And Then He Kissed Her (14 page)

She made a choked sound, her cheeks scarlet.

He grinned at her and took a bite of truffle.

She flattened her palm on the table beside the tray and leaned toward him, her eyes narrowing as she watched him eat the candy. “I thought you did not care for chocolate.”

Harry donned his best innocent air. “Why, Miss Dove, what ever gave you that idea?”

E
mma suspected Auntie would not be so proud of her now. As she and Marlowe left Au Chocolat and started back toward Little Russell Street, neither of them spoke, and Emma was glad of it, for her feelings were in such disarray, mere conversation was beyond her.

She knew certain things were wrong. Everything in her upbringing told her that. Allowing a man to lick chocolate off her fingers was wrong. Allowing a man to sit so close to her at a picnic that his leg touched hers and his hand brushed against her thigh was wrong. Had Aunt Lydia been with them during either of those incidents, no such liberty would ever have been allowed. Had Auntie’s mere presence not proved a sufficient deterrent, her pointed little cough or the delicate tap of her parasol would have done the trick.

Notwithstanding Beatrice and her most excellent Mr. Jones, for whom she had bent the rules a bit, Emma had advised young women to rigidly enforce the boundaries of propriety in her manuscripts. Were Mrs. Bartleby to find herself in such a predicament as Emma had been in this afternoon, that lady would have stopped Marlowe at once and slapped his face.

Emma feared she was not made of such stern stuff as her fictional creation.

When Marlowe had licked chocolate from her hand and sucked on her fingertips, she’d been so caught up in how it made her feel that stopping him and slapping his face had never occurred to her. The touch of his mouth on her skin had vanquished all her good sense and staunch principles in an instant. How mortifying to know her convictions were so shallow.

She cast a sideways glance at him as he walked beside her. He had never behaved this way toward her before. He had teased her sometimes, of course, and talked a bit of his nonsense now
and then, but this was not the same. The way he teased her now was personal, intimate, flirtatious. No man had ever flirted with her before. No man had ever made improper advances upon her person, and Marlowe’s sudden propensity to do so was baffling. He could behave this way with any number of women, and had surely done so many times. Why her? Why now?

I should very much like to kiss you.

In her youth, she had sometimes thought of Mr. Parker and dreamt of kisses. She’d put aside notions of that sort long ago, buried them deep down inside herself, along with her broken heart and her crushed hopes. But she could feel those secret, romantic dreams flaring back up, dreams of a different man’s kisses—a man far less proper, far more presumptuous than Mr. Parker had ever been, a man who wanted to kiss her and made no secret of the fact, a man who made her wonder, just as she had done as a girl, what it would be like to be kissed.

Emma glanced at him again and felt an overpowering, giddying rush of excitement. She wanted his kiss. It was wrong, she reminded herself, for a man to kiss a woman to whom he was not married, or at the very least engaged, and Marlowe was the least likely man on earth to marry anyone. He was a corrupt, worldly man who had illicit liaisons with dancing girls. And it wasn’t as if she wanted to marry him anyway.

They paused at the corner, and still watching him, Emma touched the fingers he had kissed to her lips.

He turned his head, looked at her, and smiled. Her breathing stopped, and her heart gave a leap of queer, painful pleasure within her breast.

It was too much, that feeling. She looked away and jerked her hand down. She was a steady person, she reminded herself as they crossed the street. She did not get stirred up or want what was forbidden. She was not giddy. She was
not
wanton.

“What’s wrong, Emma?”

Marlowe’s voice broke into her thoughts. “After what happened, I don’t see how you can ask me such a question, my lord.”

He laughed. “After what happened, I think you should call me Harry.”

Emma made a sound of exasperation. “I daresay you do,
my lord
.”

He shrugged, shifting tomorrow’s edition of the
Social Gazette
and the boxes of chocolate he carried for his sisters to his other arm. “It was only a kiss on your hand.”

“You make it sound so innocent!” She realized she had raised her voice, and she took a quick glance around as they walked to make sure no one was within earshot, but the London traffic was loud enough to prevent any other pedestrians from hearing their conversation.

“I may not be as…as knowledgeable as you in matters of this kind,” she said, returning her gaze to his. “But even I know you were not merely kissing my hand! You were…you were…” Her hand began to tingle, her whole body grew warm, and words failed her.

She looked away, thrusting her gloved hands in the pockets of her skirt, and quickened her pace, but Marlowe kept up with her easily, his long strides much more relaxed than her jittery steps. “Emma,” he said as they turned onto her street, “nothing happened.” The very gentleness of his voice only made things worse. “It was harmless fun.”

“It was not harmless. Anyone could have walked into that room and seen what you were doing!”

“No one did.”

“But they could have! And it would have been my reputation that suffered for it, not yours.”

For the first time, a shadow of guilt crossed his face. His gaze shifted away from hers. “You didn’t stop me.”

“You wouldn’t let go of my hand.”

“You weren’t pulling very hard.”

She could not argue with that, for it was true. “And it was very wrong of me! Oh, how could I have allowed you to do such a wicked thing?”

“You think what just happened was wicked? Emma, you’re not going to go to hell for this, you know. No one’s going to send you to bed without any supper or take away your Christmas presents.”

That ignited her temper, adding to her already tempestuous emotions. “Don’t make fun of me!” she flared, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk a few feet from her front door.

He sobered at once and also came to a halt. “I’m not. But it seems to me you are getting
awfully worked up over a harmless flirtation, and I do not understand why.”

Because of the way it made me feel.

She wanted to shout those words at him in the midst of the street. Instead, she took a deep breath and turned away. She walked to the door of her building. “Things like that are never harmless,” she murmured over her shoulder, striving to remember Auntie’s dire warnings from her girlhood. “Thinks like that can lead to—” She stopped, hand on the doorknob.

Behind her, he gave a low, throaty chuckle. “In a confectioner’s shop? Believe me, if I’d intended what happened to lead anywhere, I’d have gotten you alone in a much more romantic place before I ever started kissing your hand.”

“How very reassuring!” She started to open the door, but his palm flattened against it, preventing her from taking refuge inside.

“What is this really about?” he asked.

“Let me go.” When he didn’t comply, she turned around to face him and scowled. “I cannot imagine what people will think about a man accosting a woman at her door in this ungentlemanlike manner.”

“What people? Your landlady? It occurs to me that you spend a great deal of time worrying about what other people think.”

“It is always important to consider the opinions of others.”

“No, it’s not. If you’re looking for what is right and wrong, you won’t find it in other people’s opinions. You won’t find it in etiquette books.
There’s only one way to figure out right and wrong.” He leaned forward, and without warning, he touched her just beneath her breastbone.

She sucked in a sharp breath.

“Look here,” he said, his palm flattening against her solar plexus, his fingertips resting between her breasts. “That’s where you’ll always find the truth.”

Painfully conscious that she was in her own street, where her neighbors could see her, Emma glanced around, but thankfully it was the dinner hour, and no one seemed to be about. “You mean truth is in one’s heart, I suppose?”

“No. What I mean is that you find the truth about everything in your guts. Your heart can lie to you. Your intuition, your instincts never do.”

“And you always follow this guide yourself?”

“Usually.” He paused and let his hand fall away. “Not always.”

It was none of her business, but she had to ask. “When you listened to your heart instead of your instincts, what happened?”

“I got married.”

“I see.” She hesitated, but she had to ask. “And which organ was it—your heart or your guts—that led you to divorce your wife?”

He made a sound of derision. “I suppose like all of society, you condemn me for what I did. Despite the fact that I was the wronged party.”

“I was brought up to believe that marriage is a sacred vow before God and not to be broken, if that’s what you mean.”

“How easy that is for someone like you to say.”

“Just because I am a spinster, it does not mean I cannot form an opinion on the morality of divorce!” she countered, stung.

“Your opinion being that no matter what my wife did, I was wrong to divorce her?”

“It’s not my place to say.”

“Not your place?” He laughed, but it was a harsh sound. “Mrs. Bartleby spends a great deal of time advising people about the proprieties, so what’s proper in a case such as mine?” His voice was low, vibrating with an anger she’d never heard him express before. “What decorum should a man adopt when his wife spends every day of her married life loathing her husband and pining for another man? Should he be civil and sporting about it all and pretend to her that it doesn’t hurt? Should he be a saint or a martyr who never lashes back?”

He turned toward her, and in the twilight, something glittered in his eyes, something cold and icy blue. “When she runs off to America with her lover, publicly humiliating him and leaving his entire family open to scandal, should he have a stiff upper lip about it? Pretend it doesn’t matter? Should he file for legal separation? Should he live celibate? Take a mistress?”

She was startled by the raw pain in his face. “You loved your wife,” she said, appreciating that fact for the first time.

“Of course I did!” He looked away, drew a
deep breath. “I wouldn’t have married her otherwise.”

“I didn’t understand that. I thought—” She paused, considering. “I suppose I always thought that if you loved her you would have gone after her.”

“I should have followed her to New York, you mean? Dragged her from her lover’s arms and resigned myself to spending my life in hell? Would that have been more proper than divorce?”

She looked at him helplessly, with no answer to offer. Divorce was an unthinkable thing to her, as alien a concept as going without a corset or not going to church. On the other hand, what did she understand about the private relations between men and women? Next to nothing.

“I fell in love with Consuelo the first moment I saw her,” he said, turning to lean back against the brick wall of the building. “I knew nothing of her character, nothing of her mind, nothing of her temperament, but I didn’t care. I fell in love with her the first moment I looked into her eyes. She had the biggest, darkest, saddest eyes I’d ever seen. I’d set myself on marrying her before the introductions were even finished. It happened that fast.”

She stared at him, stunned, her mind flashing back to the day long ago in Auntie’s drawing room when another man had confessed a similar experience.

“I was in love once, too,” she blurted out.

“Were you?”

She nodded and leaned back against the door, staring across the street, her mind’s eye seeing right past the tidy brick buildings in front of her to Red Lion Square six blocks away. “His name was Jonathan Parker, and he was a friend of my mother’s family. I vaguely remember having met him once or twice when we were small children, but after my mother died, my father cut all ties with her family and acquaintances, and I didn’t see him again until I moved to London to live with my aunt. Mr. Parker and I became friends. The best of friends.”

“Sweethearts?”

Emma drew a deep breath. “I thought so.”

“What happened?”

“He came to call at Auntie’s house nearly every day. He dined with us two or three times a week. It was uncanny how much he and I had in common, how we thought the same way about everything. At parties, if there was dancing, we always paired up for the waltzes, for we danced together perfectly. We were seen together so often, it became a forgone conclusion we would marry one day. Everyone thought so.”

“And?” he asked when she paused.

“And then, one night he went to a public ball. I was supposed to attend as well, but I developed a terrible cold and could not go. Auntie stayed home with me, but the next morning, I heard that Mr. Parker had danced all my waltzes with someone else, a very pretty girl with blond hair. Her name was Anne Moncreiffe and she was from Yorkshire.”

As she spoke, Emma was relieved that talking about it brought no pain. “Three days later, when I had recovered from my cold, Mr. Parker came to tell me, his dear friend, the happy news. He had fallen in love with Anne. She was the most beautiful, the most vivacious, the most charming creature he’d ever met, and he was going to marry her.” She paused, shaking her head, still baffled by it. “He’d only just met her, and already he had decided to marry her. The six years he and I had spent in such close company were obliterated by a mere three days with her.”

“I’m sorry he broke your heart.”

“It was not just my heart. I lost my dearest friend that day. Betrayal hurts, too.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “It does.”

“How?” she asked, curious, hoping Marlowe could explain a phenomenon she had never understood. “How does something like that happen? How can anyone fall in love in an instant?”

“I don’t know. Speaking from my own experience, I can only describe it as a sort of madness.”

“And then one comes out of it?”

“Yes. If one is lucky, the madness passes before the wedding day. I wasn’t so fortunate, but what of your Mr. Parker? Is he happy in his marriage?”

“The last I heard of him, he was happy. Of course,” she added with rather uncharitable glee, “he lives in London and his wife lives in Yorkshire.”

Marlowe gave a shout of laughter. “The recipe for true marital bliss, no doubt.”