Chapter Eighteen
D amn, damn, damn the man.
Valencia flung off her cloak and yanked the ribbon from her plaited hair. He didn’t fight fair. Most mortals would have screamed and shouted, but Lynsley simply retreated into his unassailable shell of reserve.
A bloody cover that was thicker and more impenetrable than a suit of armor.
One shoe hit the carpet, followed by the thud of the other. Peeling off her breeches and shirt, she threw them at the bedpost, where they caught and hung like flags of surrender.
Count to twenty , she told herself, recalling one of her first Academy lessons for cooling off.
One, two, three . . .
Hell, all the numbers in the universe wouldn’t add up to a rational response to Lynsley’s sang froid . Cold blood? Ha, there had been nothing frigid about his sudden kiss.
She bit her lip, still tasting the sear of the moment.
Combat heats the blood to a boil—the pressure must burst out in strange, explosive ways.
Leave it at that , Valencia told herself. And yet, she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Stalking to the bed, she swore a savage oath and slammed her fist to duvet. Like the marquess, it shifted beneath her punch, the feathers refusing to offer any resistance. It was maddening. Mocking.
“No!” Valencia spun around, her temper flaring past the point of reason. “No, no, no.” Enough of his patrician parries. This time, she would make him fight back.
Three quick strides, and without pause for thought, she threw open the connecting door.
The firelight caught Lynsley in the act of draining a glass of brandy.
“Go away, and that’s an order.” His voice was slightly slurred. “I’m in no mood for further fireworks.”
She stepped over the threshold.
He turned away and sat down, swearing under his breath.
“Don’t you dare ignore me, Thomas. We need to talk about this.”
Lynsley looked up, his eyes overbright, and edged with a dangerous glitter she had never seen. “A lover’s quarrel?” he said with biting cynicism. “Let us not carry the charade of man and wife too far, Valencia.”
His tone, so at odds with his usual composure, goaded her to react with matching sarcasm. “I wouldn’t dream of pretending that this match is anything but a marriage of convenience, a way for each of us to get what we want from this mission.”
“Go away, Valencia,” he repeated. “We will talk in the morning.”
“Why?” she demanded.
Answering with a wordless grunt, Lynsley took a swig from the bottle. “Because I intend to drink myself into a stupor.”
A single candle sat on the sideboard. She drew closer, like a moth mesmerized by the dancing flame.
“ Why ?” she demanded again. “Because I am repulsive?” Pushed on by some uncontrollable urge, Valencia added, “Is that why you have never tried to bed me?”
“Don’t. Do. This.” he growled. She could hear his breathing grow more ragged. He recoiled from her, his face falling into shadow.
No. She would not let him withdraw into his Lair. “Do you find me ugly? Ungainly?”
The glass hit the wainscoting, shattering in a shower of tiny slivered shards.
Unrelenting, Valencia reached out. His dressing gown had come open, revealing a sliver of tanned flesh below the throbbing pulsepoint of his throat. The smell of spilled brandy and aroused male was overpowering. A dusting of curls, whiskeygold in the flickering light, gleamed against his skin. Her fingers itched to thread through their finespun texture, to feel the contrast of coarse hair and smooth muscle.
Lynsley tried to knock her hand away.
She swayed, and had to brace her palm on his chest to keep her leg from buckling. Her own wrapper unraveled, baring her breasts.
Lynsley went utterly still. Not a sound, not a breath stirred between them. He might have been carved of stone, save for the sudden flicker of his gaze.
And then a groan wrenched from his throat.
Valencia looked down at the rumpled silk of his dressing gown. And felt her breath catch in her throat.
So—he was not impervious to carnal urges.
Driven by a devilish desire, she tore open the fabric and touched his rising desire.
“Oh, you wicked, wicked woman,” he rasped.
She was wicked. Wanton. Willful. And wild with need. The passion she had thought long extinguished inside her burst back into flames.
“Tell me that you want me, Thomas,” she whispered. Her teeth nipped the corner of his mouth. “Just a little?”
“God help me.” Lynsley angled his face upward, the candlelight gilding his lashes in molten gold. For an instant, she saw longing in his eyes, the same fierce desire that swirled in her own veins. “I have never in my life wanted anything more.”
His hands framed her face. The world held still for a brief instant and then he drew her down into a kiss.
“Thomas.” Longing flooded through very fiber of her being.
His self-control seemed to melt at the tentative touch of their lips. “Val-kyrie,” he whispered, his hold on her no longer gentle. His nails dug into her flesh, his mouth demanded that she yield to him.
Yes, yes, yes. Their tongues touched for the first time, and she nearly swooned as a purely primal jolt of pleasure shot through her. Mindless to all else but the need to feel his body impressed against hers, Valencia wriggled out of her wrapper and kicked it aside. Silk ripped in a ragged sigh as she pulled the dressing gown down from his shoulders. His hands left her for a fleeting moment, leaving them connected by only the deepening kiss.
It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. She moaned against his mouth, having no coherent words to express her longing. Only his name seemed to have any shape.
“Thomas.” Breaking away from his lips, she said it over and over again as her mouth traced the slant of his cheeks, the line of his jaw.
Lynsley pushed up from the leather chair, his arousal pressing against her thigh, and lifted her into his arms. Suddenly weightless, she felt herself spun through the air. A giddy laugh bubbled up in her throat and then burst free.
His voice joined hers, a low gutteral noise. Stripped away was all semblance of the polished patrician. Raw need pulsed from every pore.
“Yes, yes, yes.” Valencia urged him on with a nip to his shoulder.
He whirled for the bed, stumbling in his haste. Limbs tangled, they fell against the paneled door.
She laughed again, twisting against and wrapping her legs around his hips.
“Make love to me,” Her voice hovered somewhere between a plea and a command. “Here. Now.”
Lynsley had heard the words before, in countless terrible, taunting dreams. He held his breath for an instant, hardly daring to believe they were now real. And yet, her sun-bronzed skin was bucking against his body, her need as demanding and desperate as his own.
In his finespun fantasies, he had taken his time, kissing and caressing every lovely dip and curve of her body, drawing out the exquisite anticipation of joining their bodies in lovemaking.
“Oh, God.” His mouth touched for a moment on her throat, the rapidfire beat of her heart pulsing against his lips. “I want you so badly, I think I might break apart into a thousand pieces.”
“Not before you make me whole.” She hitched herself higher, pressing her wet warmth against him. “I’ve waited half a lifetime—don’t make me ask again.”
Right or Wrong? Suddenly the arguments seemed meaningless. All that mattered was Here and Now .
With a clenched cry, he pulled her closer.
Valencia arched to meet him, and in the next instant they were joined as one.
You and Me. That was his last coherent thought. Time unraveled. A moment passed—or was it an eternity—and then he came apart, shattering into a glorious, glittering oblivion as she echoed his cry.
Tha-thump, tha-thump, tha-thump. Valencia drew in a deep breath as her body slowly came back to earth and the wild surging of her blood mellowed to a thrum of well-being. A sweet, sweet feeling that all was right in the universe. A gentle stirring of air tickled over her bared legs, its whisper the only sound in the room, save for the rapidfire pulse of their hearts beating in perfect rhythm.
Lynsley shifted and drew back a touch,
She tried to step sideways, but her leg buckled slightly.
Sweeping her into his arms, he carried her to the bed. The sensation was strange—she was used to being strong and standing up for herself. It made her feel delicate, fragile, precious. Feminine. All the things she was not.
But at that instant, Valencia found herself longing to be a lady. A real lady, not a iron-sharp warrior, with a birthright to be part of his exalted world.
Tugging down the coverlet. Lynsley lay her ever so gently on the sheets. In the flickering light of the candle, his eyes had deepened to a luminous ocean blue, subtle and shifting as the sea.
“Come to me, Thomas,” she whispered, reaching up to thread a hand through his silky hair,
“ Lucifer and all his legions couldn’t keep me away,” he answered. “But this time, I will try and be a gentlemen, not some ravening beast.”
“I rather like to see you with your gentility stripped away,” she murmured..
He responded with a husky laugh. “Down to the bare essentials.”
“Mano a mano,” she whispered.
“Hmmm.” He teased a finger across her heated flesh, delving lower, lower.
“Thomas!” she gasped as a jolt of pure pleasure spiraled through her core.
A growled laugh.
Valencia couldn’t hold back her response. “Yes, oh, yes.”
“Not yet, sweeting.”
Withdrawing his tantalizing touch, Lynsley began exploring every inch of her flesh. Their limbs slowly entwined, lips and hands touching, tasting, in a sweetly sublime feast of the senses.
The marquess had not been a monk. He was a skilled lover, gentle, yet passionate—a master of nuance and subtle play.
Pressing a gossamer-soft kiss to her knee, he started to feather his embrace upward.
Valencia tried to force his face away. “It is so ugly”, she whispered, ashamed of her scar, and all that it stood for.
Lynsley’s mouth touched the puckered skin, and tenderly traced the jagged contours. “It is not a flaw or a failure, Val, but rather a badge of honor.”
His words made her want to weep.
“You are beautiful in both body and spirit.”
“You have a silver tongue—” Her teasing tightened to a gasp as his kisses inched higher. His stubbled cheek scraped the sensitive skin of her inner thigh, sending shivers of pleasures through her. Their bodies came together, the friction of flesh against flesh igniting a frisson of fire in her core.
Valencia could bear it no longer and closer.
Closer. Two as one.
Moving in perfect harmony.
“Do you know what the French call an orgasm?” murmured Lynsley, once their hearts had ceased their wild pounding. “ Le petit mort —the little death.”
The little death. Valencia stared up at the ceiling and smiled. Oh, something elemental had died within her tonight—all the old anger and resentment. And something new has taken life. Something she dared not say aloud.
Love. She was in love with Lynsley. And always had been.
But he must never guess.
Holding back a sigh, she snuggled into the crook of his arm, and let herself be lulled to sleep by the gentle rise and fall of his breathing.
Valencia awoke a little later to find his beautiful eyes open and intent on her face.
“Val, I . . . I am?—”
She covered his mouth with her hand. “If you say you are sorry, I swear, I shall throttle you.”
He laughed, his breath warm against her skin. “I’m not sorry,” he said. “I am . . . I am at a loss to describe my feelings.”
“You? Speechless?”
“Bereft of words.” A whisper of a smile played on his lips. “Bereft of sanity, of self-control.”
“Is that so very bad, Thomas?” she asked hesitantly. “To allow yourself an interlude of personal passion once in a while?”
“Nay, Val. Not bad, but . . . dangerous.” His lips feathered against her brow, then he rolled on his back, facing up at the darkened ceiling. “You are like an ocean storm, an elemental force of wind and waves that I seem powerless to fight.” He laced his hands behind his head. “Yet I must, else I shall be in danger of drowning in desire.”
A dappling of moonlight, soft and silvery as spun silk, traced the outline of his profile. The chiseled cheekbones, the aquiline nose, the sculpted lips, now thinned in a half mocking curl—in such a light, his features were not merely austere, aristocratic. They blurred to a far more complex shape.
She knew every nuance of his expression by heart, but the momentary flicker of longing caused the breath to catch in her throat. “I’m not sorry. Not at all.”
He turned to look at her, his eyes aswirl with intensity. Their depth seemed go on forever. Unfathomable in their beauty.
“I am not sorry either. Though God help me, I should be.”
“Stop feeling guilty,” she cried. “You are allowed to be human.”
“I could say the same for you,” he replied.
Her throat tightened. “You’ve never failed like I have.”
“Oh, but I have. More times than I care to count.” He pointed to the scar on his shoulder. “This happened in Italy. A French agent beat me badly, and left my superior with his throat cut. Blood from the severed artery was everywhere, soaking his shirt and mine. It took several minutes for him to die in my arms.” Lynsley closed his eyes, as if it might shut out the memory. “So if anything, I bungled an assignment far worse than you can ever imagine, Valencia.”
Her eyes softened. “I didn’t know.”
“No, why would you?”
“How did you deal with it—disappointing not only your compatriots but yourself.”
“By getting up and trying again, no matter how much the wounds hurt,” he said softly.
“It’s damnably hard,” she whispered.
“Aye, it is. You blame yourself, and yet you were the only one to suffer the consequences. I failed, and had to watch my closest friend and mentor bleed to death in my arms. Few people in our clandestine world of warfare escape unscathed.”
“Oh, Thomas.” Valencia drew him into her arms. “What a pair we are. Two scarred soldiers.”
He rolled onto his back, dragging her on top of him. “For a duo of aging warriors, we aren’t doing too badly.”
She arched her back, sinfully aware of the wonderfully wanton sensations against her skin. Her hair spilling in wild tangles across her shoulders. Her legs straddling his hard, flat belly. Her laughter, slipping softly from her kiss-swollen lips.
“It seems we are still capable of rising to the occasion.”
“I am not ready to stick my spoon in the wall quite yet,” he quipped. “But as for a certain part of anatomy . . . “
“Why Lord Lynsley, what a lewd and lascivious innuendo for a gentleman to make.”
“Then I shall bite my tongue and let my hands do the talking.”
Laughing, she stroked a fingertip along the chiseling of his ribs, drawing a deep groan. Perhaps it was distant thunder, warning of an impending storm. But despite the tempestuous emotions that swirled around them, Valencia felt lightning tingle through her limbs at his responding to her. At this moment, she felt them free from all else but the essence of their bond.
Two bodies, stripped of the doubts, the fears, the differences in rank that had kept them apart for so long. For against all reason. There was a powerful connection between them—it was elemental, impossible to define.
Impossible to deny.
Nothing had ever felt so right.
Lynsley hadn’t allowed himself the luxury of mindless decadence since . . . since just once, a long, long time ago. The memory still brought the bitter sting of bile to his throat.
Valencia didn’t miss the tiny change in his expression. “Thomas?”
He tried to turn to the shadows.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
He shook his head.
“You share your strength with me. Share your pain as well,” she demanded.
He couldn’t bring himself to move his lips.
“Tell me.” Her tongue grazed over the grim line of his mouth.
A sweet taste of her essence seeped inside him. He licked his lower lip and groaned.
“Tell me.”
Ruthless, ruthless woman. She wouldn’t let him retreat.
Her arms came around him, holding him tightly. Like a child.
Lynsley suddenly realized tears were dappling his cheeks. Dear God—he was crying like a babe. “You asked me about the Academy.” He managed to murmur. “Do you really wish to know why I started it? It isn’t a pretty tale.”
“Your secrets are safe with me. Surely you know that,” whispered Valencia.
“It’s not you I doubt, it is myself.”
“Look at me.” She bracketed his face with her hands, refusing him any quarter. “You think that I might be repulsed by anything you can say? Revolted.”
“God knows, you should be.”
“Never!” Her voice was fierce. “You are such a good man, it makes me weep.”
“Don’t.” Lynsley tried to make light of things. “One wailing warrior is enough, else we might drown in salt water before we even set out to sea again. The experience is not one I care to repeat.”
“A good try.” said Valencia. “But I won’t let you wiggle out of this. And go there .”
“Where?”
“Lord Lynsley’s Lair. That dark, dank cave. If you aren’t careful, one day it will bury you alive.”
“I . . .”
“I think you should tell your story, and leave the judgment to me.”
“Alright.” A leap of faith. “Finding orphans for the Academy was not the first time I had ventured into the stews of St. Giles. I was sixteen, and had a friend . . . he was several years older, and I was proud when he and some others invited me to accompany them to a brothel there. I had never lain with a woman, but . . .”
“But at that age, it is viewed as a rite of passage,” she mused. “A mark of being a man.”
“A man,” he repeated hollowly. “Oh yes, so it is.” A pause. “We passed a place, an expensive establishment, despite the dirt, where men came for young girls. The door opened . . .” His eyes shut. “A girl ran out, chased by a gentleman. A very highborn gentleman.”
“You recognized him?” asked Valencia.
“Yes,” answered Lynsley, his turning voice bleak. “A sanctimonious son of a bitch, known for his speeches in Parliament railing against the drunkenness and depravity of the poor.” He sucked in a deep breath. “The bastard beat her, and I simply watched. Did nothing to help.”
“Thomas, you were a boy.”
“I was old enough to want to bury my own prick in some poor lass’s body. I was old enough to know right from wrong. Yet I didn’t lift a finger.”
Reaching out a hand, she touched his cheek. “You counseled me to forgive myself. Now you must do the same.”
“I . . .”
Her stroking had suddenly turned far, far more intimate.
“Do we teach you that in the Academy?” he asked through a groan of pleasure.
“It’s the class before Art History.”
“Hmmph.” The sound reverberated deep in his throat. “I may have to see about changing the curriculum.”
“Why? Did I get a failing grade?” she teased.
“You are too well-schooled, Valkyrie,” replied Lynsley. “You possess too many weapons . . . it’s not fair. No man can fight back.”
“Discipline. Detachment. Devotion to duty.”
He gave a harried chuckle. “Yes, but it is proving damnably difficult.”
Valencia’s laughter joined with his, but only for an instant. “Then we must take care that I am not a distraction.”
“As well as the other way around.” Essaying a light tone, Lynsley added, “So for the good of the mission, we had better lock away passion prepare ourselves for tomorrow.”
“Right—discipline, detachment, devotion to duty,” responded Valencia, repeating her earlier words. Slipping out from beneath the sheets, she gathered her wrapper from the floor.
“ A demain, Thomas,” she whispered before returning to her room.
Lynsley lay awake for a long while, the breeze from the window raising gooseflesh on his naked body. Taking up one of the pillows and clasping it to his chest, he was acutely aware that it was still warm and sweetly scented with her perfume. The lightness of verbena and the darker lushness of exotic spices.
Like a drowning man, he drew in deep lungfuls of air.
Nothing had changed , said the rational part of his brain.
But the rest of his body begged to disagree.
Everything had changed.
He shifted, the rumpled sheets, still damp with their lovemaking, sent a shiver along his spine.
She had touched him places he had thought too well guarded for anyone to reach. Oh, what hubris to think that he had made himself invincible. Invulnerable. For years he had believed that his defenses was impenetrable. Yet they had going up in smoke.
Fool.
He must somehow pile the ashes into some semblance of a wall, must somehow keep his personal feelings separate from the mission.
Always the mission.
It had, by necessity, come between them before. As it would now.
There was no other way. She understood it, as did he. Both of them were professionals. Both of them knew it was the right strategy to keep a distance from now on.
This fleeting tryst should cool his ardor. Maybe the attraction would burn out of its own accord. After all it had been banked for ten years, and wild conflagrations were by their very nature over in a flash—a burst of flame, then embers, then ashes and cold coals.
But his heart didn’t believe it. She wasn’t a passing fancy.
She never had been.
But like other tests of his willpower, he would find a way to come through the fire.