Chapter Eighteen

"I say... my partner for the next dance seems to have gone missing. I hope she's not unwell."

Young Lord Holroyd had paused next to his father, who was still standing with Dominic in his little clutch of Parliament members.

"Is she the young lady in blue?" his father asked.

Kirke was immediately alert.

"Indeed. The one I pointed out to you. She's a very amiable girl," Holroyd said wistfully.

Kirke stared at the boy, a decade his junior. No doubt he was the sort of "friendly" Catherine would appreciate.

"Perhaps she had a bit of a feminine emergency, m'boy," his father said. "They come in a wide variety. I speak from experience."

"Shall I go in search of her, or would that seem pathetic? I hope nought is amiss."

Kirke found it an odd sensation to both envy the boy and like him for caring enough to fuss.

"If you're wandering about looking for her, she won't be able to find you," his father said, practically. "Stay with us. She'll be easy to spot if she's just gone to the withdrawing room, or what have you."

But portent prickled at the back of Kirke's neck. He thought he knew where she was. And if she was where he thought she was, something was wrong.

A few minutes later, he began to think his assumption was incorrect. He'd wandered into the garden about fifteen feet, and it was getting darker with every step. And there was no sign of her.

He might never have seen her at all if not for the moon. It was the only illumination besides the scattering of flickering torches flanking the edges of the garden path.

It was blessedly quiet, and the air was cool and almost motionless.

The spangles on her sleeves caught his eyes. She was resting her arms on the edge of the rail surrounding a little gazebo.

He was very still, contemplating whether to approach her.

And then he did, slowly, and stood beside her.

She didn't turn her head. She in fact didn't move at all.

That's how he knew she'd known already it was him.

And that something was terribly wrong.

His heart felt like a hard boot-fall in his chest. His stomach did a slow, painful revolution. Was it her father? Had her father taken a turn for the worse?

"Winded?" he asked idly, finally.

"After a fashion." Her voice was very strange. It emerged dully, after delay.

"It's a lovely garden," he said carefully.

It might be. It was dark, and it smelled green, and the air was fresh, if London air could ever be said to be fresh. It was a thing to say, at least.

He might have said, "Any garden in which you're standing is a lovely one." He would have meant it, which was why he didn't dare say it.

"I'm a bit surprised you aren't dancing," he said, almost lightly.

"I am, too. Given that I'm apparently a success." Never had words sounded so ironic. "All thanks to you, it would appear."

He decided to be direct. "What are you doing out here instead of dancing, Keating?"

"I was just looking at the stars and thinking. About crocodiles." Another of those long pauses. "And something Lady Pilcher said."

He went rigid.

Bloody.

Fucking.

Hell.

Ice slowly spread in his gut.

He knew his long silence was incriminating.

"What did she say?" He said it resignedly. He didn't want to know. But he supposed he needed to hear how bad it was.

Keating swallowed. "She... she noticed that I had a little birthmark here, shaped like a heart. She called it charming." She pointed to her breast. "And then she said..." She took a breath, as if it hurt her. "Lord Kirke has a darling freckle on his hip about that size. And that it's hard to see when"—she cleared her throat—"your hips are moving."

He couldn't speak.

For a man accustomed to blazing ever forward in life, committed to progress, there wasn't much he wouldn't do to turn back time now to the point where he'd never met Lady Pilcher, had never made love to her, so that Keating would never need to hear that. He supposed he could turn the clock back to the point where he had never kissed Keating in the dark of a carriage, but he would need some memories to carry with him to hell when he went there for semiseducing an innocent twenty-two-year-old who trusted him.

"She had no business saying anything like that to you." His words sounded quiet in his own ears. But that could have been because there was suddenly a strange, high-pitched whining sound in them.

She made an irritated, dismissive sound.

"So you and Lady Pilcher were lovers." Her voice was so flat. "Or are lovers."

Needles driven beneath his nails. Manacles clamped to his ankles. A catharine wheel, splitting his bones apart. A rainfall of boiling oil. He could think of a dozen things he'd prefer experiencing than this conversation.

He was flailing in the dark in a windstorm. Furious and ungrounded accusations from jealous mistresses he could field. He'd never had a conversation quite like this.

So he'd never learned any strategies with which to maneuver it. That left him feeling naked and alone with the truth so that was what he gave her.

"Yes, we were for a time," he said. "Five years ago. Briefly."

She turned to him. He withstood her thoughtful, searching gaze. But the light had gone out of it. He could not feel it, and it terrified him.

"Well. You were certainly correct about the crocodiles," she said dryly. Remotely.

"Do you love her?"

"That never had anything to do with the nature of our relationship."

"Of course not," she said sardonically. Almost gently. "Silly me."

"Lady Pilcher," he began carefully, his voice scraped raw, "made an ambitious marriage that seems tremendously successful on the surface but was unhappy from the first. Which is a shame, but a common enough story. She and her husband essentially live separate lives. She is a lonely person. Tonight I suppose she saw you looking... radiant..." The word was soft. He couldn't help it. "Your future hopeful... and probably sought to retrieve a little of her power by diminishing yours. And I'm sorrier than I can adequately say if she used my name to hurt you, or to make you feel foolish."

And it was also troubling. He'd kept his distance from Keating in public since that waltz. But crocodiles knew how to lie in wait.

"I suppose I really am a success if the barbs have progressed beyond my sleeves."

He said nothing because it was regrettably true. True and perhaps inevitable.

He felt, for a moment, that he might actually be sinking into a hole in the ground.

She said, "Does that mean the whole of the ton knows about you and—"

"No. Because it's not a thing anyone is actually proud of, myself included. Lady Pilcher is usually much more discreet. Her husband doesn't mind what he doesn't hear about. He has his own affairs."

"I suppose it's what men do," she said dully.

"No. Not all men," he said at once. His voice was somewhat frayed. "Please do not think that of all men."

"So only men like you?"

Whatever that meant. She was trying to goad him. It was working. He could feel a furious defensiveness warring with guilt, neither of which he was obliged to feel. And yet. "When confronted with a need, with the desire, and the opportunity, some will. It's not uncommon in the ton. Among men or women."

"I expect it's the very height of worldliness," she said ironically. "Quite the done thing. Unlike sleeves with mancherons."

He didn't reply.

She cleared her throat. "So was I an ‘opportunity'?"

It was an attempt at insouciance, but the question was shot all through with pain. She sounded as if she genuinely wanted to know.

He knew this was the question tormenting her. This was at the core of why she was out here in the dark alone.

It made him want to cut his own throat out of self-loathing.

"No." His voice was hoarse.

"Then why... why did you... why do you..."

He drew in a sharp breath. "Because you're beautiful. And your body is beautiful. The way you inhabit your skin, the sway of your hips, the set of your shoulders, the way your neck flows into your collarbone. Because your eyes are sky blue and when you look at me it's like that first sunny day after weeks of rain. Because your breasts fit perfectly into my palms, and I have imagined the sound you would make when I take them into my mouth. Because I know that you want me to."

It was a measured, articulate assault of raw, tortured truth. But it was only part of the truth.

Did he mean to frighten her away? Overwhelm her into keeping a safe distance?

Or did he simply take the opportunity to tell someone, anyone, something of what he'd been feeling?

She pulled in a sharp, audible breath.

But she didn't back away.

After a moment, she brought her hand up to her cheek, as if to soothe the heat flaring there.

Or to see if she could feel what he felt when he touched her. How she felt in light of how he experienced her.

She dropped it.

He didn't ask her why she desired him.

He was somehow afraid the answer to that would be "because you're you."

And she didn't look away from him. Not once. She faced things head-on, Keating did.

He liked that so bloody much.

"Desire is an appetite." His voice was a little steadier. "And sometimes... for whatever reason... it demands appeasing in no uncertain terms. Both for people married and unmarried."

He was lying through omission. He had only recently come to understand that desire was more than that. Desire could be a gift and a curse, especially when you traced it back to its origins, and realized it was less about a body shaped like it was designed to fit against him, as though it was the missing part of him. And about a laugh, and an inner light, and a smile that could cut a man in two with its sweetness, and a presence that was somehow both peaceful and crackling.

He didn't know if he forgot himself or remembered himself when he was with her.

Her expression told him that she knew there was a good deal he was leaving out.

"Before we met, believe it or not, I had some knowledge of what desire is or can be, though I have never acted on it. I'm not a child, Dominic. And now I believe there is the kind of appetite which can be appeased, as you say. And then there is a sort of... craving. That just... it just never ebbs." She paused. "Is this different?"

Holy Mother of God.

It was more of a statement than a question.

For a moment he couldn't breathe for imagining her lying awake in the throes of wanting him. Of the two of them, in the rooms stacked one atop the other, staring at their ceilings, and wanting.

Mutely, he gave his head the slightest of slow nods. Resigned.

He wouldn't have her believing she was wrong. And his ego was such—and he loathed himself for it—that he wanted her to know that what they felt was incendiary. Extraordinary. He wanted her to believe there was no one else like him.

"So by your way of thinking, we can be lovers after I'm married."

"Christ," he exhaled on a gust, as though she'd rammed a plank right into his stomach.

"I won't, you know. Have lovers when I'm married."

"Good," he said evenly, when he could speak again. "You deserve to have everything you want from a marriage. And from a husband."

"If everyone can go about breaking their vows, what is the point of making them? Isn't that what gives marriage its meaning?"

"Life is long if you're lucky," he said shortly. "And people are complicated and flawed. And even saints are not immune to temptation, Keating."

She shrugged this obviousness away irritably with one shoulder.

Finally he said wearily, "But yes. People ought to be able to do hard things. You're not wrong."

"Why did your affair with Lady Pilcher end?"

Dear God, these silences: the weight of them between every question and every answer. Her pain. His discomfort.

"Because I had it wrong." His voice was thick; it was a struggle to put into words what he'd only instinctively felt, and his own sense of self-preservation fought him mightily. She was unraveling yet another layer. "And I don't suppose I felt any moral compunctions about it, so it's not that. Think of me what you will. It was just that it was wrong for me. There are reasons outside of purely baser impulses that people will seek out that kind of... let's call it companionship. Something in me wanted... easing... but when I soon realized it had nothing to do with Lady Pilcher and a bed, I ended it. I should like to cease discussing this now," he said abruptly.

She was quiet.

"Do you think Lord Vaughn is an excellent kisser?"

He froze. "I beg your ever-loving pardon?"

He'd thought he was a fighter. She was ruthless. She came out with knives whirling in her hands and one clenched between her teeth. A menace in silk, aiming straight for his weakness.

She was his weakness.

And even though he understood her tactics, he was shocked to find himself helpless against them. He could almost taste the jealousy, like blood in his throat. He was at once filled with ferocious admiration and fury, at both himself and her.

"I'm afraid I can offer no educated opinion on the matter, as I haven't kissed Lord Vaughn." His voice was cold.

"Is he the only person in London you haven't yet kissed?"

"Have a care, Keating," he warned quietly.

She fell silent at his tone.

"Would you like a list of them?" he added. "Because it's not very long. And I warn you, I will not lie."

They stared at each other.

"No. I don't think I would enjoy hearing it." She paused. "Would you like my list?"

"Yes."

"His name was Henry Thatcher. He was eighteen years old. He kissed my cheek after an assembly when I was eighteen years old."

There was a little silence.

"Lucky, lucky man," Dominic said softly. Fervently.

She exhaled a soft sound.

They stood side by side. Flickering torchlight competed with the waning moon to light her hair.

"Do you think someone like Lord Vaughn would know about... this spot here?" Without looking at him, she drew her fingers lightly up the downy hairs at the nape of her neck.

He stared. Absolutely clubbed speechless.

"Why there?" his voice was hoarse.

"Because... when you..." She swallowed. "I felt it everywhere in me," she whispered. "Everywhere in my body."

When had it become too late to walk away?

Five minutes ago? Three seconds ago? The moment he'd seen her standing alone?

He only knew he now couldn't move away from her if someone put a pistol to his temple.

From his head to his feet, lava replaced the blood in his veins. It became the very air he breathed.

"Or here," she whispered.

He followed with his eyes as she drew her finger from the nape of her neck to the lobe of her ear.

"Or here."

And he stared as her hand lowered, and she traced with a finger the curve of her breast.

"Or—"

"Here?" Dominic's voice, and then his lips, and then his tongue, were in her ear.

She had steered the both of them into this. She was furious and hurting and exultant and weak with want.

He gently took the lobe of her ear between his teeth, as one hand looped around her waist and the other traveled along her shoulder, glided down, across her chest, past the shape of a heart that had haunted him, and slid right into her bodice to cup her bare breast.

She gasped in shock.

He traced with a fingertip her ruched nipple, while his teeth ever so lightly teased the lobe of her ear.

Bliss forked through her so violently her knees nearly buckled. A choked moan rose from her.

And then she was suddenly rotating in the semi-dark, disoriented and lust-drunk, until her back was against the ivy-clad garden wall. Behind a thickly flowering shrub, Dominic's body pinned hers. And after his lips and tongue traveled her throat, her ear, sending hot, shivering trails of pleasure through her body, he found her lips and parted them with his own and their tongues reunited, twined, and teased. And his fingers were at her back, deftly flicking open the laces on her gown. Like a wanton, she slid her arms down to his hips and pulled him against her so she could feel the hard jut of his erection at the crook of her thighs. So she could feel that jolt of pleasure again and again.

And his hissed-in breath, his coarse whispered oath of pleasure, was as erotic as his hands on her body.

She felt terrified and powerful and eager. His matter-of-fact competence—as if it was a quadrille he'd performed a hundred times, with who truly knew how many people—was awful and erotic and mindlessly exciting. She wanted him to know what he was doing. She wanted to feel out of her depth, at his mercy. And she wanted to feel, wanted to know, in the wake of Lady Pilcher's ambush, how very much he wanted her. Her in particular. Because she sensed everything about the two of them together was incendiary.

She hadn't known that this degree of wildness lived in her. Some of it was anger and hurt and frustration. But all of it combined into need.

And while he drugged her with kisses, he slipped her sleeves from her shoulders, and gently dragged the bodice of that beautiful dress lower and lower until the only thing she was clothed in from the waist up was the night air.

And he filled his hands with her breasts, and stroked.

She moaned against his mouth. It was too good; how could it be borne?

He ducked to take her nipple into his mouth.

She stifled a cry by biting her lip. Her head whipped back and her fingers combed into his hair as he sucked then teased with his tongue and teeth her nipples, sending shocks of pleasure fanning through her again and again.

When she became aware of the air on the backs of her legs, she realized he had furled up her dress.

And he leaned forward.

"Look at me," he ordered on a whisper, as she felt his hand gliding along the inside of her thigh.

She stood, with her dress gathered to her waist, the air cold on the bare skin of her thighs. The toes of her slippers glinted in the filtered moonlight when she looked down.

When she looked back up, his eyes were like the night, deep and hot and relentlessly holding her gaze while his fingers slid between her legs. Without preamble, stroked.

She half gasped, half moaned.

"Tell me to stop and I'll stop," he whispered.

Rhythmically, his fingers stroked over her where she was hot and slick. And nothing mattered now except that this was clearly what she'd wanted all along, this was the secret to everything, and he knew it.

It was indescribably strange and incredible. A hidden glory she never would have anticipated. The terrible, terrible risk of being caught honed the relentlessly ramping pleasure to a blinding edge. It made a begging slave of her with shocking speed.

"Please don't stop. Promise me. Promise me." Her voice was a shred against his chest. Very nearly a sob. Her hips moved with his clever fingers, even faster now. She was frantically, shamelessly chasing something, or something was chasing her; she could not say what, only that it seemed to promise salvation.

"What is happening?" she whispered against his throat. "Dominic...?"

His breath was in her ear. "I have you, sweetheart. It's safe. Let go."

The bliss called from corners of her being by his clever fingers built into a torrent that pressed against the very seams of her. Her breath was a roar. She whimpered, helplessly from it, against his chest. She was blind with need.

He knew.

And he knew when she shattered.

Because his hand fanned across the back of her head and he pressed her scream of ecstasy against his coat, as her body was whipped backward. She would have buckled; his arm was an iron band around her body, holding her upright as a violent bliss racked her.

She became aware of things in fragments: her own breath, a ragged roar; the chill of the air; his hard cock still pressed against her, and when she shifted against it he hissed in a breath.

She reached for his buttons and his hand clamped hers. "No."

"Let me touch you. Show me," she demanded on a whisper. "Show me how. Show me what you need."

He hesitated. For a heartbeat, he was in indecision. Then with deft, expert speed he opened the fall of his trousers and guided her hand beneath the miles of his shirt to his cock. "Hold me like this." He wrapped her fingers around his shaft.

Her breath hitched at the hot, thick primitive feel of it in her fist. Very like it had a life of its own. Which probably wasn't far from the truth.

He closed his hand over hers, and dragged it down and back again. "Like that. Fast. Hard. Hurry," he said tersely.

She obeyed. And at first he took her lips in a searching, carnal kiss as she moved her fist. But soon his head thrashed back from enduring the pleasure and the moonlight glanced off his glistening bare throat. She was suffused with the power of giving him that sort of pleasure. Of having him essentially at her command. His hands covered her bare breasts again and, God help her, she wanted him so badly.

Her moving fist and his hips were a quick frenzy, and then he went rigid, his body bowing back, his lip bit against a stifled groan. "Oh God. Oh Christ," he breathed.

She sucked in a shocked breath as he spilled into her hand, his body quaking as though struck by lightning.

And even though his chest was heaving from release he became efficient. Because every second they lingered they were in danger of being caught.

He found a handkerchief and gently, thoroughly cleaned her hands.

He folded it and tucked it back into his coat.

Wordlessly, he placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her around gently so he could lace up her dress.

She'd been undone, and now she was being done up again, and she submitted, still feeling pleasure-stunned and a bit removed from her own body, which rang from the aftermath of her release. It had felt as though she'd soared over London like a firework, as exploded particles of bliss and light. She had not yet fully reassembled.

Finally, gently, he pulled her into his arms again, and held her as if she was breakable. She could feel his heart thumping beneath her cheek. His breath against her temple.

Her heart felt too hot and too bright and too sore and too crowded with conflicting emotions, all enormous.

Well. She had asked for this. She was mortified and exultant. Humbled and subdued and, in truth, thoroughly shocked. The dregs of the jealousy and hurt that had in part driven her to tempt him, to goad him, still simmered around the edges of her awareness.

But she understood now how someone could chase this feeling. How one could escape from the world through passion. How it needn't have anything to do with love at all. Indeed, until this moment in his arms, it hadn't seemed loving at all this time, for either of them. It had seemed a pure expression of anger and hurt and hunger. Primal and desperate.

But perhaps that was part of love, too. She couldn't possibly know. And though she'd naively pressed him for answers before, this was a question she didn't dare ask. She wasn't naive anymore.

He brushed his lips against her temple. Her brow. Her eyelids.

"Catherine," he said quietly, finally. "Have mercy."

He dropped his arms from her.

A moment later, thoroughly, unequivocally ravished this time and forever changed, she returned to the ball, and he remained in the dark.