A Masquerade in the Moonlight (30 page)

But now he was unsure, clumsy, as if the fine art of seduction were a mystery to him. “You know this is no game we’re playing, that what we’re contemplating is not any sort of conquest, but a declaration of our feelings for each other. I love you,
aingeal
. And yet, Marguerite—if you’ve changed your mind, if you’ve realized, as I have, that there are more problems than easy solutions in our being together—” For once his glib Irish tongue deserted him, and all he could do was lower his head and place a kiss against her nape, wanting her with all of his being, yet loving her enough to let her go.

He felt her melt against him, her soft body pressing back upon his chest, and he was undone. “Ah, Marguerite,” he groaned in very real pain as she turned in his arms, and a moment later their lips were pressing together hungrily, the fire that simmered between them whether together or apart once more springing into a raging inferno of passion.

Her hands grasped his shoulders convulsively, even as he crushed her against his chest, frustrated that he was so close, longing to be closer, holding on to her as if she were the only solid thing in the universe and he might go spinning off into the stars if he were to release her.

He heard her whimpers, small and low in her throat, and his blood sang with the realization she was as shaken as he—and the knowledge only added to his passion, his longing.

But then sanity, in the form of voices coming from somewhere in the gardens below them intruded, and he pulled away, breathing heavily as he strained to recover his equilibrium. “Come with me,” he whispered, taking her hand and leading her toward a narrow set of stone steps that descended into the gardens. “Don’t talk, don’t say a word—and, Marguerite, don’t think! If we think, if we stop again to consider what we’re doing, we’ll never be able to forgive ourselves.”

She slipped free of his grasp just long enough to pull her gold-spangled shawl up and around her head, concealing her face as the fading light of evening turned to deeper night beneath the shade of the tall, sculpted evergreens. And then they were running, like naughty children escaping their governess, stealing from one concealing shadow to another until, at last, Thomas saw the closed coach standing at the end of the gardens.

Looking around one last time, just to be sure no one had seen them, he pulled open the door of the coach and all but lifted Marguerite inside, jumping in after her as the driver released the brake and gave the horses the office to be off.

The sudden shift of the coach threw Thomas against Marguerite, and together they tumbled onto the velvet seat, laughing, two conspirators who had outwitted society, outmaneuvered the constraints of accepted behavior, and were now off on an adventure to remember for the remainder of their lives.

Righting himself, he dragged Marguerite onto his lap, untangling her from the shawl to see her emerald eyes shining with excitement. “I thought you would only take me into the gardens. Where are we going, Donovan?” she asked breathlessly, slipping the shawl around his neck and holding its two ends, employing them to pull him toward her even as those same eyes concentrated on his mouth.

“To heaven, my sweet
aingeal
,” he whispered back to her, trying to remember that, for all her eagerness, she was still an innocent. “To heaven,” he repeated, kissing her cheeks, her nose, her chin, her warm throat, the satiny cleft between her partially exposed breasts, “to heaven and to hell and to all the places in between.”

He kissed her then, kissed her over and over and over again as the coach moved through the now quiet streets, feeding on her youth, her willingness to explore the unknown, savoring the sweetness of her mouth as she allowed him entry.

Bracing her with one arm so that she wouldn’t topple to the floor, he used his free hand to liberate one perfect breast from her gown. He lightly teased her nipple into flower even as she lay back against his arm, allowing him to do what he willed, even urging him on by way of the hand she pressed against his, holding him to her as the coach bounced over the cobblestones.

He was almost beyond rational thought when the coach drew to a halt and he knew they had arrived at their destination. Giving her one last kiss, he readjusted her bodice, then levered her onto the seat beside him as he reached for the hooded cloak he’d brought with him and left in the coach. “Here, my darling, put this around you.”

She took the cloak, doing as he said, then allowed him to tie the strings at her neck and pull the hood well over her head, covering her down to her eyes. “Where are we?” she asked, lifting one of the leather flaps that covered the windows. “Donovan, what on earth—”

“We’re behind the Pulteney,” he answered, running a shaky hand through his hair. “I arranged for a key to the servant’s entrance.” He opened the door and took hold of her hand. “Now keep your head down and, for God’s sake, Marguerite—keep your mouth shut.”

He was halfway out the door when she pulled him back. “Is this how gentlemen sneak, ah—you know—
those
sorts of females into their rooms? And even more to the point, Donovan—how would you know?”

“I asked,” he gritted out from between clenched teeth, trying to remember Marguerite, as an innocent, couldn’t know that he was in no mood for any protracted conversations. “And you’re not to lump yourself with any of those women. You’re my affianced wife—not that I’ve exactly asked you to marry me, but I think we can safely say neither of us intends to sneak around London for the rest of our lives in order to be together.”

“Oh.” Marguerite looked at him queerly, almost as if she were about to cry, then pulled the hood further over her face and allowed him to help her from the coach.

They were through the doorway and slipping up the backstairs to the third floor within moments, Thomas searching in his pocket for the key to his rooms while maintaining a silent argument with himself over the possibility that he might just be the single most miserable cad in all of history.

He stopped at the head of the staircase to look both ways down the hallway, to be sure it was empty, then pulled Marguerite along once more, halting just long enough to slip the key in the lock and push her in, through the open door. Once the door was closed behind him and his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the single candle he’d left burning, he relaxed somewhat, still feeling like a very bad man, but now concentrating more on the fact that his bed lay just on the other side of the next closed door.

Leaving Marguerite to untie the strings holding the cloak, he searched out the tinderbox and lit several more candles.

“Good God, Donovan,” Marguerite exclaimed, looking around her. “You’ve been robbed!”

“I have?” Lowering the protective glass over the last candle, Thomas turned to survey the room, taking in the clutter he had become used to—most especially since he’d been the cause of most of it. “No, I haven’t. Everything is just as I left it.”

Marguerite folded the cloak over her arm and laid it on the back of the couch, directly beside the jacket he had worn that morning. “Well, Donovan,” she said, spreading her arms as if to encompass the entirety of the mess, “in that case—how would you know if you’d been robbed or not?”

He thought about her statement for a moment, then laughed, especially when he considered that the adjoining chamber looked, if anything, worse than the sitting room. He’d planned to clean up the place, truly he had, but time had slipped away from him and his head had been too filled with thoughts of Marguerite to play the housewife. “You have a valid point. I doubt I would know. Excuse me for a moment, all right? I, um, I have to check something in the other room.”

“Please, don’t let me stop you,” she said, balancing herself on the edge of a chair, that morning’s newspaper taking up most of the seat. “And when you get back we can talk. I really think we should, don’t you?”

No, he didn’t, actually. But he could see all her fears were back, and he decided he would give her a few moments to collect herself before he approached her again with the idea of taking up where they had left off in the coach.

“All right,” he fibbed, and went into the adjoining room, quickly snatching the discarded neck cloths from the bed and looking around him for someplace to stuff them.

“You might try that cupboard over there.”

He whirled around to see Marguerite standing in the doorway, his jacket in her hand.

“I, um, I thought you might want this—to put it away,” she said, her eyes wide as saucers as she looked at the large bed he and Dooley had been sharing since coming to London. And then she smiled. “You need a keeper, Donovan, do you know that? I never saw such a mess in my life.”

“Paddy says I was born in a pigsty,” he told her, aiming the neck cloths in the direction of the corner as he advanced toward her, amazed by her beauty as she was lit from behind by the candlelight. “When I was young I only had two suits of clothing, neither of them much better than rags, and now that I’ve come up in the world I have my man, Jenks, to pick up after me. Only he isn’t here, and Paddy makes a reluctant valet.”

As he spoke he kept walking toward her, stopping now he was directly in front of her and resting his hands on either side of her waist.

They looked at each other for a long time, neither of them saying anything, until Donovan smiled and asked, “Are you as nervous as I am?”

“More,” she answered on a sigh, curling her slim fingers around his forearms as she gazed up into his face trustingly. “I’ve thought about this all day, wondering if you were thinking what I was thinking, planning what I was preparing for. But now that it’s all actually happening I—”

“I’ll take you back,” he interrupted, prepared to do what was right even if it killed him, and it most probably would, for the ache in his chest was close to sending him to his knees.

“That might be best,” she said, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue. Her moist pink tongue. “I believe we may have been carried away with the thrill of the thing, the, um, the passions of the moment, and haven’t really considered the consequences if we were to—”

“I’d love our child beyond life, Marguerite,” Thomas interrupted, unable to look away from her mouth. “I have a big house in Philadelphia. We’d be happy there, you and I and the babe, I promise.”

She looked at him queerly, as if that thought had not occurred to her. “Why, thank you, Donovan. But I couldn’t possibly leave my grandfather.”

“I told you. It’s a big house. And I have another one in the country. That one’s even larger. We’ll take him with us,” Thomas said quickly, sliding his hands up her slim ribcage, stopping just beneath the swell of her breasts, dying a little, knowing he should go no farther even though he already knew the glory that awaited him. “Paddy says Sir Gilbert wants to see Philadelphia.”

“Wild Indians, Donovan,” Marguerite whispered, raising a hand to trace Thomas’s mustache from one side of his mouth to the other. A convulsive shiver ran through him, from the base of his throat to his toes. “Grandfather thinks Philadelphia is chock-full of them, remember? He’d be extremely disappointed if he sailed all that way just to find that there weren’t any.”

His breathing was becoming ragged. “I’ll hire some.”

“Idiot! But there’s more to be considered, and we both know it.”

“Yes. There’s going to be a war,” he said, lifting one hand to draw the hairpin from her curls, knowing he was in danger of drowning in the twin deep emerald pools that were her eyes. “I can’t imagine you as my enemy, but I suppose that’s how it will be.”

She worked her fingers into the casual folds of his neck cloth. “I see your point, Donovan. But haven’t you been taught to love your enemy?”

Thomas barely heard her over the pounding in his ears. He pressed his hands against either side of her face, lowering his head toward hers. “You’re not my enemy,
aingeal
. Never my enemy. You’re my life, my wife, my reason for living—”

“Oh, Donovan, enough of your blarney!” she exclaimed, rising on tiptoe so that their mouths were only a heartbeat apart. “Just shut up, and love me. I can’t care that you’re lying. Hold me, teach me, show me how to put a stop to this burning I feel whenever you look at me, whenever you touch me in ways I’ve never been touched before. Damn you, Thomas Joseph Donovan—
kiss me!
”

Their mouths met in a collision that echoed through Donovan’s body, shaking him to his very foundations. Their tongues dueling, their teeth nipping, he held her face against his, plundering, taking, being plundered, and not caring that he was being robbed of his independence, his lifelong detachment, his belief that love was no more than a game people played, and then moved on.

Somehow his fingers undid the long row of buttons that held Marguerite’s beautiful body confined in heavy silk and the gown whispered to the floor at her feet, leaving her clad in only the flimsiest of undergarments.

His jacket disappeared on the way to the bed, to be followed by his breeches and a single evening slipper. Marguerite’s hands worked at loosening his neck cloth, then the buttons of his waistcoat, then his shirt, until, as they fell sideways onto the mattress, her lips were branding his chest with their heat.

He gave a kick of his foot, and his second evening slipper clunked as it hit the far wall, then fell to the floor.

His fingers trembled as he divested Marguerite of her remaining clothing.

Stars exploded behind his eyes as he caressed the curve of her hip, then dipped his hand to slip between her smooth thighs, to find that she was moist and ready and—sweet Jesus, thank you!—willing.

It shouldn’t be this way. He knew it, even though he’d never had a virgin, never thought of the day he would have a virgin. She should be frightened. He should be going slowly, whispering sweet words into her ear, soothing her as she nervously allowed him one small intimacy, retreated for a moment behind her maidenly modesty, then granted him another small boon.

But Marguerite was not typical of anything in Thomas’s notions or experiences. She was, simply, a law unto herself.

And she wanted him. She couldn’t know the extent of her desire, but she certainly reveled in the passion that was building between them with the speed of a runaway horse broken free of its traces.