Wicked Becomes You (20 page)

She tossed the corset onto the floor. It subsided with a sad, cheap flop, and so did she, into the single small chair.

She stared at the corset. “Pretty housemaid,” indeed. What sort of name was that? Certainly it had succeeded in inspiring her to buy it, but only as a lark; she’d imagined gifting it to Caroline just to hear her shriek with laughter. Housemaids could be pretty, and the corset was priced to appeal to that demographic, but it seemed rather lewd, associating an undergarment with the wearer’s source of income.

And the corset itself was not, in fact, pretty. No housemaid would wear it if seduction was on her mind. Indeed, the insert did not even advertise it as pretty; rather, the manufacturer assured her, it was both strong and cheap.

She frowned. Was that a lewd reference, as well? A strong, pretty,
cheap
housemaid?

She slid down in her chair and kicked the thing across the small space. It went skidding up against the bed, where it sagged dispiritedly. It knew there were far prettier corsets in the world, far more appealing to men, and stronger, too. She had several lovely corsets to her name, each designed to mold her body slightly differently, the better to flatter the line of particular gowns. She’d often thought, while half-dressed in front of the mirror, that some of her corsets were almost too fetching to be covered up—that somebody should get to see her in them.

But not the Pretty Housemaid. She scowled at it. She should not have abandoned her other corsets in Paris. What had she been thinking? Corsets were not articles to be abandoned lightly; they were the benchmarks of a lady’s success, in some circles. Amongst the girls who had debuted with her three years ago, everybody had aspired to marry no later than the age that corresponded to the measurement of their corseted waists. Twenty-four had marked the beginning of proper spinsterhood.

Corsets had shortened in the years since, and lacing had grown more vicious. The current lot probably all wished to marry before they turned twenty-two.

Why . . . she sat up. The very fact that she had not overheard the other debutantes discussing the current equation of waist to marriage age was probably a
sure
sign that her age fell somewhere above the acceptable limit.

Or that her waist was too large!

Heavens. She put her hands to her hips, squeezing lightly. Would she still look pleasing only in her underclothes? Cream puffs and champagne took their toll, of course. If only she had brought her sea-green corset with her, a bit too long now for current gowns, but cunningly trimmed in matching ribbon and ivory lace. If it were with her,
that
was what she would wear into Alex Ramsey’s compartment.

She clapped a hand to her mouth.

Good Lord!

She was thinking of undergarments because somewhere, in the course of their conversation earlier, she had made a decision: the Pretty Housemaid would not serve for the seduction she planned to undertake tonight.

She could not have him forever. But she meant to have him now.

He had the compartment directly next to hers, and the door was not locked. It swung open beneath her hand soundlessly, revealing a direct and immediate view of his bed. He was lying flat on his back, one arm thrown over his head. A clothed arm, by the look of it.

For some reason she had imagined he would be naked.

When it became clear that the clamor of her thundering heart would not wake him directly, she crept forward toward the bed. How did one begin to seduce a man? Did one wake him and announce her intentions?
I have come to ravish you. I will not accept rejection.

That approach seemed to require a good deal of brute strength. She also suspected that if she told him he could not deny her, he would do so simply to prove her wrong. If she knew anything of him, it was that he was a man who jealously guarded his prerogatives.

The single chair was drawn up by the bed, and lying atop it was a magazine—
The Board of Trade Journal
, great ghosts, how awful—and, more intriguingly, something that glinted. She bent down, squinting, and discovered that the glint came from a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles.

Spectacles! She glanced up at him, lips parting in amazement. She also required them to read comfortably. But like him, she never wore them in public.

So we are both a little bit vain
, she thought. The idea made her smile. It was becoming something of an obsession, uncovering the small things which they might have in common. His loyalty to his family. His love for her brother. His disregard for the opinions of idiots and shriveled snobs.

He made a soft noise, and she froze. In the moonlight, in slumber, his face looked boyish, almost innocent. He would need to shave on the morrow; she wished she dared to touch the shadow on his chin, to stroke it simply for the pleasure of the texture beneath her fingertips. But as she reached out, her fingers curled into her palm. Some superstitious conviction came over her: if she woke him the wrong way, everything would go wrong. Fairy tales often emphasized this point. There was only one right way to stir a sleeping person if one wanted them to fall in love.

But I do not want him to fall in love with me
, she reminded herself.
I am not here because I am dreaming of a future with him.

What would a future with him even look like? He had no interest in the country, no taste for England, no care for settling down.

If he fell in love, he would still want to chase the wind. His beloved would simply have to race alongside him.

It did not seem a very restful life.

Some strand of discontent was threading through her resolve now. Of course he would not fall in love. Not with anybody. No need to feel so ill-tempered toward this faceless woman able to race with him when she would never, in fact, exist. Alex was the most determined bachelor known to her.

The thought gave her courage. It was one thing to deny a woman in public. But to find her in his bedroom, at night? Any man would take such an invitation.

Emboldened, she leaned down to inhale the scent of him. Cognac fumes still clung to him, but beneath that was something else—the smell of his bare skin? She pulled in a deeper breath. Yes, that was it. The scent of a warm, healthy, muscular man in his prime. The scent of Alex.

His eyes opened.

She froze.

He studied her for a moment with sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes.

Her heart gave a painful jolt.

The next moment, he came awake. She saw it happen. Saw his expression focus and narrow.

The only sound was the thumping of the wheels over the ties.

Or, no: the breath rasping in her throat seemed embarrassingly loud, too.

“How wicked do you want to be, then?” he murmured.

She had not planned for him to speak. With a single question, he seemed to seize control of the moment. She felt powerless, suddenly, to answer him, or to say anything at all.

His eyes, dark in the shadows falling across his face, rested unblinkingly on hers. He pushed himself up on one elbow, supple and fluid as a cat, and his open shirt parted and fell away. The muscles of his flat abdomen rippled as he moved.

Her mouth went dry.

All right. This was not
at all
a sisterly feeling.

“How wicked?” he asked again softly.

“I—” The word yielded to a breath she hadn’t realized her lungs needed. “Very,” she said as she exhaled.

“And?”

She hesitated.
And?
And what? “You . . . do you not want to?”

“Gwen.” He tilted his head slightly, so his expression was further lost to the shadows. “When you wake to find me watching you, you may begin the discussion by asking what I want. But tonight, it’s your turn to speak first. What do
you
want?”

Why must he make this so difficult? Wasn’t it clear what she wanted?

Or did he just wish to hear her stutter and stammer for his amusement?

Probably.

Why had she come in here?
Why
hadn’t she brought her green corset? “Never mind,” she muttered. “Go back to sleep.”

His mouth curved slightly. “Gwen,” he murmured, and his voice was like a siren’s song, a balm, luring her to turn back toward him. His voice addled her, she thought. Low, smooth, steady—everything sounded persuasive, wrapped up in those polished vowels. Such a voice could recite Bible verses to atheists, rally troops to suicidal charges . . . and coax a woman ten meters from the mountaintop into jumping off a cliff.

“What?” she breathed.

“You keep telling me you want to live freely,” he said. “But what’s the point in breaking free if you don’t even know what you want? Why are you here? Do you even know?”

She wrapped her arms around herself. “I
do
know what I want. But you—”
Make it very difficult to get it
, she added silently.

He leaned forward, toward her, bringing one of his large, muscled shoulders into the moonlight flooding the bottom half of the bed. Her eyes fixed on it. She wanted to touch it. She wanted to press her lips to it.

“I know my desires,” she said in a whisper. “I do.”

“Then you have a choice,” he said softly. “Lock them away and ignore them. Walk out of this room. Or learn to embrace them without shame. For
that
is what people mean when they call a woman wicked, you know.” He waited until she looked away from his shoulder, back to his face. “It has nothing to do with the quality of her spirit,” he said, “or the measure of her character. In this world, there is nothing more wicked than a woman who is unafraid to acknowledge what she wants.”

Still she hesitated. “But I have told you before what I want,” she said slowly. “At the Moulin Rouge. You stopped me then.”

“Yes,” he said. “And maybe I’ll stop you now. That’s a right I have, and a risk you must take. But even if I stop you, that won’t mean you were wrong to have taken the risk.”

She stared at him. She could not speak the words. Could she?

He laughed, a soft, rough sound in the darkness. “For God’s sake,” he murmured. “It’s only me, you know. Not some stranger.”

A flush moved through her, warming her, heating her stomach, the backs of her knees. No. Not some stranger. Far from it. He had been watching her for years. Even when she had not been watching him, his eyes had rested on her, observing, studying. Forming opinions that nobody else had thought to draw about her.
Disciplined. Shrewd. Clever.

“I want you to do things to me.” She swallowed. “I was to have been a married woman by now. I want to . . . know.” On a ragged breath, she said, “And now I have told you what I want. Will you refuse?”

He remained still for a long, agonizing moment. Perhaps he was deliberately tormenting her. She could not say, for the light in the room made his face impossible to read.

And then he rolled up onto his knees in one fluid move. A fine line of dark hair trailed down from his navel, disappearing into the waistband of his trousers, which clung low to his angular hip bones. “No,” he said.

For a split second, she did not know whether he was assenting or refusing. And then he rose very lightly from the bed, and from the expression suddenly revealed on his face, the slight, wicked cant to his lips, she understood that he was hers.

Her experience was based on novels. She expected him to lunge, then—to seize her by the waist and toss her onto her back. Instead, he smoothed his hand beneath her hair, cupping the side of her neck in one large, warm palm. Twice, thrice, he smoothed her neck, and then he lifted her hair away and bent his head. His breath wandered up her throat, hot, restless, as if searching for a place to lodge.

“Suppose you try being more specific,” he whispered into her ear.

Her eyes drifted shut. “Yes.”

His lips brushed the spot beneath her ear, the lightest tease. “You wish me to make love to you? Or shall I make you come?”

She had no idea what the difference was. But she instinctively understood why he asked. He was going to make her own this moment. This choice.

Which was well and good, because the wild resolve in her would not back down now. “I don’t know,” she said steadily. “You will have to show me the difference. But first, you will kiss me, please.”

His laughter was hot, dark velvet. He set his hands on her shoulders. His palms rubbed up the sides of her throat, turned briefly so his knuckles could brush the line of her jaw, and then slid up along her cheeks. He lifted her face to his.

“With pleasure,” he said.

The kiss he pressed on her was gentle, inviting somehow, as if his mouth were asking hers some intimate question, a secret between two pairs of lips, not meant for the ears or thoughts above. His tongue moved to the corner of her mouth, touching, retreating, and then touching again: tasting her. It slid along the seam of her lips, and she inhaled, caught by the unexpected tenderness.

His teeth very gently bit her lower lip, in reproof or encouragement. Her lips opened, then, and he moved into the kiss—moved into
her
, his palm sliding around to cradle her skull as he backed her against the wall and his tongue came into her mouth.

He tasted like brandy, like mint toothpaste and lemon water. He tasted like a wild dark night in which girls lost themselves and were lucky to ever resurface—the sort of night that left white streaks in the hair. She kissed him back, trying to arch against him. He made some slight noise and adjusted his body so their torsos could not touch. Only his mouth wooed her, and his hand cupped her head.

She opened her eyes and saw that his had closed. He was concentrating completely and specifically on her mouth, and holding her as if she were made of glass, something unsteady and precious, that otherwise might threaten to break. How lightly and economically he held her. Yet she felt completely surrounded—held, possessed, fixed in place forever.

Something melted in her heart. It had no relation to the desire. It felt more dangerous.

Don’t let me go.

The thought alarmed her. Some instinct of self-preservation struck out. She pushed against him and felt his lips curve into a smile. He took one short step toward her and used his entire body to press her against the wall.

Not gentle any longer.
Yes
. She twined her arms around his neck and opened her mouth wider, taking him in, wrapping her leg around his, every cell in her discovering the need to be touched, to be pressed against his skin. His fingers tightened in her hair and his arm slipped to her waist, pulling her by the small of her back away from the wall, more firmly into him. She could feel his hardness pushing into her belly; that would be the part of him that would make this night decisive. She rocked against it on some primitive impulse, and he made a low, guttural noise.

His mouth broke away to trace a hot, wet path to her throat. His thumb brushed across her nipple, causing her to gasp. “Yes?” he whispered.

“
Yes
,” she said.

He pulled down the neckline of her nightgown. For a moment, he went very still—so still that she looked down at him, starting to ask a question.

He smiled up at her through long lashes, and closed his mouth over her nipple.

The hot, soft sucking—the sight of his dark head bent over her naked breast—pulled something more out of her than want; her strength seemed to go with it. Her knees folded; she caught herself, barely.

He turned her and laid her down on the bed. His fingertips trailed up her calves, lingering in the tender space behind her knee, smoothing into a flat palm along her inner thigh. She felt the muscles there quiver. He was urging her legs apart. She looked into his face and found him watching her; the moment seemed unbearably intimate, but she refused to let herself close her eyes. It would be cowardly, and she had already invited these acts in words, which was sin enough in the eyes of the world; now she was only bearing out her promise, and this was the easy part, the most pleasurable part, God above, his hand moved upward through the curls between her legs and he stroked and she nearly jumped out of her skin.