Eight

As Evan watched, her arms sank, baring her heart. “You mean that.”

“I mean that, yes.”

The fire snapped, the only break in the long silence that followed. Evan waited, the next step belonging to her.

“I asked you here,” she said, “because you are my friend. And because of all the roles I play, for all people, the part of friend is the one with the greatest room for…” She caught her lower lip in her teeth, considering. “Whatever is needed. And it is the only one that allows me the joy of laughter.”

Maybe Evan wasn’t the only one for whom life became gray sometimes.

“I would give you a laugh every day if I could,” he said.

“I would do the same for you.”

There were many ways that they could enjoy each other, and one lay within this moment. “I cannot remember if I have coaxed you to laugh yet today, so let me make sure of it right now.” With a quick dart forward, he tickled her side, then sat back.

She pressed her lips together, squelching a smile. “Not enough to win a laugh. Sorry.”

“I failed? I can’t have that. Let me try again.” He tugged at her arm, and when she lifted it, he poked her beneath it. All down her side, poke-poke-poke, as though he were dotting her with spangles.

Her nose wrinkled, the beginnings of a laugh. “You are ridiculous, Evan.”

“I aim to please. Now, where are those lumpy bits you were so concerned about?”

Shaking her hair forward so it hid her face, she pointed at her midsection with a tentative finger.

Quick and delicate as the steps of a butterfly, he danced his fingertips across her linen-covered belly. She shifted and shivered as he touched her, and he had to use restraint not to fill his hands with her and kiss her senseless. “Where else?” he asked.

Her thighs. First one, then the other, they received the ticklish dance too, until her feet twitched with a new agitation, and he thought he might perish from wanting her. “Now. What else? I want to be thorough.”

“My arms,” she said. “They are as plump as columns.”

“I’m the antiquarian. I’ll be the judge of that.” He made a pincers of his thumb and forefinger and tweaked her arms lightly. “Sorry. Nothing like columns, my lady.” Catching up her hand, he turned it over. The underside of her forearm was exposed as her sleeve fell back, and he traced the sensitive line of it. “This is, I am sorry to tell you, nothing less than the arm of a beautiful woman.”

“You shall make me laugh after all,” she said.

“That’s the idea.” He pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist, a slow movement that made her fingers clench. Merciless, then, he had at her: every bit that she had covered, every bit that she had worried about. Poking, tickling, teasing, until her mouth relaxed. Curved. Until she loosed a throaty laugh as she squirmed closer and closer into his embrace. Until her flesh was a vehicle for delight.

Whatever he did to her, it affected him the same way. Pleasuring her, he was buoyed with pleasure. Caressing her, his fingertips took joy in the touch.

And then, when her laugh had gone quiet and her eyes met his gaze, his touch changed. Softened. Slowed.

She wanted them to enjoy each other? He would make sure of it. He would make sure she enjoyed him so damned much that she would never forget him or this night. He would make sure one night wasn’t enough for her.

On the soft velvet of the settee, with firelight tracing her from springing hair to clenching toes, he lavished her with touch. The neglected bits, like the tender skin behind her knees, where a brush of his fingertips had her wriggling. Through light, abrading linen, the sensitive bowl of her navel. The bits she called lumpy, which to him were curves. Curves from running and dining and bearing children and growing older. Curves that shaped and reshaped her body and showed how she had lived. Curves to fill his hands and tempt his tongue.

He nibbled along the swell of her hip, the side of her breasts. Near the center of her pleasure, tantalizing, each touch and caress a pleasure in itself.

She wiggled and twisted under his touch. “You seem as though you want me.”

For years. You. No one but you.

Of habit, he replied lightly. “Ha, I have fooled you completely. I am not enjoying myself at all.”

She shifted against him. “But your cock—”

God. He got stiffer just hearing her say the word. “It’s always like that. You should see it when it’s hard.”

“I should, should I? Let’s see if we can make it so.” Curving into him, she reached for the fall of his breeches.

He swallowed. “If you touch me…”

She did so, a caress that rocked him even through the layer of buckskin. “Will this be a threat or a promise?”

She looked so mischievous that there was only one possible answer. “It will be,” he said, “a kiss.”

At first, it was a press of lips to lips: chaste, almost friendly. Not that he had ever kissed her thus, outside of his imagination, though many was the time he’d given her a peck on the cheek or forehead.

His imagination had never touched the reality. Even this simple, light pressure was enough to squeeze at his heart. Careful…be so careful. You are within reach of everything you have wanted. What could he do, then, but reach for her? Catching her shoulders, he leaned back and pulled her atop him.

“Mmm,” she said, which was encouragement enough to continue. He parted his lips to sip at her, so warm and delicious. A quick brush of tongue that she matched, then a deeper one—more and more each time, each kiss, as they clutched at one another. This kiss, the next, the next: all were a way to make love with lips and tongue.

They clashed and joined, kissing and kissing, until Evan was hitching up one leg and surrounding her in an embrace of his limbs. She rolled her hips against him, thighs parted.

“I’m being cut in half,” she gasped, “by the tie of my robe.”

“I’ll take it off you. Problem solved. Here, you can take something off me too.”

Freed from the knotted sash, she knelt upright and let the robe slip from her shoulders. She was clad only in a shift now, simple and diaphanous.

“If you insist,” she said, and entered into the play of the exchange. Reaching to dip her finger into the nearer tumbler of brandy, she trailed it down his profile, chin, then jaw. “What a mess I’ve made. The rogue housekeeper must make things right.”

Leaning over him, she kissed the brandy from his forehead, from the line of his nose. She lingered on his lips, as though she found him worth savoring.

When she lifted her head, Evan was in a scatter of anticipation. Fumbling for blithe words, any words. “You are forever altering that phrase for me. I shall not be able to hear of a housekeeper without stripping free my cravat and collar.”

“Stripping free of a few articles of clothing. Now, that’s an idea.” She worked at the knot of his cravat.

The position was a ripe one, with her breasts right where he could touch them. As she kissed and licked at the spirits on his jaw, he grazed her with gentle hands, then between the knuckles of each caught her nipples through her shift and pinched at them lightly.

Her hips bucked. “God. Do that again.”

He complied.

The result was impressive. They undressed in a tangle of garments and hands, of questing mouths, and the tickle of her loose and flowing hair. Clothes were flung over the back of the settee, and had to be drawn back from a landing spot perilously close to the hearth.

Once bared, Evan asked, “Would you like to move to the bed?”

She nodded, a jerk of the head that hinted at the return of her agitation. “I haven’t done this in a long time. When I found out Con was…”

Evan shut his eyes. Con, you fool. “Not true to you?”

“He was in so many other beds. Eventually I forbade him mine.”

His heart shifted out of place, beating awry. “None of that matters now. I would not be scoundrel enough to judge you for anything you’d done or not done in the past.”

“Would you not? That is more than I can say of myself.”

“The rogue housekeeper is always her own harshest critic.” He busied his hands until she was pliant and gasping.

“Now you will ruin that word for me if you keep touching me like that.”

“Ruin it? I rather think I shall remake it.” Drawing her to the bed, he tossed back the folded coverlet to reveal a smooth expanse of crisp white sheets. When they settled onto it side by side, the mattress beneath was pillowy and yielding.

“Let me enjoy you now,” Evan said.

“You want to enjoy me even more?”

“You are not a maiden. Do I need to remind you what more there could be?”

“Yes. No, you don’t—but please do. I…I…don’t know what I’m saying.” Laughing, she covered her face.

“As long as it starts with yes?”

“It does. Yes.”

When she lifted her arms to take him into her embrace, he felt new. For a long moment, he held her in his arms, inhaling the scent of her spicy sweet perfume, the musk of her desire. Nudging a knee between hers, he then slipped a hand down—over the line of her belly, to tickle the curls below. She dug her nails into his shoulders, opening her legs to him. “Yes.”

Yes. He slipped a finger through her slickness. She was ready, wanting—her body as much as her words.

He painted her with her own excitement, easing a path for his fingers. Stroking the nub of her pleasure, piercing her with one finger, then two.

“Yes,” she said again, clutching for his hips. The invitation was unmistakable, and he’d no wish to decline.

He positioned himself above her, and with one sleek glide, he filled her to the hilt. A moan broke from both their throats at once.

Face to face, they looked at one another: wide-eyed, disbelieving, delighted. “God, I have wanted this,” he confessed. Revealing too much, maybe, and he stopped further words by kissing her deeply.

“Guh,” she replied when they broke for breath, which he took as a good sign.

Bracing himself on his elbows, he slid free, then thrust home again. They quickly found their rhythm, the intimate push and pull that made sensation spiral to pleasure, to delight. Clenching his toes against the gathering wave, he played her body with mouth and tongue, with everything he had and was, until her breath turned to gasps, then to a soft cry and a quaking climax.

Gritting his teeth, he withdrew from her. “Best to be safe,” he managed.

At once she reached for him, wrapping her hands around his slick shaft. “I will do it,” she said. Pumping him swift and hard, she brought him off with shocking ease. As the orgasm claimed him utterly, she caught his seed in her hand.

Spent and sated, they lay panting. “I…enjoyed that,” Kate managed.

“Likewise,” Evan said.

One of the greatest understatements of his life.

Chivalry prodded him from the bed first, to retrieve a handkerchief. He dipped it in the pitcher on her washstand, then returned to the bed and cleaned her hand with the damp cloth. “What else? I have another handkerchief.”

“Nothing else. I want to stay like this for a while.” She stretched like a cat in the sun.

It was erotic and innocent and lovely, and he lay on the bed beside her and could not look away. She was glad, wasn’t she? That she had taken him to bed? At least for now, she was glad.

She could not know this was the closeness of which he had dreamed for years. He could not tell her his true feelings. Not yet. The weight of his love would be a burden, when she already had so many to carry.

“Did that truly please you?” She sounded saucy as ever, but there was something careful in the set of her features.

“You have always pleased me,” he said quietly.

One brow lifted. “Bollocks.”

“That didn’t please me. Such doubt. You malign my honor.” He reached for her hair, then spiraled a curl about his index finger, as though in so doing he could hold her fast. “Perhaps we have changed in these past two years, after all.”

Not only her, in abandoning the proper shoulds. He had too. He wasn’t in the habit of being so honest. His conversation was of the sort that skimmed the bright surface, lest he go too deep and tap into the grayness.

“If this is what change brings, then I am glad for it,” she said. “Are not you?”

“More than you know.” For a minute, an hour, an untellable amount of time, he remained at her side and settled into the rhythm of her breath. At last, he forced himself to wrench free, to slide from the bed.

As soon as his feet touched the floor, she spoke. “Will you not stay with me?”

He looked over his shoulder. “I shouldn’t.”

“Because?”

He hesitated, then turned back to face her, bare in a way that had nothing to do with being nude. “Many reasons.”

Reasons ranging from protecting the servants’ sensibilities to protecting his heart. Though it was difficult to give a damn about those reasons as she hitched herself up onto one elbow, imploring him with eyes the shade of the Irish Sea.

“You are right.” She blinked, then looked down to trace a shape on the sheet beside her. “I ought to be prudent and let you go. But I would rather hold you longer.”

And that was that for his heart, as surely as if he’d taken a spear for her. Clearly, he would never recover from his wanting of this woman. He could not deny her what she asked, especially when it was something he wanted as well.

“Let me put out the candles, then.”

After he snuffed them in their branches, he returned to bed. She rolled away then tucked herself against him, back to belly, like the nesting of spoons. His upper arm she took over her body in an embrace. A cage of Evan, protecting her.

A shield of Kate, colorful and strong.

Breathing in the scent of their entwined bodies, he fell asleep.