Lawrence made a small noise in his throat as her fingers stroked the side of his bottom, and she turned back to look at him. Her eyes were alight with pleasure and expectation and invitation.
He ran a finger down her cheek and said, “The other night I dreamed about making love to you.”
Something flickered behind her gaze. Recognition? “Was it like this?”
“The first part,” he said huskily, and pulled her toward him. “Would you like to know what happened after this?”
“Yes,” she said, because it was the right answer.
She knew what making love was like. And if she had endured it for Curtis she could certainly do it for Lawrence. She braced herself for what came next, closing her eyes and concentrated on relaxing.
Nothing happened.
Had she failed already? She opened her eyes. Lawrence was staring down at her. She expected him to look angry or upset. He was smiling a little. He looked amused.
“We don’t have to do this,” he said.
“No, let’s.” She reached up to touch his chest.
He caught her hand. “Why?”
“Because I want to.”
“No you don’t.”
“But you do.”
For some reason this caused him to laugh. “You have never done anything in the past just because I want to.” He studied her. “I think we should put this off for another day.”
“No, let’s get it over with now.” The words were out before she knew it. This would have been a good time for Lawrence to laugh, she felt, but he just looked at her seriously.
“Tuesday, making love is not supposed to be something you want to get over with.”
She tried a smile. “I was jesting.”
The way her smile wavered, the way her voice got tight, the way she had stiffened and shut her eyes tight as if expecting to be punished made Lawrence furious at Curtis, and more in love with her. “Come here.” He gathered her to his chest and held her and kissed her gently. “You feel wonderful in my arms.”
He held her like that for an hour, rubbing her back, reveling in her smell, ignoring the pounding insistence of his arousal.
“Lawrence,” she whispered when he thought she was asleep. “Please make love to me.”
He looked down at her. She was incomparable. She did not look scared anymore, but he did not want to do anything wrong.
“Please.”
His hand moved down her back. “Maybe. I want to show you something first,” he whispered.
“What?”
He arranged three pillows against the wall, lowered her gingerly onto them so that she was half sitting up, and propped himself on his elbow next to her. For a moment he just looked at her, speechless. “You are magnificent,” he murmured, running a fingertip between her breasts. She wriggled, astonished by the sensations fluttering through her body and Lawrence seized the moment to tip his head down and kiss the freckle he had just spotted underneath her right breast. His hair tickled over her nipple and her wriggling turned to a long sigh.
“What are you showing me?” she asked, the words coming slowly like individual breaths.
“You’ll see.”
Lawrence’s hand rubbed the sides of her breasts, then slid along the curve of her waist, resting on her hip, the fingers splayed so that his thumb touched the rectangle of dark brown curls between her legs. His touch, which seemed to have a medicinal effect on every other part of her body, worked precisely the opposite magic there. Instead of being soothed, the place between her legs was aching and throbbing in a way that was exquisite and painful at once. And utterly unfamiliar.
“What are you doing to me?” she slurred now, the words and breath no longer slow.
“A medicinal procedure.”
“How?”
Lawrence appeared to think about the best way to explain for a moment as he watched her stomach rise and fall. “First, I am going to rest the palm of my hand here.” He moved so it was nestled in the soft curls and she made a tiny noise. “Then I am going to let my index finger slip down and stroke you gently like this.” His finger found a place on her body that Tuesday had never visited before. When she made no noise, he added, “Unless you object?”
She was not going to object. She was going to beg him to keep touching her there, like that, forever. As soon as she could speak again. She had been married for two years but no one had ever made her feel the way she was feeling now; she did not know it was possible to feel that way. She was beyond objecting, beyond noises, beyond moaning or sighing or breathing.
Lawrence used his other hand to part the curls and between them she could see his finger skating in devilish circles over her newly awakened body. With each caress he added another finger, and with each caress the sensation built, until Tuesday was dizzy with pleasure and alarm and wonder. He suckled on her caramel colored nipples, he planted feathery kisses along the S of her waist, and let his tongue dip into the pool of her navel, his fingers never relieving her ache, but increasing it, making it build and spread steadily, until her entire body felt like it was filled with molten gold.
Lawrence rested his chin against her hip and breathed in the potent scent of her arousal. Her hand strayed softly through his hair and he glanced up and saw her looking at him. He had planned to do this in stages, to teach her about lovemaking slowly, bring her to her first climax over hours, but suddenly he could not wait to see the expression in her eyes. Holding her gaze, he shifted so he was lying between her legs, reached out his tongue, and wrapped it around the sensitive bundle of nerves there.
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Tuesday half moaned, half shouted, as if she had just made a marvelous discovery. She wanted to observe everything, remember everything, but she could not think. Her brain, her body, had been replaced by tingling fibers, all of them wrapping themselves tighter and tighter into knots, each time past the point of bearability, each time stretching that point a little more, until suddenly, as she watched, Lawrence’s beautiful lips closed over her glistening pink bud. She felt him suck it deeply into his mouth, felt his tongue and teeth flickering around it, felt him swallow and tug at it harder, and felt the world fly out beneath her.
She pressed herself into his mouth as wantonly and insistently and brazenly and unwittingly as she could and called his name and the name of every deity she knew and prayed that she was dying because nothing would ever feel that good again. A pounding wave of pleasure rushed through her body and seemed trapped there, reverberating through every limb and sinew, sending fresh eddies down her legs and across her breasts, until she trembled and begged Lawrence never to stop and dragged his face up her body to hers.
“I thought you said not to stop,” he started to ask but couldn’t finish because she was kissing him, licking her flavor from his chin and lips, teasing his tongue with her own, repeating “thank you thank you” over and over again into his hungry mouth.
When she had almost stopped trembling, she moved her lips from his and just looked at him.
“I would describe that as extremely medicinal,” she said, her voice the lowest purr he had heard yet. It sent ripples through his body.
“Yes. Well you have a lot of injuries.”
“So do you. I want you to teach me how to be medicinal back.”
“You seemed to master that pretty well.”
“Make love to me, Lawrence.”
“I just did, sweetheart.”
Hearing him say sweetheart made her heart stop then start again. “No, I mean—I mean the other way.”
“The ‘Let’s get it over with’ way?”
She nodded.
“Why? There are so many other things we can do.”
She looked right at him and said, “I want to know what it feels like to have you inside of me. I want to be that close to you.”
It took him a moment to find his tongue. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I don’t care. I’m not
a virgin. And I just learned that I am not frigid. I feel like I have missed out on so much and I want to experience it all right now.”
“There is plenty of time.”
“Bianca said I might die.”
“You heard that?”
“Please. Let me hold you inside of me.” As she spoke, her hand slipped down and rested on Lawrence’s shaft. It was rock hard and feverish and it jumped when her hand closed around it.
“You can’t do that,” Lawrence eked out. “Not if you are serious.”
“About what?” Tuesday asked, moving her palm from the tip to the base.
Lawrence’s hand wrapped around hers, stopping her. “Tuesday, you don’t seem to have any notion of the effect you have on me, but if you—stop squeezing!—don’t move your hand at once, there will be no lovemaking.”
“Is it going to break?”
“Tueaaaahhhhh!” She did not move her hand. She moved her entire body. So that she was lying on top of him with her wet curls trailing over his aching member. She glided up, down, and up again along his length, then arched her back and in a single graceful motion slid him inside of her.
This was nothing like the raw, painful scraping of having Curtis inside of her. This was smooth and silky and completely magical. She sat atop Lawrence, savoring the feeling of his body in hers, reveling in the expression on his face, the one he wore when something she said made him summon up all his self-control. It was her favorite expression.
“Don’t move,” he ordered through clenched teeth, and for once she would have been happy to obey him.
Except she couldn’t. Because she accidentally discovered that the feeling of having him inside of her became so much more intense when she moved just slightly up or down, that she could not stop herself.
“Tuesday,” Lawrence moaned as she slid her body up his organ. He clutched at her bottom, pulling her toward his chest and held her very still. “You are cruel,” he panted, the strain of the discipline he was exerting visible in every feature of his face. “You make me feel weak.”
Knowing that Lawrence Pickering, the war hero, the demigod, felt weak with her, could feel weak for her, overwhelmed her. She realized that the reason she could be angry in front of him was not because she did not care what he thought, but because she trusted him, trusted him entirely and implicitly. With him she felt powerful and sensual and whole. She wanted him to trust her completely, to give himself to her with nothing held back. She needed him to lose himself inside her. She evaded his grasp, shifted her legs, and took him into her as deeply as he could go.
All the strength that Lawrence had been pouring into restraining himself, all the longing that he had denied and pushed away over two years, over thirty-two years, now flooded out as he buried himself within this most extraordinary woman. He saw lights dance in front of his eyes and felt his toes wriggle and heard someone that sounded like him laughing uproariously, and he smiled in a way he had forgotten and he knew he had never been more alive in his entire life. Then he felt himself explode into her, felt her climax around him, heard her saying his name over and over and saw what was written in her eyes and knew he had been wrong.
He had lost control and shown her what he’d never shown anyone before, the real man beneath the careful surface, and she had not run away or flinched or called him a monster. She had looked into him and said, “I love you Lawrence.”
It was the best moment of his life.
It was the worst mistake of hers.
Chapter 25
“When I get my hands on you, Tuesday, you are going to be sorry!”
Tuesday woke up sharply, confused. It was evening (Still? Again?) and she did not think she had been dreaming, but she had heard someone hollering at her an—
“Dammit, girl, where the devil are you!”
“Father,” she breathed, trying to slow down her racing heart. It must have been days since she’d seen him. No wonder he was yelling for her.
She rolled toward the side of the bed, and practically fainted from the pain. She had forgotten her broken arm. Carefully, she curled onto her back and started shimmying to the edge of the mattress. Halfway there she realized she was naked and remembered everything that had happened and blushed a deep red.
That was when Lawrence strolled into the room. He saw her, naked except for her sling, caught in a tangle of sheets, and smiled hugely.
“Good afternoon, sweetheart,” he said, moving to her and kissing her on the lips.
“Good afternoon, Lawrence.” This was not really happening. He was not really sitting with her, calling her sweetheart and looking like he loved her and knew she loved him back. Her life was not like this. Her heart was not slowing down.
“What are you doing up?”
“I thought I heard my father calling me.”
Lawrence shrugged. “He was but I explained to him you weren’t available.”
“Explained? How?”
“I said that I wanted you all to myself and you would no longer have time to see to his needs.”
“Ah. How did he take that?”
“Very well. Understood perfectly.” He had, too, after a bit of negotiation. “You have had about a hundred visitors,” he went on, changing the subject. He pulled a list from his doublet and read from it. “Tristan and Sebastian have been most insistent. They each sent a dozen proposals in the event that you recover and I think Tristan might have said he would marry you even if you didn’t. Then there were Sophie and Bianca. And what appears to have been everyone in the neighborhood, the lords and ladies as well as the cooks and coal maids. And all three of the Burns children. Oh, they wanted to send something called Captain Gumpkins—they felt it would really help your recovery—but it appears to be missing.”
“Not it. He. Their dancing dog.”
“Right. I can see where that would help. Also, of course, CeCe, who now regards me as no better than a robber for almost getting you killed. I think she’d be happy to see me hang on the gallows.”
Tuesday chuckled. “Anything else?”
“George Lyle came over. He said he had to speak to you urgently.”
“I’m glad he is back. Did you tell him about Lucy Burns?”
“I did not think it was my place.” Also, Lawrence had not wanted to be bitten, which was what it looked like George Lyle would have enjoyed doing to him if they had stood close enough together for another moment.
“How do you feel?” he asked after studying her.
“Like a house fell on me.”
“You’ve really got to stop exaggerating. It was just the chimney.”
There was a long pause. “Lawrence, I am so sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“It was my fault we were there in the first place. My fault we followed all that fake evidence.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was a disguise. The brown hair and the limp. A costume. I saw it in his chamber.”
“You told me that earlier. And I told you that does not make it your fault.”
“Yes it does. And that your men died. And you got hurt. Not to mention that he got away.”
“No, if I had evacuated the building like you suggested, no one would have gotten hurt. It is my fault.”
“Mine.”
“That is completely absur—”
“I like fighting with you, too, Lawrence,” she interrupted, smiling. She reached her free hand up and touched his face. “Are there any new traces of the Lion?”
Lawrence shook his head. “And it seems that we’ve got competition, at least for the Special Commissioner’s forces.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you ever hear about the Vampire of London?”
“Of course. He killed all those girls several years ago. But didn’t your friend Miles catch him?”
“Everyone thought so, but a new victim was discovered on Friday. It was in all the news sheets this morni
ng but we slept through them.”
“Two killers loose in London! I wish we were still sleeping.”
“We could be. As a matter of fact,” Lawrence leaned over and kissed her lightly, “you are already dressed for it.”
The fingers of her good hand had only just slid past the fabric of his shirt to where his heart had already quickened when someone pounded on the door three times, then shouted, “Tuesday, open this door. I know you are awake. I heard you.”
“George,” she sighed.
“Ignore him. I locked the door.”
“It won’t matter. I gave him a key.”
“I don’t mean to be critical, but that was a very silly thing to do.”
The sound of a lock coming unlocked echoed through the room and was followed by the quick, agitated tapping of George’s walking stick. Tuesday-managed to pull the covers up to her chin and Lawrence to assume a respectable distance in the chair beside the bed before George spotted them.
He rushed to her side. “Tuesday, princess of my heart, are you all right?”
“Yes, George. A little bruised but fine.”
“I’ve been trying to get in here since early this afternoon but someone—” the eyes that slid to Lawrence were George’s only recognition of the other man’s presence, “—told the guards I was a suspect and not to be let in.”
“We have to be careful.”
George ignored him. “I have to talk to you, Tuesday. It’s extremely important. Alone.”
Lawrence’s “Out of the question,” and Tuesday’s “Of course,” collided in midair.
George smirked at Lawrence. “Good night Lord Pickering. She’ll call you when she wants to see you again. But I would not recommend that you wait around.”
Lawrence was caught between wanting to laugh and wanting to sock the putative artist. He opted for just leaving the room.
Christopher was waiting for him outside. “All done, sir.”
“Good,” Lawrence confirmed moodily. “Christopher, I need you to look into something for me.” The old man cocked his head and waited. “I want everything you can find on George Lyle. Everything. As soon as possible.”