There Will Be Phlogiston Page 7

  “If you are as skilled at other matters as you are at kissing, I would be willing to give you all that you wanted.”

  “Not your self, or your unstolen time.”

  Before she could answer, he tugged her chin up so her eyes met his and her mouth was vulnerable, and kissed her so fiercely that her hat fell off and half her pins sprang free. They tumbled to the forest floor, and she didn’t care, because Anstruther Jones had his mouth on her mouth, and his leg between her legs, and his fingers in her tangling hair. His breath was ragged, and his heart was thundering, and his body—revealed to her like this—felt like some extraordinarily intimate miracle, all fire and power and motion.

  They broke away, gasping and wide-eyed, and she put her fingers to his lips, wanting still to claim him. They felt a little damp, a little swollen from her attention. From her savagery and his.

  “I think,” she said, “I think you should remove the rest of your garments.”

  His kiss-touched mouth turned up at the corners. “And why do you think I should do that?”

  “Because I want to see an unclad man.” Lies. “Because I want to see you.”

  “It’s a little cold, Ros.”

  “I shall keep you warm.”

  His tie followed his coat. His waistcoat followed his tie. His shirt. His boots. His trousers. His underthings. Until he wore only skin and sunlight.

  Magnificent. A piece of the world’s wildness.

  “Turn for me.” It was not entirely a request.

  Laughing softly, Jones obliged, revealing himself to her: all his physical strength set into hard lines and masculine angles. His spine tempted her down to the tantalisingly muscular curve of his haunches, and the burn scars that ridged the skin there. She wondered if she should have been shocked by them, or found them ugly, but they were simply there, simply part of him. And, in truth, she almost envied him his lived-in flesh. She had experienced nothing that had marked her.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “Sorry, it’s probably not what you’re used to.”

  “Naked men? I should think not. I have been delicately raised.”

  “I meant—”

  “Your form is quite pleasing. And you may complete your revolution. Although,” she added sourly as she was confronted by the rest of him, “I have been led sorely astray by the Elgin Marbles. I was anticipating something altogether less imposing.”

  He glanced down at the point of contention. “Blame your kisses.”

  She rather liked that idea. It made her feel giddy and invincible and bold. She closed her hand around . . . around it. His member. And was shocked and excited by the heat of it, the way it was hard and tender at the same time, pulsing softly against her palm as though it possessed a heart of its own. “Then that makes it mine.”

  He might have laughed, but she tightened her grip and he moaned instead—such a private sound, needy and harsh and entirely ungentlemanly. Presumably all his sex reacted so when they were touched, but she couldn’t quite imagine it. And she didn’t want to. The marquess was surely handsome, but her mind recoiled from the prospect of his nakedness. She knew instinctively he would never do this for her. Be like this with her.

  And she didn’t want it. Not from him.

  She wanted Anstruther Jones. Not just his kisses and his body and his money, but the man. His rough ways, and his soft words, and the way she felt when she was with him.

  And the realisation was unexpectedly frightening.

  She had wanted to fulfil her duty to her family, secure a proper match, make her father proud. But she had never really dared to want anything for herself. She had always assumed there would be time for that . . . after . . . well, after. Whatever happened after you were married. If you didn’t become like her mother, of course.

  But suddenly there was a now. A forest and a waterfall and a horse and a man who had made himself naked for her.

  “Are you all right?” Jones brushed her cheek with callused fingers.

  Was she? No. And yes, oh yes, yes.

  She nodded, took his hands, and pulled him to the ground. He came with her easily, no struggle, no hesitation, sprawled out across the leaves like some fallen god—Ares, perhaps—fearless and unconquered, the curves and hollows of his flesh brushed here and there with gold. She settled over him, soaking up skin, heat, the intensity of this physical closeness, wishing she could shed her heavy skirts, her corset, and feel nothing but him. But if she got out of her clothes, she doubted very much her ability to get back into them, and so she told herself this was enough.

  This was not enough.

  Her body was sticky-hot, cocooned in steel and starch and wool and chamois leather, almost entirely lost to her. She could have been a spirit, hollow, untouchable, except she wanted, she desired. She was alive with it, incandescent with it. She curled her fingers into the hair on his chest, half-expecting it to be rough, but it was soft, so soft, silky little curls that stirred beneath her touch.

  His was lived-in skin. Not beautiful. He was never that. But very real. She traced the long veins that wound down his arms, feeling occasionally small pieces of roughness, scars and burns, old hurts and injuries that had healed badly or not been tended. His whole life, written on his body, laid bare for her.

  If he had stripped her, she would have been pale, pristine, blank. A book without a story.

  He pulled her close, cradling her between his knees. “You’re beautiful, Ros.”

  “I know.”

  He grinned, running his palms down her back, though all she could feel of them was the pressure of their progress.

  “I think,” she said, “we should have sex.”

  He nudged the tip of his nose against hers. “We are.”

  “No, I think you should . . . you know . . . with your member.”

  There was a silence that Rosamond thought might not have been entirely comfortable. The breeze snatched up a handful of leaves and whisked them into the brook.

  “I don’t think I should do that.”

  Well, how rude. “Don’t you want to?”

  “Yes, but there are lots of things I want to do, and that’s just one of them.”

  “What about what I want?”

  He looked up at her, the shadows mixing grey into the blue of his eyes. “You want to marry a marquess. And he’ll want a virgin.”

  “And how precisely will he tell?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never—”

  “Well,” she snapped, “I am a virgin, and I have put my fingers inside myself, on several occasions, and I have discovered no particular barrier to ingress. So I don’t see why I should be prevented from having sex if I wish to.”

  His hands swept back up to her shoulders and discovered the thin band of uncovered skin above her collar. The brush of his thumbs over it made her shiver wildly, the pleasure flooding her in heavy waves, almost hypnotic.

  Don’t stop, she thought. Never stop doing that.

  “And if I get you pregnant?” he asked.

  Oh. A chill gathered inside her, settled over her, consuming his touch. “That would be inconvenient.”

  “Just a little, love.”

  She was tired. Cold. And the colours in the glade had shed their brightness. The trees huddled too close around them, cutting the light to strips. She pressed her face against his shoulder. “I want to feel something,” she whispered.

  His arms came round her, enfolding her. “I don’t need my prick for that.”

  And the next thing she knew, she was on her back, slightly dizzied from the speed of it, the rush of grey sky and red trees that filled her eyes as the world turned upside down. Jones was tangled in her petticoats and her hair, leaves and grass clinging to his copper-dark skin, and he was laughing.

  “I thought you were supposed to have facility,” she muttered.

  “I’m not used to so many clothes.”

  “That is because you have disported yourself too much with whores and other men.”

  He pushed her
hair out of his eyes and got a knee between hers, which left her very little choice but to part her legs for him to settle between. Her skirts rucked up against his, well, his loins she supposed, outlining the shape of her lower body in a manner as blatant as it was surely obscene. Thankfully, she knew she had fine ankles, well-turned calves, and shapely thighs, even if they were currently more inclined to wrap around Anstruther Jones than display themselves to proper advantage.

  He lowered himself to his elbows and kissed her again. It was different like this, more awkward and more intimate at the same time, the way they aligned and moved together, as if their bodies wished to commune in the same fashion as their mouths. There was something undeniably carnal in the silken infiltration of his tongue, the way she could feel the evidence of his arousal pressed against her even through all her damnable layers.

  The hunger of it, the eagerness, and the vulnerability of that desire was . . . frankly . . . thrilling. She made an immoderate sound against his lips, and he swallowed it, returned it, just as immoderately, her wanting echoed and multiplied. She curved her hands over his shoulder blades—how satin-smooth his skin poured over that ridge of muscle and bone—and tugged him down, harder, closer, relishing his weight, his rough strength, until all their desperate sounds were one.

  His hand had somehow found its way under her skirts and petticoats, and was fumbling with the fastenings of her breeches. And then sliding into her drawers, the heel of his palm nudging the unnameable place that ached for him.

  “If that’s your intention,” she said, a little breathlessly, “I can very well do it for myself.”

  “It’s different when it’s someone else.”

  She scowled. “I don’t see how. It is a perfectly simple motion.”

  “That so?” He parted her, not roughly at all, but with a surety that was, in its own way, just as startling. “What sort of motion?”

  It was hard to think with strange fingers—his fingers—touching her so intimately. It made her almost unbearably conscious of her own heat, her own dampness, how soft and swollen and eager she was. “I . . . that is . . . I have discovered . . . a particular place, not inside but towards the top of the—ah, yes.”

  Her head fell back against the leaves, her spine arching. She had long believed this intense sensitivity a secret peculiarity of her body, but Jones had somehow managed to locate the area unerringly.

  “What sort of motion?” he asked again, his voice husky with passion and a hint of something that might have been laughter.

  “I usually— Oh.” She tried to catch her breath. “I— Oh. Oh.”

  How did he know? The way he touched her, gently at first, tantalising but not teasing, like the opening notes of a melody just before you recognised what it was going to be.

  “Perhaps I could just do this?”

  “That would . . . that would . . . be acceptable.”

  She lost all track of time, of everything in fact, that wasn’t her body, and the ecstasies it learned. Jones had been right, of course: with him, it was not the same. With oneself pleasure was the destination. With a lover it was the journey. And, although it was disconcerting, at least initially, to be unable to exert much direct control over the pressure or the pace, she found she could nevertheless influence it almost unconsciously through sound and gesture. For Jones was quite remarkably attentive, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on her face, his breathing just as helplessly uneven as hers, his sinewy forearm sweat-streaked and flexing as he worked between her thighs.

  It was a provocative contrast, to feel at once so powerless and powerful, exposed yet safe, as though one gave, and was taken, in the same handful of moments. But it was also hard to dwell on such matters—intriguing though they were—because she had an incipient climax to attend. He had coaxed her carefully to what seemed like the brink of one, on several heart-squeezing occasions, only to reveal some new variation of bliss he wished to wring from her. The physicality of it was quite wondrous. Truly, it was. But more than that was how dazed he looked, how frantic, as if it were his own pleasure he sought, not hers.

  It filled her with a kind of possessive tenderness. And that, strangely or not so strangely, that was what took her in the end. Drew her tight like a falcon on the brink of flight, and then set her free in a flash of heat and joy. Her wild scream vanished into the roar of the waterfall, and for a moment the world was jewel-bright in her eyes—almost more beautiful than she could bear. And then there was just the dark rush of rapture, as different to whatever satisfaction she had found with her own fingers as the sun to the moon, the phoenix to the sparrow.

  It was almost irritating.

  Almost.

  Somehow, he had seemed to know exactly the moment to cease his more intimate attentions, and there was something rather lovely in having instead his arms to hold her through the unseemly violence of her dissipating ecstasies. His ardent mouth to press kisses into the burning skin of her throat. It should, surely, have been mortifying to be witnessed in such a state, but instead all she felt was safe.

  And whatever was the opposite of lonely. For which, just at present, she could not find a word.

  Trembling still, and breathless, she abandoned herself to Jones’s embraces. It was, she discovered, more difficult to trust him with her comfort than it had been to trust him with her pleasure. The need, though just as great, was not as sharp, or as urgent. But this was her afternoon. Hers. She would deny herself nothing that she wanted. And Jones was as generous in this as in everything else. His body surrounded her, still rigid, and flushed with arousal, and she pressed her cheek against his chest, breathing in the scent of his skin.

  He smelled of the cold air, clean and sharp, fresh sweat, and some deeper musk, heavy with salt, that she thought was probably male desire.

  She wasn’t sure how long they lay together tangled in satiation and want, but the slight movement of his arm made her open her eyes. He had his still-glistening fingers pressed to his mouth. Shocked and perversely delighted, she watched him slowly lick them clean.

  “Sir, that . . . that is not gentlemanly.”

  He grinned at her, as lazy as a lion in sunlight. “I don’t give a damn.”

  His erect appendage was pressed against her hip. While it may have born very little visual resemblance to the Elgin Marbles, in rigour at least there was some comparison to be made. “Should there be some fashion of reciprocity?”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  “What if I wished it?”

  He made a rather lofty gesture with the hand that had previously pleasured her. “Then I’m told it’s a gentleman’s duty to always oblige a lady. What do you wish of me?”

  She felt that damnable, telltale blush heat her cheeks. “I wish to watch you . . . bring yourself to crisis.”

  He rolled carefully away from her, settling on his back on the leaves, reaching down to encircle his own prick. His expression was a little abashed as he muttered, “It won’t take long.”

  For some reason she found the notion pleasing. “Do I stir you so?”

  He nodded. “Always. But specially like this.”

  “Sweaty and rumpled and—”

  “Pleasured, aye.”

  She smiled. Not like ladies were supposed to smile, but like some monstrous thing, all teeth and satisfaction.

  As Jones had warned, it was not a lengthy process, though nevertheless fascinating to behold. He was all tight muscles and unexpected physical openness, his head thrown back and his face naked in bliss. It was a strange and powerful intimacy to see all these secret, forbidden things. The glide of skin between a man’s fingers as he caressed himself. The pearly moisture that gathered to his touching. The helpless curl of his toes. The hitch of his breath. The closed door of masculinity thrown wide, just for her.

  “Oh . . . God . . . Ros.”

  His voice was little more than a scratchy growl. Exhilarating. Stirring reactions in places that should surely have been replete.

  Wanting to kiss him,
but not wanting to miss a single moment of his climax, she touched her hand to his lips, and that was how he found completion, his groan smothered against her palm like the roughest, sweetest of kisses.

  She gazed at him, absurdly, helplessly enamoured. Slightly stunned by the realisation that she did, indeed, find him beautiful. Or that the word itself was lacking if she could not apply it to Anstruther Jones. A man of scars and wounds and gold, garlanded in the pearls of his own pleasure.

  “Oh my—” she swallowed a gasp of her own “—you are most extravagantly bedewed.”

  He laughed, and pulled her down, tucking her against his side, her head nestled to his shoulder. And they lay there awhile in love and bliss and silence.

  “You were right,” she said, finally. “We should not do this again. It . . . it would be too painful.”

  He made a soft sound, frustration she thought, and longing perhaps. “Or you could be with me. However you want.”

  “Is . . . is that some fashion of proposal?” She tried to make it a joke, but her voice trembled and betrayed her.

  “Yes.”

  “It is not a very creditable one.”

  “No, but it’s sincere. I’d like to make you happy, Ros. I know you’d do the same for me.”

  “What can possibly have given you that idea? We have already established that I am spoiled, headstrong, stubborn, and—”

  “And I like you.”

  Oh, why did she feel like crying? “I can’t. I’m engaged to a marquess. To jilt him for you would ruin me.”

  “And marrying him won’t?”

  It was at once a reasonable question, and terribly unfair. “You don’t understand.” She pushed away his arms, and the world felt colder outside their circle. “It’s easy for you. You don’t have anything to lose, and you only have to think of yourself. I have my family.”

  “Yes.” He still did not flinch from her. “Yes, you do.”

  Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. “I did not mean . . . That is . . . I was clumsy.”

  “It’s all right, Ros. I just think a family should do more than take from you.”