He had the compartment directly next to hers, and the door was not locked. It swung open beneath her hand soundlessly, revealing a direct and immediate view of his bed. He was lying flat on his back, one arm thrown over his head. A clothed arm, by the look of it.
For some reason she had imagined he would be naked.
When it became clear that the clamor of her thundering heart would not wake him directly, she crept forward toward the bed. How did one begin to seduce a man? Did one wake him and announce her intentions? I have come to ravish you. I will not accept rejection.
That approach seemed to require a good deal of brute strength. She also suspected that if she told him he could not deny her, he would do so simply to prove her wrong. If she knew anything of him, it was that he was a man who jealously guarded his prerogatives.
The single chair was drawn up by the bed, and lying atop it was a magazine—The Board of Trade Journal, great ghosts, how awful—and, more intriguingly, something that glinted. She bent down, squinting, and discovered that the glint came from a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles.
Spectacles! She glanced up at him, lips parting in amazement. She also required them to read comfortably. But like him, she never wore them in public.
So we are both a little bit vain, she thought. The idea made her smile. It was becoming something of an obsession, uncovering the small things which they might have in common. His loyalty to his family. His love for her brother. His disregard for the opinions of idiots and shriveled snobs.
He made a soft noise, and she froze. In the moonlight, in slumber, his face looked boyish, almost innocent. He would need to shave on the morrow; she wished she dared to touch the shadow on his chin, to stroke it simply for the pleasure of the texture beneath her fingertips. But as she reached out, her fingers curled into her palm. Some superstitious conviction came over her: if she woke him the wrong way, everything would go wrong. Fairy tales often emphasized this point. There was only one right way to stir a sleeping person if one wanted them to fall in love.
But I do not want him to fall in love with me, she reminded herself. I am not here because I am dreaming of a future with him.
What would a future with him even look like? He had no interest in the country, no taste for England, no care for settling down.
If he fell in love, he would still want to chase the wind. His beloved would simply have to race alongside him.
It did not seem a very restful life.
Some strand of discontent was threading through her resolve now. Of course he would not fall in love. Not with anybody. No need to feel so ill-tempered toward this faceless woman able to race with him when she would never, in fact, exist. Alex was the most determined bachelor known to her.
The thought gave her courage. It was one thing to deny a woman in public. But to find her in his bedroom, at night? Any man would take such an invitation.
Emboldened, she leaned down to inhale the scent of him. Cognac fumes still clung to him, but beneath that was something else—the smell of his bare skin? She pulled in a deeper breath. Yes, that was it. The scent of a warm, healthy, muscular man in his prime. The scent of Alex.
His eyes opened.
She froze.
He studied her for a moment with sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes.
Her heart gave a painful jolt.
The next moment, he came awake. She saw it happen. Saw his expression focus and narrow.
The only sound was the thumping of the wheels over the ties.
Or, no: the breath rasping in her throat seemed embarrassingly loud, too.
“How wicked do you want to be, then?” he murmured.
She had not planned for him to speak. With a single question, he seemed to seize control of the moment. She felt powerless, suddenly, to answer him, or to say anything at all.
His eyes, dark in the shadows falling across his face, rested unblinkingly on hers. He pushed himself up on one elbow, supple and fluid as a cat, and his open shirt parted and fell away. The muscles of his flat abdomen rippled as he moved.
Her mouth went dry.
All right. This was not at all a sisterly feeling.
“How wicked?” he asked again softly.
“I—” The word yielded to a breath she hadn’t realized her lungs needed. “Very,” she said as she exhaled.
“And?”
She hesitated. And? And what? “You . . . do you not want to?”
“Gwen.” He tilted his head slightly, so his expression was further lost to the shadows. “When you wake to find me watching you, you may begin the discussion by asking what I want. But tonight, it’s your turn to speak first. What do you want?”
Why must he make this so difficult? Wasn’t it clear what she wanted?
Or did he just wish to hear her stutter and stammer for his amusement?
Probably.
Why had she come in here? Why hadn’t she brought her green corset? “Never mind,” she muttered. “Go back to sleep.”
His mouth curved slightly. “Gwen,” he murmured, and his voice was like a siren’s song, a balm, luring her to turn back toward him. His voice addled her, she thought. Low, smooth, steady—everything sounded persuasive, wrapped up in those polished vowels. Such a voice could recite Bible verses to atheists, rally troops to suicidal charges . . . and coax a woman ten meters from the mountaintop into jumping off a cliff.
“What?” she breathed.
“You keep telling me you want to live freely,” he said. “But what’s the point in breaking free if you don’t even know what you want? Why are you here? Do you even know?”
She wrapped her arms around herself. “I do know what I want. But you—” Make it very difficult to get it, she added silently.
He leaned forward, toward her, bringing one of his large, muscled shoulders into the moonlight flooding the bottom half of the bed. Her eyes fixed on it. She wanted to touch it. She wanted to press her lips to it.
“I know my desires,” she said in a whisper. “I do.”
“Then you have a choice,” he said softly. “Lock them away and ignore them. Walk out of this room. Or learn to embrace them without shame. For that is what people mean when they call a woman wicked, you know.” He waited until she looked away from his shoulder, back to his face. “It has nothing to do with the quality of her spirit,” he said, “or the measure of her character. In this world, there is nothing more wicked than a woman who is unafraid to acknowledge what she wants.”
Still she hesitated. “But I have told you before what I want,” she said slowly. “At the Moulin Rouge. You stopped me then.”
“Yes,” he said. “And maybe I’ll stop you now. That’s a right I have, and a risk you must take. But even if I stop you, that won’t mean you were wrong to have taken the risk.”
She stared at him. She could not speak the words. Could she?
He laughed, a soft, rough sound in the darkness. “For God’s sake,” he murmured. “It’s only me, you know. Not some stranger.”
A flush moved through her, warming her, heating her stomach, the backs of her knees. No. Not some stranger. Far from it. He had been watching her for years. Even when she had not been watching him, his eyes had rested on her, observing, studying. Forming opinions that nobody else had thought to draw about her. Disciplined. Shrewd. Clever.
“I want you to do things to me.” She swallowed. “I was to have been a married woman by now. I want to . . . know.” On a ragged breath, she said, “And now I have told you what I want. Will you refuse?”
He remained still for a long, agonizing moment. Perhaps he was deliberately tormenting her. She could not say, for the light in the room made his face impossible to read.
And then he rolled up onto his knees in one fluid move. A fine line of dark hair trailed down from his navel, disappearing into the waistband of his trousers, which clung low to his angular hip bones. “No,” he said.
For a split second, she did not know whether he was assenting or refusing. And then he rose very lightly from the bed, and from the expression suddenly revealed on his face, the slight, wicked cant to his lips, she understood that he was hers.
Her experience was based on novels. She expected him to lunge, then—to seize her by the waist and toss her onto her back. Instead, he smoothed his hand beneath her hair, cupping the side of her neck in one large, warm palm. Twice, thrice, he smoothed her neck, and then he lifted her hair away and bent his head. His breath wandered up her throat, hot, restless, as if searching for a place to lodge.
“Suppose you try being more specific,” he whispered into her ear.
Her eyes drifted shut. “Yes.”
His lips brushed the spot beneath her ear, the lightest tease. “You wish me to make love to you? Or shall I make you come?”
She had no idea what the difference was. But she instinctively understood why he asked. He was going to make her own this moment. This choice.
Which was well and good, because the wild resolve in her would not back down now. “I don’t know,” she said steadily. “You will have to show me the difference. But first, you will kiss me, please.”
His laughter was hot, dark velvet. He set his hands on her shoulders. His palms rubbed up the sides of her throat, turned briefly so his knuckles could brush the line of her jaw, and then slid up along her cheeks. He lifted her face to his.
“With pleasure,” he said.
The kiss he pressed on her was gentle, inviting somehow, as if his mouth were asking hers some intimate question, a secret between two pairs of lips, not meant for the ears or thoughts above. His tongue moved to the corner of her mouth, touching, retreating, and then touching again: tasting her. It slid along the seam of her lips, and she inhaled, caught by the unexpected tenderness.
His teeth very gently bit her lower lip, in reproof or encouragement. Her lips opened, then, and he moved into the kiss—moved into her, his palm sliding around to cradle her skull as he backed her against the wall and his tongue came into her mouth.
He tasted like brandy, like mint toothpaste and lemon water. He tasted like a wild dark night in which girls lost themselves and were lucky to ever resurface—the sort of night that left white streaks in the hair. She kissed him back, trying to arch against him. He made some slight noise and adjusted his body so their torsos could not touch. Only his mouth wooed her, and his hand cupped her head.
She opened her eyes and saw that his had closed. He was concentrating completely and specifically on her mouth, and holding her as if she were made of glass, something unsteady and precious, that otherwise might threaten to break. How lightly and economically he held her. Yet she felt completely surrounded—held, possessed, fixed in place forever.
Something melted in her heart. It had no relation to the desire. It felt more dangerous.
Don’t let me go.
The thought alarmed her. Some instinct of self-preservation struck out. She pushed against him and felt his lips curve into a smile. He took one short step toward her and used his entire body to press her against the wall.
Not gentle any longer. Yes. She twined her arms around his neck and opened her mouth wider, taking him in, wrapping her leg around his, every cell in her discovering the need to be touched, to be pressed against his skin. His fingers tightened in her hair and his arm slipped to her waist, pulling her by the small of her back away from the wall, more firmly into him. She could feel his hardness pushing into her belly; that would be the part of him that would make this night decisive. She rocked against it on some primitive impulse, and he made a low, guttural noise.
His mouth broke away to trace a hot, wet path to her throat. His thumb brushed across her nipple, causing her to gasp. “Yes?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she said.
He pulled down the neckline of her nightgown. For a moment, he went very still—so still that she looked down at him, starting to ask a question.
He smiled up at her through long lashes, and closed his mouth over her nipple.
The hot, soft sucking—the sight of his dark head bent over her naked breast—pulled something more out of her than want; her strength seemed to go with it. Her knees folded; she caught herself, barely.
He turned her and laid her down on the bed. His fingertips trailed up her calves, lingering in the tender space behind her knee, smoothing into a flat palm along her inner thigh. She felt the muscles there quiver. He was urging her legs apart. She looked into his face and found him watching her; the moment seemed unbearably intimate, but she refused to let herself close her eyes. It would be cowardly, and she had already invited these acts in words, which was sin enough in the eyes of the world; now she was only bearing out her promise, and this was the easy part, the most pleasurable part, God above, his hand moved upward through the curls between her legs and he stroked and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
His hand lingered there between her legs as he leaned up over her, the muscles in his upper arm springing into prominence as he rested his weight on it for balance. He looked startlingly grave in the half-light, his fingers moving so gently up and down that wet and wetter part of her. She reached out and laid her palm atop his biceps, then pulled herself up to plant her lips onto his shoulder, which was as smooth and hard and hot as she had imagined. She licked him, for the taste, and maybe to shock him, but she forgot whom she was dealing with; the low, broken thread of his laugh announced only approval. “Bite,” he whispered, and she almost wasted time by giving him a look of surprise, but what was the point? Biting was a brilliant idea. She put her teeth gently against his flesh, and below, he pushed one long finger into her, so she inhaled in startlement against his skin, and then broke away to arch up as his thumb hit some sweet nerve that made her light up like the windmill at the Moulin Rouge.
He stroked again, and again, leaning down now to kiss her earnestly, his lips never breaking from hers as she twisted and pushed beneath his touch. There was more to this, she knew there was more to the marriage bed, or the un-marriage bed, the fornication bed they could call it, she did not care, only she knew that the part of him that had grown hard, his erection, was meant to be involved, too, and he was driving her toward some point, his hand setting a purposeful rhythm that tormented her and made pleasure pop through her like champagne bubbles, but his erection remained uninvolved. She groped blindly, finding it, and he hissed into her mouth when she closed her hand over his length. His hips jerked into hers, and she pushed harder back; this was what she wanted, she felt achingly empty, incomplete in a novel and wholly delicious and utterly abandoned way. This couldn’t go on, she couldn’t go on like this—she felt a lick of anger move through her, and bit his lip to express this. He settled the full weight of his torso against hers while his hand continued to drive her mad and his kisses grew harder and deeper, and she lifted her hips, once, twice, a third time, and, oh.
“Oh, oh, oh,” she gasped, as her body, her hips, the aching places deep inside her, sprang apart and snapped back together; she felt like one of those wind-up alarm clocks with bells, which rattled and jumped and clanged, oh. She felt his lips turn into a smile against her mouth and well he might smile as her head fell back; her mind went blank as the pleasure uncoiled again sharply through her, fading slowly, in deep, pulsing throbs, until the gentle reminder of his hand called them forth once more, briefly now.
Her muscles unwound like overcooked pasta. She lay back, gasping, her eyes blindly fixing on the darkness of the ceiling, the ghostly rippling silhouettes of trees, rising and falling, rising and falling as the train passed onward.
She had never felt so . . . replete . . .in her life.
A gentle kiss pressed against her cheekbone. She blinked slowly, then turned her sweaty face to him.
One might have thought it would be awkward. His hand was still pressed between her legs. But the sight of him, his angular bones, the long, dramatic sweep of his mouth, seemed so natural to her. As though she should see his face every night in the dark.
Slowly he removed his hand, sliding it gently over her bared hips.
“What of you?” she murmured. Her voice sounded slurred.
A soft breath escaped him. She knew enough now to interpret it: he liked the way her voice sounded, or the remark. It made him hot, as he’d made her.
He was still hot, in fact. The awareness stirred a small bit of anxiety. She was not so naïve as to imagine that this was why men visited brothels. She started to sit up. “You haven’t—”
“Shh.” Delicately he touched her temple, the feathery hair there. “Lie back, Gwen.”
“But I wanted—”
“No. We’re not going to do that.”
No? The words tripped off a flutter of strange panic. Weren’t they done with rejection? She’d looked up at him in those moments of immense pleasure and seen him gazing back at her, expression stark, and she’d felt as though they were attuned. Would he refuse her again tomorrow, then? She felt greedy for him now. The very pores of her skin seemed to be opening in order to inhale him, the scent of him. “But why not?” she asked, and her voice emerged so clumsily, sounding as small and petulant as a child’s.
He pulled away from her, rose from the bed, crossed to the small ledge built into the teak wall. He had ordered another bottle from the porter. As he splashed brandy into a glass, the moonlight caught his face again, outlining the sculptured contours of his mouth. He glanced up at her, as if sensing her inspection, and his eyes caught the light, glittering beneath the heavy fall of his dark hair.
“I can’t do this,” he said quietly. He put down the bottle with a thump and kicked around the chair so its back was to the bed. He fell into it, straddling the seat, one muscular forearm propped atop the back, the brandy glittering in the cold light.
She knocked her nightgown back over her legs. Did up the buttons above her waist. He sat in all apparent comfort, although he was naked from his trousers up. His torso—well, it distracted her briefly. As a boy, he’d been sent down from the Rugby School for beating Reginald Milton bloody—she knew this from Richard, whom his violent intervention had saved, and the twins besides. She knew, too, that he still studied violent arts, but his manner was so casual and his physicality so indolent that one did not imagine him capable of brutality, until one studied the muscled hew of his arms and chest.
“You can do anything,” she said. Her throat tightened; she spoke the next words with difficulty. “But if you don’t want to, that’s another thing.”
He leaned forward, quick as a snake, and caught up the chain around her throat. He let a length of it run through his fingers, setting Richard’s ring swinging over her breast.
Her stomach fell.
“I meant to take that off,” she whispered. She could not believe she’d forgotten.
“Did you?” He sounded contemplative. “We talked of Richard all night, you know.” He let go of the chain and took a sip of the drink, then added, “But we never talked of what he would have thought about this.”
Cold foreboding stabbed through her—through a body that still felt lethargic, weighted with the remnants of pleasure. The combination dazed her. “Perhaps we did not mention it because my brother is dead. His opinion no longer signifies.”
A caustic note entered his voice. “Of course I am aware of that. Let me be clearer: when I am speaking of Richard now, the person I am really speaking of is you. I begin to wonder at your motives, Gwen.”
She stared at him, utterly confused. “I have been as frank with you about my motives as I know how. I have told you again and again that I’m in search of a different life. Of something . . . something that is—”
“Irrevocable,” he said. “You are in search of a moment, an experience so irrevocable that you will never be able to turn back.”
She pondered this for a moment, looking for traps. But she found none. “Perhaps that’s part of it,” she said. But not all of it. If it had been, then any man would have served for seduction.
Instead, she only wanted him.
“It’s good that you admit it,” he said casually. “But as I said, there are always two choices involved. And I won’t be your guillotine. Regardless of what happened to Richard.”
The words chilled her. She did not understand them, but she recognized their power. They raised a wall that would take an axe to break down. “What happened to Richard has nothing to do with this.”
“And yet we’ve never spoken of it,” he said. “An absence so pointed is not an absence at all.”
She drew her knees up into her chest. “I have . . . no wish to die, if that’s what you mean. This is not some grand, reckless, suicidal lark on my part.”
“I don’t think he meant his to be, either.”
Silence. “He was . . . angry with you,” she said finally. “I know.”
“I could have stopped him,” he said. “So easily.”
The rawness in his voice jarred her. “Alex—do you think I blame you for his death? I have never done so. Not once.”
The corner of his mouth tipped up. He sat back into the shadows, his expression lost to her. “Not once,” he echoed.
The mocking emphasis filled the air between them longer than she should have allowed. But she knew a challenge when she heard one—and also that old habits were so hard to shake, while new skills took time to sharpen. She did not want to be clumsy in her honesty.
“Perhaps,” she began carefully, “in the early days, when he had just . . . left us—”
“Been murdered,” he said emotionlessly. “He did not leave us, Gwen. He was violently taken. It is an important distinction: it means there is blame to be apportioned.”
“All right,” she said softly. “After he was murdered . . . I did think, once or twice, that it was you who taught him to play such games—that it was your path he had followed to the grave.”
There. That was the cruelest part, and it was spoken, now.
By a fierce act of will, she restrained herself from rushing onward.
He, in turn, sat impassively, watching her from the dark.
She stared back into his featureless face. She did not need the light; she knew what she was looking at. Chestnut hair, ice blue eyes, broad cheekbones over gaunt cheeks, a strong jaw and high-bridged nose: he was the picture of rugged good looks, and girls did sigh over him, in secret, when their mothers were not listening.
For herself, she had always, usually reluctantly, admired his more intangible qualities—foremost, his unshakable composure.
It was rather unnerving now to be faced with the full force of that composure. He had asked the question; surely he owed her some reaction to the answer.
As the silence extended, his impassivity, his unfair use of the darkness, roused a small strain of resentment in her—just enough to remind her of exactly what she had thought, in those weeks after Richard’s death. After his murder.
“At the funeral, you were so cold,” she said. So composed. It had unnerved her. Unnerved and angered her, too. She had lost the last person remaining to her, but he still had so many people to love him, for all that he took them for granted, rebuffing their every sign of care.
“I was in shock,” he said evenly.
“Yes.” That had been her later conclusion. But at the time, locked in her own shock, she had thought that maybe it was not composure so much as inhumanity that aided him—in which case, people would do better to admire him as they might a tiger at the zoo: from a distance, with no ambitions.
She did not believe that now. She saw him more clearly.
“Here’s something,” she said quietly. “I thought to myself that you put a spell on people—inadvertently, of course. Sometimes I still think it. Your wit and charm seem so careless—almost accidental, really. You’re so at ease in the world, Alex. And I think, because you make it look so easy, that people think they can emulate you—can seize life by the throat as you do. But it requires skill to skirt the risks you run. And my brother never had that talent. He was not . . . watchful enough.” She paused. “But I am.”
He made a soft noise, of skepticism or scorn.
“I am,” she said more sharply. “I am not my brother. And I knew my brother as well as you did, mind you. When I say you charmed him, that does not mean you were somehow to blame.” By befriending Richard, Alex had only done what her parents had hoped for. They had wanted Richard to learn to see the world from a particular vantage point: how to make the sort of assumptions, and to demand the sort of entitlements, and to formulate the sort of expectations, that any gentleman of the upper class did. How to gamble, how to drink, how to cut a stylish path through the Continent—why else had her parents sent Richard to Rugby?
Alas for her parents, Richard had fixed on the one aristocrat’s son who’d learned his lessons outside the canon.
She cleared her throat. “You cared for Richard deeply—that I never doubted. And he knew you far better than I. Certainly he knew you well enough to understand the difference between style and substance, and also the relation between the two.” She folded her hand over the ring. “He must have known your mettle. He knew what he was trying to emulate. And if he didn’t . . . then that was his failing, not yours.”
“Perhaps,” he said.
“No,” she replied instantly. “Since you have asked me the question, you will do me the favor of believing my reply. As his sister, I am best equipped to judge this question. And had you escorted him directly to that casino, it still would have had no bearing on the fact that some drunken barbarian shoved a knife into his chest. Yes?”
Her voice had grown very firm. He sat up a little, doing her the favor of showing her that he was looking directly into her eyes. “Yes, Gwen,” he said. “I heard you.”
“But do you believe me?” When he did not immediately reply, she let go of the ring and reached out for his hand, grabbing it harder than ever would have come to her by habit or whim. “Do not offend me,” she said, “by implying that I would long to touch a man who bore any blame in my brother’s murder.”
She felt his fingers move at that pronouncement, a small, indecipherable ripple. But his regard remained as neutral, as coolly speculative as his voice. “Perhaps you do see me clearly,” he said. “And from what you’ve said about my effect, wanting to touch me seems very unwise. Better, I think, to stay away.”
“Yes,” she said. “For most. But not for me. And by your own admission, if you believed me incapable, you would not have invited me to come with you on this journey.”
He gave her a lingering look, from eyes to lips to shoulders and breasts. “I begin to regret it,” he said, almost beneath his breath.
Her hand moved of its own accord to her stomach. Such pain those words lashed into her. Only a quarter hour ago, he’d made her feel so replete. But now, all at once, she felt battered by him. Drained.
On a sigh, he turned back to the bottle. “Go to bed, Gwen,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m done with company for the night.”