This Perfect Kiss (23 page)

“I am pleased that you want to please me, Christel.”

“And I am torn between wanting to give you a facer and kissing you.”

Pressing his advantage, he took her hand and pulled her outside the room and into the hallway, cradling her face between his palms. Then she was reaching for him as he was easing his fingers through her hair, and, in a moment, everything changed with the force of his touch.

He deepened the kiss, each thrust of his tongue joining hers, and she found a need equal to her own. He groaned and shifted his body, holding her wedged between him and the door. A part of her disliked being trapped. There was a certain helplessness that came with the feeling, but before discomfort began to rise and take hold, his kiss turned from an intensity that suckled the core of her being to one more defined by leisurely enjoyment. His palm glided from her breast to the curve of her hip. Lingering just one more heartbeat, he pulled away, but only far enough to look into her eyes. His heart pounded against her palms.

“I have truly missed you,” he said.

Smolich was suddenly standing at the top of the stairs. Christel saw him first and barely restrained a gasp. Lord Carrick looked over his shoulder, his forbearance more refined than hers as he straightened. “What is it, Smolich?” he asked, as if it had been commonplace to be caught in the hallway kissing his daughter's governess.

“My lord . . .” The man cleared his throat. “The dowager sent me up to tell you supper will be served in a half hour. She asked if Miss Christel will be joining you in the dining room.”

Lord Carrick said, “I will be down momentarily. However, Miss Douglas will join us another time.”

Smolich momentarily looked as startled as she felt. “Aye, my lord.”

After the butler left, Lord Carrick returned his attention to her. “You need not concern yourself,” he said, misreading her expression as shock. “Smolich will say nothing.”

“You need to attend to your guests,” she said before his mouth could touch hers again.

He put the side of his thumb to her cheek and turned her face. “They can wait another five minutes.”

“Nay.”

“Christel.” His thumb brushed over her mouth. “ 'Tis only supper.”

She toyed with the soft edge of his clubbed hair. “If it eases you, I had no desire to join you and guests for supper tonight.”

He leaned his palm against the wall. “I have my reasons for not including you tonight. In this you must trust me.”

“There. You see?” she said.

Recognizing a challenge when he heard it, he raised a brow. “You think I am concerned by what family and friends will see?”

She let out a soft laugh. “You blanched. I think you are wondering how best you can retreat from this conversation with your fortitude intact. I assure you, you have paid me well to do your bidding, my lord.”

Drawing her close, he stood for a space of time with her body touching his and gently said, “You misread my intentions, Christel.”

“If you say so, then I will believe you,” she said.

“Listen to me well, love. I only know that somehow away from the rest of the world, we have a chance to find something that is ours alone. Something we cannot have in the public eye.” He took her face between his palms. “You must feel the same desire for me, or you would not be here no matter what it is I paid.”

“No guarantees or expectations. No promises.”

“You mean you will expect nothing from me, so nothing is lost when I disappoint you.” Teasing mockery underlay the deference in his tone. “Do you expect disappointment, then?”

He was still perfection to her, and she was tipsy with desire. “Nay, my lord.” She stood on her tiptoes to reach his mouth and smiled against his lips. “I expect nothing less than paradise.”

The vibration of his chuckle made her want to hum in tune. “I do not think anyone has ever held me to such a standard,” he said.

“And I have never been anyone's illicit lover.”

“Ah, Christel . . . I am glad to hear that, love.”

With a twinge of illogic, she found herself jealous. He could not say the same. He was suddenly the Barracuda, the consummate hunter, and she the prey.

And he had her pressed to the wall, his arousal hard and explicit against her stomach, and she was stretched taut against him, like some carnal offering on the altar of pagan sexuality.

The vague scent of soap, sea and salt mist enveloped her senses. His hand slid around the slim column of her neck, feather-light against her throat, and he marked the race of her pulse against his fingertips. His other hand moved to the back of her waist, his thumb brushed her breast. Her senses seized, nay exploded. He couldn't have been clearer what he wanted from her, and she didn't know if the sharper edge of desire now coloring their exchange was his or hers.

“Perhaps . . . you should return to your guests now.”

The sharp, rasping sound of his breath touched hers, mingled and burned. “Perhaps I should,” he agreed.

Rationality did not seem to sway either of them. And they remained thigh to thigh, neither willing to move first.

She felt the rise and fall of his chest against her breasts. The thrum of her pulse in her ears as he slid his lips to the soft shell of her ear. “But you and I both know I will not.”

He sealed his words with a kiss, acquitting himself well as his masculine strength overwhelmed her, and because they urgently longed for each other, the kiss quickly turned into something more. Akin to the sensation that came from stepping off a ledge into a black bottomless chasm that had both the depth to swallow her and the width to allow her to spread her wings and fly.

Somehow, they kissed the whole way to her bedroom. He shut the door behind him. Paused as his hand turned the key with a click. His waistcoat was already undone. She had not lit a candle, but her room was not so cluttered with furniture that she felt in danger of colliding with any unmovable object. He dropped his frock on the way to her bed.

He had already begun to work his shirt out of his breeches. Christel busied her hands over the laces of her dress. Soon the rest of their clothes lay in a heap at their feet next to their shoes. He took her down to the bed, turning her in his arms so that she sprawled on top of him and became a part of him, her response in tandem to his. His hands gripped her hips, forcing her down as he thrust upward, a perfect fit. Her fingers closed on his hair. They were neither gentle nor patient, but with pain came searing pleasure. He increased the rhythm of their lovemaking and she felt the first small convulsions deep within her build. Her lungs grabbed onto his name. She clutched at him to hold him deep inside, and the long weeks of wanting him ended astride him in a violent shuddering climax. He poured himself inside her, and she collapsed against his chest with the sound of her own sated heartbeat loud in her ears, feeling drowsy and heavily content.

His big hands cupped her bottom. The house itself seemed to stretch and sigh with her contentment. He finally turned her onto her back and eased from her. She could feel his eyes on her face in the darkness. He touched her jaw gently, letting his hand slide through the cloud of her hair and down her throat to delicately cup her breast, then lower still to rest against the curve of her thigh. A cool draft played against the hot wetness between her legs, warming as his fingers touched her intimately. Primal. Possessive. Her soft moan slipped into his mouth. An unmistakable heat still lay between them.

He reached behind him and pulled the blankets over them. “Did I hurt you?” he asked, the words vibrating against her lips.

“I have never felt better.” She tugged his lip between her teeth, then joined him in another kiss. “Will they not miss you at supper?”

“Probably.”

She snuggled against him. “I will not be offended if you choose to leave now.”

He chuckled against her hair. “I would as soon stop breathing than leave this bed. Do you not have a stove or candles up here?”

“I have both. But who needs either when I have my own warm luminary in bed with me.”

She lowered her gaze over the corded muscles on his shoulders and arms, the dark shadows of hair at his armpits. He was on his back, his forearm resting across his eyes, and she visually traced the perfection of his silhouette. With his dark hair and the refined detail of his severely classical features, made more evident in his long-lashed eyes and delicate mouth, she wondered if somewhere in his ancestry he did not have a Roman general's blood running through his veins.

The thought struck her that she had never spent the night with any man but her husband.

She laid her cheek against his heart and splayed her fingers across his hip, touching the runnel of a scar that stretched down his thigh. His head turned on the pillow, his features lost in the shadows cast by the moonlight coming in through the window, but his breathing had changed. He moved his hand over hers, as if to cease her exploration of that most private to him, and set it on his stomach.

She swallowed. “You have not told me if Glasgow was a success.”

“The
Anna
is now part of a three-ship fleet that will be transporting wool goods from Glasgow to Flanders and other ports of call on the continent. Our first consignment will be just after the midspring sheep shearing,” he said.

“Our
? Do you mean yours and Sir Jacob's?”

He pressed his lips to her hair. “One does not acquire contracts of that magnitude without having ships. One does not acquire ships without investors. Aye, I mean Sir Jacob. The contracts are a necessary hedge against the possible failure of crops over the next few years.”

She traced the ridge of muscle across his stomach.

“Talk to me,” he said after a moment.

“There is so much about you I do not know. I never knew anything about your parents, except that your father gave me my first unpleasant glimpse of an aristocrat.”

“My father preferred to be feared rather than loved. He was an autocrat, master in his kingdom. He wed for political power. He bred the required two sons, then left. When I was nine, he came back for me. Despite what you may think, I have always been an outsider here.”

“What happened to your mother?”

“I was a child when she died. Even when she was alive, I was never privy to her thoughts or her heart. Stiff upper lip and all that. Unlike the Scots, who bleed passion, we Brits find any display of emotions coarse. Neither parent was alive to see my disgrace after Yorktown. I almost wish my father had been.”

“I am sorry.”

“You mistake my sentiment. My father would have preferred me dead than to know that 'twas an American ship that pulled the survivors from the water. That your uncle saved our lives.” His finger traced a path up and down her arm. Her cheek still pressed atop his heart, she sensed a subtle change in him. “I remember . . . waking to the darkness,” he said. “
You
beside the cot talking to me as you are now.”

“I worked at the camp prison hospital,” was all she could manage to say. “The doctors were always short of help and supplies. I oft cared for most of the British prisoners. I read to them, composed letters to their families. That is why I was there the day you came in.”

He turned her onto her back and looked down at her. “Is that all you did at the hospital?”

She began speaking because she had to talk, because the burden weighed so heavily on her heart she thought it would be crushed. Even if he hated her, he had to know what kind of person she was.

“Daniel and I both were involved with the Sons of Liberty,” she said. “I carried missives from camp to camp. I owned a popular dress shop in Williamsburg. Therefore, I could travel easily into places where no one else could. He was part of an underground printing press run by his older sister. I oft brought . . . information to them and they printed it.”

“Information that you sometimes received from British households and prisoners?”

She nodded jerkily in response. “If I thought anything I learned could save lives, I reported it. I became very adept at what I did but not adept enough to know when my cover had been compromised. The men who killed Daniel . . . found him because of me . . . I brought those men to my husband's house. He died saving me. I had never even told him that I loved him.”

Turning away, she tasted the tears she did not want Camden to see. Her greatest fear was not that he would revile her as a spy and a thief but that he would know her as a faithless wife and find her
truly
undeserving of anyone's love.

He pressed his lips against her cheek gently and without expectation that his overture would be returned. Expecting censure, she was struck instead by compassion. She couldn't fathom why it set her emotions into a state of chaos.

She was afraid of the strength in him. Afraid that it made her feel helpless in a world that had rarely been kind to her.

When he drew back, it was to adjust his position so that he could settle her head on his shoulder and carefully arrange the blankets so that they protected her from the night and the cold. He couldn't know that the darkness had always been her friend more than the light.

S
he kissed him first.

Part of Camden hesitated. Not because he didn't want to indulge his own carnal need but because he was still capable of considering his own moral boundaries when it came to life and the choices he made. He had listened as Christel's tears had subsided. Listened as her breathing had softened. Knowing he should say something. But in many ways, they were a matched pair, a combination of personalities refined by guilt.

He kissed her back, pressing her into the pillows, and lost himself in the sensations that came with her touch in the darkness.

Tomorrow would be soon enough to contemplate the ramification of her revelations this night.

Yet, with sudden tenderness, he shifted his arm to bring her nearer. The movement stirred the scent of him on the sheets and between her legs. Then his mouth slanted across hers and he wasn't thinking about anything outside this room.