Chapter Eight

A man had his head between her legs. Beneath her skirts. Where he touched her in an unmentionable place. With his tongue.

Emma wasn't certain if it was the knock to her head or the breathlessness created by the wicked flicks of that tongue over her private flesh that had sent the ceiling spinning, but the intricate molding whirled above her no matter the cause. And she—

She stroked his hair. She had meant to pull him away, she was sure of it. This, surely, was beyond improper. She had wrenched herself up, and had grabbed up a great fistful of his hair, intent upon yanking him away.

He'd done something with his tongue—something terrible; wonderful.

She'd drifted back down to the desk, limp as a wilted flower.

Oh, yes. Any woman would follow him straight into Hell. Perhaps, in some far-off future, she would recover herself enough to feel shame for this. For what she was allowing him to do to her. But just now, there was no room inside her for anything but that magnificent swell of pleasure that spiraled from her belly outward, radiating brilliant sparks of flame along every nerve. She heard her breath sawing from her lungs, carving through the still air with each gasp, felt her back arch with a particularly devious flick of his tongue and the slow plunge of his fingers inside her. Something crashed to the floor—a pile of books, she thought—swept off the desk by the unconscious flail of her arm, which had scrabbled for purchase somewhere above her head. The edge of the desk bit into her palm as she curled her fingers around it, holding on for dear life.

His cheek rasped against the tender skin of her thigh, the abrasion of his stubble startling, maddening. She bit back a cry as the pleasure began to crest in tiny, intimate pulses, her private flesh contracting around the fullness of his fingers.

And then she whimpered as he withdrew. Too soon—her body clutched only upon emptiness, and that delicious rush of bliss abated like a kettle that had been removed from the stove just shy of boiling. Frustration struck at the loss, and her fingers curled into claws, intent upon seizing him, yanking him back. "No," she croaked. "I was so close!" Her fingers swiped at empty air, and he—he laughed.

He knew damn well what he had done. How he had left her.

His hands bracketed her hips, pulling until her bottom slid off the desk, until her feet touched the ground. And he held her up as her trembling knees failed to adequately support her, dodging the furious and pitiful strike of her hand as she lashed out at him in disgruntled ire. Her legs nearly tangled upon themselves as he turned her, and the firm pressure of his palm in the center of her back forced her down, bent once more over the desk.

"Emma," he said. "Stop. I'm going to take care of you." His fingers caught at the laces of her gown, holding her still with the constriction of her bodice. Her skirts rustled, cool air swirling up her legs once more, and she gasped as he palmed her naked bottom, squeezing her flesh in his fingers as if he might brand her with his touch. "Christ," he said, in a rough, agonized voice. "So damned soft."

His fingers swept between her thighs, finding the bead of her clitoris once more. Emma pressed her face into the curve of her elbow with a faint, pleading whimper. The sound of buttons tearing free of their closures burned in her ears, and then—then there was the hot, hard pressure of him between her thighs, fighting for entrance against the swollen, tender tissues that wanted to resist the invasion.

But she was embarrassingly wet, and he was determined; he used the moisture of her arousal against her, breaching her body in one smooth, sleek stroke. In, and in, and in, until she breathed in broken pants, stretching out her hands to grasp the sides of the desk. Until she could feel the hair that dusted his legs tickling her thighs. Until there was no part of her that did not feel occupied, filled, taken.

Something like a growl tore free of his throat, some feral and utterly atavistic sound that lifted the fine hairs at the nape of her neck. Not content with the space he had commanded within her body, he pressed deeper still, greedy and demanding. And her body, lulled into acquiescence by the slippery strokes of his fingers there at the apex of her thighs, accepted the domination of his. Softened. Yielded. Made space where she had been certain none existed.

A slow withdrawal. An insistent plunge, barely-leashed ferocity evident in the grip of one hard hand on her hip, as if he had some primal need to hold her still for his plundering. She couldn't have moved if she had wished to; not with the edge of the desk biting into her belly, not with the solid weight of him at her back. Heat shimmered along her skin. Her breath misted the surface of the desk, a burst of fog blooming across the varnished wood surface. Lightning seethed beneath the surface of her skin, crackling through her veins.

Her heart pounded against the cage of her ribs. Her hips canted as much as they were able into the tender caress of his fingers, so at odds with his fierce thrusts. "Please," she whispered, uncertain what, exactly, she was pleading for. For a culmination of the strongest climax she would ever know. For it never to end at all. "Please."

Perhaps he had taken pity upon her. Perhaps he was simply at the edge of his own patience. Those teasing fingers redoubled their efforts, and her peak crashed toward her on a nearly-painful spiral. She fractured beneath him with a plaintive cry of completion, her nails scoring the underside of the desk, the sudden softness of her body absorbing the last few desperate lunges of his. She could feel the pulse of him inside her, feel the helpless shiver that wracked him. Feel the heat of his breath near her ear, the raggedness of it, as if it had been yanked free of his lungs.

"I didn't know." She murmured the words into the silence that had settled between them in the hazy aftermath. She was uncertain what, exactly, the words had been meant to convey to him. Perhaps they had not been meant for him at all, but for herself—a confession of her own ignorance. That there existed depths of passion which she never could have conceived of; that he had found them there within her.

His fingers toyed with the drape of her hair, gathering it up and tossing it over her shoulder. His lips touched the back of her neck just above the neckline of her gown in a kiss that seared her straight to her soul. "Now you do."

∞∞∞

Rafe curled his hand around Emma's hip, stilling the restive little movements she made. "Emma. For God's sake, enough. You've drained me already." Still, his groin made a valiant effort to rise to the occasion, stiffening against the luscious softness of her bottom.

"Oh. I'm sorry." It was just a murmur, buried into the feather pillow tucked beneath her head. "It's just…this isn't exactly comfortable, is it?"

For him? Exceedingly. For a few minutes, with the smooth slope of her back pressed against his chest and her legs entangled with his own, he could pretend that she was his. That she always had been. That she always would be. A futile dream he could live within for a few minutes at a time, perhaps as much as an hour. If she could learn to cooperate.

She didn't know how to share a bed with a man. It hadn't been obvious that first night, when she had fallen into an exhausted sleep after several frenzied bouts of lovemaking. But now she was awake. Restless. Uncertain. She twitched when he ran his hand down her side, kicked the thick counterpane away from her feet, and kept making strange little wistful-sounding noises. Like a series of sighs had collected in her throat, dislodged one at a time with each fitful movement.

Clearly, Ambrose had never shared her bed for longer than required to copulate. He swiped one hand over his face to scrub away the traces of the frown that had gathered there, but she must have heard him make some sort of disapproving sound anyway.

"I'm sorry," she said again, and there was a tinge of frosty distance injected into her voice this time. "You need not stay any longer. I'm certain you have got…other interests which require your attention."

Bloody damned hell. "I'm not leaving," he said. "You're going to learn to do this properly."

"I beg your pardon. Do what properly?"

"The after bits." He tugged the pillow out from beneath her head, and slid his arm into its place, tucking her cheek against his shoulder.

"I don't know what you mean."

That much was obvious—and a damned tragedy. He flattened his palm against the gentle slope of her belly, felt the tremble that slid through her. "Did your husband never share a bed with you? Not even once?"

"No." She blew out a breath a fractious breath. "No, he just—he left. He always left." Her leg slid against his, cold toes tucking themselves between his calves. "It's not unusual. They've both passed, now, but while they lived my parents never shared a bedchamber."

Nor had his. It wasn't unusual, in fact. Too many couples wed for money, or position, or power. He'd seen remarkably few love matches in his life. "Did you want him to stay?"

"I don't know. I suppose…I suppose I did, in the beginning of our marriage. When I thought—" An abbreviated sigh swallowed the words, puffing out against his skin.

"When you thought what?" he pressed.

"When I thought he loved me," she admitted in a small voice. "Or—when I imagined he might grow to love me." Her nails dragged against the sheet, a solemn scratch in a room gone too silent.

"Is that why you married him? Love?"

The silky strands of her bright hair, turned nearly auburn in the darkness, teased his chest as she shrugged. "I did," she said slowly. "I thought I did, at least. But now I wonder if I married him because he was the only one who asked." She sounded shaken by the confession, as if it were a deep truth she had never before allowed herself to acknowledge. "My title doesn't come from him. My father was an earl. Ambrose was common, but wealthy—my father was noble, but impoverished. My dowry was little more than a pittance, by the standards of the Ton. So I never attracted much attention, you understand."

No, he damned well did not. She ought to have had hordes of admirers, despite her modest dowry. She was a lovely woman, kind and intelligent and generous, worth so much more than whatever monies a man might have gained in marrying her.

"Ambrose was the only man who courted me. He was witty and charming. Amiable. We shared similar interests. Poetry, literature, music. He brought me flowers and sweets, took me on drives, danced with me." A sigh, long and low and despairing. "It wasn't until after we had married that I began to understand the truth."

"Which was?"

"The depths of his feelings for me were quite shallow indeed. I was simply the best he could do. A well-born wife who could not expect to marry into a more prestigious title. I'm certain he must have liked me, at least a little. As one would have a fondness for a valuable possession. A vase, or perhaps a painting." The tiniest sniffle, as if that fact pained her still. "Those courtship rituals which I had so cherished—I had to contend with the fact that they had been false. Only a means to an end."

And marriage had been that end. Ambrose had got his well-born wife, and that had been enough. There had been no need, thereafter, to go to any particular trouble to make her feel loved, wanted, needed.

"He was never cruel to me," she said. "But he was—distant. He didn't want me underfoot, in his company any more than he deemed necessary."

That was, in itself, a form of cruelty. To betray the tender regard of the woman who had agreed to place herself into his keeping with indifference, with apathy. She had given him her heart, and he had crushed it in his hands.

"Now I wonder if I ever loved him," she said. "Or if I was only so desperate to be loved that I told myself I must love him. If I convinced myself of it."

She had had ten years to torture herself with such thoughts, but Rafe remembered with startling clarity that horrible, piercing wail of grief. No one could make a sound like that and not have loved. It had never mattered whether or not Ambrose had deserved it. Emma had loved him all the same.

Then, at least.

"I suppose he must have held me in some small esteem," Emma said. "He left everything to me in his will. He didn't have to, of course. His family was quite put out by it. They came swarming in before he was cold in the ground, eager to claim what they had been certain was to be their portion of his estate. But all of it had been left to me." A small shrug, as if she had long grown to understand the nastiness that had come about in the wake of her widowhood. "Of course, I supported them nonetheless. Provided an income for those who had depended upon him for their living. Returned the heirlooms that—that we had never had children to whom to pass down."

Bloody vultures circling carrion. Preying upon a grieving widow in the service of carving out a slice of Ambrose's wealth. They wouldn't have got it, even if he and Chris had not secured it for Emma. Everything Ambrose had owned, every last farthing within all of his accounts, would have been forfeit to the Crown.

And Emma would have been completely and utterly ruined. Not only within the eyes of society, but financially as well. She wouldn't have had so much as a penny to her name. A husband and wife were one person under the law, inseparable. Ambrose's ruin would have been her own.

"That feels quite nice," she murmured, and he could feel the hint of a smile on her lips as she pressed her cheek against the arm he'd shoved beneath her head. He'd been absently stroking her as she spoke; just gentle, soothing motions along her arm, the curve of her hip, her thigh. Like he might've petted a cat—or a woman he'd wanted in his bed for well over a decade. She gave a soft sigh that ended on a hum, which told him she was edging toward the borders of sleep. "You're very warm."

Probably he seemed so. But more likely she had simply been alone in her cold bed for far too long.

∞∞∞

The door to Rafe's study eased open silently, cutting through the light shed by the lamp on his desk. He didn't lift his pen from his paper or his eyes from the page before him. He'd been home only a half an hour on the outside, and it had gone past three in the morning. Far too late for any regular visitor. "I had wondered if I might expect a visit."

"I thought ye might." Chris nudged the door closed again with the toe of his boot and dragged a chair across the floor to sit near the edge of Rafe's desk.

"She left her door unlocked this evening. I won't let it happen again, but perhaps you should tell her also." At least until they could ensure that she was truly safe. "Planning to hit me again?"

"Sooner or later. Thought I'd let my knuckles heal a bit first. Damn, but ye've got a hard head."

"Should have gone for the nose."

"What, and ruin that pretty face wiv a broken nose?"

"It's been broken before." Rafe said, scraping one hand over his jaw, which still ached. Between the two of them, Chris was, by far, the prettier. He bore a closer resemblance to his father than Emma did, in fact, with similar patrician features—straight nose, impeccably carved jawline, brows that could manage an elegant, supercilious arch when offended. Glacially cold eyes, several shades lighter than Emma's.

His features were too striking for him to blend the way Rafe did. Instead he commanded attention, attracted notice. Inspired reverence, awe...fear. He was just as comfortable with using his fists as he was with using cutting words. A cudgel, in every sense of the word.

"Incidentally," Rafe said, "I've employed the little urchin you sent to me as a messenger for the time being. You need no longer play intermediary between your sister and me."

"Oh? Shuttin' me out, then?" Chris flexed his knuckles in a vague suggestion that perhaps he already considered them sufficiently recovered.

"Considering that I don't particularly fancy coming out with a fresh injury for every night I pass with your sister, I'd call it less being shut out and more minding your own damn business. Should I have something pertinent to share with you, I'll send Dannyboy round."

"Is that ‘is name?"

"It's what he answers to, at least." Rafe rifled through the papers spread across his desk, selecting one to pass across the desk to Chris. "If you'd like to make yourself useful, here's a list of books I'd like you to purchase for me. I'd send Dannyboy for them, but he can't read, and I doubt most booksellers would let a child of his age browse their wares besides."

Chris accepted the list, scanning the titles and authors scrawled there. "What do you want them for?"

"Emma mentioned that she and Ambrose shared an interest in literature and poetry. Before I left, I made a list of books in his study fitting that description." There hadn't been so many of them. Perhaps twenty or so, since the majority of the books had been the sort of heavy tomes that men of business tended to keep in their private libraries to project the image of a learned man, even if the spines of those volumes had never even been cracked. "Likely Emma would have noticed the volumes missing if I had taken them, but it shouldn't be difficult to track down the titles. They're not particularly rare; any standard bookshop should have more than a few on offer."

"I'd say so," Chris said with a disdainful sniff. "Donne, Byron, Blake, Shakespeare. Staples of any proper English library, I suppose."

"Just so." Rafe gestured to the discarded sheets of paper he'd gone through, full of nothing but a random assortment of letters. "I've already tried the authors and titles as keys, with no success. I thought perhaps the books themselves might yield better results." Though it promised to be a frustrating—if not entirely futile—task.

"Could be nothing," Chris said as he folded the list and tucked it into his pocket.

"Could be something." What it certainly would be was work. Hours and hours of it, scratching out lines upon paper and cross-referencing letters upon the table that Rafe had drawn up which would, in theory, reveal the contents of the text within Ambrose's journal. If they could pair it with the key.

But it was, presently, the only lead they had to work from. And from the faintly caustic glance that Chris slanted toward him, he suspected that the man knew it was far from the last call that Rafe would pay upon Emma. The books might well yield nothing at all, but Emma might possess the requisite information.

"Bring hyacinths," Chris said scathingly as he rose to his feet and headed toward the door. "They're her favorites."