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He licked that hard tip, as if somehow, her response would count as real acquiescence. Maybe, if he was good enough to her, if he brought her to the most trembling peak of pleasure, she would forgive him. Maybe he could give a hint of truth to this lie. He set his leg between hers as he tasted her body, and she ground her hips against him. She was either an incredible actress, determined not to flinch, or she truly wanted him.
He let one hand skim down her body to the edge of her chemise. He pulled it up, up, until his fingers slipped between her thighs.
She was not acting. She was silky wet. There was no space in his mind to encompass the wonder of her desire. He was lost, sliding his fingers through her curls until he found the spot that made her arch her back even more. He pinned her against the wall, pressing, tasting, touching, until she trembled, her breathing ragged. And then he sent her spinning over the edge.
She made a high, keening noise as she came.
A small sense of intelligence returned as she looked up at him. She was breathing heavily. Her skin glowed. Her chemise was rucked up to her waist. Her body pressed into his. He could feel her heart beat against his chest, feel her ribs expand with her every breath.
He was still dressed. His member was hard; his body screamed to sheathe himself deep inside her.
“William?”
No. He couldn’t fool himself any longer. This was not some delicate virgin, submitting to his coarse lusts out of an excess of familial feeling. This was Lavinia. She was robust, and unbreakable. And for some unknown reason, she was not acting. She wanted him.
And he shouldn’t take her. Not like this.
But when he pulled away, she followed. When he hesitated, she set her hands under his shirt. Her fingers slid up his abdomen, over his ribs. Any good intentions that might have entered his mind flared up in smoke, illuminating William’s path to hell. He pulled off his shirt. The air was cold against his bare skin, but Lavinia was warm, and she was caressing him. Her hands slid to his waist. Her mouth found his again, and he could think of nothing but having her skin against his, her flesh pressed naked under his. He pulled his breeches off and pushed her onto the bed.
She landed and looked up at him. And then—time seemed so slow—she lifted off her chemise. Every fantasy he’d ever had compressed into this one moment. Lavinia Spencer was naked in his bed, lips parted, eyes shining. He spread her knees with his hands and leaned over her. He had a thousand fantasies, but only this one chance. He positioned his member against her hot, wet cleft.
He should not have been able to think of anything except the pleasure to come, but she looked into his eyes. Her look was so clear, so devoid of guile, that he stopped, arrested on the edge of consummation.
You don’t have to do this.
He didn’t know where the thought came from—perhaps some long-atrophied sense of right and wrong had exerted itself. The tip of his penis was wet with her juices. Her nipples had contracted into hard, rose-colored nubs and she lay beneath him, legs spread.
The next step would be so easy.
It was not just her innocence he would take. Lavinia’s beauty was not a mere accident that arose from the fall of hair against shoulder, the curves of her breasts, the petals of her sex. No, even now, spread before him like an offering, she glowed with an inner light. Her appeal had as much to do with the innate trust she placed in those around her, in the way she smiled and greeted everyone as if they were worthy of her attention. If he took her, like this, he’d shatter her trust in the world. He would show her that men were fiends at heart, that there was no forgiveness in the world for sins committed by others.
You don’t have to do this.
But men were fiends. And there was no forgiveness. He had never been granted any forgiveness.
He didn’t have to do it, but he did it anyway. He slid into her in one firm thrust, and it was every bit as awful—and as good—as he’d imagined. It was wonderful, because she was sweet and hot and tight about him. It was wonderful, because she was his, now, in the most primal sense. But it was terrible, because he knew what he destroyed with that single thrust. Her hands came involuntarily between them, and he tensed and stopped.
“William.” She touched his shoulders tentatively, as if he were the one who needed comfort. As if even his vile penetration could not shake her absurd trust in the world. And so he took her, thrusting into her. She clenched around him, the walls of her passage tight around his erection. She brought her hips up to his. And by God, that heat, that pulsing heat that wrapped around him, that cry she gave—it couldn’t have been. She could not have come. But she had, and then he was pumping into her, loosing his seed into her womb, and crying out himself, hoarsely.
As his orgasm faded and his mind cleared of lust, he realized what a despicable man he was. He’d taken her like an animal. Oh, she’d let him—but what choice had he left her? He should have stopped. He should have let her go. Instead, he’d been so intent on himself that he hadn’t cared what she wanted at all. He was as sorry a specimen as had ever been seen.
He pulled out of her and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her.
The mattress sagged as she rearranged her weight. “William,” she said.
He could not bring himself to turn around and see what he’d done. Would her eyes reflect the betrayal of trust?
“William,” she said. “You must look at me. I have something to tell you.”
He knew already what a despicable blackguard he was. He’d taken her virginity, and damn, he’d enjoyed it. But everything had a price, and the price of William’s physical enjoyment would be this: her cold censure, and a speech that he hoped would cut him to ribbons. He deserved worse. And so he turned.
There was no judgment in her eyes—just a quiet, unfathomable serenity.
“When I told you my brother was not yet one-and-twenty,” she said, “I did not intend to engage your sympathies. I was trying to point out that he is legally an infant. He is incapable of forming a contract. That promissory note is unenforceable.”
William’s mind went blank. Instead of thoughts, his head seemed to fill with water from the bottom of a lake—chilled liquid, dwelling where light could not filter.
“You had nothing to coerce me with,” she continued. “You could not have done. No magistrate would have compelled my brother to pay the debt.”
Her words skipped like stones over the surface of his thoughts. Hadn’t he coerced her? He was sure he’d forced her into his bed. He deserved her condemnation. Damn it, he wanted it.
Instead, he was as empty as the wick of a candle that had just been extinguished. “Oh,” he said. That one bare word didn’t seem enough, so he added another. “Well.” Other thoughts flitted through his mind, but they were also single syllables, and rather the sort that could not be uttered in front of a membe
r of the gentler sex. Even if he had treated her in a most ungentle manner.
There was a vital difference between lust and love. It had been lust—desperate lust for her body—that had brought him to this point. Lust did not care about the loss of a woman’s virtue. Lust did not care if a woman’s feelings were wounded. Lust howled, and it wanted slaking. It didn’t give a fig as to how the deed was accomplished. Lust was a beast, and one he’d nurtured well with a decade of resentment.
William thought of his four pounds ten a quarter—eighteen pounds per year of drudgery—and of the many years ahead of him while he garnered the recognition and the recommendations he would need so that he could one day become a man who earned…what, twenty-three pounds a year? He thought of the hole in Lavinia’s glove, and her brother asking when she’d last had a new dress.
“Lavinia,” he said carefully, “I don’t deserve such a gift.”
“Nobody gets gifts because he deserves them.” She stood up and shook out her wrinkled chemise. “You get gifts because the giver wants to give them.”
She wasn’t arguing. She wasn’t throwing herself at him. She wasn’t weeping and carrying on. If she had done any of those things, he could have borne it. But she exuded a calm, cool competence that lay entirely outside William’s understanding.
“I can’t support a wife,” he continued. “And even if I could, I’m not the man for you, Lavinia.”
She reached for her dress. “I knew that the minute you tried to coerce me into your bed.”
He shifted and fixed his gaze past her on the blighted tree outside his narrow window. “Then why did you agree to it? You had no need.”
She had not trembled when he’d threatened her, when he’d made his horrible proposition. She had not shivered, not even when he’d claimed her body. But her hands betrayed the tiniest of tremors as she fastened her dress and reached for her cloak.
