Teresa Medeiros (26 page)

Lucy moaned and turned her face into the pillow, haunted by a ghostly melody—the vibrant notes of a Viennese waltz. Tonight she had danced in the arms of the man she loved and felt young and carefree for the first time in her life.

Now she felt ancient. She could almost feel her skin drawing, her bones stiffening, her heart crumbling to dust from both past and future neglect. She lay there, steeped in misery, until she heard her father’s uneven step on the stairs.

She held her breath as he approached her room just as she had always done. Beneath his exacting tutelage, she had clipped the wings from most of her flights of fancy, but her stubborn heart had clung to one childhood dream, nurturing it in the secret hours between midnight and dawn.

If she kept her eyes shut very tightly and feigned sleep, her father might ease open the door and tiptoe over to the bed. He might bend down to touch her hair, kiss her brow, and tell her what a good girl she
was, how proud he was to have her for a daughter. Then she would open her eyes and fly into his arms. They would laugh and cry at the same time, finally free to confess their love.

Lucy’s hands curled in the bedclothes. If he came tonight, she vowed to herself, she would promise to forget Gerard. She would strive even harder to be the dutiful daughter he’d always wanted.

Her entire body started violently as something crashed to the floor outside her bedroom.

“Goddammit!” came the Admiral’s voice, harsh and ugly, faintly slurred. “How many times have I told that stupid girl not to scatter things about on the floor? Won’t be satisfied till I break my bloody neck.”

Lucy kept her eyes closed until his lumbering steps had faded. From somewhere high in the house came the hollow slam of a door.

Once, Lucy would have curled into a miserable ball and cried herself to sleep.

Now, she rose, dry-eyed, and slipped silently from the room.

L
UCY’S RESOLVE WAVERED JUST OUTSIDE the cozy square of light cast from the gatehouse window. She wished for another glass of champagne to help her recapture her reckless euphoria.

A gust of wind tossed icy needles of snow in her face, making her flinch. How many nights had Gerard stood watch beneath these very eaves, gazing up at the darkened, impassive panes of her window? Tonight it was her turn to shiver like a beggar in the cold and wonder at her welcome.

Wiggling her stocking toes in a vain attempt to relieve their numbness, she lifted her hand to knock. Her curled fingers hung an inch from the door, paralyzed more by terror than the biting cold.

Don’t shilly-shally, girl. Chart your course and stay it or you’ll soon find yourself sailing in circles
.

“Thank you, Father,” Lucy whispered to the echo of the Admiral’s voice, smiling faintly at the irony.

She drew back her hand and gave the gatehouse door two sharp raps. The haste with which the crisp
footsteps approached reassured her that she hadn’t dragged Gerard from his bed. He was already speaking as he opened the door.

“It’s hardly oh six hundred yet, Smythe. It’s too blasted dark out … side.”

He’d been shrugging on a rumpled shirt as he walked and, upon discovering it wasn’t the Snow butler on his doorstep, he jerked it the rest of the way over his shoulders. Lucy was left staring at the sculpted muscles of his bare chest beneath their sprinkling of auburn hair.

Her breath caught with longing. She wanted to touch him with the unbridled curiosity of a child. Wanted to rake her fingers through those crisp hairs and see if his skin was as warm as its honeyed hue. She slowly lifted her gaze to his face.

He wasn’t wearing his spectacles so there was nothing to shield her from his scowl. “It’s well past your bedtime, Miss Snow. I thought Smythe tucked you in.”

“I untucked myself.”

When he offered her no sign of welcome, grudging or otherwise, she brushed past him to invade his inner sanctum. The rough-planked floor snagged her expensive stockings, but she hardly noticed. She was too captivated by the masculine ambience of the room. Its inviting warmth was completely unlike the forbidding chill of her father’s house.

A lamp burned on the bedside table, wreathing the gatehouse’s modest furnishings in a flattering glow that disguised their nicks and scars and hinted at their former grandeur. Several books were scattered across the table. A fire waned on the brick hearth at the far end of the long room, as if she’d come too late and the time to spend its cheer was done.

The faded quilt draped over the humble bedstead struck a wistful chord in Lucy. It pleasured her to
imagine Gerard protected from the cold and the dark by its worn folds, his face smoothed free of wariness, his hair tousled like a boy’s. A breath of icy air fanned her nape, warning her that he still hadn’t closed the door.

“I’ve never been in here before,” she confessed, desperate to distract him from tossing her out on her ear.

“I doubt that Fenster did much entertaining. He doesn’t strike me as the gregarious sort. Nor am I at the moment.”

When she made no move to leave, he turned his back to her, bracing his hands against each side of the doorframe as if he had every intention of bolting into the night himself if she refused his pointed invitation to depart. The lamplight sought the loose folds of his shirt, outlining his bunched muscles. Lucy longed to touch him, to ease his tension with a caress. She glided toward him, her stockings whispering against the planks.

She reached beneath the tail of his shirt, her trembling fingertips finally making contact with warm skin. Her touch had the opposite effect. His muscles tensed, leaping as if from a blaze of unexpected lightning.

“Don’t!”

He slammed the door and spun around to face her, his features robbed of their geniality by desperation. Lucy took an involuntary step backward.

“I’m not one of your girlish fantasies, Lucy. I’m not your tragic and noble Captain Doom. I’m a man. Flesh and blood. Cut me and I bleed. Provoke me and I strike back. I’m fully capable of taking what’s offered me for my own selfish satisfaction. Fully capable of compromising a foolish girl who’s had too much champagne to consider the consequences of her actions.” Lucy would have almost sworn she heard a hint of a
plea in his harsh words. “Trust me. You’d be better off passing your lonely nights with your precious shadow of a ghost than with me.”

Lucy refused to shrink before his rebuff. “I’ve spent my entire life with the shadow of a father and the ghost of a mother. I need someone I can touch. Someone warm. Someone real.”

“Oh, that’s bloody rich!”

Gerard clenched his teeth against a despairing laugh. Before he’d met Lucy, he’d felt as ephemeral as her Captain Doom, nothing more than a murky shade of the man he’d once been. But with this woman standing so boldly before him, her delicate jaw set with determination, her silky hair tumbling from its gold fillet, he felt every inch a man. Rushing blood and straining flesh, fraught with all of its mortal perils. His pulse roared in his ears, pounded a temptation in his aching groin.

He might have been able to resist its siren throb had Lucy not chosen that moment to forsake her stubborn pride. She lowered her smoky eyes and whispered, “I’m not asking for any promises.”

He caught her to him with reckless ferocity, knowing this might be his last chance to extract one or both of them from a silken snare of disaster. “What
are
you asking for? This?”

He collapsed against the door, legs splayed, and pinned her between his thighs, lowering his head to tangle his tongue with hers. He thrust roughly into the warm, wet recesses of her mouth in a crude imitation guaranteed to challenge her innocence. She whimpered against his lips and grasped his forearms as if to deny the sensation of falling.

His mouth plundered a ruthless path from her lips to her ear. His voice dropped to a ragged whisper.
“Was that what you came here for, my sweet little mouse? Or was it this?”

Sinking his teeth gently into her earlobe, he filled his palms with her backside and rubbed his hips against the softness of her belly. She gasped as he forced her to acknowledge the full measure of his desire and the high stakes of her surrender.

Still cupping her bottom, he leaned his head back against the door and surveyed her through his lashes, raking his gaze down her shuddering breasts with deliberate insolence.

Gerard expected her to slap him as he so richly deserved. Expected her to gather her icy composure and coolly denounce him for the vulgar commoner he was. Expected her to burst into tears and run screaming for Smythe.

What he did not expect was for her to cup his face in her cool hands and press her lips to his with a loving fervency that crumbled the last of his defenses.

Shamed by her selfless tenderness, Gerard gentled his grip, running his hands up her slender back.

“You’re drunk,” he muttered against her lips, hating himself for reminding her.

“I’m tipsy,” she whispered.

“I’ll take advantage of you,” he warned.

“Promise?”

She looked so hopeful that a choked laugh escaped him. He smoothed her hair away from her face, held captive by the earnestness in those incredible eyes. She had only tonight to love him, he thought. She would have a lifetime in which to hate him.

Driven by that realization, he backed her toward the bed in a dance as old as time itself. Once learned, its steps were never forgotten.

Lucy felt herself tumbling headlong into some sweet abyss, as dangerous as it was seductive, her fall broken
only by Gerard’s arms and the scratchy softness of the quilt beneath her knees. They knelt on the bed, face-to-face. The intensity of his gaze sobered her.

Afraid she would start quaking with fear, she reached to extinguish the lamp.

Gerard stilled her hand. “No. I like the light.”

It was then that Lucy saw the tarnished candlestick and neat row of candles kept next to the lamp, insurance against the shadows of night. The sight inexplicably touched her. She suspected Gerard didn’t like the light nearly as much as he hated the darkness.

Gerard drew the fillet from Lucy’s hair. As the silky mass cascaded around her shoulders, the lamp flame seemed to flicker and pale as if she had absorbed its incandescence. Light filtered through her hair, burnished her skin to opalescent pearl, sifted the white of her dress to ethereal gauze. Gerard realized that the lamp flame was but a paltry imitation. Lucy was the embodiment of light. Shimmering. Quicksilver. Elusive.

Gerard buried his hands in her hair. The ashen skein slipped through his fingers like moonbeams.

His hands tightened into fists as he gazed into her misty eyes. He’d been a creature of the darkness for too long. The light he craved was now his enemy. It was too harsh, too revealing. He couldn’t bear for her brightness to illuminate his vulnerability, the rawness of his need.

Breathing an oath, he killed the lamp himself, then leaned against the headboard and drew Lucy into the cradle of his thighs until her back was wedged against his chest. It seemed fitting that he should come to her this way—a faceless lover in the dying firelight. His arms circled her from behind, holding her steady when she squirmed in protest.

“But, Gerard, I don’t under—”

“Hush.” He rubbed his cheek against her temple, soothing her like a child. “Let me take care of you. It’s my job. Remember?”

As she ceased her wiggling, the softness of her backside molded itself to his aching flesh. He rolled his eyes and sucked in a shallow breath. He had thought he knew all there was to know of torture, but this mingling of delight and deprivation was a taste of heaven and a blast of hell, a torment beyond any he had known before.

Until he began to touch her.

Lucy had spent almost twenty years building her prickly shell of reserve, yet Gerard cracked it with nothing more than a few artful strokes of his fingertips. They probed her temples, skated down the column of her throat, caressed the fluted valleys above her collarbone.

“I told you once,” she said breathlessly, “that I don’t like to be touched.”

“And I told you,” he replied, tasting the sensitive whorl of her ear with the tip of his tongue, “that you were lying.”

He proved his accusation with another foray of his magical hands. A man’s hands, roughened and callused from a lifetime of hard work. Lucy was hypnotized by their downward glide as he lowered the bodice of her gown, dragged down the delicate puffed sleeves of her chemise, exposing her small, pink-tipped breasts.

Her first instinct was to moan with shame and cover her breasts with her hands. But Gerard, her bodyguard, her protector, did it for her, shielding them from the flickering firelight with his sun-darkened fingers. Lucy shivered with mingled delight and mortification as she realized he was watching over her
shoulder, sharing the provocative sight of their mingled flesh.

Her breasts fit the nest of his palms as if they had been made for him. They flushed, fevered by his touch. He teased her nipples to aching buds, circling, stroking, then gently tugging until Lucy felt a kindred tingling between her thighs. Pleasure and need rippled through her. A helpless whimper escaped her. She arched against him, pressing her yearning softness instinctively to the unyielding ridge of flesh beneath her.