Seducing the Rake (Mad, Bad and Dangerous Heroes) (12 page)

“Flour … your chest…” She tried to marshal her chaotic thoughts, but the fantasy would not release her.

How would it feel if she—if he—

Her fingers slid deeper, tugging lightly through his hair as she traced the hollow of his collarbone from neck to shoulder. She shivered as she felt his muscles tighten.

Ten years?

It felt just like yesterday.

“Chessy,” he whispered harshly.

And then she was crushed against him, her heart lurching as he anchored the back of her head with endless care and brought his mouth down against hers.

His first touch was tentative, almost fearful. He drew her closer, his breath a soft, restless counterpoint to the sliding pressure of his lips.

Chessy forgot to breathe, forgot to think, forgot everything but how perfect it felt to kiss him so.

As a
woman,
not as a girl.

Her fingers tensed. She held on for dear life, feeling logic, habit, and the beliefs of a lifetime swept away before the aching purity of his careful touch.

His hand splayed open against her hip. Groaning, he urged her against his rigid thighs. At the same time his mouth opened, moving with slow thoroughness from one curve of her lip to the other. His tongue teased the closed line of her mouth, and Chessy felt him shudder.

A wild curiosity seized her. With a gasp she opened to his sleek probing, welcoming him inside her, drinking in his heat.

The change in him was instant. He urged her closer, opening his legs to catch her between the hardness of his thighs while his tongue found hers.

Ten years whirled past in a second. Chessy could almost feel the deck pitch beneath her, hear the creak of rigging in a fresh tropical wind. For years she had dreamed of reliving that moment and finding out what would have happened next. Now she would know. Even while her mind screamed out for her to deny him, to shove him away, Chessy realized she could not.

Not when he was everything she had dreamed of. And damned if she’d let him think he was the
only
man she’d kissed in ten years.

She drew him closer. Her lips closed sleekly around him.

“Chessy—” The fingers buried in her hair tightened convulsively.
“More.
Let me taste you.”

Chessy made a lost sound as he caught her lip between his teeth in an erotic slide of friction that made her dream of all the other exquisite textures of skin on skin that he could teach her.

“So sweet.”

But the raw hunger in his voice was the sweetest joy of all. Chessy realized that
he
was reeling from shock as much as she was. When he had kissed his laughing courtesan, his voice had held no such tremor, no loss of clarity or resolve. He had been in total control, then and through all the intimacies that had followed.

But he was
not
in control now. Far from it. One kiss had left him breathless and reeling.

Chessy was glad of that. So very glad. Because it had left her the same way.

“Stop me, Cricket. I don’t—
we
can’t—”

He groaned. What he did next stripped Chessy of breath and reason. He caught her cheeks in his palms and drank in the richness of her mouth. He tasted her blindly, as if waking from a long and thirsty sleep.

And then he brought his finger to her mouth. While they kissed, he traced the outline of their wet, bonded lips.

Gently.

With infinite care.

Almost as if afraid that the union existed only in his mind.

The vulnerability of that gesture made Chessy’s eyes blur with tears. She realized then how deeply she had fallen, how vulnerable she still was to his rakehell charm.

And that thought made her recall the present, along with bleak, unbending things like honor and pride and the duty she owed her father.

Grim reality dragged her back from danger then. One second she was pliant and breathless against him, infinitely vulnerable, and the next she was shoving, her fingers splayed tensely against his chest.

For a moment he didn’t move. He barely seemed to breathe. His jaw could have been carved of fine granite.

And in those breathless seconds before reality came lurching back, Chessy saw that he had been no more careful or cogent or calculating than she had.

So it was true.
His
need had been as fierce and unexpected as hers.

And it was driving him still. The hard pressure against her thighs was unmistakable.

From the rear stairwell came the scrape of boots. Swithin appeared, mopping his sweaty brow with his cuff. “Food’s all stowed, Miss Chessy. Reckon you can—”

He stopped abruptly. His eyes narrowed as he studied the pair motionless by the wall. He registered the pallor of Chessy’s face, the redness of her lips.

“By heaven, if you’ve so much as laid a hand on her, I’ll—”

Chessy silenced him with one trembling gesture. “Lord Morland is just leaving, Swithin. We wouldn’t w-want to detain him.”

Morland’s face hardened. He looked like a man ready for a fight—maybe even
looking
for a fight. “Just like that?”

Chessy’s fingers locked at her waist. “Just like that,” she said flatly.

“Oh, Cricket,” he whispered, “it’s not going to be nearly that easy. Not this time. We’ve both changed.”

Then, before Chessy could shout or swear or deny the tears that were threatening to spill free any second, he turned and shrugged on his bottle-green jacket, which he’d slung over a chair when he’d begun his cooking.

His sapphire gaze never left her face. That look told her he was harder, more determined than ever. And that they could not go back to innocence.

“I’ll be back, Francesca. And I am going to have some answers.”

Chessy groped blindly for the table at her back, struggling to support herself against the sudden weakness in her legs. She could not let him see the power he held over her. He had fooled her once, long ago when she was a green girl of fifteen. He must never do so again. Her only goal was to save her father. “Come back and you’ll find more of the same!”

Morland stared down at her flushed cheeks, at her dewy, well-kissed lips. “Is that a promise? If so, my sweet, it will be my keenest pleasure to return.” And then, with a perfect bow embellished by the flourish of his immaculate doeskin gloves, the earl was gone.

~ ~ ~

Chessy gripped her sooty muslin skirt, listening to the drum of his feet as he pounded up the stairs and crossed the front foyer.

Fool! How could you let him turn you inside out this way? Have you learned nothing in ten years?

Tears pricked at her eyes.

How had it happened? She could have overwhelmed him in a matter of seconds, but all her logic had melted away beneath the heat of one soft, stunning kiss.

She swallowed a sob as she heard the front door slam. The sound crashed in the silence, echoing cold and hollow right through to the bone.

What had
he
done? How had he managed to destroy all her careful control and all her defenses in one brief kiss?

Behind her Swithin coughed and Chessy remembered she was not alone.

“You’re—all right, miss? Nothing you need to tell me, is there?”

Chessy heard the gruff concern in that dear, familiar voice. She brushed furtively at her eyes.

No, now was not the time for tears.

When she turned around, her smile was firmly in place. “Much better, Swithin. Amazing how a decent meal can restore a person’s spirits. Although I don’t know how I’m going to pay our visitor back for all that lovely food.”

Swithin’s eyes narrowed. Chessy had the feeling she wasn’t fooling him in the slightest. Meanwhile her entire funds equaled forty-three pounds and the lease on this house would set her back twenty-one of those pounds.

It made little difference. It would be enough. She had only one week left to find that wretched book, so the last anonymous note had warned her. Otherwise, her father…

She forced down the thought, her eyes dark with pain. “We are going to find that book, Swithin. We
have
to. Then we will leave this horrid, barbaric city forever.”

Her throat tightened at the thought. She spun about, fighting back tears.

“And now I’m g-going upstairs. If anyone else calls
—anyone at all
—I am
not
at home!”

~ ~ ~

Bloody, bloody fool.

The words pounded through Morland’s head as he stalked down the steps and signaled to a passing hackney.

When the driver creaked to a halt, the earl changed his mind and waved the vehicle on. What he needed now was to walk. Maybe exercise and fresh air would clear his head.

But he wondered if anything could make him forget the way Chessy’s soft hands had felt pressed to his neck. And then, she had run her fingers over his skin, beneath his shirt, looking shocked by her desire.

Morland stabbed a hi hand through his hair, trying to fight down the heat that blazed back to life at the mere thought of the unforgivable desire that had flared to life at her touch.

Was he
mad?
She was Chessy, the innocent daughter of one of his closest friends! The man had saved his life on two occasions.

And this is how you repay him? By trying to seduce his daughter?

Morland scowled, sending two passing matrons into agitated titters. But he noticed neither their reaction nor the chaos of the street around him.

All he could think of was how sweet Chessy Cameron’s lips had felt in their first tentative response of desire. How her cheeks had taken on a lovely flush as she ran her fingers gently across his chest…

Enough, fool! Put her out of your mind!

Why complicate your life by dreaming about the only woman you can’t have?

But as Morland stalked through the noonday crowds, his leg aching keenly, he had the nagging suspicion that forgetting Chessy was not going to be that simple.

When Morland left Half Moon Street that evening, it was with one grim resolve: to be bloody roaring drunk by midnight. And by the time the charming ormolu clock in Brooks’ struck the hour of ten, he was halfway there.

Beneath the club’s gleaming central chandelier, elegant men sat at ease, losing ten or a thousand pounds with the same careless grace. The company was thin this night, but at least one royal duke was present, huddled in a corner with his cronies, losing heavily at faro.

Morland nodded to several acquaintances as he finished his fifth brandy. He was feeling a decidedly pleasant glow when Atherton walked by, encased in a violet waistcoat that emphasized the protuberance of his stomach.

Somehow the dark silk reminded Morland of Chessy’s eyes.

With a low curse, the earl sat forward, signaling for a waiter to refill his glass.
Chessy
was the last thing he meant to think about!

At a nearby table he heard the sound of a hand being tossed in. “No more high play for me. In dun street already. Ho, Morland! Care to take my play?”

Morland saw a slender red-haired man motioning to him.

Why not
? he thought grimly. A few hands might take his thoughts off a violet-eyed innocent with lips like warm silk.          

He took his seat amid the usual idle banter and studied his companions. On his left were two he had known during his years at Oxford, both dressed in remarkably ugly shades of puce. To his right sat a morose baronet from Somerset. And he could not forget Atherton, watching everything with a cold, glittering gaze.

Warm with the glow of his fifth brandy, Morland decided simply to ignore Atherton’s existence.

Soon the play settled into a comfortable rhythm. Morland lost fifty pounds in the first few minutes, then gained twice that sum back.

The baronet sighed morosely. “What do you make of this string of robberies about town, Morland?”