And Then He Kissed Her (22 page)

I
t was starting to rain. From her position on the chair beside her desk, Emma stared through the open French window that gave onto her fire escape, watching the long curtains stir in the storm’s breeze. She didn’t know how long Harry had been gone, but to her, a lifetime had passed. Her lifetime. As the clock had ticked away the minutes and chimed the hours, remembrances had run through her mind one after another.

White dresses with mud on them, and Mama’s placating voice making excuses to Papa about why Emma’s best Sunday dress was muddy
again
.

Mouthing hymns in church, trying not to sing out loud and offend God’s ears.

Having her hair cut…the scent of a burned book…Papa at the other end of the dinner table and a month of cold silence.

She touched her cheek, and felt her throat closing up until she couldn’t breathe. By sheer will, she forced her father out of her mind and thought of Auntie instead. That was better. She began to breathe again. Auntie had been capable of showing affection. Auntie had never gone days without speaking to her. Auntie, she knew beyond doubt, had loved her.

But there were memories of sitting up straight, and reminders to wear gloves, and not to run, and not to become overwrought, and to always be nice. Waltzes are one foot apart. Dessert forks go above the dinner plate. Handkerchiefs are never starched. Gentlemen have animal spirits. People don’t kiss unless they’re married or engaged.

Harry’s words came back to her, words that hurt because they were true.
Mrs. Bartleby isn’t you. She’s your Aunt Lydia…. Where is Emma? What happened to her? What happened to the little girl who liked rolling in the mud and singing off-key?

She knew what had happened. In exchange for affection and approval, she had paid the price of losing herself, bit by bit, in thousands of tiny, imperceptible pieces taken out of her over many years, until she had become a woman half starved and half smothered and only half alive.

And then Harry had kissed her and everything had changed. She had come awake at that moment, as if after a long winter’s sleep. Afraid, yes, but so awake and alive—in every fiber of her being and every cell of her brain and every whisper of her soul. Yet to night she had thrown all of that aside and reached instead for the smothering safeness of what was familiar and approved.

She closed her eyes and breathed deep, thinking of the things he’d done to her in his office and the shocking things he’d said he wanted to do. Just thinking of it all made her whole body fiery with shame and excitement.

Take me upstairs.

She would have, God help her, a lifetime of virtue melted away in the scorching heat of a man’s erotic, illicit promises, if she hadn’t known her landlady was eavesdropping on the other side of the door, hoping against hope a proposal of marriage was in the offing for dear Lydia’s niece.

Emma had a sudden, absurd desire to laugh. How shocked Mrs. Morris must have been to overhear the truth—that the viscount had been making a proposal of a very different sort, and how dismayed she must have been to learn that dear Lydia’s niece was in truth a carnal, fleshly hedonist who had relished every word he’d said. Even the painful words that were brutal, blunt, and true.

Where’s Emma? What happened to her?

A wave of resentment flared up within her against all the things she had been denied, re
sentment against all the people whose love she wanted or whose approval she craved. Resentment against herself for waiting so long to discover how rich life truly was, how exhilarating it was to take risks and how luscious a man’s kisses and caresses could be. For throwing it all away out of fear.

Too late now. Emma turned her head and looked at the vase of peacock feathers by her desk, her birthday consolation prize. Once again, she had waited until it was too late.

Being good all the time was a bad bargain.

Emma jumped to her feet and caught up her reticule from the desk, pulling out her latchkey and verifying she had enough coins for a hansom. She blew out the lamp, but though she closed the French window, she deliberately left it unlocked. She went out the front door of her flat, locked the door behind her, and dropped her latchkey into her bag.

She ducked down the back stairs unseen, out to the alley, and into the pouring rain. In her haste, she’d forgotten to don a mackintosh, get an umbrella, or even put on a bonnet, but that couldn’t be helped. She wasn’t going back.

Emma ran out of the alley, pausing at the corner. She rubbed a hand over her wet face and glanced up and down the dark, empty, rain-drenched street. Not a cab in sight.

There were always hansom cabs by the Holborn Hotel, and she headed in that direction, her steps quickening to a run. Dodging traffic at the corners, she ran all five blocks without stopping,
coming to a breathless halt beside the first available hansom. “Fourteen Hanover Square,” she told the driver, her words coming in gasps. “And there’s an extra half crown for you if we get there in a half hour or less.”

She jumped inside, and the cab jerked into motion. Emma drummed her fingers against her knees, tapped her feet, and kept changing her position on the seat as the minutes clicked by. The hansom seemed to crawl toward Mayfair by inches, and just as she’d known would happen, caution and doubt had time to whisper to her.

She didn’t even know if he was home. He was probably out. At his club. Or with some music hall dancer. What would his servants think when she came waltzing in asking to see him? What if he didn’t want her anymore? What if she was making the biggest mistake of her life?

She shoved doubts and cautions aside. Tonight she intended to become an unchaste woman. Emma pressed a hand to what Harry called her guts. She didn’t feel she was making a mistake. She didn’t feel sinful. She felt…crazy, wild. She felt like herself for the very first time.

Her tummy was quivering with excitement and fear. Her body ached with longing. This cab ride was taking forever.

She opened the window and stuck her head out, blinking against the drops of rain that hit her face. They were nearly to Regent Street. Hanover Square wasn’t far now.

Still, it seemed another eternity before the hansom turned into Hanover Square and stopped
before number 14. She didn’t verify the time, but gave the driver the extra half crown along with the fare just because she felt like it, then she jumped out of the hansom and raced for Harry’s front door, praying that for once in her life, she wasn’t too late. She grabbed the bellpull and gave it a hard yank.

Chimes sounded within, and moments later a footman opened the door. He stared at her in amazement. “Yes, miss?”

“I’ve come to see Marlowe,” she said, walking right in as if she paid calls on the viscount’s house hold every day of the week. “Is his lordship at home this evening?”

The servant looked her up and down, askance. “I…I am not certain, miss. I shall inquire. What name shall I say?”

“Tell him…” She thought a moment, wondering wildly what the etiquette was in these circumstances. Her own name was clearly out of the question, as was her pseudonym. “Tell him Scheherazade is here to see him.”

The footman frowned as if not thinking her quite right in the head, but he departed, leaving her standing in the foyer.

There was a long mirror on the wall opposite, placed to reflect the light from the windows that flanked the front door, and Emma walked toward it, laughing under her breath.

Heavens, she looked a fright. Small wonder that footman had stared at her in such amazement. Her skirt clung to her hips, and the soaking wet linen of her shirtwaist clearly showed
the layers of undergarments beneath. Her hair had come down, and her combs were long gone, lost in her race for the hansom, no doubt. She hadn’t even noticed at the time. Tendrils of her loose hair were plastered to the sides of her face, while the rest hung in a sodden tangle down her back. She was dripping water all over the golden terrazzo floor.

Emma’s lips curved in a rueful smile. Clearly she wasn’t at all versed in seduction. Any woman who possessed such a skill would have taken more pains with her appearance before showing up at a man’s door, especially when he’d vowed never to see her again. She toyed with her hair, combing it through her fingers, trying to put the tangled strands in some sort of order, but it was useless.

“Emma?”

At the sound of his voice, she met her own eyes in the mirror.
No going back now, Emma
, she thought, as she drew her shoulders back and turned toward the wide, curving staircase to her right.

He was standing on the bottom step, one hand on the elaborately carved wrought-iron railing, and the sight of him jangled her nerves even more, for she hadn’t expected him to be in a partial state of undress. He was clad only in dark trousers and a claret-red dressing gown. He wasn’t even wearing a shirt, and she could see the vee of his bare chest between the edges of his dressing gown. Her heart began to race.

He looked at her without expression, his lean,
handsome face giving nothing away. No easy smile, no teasing words. “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to see each other again.”

“There was no agreement. You decided. I decided…something different.” She grasped handfuls of her sodden skirt and started toward him. “Harry, I have to talk to you.”

He glanced up and down her body as she approached. “My God, you’re soaked to the skin.”

“I had to run five blocks to get a cab. After you left, I thought about what you said. All of it.”

He turned his face away, looked at his hand, watched his own fist open and close over the black pineapple filial atop the newel post. Then he looked at her. “You shouldn’t be here, Emma. My valet, a footman, and I are the only ones in the house. Most of the servants have gone to Marlowe Park. The rest have gone with my family to Torquay.”

Now that she’d decided to give her chastity away, she wanted to get on with it, but she didn’t quite know how to set about it. “Yes, I know, but this is important.” She glanced at the footman who hovered nearby. “Is there somewhere we could speak privately?”

He rubbed a hand over his face. “Lord, we wouldn’t want anything to be easy today, would we?” Heaving a sigh, he turned and gestured to the staircase. “Come on.”

He led her up the stairs to the drawing room. Once they were inside, he reached for the bell-pull. “I’ll have Garrett light a fire.”

“No, no. I don’t need a fire. I’m not cold. It’s
August. And besides, after all those things you told me, how could I be cold? I feel as if I’m on fire.”

He looked at her for a moment, then he closed the door, leaned back against it, and folded his arms over his chest. “What do you want to talk to me about? I thought we both said a great deal already this evening. What more is there to say?”

“I want to tell you a story.”

He stirred against the door, clearly impatient with this. He unfolded his arms. “You came here at this hour in the pouring rain to tell me a story?”

She nodded and began to laugh. “Yes. Crazy, isn’t it?”

“Emma—”

“It all started with this peacock fan. This big, extravagant peacock fan. It was so expensive, and so impractical, but it was gorgeous and exotic and I wanted it so very desperately. I dithered for days, going back to that shop several times, but I could never bring myself to buy it. It cost two guineas, Harry. Two! You know how I am.”

That made him almost smile. Almost. “Miserly.”

“Frugal.”

“What ever you say.”

“Anyway, the day you told me you wouldn’t publish my new manuscript was my birthday, and—”

“Your birthday? I didn’t know. You should have told me.”

“I never expected you to know my birthday. I
know how you are about things like that. And besides, no employer knows his secretary’s birthday. Anyway, I was so angry with you because you didn’t know who Mrs. Bartleby was, and I thought you hadn’t read any of my work, and I was going to resign my post, but by the time I was halfway home, I had talked myself out of it. I do that, talk myself out of things I want because they are impractical or frivolous or improper.”

“Yes, and unless I’ve gone completely off my onion, we had an argument on that very topic earlier this evening.”

Emma persevered. “I decided to go and buy that fan as a birthday present to myself, so I went to that shop, but when I got there, another woman was buying it. She was just a girl, a young, pretty girl in her first season, and she was taking the fan to a ball. I had waited too long, you see, and lost my chance to buy it. And right there, in that shop, I suddenly saw the whole history of my life laid out, with me making the same choices over and over, choices that were good, safe, sensible, respectable. Waiting for Mr. Parker to propose, waiting to buy that fan, waiting for you to publish my writing, when I knew in my guts you’d keep rejecting it.”

She took a step closer to him, then another. “The point is, all my life I’ve hung back, never going after what I really wanted, trying to be content with settling for less. Meanwhile, life went on all around me, but I was never really a part of it. That’s what spurred me to resign my post.”
She stopped in front of him. “You see, when I watched that girl walking out the door with my peacock fan, I thought to myself that was only right. After all, it was the springtime of her life, and my own springtime had passed me by years before. I let it happen. I let it slip away. I’ve let so many beautiful things slip through my fingers in my life because I’ve been afraid. I don’t want this to be one of those times.”

She touched him, cupped his face in her hands. “I want what I missed, Harry. I want my springtime.”

He straightened and unfolded his arms. Grasping her wrists, he pulled her hands down, holding them in a hard grip. “Let’s get this clear. What, exactly, are you trying to tell me?”

“I want you to make love to me. Is that clear enough?”

He didn’t look happy about it. His mouth turned down with an almost sulky curve. “You know I’ll never marry again.”

“I didn’t ask you to marry me.”

“This means an illicit affair. Are you sure that’s what you want?”