt his heart beginning to pound. He hadn't planned on paying Gigi a conjugal visit, this being Mrs. Rowland's house and all. But if they were going to be stuck in the same—and chances were, fairly cramped—room and forced to share a bed, well . . .

“Do you have anything that needs to be carried?” he asked.

She shot him a suspicious glance, but in the light spilling out from all the open doors, he noticed she was no longer as pale as she'd been a minute ago. “No, thank you. You go on.”

He went down the stairs. Hollis showed him to the governess's room. Camden found himself in a chamber both larger and prettier than the one he had been given, its walls covered in a cream damask with elegant persimmon-and-moss arabesque patterns. Pink and white ranunculus in painted Limoges vases stood on each nightstand. The bed itself was quite large, the white summer bed linen already invitingly turned down.

“Mrs. Rowland uses this chamber for afternoon repose in the summer,” Hollis informed him. “It is cooler than the upstairs chambers.”

Camden turned off the lamps and opened the window shutters. Night air wafted in, cool, moist, and heavy with the scent of honeysuckle. A waxing moon was on the climb, its light pale and lucid. He discarded his robe, and, after a brief hesitation—Who was he trying to fool? Napoleon wanted Russia less badly than he wanted to lie with her—he removed the rest of his clothing too.

Gigi came only after a good quarter hour. Her footsteps stopped outside the door. Then nothing happened. The silence unfolded and unrolled, shrouding him in its oppressive strata, chafing at his patience and nerves.

The doorknob finally turned, softly. She closed the door behind her but advanced no further, standing with her back against it, her feet just beyond the imprint of moonlight. He was reminded of a night long ago, in a different house that also belonged to Mrs. Rowland, where a similarly lustrous moon also silvered a long swath of the room—the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning.

“Like old times, isn't it?” he said, after a full minute had passed.

More silence. “What do you mean?” she said at last, her voice slightly creaky.

“Don't tell me you've forgotten.”

She shifted, barely audible sounds of silk sliding on flesh and against the panels of the door. “So you were awake,” she said accusatorily.

“I'm a light sleeper. And I was on an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar house.”

“You took advantage of me.”

He chuckled. “What did you expect, after you felt me up and down? I could've done more and you'd've let me.”

“I could've done more too. I almost climbed back into your bed that night. Would have been a short path to the altar.”

“You don't say,” he murmured. “What stopped you?”

“I thought it was dishonorable. Something beneath me. Ironic, isn't it?” She pushed away from the door and advanced until she stood by the bed, on the farther side from him, her silhouette limned against a nimbus of moonlight, the dark curves of her body just barely visible inside the diaphanous shadows of her peignoir.

He swallowed.

“I should have gone ahead and done it that night,” she said. “You'd have married me, knowing you'd been had. But you wouldn't have been infuriated enough to run to America, only disgusted enough to not be happy with me. We'd have been like every other couple in Society—a normal life, you see.”

“No,” he said, his voice harsher than he'd intended. “You should have done the honorable thing. Theodora married one day before we did. Had you a little more patience, when I returned to England for Easter, you could have had your cake and eaten it too.”

The bed dipped beneath her weight. She slid under the covers, safely on her side of the bed. “I think I've learned my lesson already.”

“Have you?”

She didn't answer. Instead, she asked a question of her own. “Why do you place so much importance on reaching financial parity with me?”

Because I am married to you, the richest woman in England after Victoria Regina, you idiot. What's a man who still dreams of fucking you to do?

He reached under the cover, grabbed her by the front of her peignoir, and yanked her toward him. She gasped. And gasped again as his teeth scraped the crook of her neck.

He rolled on top of her . . . groaning with the heavenliness of her under him. Since his return, he'd seen her naked. He'd climaxed inside her. But he had not allowed himself to feel her, the dense, smooth texture of her skin, the firm undulation of her body. He grabbed a fistful of her peignoir and pushed it upward. “Take it off.”

“No. You can do what you want perfectly well with it in place.”

“What I want is you naked. Without a stitch.”

“That wasn't part of our deal. You never said I had to disrobe for you.”

“What's the matter?” he said softly into her ear, enjoying her quiver. “Afraid to be naked under me?”

“It's not right. I'm not going to dishonor Freddie by allowing you any more liberties than I must.”

Suddenly he was enraged, at her obduracy and her obtuseness. Lord Frederick would make her about as happy as a clam in a bowl of bouillabaisse. He gripped her peignoir at her throat and tore it down its length, the shrill
sszzzzz
rudely rending the somnolent darkness. “There. Now if Lord Frederick asks, which is none of his business, you can tell him in all honesty that you didn't
allow
me any liberties.”

She panted, the sound of a woman unable to get enough air, her exhalations drowning out the muffled chirping of sleepless crickets in the garden.

He lowered himself onto her, the sensation of her skin against his at once shockingly familiar and un-nervingly new, as if he'd never left her bed all these years, as if this was only the second night of their honeymoon and he'd been staring at her all day, dying for the sun to set and a blessed, endless night to descend.

He was a fool. A fool to fall for her the first time. And a fool to come back now, when he already knew his weakness all too well, having wrestled with it every day of these past ten years.

Too late.

He drowned himself in the velvety feel of her, marveling at the way her skin slid over her clavicles with her every breath, kissing a trail along the top of her shoulder, reluctant to leave each square inch of her glorious skin, impatient to savor all of her.

She placed her hands against his upper arms, but she didn't push. She only emitted a sweet, despairing sound as he kissed the base of her throat. The gloom in his heart lifted a bit, though he knew it was madness to think this was anything but madness.

He kissed his way to her chin, to the soft spot just under her lips. There he hesitated. To kiss her on the mouth was to inform her, in exactly so many words, that she'd marry Lord Frederick over his dead body.

Beneath him, he felt her heartbeat, as rapid, erratic, and uncertain as his own. Did he want to go down that path? Did he dare? And what awaited him at the bitter end if he were to walk this avenue of folly?

“There is something I have to tell you,” she said suddenly, rupturing the moment of suspense. “There is no point to your sleeping with me. None at all. I am using a Dutch cap. I have been using one all along. You stand no chance of getting me with child, so you might as well leave me alone.”

When he was six years old, during an exuberant game of chase in the corridors of his grandfather's house, he'd run into a wall. The next thing he knew, he found himself flat on the floor, too stunned to understand what had just happened. He felt like that now. He didn't know what to make of her outburst, her abrupt decision to push things to the brink.

He gazed down at her. Her features were only half visible in the faint illumination of the moon, a shadow of a high cheekbone, a dark fullness of lips, and eyes like water at the bottom of a deep well, black with pinpoints of refracted starlight.

“Then why do you tell me? Why not go on duping me? That would have served your purpose better.”

“Because I can't take it anymore,” she said, lying very still. “I'm sure you are happily vindicated in your opinion of me. But it doesn't matter. I can't go any further.”

“Why?” He ran his fingers through her hair, the ultimate luxury. Her hair was heavy, smooth, glossy, and cool as morning dew. He never remembered another woman's hair the way he remembered hers. “What happened to your legendary ruthlessness?”

She closed her eyes and turned her face away from him.

His fingers felt ridiculously comforting against her skull. They moved with reassuring gentleness, coming to rest for a moment next to her temple, then sliding lower along her ear, her jaw, and finally her lips. The pad of his thumb skimmed over her bottom lip, rolled it down slightly so that he touched the moist membrane just inside her mouth.

His reaction confused her. She wanted to ask him, loudly, whether he'd heard anything she'd said—that she hadn't changed, hadn't learned her lesson at all, and had tried to deceive him again. But his touch hypnotized her. It was warm, curious, and utterly without rancor. She could not speak. She was all awareness—all deprived, hungry, unbearably keen awareness.

He kissed the lobe of her ear, the bone that hinged her jaw, the tip of her chin. He kissed her neck, her shoulder, and the indentation of her clavicle. She kept her eyes tightly shut. In that absolute darkness, he was all heat and sensation to her, his lips a source of cool fire that burned everything they touched, spawning jolts of desire that spiked through her body, leaving her mindless and weak.

Suddenly his mouth closed around her nipple. She gasped, a flabbergasted sound of pleasure. He licked her. She wanted to thrash and gyrate and beg for more. Her nails dug into the counterpane. His hand found her other nipple and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, with just enough force to make her abandon all efforts at quietness. She moaned out loud.

His hand moved lower, down her side, coming to rest a fraction of a second against her hip and then on to pry her legs apart. She made a feeble attempt to keep them together, but he only had to swirl his tongue slowly once around her nipple for her to forget everything.

He found her, probably the easiest thing in the world—he but had to go to the source of her wetness. And then his finger, no, fingers were inside her.

“Tell me to stop, and I will,” he said, just before he took her other nipple into his mouth.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized what he was doing: dislodging and removing the Dutch cap. She might have objected had she been capable of coherent speech. But she wasn't, and the only sounds she emitted were choked whimpers of arousal.

He easily extracted the Dutch cap from her and tossed it to the side of the bed. She shivered.

“Now there's nothing between us,” he said.

A sudden flash of terror paralyzed her. She was utterly exposed to him—her womb, her future, her entire life. And just as suddenly, an overwhelming swell of desire inundated her. She wanted him inside her, to possess her, to shatter her, to fill every emptiness and destroy every defense.

With a moan of despair she grabbed hold of him and pulled him down to her, kissing him so hard that their teeth banged and ground together. He pulled away slightly, restrained her face between his hands, and kissed her his way, slower, more gently, and much more thoroughly.

She opened her legs wide and he came into her, thick and hot, as he kissed her. She wrapped her legs about him, urging him, wanting something fast, furious, and utterly obliterating. But in that he refused to oblige her.

He tormented her with long, slow strokes, teasing her nipples as he drove into her at a leisurely pace. He made her beg for each delicious thrust. He made her thrash and gyrate and wail and whimper. And only when she was wholly vanquished, desperate, convinced that she would exist forever in this state of trembling, feverish arousal, only then did he give in and pummel her to her incoherent, wild, joyous, and vocal satisfaction.