Page 17 of The Lady Sparks a Flame (The Damsels of Discovery #2)

17

It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility.

—Michael Faraday

“Is this pink? They come in pink as well?”

Phoebe held a silken scarf to the faint moonlight shining through the front windows on the third floor of Fenley’s Fripperies. How had she not known Letty’s family owned a veritable paradise?

Still silly from her ale, she’d walked slowly with Sam along Clerkenwell Road, careful to avoid Farringdon, where Sam could be recognized. She’d folded herself into the tiniest space between two buildings across the road from the emporium and waited while Sam went inside. Ten minutes later, a group of young men and a few boys burst out through the doors and walked in the opposite direction, laughing and slapping at one another and lampposts in that way boys had of having to hit things in order to imprint them in their brains.

Another ten minutes went by until Sam peered out from the alley running along the side of the emporium and waved her over, locking the door behind them. He told Phoebe he’d played the generous drunk and invited his employees to close early, go out, and put themselves in the same state.

Phoebe had never thought to imagine what the inside of such a shop might be like. The surprise had been a good one.

Now Sam took the scarf from her hands and refolded it.

“Pink is far too gauche a color,” he said, distracted. “It’s blush.”

“I’ll take three.”

“You’ll take none, or my mam will know someone’s been here after hours,” Sam said. “When this is over, you can walk through the front door like any other customer—”

“Pfft.” Phoebe snatched the scarf back and flung it over her shoulders. “Any other customer. As if the daughter of a marquess walks into this place every day.”

“Well, the wife of a viscount does,” he retorted. “Listen to me, Phoebe. We are supposed to be hiding in the store, not raiding it.”

“Semantics,” she murmured.

The walls were covered with mirrors that threw the cacophony of colored scarves, shawls, dresses, and bonnets around and around like the ever-changing colors in Sir David Brewster’s kaleidoscope.

“Watch your step,” Sam said over his shoulder as he led her up a set of unpainted wooden stairs past the third floor—“offices,” he explained—to the fourth floor where a crooked doorway stood partway open.

Unlike the display rooms on the first three floors, the space on the fourth floor was an organized clutter. Boxes and crates of varying sizes were stacked higgledy-piggledy, but the floor was spotless and windows were clean and hung with bright yellow curtains.

Lavender and orange peels scented the air, no doubt from the barrels in the corner, one of which was opened to reveal mounds of dried rosebuds. Phoebe made her way to the far wall, the familiar scent of sachets ladies used to scent their linen drawers pulling her closer.

“Usually, we hold most of these in the cellar,” Sam explained, peering at the stenciled letters on the top of a rectangular carton. “We were looking into having water in the building and moved the lightest of the boxes—who went and ordered these coverlets when we already…”

When he pried open the box, an explosion of gold, orange, and red silk fell out. Phoebe drew in a breath of wonder and sank to her knees, heedless of the bare wooden boards.

“These are beautiful.” The raw silk coverlet’s embroidery showed crimson and green vines, blue birds, and purple fruit.

What must it be like to grow up surrounded by beautiful colors and smells, mirrors and crystals, and half of London walking through the store; folks from all corners of the world talking and laughing together?

“They’re pretty, I suppose,” he said, “but we’ve too many of them. Someone must have doubled the order by mistake. Going to have to lower the price and—”

Phoebe peered at Sam from where she sat in a puddle of sunrise, having pulled the rest of the coverlets from their box and wrapped herself in them, luxuriating in their brightness.

“What?” she asked.

They’d lit only one lamp and the oil was running low. Moonlight came through the opening in the curtains, but not enough to illuminate their expressions. Phoebe knew Sam was regarding her and not the coverlets.

“Was I not supposed to touch them?”

Sam crouched down until he was on his knees, level with her. Nothing was said, but her pulse sped and heat crept along her chest and pooled low in her belly. Slowly enough that Phoebe could pull away if she wished, he pressed his thumb to her lower lip, then traced a line to the corner of her mouth. The sensation set off crackles of anticipation beneath her skin, and her pulse grew stronger, making her squirm.

“I wanted it to be a bed,” he whispered in a voice deep and rough with longing, blanketing her in a caress.

“If I said no?” she whispered back, and Sam held his hands in the air, continuing to stare at her mouth.

“I will never touch you unless you want it, Phoebe.”

It hurt to breathe a little bit, having to force the air past the trapped bird inside her chest where her heart once lived.

“Will you still touch me even if I shouldn’t want it?” she asked.

Sam sat back on his heels, eyes meeting hers. “I don’t want to marry your sister…”

Phoebe frowned.

“…and Lady Karolina doesn’t want to marry me,” Sam said. “She told me before we left Cumbria.”

Oh. Well.

The more Phoebe got to know her younger sister, the more she enjoyed the woman Karolina had become. Moti’s warnings about Lionel Armitage had influenced Phoebe to see Karolina as a victim, a girl to be protected. Shame on her for not recognizing Karolina was brave and resourceful and perhaps did not need marriage to Sam as a shield.

A dizzy relief spun her head until the memory of who she’d been and what she’d done stopped the spinning.

“I shouldn’t want you for a million reasons besides my sister,” Phoebe said. A cracked laugh escaped in a puff of air. “I shouldn’t want you because you won’t hurt me, because I don’t deserve your care, because there is nothing kind I cannot kill.”

Within seconds she was on her back and Sam’s mouth covered hers. The kiss was long and hot with teeth and tongue, harder and harder he ate at her mouth. She held on to his shoulders to keep from dissolving from lust and longing.

He pulled away and she gulped the air; a gorgeous ache like a clenching fist blossomed between her thighs.

“You…” he said, and that smile of his, the one that lit him from within, as if he’d bitten the sun like a persimmon—it changed his face from merely handsome to something approaching true beauty “…have a tendency toward the melodramatic.”

Of all the…

One golden blond brow rose slightly and Sam lowered his head toward hers. “I can’t wait to hear you describe my sexual prowess in such dramatic terms.”

Like the bubbles in champagne, a stream of giggles buoyed up.

The giggles grew into laughter, a cleansing laughter from her belly, and shook her whole body.

Obviously used to women bursting into hysterics beneath him, Sam sipped the laughter from her skin, lips moving across her shoulders to her temple.

“By God, you are—” she began.

“Irresistible,” he supplied, biting the tender lobe of her ear.

Phoebe shuddered. How lovely.

“Yes, but also you are—”

“Superbly well-endowed.”

Oh, for goodness’ sakes. Setting her hands to either side of his head, Phoebe pushed him a few inches away, then covered his mouth with her thumb.

“Do you know how high you’ve set my expectations, Sam Fenley?” she asked. “You had better meet them tonight.” Better he believed she lusted for him than know she…

“I will exceed them, my lady. Come here.” Sam pulled her out of her nest of coverlets and draped them about her arms and shoulders, then took her hand and guided her to the corner of the room behind the barrels of dried flowers. There, leaning against the wall, were rolls of dark green and aubergine velvet and brocade. With brusque practiced movements, Sam unrolled the fabric into a pile at her feet.

“I shall return in one moment. Feel free to divest yourself of any encumbrances,” he said. “Clothes, for example.”

He walked to the other side of the room and rummaged through a carton.

“I really really wanted this to be in a bed,” he said once he returned, humor threading through his low growl of desire, a tin of condoms in his hand.

Phoebe let him take the coverlets and lay them into a crazy quilt of colors. She’d no time to tease that it had better be his arse on the bottom or that a bed would make no difference to what she planned to do to him before he stood to face her, and his mouth was back on hers.

His entire body kissed hers, his hands traveling up the back of her legs to her bottom while his tongue slipped over the front of her teeth and the roof of her mouth, hips rubbing up against her ever so slightly. A frisson of friction, just a hint of what was to come, made her knees weaken and she grabbed his waistcoat tight, answering his desire with her own.

Her skirts bloomed into a bell shape at her feet when his nimble fingers found the tapes. Off came his waistcoat and long-tailed linen shirt with nary a protest from him. Alone in the enormous building, they might have been in the farthest corner of Cumbria or the Outer Hebrides for what they sensed of the outside world.

Sam’s groan of pleasure when Phoebe ran her fingertips down his breastbone was the sound of honey dripping down her shoulders and resting in the cup above her clavicle. He pulled his mouth from hers and let his hands slip into her coiffure, holding her tight.

She matched his hungry stare with her own. The thin cotton of her chemise felt like bark against her nipples, and the rough coils of the hair on his legs rubbed her through the slit in her pantalettes.

When had he taken off his pants?

Quick as a whip, he turned her to face the wall and pressed one large palm against her stomach while unlacing her corset with the other hand. In a matter of seconds, the corset and her chemise were on the ground as well. His cock was hard and hot through the fine lawn of her pantalettes.

What in the name of God was she thinking?

Phoebe faced him, prepared to say something, anything, to regain her composure, but he was naked, and all she wanted was to run her tongue along the planes and lines of him.

Sam kept his eyes locked on her as she pushed her palms into his skin and dragged them down, down over the muscles of his chest, the stacked boxes of his abdomen, and then to the center of him.

One hand slipped below to cup his balls, and she wrapped her other hand around the hot length of him. His cock twitched at her touch, and a tiny flame of lust awoke at her own center.

When Phoebe delicately stroked him, brushing her thumb over the slick seed at his tip, the summer sky in his eyes darkened into a storm.

Sam fought a groan until the tendons in his neck stood out. It didn’t matter. Phoebe knew he wanted her as badly as she wanted him. The air grew redolent with the scent of dried roses mixed with their warm, wet breath, leaving her dizzy.

Never had Phoebe knelt before a man.

Oh, she knew what she was doing when she dropped to her knees and let the plum-shaped head of him rest on her tongue before sucking it into her mouth.

Knew he would bend his head back against the surge of bliss, clench her skull loosely in his hands to keep himself from falling as she took as much as she could of his cock until the tip of him hit the back of her throat.

Knew the guttural words of praise he whispered, the encouragement, the way he called her his Phoebe-girl was from gratitude and desperation, not derision.

Knew when he shouted her name at his release as she swallowed the proof of his desire that his entire body would shake for long, aching moments even after he came.

Until Sam Fenley, Phoebe had insisted this act be mutual. That her lovers pleasure her at the same time she gave them relief.

Only with Sam had she performed this act alone.

His pleasure had been her only aim, not once wondering what she looked like or if he would look down upon her afterward. If he would thrust too hard, if he would pat her on the head like a pet, or if he would simply turn over and fall asleep.

An act of submission on the face of it; it had been, in fact, an act of courage on her part.