Chapter 14
Jake sank his battered and bruised body into the steaming salt bath and exhaled a moan equal parts exhaustion and deep satisfaction. How was it possible that he’d gone this long in London before discovering Gentleman Jackson’s boxing saloon?
There was something undeniable and purifying about stepping foot in the ring, looking another man in the eye, and tacitly agreeing to do one’s worst to each other. It bonded men together in brotherhood at an elemental level.
And it was precisely the release he needed after last night. He’d sent his excuses to the Duke this morning and succumbed to the mindless brutality of the ring. Anything to clear his head of her, and it had worked. For a time. Until he’d set foot outside the ring again.
He inhaled a deep draught of warm, humid air. There she’d stood in her studio, chest rising and falling in short bursts of air, eyes wide and inquiring. He’d only a few seconds before her questions went from general to specific. A second after that, she’d require serious answers. Answers he hadn’t been prepared to give.
With a single second to decide his course, he’d taken a step, then another, a way to silence her solidifying with each inch forward. A simple kiss would do the trick.
He groaned and sank deeper into the water, even as a charge, one specific to her, spread from his gut to his loins. His cock grew thick, and he reached down to give it a testing stroke. There had been nothing simple about that kiss. His eyes drifted shut, the sight of her, the feel of her, and he tightened his grip, his body seeking another kind of release.
The low murmur of voices in the corridor caught his attention. He froze and listened, his fingers loosening their grip. Frustration ripped through him. Would he never be allowed release?
The voices resonated no louder than a soft drone, yet he discerned an insistence in the tenor of it, Payne’s deep, mournful intonation at odds with one distinctly female. A dogged quality imbued the interaction, replacing frustration with curiosity. The door to his private sitting room turned on its hinges and opened without a knock. What was happening?
He braced his hands on either side of the sunken bathtub and stepped out of its sultry embrace to investigate the situation. His fingers found a towel and wrapped the soft cloth around his hips, droplets of water streaming down his exposed chest and his partially aroused cock.
A surprised, “Oh!” echoed in the other room, and a lengthy silence followed, which in reality could have lasted no longer than a few seconds.
Yet that single syllable was enough to set his bare skin alive. He knew that voice. Even by a single syllable. His ears strained for more, for certainty.
“These are the viscount’s rooms?” Her voice, while definitely hers, sounded different, like there was a catch in it.
“My lady, this is most irregular. If you would please—”
“I please to wait here for his lordship.”
Without delay, he padded across the wet bathroom over tatami mats and came to a stop at the sliding rice paper door separating his bedroom from his private sitting room. He placed ambivalent hands on the door handles and hesitated a brief moment. A moment of self-preservation, perhaps. After all, she was here, in his private rooms. No good could come of it.
His jaw clenched in decision. He was master of these rooms.
The door slid open on silent tracks. Framed by the rectangular doorway stood Payne facing down Lady Olivia, her determination apparent in the set of her shoulders and the rigidity of her usually lissome body. She exuded no whiff of the pugnacious, only the quiet assurance that she would have her way.
“Payne,” Jake said, eliciting startled glances from the adversaries. “That will be all.”
“My lord, I tried—” Payne began in a rush.
Jake caught Lady Olivia’s eyes, flickers of doubt chipping away at the assuredness he’d heard in her tone seconds ago. “And shut the door behind you.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Jake raised his brow and questioned Lady Olivia with his gaze. Her jaw clamped shut, and her lips drew into a straight line, as if every muscle in her face was bent on keeping words locked away. As if the flow of them would cost her dearly. After last night, he wasn’t certain what he’d expected of her, but it wasn’t this, to find her barging into his private rooms.
Of course, he’d entered her private rooms uninvited. Perhaps he should have expected a counterpunch of this sort.
“May I inquire why you’re here?” he asked at last, convinced they would be engaged in this staring contest all day if he didn’t broach the topic.
He reached down to secure the knot at his waist, and her gaze followed the motion. A second later, she appeared to catch herself, wide, blue eyes startling up to meet his again.
“I, uh—” she began. He watched her struggle to keep her gaze steady on his, resisting the pull to steal glimpses of his bare torso. “I have something I want to say to you.”
Her words emerged choppy, the phrasing disjointed. As if her mind was wandering off in a thousand directions. She wasn’t acting like herself, her cool composure appearing to fail her. He rather liked this Lady Olivia.
“Olivia,” he began, seizing this unsteady moment to take a risk and make a gain, “have I leave to call you Olivia?”
Her eyebrows knitted together in question, even as she nodded her assent to the familiarity.
“In my experience of you,” he continued, a rush of satisfaction fueling his response, “those words could lead us anywhere.”
~ ~ ~
Olivia swiveled around and pretended to take a look at the room about her.
Somehow the moment had gotten away from her, and the logic and bravado that had propelled her forward had already begun to fail her. How could she possibly say what she’d come here to say with him standing in her line of sight wearing . . . almost nothing?
Too distracting were the corded muscles of his arms and stomach, rippling beneath surprisingly tanned skin. Too distracting was the fine dusting of golden hair scattered across his chest that narrowed to a thin line below his navel as it trailed ever lower to its inevitable destination beneath his towel.
A woman couldn’t think with that much flesh on display.
And it wasn’t about the quantity, either. This was flesh of the finest quality, even if it was littered with a scattering of newly emergent bruises. What did this man do with his time?
Back firmly to him, she focused on what had first caught her attention when she’d entered this room: the room itself. She’d never beheld one like it.
Despite the rather large amount of wood, a brightness pervaded the atmosphere. A simple, caramel-colored grid of maple outlined the ceiling and walls, which were, in turn, filled in with blank rice paper. Centered in the room stood a sunken mahogany table and four legless chairs.
The room came together in way that suggested open air. One could breathe in this room, so sparse and distinct were its furnishings. With each breath a measure of strain dissipated.
It was all so utterly, simply, starkly beautiful. And all so utterly, simply, starkly foreign.
Up until this instant, she hadn’t considered how very different Lord St. Alban was from Society, from her. He so closely resembled the ideal, privileged viscount that one could forget. But who was he really?
A different man altogether, she suspected. One who intrigued her too much. This room, and him in it, wasn’t helping her Lord St. Alban problem.
“Did you have this room imported whole cloth from Japan?”
“Nearly.”
Her eyes swung up to inspect the expertly latticed woodwork on the ceiling. “I’ve never seen its match.”
“Not even in the mysterious Jiro’s studio?”
The mysterious Jiro. The words struck her at a wrong angle. Or rather it was the way he’d inflected the words. Something her ears picked up that she couldn’t quite lay her finger on. And turning around to see the expression on his face wouldn’t help at all. She would go absolutely tone deaf at the sight of him.
“Is there something you wish to know about Jiro?” she asked. “Does Miss Radclyffe require an art master?”
One second, then another, passed, a resounding silence filling the air. She’d begun to question whether he would reply at all when he said, “No, Miss Radclyffe doesn’t require an art master. That is a tansu.”
Olivia saw that she’d begun to feather her fingertips across the intricate ironwork of a chest. “Lovely.”
“It’s a mobile storage chest used by the Japanese.”
She half turned toward him and almost took no notice of his naked chest. Or the bruises strewn haphazardly across its surface. Almost. “It’s bold, yet refined, too.”
“Boldness can be found in even the most refined objects,” he said before adding, “Unexpectedly so, at times.”
Again, she pivoted away from him, unable to hold his gaze when he spoke in so suggestive a manner. Yet wasn’t he playing into her plan? Hadn’t she come here to be bold?
Her courage, nay foolhardiness, failed her with each successive moment, her plan becoming impossible, an embarrassment, truth be told. Too bold.
She cleared her throat and focused on the tansu. She needed to be gone from this room, now, but her feet felt mired in quicksand.
“There are tansu for every use”—His voice sounded farther away now. Had he retreated to the sliding door? She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed—“clothing and food storage, money, linens, even apothecaries use them. Every ship trading along the Pacific carries one onboard for safekeeping valuables and as a sort of status symbol for trading purposes. Funa-dansu, they’re called, the most ornate of the tansu.”
Her eye caught his over her shoulder, and her body followed. It almost didn’t matter that this man, whom she’d kissed with a passion resembling a mystical experience, stood no more than fifteen feet away nearly stark naked. Almost.
“Did you carry a funa-dansu on your ship?” she asked, although she shouldn’t. She had an insatiable curiosity about this man.
“I did.”
“Did it stay with the ship?”
“It’s in the other room.”
“The other room?” His meaning caught up to her. “Your bedroom?”
He nodded once, a curt affirmation.
“Is your bedroom the same as this room?”
“Very similar, yes.”
She could have left it at that. But she didn’t want to. A closeness to him that she couldn’t account for stole through her. This room wasn’t only a world apart, it was the world within him, and she would know more of it. The feeling transcended simple curiosity. She felt on the edge of something new. She felt on the edge of knowing the very essence of the man.
“May I see it?”
A hard beat of her heart thudded in her chest. He didn’t have to say yes. After all, her request fell well outside the bounds of propriety. But what did Society have to do with her and Lord St. Alban?
“Certainly, my lady,” he said, his tone formal, or as formal as a man clothed entirely in a bath towel could manage. He managed it quite well, actually. “But you will have to excuse me while I clothe myself in something with a little more . . . fabric.”
~ ~ ~
Jake turned on his heel and strode through the open doorway, making a straight line for his dressing room. He’d just conducted an entire conversation about Japanese utility chests clad in nothing but a strip of cotton. He’d never blushed a day in his life, but if the heat suffusing his body from head to toe was any indicator, he was now.
What was he thinking? Allowing that woman access to his bedroom?
He tore off the towel, grabbed the first pair of trousers at hand, and yanked them up his legs. Next, he had his arms through a white lawn shirt and over his head. He’d skip the cravat, no time for intricate knot tying as he must return to his guest.
But the real question was this: what was Lady Olivia Montfort—Olivia—doing in his private rooms? He mustn’t let her duck the question again.
The moment he slid open his dressing room door the question fled to the Outer Hebrides. Connective words refused to link the images together: Bedroom. Bed. Floor. Hands. Knees.
Olivia. The very thing of beauty who would surely lead to his undoing.
At the sight of her upturned bum, an instinct—instinct surely passed down from generations of medieval warlord ancestors—to drape her skirts across her back, and take her then and there, surged through him on a wave of unslaked thirst. What in the world was the woman trying to accomplish? His undoing?
He cleared his throat and in doing so hoped to clear his mind. It didn’t work. He must say something. “Have you dropped your reticule?”
An honest laugh floated on the air, tinkly and joyous, and at complete odds with the dark seed of lust sprouting inside him. When she sat back on her heels and twisted around to reply, delight lit up her entire being, and another layer of his desire unfolded.
“I didn’t bring a reticule with me.”
His mind conjured up that word again. The one that described what he most liked about her when she allowed it. Unbound . . . and vulnerable.
A gentleman didn’t allow himself to think in such a base manner about a lady. The gentleman and the medieval warlord battled for dominance.
She would be unbound, and he would be undone.
“I was investigating how your bed is constructed. I’ve never seen its like,” she said, oblivious to the struggle waging within him. “I don’t have much experience with beds other than my own.” Another melodic laugh sounded.
Her bright mood infected him, and he felt a smile of his own unbind, even if his stubborn medieval hunger hadn’t abated a whit. “It’s called a platform bed. You see them in the Scandinavian countries.”
“From above, it appears to be floating.” Her smile turned sheepish and charming. “I had to see if a spell was cast upon it.”
She rose to her feet, and he took a seat on the other side of the bed. Oh, how he liked the way she looked in this moment: hat askew; cheeks flushed; unwary, uncool, uncollected smile curving her Cupid’s bow lips. Utterly kissable lips, he’d learned from recent experience. Lips he would like to taste again. The bed wasn’t the only entity in the room that had a spell cast upon it.
“While I like the simplicity of the Japanese bedroom, it consists of little more than a futon spread on the floor,” he explained. For some reason, surely self-destructive, he wanted her to understand him. “The wizened sailor in me prefers sleeping above ground.”
“I would hardly describe you as wizened, Lord St. Alban.”
“Jake,” he cut in. He wanted to hear his name, his real name, on her lips.
“Jake,” she repeated softly. Her smile took on a knowing quality. “There isn’t a woman in London who would describe you that way.”
If they’d been surrounded by the glitter and pomp of a ballroom, and she’d spoken those words to him, with that particular smile lifting the corners of her lips, he would have sworn she was flirting with him. But, given their history, he wasn’t sure what to make of her words. Only this: they made his insides feel as light and variable as a fall leaf released to the four winds on a blustery day.
“Well”—He tried to ignore the feeling—“this bed is a solution to that problem.”
A wicked laugh escaped Lady Olivia . . . Olivia. “And which problem is that? That too many women find you irresistible? I know women, my lord, and I’m of the opinion that your bed might only exacerbate the problem.”
“It addresses,” he replied, his voice a husky register out of his control, “my particular desire to sleep at an elevated level, my lady.”
What he really wanted to say was, And you, Olivia? Can I count you among those women who find me irresistible? Might my bed exacerbate that problem for you?
She focused on a point beyond his shoulder and gasped. “Oh, it’s lovely. So intricate, yet subtle.”
She’d spotted the funa-dansu, and he was enchanted, thoroughly and irrevocably, by her.
Without a consideration for the relation of their bodies to one another, she moved between his place on the bed and the funa-dansu to run her fingertips across its intricate geometrical pattern of ironwork overlaid onto smooth keyaki wood. Seeking a wider view of the piece, she backed up by slow increments until her skirts brushed against his knees.
She assumed she was pressed against the bed. He knew it. Just as he knew he must extricate himself from this situation. He’d let matters progress too far. Settled on a direct course of action, he stood, attempting to slide out of her way before she realized her mistake. It was what a gentleman would do.
The point became moot when her spine stiffened and her body went ramrod straight, accomplishing nothing more, or less, than to press herself full-length against the front of his body. It was entirely possible that she felt the outline of his stubborn erection through her muslin skirts.
He held himself stock still and awaited her direction. But there was no question in his mind of how this would end. The medieval warlord had won the battle.
He only waited for her to realize it, too.