Page 17 of When Jess Wainwright’s Curiosity Was Satisfied (Wainwright Sisters #4)

Chapter Seventeen

J ess had only seen one illustration of what he was preparing to do to her. In that picture, the courtesan had sprawled with abandon over a coverlet while a man buried his face between her legs. The woman’s back had been arched, and her hands were tangled in her lover’s hair.

In her naivete, Jess had thought that was the only way to position herself.

When his teeth grazed her inner thigh again, she set her nerves aside. She knew she was woefully ignorant of all but the most straightforward lovemaking. “Although this isn’t quite what I pictured, I’m placing myself in your hands,” she informed him somewhat primly.

He laughed into her skin, and the rumble of it made her body clench. “This isn’t a lesson, Jess. Let your body relax and enjoy the experience.”

Jess took a deep breath and willed her muscles to surrender to what he was doing.

“Good girl,” he murmured, as he skated his nose up her thigh again.

“I’m not your girl,” she groused as her body tingled. “Good or otherwise.”

“In this moment, right here, right now, that’s exactly what you are,” he contradicted as he nipped her skin. And then his mouth was right there, swallowing the bundle of nerves. She bucked against him and he laughed again. His tongue swirled over her and she could feel herself quaking and melting. She’d been on edge for days, worried about her sisters’ protective gestures and what the repercussions of this agreement would be, and this felt like a reconciliation of what she wanted but was afraid to claim.

She glanced over her shoulder and the sight of him clearly enjoying her torment, his eyes closed in concentration, made everything inside her start to climb. “This isn’t part of our wager, we agreed,” she reminded him again.

“Just let go, dragonfly. And stop talking,” he reprimanded with a slap to her bared cheeks. She gasped at the sting, and the determined suction of his tongue. She was gripping the ladder so hard she was afraid she’d have splinters.

She held her skirts in one hand and watched as he licked two of his fingers. When he thrust them inside her and bit down subtly on her clitoris she rose to her toes. She was desperate to escape the pressure, but she never wanted it to end.

Her hips ground against his face and he groaned. That naughty, feral groan was what her body had been waiting for. The pulse started in her sternum and lodged in her stomach, and then in her center.

Jess finally let go. He swallowed all of it as her legs shook and she sagged against the ladder. He had an iron grip on her hip, holding her there while he gulped down her release. If he’d possessed the temerity to loosen it, she’d have sunk to the floor. Boneless and dazed.

When he stroked her back and set the hand that had been holding her skirts firmly on the ladder again, she was suddenly shy.

He rose to his feet, and when he tipped her face toward him, she could see the glistening drops of her arousal in his beard. “You’ve no reason to be ashamed. Especially not with me.” He brushed a soaked lock of hair from her neck.

“It was over quickly - and you received nothing in return.”

He kissed her then, and she could taste herself on his tongue. “I wanted to see you come apart for me, dragonfly.” He lifted her hand and pressed it to the front of his trousers. They were wet and the grin he tossed her was smug. “I received what I wanted in return. I’ll receive it again when I remember how you looked when you finally let me give you what you needed.”

“That’s all it took for you to spend as well?” She asked in astonishment.

“Only with you. It was a near thing in the wardrobe today. The alchemy you wield is a dangerous thing to my self-control.”

Now Jess was the one who felt like preening. She considered her mission an unmitigated success. She’d wanted to assert a sort of dominance over him, because she’d loved the feel of the power sluicing through her veins in the wardrobe.

“I like the thought of my alchemy rendering you senseless and chaotic.”

His chuckle held a bitter edge. “More fool I for letting you find the chinks in my armor,” he said as he took her hand and pulled her toward the settee in the center of the room. He collapsed onto it, and dragged her onto his lap.

She resisted at first, wrapping her hands around his biceps and straining away. He grinned and shook his head.

“The hour grows late and I need to avoid discovery.”

“A quarter of an hour more will arouse no suspicions.”

“Only for a moment.” Jess was relenting because she’d never in her life felt so untethered and without a compass.

He settled his hands around her waist and she leaned in, until her head was nestled in the crook between his shoulder and neck. She pressed her face to the skin there and inhaled the scent of sulfur and leather that always seemed to cling to him.

“Tell me about the mines,” she murmured.

His chest rose and fell in a deep sigh, and she sensed his reluctance.

“I try not to think about the mines and all they took from me.”

“You’ve revealed virtually nothing about whence you came and why you settled in Heathsted.”

He tipped his head and rested it against the tufted back of the sofa. “Caris and I settled here because our sister Gwyn wed a man from hereabouts. Simon Cuthbert. When he got the gold bug, she followed him to California, and left Davy and Ella in our keeping.”

“Why would she leave her children behind?”

“They didn’t know what awaited them in America, and she promised to send for them once they were settled. Her letters have become more and more infrequent, and the most recent one…” He blew out another sigh and closed his eyes.

“The most recent one?” Jess prompted.

“She finally told us she’d decided to leave Davy and Ella here - and asked if I’d become their permanent guardian.”

“You seem conflicted about her decision.”

His eyes flickered open and his gaze centered on hers. “I understand her reasons, and I love them. I’m not hesitating because of that. My sisters and I lost our father when we were too young to remember him, and our mother and our eldest brother to a mine explosion when I was barely fourteen. To willingly give up the keeping of those dearest to you? I cannot fathom it.”

In that moment Jess finally acknowledged to herself that Cadoc Morgan was far more complex and intriguing than she’d first thought. “That’s why you stepped in to raise your sisters? Even though you were nearly as young?”

His expression closed. “There was no one else to do it. I did what I had to because Ma wouldn’t have wanted us separated. And my elder brother Griffin would have found a way to haunt me to the end of my days.”

She laid her head against his chest. “I was barely five when our mother died. Arie is truly the only mother I’ve ever known. Our father fell apart after the funeral, and it was up to her to keep us in shoes and food. Even after he roused himself from the pit of drunkenness, he sought comfort elsewhere. We recently found out we have a gaggle of half sisters we knew nothing of.”

“My old man loved the bottle far too much as well. To the detriment of everything else in his life. Including his family. I think Mam was relieved when one of the dray carts mowed him down as he was stumbling home.”

“And what of your brother Griffin? Do you think he was relieved?”

“I think he was relieved, but sorry too. Da was the one who taught all of us to sing. And he used to write all of the things he used to compete in the Eisteddfod.”

“What is the Eisteddfod?” The word mangled itself on her tongue.

“It’s a Welsh singing competition. Before he passed, Da placed in it almost every year. Griff followed in his footsteps and he nearly won everything the year before he died.”

“So all of you can sing?”

“We can all carry a tune, but Griff was the one who inherited Da’s bardish talents.”

“Will you sing something for me?”

He began with a low hum, and then she felt the rumble of the words building beneath the ear pressed against his chest. His warm baritone surrounded her, like hot tea and a shawl.

“When thy father went a-hunting, a spear on his shoulder, a club in his hand. He would call the nimble hounds, ‘Giff, Gaff; catch, catch, fetch, fetch!’ He would kill a fish in his coracle as a lion kills its prey. When thy father went to the mountain, he would bring back a roe-buck, a wild boar, a stag, a speckled grouse from the mountain, a fish from Rhaeadr Derwennydd. Of all those that thy father reached with his lance, wild boar and lynx and fox, none escaped which was not winged.”

When his voice tapered off she remained where she was. His arms tightened around her instead of loosening - the only indication he was as loath to sever their connection as she was.

“Was that song about hunting?” She finally broke the silence to ask.

“Aye, Griffin used to sing it to all of us by the fire at night. After Da passed. It’s the oldest song in our language - but I’m not as fluent as my brother was. Hence my English translation. It’s a lullaby about the death of a boy’s father and his legacy.”

“You can hear the yearning in the melody. It’s beautiful.” She was too shy to tell him she thought the singing itself was beautiful, that she thought he was beautiful in ways she never expected him to be. He was a study in contrasts and the more time they spent together the more aware she became of how deep those contrasts went.

“The yearning is probably why we loved it so much. Our Da was troubled and we didn’t have many good memories. We probably wanted to gild them.”

“Is that why you’re so overwhelming sometimes? Because you are so accustomed to fighting for everything?”

He chuckled darkly and rested his chin atop the crown of her head. “Caris says I’ve always been a scrapper. She said even when I was a drammer, I wrapped a cache of rocks in a rag so I’d have something to defend myself against the whip.”

Jess was shocked. “They whipped you? I knew the treatment of children in the mines was deplorable, but I hadn’t realized it was so bad.”

“I have the scars on my back and my mangled fingers and a bum knee to prove it. But suffice to say it wasn’t just the pit boss I had to watch out for. It was competitive, and there were explosions and the dust and damp all the time. I was heartily relieved twenty years ago when women and children were prohibited from going underground.”

Jess nodded. “The Mines Act of 1842. I was only eight, but when Arie read about it to us I remember thinking I’d never again take the clean air of the countryside for granted.”

She couldn’t resist nuzzling into the space beneath his chin and pressing a kiss to his scruffy jawline. “Do you miss any of it now that you’re standing on the outside looking in?”

She felt him swallow. “Just Griffin and Mam. I wonder if they’d be proud of what I’ve accomplished.”

“How could they not be?” She asked as she laid her hand against his heart, and felt it thud beneath her palm and the soft lawn of his shirt. “You’re an exceptional man, Cadoc Morgan.”

Jess placed a chaste kiss on his bared collarbone.

“I’m not, dragonfly. I just do as I need to.”

“So you still plan on surrendering the lens I won earlier today?”

“Aye, I’ll give you a moment to tidy up while I fetch it.”

He rose to his feet and raised her to her own. His eyes darkened when their most intimate parts slid together, and he clenched his jaw immediately afterward.

In the beginning, Jess thought the power dynamic of their bargain was skewed in his favor. But now she was coming to know the truth. The truth was that Cadoc Morgan was more bluster and braggadocio than anything, and his defenses were the furthest thing from an impenetrable fortress imaginable. The truth was that he had made this bargain for reasons he kept to himself and sometimes the way he looked at her made Jess feel like a Greek statue on a pedestal. As if he thought she was rare and he’d be her supplicant if she asked.

He was making her question everything she thought she knew and wanted and she desperately needed to shore up her defenses against him.