Jacqueline watched him, bemused and suspicious. She accepted the dresses he piled in her arms, and wondered. At last, he stepped back, reached for the wardrobe doors—and shot her a swift glance that was too saber-sharp, too assessing, to be casual.
He met her gaze; she raised a brow.
His lips twisted, rather grimly. He closed the wardrobe doors and reached for her hand. “Come here.”
He towed her, her arms full with seven gowns, over to the hearth. Two lamps stood on either end of the mantelpiece, spilling strong, steady light out over the room.
“Here.” Drawing her about, he positioned her before the mantel, a foot or so from the lamp on one end. He stood back, looked, then shifted her a fraction closer to the lamp. He seemed to be judging the play of light on her hair.
“That’s it. Now turn your face up a little, toward the lamp.” His fingers touched, lingered beneath her chin. “Just so.” He cleared his throat. “Now.” Scooping the gowns out of her arms, he selected one in spring green, and flung the rest over her armchair.
Ignoring the thought of her maid’s protests, Jacqueline watched as he shook the spring-green gown out, looking at it, then at her; his gaze drifted down her body…she recalled how fine her nightgown and robe were, recalled she was standing before the fire.
Abruptly, he held up the gown, as if to preserve her modesty—although he’d already looked and, she would wager, his keen artist’s eyes had seen all there was to see. He handed her the gown. “Hold this against you and let me see.”
She did as he asked, mystified, wondering why she was humoring him, yet she stood before the fire, bathed in light, and allowed him to hand her gown after gown. Some he dismissed, others he returned to; the selection he’d chosen covered a range of colors from deepest forest green—a color, once she’d held it up, he rejected out of hand—to old gold, another shade that on examination didn’t meet with his approval.
“Somewhere in between,” he muttered, returning to a gown of eau de nil silk.
That he was in truth evaluating her gowns was plain enough, but the swift searching glances he every now and then directed her way assured her that wasn’t his sole aim. Indeed, as he returned to assessing gowns in various shades of bronze, she was increasingly sure his interest in her gowns and on the play of candlelight on her hair was not so much an aim as his excuse.
Finally, he stood back. Hands on hips, he studied her, head tilted, a critical expression in his eyes, a slight frown on his face. “That’s the closest you have to the right color—an intense bronze but with more gold than that is what we need. And, of course, the drape is all wrong, but at least now I know what’s necessary.”
“Indeed.” She waited until his gaze rose to her eyes, then asked, “So why are you really here?”
He held her gaze, then opened his mouth.
“And don’t tell me it was to study my gowns.”
He shut his lips, pressed them tight. His eyes held hers as he debated, then his lips eased and he exhaled through his teeth, not quite a sigh, not quite an exhalation of frustration. “I was worried.”
A muttered confession. “About what?”
“About you.”
He didn’t sound pleased about it. When she looked her befuddlement, he reluctantly elaborated, “About what you might be thinking and feeling.” His hand rose, fingers spearing into his hair, but then he stopped and lowered his arm. “I was worried about how the revelations of the day had affected you.” He glanced away, his gaze falling on the pile of her discarded gowns. “But I did want to evaluate your gowns. I want to complete the portrait as soon as possible.”
A vise of cold iron closed about her chest. “Yes, of course.” Turning away, she moved to lay the bronze silk gown she’d been holding over the chair. “I expect you’ll want to leave as soon as possible.”
Guarding her expression, smoothing her features to rigid impassivity, she turned to face him—and found him, hands on hips, frowning, quite definitely, at her.
“No—I don’t want to leave as soon as possible. I want to complete the portrait and free you”—abruptly he gestured—“from all this—the suspicion and the well-meaning prison all around have created for you.”
The expression glowing darkly in his eyes made her heart leap, then thud. Oh seemed redundant. She moistened her lips—watched his eyes trace the movement of her tongue. “I thought”—she sucked in a breath and steadied her voice—“that perhaps, after this last, you might wish to leave—that you might wish you’d never agreed to paint my portrait.”
“No.” What rang in his tone brooked no argument. He held her gaze steadily. “I want you free of this intolerable situation…” His hesitation was palpable, but then he continued, his words precise and clear, “Free so we—you and I—can pursue what’s grown—growing—between us.”
Gerrard saw the “Oh” form in her mind, more tellingly saw her features ease as the control she’d imposed on them faded. He was searingly aware of an almost overpowering urge to close the distance between them and take her in his arms, to comfort her physically and emotionally, in every way open to him.
Not a good idea.
Dragging in a breath that was too tight for his liking, he forced himself to turn to the fireplace. “So—how do you feel about Thomas’s death?”
Not an easy question to make sound idle, not least because it wasn’t; he definitely wanted to know. He didn’t look at her, but studied the lamp on the mantelpiece. He felt her gaze on him, felt her consider—sensed the change in the atmosphere when she decided to tell him.
She rounded the chair; he turned his head and watched as she smoothed the gown she’d laid over it, then, drawing her robe closed, folding her arms, she paced across the room in a brooding, feminine way. Halting before the windows, she lifted her head and stared out at the dark. “It’s odd, but the point that upsets me most is that I can’t remember his face.”
He leaned back, setting his shoulders against the mantelpiece. “You haven’t seen it for over two years.”
“I know. But that’s a real measure of the fact that he’s gone. That he’s been gone, dead, for a long time, and I can’t change that.”
He said nothing, just waited.
After a while, she drew in a deep breath. “He was a nice…boy, really.” She glanced across the room at him. “He was kind, and we laughed, and I liked him, but…whatever might have been, might have come to be between Thomas and me—that I’ll never know.”
Abruptly, she swung from the windows and came pacing back, her brows knitted, her gaze on the floor. Halting a yard from him, she looked up and met his eyes. “You asked how I feel. I feel angry.”
She pushed back the hair that had swung forward, shielding one side of her face. “I’m not sure why I feel so strongly, and not just on Thomas’s behalf. The killer took something he wasn’t entitled to take—Thomas’s life, yes, but that wasn’t all. He struck because we—Thomas and I—would have had a marriage and a family, and that the killer didn’t want us to have. That’s why he killed—he wanted to deny us that.”
Her breasts swelled as she dragged in a huge breath. “He had no right.” Her voice shook with a medley of emotions. “He killed Thomas and stymied me—locked me into a cage of his making. And then he killed my mother.” Her face clouded. “Why?”
When she refocused on him, Gerrard pushed away from the mantelpiece. “With your mother, it can’t have been jealousy, or any variation of that. Perhaps she learned something the killer didn’t want known, either something about Thomas’s death, or something entirely different.”
She held his gaze. “But it was the same man, wasn’t it?”
“Barnaby will tell you that the odds of having two murderers in such a limited area are infinitesimal.”
Her gaze grew distant, assessing. “We have to catch him—expose him and trap him—and we need to do it soon.”
“Indeed.” His crisp tone drew her attention back to him. “And our first step is to complet
e the portrait.”
If anything, the discovery of Thomas’s body and their speculation over his death seemed to be hardening her resolve. He remembered thinking that if he were the murderer, he’d be wary of her, of underestimating her strength.
He reached for her arm. “I’m seriously considering painting you in candlelight. Come over here.” He drew her to the end of the mantelpiece and positioned her as before. Retrieving the last gown from the chair—the gown closest in hue to what he wanted—he held it out. “Hold that against you.”
Jacqueline did. She’d cried all her tears for Thomas long ago; it had been comforting to own to her anger, to be able to admit to it—to speak of it aloud and so give it strength. She watched as Gerrard stepped back, studying her with his painter’s eyes. There was an expression in them when he was given over to his art that she was learning to recognize.
That was comforting, too, for it gave her the freedom to think of other things, to acknowledge that he, hearing of her anger—an unconventional response from a young woman over the violent murder of her intended, surely?—hadn’t judged. He’d simply accepted, indeed, he’d seemed to understand, or to at least find nothing startling or shocking in her feelings.
He frowned. “The light’s too even.” He looked at the lamp, then scanned the room. “Candlestick?”
“On the dresser by the door.”
He crossed to pick it up and brought it back. He bent to light the wick at the small fire in the grate, then straightened and reached for her right hand. “Here—hold it like that.”
Leaving her clutching the gown to her chest, the candlestick held aloft, he went to the lamp at the far end of the mantelpiece. He turned down the wick; the light faded, then died.
Crossing in front of her, he glanced measuringly at her, then doused the other lamp, too. He looked at her, then adjusted her arm. “Hold it there.”
He stepped back, then back again. His eyes narrowed, scanning, checking; he spoke softly, vaguely, “I promise I won’t make you hold a candle—I’m just trying to get an idea of how it might look if…”
His words faded. She watched him look at her, not as a man but as a painter. Watched the change in his expression, the play of the candlelight on his features, watched a sense of awe slowly seize and grip him.
A silent minute passed, then he refocused on her face. “Perfect.”
She smiled.
He blinked. Slowly. His lashes rose, and suddenly she knew he was seeing her no longer as a painter, but as a man. He wasn’t seeing her as his subject, but as a woman, a woman the look in his dark eyes stated very clearly he desired.
Her heart expanded in her chest; it seemed to slow, then start to thud.
A need to explore his desire swept her. The killer had stolen from her any chance of that with Thomas, yet because of the same killer, Gerrard was now here.
That need took root, grew and filled her. Slowly, she closed her fingers, grasped the gown she’d been holding, and lifted it from her, and away. Extending her arm, she opened her hand and let the gown fall unregarded to the floor; his gaze didn’t shift, didn’t move from her to follow the silk as it fell.
His gaze, dark and burning, remained locked on her. At his sides, his hands slowly clenched; his jaw set, rocklike; his lips were a chiseled line.
He wasn’t going to move, to, as she had no doubt he would see it, take advantage of her; he was holding against it, against the impulse she could see flaring in his eyes.
She tilted her head, studying him as brazenly as he did her. She felt his gaze rake slowly down her body, outlined by the glow of the fire behind her. Her flesh reacted, heated, prickled—as physical a reaction as if he’d touched her. More reaction than if any other man had touched her, yet it was only his gaze, and the hunger she sensed behind it.
The clock ticked; for finite instants, desire held them, a force strong enough for them both to feel. To appreciate. She took a moment to savor it, to experience it, but that was all she dared—he was strong enough to break free, if she let him.
She was still holding the candlestick; other than the small fire, it was the sole source of light remaining in the room. To set it down, she would have to turn, to take her eyes from him, and break the spell.
No. The spell was hers, patently there, hers to use if she chose.
She chose.
Slowly, she extended her other hand, palm up—an unmistakable invitation.
For one heartbeat, as his gaze fixed on her palm, she wondered if he would decline. But then his eyes lifted and locked on hers, and the silly thought slipped away.
He moved to her, slowly, like the predator she’d sensed from the first he truly was. The ton’s artistic lion in truth, and he was here with her, in her bedchamber, and it was almost midnight.
He closed his hand about hers, engulfing her fingers with the heat and strength of his; as he stepped nearer, he raised her hand to his lips, and brushed a slow kiss over her knuckles.
His eyes, dark in the poor light, hadn’t left hers. He searched them briefly, then turned her hand and pressed a slow, deliberate kiss to the sensitive skin of her palm.
She felt it like a brand, hot, searing, possessive. She couldn’t breathe as he took the tilting candlestick from her other hand; reaching past her, he set it on the mantelpiece behind her.
He stepped nearer, releasing her hand to fall on his shoulder, gathering her to him. She was excruciatingly aware of the strength in his muscled arms, of his hand as it spread across the back of her waist, of the insubstantial protection of her nightgown and robe.
Their eyes met, in one glance said all there was to say, then he bent his head as she lifted hers, and their lips met.
Touched, brushed. Fused.
The kiss slid straight into a sea of heat, of pleasured warmth as their lips melded and their tongues twined. She knew this, wanted it, and went forward without reservation, receiving each slow, languorous caress, returning it with abandon and inciting more, inviting even though she had little idea of what, precisely, came next. She wanted to know, wanted to feel; as the kiss deepened, as he angled his head and heat burgeoned, flared and raced through her, spreading under her skin, making her mentally reel until her wits slid away and she gave herself over to feeling, simply feeling, as desire flooded her and grew to a pounding beat, she burned to learn more.
Gerrard sensed the rising tide, the welling of desire, and behind that, a passion that was more—more powerful, more compelling, more enthralling—than any he’d felt before. Her mouth was a haven of feminine delight, soft, giving, beyond tempting; the feel of her body so scantily clad in his arms, leaning into him, sinking against him in naïve surrender, was a potent lure.
With an effort, he lifted his head, broke the kiss enough to look into her face, into her eyes as her lids slowly rose. Enough to realize how rapidly he was breathing, how much his head was spinning…already.
Hauling in a breath, he said, “This is dangerous.”
And was shocked by how gravelly and harsh his voice sounded.
She didn’t blink, but studied his face. He felt her breasts expand against his chest as she drew a steadying breath.
“No.” Her gaze remained level, her lips soft, sheening, slightly swollen. “This is right.” After a moment, she added, “Can’t you feel it?”
He could. Every instinct he possessed was urging him on; not one suggested retreat. If she was willing to move forward, so was he.
She’d been searching his eyes; her lips slowly curved. Her gold-green eyes glowed. “You know it.” Sliding her hands up from where they’d rested until then, passive against his chest, she slid her palms along his face, framing it, then stretched upward and breathed against his lips, “Stop denying it. And me.” Then she kissed him.
He let her, let her coax, then more blatantly invite.
Then he accepted. Stopped denying what he wanted, what he felt compelled to explore. Her. And their passion.
In every imaginable way.
&
nbsp; His arms tightened, urging her closer. She responded, pressing her body to his, her hands sliding back through his hair, then away as she locked her arms about his neck and clung. In his mind, he smiled, purely predatory, then eased his hold on her and let his hands roam.
Heard her breathing hitch as he closed his hands over her gorgeous breasts, full and firm, and kneaded. Sensed the surge of unadulterated desire that rose within her as he played, as he teased her senses awake, as he opened her eyes to sensual pleasure.
Their lips melded, a connection, a communication she clung to; his attention switched from her swollen breasts, from the ruched nipples pressing into his palms, to the succulent delight of her mouth, of her lips and her increasingly educated tongue.
She delighted him, simply and sincerely engaged with him; as he eased his hands from the now tight mounds of her breasts, he gave thanks for her directness, for her straightforward honesty, even in this.
Her clear and unequivocal encouragement wasn’t in doubt; she pressed kiss after increasingly scorching kiss on his lips, pressed close and ever closer, sliding her body, all lush curves and supple grace, against his.
He sent his hands sliding, palms beneath her robe, over the fine fabric of her nightgown, so thin it provided a mere whisper of separation between his skin and hers. He traced the indentation of her waist, let his fingers grip her hips, then ease as he explored, then he gave in to temptation and slid both hands down to cup her bottom. Lifting her against him, into him, he flagrantly molded her hips to him, to the rigid column of his erection.
Her breathing fractured, but she didn’t draw back. Instead, she gripped his face again, and pressed ever more heated, ever more eager kisses on him.
He thrust against her, suggestive yet restrained, and was rewarded with a gasp, smothered between their lips.
Thinking was no longer necessary. Juggling her, he stripped off her robe, left it lying on the floor as he swung her into his arms and carried her to the bed.
They broke from the kiss as he laid her down, yet when from beneath heavy lids her eyes met his, he detected no hint of second thoughts, of hesitation. Only a steady, unwavering purpose he was coming to recognize as intrinsically her.