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“Put me down,” she said, squirming. “The game is over.”
Not by a long shot, he thought as he carried her to the door of an establishment with which he was more than passing familiar, where the first-floor rooms might be rented by the hour.
“Listen to me, Ain—”
He stopped her speech with his mouth, while he kicked the door open and carried her into a dimly lit corridor.
She squirmed harder and wrenched her mouth away, and so he had to let her down, to free his hands to hold her head still while he kissed her again, in heated earnest, as he’d wanted to do from the moment she’d begun teasing him.
He felt her stiffen while her lips compressed, rejecting him, and anxiety bubbled up inside him.
She didn’t know how to kiss, he remembered.
She’s innocent, an inner voice cried.
But it was the voice of conscience, and he’d stopped listening to it a year and a half ago.
She was acting, he told himself. She was impersonating an innocent. She was no green girl but a grown woman with a body made for sin, made for him, blackhearted sinner that he was.
Still, if she wanted to play the skittish maiden, he was willing to play along. He gentled his kiss, from lusty demand to patient persuasion. He gentled his touch as well, cradling her head as one might hold a moth captive.
He felt the shiver run through her, felt her rigidly unyielding mouth soften and tremble under his. He felt, too, a sharp ache, as though someone had stabbed him to the heart.
He called the ache lust and wrapped his arms about her. He drew her close, and she didn’t resist. Her mouth, blissfully soft in surrender, seemed to simmer under his. He was simmering, too, on fire, though for him this was the chastest of embraces.
What made him burn, he believed, was the novelty of playing at innocence. It was that and impatience to take what, usually, he didn’t need to work or even coax for.
He’d never had to work at winning women. A glance, a smile, and they came—for a coin or out of mutual desire—and always knew, all of them, what to do, because knowing women were the only kind he chose.
She wanted to pretend she didn’t know, and so he played the role of tutor. He taught her what to do, coaxing her soft mouth to part for him, then tasting her little by little while her scent swam about him and in his mind until scent and taste mingled and simmered in his blood.
He was aware of his heart pumping furiously, though this was merely a deepening kiss, no more than the titillating prelude.
The wild heartbeat was only impatience with this game of hers. And it was for the game’s sake he let his hands move slowly down from the innocuous realms of her shoulders and back, down along the supple line of her spine to the waist his big hands could easily span. Then slowly, caressingly, he continued down, to the realms no innocent would let a man touch. And it was the perverse game they played that made his hands tremble as they gently shaped to the lavish curve of her derriere. It was the perversity that made him groan against her mouth while he pressed her against him, where his swollen rod strained against confining garments.
Too far, the rusty voice of conscience cried. You go too far.
Not too far, he was sure, for she didn’t pull away. Instead, her hands moved over him, tentatively, as though it were the first time she’d ever held a man, the first time she’d ever let her hands rove over masculine shoulders and back. And still playing the game, she pretended to be shy, and went no lower than his waist.
He broke the kiss to tell her she needn’t be shy, but he couldn’t make his mouth form the words. He buried his face in her neck instead, inhaling her scent while he trailed kisses over silken skin.
He felt her shudder, heard her soft, surprised cry, as though it were all new to her.
But it couldn’t be.
She was breathing hard, as he was, and her skin was hot against his mouth. And when he slid his hand up to cup her breast, he felt the hard bud against his palm through the woefully inadequate bodice. There was little enough fabric shielding her skin, and he pushed down what there was and filled his hands with her, as he’d dreamed so many times.
“Beautiful.” His throat was tight, aching. He ached everywhere. “You’re so beautiful.”
“Oh, God, don’t.” Her body stiffened. “I can’t—” She reached up, grabbed his hands. “Damn you, Ainswood. It’s me, you drunken idiot. It’s me—Grenville.”
To Lydia’s astonished dismay, Ainswood did not recoil in horror.
On the contrary, she was having the devil’s own time prying his hands from her breasts.
“It’s me—Grenville,” she repeated five times, and he went on fondling her and kissing an exceedingly sensitive place behind her ear that until now she hadn’t known was sensitive.
Finally, “Stop it!” she said in the firm tones she usually employed with Susan.
He released her then, and instantly changed from the ardent lover telling her she was beautiful—and making her feel she was the most beautiful, desirable woman in all the world—into the obnoxious lout he usually was…with an added dose of surliness she might have found comical if she hadn’t been so disgusted with herself.
She had not put up even a reasonable facsimile of resistance.
She knew he was a rake, and the worst kind—the kind who despised women—yet she’d let him seduce her.
“Let me explain something to you, Grenville,” he growled. “If you want to play games with a man, you ought to be prepared to play them through to the conclusion. Because otherwise you put a fellow in a bad mood.”
“You were born in a bad mood,” Lydia said as she jerked up her bodice.
“I was in an excellent humor until a minute ago.”
Her glance fell to his hands, which ought to have warning signs tatooed on them. With those evilly adept hands he’d stroked and fondled and half undressed her. And she hadn’t offered a whisper of protest.
“I’m sure you’ll cheer up again soon,” she said. “You’ve only to step out the door. Covent Garden is rife with genuine harlots eager to raise your spirits.”
“If you don’t want to be treated like a tart, you shouldn’t go out dressed like one.” He scowled at her bodice. “Or should I say ‘undressed’? Obviously, you’re not wearing a corset. Or a chemise. I suppose you haven’t bothered with drawers, either.”
“I had a very good reason for dressing this way,” she said. “But I’m not going to explain myself to you. You’ve wasted enough of my time as it is.”
She started for the door.
“You might at least fix your clothes,” he said. “Your turban’s crooked, and your frock is every which wa
y.”
“All the better,” she said. “Everyone will think they know what I’ve been up to, and I should be able to get out of this filthy place without having my throat cut.”
She opened the door, then paused, looking about. She saw no signs of Coralie or her bodyguards. She glanced back at Ainswood. Her conscience pinched. Hard.
He did not look in the least lonely or lost, she told her fool conscience. He was sulking, that was all, because he’d mistaken her for a whore and gone to all the bother of pursuing her and seducing her for nothing.
And if he wasn’t so curst damned good at it, she would have stopped the proceedings before they truly got going and he could have found someone else…
And wrapped his powerful arms about that someone and kissed her as sweetly and ardently as any Prince Charming might have done, and caressed her and made her feel like the most beautiful, desirable princess in all the world.
But Lydia Grenville wasn’t a princess, she told her conscience, and he wasn’t Prince Charming.
She walked out.
Only after she’d closed the door behind her did she say, under her breath, “I’m sorry.” Then she hurried out from the piazza and turned the corner into James Street.
Vere was furious enough to let her go. As she’d so snidely reminded him, Covent Garden was rife with whores. Since he hadn’t got what he wanted from her, he might as well get it from someone else.
But an image hung in his mind’s eye of the lechers ogling her, and the vision set off a host of unpleasant inner sensations he didn’t care to identify.
Instead, he swore violently and hurried out after her.
He caught up with her at Hart Street, halfway to Long Acre.
When he reached her side, she glared at him. “I don’t have time to entertain you, Ainswood. I have important things to do. Why don’t you go to the pantomime—or a cock fight—or whatever else appeals to your stunted mind?”
