“Since you’ve made a fire, you may now make tea,” Radford said.
“Yes, sir.”
Radford opened the door to Westcott’s office and pushed her in.
The day was stormy and the room, with its dark wainscoting and heavy furniture, was gloomy at the best of times.
She was the only bright thing in it, he thought.
Candlelight and firelight glinted on the moisture sliding from her bonnet to her cheek. And down her neck.
Wet!
He pushed her toward the fire.
“Yes, Mr. Radford, I can find the fire for myself,” she said. She started pulling at the ribbons of her hat.
“Not like that!” he said. He went to her and pushed her hands away. “You’ll tighten the knot. Does this surprise me? No. Naturally you have no idea how to untie your own hat ribbons.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “But they’re not so manageable when wet and I can’t see what I’m doing.”
“Put up your chin so that I can see what I’m doing. This brim is monstrous. It looks like a giant duckbill and does nothing to shield the sides of your face.”
She tipped her head back and looked up at him.
Her eyes were the clear light blue of aquamarines. The damp on her perfect skin was like dew on rose petals.
The hat was hideous. She was unreasonably beautiful.
A less disciplined man might have found it painful to look at her.
He concentrated on unknotting the ribbons. His hands were perfectly steady. His heartbeats were erratic.
He drew the soggy ribbon out from under her chin. “There. It’s done. I should advise you to throw it on the fire, but at present I have no ladies’ hats to replace it.” He snatched the sodden hat from her head and dropped it on the nearest table. “However, I recommend . . .” He trailed off as he turned back to her.
The room’s light flickered over hair the color of champagne.
He’d never seen her bareheaded before.
He tried to detach himself, but his other self clung, and for a moment he felt he’d been launched into the world of the Odyssey. She was too cruelly beautiful to be a mere human. She was Calypso or Circe or Aphrodite herself. The mythical bewitchers of men.
But this wasn’t a myth and he was a reasoning human being. He could not be bewitched because there was no such thing.
She was fumbling with the cloak’s fastenings.
He went to help. “I know it’s true, but one must see it to believe it,” he said. “You cannot manage even the simplest act of self-sufficiency.” He reached for the fastenings.
She pushed his hands away. “I’m perfectly capable—”
“You obviously are not.” He tried again.
She jerked away. “Leave me alone.”
“You can’t—”
“You don’t know what I can and can’t do. Stop treating me like an idiot.”
“I did not say you were an idiot.”
“You say it constantly,” she said tightly. “In a hundred different ways.”
“I merely point out simple facts, which you seem unable to accept.”
“I’d like to see you accept them,” she said. “I’d like to see you try to live my life. You wouldn’t last twenty minutes.”
“Oh, no, such a trial it is to live in the lap of luxury, where one is endlessly petted and adored.”
“You haven’t the stamina to endure it,” she said. “You’d die of boredom in an hour.”
He stepped back, aware of a fraught note in her voice and a flash of something—pain?—in her eyes. “Very possibly,” he began. “But—”
“You’ve no notion how I live in the world you call a fantasy,” she went on in the same taut tone. “You’ve no idea what it’s like to spend your life wrapped in cotton wool, with all about you protecting you, mainly from yourself, because you don’t behave as they think a girl ought to do, and they believe something’s wrong with you. You don’t know what it’s like to watch your brothers go away to school and make new friends and have adventures you’ll never have, even vicariously, in books. You don’t know what it’s like to be scolded for reading too much and knowing too much—to be taught to hide your intelligence, because otherwise you’ll frighten the gentlemen away—to stifle your opinions, because ladies aren’t to have any opinions of their own, but must always defer to men.” She stamped her foot. “You know nothing about me. Nothing! Nothing!”
She burst into tears—and not mere weeping, but great, racking sobs, as of a long pent-up grief.
He started to reach for her and caught himself in time. “Stop it,” he said, clenching his hands. “Stop it.”
“No! You’re such an idiot!”
“You’re hysterical,” he said calmly, while his heart pounded. “Don’t make me pour a bucket of water on your head.”
She stamped her foot again. “I’m already w-wet, you m-moron!”
“Oh, good. What I always wanted. An irrational female bawling and stamping her foot, because she can’t have her own way.”
“Yes, I’m irrational, you supercilious, conceited, ill-mannered—”
“Better and better,” he said, aware of heat—inappropriate heat—surging within. “A temper fit over nothing.”
“Nothing!”
She whirled away and grabbed her ugly hat from the table.
“Going so soon?” he said. “And we—”
“You condescending thickhead!” She hit his arm with the hat. “You obnoxious—” She hit his chest.
“You’d better stop,” he said. “I’m trying to be the sane one in the room, but you’re making that exceedingly difficult.”
She made it impossible. She was a goddess in a passion. The blaze of her blue eyes and the pale fire of her hair and the crimson glow of her cheeks.
She flung down the hat and grabbed the lapels of his coat. “I wish I were a man,” she said. “I would knock you down. I would plant you a facer. I’d break your nose. I—”
“No, really, I mean it,” he said. “You’re murdering my brain.” And he took hold of her shoulders and bent his head and kissed her.
Chapter Five
THE BARRISTER . . . 1. In considering his duty to his client, he reflects upon the propriety of his acting; upon the person for whom he should act; and his mode of acting.
—The Jurist, Vol. 3, 1832
Clara knew what a lady was supposed to do when a gentleman attempted to take liberties. She was supposed
to fight him off and defend her honor with all her might.
Whoever made that rule had never been kissed by Raven Radford.
His mouth pressed to hers and things happened in her head and spread over her body, alien feelings in a great, overwhelming rush, like a windstorm, and all the rules of ladyship, written in a massive tome in her brain, flew off the pages and vanished.
She did not push him away. She held on for dear life, and gave back the best she could, given limited experience.
Given no experience.
What had previously passed for kisses before compared to this in the way playing with tin soldiers compared to Waterloo.
She let go of his coat to reach upward and wrap her arms about his neck, and her body lifted to fit against his.
He made a sound deep in his throat and moved his hands downward from her shoulders past the barrier of her sleeve puffs, to grasp her upper arms. He started to draw away but she wasn’t ready. She held on, and after a heartbeat he slid his hands to her waist and pulled her closer. His kiss grew more fiercely determined, as though he would wipe every recollection of anything remotely resembling kisses from her mind and imprint his, permanently, upon it. And upon her body, where the alien feelings simmered into excitement and happiness and a yearning for more.
Strange feelings, and most likely wrong, as so much was for young ladies.
She let herself swim in them the way she’d swum, in childhood, in forbidden waters. She floated on the rise and fall of his breathing, fast, like hers. She swam in the heat radiating from his big frame and the warmth and strength of his hands, in a sea safe and not at all safe. Beyond it, on some far horizon, lay another realm toward which she was moving on a strong current.
Not safe, not safe.
She didn’t want to be safe. She’d been too safe all her life.
She wanted to be in danger like this, caught in his arms and crushed to his powerful body. She wanted not to think at all, simply to be aware of him and everything about him and about this moment. The feel of wool and linen and the faint rustle of her cloak against his coat and the scents of coal fire smoke and damp wool and linen mingling with the smell of male, this male. She wanted to burrow into him. She wanted the heat and the deepening kiss and the feelings pulsing along her skin and through her veins that made her restless, wanting some vague more and more still.