He had his arms folded over his chest, and he was grinning, but she wasn’t stupid. He was vibrating like a string of a violin.
“I’ll thank you to extinguish all these lights,” she said. “I believe I shall remove my mask.”
He did so. The only light he left was the very dim glow of Jeremy’s lantern, set far off in the corner and certainly not lending enough illumination so that Gil would recognize her, if indeed, he remembered his fiancée’s features at all. Emma pulled off the heavy, jeweled mask and put it to the side. She could hardly see Gil; he was just a tall, shadowy form, but she could feel him: feel his desire reaching toward her, with all th
e inevitability of a spark hitting dry leaves.
“I’ll grant that you are slow to learn, given your nationality,” she told that dark gypsy shape of her future husband severely, “but the time has come for you to mend your ways.”
“Hmmm,” was all he said, but he seemed to be moving toward her right on course and as if he couldn’t help himself, so she let him take his time.
It didn’t take him more than a second to bring her back to that all-important moment, which just goes to show that the man did indeed learn something over in Paris.
And this time, he didn’t stop.
Her body danced to the tune of his fingers, as if she were a puppet on his strings. She gasped, cried out, reached for him. . . .
When she pulled herself back together, she was still lying on her own velvet pelisse, staring up at the dusty rafters far above them. Gil was on his knees over her. And every inch of her body was quivering, as if a forest fire had rushed over her, left her scorched and yet unconsumed, burned and yet desirous.
She took a deep breath and focused on his face. There had to be more to this. In fact, she knew there was more to it. He’d taken off his shirt, but he was still mostly clothed. And even if he was looking at her with naked longing in his eyes, and his hand was shaping her breast in a way that made her press up, in his palm—even so, there was something about him that signaled that he thought he’d won.
Won?
She hadn’t even started to fight.
Slowly, so she didn’t startle him and make him dash back for his shirt and the security of all his vows about not sleeping with women, especially, she was beginning to think, Frenchwomen, she reached out her toes and her arms, and stretched. His eyes were liquid black, watching the arch of her body.
“I gather,” she said, “you are still determined to pay me no favors.”
“Those favors should be reserved for the man you marry.” But his hand was on her breast again, shaping it.
She curled into his palm, making that sound in her throat, the one he liked and the one that seemed to come naturally every time he touched her. Then she nodded, quite as if she understood and didn’t think he was feebleminded which, frankly, she was starting to take as a serious possibility.
“In that case, I would suggest that a gentlemen must allow a lady to reciprocate. Not the favor, since you are disinclined to grant my wishes. But . . .” She caught his eye and held it, “a reciprocation.”
He frowned. “What—”
She pulled her legs to the side and pushed at his shoulder gently, and he finally collapsed on his back, smiling a little crooked smile. For all she knew of the male anatomy (mostly gathered at the births of male babies), she could see from the rise in his pantaloons that there was a miraculous transformation that happened between age one hour and age thirty-two.
But he was like a partridge in the wild: if she startled him, he’d fly away. So she knelt to his side, quite as if she didn’t even notice the way his pantaloons were straining, and ran her hands through his hair. His hair was wild, coarser than hers. It sprang back against her fingers and smelled of woodsmoke and some sort of male soap, strong and not perfumed.
He wasn’t protesting, so she let her fingers do the thinking for her.
His forehead was high, the forehead of a thinking man, a man who knew Shakespeare, the Parliament, and the way not to fall out of a moving carriage. And how to make a woman fall in love with him, in all of one evening. His nose was a narrow aristocratic triumph, a nose handed down from the Elizabethans. His mouth . . . well, his mouth had everything in it. A sardonic laugh, and one of joy. That plump bottom lip knew grief and—unless she was truly mistaken, and Emma had made a practice never to be mistaken—was longing to kiss her breasts.
Men liked kissing a woman’s breasts, for all that Gil had so far only run his hands over her. She edged up closer to him and thought about offering him a breast, but rethought it. For one thought, it felt dismally maternal. For another, his black eyes were so steady and clear that she couldn’t quite find the courage. And for the final thing, it just didn’t sound right. Perhaps she’d misunderstood when village women talked of men supping at their breast, for all they were babes in arms.
She moved back and let her hands run from his lean cheeks to the strong cords of his neck, down to the ridged muscles on his chest. Were all men so muscled? His nipples were flat against his skin, and his mouth opened slightly as she touched them, although he made no sound.
It would be nice to hear him make a sound in his throat. Not looking at his eyes, she ran her fingers over his chest again, but he was silent, just waiting.
His pantaloons fastened themselves at the waist, but she wasn’t certain he would allow her to disrobe him. It wouldn’t suit his Puritan tendencies, that was certain.
She bent over him, and her hair fell forward, creating a little curtain around their faces. Then she licked his bottom lip again. A woman could spend her life tracing that line, feeling the quake low in her stomach at the curve of it, the softness of his lip, the strength of it.
A huge hand came to the back of her head and pulled her mouth down to his, and in that moment she let her right hand slide from his lean stomach onto the front of his pantaloons. For a moment he went rigid, his mouth warm on hers, in hers, and her fingers curled around him as if of their own volition, and then he groaned into her mouth, a queer, hoarse sound that made her sink from her knees so that she was lying on top of his body, boneless, sinking into him.
His mouth was ravaging her, her hand trapped between their bodies, between the softness of her skin and the fabric of his pantaloons.