Lord Perfect (The Dressmakers 3)

His mouth came down on hers.

THE WORLD TIPPED out of balance, went dark.

He slammed the door shut, fell back against it, his mouth clamped on hers.

No! No! a voice inside Benedict’s head roared.

Too late.

Her mouth instantly yielded and her hands came up and curled tightly on his shoulders.

She took his kiss and gave him back more, laced with defiance. The same defiance that had flashed in her blue eyes became molten liquid in his mouth.

She squirmed in his arms until he eased his grasp and let her down, but her mouth never left his. He drank liquid fire while she slid down slowly, the friction of those soft curves against his hard frame setting every fiber and cell of his body vibrating.

He had to let her go. Now.

All he had to do was unhook his arm from her waist. But he didn’t. He held her against him while the kiss became a wicked game between them, taunting, daring, demanding.

Passion.

Passion was not allowed. Ever. Passion was madness, chaos. He had scores of rules against it.

NO. Kick me. Step on my foot. You know how to fight.

She held on to him, one slim hand that might as well have been a vise curled over his upper arm.

He heard the voices of Reason and Duty shrieking out rules, but she drowned them out with the whisper touch of her fingers gliding over the back of his hand, the hand he’d laid flat against the door, to keep it still until he found the strength to draw the other away from her, too.

Her fingers curled round his wrist and he couldn’t help but turn his hand to twine his fingers with hers. The intimacy of the touch made him ache and the ache made him angry. She was made for him. Why could he not have her?

He broke the kiss, burying his face in her neck. He tasted her skin and drank in her scent, and it was all as he’d remembered and remembered despite trying so determinedly to forget.

Then he could not keep his hands still. He dragged them over her back and traced the curve of her waist and the sweep of her hips. And it was as though he dared her, or perhaps she felt it, too, the same mad need he felt, because her hands moved, too, and made turmoil wherever they went. They slid under his coat and inside his waistcoat and teased over the thin shirt when she knew, she had to know, he needed her hands on his skin.

He felt over the back of her dress, but the fastenings weren’t there. He found them in front instead, and it was a moment’s work to undo the tapes, to push away the thin fabric of her shift and thrust his hand inside the top of her stays and clasp her breast, skin to skin.

She sucked in her breath.

Tell me to stop don’t tell me to stop.

She pulled away and tugged at the corset, loosening it, and looked up at him, eyes dark and challenging. She brought her hands up to his head and drew him down, and he heard her soft gasp of pleasure when he trailed his lips over the smooth swell of her breasts.

That was the end of thought.

After that was only mindless I want and must have, must have and mine, mine, mine.

The beast in charge.

He dragged up her skirts, up and up, petticoats bunching and whispering against his sleeve until at last his hand slid over the top of her stocking, and then up, where there was soft, soft skin, and up farther still, until he found the core of her, warm, silky, slick.

He reached for his trouser buttons, but she was there first, and when her palm brushed over his throbbing groin, he had to sink his mouth onto her shoulder to keep from crying out, like the merest boy learning pleasure for the first time.

He was impatient, mindless, but her hand was there and that was too tormentingly pleasurable to push away, for all his impatience. He felt one button come loose, then the next. His cock thrust against the cloth toward her hand and he was reaching to help her—to help himself—he couldn’t wait—when she cried out, and pulled away, then swore, low and fierce, in French.

ONE FEROCIOUS JAB of pain: That’s what it took to bring Bathsheba to her senses.

She pulled away from him, her hand throbbing. She turned away, too, her face aflame.

“What?” he said, his deep voice thick. “What?”

She could have wept. She could have laughed. “My hand,” she said. “My hand, thank heaven. Damn you to hell, Rathbourne. You know we cannot do this.”

“Damn me to hell?” he said. “Damn me to hell?” Then, more gently he said, “What is wrong with your hand?”

“I think it broke somebody’s nose,” she said. “And now it throbs like the very devil.”

“Let me see.”

She wanted to put distance between them while she put her clothes back in order and gave him time to do the same. Her bosom was falling out of her stays, part of her petticoat had bunched up under her waistband, and her skirts were all twisted about.

But she had never learnt to be ashamed or shy about her body, and at the moment she didn’t care what he could see. She would have let him see all he wanted and have all he wanted, and she’d have done it happily, nay, eagerly.

Because she was besotted and it was completely hopeless. She was completely hopeless, a DeLucey through and through, no matter what she did.

She let him take her hand and look at it.

“Your fingers are swollen,” he said. “Did you say you punched somebody on the nose?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Because of me,” he said.

“Yes, certainly, because of you,” she said. “I was not going to let you fight them alone, Rathbourne. Not that you should have fought them in the first place. It was ridiculous to make such a fuss over that drunkard groping at my leg. I was perfectly capable of kicking him if he became too annoying. Still, it was lovely of you. Chivalrous.”

“It was not lovely of me,” he said. “It was ridiculous. If I had not behaved in that imbecile, Rupert-like way, we should be well on our way by now, with none of us sporting any injuries and none of us imagining the other had any injuries, and most important, neither of us coming within a hairsbreadth of doing what we both know perfectly well we must not do.”

“Well, we didn’t do it,” she said. She didn’t try to sound cheerful about it. She hadn’t even enough self-command to not sound regretful.

“No, we did not.” He stared at her hand. Then he bent his head and brought it to his lips and gently touched them to each knuckle. He released her hand and looked her up and down. He let out a long sigh. “I was the one who took your clothes apart. It seems I had better put them together again.”

“I can do it,” she said.

“The pain made you cry out when you were simply trying to unfasten a trouser button,” he said. “How do you imagine you will be able to manage your tapes and corset strings?”

Good question.

As she’d predicted, there was a delayed reaction to the fight. But she was the one in pain, not he. Too bad the pain had not started some minutes sooner. Then she would not have had to face the fact that she was another DeLucey harlot.

“I imagine it would take me several hours and a good deal of cursing and screaming,” she said. “Perhaps you had better do it.”

She stared at the notch of his collarbone while he briskly pulled the corset back into place, arranged and smoothed her shift, stuffed her breasts back where they belonged, and laced up the stays.

While he tied her petticoat, she swallowed and said, “Idaresay proper ladies do not unbutton

gentlemen’s trousers.”

“They do not do that,” he said as he tugged her frock straight, “nearly so often as one could wish.”

THOUGH THEY HAD the fare to take them to Twyford, Peregrine and Olivia did not get that far.

In Maidenhead, when the coach stopped to change horses, Peregrine squeezed himself out from where he was wedged between two fat and not overclean male passengers. They had been sleeping soundly, mostly on him. He’d inhaled their stinking breath and been deafened by their explosive snoring for the last five miles. He would not have minded so much if he’d had something interesting to do or to look at but he hadn’t, and so he was bored and cross as well as tired and hungry.

“I’m stopping here,” he told Olivia. “You can stay or you can go on. I really don’t care.”

He climbed out and walked out of the inn yard and into the street and gulped in cool night air.

Then he looked about him. He had never before been out so late at night, alone, in a strange town. Except for the bustle in the inn yard, the place was quiet. It was very late, and everyone was asleep.

He wanted to be quiet, too, so he could think. In fact, he wanted to be asleep, like everyone else.

He’d spent the afternoon and night in a state of tension, unsure what Olivia would do next, wondering when calamity would strike.

Now he realized it had already struck. Running away with Olivia Wingate, no matter how worthy his reasons, was going to bring unpleasant consequences.

Had Lord Rathbourne caught up with them early on, as Peregrine had hoped, matters might have been settled without a great fuss. He had only to explain, and Uncle would understand why he’d done what he’d done. Uncle Benedict was a reasonable and rational man.

But it was tomorrow already. It was Saturday, the day Peregrine was supposed to set out with his lordship for Scotland. Even if Peregrine could afford to hire a post chaise—which he couldn’t—he doubted he could get back to London fast enough to avert disaster. By now all of Uncle Benedict’s servants would know something was wrong. Once the servants knew, all the world would find out.