To Tempt a Saint (23 page)

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Authors: Kate Moore

BOOK: To Tempt a Saint
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“Oh dear. Charlie told you?”
“He confessed.”
“Well, I’ve unlocked all the closets, so I know the truth.”
“I wasn’t going to do this.” Xander stared down at the princess who had landed in his bed while a nasty dragon napped. He’d made off with her, he who was no king’s son.
Marrying her for her money had seemed a reasonable plan, no riskier than dozens of ventures he’d gambled on before. They would have months to use her money, and once he found Kit and she got Charlie in school, March would obligingly take them to court to undo their marriage that was no true marriage with no harm to either. A baron’s daughter, a baron’s sister, she would find a gentleman to marry, and somewhere there would be another Miss Finsbury for him.
But he realized his plan had been in peril from the first because he wanted his pauper princess, had wanted her even when he pocketed a piece of straw from her muddied hem. And neither his plan nor his conscience was a match for the desire that gripped him now. He inhaled a shuddering breath, gathered the bed coverings in his fist, and stripped them back.
Cleo gasped at the sudden exposure. A good blaze crackled in the fireplace, but her skin pebbled in the air, the tips of her breasts beaded. She held herself still for his gaze. It was her dream from the first day in the bank. But now, experiencing it, she understood her own impulse. She had wanted to be herself with him. She had thought nakedness vulnerability, but it was power.
He dropped the covers, and his palm, warm and slightly rough, came to rest on her knee. Slowly he drew his hand up her thigh, fingers spread, the faintest raking touch, stirring her body to pulsing life. He paused briefly at the juncture of her hip, brushing with his thumb the crease. She closed her fist against the shocking desire to arch into his touch, opening to him.
His hand continued its journey up over her abdomen and ribs, parts of Cleo she had not given a thought to, awakened by his touch, to want more. Then his hand caught her breast, lifted it, molded its curve to his palm, a possession that sent currents of feeling jolting along her veins. And she knew he had wanted this, too.
“I want to taste you everywhere,” he said. Unhurried, he mounted the bed, kneeling above her on hands and knees, his legs straddling hers.
He looked down at her. “You think you’ve won.”
She swallowed. She had won. He would give in to the demand of her female body that his male strength yield to her and join with her in one strength.
“Think again. My bed, my way, and it won’t be the least bit medicinal.” He smiled then, and the stony saint vanished in that sure and wicked smile.
He dipped his head and took the breast he had touched into his mouth, his eyes closed, his face intense. Cleo slid her arms around his shoulders and pushed her fingers into his hair and clung as he rubbed lips and teeth and tongue and face against her breasts. The slight dragging scrape of his jaw sent shivers through her, and her body flared like a candle around a burning wick of desire.
He lowered his body to hers, his chest against her breasts, an urgent pressure that she had to answer by arching upward. Sensation overpowered her—the fine wool of his trousers against her legs, his weight a pleasure to take. He distracted her with openmouthed kisses and deep penetrations while his hands stole her secrets, opened her body, touched her everywhere. His hand at last found the secret she had never told anyone, the secret that she spoke the language of desire, a language of soft cries and throaty exhalations. His touch made her sing in that new tongue, her body straining, reaching for a note so high, so right, it would swell to fill her whole person. And when she hit that perfect note of pleasure, the joyful vibration lingered, hung in the hushed air, and faded in long echoes down all the pathways of her body.
He shifted to lie beside her, his gaze on her, his hand at rest with satisfied possession on her red-touched curls.
“Poor Miss Finsbury, never to have had this.”
“Miss Finsbury never would have had this.”
Xander saw his mistake when she turned and drew her hand down his chest over the band of his trousers, finding the heat and pulse of him through the fine wool, pressing her hand there. Her fingers stroked the length of him, exploring. His mind went away in the pleasure of it until he caught a glimpse of her face wearing a small, satisfied smile.
“You still think you’re in charge here.” He worked the buttons of his trouser fall.
Cleo nodded.
He shoved wool and linen over his hips in a single motion and kicked them away.
Cleo sucked in a little breath. He was quite handsome there, too, in an unexpected way, like a ridged and helmeted column. He accused her of thinking, but really, she hadn’t been. She had merely been enjoying the way he pressed himself into her touch and the way his face grew taut as her fingers slid over him.
He came on top of her in a swift move, pressing his length to hers, his sex, heavy and full, settling against her aching center. And then thinking wasn’t possible, because she was skin to skin with a wholly naked male. He took possession of the back of one knee and lifted her leg over his hip, opening her body to his.
His body rocked upward, unerringly stroking hers, parts meant to fit together. Her body, hot, slick, and aching, opened and lifted.
They were joined, barely, his fullness pressing into the place that felt hollow and empty. Their gazes locked, his teeth clenched, he held himself still on trembling arms.
Cleo could touch him anywhere. She slid her hands over his shoulders and down the long slope of his back. She cupped his hips in her hands. She pressed her thumb to the furrow above his nose and drew her fingers over the strong ridge of his brow to graze the white groove of the scar at his ear.
“No, you don’t.” Her body he would take, but not her sympathy. He drove himself deep, surrendering to her body’s demand of him, erasing the sweet, knowing look in her eyes.
She went still from the pinch and burn of it, but her arms clung to him, and he began to move inside her.
Only at the last, looking into those guileless green eyes, did Xander swear an unsaintly oath and wrench himself free of her body’s exquisite hold to spill his seed in the tangled sheets. She would have one small reason not to hate him when the day of reckoning came.
Cleo lay under his arm, feeling his pulse subside, her senses and spirits leveled. She had been lost in the moment as he had intended. The startling connection not just of bodies had seemed all powerful, all consuming. But only for her, not for him. He offered heat but denied her shining looks of love, sweet expressions. She could want him, she could take her pleasure from him, but he would not let her love him. Some part of him had remained stone, detached, locked in a drawer, like his unopened letters.
The candles burned on. The fire popped and cracked. Her heart might ache, but her body floated in an odd, paradoxical languor. She felt supremely, stunningly alive, whole, all her parts joined. She stretched, flexing her feet, feeling the friction of the sheets against her skin everywhere at once. She felt like a general with an army at her command, every muscle and nerve ready to salute and serve. Oh, she could admit that he excelled in this art, while she was a novice, but she had paid close attention, close, close attention. She had already learned a thing or two. He had opened himself to her more than he realized, and she would now use the lessons he taught against him. She turned on her side and pressed her body against his, the contact of skin against skin immediately rousing her body again. She slid the flat of her palm across his collarbone and down the hard plane of his chest.
Chapter Seventeen
E
VERSHOT was not there to greet them at the appointed hour. Meese ushered them into the richly appointed office with perfect fawning civility, but Cleo caught the smirk on his thin lips. It made him seem sure of his power over her, like her tormentor of old. She meant to consider the meaning of that smirk, but the warm point of connection where her elbow rested in Xander’s palm had her full attention. Later she would set Meese in his place.
The door closed behind them, and Cleo stopped. The silver teapot gleamed on the table with its pale white cups that fit so roundly in Xander’s hands that first day. She had thought herself recovered from the mindless-ness of the night before, but she could not halt a rush of images of his hands on her body.
It was just desire. But she had been wrong about desire. She had not guessed how completely consuming it could be. How it could burn away all pretensions and leave one humbled before it. And how it could spark again even in the most spent moment. They had turned to each other again and again in the night and even by day with the candles out and the gray light of morning filling the room. Cleo had been naked for nearly eight hours by her count.
But now they were in the bank, for heaven’s sake. They had business to conduct. Today they had agreed to withdraw substantial sums, Xander for the hiring he was ready to do, and Cleo for Charlie’s school fees. She took a shaky breath and a firm step forward.
Gaslights and school fees first
. But Xander’s warm hold on her elbow checked her movement. She glanced over her shoulder and found her husband’s shuttered gaze on her. Oh well, then, she thought, turning into the pull of him. He had not given her a babe yet, but he had barely left her side since their joining in the night.
“It was a long carriage ride,” he said, drawing her into a press of bodies. Leaning back against the door, he fit her to him, her breasts yielding to the hard plane of his chest. “You were too far from me.”
“Yes, and then there’s that tea set.”
“The tea set?” He sounded lost. With one hand he held her waist, with the other he brushed her fur-trimmed cloak off her shoulder, his fingers grazing her collarbone.
“That first day. You put your hands around a teacup, and I thought . . .” She could not say what she thought. His thumb had found her breast and coaxed her nipple to a sensitive peak.
“What’s behind that screen?” His voice rasped in her ear.
She looked up at him, the plain sense of his question eluding her.
“Is there a bench or a chair? Behind that screen?”
Her mind caught up to his. “We couldn’t.”
“We could.”
“Evershot could walk in any minute.”
“Consider it a medicinal procedure.” Her wicked husband grinned at her. He looked young and almost happy, and Cleo had never seen that particular light in his eyes.
He gave her a little push, a cock of his hips against hers. Cleo backed up a step. He followed, his silver gaze intent.
She glanced over her shoulder at the distance to the standing screen. “It
was
a long carriage ride. We just need a moment to refresh ourselves, put ourselves to rights.”
The door opened, admitting Evershot followed by Meese with an armload of account books and papers. “Ah, Sir Alexander, Miss Spencer, sorry to keep you waiting. Demands of business, you know.”
“Lady Jones,”
Xander corrected, shifting to stand behind Cleo, his hands drawing the loose cloak from her shoulders.
“Well, of course, so used to our former Miss Spencer, don’t you know? Did you have some tea?” Evershot waved Meese over to the vast desk, where Meese dropped his ledgers and papers with a thud.
“It’s money we’ve come for, Evershot.” Xander’s voice had a sudden edge.
“Well then, we’ll get down to it. There’s a bit of paperwork to be done, I fear.” Evershot did not move.
Cleo felt Xander tense, and she stepped from his hold. “More paperwork? I thought we cleared up all the necessary questions on our last visit.”
“Just a few details. We bankers always take extra care.” Evershot spread his hands in a gesture of apology, which rang false.
He was stalling. Cleo crossed to the big desk where Meese was arranging papers. “What is this?” she asked, looking down at a document with the seal of the Chancery Court. “I don’t see our drafts, here, Mr. Evershot?”
Evershot smoothed the thin strands clinging to his brow and cleared his throat. He looked directly at Cleo. “I’m afraid I have bad news, Lady Jones. In point of fact, legally that is, you may be Miss Spencer yet. It appears you are not married.”

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