Page 21 of Hazard a Guest (Ladies’ Revenge Club #3)

She hummed in response, allowing him to set about his task. She turned in a half circle, admiring the room.

She paced over to the small chest of drawers near the coal burner and beheld herself in the small half mirror atop it.

“You know, I thought Penrose was blowing smoke when he said that there weren’t any rooms prepared for a woman available, but this one really is different to mine.

The furniture, the little amenities. Maybe he wasn’t being a rat bastard and actually was telling the truth. ”

“I don’t think he’s a bully,” Joe replied, uncorking the half-full bottle and pouring into the small washroom glass. “Just deeply oblivious and too wealthy for it ever to have come to haunt him.”

He paused, looking down at what was left of the bottle, and grabbed himself a glass too. Maybe it would help him sleep.

She chuckled, glancing over her shoulder at him. “ Oblivious is one word for it. Did you hear him tonight ranting about his family being the backbone of Anglican legacy or some such nonsense? He went on about it for quite a while, but it might have been after you’d already retired.”

“I missed it,” he admitted, shuffling back over to her with her glass outstretched. “But he said something similar a few days ago to me as well.”

“I’m sure he did,” she replied with amusement.

The wine, he realized, matched her dress when it was catching direct light. The coals and candle flame caught all the low pinks and crystal highlights in it, reflecting prettily on the velvet of her bodice.

“Maybe that’s his issue,” she speculated after a healthy sip. “Not that I’m a woman. Not that I own a business. Not that I’m Irish. Just that I’m a filthy, filthy papist. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Something, yes,” he replied, chuckling too. “But not really surprising , given how obsessed he is with the Lazarus family’s otherness. Perhaps I should ambush him with mine too.”

“Don’t you dare,” she said, bracing herself from behind against the chest of drawers. “Freddy can’t carry the entire weight of his affection alone. I’ve already asked far too much from the dear fool as it is.”

Joe paused, that anxious sleeplessness starting to scratch at him over what had happened here some hours past. He didn’t want to talk about Freddy.

“You said you’re keeping track of the cards already played,” he said instead, drawing her attention to something safer. “How? Do you have some mnemonic tactic?”

She shook her head, looking a little bashful about it. “No, nothing so impressive. It’s just a quirk of my natural perception. I’ve always been able to do it, but only with numbers. I’m helpless with any other subject.”

“You’ve never been helpless in your life,” he returned immediately, flashing her a smile at his conviction of the statement. “Not once.”

“Well,” she said, her voice dropping a level, those golden eyes flicking toward his bedroom door and then back to him. “Maybe once.”

He felt his entire body tense, a billow of heat flashing up from his bare feet and through the entire core of him, flaring and flashing like the tinderbox had when he’d lit the lantern. He could feel it again just at that sly reference, the full-bodied impact of it, the taste, the feel of her.

She lowered her lashes, and he wondered if she was feeling it too. “I quite enjoyed it,” she added in barely a whisper.

“That’s well,” he managed to respond, “because if we keep talking about it, it’s going to happen again.”

“Oh, Mr. Cresson,” she replied, her lashes flicking back up, a smirk finding its way onto her wine-tinted lips, “don’t promise me all the things I want at once, now.”

He heaved a sigh, already moving toward her, already aiming his glass at the wooden surface of the chest of drawers, already feeling her under his hands before he could half close the gap between them.

He drew her up into his arms, groaning softly at the way she looped her wrists around his neck, and slanted his lips over hers, ravenous for something far sweeter than the taste of wine.

Her fingers extended, looping into the coils of his hair.

Her mouth parted, her sharp little tongue flicking out and begging access to his own, which he happily granted.

She pressed her body into him, that whisper-soft velvet tickling at the exposed flesh at his collar, crumpling softly under his hands as he explored the taper of her waist.

She arched her body, inviting him to explore more thoroughly, to touch her in ways that crossed the threshold from wanting to claiming.

Joe thought it was very rude to refuse invitations.

He let his hands travel down over the flare of her hips, allowed himself to fill his hands with the taut globes of her backside, drawing her nearer to him, revealing to her that the want had made itself known in every cord of his body.

There was no hiding his desire like this, in the thin silk covering him, in the feeble barrier between pajama and skirt. He made it known; he enjoyed the friction, letting her softness collide with his hardness, squeezing and lavishing in touching her this way.

When his hands made their way back up over the dip of her spine, along the delicate framework of her ribs, and the feather-soft freckled flesh of her arms, she did nothing to separate the scandalous join of their bodies.

She only rose on her tiptoes to meet his mouth with her own, gripping at his hair and leveraging herself from the sturdy wood at her back.

“Yes,” she whispered into his mouth, her lips warm and wet against his. “Yes.”

It was enough to break something in him, the final brittle vestiges of his restraint.

He had never wanted anything in his life as much or for as long.

He lifted her against him, running his hands down the velvet-clad length of her thighs, holding her straddled against his body as he turned and walked them to his bed, his own voice untethered with senseless sounds of want muffled into their kisses.

He sat, letting her fall atop him, looking up at her with a kind of reverent indulgence as she found her balance, pressing her knees into the mattress and sinking her manicured fingers into his hair, her thumbs tracing the shape of his jaw, the hollows of his cheeks.

Her skirt flared out around them, next to nothing underneath, and she didn’t shy away from that.

She put weight into her hips, let the imitation of their final goal pleasure them both, hiccuping in approval as she felt the length of him against her, drawing his bottom lip between her teeth in encouragement as his hands returned to their exploration, no longer needing to offer her stability or support.

He pulled loose the laces at the center of her delicate spine, unspooling the crisscrossed fabric with gentle pulls. He felt a wave of vertigo as she stopped to help him, jerking down the sleeves of her dress over her arms, over the midnight blue of the half stays underneath.

He hadn’t ever considered that a woman might have lushly dyed undergarments.

It had never once occurred to him. Seeing it, that rich, metallic satin glowing against the pale, dappled bounty of her skin, framing the gentle swell of her breasts, inflamed him; it sent nothing but electricity and storm clouds roiling through his mind.

He wanted to drink in the effect of it for the remainder of his natural life, almost as much as he wanted to rip it away and never see it again.

His hands were sparking, tingling like they’d fallen asleep under a ton of unseen weight—the weight of wanting and the weight of satisfaction.

She was pulling at his clothes now, her fingernails flicking the buttons free down the front of his pajamas, her breath coming thick, short, and impatient, until she finally freed enough of it for Joe to rip the thing off over his head to pull her back, to feel the touch of hot, bare skin colliding, shoulders and sternums and arms.

The pads of their fingers trailed over one another, their lips and teeth and tongues danced, and still she kept that pressure, that rocking of her hips, that promise of something more grating against the delivery of something wickedly delicious in its own right.

She was jerking free the delicate silver laces of her stays, with no care to their fineness. “I want you,” she breathed, relieved when he reached up to finish the job for her. “I want you inside me.”

He nodded, unable to find words in his own throat.

He pulled the stays away, leaving her with only the remains of her dress around her legs, and allowed himself a moment to witness it, to see this part of her that he never thought he’d be granted access to.

She watched him with thin little breaths, her bare breasts rising and falling with the effort of it as he touched them, as he tasted them, as he memorized them with some heady mixture of disbelief and primal craving.

She played with his hair. She moaned his name. She rocked her hips.

It was too much for even the most contained soul to bear.

He scooped one arm around her, strong from that year abroad, strong from rolling barrels of gunpowder and carrying injured men to safety.

Strong because he cared when he oughtn’t have.

And he lifted her, setting her back gently against the pillows so he could remove the remainder of her dress and the remainder of his silly silk pajamas, which had spent too long keeping him from what she was offering.

She bent her legs, kicking away the fabric, lifting herself up on her elbows, refusing to be passive in her own undressing.

It cracked something in his bones, something hungry, something he’d kept quiet for all of the days of his life.

He crawled over her, pushing a kiss into her mouth, claiming it this time, just this one time, for himself. His hands rested on her bare knees, thumbs massaging the delicate dips and bumps of this tiny, forbidden part of her, and then, with a gentle application of strength, he pushed them apart.

He kissed his way down her naked body, tasting, indulging, claiming. He traced his hands along the soft pliancy of her thighs, and he stole one more burning gaze into her face before he sated the white-hot need within him, the demand, before he tasted her at her most primal, at her core.

He was not delicate with his hunger, not gentle in his feasting.

That part of him that had escaped, that was driving him to take this, to revel in it, kept whispering to him, kept suggesting that this was why she had come here tonight.

This was why she had knocked on his door.

This was what she had been inviting from the very start.

And if that was true, if it was even a little bit true, it only made him want more.

It drove his tongue and his lips and his hunger until he heard her crying out, felt the tips of her fingernails in his shoulders, rode the twisting of her body as she fell completely apart at the mercy of his want and the onslaught of his hunger.

It broke him too. It flew through his body as keenly as her hands might have, as potent as a joining.

He cried out against her as his body jerked with the force of it, as he spent himself without a single touch or stroke.

He held himself there; he leaned into it until she had ridden the full crest of her pleasure and become still again.

He hadn’t known such a thing was possible. He doubted many people knew. He was ragged with it, spent.

Only then did he feel as though he could pull away and study her, listen to her breathing, and continue to touch, lightly, gratefully.

He watched her eyes crack open, a glimmering, molten gold in the candlelight, and when she reached out a hand to him, he happily gave it, falling onto the pillows beside her, pulling her into him, kissing the line of her hair, the sweet softness of her temple, the little dip of her nose between her brows.

He held her tight and close and let her breathe stillness back into herself, grateful for the gift of her warmth.

And then, miraculously and at long last, he slept.