Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

J ack succumbed to the exhilarating intoxication of her. His eyes slid shut and he inhaled her essence—of spring blossoms and summer sun. Of lazy mornings and endless afternoons. Of sweet, soft?—

At that moment, fate, or destiny, or simple ill-luck intervened—the door at the far end of the room rattled on its hinges.

Flora practically jumped out of his arms.

“I locked it,” he assured her, just as the sound of a key being inserted into that very lock gave lie to his assertion. “Damn my eyes. We’ll have to?—”

“—hide,” she finished, but she was already pulling him after her, retreating into the enveloping cocoon of the verdant ferns and palms at the farthest end of the glasshouse, plunging them deep into the velvet green dark.

And just in time.

“How strange that the room should be locked,” a woman’s voice penetrated their hiding place. “Though it’s thankfully empty. And blessedly quiet. What a crush.”

“Perhaps your aunt wanted to keep the conservatory private tonight,” came a man’s voice that Jack now reckoned must belong to Hamish Cathcart, who was husband to Lady Ivers’s niece, the author Elspeth Otis Cathcart. Hamish was a younger son of the Earl Cathcart and a publisher of some note in Edinburgh. “I for one, think it a marvelous idea.”

“Do you?” his wife queried absently. “Why ever?—?”

Her question was answered by a low laugh, followed by the sound of the lock being turned over at the door. Though they were ostensibly hidden in the foliage, Jack instinctively turned his back to the room, wrapping Flora in his arms and urging her more protectively toward his chest.

“Hamish.” The name held a playful warning. “Be good and let me light the lamp. I want to talk to you seriously about the manuscript I’ve been slaving over?—”

“You shouldn’t have to slave, my darling. Your publisher must be a brute to make you do so.”

“Oh, he doesn’t make me,” the women’s voice assured him playfully. “I want to. To please him.”

“Methinks he should be the one pleasing you, lass,” was the answer, which was swiftly followed by the soft sounds of lips meeting in passionate embrace.

After a brief, but not quite silent interval, during which the lamp remained unlit, Jack heard Mrs. Cathcart’s breathy reply. “Oh, he does please me.”

“Perhaps, he might please you more?” Cathcart queried.

“Hamish? What are you—” Whatever question the young Mrs. Cathcart might have posed, seemed destined to go unanswered—at least with words. “Oooh. Oh, yes, Hamish. Yes, please.”

What followed, to Jack’s acute ears, was the unmistakable sound of Mrs. Cathcart sinking onto the Admiral’s comfortable chaise not more than ten feet from where he and Flora Conway stood hidden and being thoroughly and quite completely pleasured by her clearly devoted husband. Soft sighs and low moans permeated the thin barrier of the foliage until the air in their little cocoon of green began to grow as hot and humid as any summer’s night.

Jack felt the moment Flora Conway realized exactly what it was she was hearing—he heard her faint gasp and felt her instinctive tensing as she shifted against him. He might have cautioned her by laying a hand across her no-doubt gaping mouth, but he dared not move at all—for a number of different reasons, the chief being his own instinctive physical reaction to both the stimulating sound of a woman being pleasured by cunnilingus and the softer sound of another woman’s agitated breathing.

He held himself vigilantly still—squashed up as tight as they were, face to face, or rather, face to chest—lest she feel his inadvertent but persistent arousal.

But what was a man to do when the sounds of a woman being deeply pleasured filled his ears? With every moan and sigh, Jack’s imagination was stretched tighter and tauter until he felt himself pulled as stiff as a backstay.

And if the uncomfortable shifting in front of him was any indication, Flora Conway was not faring much better. Her breathing changed, becoming shorter and less measured—she was so close, he could feel the rise and fall of her breasts above the taut boning of her stays.

“Easy,” he whispered to reassure her, even though he risked their discovery.

Thankfully, the Cathcarts seemed to be too distracted for discovery.

Which was good, because once Jack had broken his silence, the urge to take up where he had left off gripped him stronger than ever. The urge to find her lips and put an end to this infernal hunger that had somehow devoured him whole. This need to be with her and for her.

He could not wait to taste her lips beneath his again. To find out how those soft breasts pressed against his chest might feel without all the intervening layers of clothing. Or explore the way her naked skin might feel stretched out atop his.

But he had to go slowly, stealthily, quietly. He had to fight to control his own breathing, because the air was beginning to saw in and out of his chest as if he had sprinted up the ratlines of a main mast, even with his two feet all but nailed to the ground.

And his torture had only just begun. Because in the next moment, Flora’s hand landed tentatively on his hip—the barest weight, but he felt it echo through him like a cannon shot.

Yet, he did nothing. Well, nothing more than holding her a bit closer, perhaps.

For her own protection. And his own peace of mind.

Thus, tacitly encouraged, she moved her hand up along the taut column of his spine to the flat of his shoulder blade—a small, subtle pressure, yet he still felt as poleaxed as if she had run him through.

And then a slightly greater weight settled upon his chest—her head as she laid it against his lapels. She sighed, a silent exhalation of comfort and relief, but it was his eyes that fell closed as if of their own accord. As if the febrile weight of her was too much.

Or not enough. Never enough.

No, no, he was wrong. The feel of her in his arms, no matter the circumstance, no matter the embarrassingly erotic environment, was more than enough. It was perfect. He would impress this moment in his mind and heart and soul and make it last forever, a memory he would live on for the rest of his lonely life, in whatever corner of the globe fate took him.

But in that quiet moment, it seemed Flora Conway had decided to take fate, and something far more tangible, into her own hands. She wrapped both of her arms around him, hugging him closer, spreading her small palms wide across his back, testing out the length and breadth of him before she changed tack and found the way beneath the hem of his coat jacket, until there was nothing but the thin layer of his worn linen shirt between her hands and his skin.

His own hands nearly pulsed with the need to feel so close to her.

But before he could put thought into action, a cry came from Elspeth Cathcart. “Hamish!”

“My darling lass,” her husband answered.

“Yes,” was his wife’s barely audible direction. “There. Yes. Please.”

And judging by the immediate cries of bliss that escaped the woman’s mouth, her husband had done as charged, and done it very well indeed.

But all Jack could imagine as he shut his eyes tight was that it was the woman pressing herself against him making those sounds. And that it was he who was touching her and bringing her to such unmitigated bliss. That it was his mouth on her pale exquisite flesh. His fingers on her pink, ruched breasts.

Would she call his name? Would he call her his darling lass? What would she look like, all pale and flushed and spread out before him, her pristine white skirts pushed up, her soft, sweet belly, rising and falling with each excited breath. What would she taste like when he put his mouth to her flesh? What would she sound like while he brought her to the peak of her bliss?

The hell of it was, he would never know. What he could so vividly imagine, could never be. Because he was poor, and she was not for him.

But then, the divine Miss Flora Conway did something he could never have predicted—not in a hundred or a million or a hundred million years.

She sighed against him and then unerringly wrapped her hand around his cock.