“No.” He stroked her ankle. “Does it feel cold to you?”
“I couldn’t tell whether it was me or you.” She swallowed. “I am quite . . . warm.”
He pushed the gown up higher and slid his hand over the perfectly curved limb he’d exposed. She wanted her hospital, he told himself, and she was prepared to pay the price.
And he wanted to trail his mouth over her wickedly lovely legs . . . up, all the way up to . . . His gaze shot to her hair, the wild red curls. His mind conjured a picture of what he’d find at the end of the journey, at the juncture of her thighs.
Then his gaze locked with hers, meltingly soft.
Then he was lost, rising from the water and reaching for her, lashing his arm round her narrow waist, drawing her toward him. He felt the air, cool against his back after the water’s warmth, but it was her warmth he wanted.
“You will take a chill,” she gasped. “Let me get you a dry towel.”
“No, come to me,” he said thickly.
He did not wait for her to come but swept her up in his dripping arms and held her tightly for a long, mad moment. Then he sank down with her into the scented cauldron, and as the water closed over them, his mouth found hers, and he sank deeper then, beyond saving . . . drowning in a sea of warm promises.
THIS WAS MOST unprofessional, Gwendolyn scolded herself as she flung her arms round her husband’s neck.
It was well known that excitement of the passions exacerbated sick headaches.
Unfortunately, nowhere in the medical literature had she encountered a remedy for cases in which the physician’s passions were excited. She did not know what antidote to apply when the patient’s lightest touch triggered severe palpitations of the heart and a shockingly swift rise in temperature to fever point. She did not know what palliative could alleviate the coaxing pressure of a wickedly sensual mouth upon hers, or what elixir could counteract the devil’s brew she tasted when her patient’s tongue stole in to coil with hers.
She was aware of water lapping at her shoulders and her gown billowing up to the surface in the most brazen manner, but she could not retrieve sufficient clinical objectivity to do anything about it.
She was preoccupied with every slippery, naked inch of him, hard and warm under her hands, and she couldn’t keep her hands from moving over his powerful shoulders and the taut, smooth planes of his broad chest. It wasn’t quite enough. She could not resist the need to taste the smooth, water-slick skin. She eased away from his enslaving mouth and traced his wet jaw and neck with her lips while her hands continued to explore his splendid anatomy.
“Oh, the deltoid muscle . . . and pectoralis major,” she murmured dizzily. “So . . . beautifully . . . developed.”
She was aware of the increased urgency and boldness of his touch, and she knew her brazen behavior incited him. But his caresses were inciting her.
She felt the weight of his hands upon her breasts, a warm pressure that made her ache and push into his hand, seeking more. The sensuous mouth upon her neck simmered kisses whose heat bubbled under her skin and made her quiver with impatience. His wicked tongue teased her ear . . . maddening.
Above the water’s plashing, she heard the low animal sound he made when she shivered uncontrollably and burrowed into him, as though she could crawl into his skin. She wanted to.
She could not get close enough. The water . . . her clothes . . . everything between them . . . obstacles.
“Do something,” she gasped, fumbling with her gown. She tugged at the bodice, but the soaked fabric wouldn’t tear. “Get it off,” she told him. “I can’t bear it.”
She felt his fingers struggling at her back with the tapes. “They’re too wet,” she said feverishly. “You can’t untie them. Rip it.”
“Wait. Calm down.” His voice was thick.
She dragged her hand down to his belly.
He sucked in his breath. “Gwendolyn, for God’s sake—”
“Hurry.”
“Wait.” He closed his mouth over hers and swept her lunatic rage away in an endless, soul-draining kiss.
She clung to him, her mouth locked with his while he swung her into his arms and up, out of the bath and onto the damp towels.
When he broke the drugging kiss at last, she opened her eyes to a burning gold gaze. He knelt over her, straddling her hips. His skin was slick, shimmering in the candlelight. Water streamed from his long, night-black hair.
While she watched, spellbound, he brought his hand to the neckline of her soaked gown. With one easy yank, he tore it to the waist. “Happy now, witch?” he whispered.
“Yes.” She reached for him and drew him down, frantic to feel his skin against hers.
Hot, hasty kisses . . . over her brow, her nose, cheeks, chin . . . and more, down over her throat to sizzle over her breasts. The scorching kisses burned the spell away, and the madness returned.
She caught her fingers in his hair to keep him there. She needed more, though she hardly knew what the more was. She felt his mouth close over the taut bud of her breast, and the first light tug shot threads of tingling electricity under her skin, into . . . somewhere . . . a world inside her she hadn’t realized was there.
It was wild and dark, a pulsing jungle of sensation. He took her into the darkness, drawing her deeper with his hands, his mouth, his low, ragged voice.
The remnants of her garments fell away, along with the last vestiges of her reason. She was lost in his scent, so potently masculine, and in the sinful taste of him, and in the stunning power of muscle under taut, smooth flesh.
She wanted him to crawl inside her, under her skin. She wanted him to be part of her. Even when his hand settled between her legs, upon the most private of places, it wasn’t enough, and she arched up to his touch for more.
He caressed her in secret ways that made her moan and squirm under his hand, but it was not enough. The tantalizing strokes slipped deeper, inside her. Spasms racked her, hot, delicious . . . but not enough.
She trembled on a precipice, caught between wild pleasure and an unreasoning, inescapable craving for more, for something else.
“Dear God,” she gasped, writhing like one demented, which she was. “Do it. Please.”
“Soon.” A rough whisper. “You’re not ready. It’s your first—”
“Hurry.” She could feel his shaft pulsing against her thigh. She dug her nails into his arms. “Hurry.”
Cursing, he pulled her fingers away. She could not keep away. She dragged her hands down over his belly, to the place where instinct led her. She found the thick, hot shaft. Immense. Her hand could not close about it. “Oh, my goodness,” she whispered.
“Stop it. Christ, Gwen, don’t rush me. It’ll hurt and you—”
“Oh, Lord. It feels . . . so strong . . . and alive.” She hardly knew what she was saying. She stroked the velvety flesh, lost in heated wonder.
She heard a strange, strangled sound above her.
Then he was caressing her intimately again, dragging her back into the frustrating madness. Her hand fell away from him as the furious pleasure swept her to the precipice.
Then it came, one swift thrust—and a stinging sensation that jerked her back to reality.
She gulped in air and blinked. “Good heavens.”
He was enormous. She was not comfortable.
Yet she was not exactly uncomfortable, either. Not altogether.
“I told you it would hurt.”
She heard the ache in his voice. Her fault, she reproached herself. Everyone knew it hurt the first time. She should not have let herself be taken unawares. Now he probably thought he’d done her a permanent injury.
“Only at first,” she said shakily. “That is normal. You mustn’t stop on my account.”
“It’s not going to get much better.”
She looked into his glowin
g eyes, saw the shadows lurking there. “Then kiss me,” she whispered. “I’ll concentrate on that and ignore the rest.”
She reached up, slid her fingers into his thick, wet mane, and drew him down.
He kissed her fiercely. The hot need she tasted ignited hers. She simmered in the devil’s brew, and the pain and tightness bubbled away into nothingness.
He began to move inside her, slow strokes at first, but soon quickening. She moved with him, her body answering instinctively, gladly. In the intimate beat of desire, passion returned, hotter than before. She was joined with him, and this was what she’d needed: to be one, to take him with her to the edge of the abyss . . . and beyond . . . into the last, searing burst of rapture . . . and then she sank with him, into the sweet darkness of release.
Chapter 5
SOME TIME LATER, enveloped in her husband’s dressing gown, Gwendolyn sat tailor-fashion near the foot of his bed.
She had piled a heap of pillows at his back, and he sat with his legs stretched out in front of him—under the bedclothes because she had insisted he keep his feet warm.
The debauch in the bathing room had left them famished. They had raided the larder and sneaked up to his bedroom with a tray of thick sandwiches, which they’d made short work of.
Though the bath, the lovemaking, and the meal had radically improved his mood, he was not altogether tranquil.
Gwendolyn was aware of the glances he stole at her from under his black lashes when he thought she wasn’t looking. She wished she knew what those troubled glances signified. At present, only one aspect of his character was truly clear to her.
Though facing a horrendous death in quicksand, he’d tried to drive her off—because he was afraid she’d fall in.
He had been willing to risk medical bedlam and eventual incarceration in a madhouse, rather than subject her to marrying him.
Though informed of the deadly risks of unsupervised laudanum consumption, he had locked himself alone in his room—to spare her witnessing his miseries.
The Earl of Rawnsley, in short, had a protective streak a mile long and three miles deep.
Gwendolyn didn’t think she was overestimating him. She’d had enough experience with her father, brothers, uncles, and cousins to recognize this particular ailment.
The awareness was doing nothing to restore her clinical detachment, which was in dangerous disrepair already.
Just looking at him paralyzed her intellect. When she recalled what that sensuous mouth, those strong, graceful hands, and that long muscled body had done to her, her entire brain, along with her heart and every other organ and muscle she possessed, turned to jelly.
His low voice broke into her bewildered thoughts.
“I don’t think you ought to stay in here,” he said gently.
She looked up from her folded hands. His carefully polite expression made her heart sink.
She could guess why he wanted her out of his sight. He’d probably spent most of the time since they’d left the bathing room devising a courteous way of telling her he’d rather not repeat the experience.
But she’d been rejected countless times before, Gwendolyn reminded herself, and it hadn’t killed her yet.
“I understand,” she said, her voice cool, her face hot. “I know I behaved shockingly. I scarcely know what to think of myself. I have never, ever, in all my life, reacted that way—to anybody.”
A muscle worked in his jaw.
“Not that I’ve had so many beaux,” she hurriedly added. “I am not a flirt, and even if I was, I hadn’t much time for suitors. I didn’t want to make time,” she babbled on as his expression grew tauter. “But girls are obliged to make an appearance in Society, and then of course the men think one is like the others, and one feels obliged to pretend that’s true. And I must admit that I was curious about what it was like to be courted and kissed. But it wasn’t like anything, and not half so interesting as, say, Mr. Culpeper’s Herbal. If it had been that way with you, I’m sure I should have behaved much more decorously downstairs. I should have fastened my mind on a medical treatise and not made a spectacle of myself. But I could not behave properly. I am truly sorry. The last thing I wanted was to make myself disagreeable to you.”
With a sigh, she started to crawl from the bed.
“Gwendolyn.” His voice was choked.
She paused and met his gaze.
“You are not disagreeable to me,” he said tightly. “Not at all. Word of honor.”
She remained where she was, kneeling near the edge of the mattress, trying to read his expression.
“How could you think I was displeased?” he demanded. “I all but ravished you.”
Good grief, how could she be so stupid? He was upset with himself, not her. Because of the mile-long protective streak.
She tried to remember what Genevieve had told her about men—and the first time—but her mind was a jumble. “Oh, no, it was not like that at all,” she assured him. “You were so very gentle—and I did appreciate that, truly I did. I know I should not have acted like a general: ‘Do this,’ ‘Do that.’ ‘Hurry.’ But I could not help myself. Something”—she gestured helplessly—“came over me.”
“The something was your lusting spouse,” he said grimly. “Which I should not have allowed myself to become.”
“But we are wed,” she argued. “It was your right, and it was a pleasure for me and—” Her face burning, she boldly added, “I am glad you lusted, my lord. I should have been very disappointed if you did not because I have wanted you to make me yours since . . .” She frowned. “Well, I’m not sure when exactly it began, but I know I wanted it after you kissed me.” She crept toward him. “I wish you would not fret about me.”
“This was supposed to be a business arrangement,” he said. Shadows darkened his eyes. “No one would have known if the marriage had not been consummated. Your position was secure enough. I should not have touched you. You have no experience. You do not know how to protect your feelings. Your heart is too soft.”
She sank back on her heels. “I see. You are alarmed that my feelings will become engaged.”
“They are engaged,” he said. “You have just told me as much. Not that I couldn’t see it for myself. I wish you could see the way you look at me.”
Good heavens. Was she so obvious?
But of course she was. She was not like Genevieve or Cousin Jessica. She had no subtlety, Gwendolyn was aware. But she did possess both a sense of humor and common sense, and these came to her rescue.
“Like a lovesick schoolgirl, you mean?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, what do you expect? You are shockingly handsome.”
He leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. “I have a brain disease. My mind is crumbling to pieces. And in a few months I shall be a rotting corpse!”
“I know that,” she said. “But you are not mad yet, and when you become so, you will not be my first lunatic—any more than you’ll be my first corpse.”
“You didn’t marry the others! You didn’t bed them! Damnation.” He flung back the bedclothes and stalked, splendidly naked, to the window. “I didn’t even want to be your patient,” he said as he gazed out into the darkness. “And now I am your lover. And you are besotted. It is macabre.”
He would not think it macabre if he could see himself as she saw him, standing so tall and strong and beautiful in the candlelight.
“You said yourself that Providence does not grant all its creatures a pretty demise,” she said. “It does not give each of us exactly what we want. It did not make me a man, so that I could become a doctor.”
She left the bed and went to him. “But now I am not at all sorry I’m a woman,” she told him. “You’ve made me very glad of it, and I am practical and selfish enough to want to enjoy the gladness for as long as I can.”
He s
wung round, his countenance bleak. “Oh, Gwen.”
She understood then that she would not have long. The stark expression, the despair in his voice, told her matters were worse than they appeared.
But that was the future, she told herself.
She laid her hand on his chest. “We have tonight,” she said softly.
HE’D MADE HER glad she was a woman.
We have tonight, she’d said.
Saint Peter himself, backed by a host of martyrs and angels, could not have withstood her. He would have let the heavenly gates slam shut behind him and taken her into his arms and devoted body and soul—eternally damned though it might be—to making her happy.
And so Dorian scooped up his foolishly besotted wife in his arms and carried her to the bed and made love to her again. And he tasted, again, the rapture of being made love to, of being desired and trusted. And later, as he held his sleeping countess in his arms, he lay awake wondering whether he was dead or alive because he could not remember when his heart had felt so sweetly at peace.
Not until the first feeble light of daybreak stole into the room did something like an explanation occur to him.
Never, in all his life, had he ever done anything that was any good to anybody. He’d done no more than fantasize about rescuing his mother from a world where she didn’t belong and taking her to the Continent, where she would no longer have to lie and pretend. When he’d finally got around to visiting her here, he’d missed all the hints she dropped, and gone on his merry way. If he had paid attention instead, and stayed, and helped his father care for her, they might have forestalled his grandfather and the “experts.” Even at the madhouse, when it had seemed too late, it needn’t have been, if Dorian had used the clever brain he’d inherited. He should have played on his grandfather’s overweening pride and sense of duty, and worked him round by degrees. Mother had pulled the wool over the old tyrant’s eyes for years. Dorian could have done it, should have done it.