Page 7 of Tall, Dark and December (The Rake Review #12)

CHAPTER SEVEN

WHERE A MAN ADMITS TO AROUSED UNEASE

D ebating his options when he suspected he only had one, West lingered in the courtyard behind Penny’s terrace, knocking his boot against an uneven stone and recording the play of shadow and light over ivy-covered brick.

He believed the English called this space a mews.

His wish to know the inner workings of Penelope Anstruther-Colbrook this desperately was a hazard. A threat. Risky behavior of the romantic kind he always avoided. Lovemaking on the run, as it had been with Lady P and the others, even Emelia for the most part, suited him. Suited the women involved. Everyone was happy. Agreeable. He gazed at the moon in admiration, deciding a cloudless sky in London was quite the rare thing.

Making love in a moonlit garden would be an adventure.

Despite his varied experiences, he hadn’t had many of those.

Removing his timepiece from his pocket, West ticked off his motives for delaying with the minutes. A man of detail, he’d discovered new aspects of sexual congress during each encounter until confident proficiency had taken over. Striving for her pleasure over his seemed, to him, a good thing.

Accordingly, lack of skill wasn’t the cause of his apprehension.

His dilemma lay in the certainty that he couldn’t like Penny any better than he already did. She was intelligent, kind, strong, loyal. And so, so beautiful. What could come from seeing her secrets spilled before her like jewels from an open vault, but a fall he wasn’t prepared for? She’d neatly shelved their professional relationship into a drawer for completed projects and now wanted to let him into the deeper recesses. When his future was cogs and spinning gears, the things he’d found he could trust. Numbers that led to equations that led to designs were what he used to navigate the world without destroying anyone in the process.

Including, maybe weakly, himself.

When he’d told Penny, under the drunken power of her allure, that she made him feel safe, he hadn’t been joking.

Safe wasn’t something West was used to.

Every time she’d arrived at his warehouse looking fresh as a flower of the English variety, something pristine and straight-stemmed—thirteen visits, to be exact—he’d slipped a little deeper under her spell. Along the way of learning which spoon had been crafted for soup and soup alone, he’d discovered the oddest thing.

A lesson he would impart to his son someday.

When a man slipped under said spell, and the woman casting the spell didn’t know she was casting it, the spell and the woman became more powerful.

Too powerful for someone who held his pleasures and his hurts very, very close.

Seeing bits of himself break off like the edges of a dry leaf and drift over to her during their discussions in his balmy warehouse had been illuminating in a scared-as-hell sense. West suspected this is how friendships were built, brick by brick. Story by story. Smile by smile. Over the days, he’d become comfortable. Looked forward to hearing her sultry voice define acceptable topics of conversation for a dinner party and ways to properly knot a cravat. If lovely, witty, delightful Lady Penelope took the time to ensure a ruffian like him knew an earl held a higher rank than a baron, who was he to argue?

Traces of her lingered in his world. A cracked vase on his desk, the scent of her embedded in his coat, her delicate scrawl on notes scattered about his office, none of which he’d made any effort to dispose of.

Yet, through this blinding temptation, he’d held steady.

Until a ball, two glasses of champagne, and a moonlit veranda. Their kiss was an undoing. The shedding of a base layer, leaving raw, throbbing desire exposed.

Where did a blossoming friendship go after the best first kiss in history?

“Ah, hell ,” West whispered and clenched his trembling fingers into a fist.

Remembering the cheroot his brother had given him, he unearthed it from his trouser pocket and stalked to one of the torches lining the gravel footpath. With a deep inhalation, the tip blazed to life. The flavor was sweetly arid and calming for no reason he could determine. He wasn’t a smoker or a drinker of any consequence until this country and a woman he couldn’t get out of his head. Now, the taste and scent of her was ripe in his blood and his cock. He’d been hard since they started making love; there was no need to deny what it had been on Tristan’s terrace.

He could have had her against those bricks, then climbed atop her, or she him, in his carriage on the ride home, then again in his massive tester bed where they’d claw and bite and moan until dawn—and still not had enough.

The conversation after, he almost looked forward to more.

There was his bloody dilemma, as the English would say.

They fit. In kisses and conversation. An unusually coordinated synchronization, a blueprint for the beauty of perfect mechanics.

The kiss, for instance, how to describe it? There’d been no awkwardness, no hesitation. Where did his hand go? Her arm in the way. Stepping on each other’s toes. Hair tangled about his fingers. He’d flowed into Penny like lava into stone, forging a path. He’d never had such a seamless encounter originate from an abrupt and emotional start. If he designed a steam engine that ran with such precision, he’d have conquered the industrial world by now.

Her lips had been open, welcome and waiting, before he touched them. Never, not on his deathbed, would he forget this staggering find.

“I don’t believe people are made for each other,” he reasoned and expelled a wrathful stream of smoke to punctuate the statement. “Fairy tales are bullshit.”

“Are you out here talking to yourself in the freezing cold, Whitaker?”

West dropped his head back and sighed into the night. His breath frosted the air, testament to the frigid temperature. When he turned, it was worse than he’d imagined.

It had begun to snow, wispy flakes adding splendor to the scene. They drifted to land in her hair, down about her shoulders in the least formal arrangement he’d ever seen, the colors finally freed for his study. Golden strands, darker auburn, mahogany. He longed to gather the thick length in his fist and bury his face in it. Her gown was outdated, tattered at the hem and bodice, spattered in paint, a small rip on one sleeve. Boots, likely one of the scuffed pairs he’d seen that day in her parlor, peeking from beneath.

Unpretentious, genuine.

This is the real girl, he realized in dazed recognition. Closer to the real you than not.

Before he could tell her he had to return to the warehouse to review a prototype, she shivered, her slender arms going around her chest to contain it.

“Inside,” he whispered and ground the cheroot beneath his heel, knowing more of her waited there. Learnings set to alter the situation between them for better or worse.

Nonetheless, he longed for those pieces too urgently to say no.

Their footfalls crunched over gravel and across stone as they traveled the side path to enter the house through the service entrance. He didn’t blame her for hiding him, a man recently exposed in London’s most scandalous gossip column arriving at her residence after midnight.

As he recorded the shift of Penny’s hips beneath her ragged gown, a sizzle of temper lit his senses. He made a mental note to ask his investigator how progress was going on finding the identity of the Belle. She’d made this whatever he and Penny were doing harder by focusing light on him he now had to ensure didn’t shine on her .

She turned at the base of a narrow staircase clearly used by staff. “It’s the top floor, the garret.” Bringing her hand to her lips, she placed a finger before her lips. Quiet . “The third plank on the second landing groans, so follow me and step over it. Heat rises from the chambers below if the hearths are lit, and it actually stays warm enough most days.”

“A garret is an attic, I’m guessing,” he whispered as they climbed.

Her gaze shot in his direction, her laughter low but joyful. Her irises behind her lenses were dark amber and honey, colors he believed he’d influenced with his kiss. “No one comes up here. It’s quite my space and mine alone.”

She was enjoying this, and as usual, he was enjoying her .

Then, she did something no woman ever had and grasped his hand, her slender, slightly chilled fingers twining with his. His chest ached, time skipping back until he was a smitten boy experiencing his first crush. West faltered, stubbing his toe on the stair, and owing to her kind heart, Penny acted like she didn’t notice.

To keep his mind off troubling yearnings and the hand tucked neatly in his own, he studied her home as they made their way higher. The walls were papered in once-fashionable damask, colors faded to a muted rose, corners peeling to show stained plaster beneath. The faint odor of damp lingered, and the scarred mahogany banister beneath his hand wobbled. The staircase, created for the lesser inhabitants of the household, was without a runner and grumbled mightily with each step. He couldn’t imagine who they were hiding from if this was the deafening procession.

All in all, the dwelling spoke of better days long past, leaving West to question how an unmarried woman with meager funds was managing to hold her family’s life together.

When they reached the top landing, she halted in the vestibule and, with a tumultuous sigh, slipped her hand from his. Laughing softly, she ironed her palm down her bodice, a habit he’d seen before, one that meant she was nervous.

When she didn’t have to be, not with him. Although he could see she vacated the indecisive place he had minutes ago in her courtyard.

To his mind, Penny had two choices. Either she disclosed the part of herself she’d hidden from the world, or she snatched him into another tantalizing kiss and perhaps more, secrets forgotten.

Selfishly, he craved both—but one was profound, the other customary.

Was he someone she trusted, or was he merely a man of the hour? He’d never been the first, only the latter. He was skilled at the latter, comfortable with the latter.

Yet, he found himself strangely breathless at the expectation of meaning more.

Decided, he reached around her to open the squat attic door and, with a ducking motion to avoid bashing his head on the archway, stepped inside.

Illuminated by at least a dozen candles, the attic revealed a vastly different world from the one below. Slanted beams and rough stonework walls, the aromas of linseed oil and turpentine mincing the air. Canvases leaned drunkenly against every available surface, and the floorboards he crossed were strewn with streaks of paint. An antique vanity had been put into use as a workbench and was covered with dented cans housing brushes and rags spotted with a multitude of hues. Before a grimy-paned window, a stool and a small easel sat waiting.

West could imagine her there, her brow split by that charming pleat, her singular focus on her work.

His perception of her in transformation, he recorded the cacophony of strikes, his brain buzzing as it did when he designed an engine. He paused, afraid to move too fast and miss something. Her nook was creative chaos, what he reasoned about his own working spaces, vibrant and unfinished, thoroughly suiting an artist’s temperament.

Penny drifted about like a ghost, grazing her fingers across a set of brushes, a blank canvas, twirling a tool with a blunt metal blade between her fingers. “Like your designs, I see colors, connections. The way the world appears to me, the way pieces fit.”

Fit. He exhaled roughly, visions flooding his mind of their bodies entangled, bent over a settee or flush on a bed, hers rising above his, her face coiled in ecstasy. He stayed the urge to adjust his cock to hide his arousal. If she noticed, she noticed. He was past being able to control how badly he wanted her.

Like any man suffering under infatuation’s thrall, one word, one look, was enough to envelope him in a misty, erotic haze.

Thankfully, Penny was too preoccupied to notice.

She picked up a powdered cake the color of blood and held it into a candle’s glow. “I purchase dry pigments, then I mix them with binders and grind them into paste. It’s hard work but more affordable than buying premixed. Ceramic paint pots are a luxury. Watercolors are used often among amateurs because the materials are less expensive. I also reuse my canvases when I can.”

Before he saw her paintings at close range, his snap, albeit patronizing judgment was, oh, this is her hobby. How nice. Watercolors, like ladies in society favor.

Then, he moved closer.

Going to his knee to view a series of canvases propped against a sagging sofa jammed along one wall, he reached before jerking his hand back. Nothing was as he’d expected, simple portraitures or bland sketches of fruit. Rather, her artwork depicted stormy skies, fiery sunsets and brilliant dawns, paint tossed about with ferocious resolve. They were evocative, dazzling, and though he was no expert, like nothing he’d ever seen.

They were nearly violent in interpretation.

His gaze met hers across the candlelit distance. “Sweetheart, these are incredible. Why have you been hiding this?” He glanced back to the painting he was most drawn to, a blurred sunrise bursting with shades of red, yellow, and blue.

“Because they’re not conventional or appropriate, like everything about me. For years, I’ve repressed my needs, my desires. Painting is merely one of them.”

This was the secret, West realized, and slowly rose to his feet. He made no move to cross to her. He didn’t think he could touch her while she told him—and he had the feeling she felt the same.

“Unbelievably, I’ve never experienced a kiss like ours. Though, I have, as you asked, done more.” She smiled scornfully, the tool she clutched glinting. “He was my tutor. French.” The golden highlights in her hair shimmered as she dipped her head, and he had to force himself not to go to her. “How banal a tale, isn’t it? A sheltered young woman from a respectable but impoverished aristocratic family becomes smitten with her art teacher. My father hired him because I continued to paint”—she jabbed the blade toward a particularly striking piece at her side—“what he called monstrosities. I was to be taught how to create proper landscapes and the like. Instead, I seduced, because I want you to understand it wasn’t the other way around, my instructor. I was na?ve but determined.”

West brought his bowed hands to his mouth and shot a tense breath between his fingers. One wrong step, and she would shut down. Jealousy, though it flamed fiercely in his belly, had no standing here. Lowering his hands, he smiled ruefully. “I understand, knowing the determined woman.”

Penny’s lips kicked, though her hands were shaking. Placing the knife in a can with a clatter, she strolled to the easel, dusting her finger over the unfinished piece atop it. “There were two encounters, and I won’t deny I liked them. They weren’t glorious but… they were crudely exciting. As an artist, I appreciated being allowed into a domain prior denied me. I didn’t love him. It never occurred to me to love him. Am I wrong to admit this? Men say it every day in a variety of subtle ways. I suppose, in part, I did it to ease the hunger and the loneliness.”

“No, you’re not wrong,” he whispered, fairly vibrating with the need to touch her. This conversation was giving him insight into her isolation while feeding his need to protect her. Also, if she didn’t know it yet—and he was moderately surprised he did—loving someone never occurred . It simply struck you in the head like a stone.

No one in their right mind would ask for such an assault.

“Northridge requested my hand in marriage, oh, sometime that summer in a stoic conversation with my father. My family was ecstatic. I was twenty, and it was time. He was suitable, handsome enough, from an established title, and wanted me despite my meager dowry.” She did another ironing press of her bodice, and his gaze trailed to her breasts, unbound beneath the tattered cotton gown. No corset, it appeared.

“Even then, I was the responsible one, taking care of my sister because our mother was ill her entire life, in her mind not her body, which may be worse. Suffice it to say, Northridge walked in on a relatively subdued episode during my art lesson, much less than he could have seen. No one ever knew how far we’d gone.” She dusted her hands together. “No matter, that was that. Currently, Isabella shoulders the burden for my downfall.”

West cracked his knuckles, holding back his rage. “That bastard said something about what he’d seen?”

Penny’s gaze hit his, her spectacle lenses shimmering. “Northridge?” Her smile was wise, knowing, the first true time the disparity in their ages and social expertise appeared. “Of course, he did. Very discreetly, very diplomatically over drinks at White’s or across a billiards table. My actions besmirched his good name and his offer . You must understand I was from a respectable family, but my so-called beauty was the catch because I had no money backing me. He went lower than he could have, far lower, when he asked for me. Thank heavens, the only story he was able to repeat was tamer than the truth.”

“I hate these damned rules,” West said and gave his cravat, tightly knotted and choking him, a violent tug. He wrestled with it, finally ripping it from around his neck. “So many, one holding the other up until the entire setup is on the verge of collapse. It’s no wonder England lost the war as you’re all too concerned about using the correct fork.”

Penny braced her hip on the window ledge, her expression luminous, the snowflakes swirling behind her soaking the scene in charm. Even she couldn’t have painted a prettier picture. “Now, I’m seducing my student. An American this time. The tide has shifted across an ocean.”

Unable to endure being fifteen feet away while she was teasing him, West sent the attic’s floorboards creaking as he crossed to her. Seeing him coming, she brushed a strand of hair from her cheek with a shy smile that did nothing to deter him.

Moody over her admission about a French tutor and with a marquess who seemed set to take her from him looming, he didn’t ask before he cradled Penny’s face in his hands, bringing her to her feet to seize her lips. Every ounce of his angst flowed into her, his greed, his passion, his want . She moved up and in, her body bumping his, where she then matched his ardor. Her fingers coiled in his hair, nails scraping his scalp, her groans as effervescent as frost on a winter morning, driving him wild.

Alarmingly, she seemed made for him.

“Lock the door,” she murmured, racing her hand down his ribs to his belly, on track to dive below his waistband.

His heart jerked, thumping madly. Thought scattered, replaced by blind hunger. Kisses aren’t meant to throw a man off-balance like this, he reasoned before he went under.

Cupping his rigid shaft, she stroked while he murmured mindless endearments against her lips, her delicate jaw, the exquisite curve of her neck. Her breast fit his hand with ease, her nipple a puckered bud beneath his thumb he could actually feel this time without a corset in the way. Impatient, she worked his trouser buttons with one hand while hanging on to his biceps with the other.

It was awkward, laughingly breathless, and wonderful.

Somehow, she released him from the confines of his drawers and trouser close, her fingers closing around his pulsing length. She was capable and had him gasping in seconds flat.

He grabbed her wrist, the cravat he held fluttering over their hands. “I’m going to spend before you if you keep this up, and that’s not my way. Like discussing politics at a ball, it’s utterly unacceptable. The lady has first selection.”

She giggled—the sweetest sound in his world—and caressed the crown of his cock with her thumb in agonizing circles. “How to rectify that, I wonder?”

Dropping his head back, he groaned softly. “I had a lewd dream last night. Want to recreate it?”

Her fingers tensed around his shaft. “Was it about me?”

He glanced down to find displeasure twisting her features. She was damned adorable when she was vexed. “Sweetheart, it was most definitely you .”

Appeased, she turned, scraping her hair off her neck to hold it in a high bundle. Thunderstruck by her brazenness, he brushed the overlay of fabric aside to expose her gown’s hook and eye closures. A neat row down the center seam he could unfasten in seconds if he set his mind to it. The mechanics of attire had nothing on Weston Whitaker, future Cambridge fellow and inventor of steam-powered engines.

He pressed his lips to the nape of her neck and sucked gently but with intent. He had no intention of treading lightly if they were going to do this. First, however, he had to ask. “This Neville fellow, he’s set to remove you from this shelf you’re on? Am I taking something from him? I don’t like to step where I shouldn’t. I’m not that man.”

Penny hesitated before answering, a duration where his heart ceased beating. “It’s nothing like that. We aren’t committed to anything but friendship. He hasn’t asked for more, but I think perhaps he will. I haven’t even kissed him, not once. After my disgrace, my choices are limited. Being the sister of a marquess through marriage would greatly assist Isabella as well. And—”

The whisper was urgent and so low he had to strain to hear it. “I want children. I’ll soon be too old to have them. You have time. I don’t.”

Another comment about the difference in their ages he chose to ignore. Settled, he unfastened the top closure, then the next, revealing a creamy expanse of skin. Tracing his knuckle along the curve of her shoulder blade, he gently captured her shiver with his teeth. “What about what you want, Lady Penelope?”

Her golden gaze met his. “That’s where you come in.”

Ah, he was the man of the hour after all.

The valuation was expected, hurt he’d been trained to handle his entire life. This was simply another lesson she’d imparted, nothing to do with etiquette.

Wordless, he opened her gown to the waist, baring her body. The sting of her words hadn’t slain his yearning. Love, if he’d been toying with the distant emotion, could be extinguished. In any case, it was a foreign concept.

After they feasted, there would be time to mourn what could have been.