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She stroked over his shirt and laid her hand over his heart, where there was no hiding the truth from her, no concealing its wild hammering.
He was past wanting to hide the truth, even if he’d known how. He was past reasoning in any way.
Mindless, he was pulling at buttons, drawing back fabric warm with her warmth. It whispered as he pushed it away. He found the hot silk of her skin, and teased himself, lightly stroking over the swell of her breast, letting his thumb play over the tight bud while he heard her catch her breath and let it out with a faint cry she couldn’t keep back.
She pushed nearer until her pelvis pressed against his rod, swollen and all too eager to accommodate.
The beacon flashed once more, but he buried his face in her neck and dragged her scent deep into his lungs. The warning light went out, smothered by sensation: Her skin was velvet against his cheek, warm silk under his lips.
He was aware, searingly aware of her hands, tugging at his shirt, then scorching over his skin.
His own were busy, too, searching for the waistband of her trousers, for the buttons, the flap opening. He found it—and in the same instant, a jab of sensation darted from his elbow to his shoulder.
It jolted him into a moment’s consciousness. He blinked stupidly, like a drunkard, sotted with lust. And in the next instant he focused and saw that it was a doorknob his elbow had struck, and it was attached…to a door.
The door.
He had her against the bedamned front door.
“Jesus.” He lifted his head and dragged in a lungful of air, then another and another.
He felt her hands slip away, heard her shuddering breath.
“Grenville,” he began, nearly choking on his thick tongue.
He saw her hands move unsteadily to her garments and clumsily refasten what he’d undone. “Don’t say a word,” she said, her voice as thick as his. “I started it. I’ll take the blame, the responsibility, whatever you like.”
“Grenville, you—”
“I’m out of my depth,” she said. “That’s obvious. I should be thankful, I suppose. Only I can’t quite get to that yet. I understand now what you meant last night about getting in a bad mood.” She shut her eyes, opened them. “You didn’t mention anything about one’s vanity being hurt, but that’s just as one deserves, isn’t it?”
“Damnation, Grenville, don’t tell me I’ve hurt your feelings.” His voice was too sharp, too loud. He tried to level it. “For God’s sake, we can’t do it against the front door.”
She pushed away from the door, picked up her bundle, and started down the hall.
He started after her. “You don’t really want me,” he said. “It was the heat of the moment. The excitement. Danger is arousing. You shouldn’t come within a mile of me, Grenville. I’m a bad influence. Ask anybody.”
“I’m not exactly a model of goodness myself,” she said. “If I were, I should never be attracted to a worthless degenerate like you.”
She punctuated the statement with an elbow to his ribs. “Go away,” she said. “And stay away.”
He stopped then and let her go. He watched her march, spine straight and arrogant rump swaying, the last few paces to her study door.
She opened it and without a backward glance at him went in and shut it behind her.
He stood unmoving, unsure, his mind the churning mess it usually was in her vicinity. This time it roiled with “someone else” and all the lies he told himself and whatever stray bits of truth managed to survive in the hellhole that was his brain.
In that seething pit, he discerned one glaring truth, the most humiliating: It was the “someone else” he couldn’t bear.
This was the most unfortunate truth for her, but it couldn’t be helped. She’d been so unlucky as to cross his path, and more unlucky still to pique his interest, and now…
He shouldn’t even think it because, of all the depraved things he’d ever done or thought of doing, what he contemplated at this moment took the prize.
Still, he was the last Mallory hellion, dissolute, conscienceless, et cetera, et cetera.
What was one more crime in a lifetime of sins and outrages?
He advanced to the study door, pushed through it.
He found her dumping the chemise’s contents onto her desk.
“I told you to go away,” she said. “If you have one shred of consideration—”
“I don’t.” He pulled the door closed. “Marry me, Grenville.”
Chapter 10
Ainswood stood before the door, looking like a shipwreck. His coat and waistcoat, both rumpled and dirty, hung unbuttoned. He’d lost his neckcloth—probably with Lydia’s help—and his shirt had fallen open, revealing the powerful lines of neck and shoulder and a tantalizing V of masculine chest. His snug trousers were stained, his boots scuffed.
“Marry me,” he repeated, drawing her gaze back to his face. His eyes were dark and his countenance had taken on the hard-set expression she’d seen before. It signified his mind was closed and she might as well talk to the door he was blocking.
She wasn’t absolutely certain what had put wedlock into his head, but she could guess: a belated attack of conscience, a misguided notion of duty, or the simple male need to dominate. Most likely it was a random mess of all three, with a dose of charity and probably several other noxious ingredients thrown in.
In any event, regardless what he meant by asking, she knew that marriage meant male dominance—with the unquestioning support of all forms of societal authority: the law, the church, the Crown. By everyone, in short, but the dominated gender, the women, whose enthusiasm for this state of affairs ran from strong (among the misguided few) to nonexistent (among the enlightened). Lydia had in her late teens taken her place among the latter and had not budged from that position since.
“Thank you,” she said in her coolest, most resolute tones, “but marriage is not for me.”
He came away from the door to take up a position across the desk from her. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’ve some high-flown principle against it.”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“You don’t see, I suppose, why a woman has to behave differently than a man does. You don’t see why you can’t simply bed me and leave me. After all, this is what men do, so why can’t you?”
“Women d
o it, too,” she said.
“Whores.” He perched on the edge of her desk, his back half turned to her. “Now you’re going to tell me that calling them ‘whores’ is unjust. Why should women be vilified for doing what men do with impunity?”
This, in fact, was what she had been thinking and what she was about to say. Lydia darted him a wary glance. His face was averted. She couldn’t read its expression.
She grew uneasy. She would have wagered a large sum that he hadn’t the remotest idea of what she thought or believed in.
He was not supposed to have any idea at all about what went on in her head. He was supposed to view all women as objects of varying degrees of physical attractiveness who had but one use, thus only one purpose for existing at all.
“I should like to know why I am the only woman who has to marry you,” she said, “merely to get what you pay to give other women. Thousands of other women.”
“Leave it to you,” he said, “to make it sound as though you’ve been singled out for punishment—cruel and inhuman, no doubt.” He left the desk and moved to the fireplace. “You think I’m a bad bargain. Or, more likely, it’s worse than that: It isn’t me specifically, but all men.”
He took up the coal bucket and replenished the dying fire while he spoke. “You’re so blinded by contempt for men in general that you can’t see any of the advantages of marrying me in particular.”
As though she hadn’t spent most of her life seeing for herself wedlock’s so-called advantages, Lydia thought. As though she didn’t see, almost daily, women wedlocked in heartbreak, helplessness, instability, and all too often, appallingly, in violence.
“What particular advantages do you have in mind?” she asked. “Your great wealth, do you mean? I have all the money I require and enough left over to save for a rainy day. Or is it the privileges of rank you refer to? Such as shopping for the latest fashions to wear to grand social affairs where the main entertainment is Slander My Neighbor? Or do you mean admittance to court, so that I may bow and scrape to the king?”
