Page 28

Violet slept on and off before awaking with a start in the dark room. She sat up, groggy and puzzled, before the events of the last day and night came rushing back to her.

Then she collapsed back down on the mattress. She’d lost the child. Saved the mother but lost the child. She knew there was every chance that the babe had died hours before she’d arrived, but still, the loss hurt.

She slipped her feet out of the warm blankets and onto the cold floor. She should find Jess and check on her. The girl was still very much at risk; if she developed a fever now, she would be too weak to fight it.

The chill that rushed up her legs from her bare feet startled her, and she looked down to discover she was unclothed. She supposed that should not surprise her. Her clothes would have been filthy, covered in dirt and blood and bodily fluid and who only knew what else from her day’s labor.

A maid must have undressed her and taken them away to launder. She looked around quickly for a robe or a night rail to don but found nothing suitable. Wherever she was, the wardrobe was somewhere else. She pulled a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around herself to explore her surroundings.

There was a thin, wavering light emitting from the next chamber, so Violet made her way to it and knocked quietly on the closed door. When there was no answer, she tried again, louder. When all was still quiet, she pushed open the door and entered what turned out to be the bath chamber.

Violet smiled to herself. She couldn’t help it. There was Alistair Crawford, sound asleep and snoring slightly in a tub full of water that had surely grown cold.

“Hello,” she called to him softly.

He snorted slightly but didn’t wake.

She approached his sleeping form, knowing she should not stare at him. She should lower her eyes and give the man some privacy. But she didn’t.

Violet drank him in. She’d never seen a man arrayed before her as nature had intended. He was magnificent, and she would be damned if she wasn’t going to take the opportunity to examine him.

She’d seen renderings of male organs in the course of her studies and male flesh during her work, but never like this.

Alistair had broad shoulders, still sun kissed from his last voyage, and the hard arms and shoulders of a man who worked for a living.

Her eyes traced down his body to muscular thighs and calves, dusted with dark hair, and, of course, his member.

She’d definitely never seen one of those in person before.

She leaned forward for a better view and then, before she could stop herself, she giggled. She’d expected something… different than what she saw. When she’d felt him before, through his small clothes and trouser flap, he’d been hard and long. Now he looked soft. Unintimidating.

Violet knew the mechanics but was intrigued by the reality. She leaned in further still for a better look, and then, before her eyes, his cock began to grow.

“Has no one ever told you that it is impolite to stare?” came his low voice.

She startled at the sound of him and turned to find Alistair Crawford very much awake. His eyes were on her, lidded and heavy, but the corner of his mouth was quirked up in a smile, and he had that one revealing eyebrow quizzically raised.

Violet raised herself upright and stepped away from him, her cheeks blazing red. She gripped the blanket around her body hard.

“It’s too late for propriety now,” Alistair said, bringing his hands up lazily to rest behind his head.

His cock had grown long and hard and stiff under her gaze. It looked now as she had imagined it to look when she’d felt it before.

She tilted her chin up defiantly to cover her embarrassment and crossed her arms in front of her.

“I was just about to wake you,” she said. “You’d fallen asleep, and I’m sure the water grew cold.”

“It is a bit tepid. I should get out.”

He put his muscled arms on the sides of the copper tub and lifted himself to standing in one graceful movement until he was brazenly facing her. “Hand me a towel, would you?”

Violet lifted her chin even further. She would not be ashamed or intimidated or any other thing by the sight of his arousal in front of her. She took up a towel and stepped forward.

“Lord Alistair,” she said, primly, “I am a student of medicine. It’s no use trying to scare me. I should like to check on Jess now, if you can please tell me where to find her.”

He laughed, deep and low, before dropping into a whisper. “I’m not trying to scare you, Miss Goodwin. You wanted to look, so I’m giving you the opportunity. Come closer and look your fill.”

“And Jess?”

“Jess is sleeping, with laudanum as ordered. The maid has instructions to wake you immediately should there be any change in her at all.”

He stared at her for a long moment before he said, “there’s nowhere else you need to be except right here in this room, Violet. You choose whether you will remain here or not.”

Her feet went toward him, as they always did.

Her mind unenthusiastically ordered them to stop but conceded quickly when they disobeyed.

Alistair Crawford was just a man, after all, her mind reasoned.

An unclothed, deeply aroused man, but just a man.

She needn’t be afraid of him. She needn’t shy away from his body.

Bodies were her specialty. They were what she understood.

She took another step and tried to ignore the giggly, nervous feeling that was rising into her chest from her belly, as if someone had let loose a barrowful of butterflies there. She was just inches from him now, one hand holding the blanket tightly around her while the other clutched his towel.

As she came nearer, she allowed herself to stare as she desperately wanted to. His cock quivered slightly under her gaze, causing a flush to rise up and color her cheeks.

“The towel,” he said, his voice going even lower still.

He reached out his hand for it, and when she extended her own, he brushed his fingers along the tender, soft skin of her inner wrist.

She had not realized how such an inconsequential place on her body as the inside of her wrist could contain the multitude of sensations she now experienced. She practically shivered from the pronounced tingling of her skin.

“Lord Alistair,” she whispered, raising her eyes to meet his. “Your towel.”

“Thank you, Miss Goodwin,” he answered, as if their formality could do anything to dampen how husky his voice had grown or how his eyelids had hooded with desire.

“I’ll say one more time that you are welcome to leave me here on my own. Or,” and here he rubbed his thumb across the inside of her wrist once more, lighting up her skin again and causing her entire body to burn, “you are welcome to stay.”

She took another step forward in answer, so close now that his member was almost touching her. She watched the head of it turn a deep shade of purple and a single bead of liquid spill from its tip.

“Why, I wonder, do you keep asking?” She reached for him gently, and he shuddered under her touch. “Does a part of you wish me to leave?”

“Christ, no.” He groaned as her fingertips trailed up the hard length of him from his groin to his tip. “Every part of me wants to be inside you.”

But he caught a hold of her wrist before she could touch him again. “Which means you must stop that, or we’ll be over before we begin.”

He stepped out of the tub and toward her, water streaming off his body. And then he ran a damp finger along her cheek and down the side of her neck.

“You do understand,” he said, “what this will mean?”

Violet nodded her head. She didn’t care about rules or reputation or ruination, at least not ruination of this kind.

She cared about the overwhelming sensation of craving and need in her body.

About how her heart was thumping wildly against her chest and the feelings of pleasure shooting through her.

To her surprise she found those feelings to be a kind of balm to the intensity of the day and night they’d faced together. She closed the distance between them and pressed her body into his.

“Then let’s do this properly,” he said, his fingers running lightly down her shoulders and arms until they found the hand that clutched the blanket.

He caressed her knuckles and the small bone in her wrist before giving the blanket a tug. Violet let it drop to the floor so that she stood nude in front of him, as he did in front of her. He held the towel back out to her.

“Would you like to continue your perusal?” he asked.

Alistair’s body was burning as it never had before. His cock was hard and trembling under her gaze—the sight of her watching him being one of the more erotic experiences of his life. But he would not move too quickly; he’d let her take her time.

Violet was Violet, and she’d want to understand the ins and outs of him. To study him. To participate fully in their lovemaking. Hell, she’d probably want to lead it. And he would be more than happy to let her.

Fuck , it would be hard to wait though.

He tried to think of anything but slipping his cock into her ready body. When the time came, and he had her tight, wet heat encasing him, it would be extraordinary.

He groaned to himself as she took the towel from his outstretched hand and turned him around.

He moved slowly, not wanting his eyes to lose the feast that was her unclothed body.

But then she ran the towel across the broad swath of his shoulders and down the muscled planes of his back to his waist, and he realized how much more he felt when his eyes could not see.

His muscles jumped and rippled in response to her touch; his skin blazed where her fingertips traveled. His cock grew harder and longer and heavier than he even knew was possible.

She bent to the floor, running the towel up one broad thigh and calf and then down the other. He groaned again as he felt her breath on the skin of his buttocks, warming him. His hips gyrated in the air as if he was already inside her, and it took a vast strength of will to keep them still.

“Christ, Violet,” he whispered as she stood, letting her fingers drift back upward along the bunched muscles of his calves and hamstrings. When she was standing again, she pressed her body against his back and let her fingers wander down the front of his chest toward his hips.

He turned to face her, too aroused to allow her to continue. “Shall we move on, my love?”

At her nod, he picked her up and carried her into the bedchamber.

Despite his eagerness, Alistair moved slowly. He was determined to savor every moment of this experience. It was the first of its kind he’d ever had. She may be the virgin, but he was too in his own way.

He’d never let a woman sleep over in his bedchamber, neither here in his rented townhouse nor in his captain’s quarters on his ship.

In fact, he’d barely had more than a passing conversation with most of the women he slept with.

This place where he found himself with Violet was utterly new and bewildering to him.

But Alistair Crawford was a man entirely comfortable rejecting out of hand what did not suit him.

Career choices, familial relationships, societal expectations—he knew what he did not want.

So, on the rare occasion when everything he did want was within his grasp, he was not fool enough to let it go on account of a little bewilderment.

He deposited her gently on the mattress and ran his hands through her masses of honey-colored curls.

He’d taken most of her pins out earlier before her bath, so now he had the pleasure of watching her riotous hair spread out on his pillow.

It was just as glorious as he’d imagined it would be in this moment, when her eyes turned the sapphire color of desire, and her body became warm and supple beneath his fingers.

He bent forward and kissed her. Their lips met slowly at first, languidly, each responding to the other but neither driving too hard nor too fast. It was as if their lips were making a kind of promise to each other, that in the moments of passion and discovery to come, they would act kindly.

Gently. No matter the anticipation that was growing between them or the coil of barely suppressed feral energy that sparked whenever they touched.

Even as their kisses grew more frantic, the tenderness between them remained, and he wondered if every kiss with her would be different from the one that came before. A new experience every time they came together.

Her soft lips gasped into his, and he pulled himself away.

He would not hurry this. He stretched out on the bed next to her, and she reached for him.

Her fingers lightly explored the fine hair on his chest, while he brushed his softly along her collarbone.

And then he picked up her hand and kissed the inside of her palm, where her calluses were.