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I crossed seas, and it was like crossing years. To everyone it must seem as though I have come back from the dead.
That’s what they’d seen, those royals who’d seen and borne shame and disappointment and madness and the early deaths of loved ones: They’d seen life and courage and hope.
Zoe had glowed like the summer sun, and it was impossible to look at her and not feel the warmth and the optimism of her spirit.
That’s what the Regent had seen. That, combined with youth and good nature and beauty, had touched his sentimental heart.
Marchmont realized he’d been woolgathering and staring at her for rather a long time. He discovered that she hadn’t turned back to the window and the fascinating greenery outside. She was watching him.
“Are we done being proper?” she said.
“Oh, no,” he said. “That part’s only begun.”
“But isn’t this improper?” One gloved, braceleted hand took in the vehicle’s interior with a little sweep. “To be alone in a closed carriage? I wondered whether the court presentation changed the rules.”
“It doesn’t,” he said. “But others’ rules don’t apply to Aunt Sophronia. She makes her own.” He forced his mind away from the dangerous fact of being alone with Zoe in a closed carriage. He wrenched his attention from the warm bosom so generously displayed an arm’s length away, and changed the subject. “You swept all before you, too. That curtsey my aunt remarked upon was the most spectacular I’ve ever seen.”
Also the most arousing, but he wouldn’t let his mind dwell on that, either.
“Once I learned the way of it, I had no trouble,” she said. “I’ve prostrated myself wearing very complicated clothing. Everyone imagines we were always naked in the harem—or wearing a few veils—but that was not the case.”
He’d seen her naked a thousand and one nights, in his dreams.
“We were naked in our thoughts and feelings, though,” she went on. “That has been one of the hardest things about coming home: not saying what’s in my heart.”
What was in her heart was not his concern. What was in his was not her concern. “You don’t need to say anything,” he said. “You show it.”
“That, too, is a difficulty here.”
“You’re happy,” he said. “That shows. This was what you wanted—the life you would have had if those swine hadn’t torn you from it. Today that life begins, with royal blessing.”
She folded her gloved hands in her lap and looked down at them. “My heart is too full for words. You think I’m ungrateful and capricious, but that isn’t so.”
“I never thought you ungrateful,” he said. He remembered the light kiss on the top of his head and the whispered thank you and the sweetness of that moment.
“But capricious?” she said. “Because I flirt with your friends?”
“Oh, that.” He waved his hand. “Perhaps I was overprotective.”
“Oh, Marchmont, is that what you call it?”
Jealous and possessive and selfish was what he’d called it the day after.
Then he’d told himself, Out of sight, out of mind.
“What do you want me to call it?” he said lightly.
“What it is,” she said. “Not what’s convenient or witty or agreeable to your pride. But you’ll never do that, will you?”
To his consternation, she began to cry.
Zoe never cried.
She brushed away the tears. “Never mind. I’m too excited. I need some air. I’ll walk.”
“You can’t walk. No one walks in court dress, from court.”
She flashed her Is that a dare? look and reached for the carriage handle.
The carriage, which had stopped for the hundredth time, lurched into motion as she was leaving her seat and leaning toward the door. She lost her balance and fell on the floor in a heap of hoops and waves of satin and lace and net, her plumes tumbling forward.
She reached up for the door handle. He grabbed her hand.
“Let go of me!” she said. “Let me go.”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
She tried to pull free.
“Stop it,” he said. “If you open the door you’ll fall out onto your head.”
“I don’t care!”
“Zoe.”
She was trying to pull away, still.
He kept his grip on her hand and got his other arm under her shoulder and hauled her up.
She struggled all the way, squirming, feathers flying and diamonds flashing.
“Stop it, drat you!”
“No, no, no.”
He pulled her up and onto his lap, and held her there, his arms wrapped about her. Her tiara had slipped forward. The plumes tickled his cheek, and she wouldn’t stop squirming.
His manly parts couldn’t distinguish between a struggling sort of squirm and an invitational sort of squirm. They came to attention and his brain thickened.
He was lost in the cloud of satin and lace and net and the scent of Zoe and the warmth of her.
“If you don’t stop,” he said, “I’ll drop you on the floor and hold you down with my feet.”
She reached up and grasped a fistful of his hair. She brought her face close to his. “Possessive,” she said. “The word you want is possessive.”
He didn’t know what she was saying. Her mouth was a breath away from his and her scent was everywhere, in the cloud of satin and lace and net and femininity. The cloud billowed about him.
His hand slid up to the back of her neck, to cup the back of her head, and he kissed her.
Eleven
Zoe knew what he wanted. She’d known from the moment she’d stood on the landing and caught Marchmont’s first, startled expression before he hid it.
Liar, liar, liar, she thought.
He lied with words and he hid his eyes, but his kiss didn’t lie. It was hot and fierce.
His body didn’t lie. She felt his heat and his arousal against her thigh, even while she struggled in his lap. She still struggled, though she knew she’d never be free of him. She squirmed under the big, gloved hands clasping her waist because she needed to. She did it for the pleasure of it, for the heat and the wild sensations racing through her blood. The thrill of it. The excitement.
She’d been trained to yield, but she wouldn’t yield to him. He would have to admit what he wanted and fight for it.
She turned her head away, breaking the kiss, and his hands tightened on her waist. She twisted this way and that, but he wouldn’t let go.
He kissed her neck and her shoulder and pushed aside the top of the sleeve with his mouth and kissed the place he’d bared. He lifted his head, and she thought he’d give up then, that his conscience or honor or some other horrible thing would get the better of him, but he breathed in deeply and she knew he was drinking her in, the way she did him.
The more she struggled, the warmer it became, there in the closed coach. From the corner of her eye, while she refused to give way and tried to turn away, she saw his golden head sink down, and then she sucked in her breath as his mouth touched the top of her breast. The hoops had folded up, crushed between them, and one big, gloved hand slid down to her knee.
His mouth was on her breast, his tongue dipping under the lace edging the bodice’s neckline. His hair brushed her chin, and the smell of him was all around her, inescapable: the clean, starched scent of his neckcloth and the fragrance of his shaving soap and above all the scent of his skin, and the combination of all these things, a scent like no one else’s in all the world.
The combination was fatal to her, as inevitable as kismet.
She turned a little toward him and beat on his shoulders, and then his hand came up and closed over her breast, and she gasped. The shock and pleasure of it raced through her and vibrated in the place between her legs.
He pulled her round to face him, and she couldn’t make her hands beat on his shoulders anymore. Her arms went round his neck, and when his mouth found hers, she gave up the kiss she’d he
ld back.
This was the kiss she’d longed for. This was the caress she’d longed for. This was the heat and excitement only he could make inside her.
He’d stolen away with her for a moment, and lifted her up and spun her in the air, and all of her being had soared with happiness and triumph.
Oh, and love.
He’d set her on her feet again, slowly, reluctantly, and she’d acquiesced, because what choice had she?
She hadn’t wanted him to set her on her feet.
She’d wanted him to push her against a wall and have her then and there.
Now, behind his back, she was pushing down her gloves and pulling them off, heedless of the bracelets. One fell off and another remained on her wrist, bare now. She slid her naked hands into his hair and held him so while the kiss deepened from longing to passion and while thinking dissolved into feeling.
She felt him move then, too, tearing off his gloves without breaking the kiss, and this time when she squirmed, it was toward him. But the hoops were in the way. She pulled up one side of the gown, but he pushed her hand away, and then his naked hand was on her knee, and moving up under the petticoat, sliding over her stocking and over the garter and up, onto her skin, and it was beautiful, a rush of pleasure so deep that she seemed to fall to the bottom of the world.
His hand slid higher.
“No drawers,” he said, and it wasn’t words but a groan. “Oh, Zoe.”
“To be proper above and wicked below,” she murmured.
“Oh, Zoe.”
The carriage lurched again and she nearly fell off his lap, but his arm braced her. But the other hand was still under her skirts, still on her skin, sliding upward with a slowness that was torture. She buried her face in his neckcloth.
He cupped her Palace of Delight, and she let out a cry and then another as he stroked her.
