Three Weddings And A Kiss (18 page)

“It isn’t merely the property,” he said. His voice was taut, his face a rigid white mask.

She wanted to reach up and smooth the turmoil and tension away, but that would look like pity. She plucked a leaf from a rhododendron and traced its shape instead.

“The guardianship includes legal custody…of me,” he said. “Because I cannot be responsible for myself, I must be considered a child.”

He was not irresponsible yet or remotely childlike. Gwendolyn had told Abonville so. She knew her lecture had calmed the due down, yet it was too much to hope that her speeches could fully quell his overprotectiveness. He meant well, she reminded herself. He assumed the marriage would be too great an ordeal for her and wished to share the burden.

She could hardly expect her future grandfather to fully understand her capabilityies when none of the other men in her family did. None of them took her medical studies and work seriously.
Her dedicated efforts remained, as far as the males were concerned, “Gwendolyn’s little hobby.”

“It is very difficult to think clearly,” Rawnsley went on in the same ferociously controlled tones, “with a pair of lawyers and an overanxious would-be grandpapa hovering over me. And Bertie’s holding his tongue was no help, when he had to stuff his handkerchief into his mouth to do it, and he still couldn’t stop sniffling. I came out to clear my head, because…
damnation
.” He dragged his hair back from his face. “The fact is
,
I do not feel reasonable about this. I wanted to tell them to go to the Devil. But my own solicitor agreed with them. If I object, they’ll all believe I’m irrational.”

And he was worried he’d end up in a madhouse, Gwendolyn understood.

That he’d come to her with his problem seemed to be a good sign. But Gwendolyn knew better than to pin her hopes on what seemed to be.

She moved to stand in front of him. He did not look down at her.

“My lord, you are aware, I hope, that the 1774 Act for Regulating Madhouses included provisions to protect sane persons from improper detention,” she said. “At present, only an examining body composed of imbeciles and criminal lunatics could possibly find you non compos mentis. You need not sign every stupid paper those annoying men wave in your face in order to prove you are sane.”

“I must prove it to Abonville,” he said stiffly. “If he decides I’m mad, he’ll take you away.”

She doubted the prospect was intolerable to him. She knew he’d agreed to marry her for what he believed were the wrong reasons. She doubted he’d developed a case of desperate infatuation during the last few hours.

It was far more likely that he’d come to test her. If she failed, he would believe it was wise to let her go.

Gwendolyn had been tested before, by certified lunatics, among others, and this man was no more deranged at present than she. Nevertheless she did not make the mistake of imagining this trial would be easier—or less dangerous. She had marked him as dangerous from the first moment he had turned his smoldering yellow gaze upon her. She was sure he fully understood its compelling effect and knew how to use it.

Her suspicious were confirmed when the brooding yellow gaze lowered to hers. “What’s left of my reason tells me you represent an infernal complication, Miss Adams, and I should be better off rid of you. The voice of reason, however, is not the only one I hear—and rarely the one I heed,” he added darkly.

His gaze drifted down…lingered at her mouth…then slid downward to her bodice.

Beneath layers of silk and undergarments, her flesh prickled under the slow perusal, and the sensations spread outward until her fingers and toes tingled.

He was trying to make her uneasy.

He was doing a splendid job.

But he faced madness and death, she reminded herself, next to which her own anxieties could not possibly signify.

By the time the potent golden stare returned to her face, Gwendolyn had collected at least a portion of her composure.

“I am not sure you have identified the correct voice as
reason’s
,” she said. “I am absolutely certain, though, that if Abonville tries to take me away, I shall take a fit. I went to a good deal of trouble to get ready for the wedding. My head is stuck full of pins and my maid laced my stays so tight it is a wonder my lips haven’t turned blue. It took her a full hour to tie and hook me into this gown, and I shall likely be three hours trying to get out of it.”

“I can get you out of that gown in a minute,” he said too quietly. “And I shall be happy to relieve you of your painful stays. It would be better for you not to put such ideas into my head.”

As though they weren’t already there, she thought.
As though he hadn’t warned her: he hadn’t had a woman in a year.

Though she knew he was testing her maidenly fortitude, his low voice set her nerves aquiver.

He was taller than she.
And heavier.
And stronger.

A part of her wanted to bolt.

But he was not on the brink of a violent lunatic fit, she scolded herself. He was feigning, to test her, and allowing him to intimidate her was no way to win his trust.

“I do not see why it would be better,” she said. “I do not want you to be indifferent to me.”

“It would be better for you if I were.”

He had not moved an inch nearer, yet his low voice and glowing eyes exerted a suffocating pressure.

Gwendolyn reminded herself that the Almighty had been throwing obstacles in her path practically since the day she was born and had confronted her repeatedly with men determined to browbeat or frighten her.

That was sufficient practice for dealing with him.

“I know I am an infernal complication,” she said. “I realize you feel put upon, and I do understand your resentment of your—your masculine urges, which incline you to act against your better judgment. But you are not looking on the bright side. A lack of such urges would indicate a failure of health and strength.”

She caught the flicker of surprise in his eyes in the instant before he masked it.

“You ought to look upon your animal urges as a positive sign,” she persisted. “You are not as far gone as you thought you were.”

“On the contrary,” he said. “I find myself in far worse case than I had imagined.”

He directed his yellow stare to a point on her left shoulder where the neckline of her growth left off and her skin began…and instantly she became hotly conscious of every square inch of her skin.

She heard a crackling sound. Looking down, she saw the paper crumpling in his tightly clenched hand.

He looked there, too. “It hardly matters what I sign,” he said.
“Nothing matters that should.”
He crushed the document into a ball and threw it down.

Her heart was pumping double-time, speeding the blood through her veins in preparation for flight.

“Damn me,” he said. He advanced.

She sucked in her breath.

He grasped her shoulders. “A pretty fellow, am I? Take a fit, will you? I’ll show you a fit.”

Before she could exhale, he clamped one hand on the back of her neck, pulled her head back, and brought his mouth down upon hers.

It was her fault, Dorian told himself. She should not have looked at him in that bone-melting way. She should not have stood so near and caught him in her scent, rich and heady as opium to his starved senses. She should have run, instead of staying so close and snaring him in awareness of the fine, porcelain purity of her skin.

He could not help yearning for that purity and softness, and then he could not keep from reaching for her.

He clamped his needy mouth upon her soft, trembling one, and the clean, sweet taste of her made him shiver—in pleasure or despair, he couldn’t tell. For all he knew the chill was the emptiness inside him, ever-present, impossible to fill.

He should have stopped then, for his sanity’s sake, if nothing else. He knew it was hopeless. This innocent could never sate him. No woman, no matter how experienced and skilled, had ever done it.

But her lips were so soft, warming and yielding to the pressure of his. He had to draw her nearer, seeking the warmth of her young body while he savored the untutored surrender of her innocent mouth.

He pressed her close, greedy for her warmth and softness. He pressed her to his famished body while he deepened the kiss, seeking desperately, as always, for more.

He felt her shudder, but he couldn’t stop—not yet. He couldn’t keep his tongue from searching the mysteries of her mouth…feminine secrets, promising everything.

Lured by scent and taste and touch, he slipped into the darkness. He stroked over her back, heard silk whisper under his fingers, and felt her shift under his touch. Then he was truly lost because she moved into his caress as though she’d done it many times before, as though she belonged in his arms, had always belonged.

Warmth…softness…sinuous curves under whispering silk, melting against him…woman-scent, enveloping him…and her skin…

He trailed his lips over her satiny cheek, and she sighed. The soft sound ignited the too-quick inner fuse of desire. His fingers found a fastening…

“If you’re trying to scare me off,”
came
her foggy voice, her breath tickling his ear, “you’re going about it all wrong.”

His hands stilled.

He raised his head and looked at her. Her eyes opened, and slowly her hazy green gaze sharpened into focus. His own haze instantly dissipated under that penetrating study.

“I was taking a lunatic fit,” he said, aware that his thick tones told another story. He wrenched his gaze from the mesmerizing trap of hers and drew back.

Curling red tendrils had escaped their pins to tumble wildly about her flushed face and neck. Her gown was twisted askew.

He stepped back and looked at his hands, afraid to think where they’d been and what he might have done to an innocent, lusting oaf that he was.

“What is wrong with you?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you make me stop? Do you have any idea what I might have done?”

She tugged her gown back into place. “I have a very good idea,” she said. “I am familiar with the mechanics of human reproduction, as I told Mama. But she felt it was her maternal duty to explain it herself.”

She smoothed her bodice. “I must say, she did point out a few subtleties I was unaware of. And Genevieve, as you would expect, enlightened me further. It turned out to be not quite as simple as I thought.” She pushed a few pins back into her hair. “Which is not to say I haven’t experienced considerable enlightenment under your tutelage, my lord,” she added quickly. “It is one thing to be told about intimate kisses. Experiencing them is another matter altogether. What are you staring at?” She looked down at herself. “Have I missed something? Is anything undone?” She turned, presenting, her slim back. “Do I need fastening?”

“No.”
Thank God
, he added silently.

She turned back and smiled.

Her mouth was overwide. He had noticed that before…and felt and tasted every luscious atom of it.

He could not remember seeing her smile before. If he had, he would not have forgotten, for it was a long, sweet curve that coiled about him like an enchantment.

He did not know how to resist its warm promise. He did not know how to fight her and himself simultaneously. He did not know how to drive her away, as he must, when she made him want so desperately to hold her.

It seemed he did not know how to do anything.

The document he’d been asked to sign, the reasons they’d given him for signing, had made him face what he’d tried to ignore. He’d come, intending to scare her off for her own safety—and his peace of mind. Yet he, once capable of making hardened whores tremble, could not stir the smallest anxiety in her, any more than he could rouse his feeble conscience.

Once capable
.

Past tense.

Before the headaches.
Before the disease had begun its insidious work.

The answer came then, chilling him: the tenuous link between will and action, mind and body, was breaking down already. He was healthy and strong, she’d claimed, but that was only outwardly. His degenerating mind was already sapping his will.

He turned away, lest she read his despair in his countenance. He would master it. He needed but a moment. It had caught him unawares, that was all.

“Rawnsley.”

He felt her hand upon his sleeve.

He wanted to shake it off, but he couldn’t, any more than he could shake off his awareness of her. The taste of her lingered in his mouth, and her drugging scent wafted about him. He recalled the soft look in her beautiful eyes and the smile…warm promises. And he was cold, chilled to his soul.

And too selfish, too weak, he thought with bitter resignation, to let her go.

He brought his hand up and covered hers. “I do not want to go back into that curst library and listen to their solemn speeches and read their bloody documents,” he said levelly. “I signed the settlements. You’ll get your hospital. That is enough. I want to be wed.
Now.”