Mistress at Midnight (18 page)

Alfred loved her. His friends loved her. He noticed how she thanked each servant every time they offered her something to eat or drink.

Even the damn cat, who more usually scurried away at any slight noise, had sidled up against her on the sofa, purring as her fingers ran through his coat.

The laughter closed in about him, removing such introspection and drawing him out.

‘We met at Taylor’s Gap,’ Aurelia was saying.

‘What were you doing down that way, Hawk?’ Nat asked the question, a frown on his brow.

Thinking about ending it all
, he might have said, but he stayed silent, waiting for her reply.

‘He was watching the view—’ the edges of her mouth lifted up ‘—and I was inveigling Lord Hawkhurst into giving my family invitations to his ball.’

‘How did you inveigle?’ Nat asked this, a wry smile on his face and when Aurelia blushed, Hawkhurst stepped in.

‘I was down that way to look over Cloverton’s matching greys. The ones you had told me of, Nat.’

‘And did they measure up?’

He was pleased with the change of topic. ‘They are being delivered next week to Hawthorn Castle. You can come down and see what you think.’

Dinner was a beautiful meal, the French chef presenting two main courses of seafood and chicken along with vegetables, savouries, creamy sauces and a selection of cakes.

Aurelia had been placed next to Lillian and Lucas Clairmont and as far away from Lord Hawkhurst as the table might allow, though looking up once or twice, she found his gaze upon her.

Lillian spoke of her children and of a manor house that they were trying to modernise.

‘Hope embroidered the neckline of my
dress,’ she said, holding her chest forwards so that it might be viewed properly. ‘She is twelve and our oldest.’

‘You must have been awfully young, then, when you had her.’ Aurelia could not help the comment for Lillian Clairmont barely looked any older than she was.

‘Oh, Hope and Charity came to us in a more roundabout fashion. They were always meant to be ours, but it took them a while to find us.’

‘Sometimes that happens to people. Take Nat, for example. I found him again in the most unlikely of places.’ Cassandra laughed as she spoke.

‘Where?’ Aurelia began to smile.

‘In the bedroom of a run-down boarding house in London. Spying on me.’

‘Protecting you, more like.’ Nathaniel Lindsay, across the other side of the table, was adamant in his understanding of the situation.

‘By insisting that I remove my clothes?’

At Cassie’s interjection everyone began to laugh.

It felt so good to be accepted by a company of people who did not judge and who all had their strange quirks and peculiarities.
Hawkhurst, however, seemed to remain outside the hilarity, an observer rather than a participant.

Aurelia wanted to sit beside him and take his hand and make him smile as a way of thanking him for asking her tonight. With delicious food in her stomach, a warm cat snuggling across her feet and a group of interesting and genuine people around her, she could not remember ever feeling quite as relaxed.

Much later, after the best evening of her life, she stood with Stephen Hawkhurst and listened to the departing carriages of his friends. Alfred had sought his repose a good few hours earlier and so they were left alone, a dozen candles on a sideboard and not a servant in sight.

Hawkhurst’s hand came forwards. ‘Stay the night, Aurelia. With me.’

No artifice or pretence. No chance to misunderstand just exactly what he was asking. Just them in a shaded corner of his house, the midnight closing in and the promise of all that had begun at Taylor’s Gap sharp upon the air.

She had dreamt of this, imagined such
words in her bedroom late at night, the emptiness inside her calling to be assuaged. But now…now that he had said all that she hoped for, what could it mean?

‘If others knew?’ She shook her head.

‘They won’t.’

‘Just us, then?’ Barely spoken, soft with desire. ‘A secret?’ The words were out, falling into permission. Her sisters never waited up for her and, if she returned before daylight, only John would know of her absence and he was more than loyal.

At eighteen she had never had a chance, but at twenty-six she did and every fibre of her being wanted to know what it would be like to feel the things that poetry and prose wrote of, the ache that lovers died for, the completeness that overrode armies and philosophers and kings.

If she started this in the way she meant to go on, would there be hope for them beyond the call of duty, diplomacy and expedience? She had made so many mistakes that she was frozen with the fear of making another one and yet…for the first time in her life she knew those things society decreed wrong would be so very right for her.

With a trembling breath she made her
glance meet his, and a belief in herself, badly battered by Charles, began to reform.

Aurelia’s mismatched eyes were so damned fine and she had painted her nails red, the colour of lust and of the roses in a vase to one end of the mantel, overblown and wilting.

The heat of her was beguiling, her lips full and beckoning. He had promised to take nothing and yet here she was offering him everything, his blood thundering as if she were naked.

When she lifted her hand to wipe away a tendril of hair he saw she shook, a beam of sudden moonlight at the window turning her hair to scarlet.

The tie at his throat felt too tight and the waistcoat, jacket and trousers heavy against a rising want.

There were so many other things he needed to know about her, but his mind could only concentrate on her form and her smell and on the dimples in her cheeks which deepened with the smallest of movements. He wanted to touch her, wanted to run his hands across the curves and the softness until he knew each and every contour
of her body. But she stopped him with more words.

‘I am not quite as practised in the sensual arts as you might imagine, Lord Hawkhurst.’

Her admission took him from his reveries with a startling quickness.

‘Charles and I were…distant, you see.’

‘How distant?’

‘Very. He enjoyed women with more experience than I had.’

‘God.’

‘I was glad for it.’

His erection rose up another notch, pushing against the superfine of his trousers. He did not wish to frighten her, but a lust unlike any He had ever known before caught him off guard. How did she do this to him, and so easily? He could not remember one other woman who had affected him as she did.

Reaching out, he pushed the gown gently off her shoulders, cupping the bounteous beauty below the silk.

Heaven. He watched as she flinched at the feel of him against her nipple, his other hand moving to her throat and her cheek and tipping her lips to his own.

Home. He was there as his mouth covered hers and the feel of warm familiar sweetness
surrounded him. Deepening the kiss, he pushed inwards, taking all that she would give him and more, force overcoming softness in his need to possess her. Her skin beneath his palms melted like silken liquid, the stain of her red tresses across the paleness sending sense into greater frenzy.

‘I want all of you.’ The voice sounded nothing like his own, hoarse and desperate, and pulling her hair into a knot, he anchored her close, his other hand around the curve of her bottom.

She let him lift her against his chest, his breath on one cheek and his heartbeat against the other.

‘My room is near.’

Up one flight of stairs and then down a short corridor. He carried her as though she were the weight of a feather, though the burden of acquiescence caught solid between them, heavy with suggestion.

When his door shut Aurelia closed her eyes against the four-poster she could see in the corner, and she kept them closed as he lay her down upon the softness, catching breath and counting seconds.

‘I would never hurt you, Aurelia.’

She could no longer dwell in her own darkness. ‘I know.’

Her scarlet gown was bright against pale coverings and white sheets, and when he removed her shoes and stockings she did not flinch.

His touch strayed to a higher place and she waited for denial or for panic. Neither came, although her breathing worried her. No longer controlled or bridled, the crisp feel of cotton beneath her fingers clasped tightly against an escalating need. When he peeled back her bodice she felt the material fall loosely to her waist, her skirt hitched up to join it.

She felt him look at her, felt his glance know her breasts and her legs and the curved sway of hip, felt how he tethered her with her hair, holding her still, inescapable. Her breath in the silence was ragged, wanting the finesse and the adroitness she knew he would be capable of, wanting the torn-away utterness of what it must be like to be truly loved.

Loved. Her lips curved upwards. He had never said it once and he would not. This was lust and passion and desire on both sides, though the expression in his eyes was one
she had not seen there before. Redemption, if she might name it. Her thighs fell open with a will of their own, the hem of scarlet silk cool on burning skin.

He did not hurry. He did not plunge in as Charles would have, caring not a whit for any satisfaction that she needed. Rather he tarried, a small caress here, a longer one there, pressure on a place she had not thought to know, her response surprising as she rose to his ministrations.

A midnight magic
.

‘Let go, sweetheart,’ he whispered as she tensed against ardour. ‘Let me take you to a place that is wonderful.’

One finger came inside her, widening the tightness, his other hand flat across her stomach keeping her still. Faster and then faster, his thumb hard against the bud of promise and as she cried out he pressed down, her deep muscles clenched together so that she knew a growing restless wave of release, the ache of it arching her back and making her shout out into the darkness. The keening groan held rapture on its edge.

She was boneless, formless, spent. But she was also elated. She had never felt this pull of seduction, this completeness that took
her from this world and far off into a place where all she wanted was more. She no longer cared to be soft or docile or gentle. Finally.

As he brought her fingers to the place his had just left and she felt the wetness, she was mute with the knowledge that her body was not ‘dried out and prudish and useless’ as Charles had been wont to label her.

The gift was like a treasure.

A single tear traced its way down the side of her cheek.

‘Never leave me, Hawk.’ She needed to say it, to make him understand. Not just tonight. But for ever.

‘I won’t.’

When he stood to remove his clothes she watched, the sculptured strength of his body revealed with each discarded garment, though as he took off his trousers Aurelia saw a vivid red scar curling down the whole front of one thigh.

Her finger went out to touch the knotted and raised flesh of a wound beneath each pad.

‘Someone has tried to kill you?’

‘More “someones” than you could imagine.’

‘But not now?’

He only smiled and she understood that whatever took him from England’s green and pleasant lands was not finished yet.

She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he had been with a good number of beautiful women. But it was more than just the physical, Hawkhurst thought.

Aurelia was a woman who had reached out to the ice-cold core of him and begun a thawing. He could feel it inside, the tense hard ache of loneliness dissolving.

She had lived and she had lost and yet still she triumphed and it was this more than anything that made hope rise unbidden. Hers was not the innocent purity of Elizabeth Berkeley which he could have so easily ruined, but another quality that held the kernel of a faith surprisingly and exactly right.

For him.

Like two halves coming together as a whole.

Usually he took women quickly because his life had been bound by danger and by little free time and because he did not wish for the commitment that all of those he had bedded seemed to demand. But this time was different. This time he wanted the night
to stretch on for ever, the moon across their skins and a joining connecting body and soul.

Rolling on to her, he opened her thighs with his knee, signalling purpose. She was damp and she was ready, the swollen flesh of her sex calling them together. With one hand under her bottom he raised her up so that the angle of their connection might be more conducive to pleasure and, poised at the opening of her womanhood, he waited.

‘I will be gentle,’ he promised as he pushed in. She was tight and small and when her eyes widened at the pain he waited until she could accommodate him. Then with one hard and heavy push he was in her, buried to the hilt, her flesh calling in the ancient rhythm of life. Aurelia was his, her hair wrapped like flame about his hand and the generosity of her breasts between them.

The ache of ownership was the most powerful aphrodisiac Hawkhurst had ever experienced and, emptying himself into heat, he gave no thought to protection or hesitation, just need, desperate and all consuming.

He had bruised her, he thought later, with his fingers as he clung to hope and with the drive of his manhood into softness. But she had stiffened as he did, her nails a-tremble
on his skin and urging him into a response he could not stop.

The little death, the French called it—the time when a lover died and went to Heaven and back. Joined by sex they moved inwards, straining, wanting the moment to last for ever, listening to each other’s heartbeat and knowing each other’s breath, the rush of it beaching in relief as wave after wave depleted sanity.

Her fingers strayed, holding the small bud of his nipple, causing Hawk to simply stop breathing.

He would impregnate her; he knew he would, his seed climbing into fertile flesh and growing. He wanted to see the swell of motherhood on her flat pale belly.

Surprise hit him fully as he hardened again, the clenching surge of it taking breath as he turned her against him and pinned her motionless—slowly this time, listening to the rhythms of the long and silvered night. She cried out as his fingers found her desire and brought her with him.