Taming Beauty (13 page)

Lilith’s eyes remained open as she made tender love to him, watching him until the first shudder wracked her slender frame. Her eyelids fluttered shut and a soft, tremulous cry erupted from her parted lips. Her release triggered his own and Jasper let himself go, bowing up off the bed and spending long and hard within her body.

Some minutes later, Lilith pressed a chaste kiss to his lips and gently disengaged their bodies. Slowly she climbed off his lap and urged him down on the bed, following him and curling up on her side beside him but not touching any part of him.

Jasper reached for her, fully intending to hold her until she fell asleep before he found his own bed.

“Oh, don’t,” she exclaimed on a huff of breath, wriggling away. “I’m all dewy.”

“Dewy?” He ignored her protests and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close and running a hand down her spine. Her skin was unfathomably soft and slightly…dewy.

“I perspire,” she whispered, ducking her head in a gesture that, coming from any other woman, he might have taken for shyness.

“Everyone perspires,” he replied with a laugh.

“Yes, well, I perspire more than a lady ought to,” she said as if she were admitting to a sin of scandalous proportions. “Especially when I am nervous or unsettled.”

“Or when you exert yourself in balmy weather,” he teased.

“You don’t find it rather grotesque?”

In answer, Jasper ducked down and licked her from temple to jaw.

Lilith squirmed about, giggling like a young girl, so he continued the torment, tracing a path down her neck, her skin tasting of her exotic blend of soap and faintly of salt and her own musk.

“Oh…stop…Jasper,” she panted, her laughter escalating until it echoed around the cramped bedchamber.

“Delicious,” he proclaimed, nipping at her shoulder before relaxing back on the bed once more, an odd sort of contentment washing over him.

Lilith curled one leg over his hip, her hand coming to rest lightly on his chest. Carefully, as if testing the protocol of such intimacies, she rested her cheek on his shoulder.

“One day soon I should like to see your hair down.” Sifting his fingers through the curls piled atop her head, he settled her more comfortably against him.

“It gets tangled all around my neck and shoulders,” she answered drowsily. “Like a heavy, woolen hood.”

“Makes you dewy, does it?” It occurred to Jasper there was no coverlet on the bed, only a thin sheet that hadn’t been pulled down.

“Gloves, too,” she replied around a yawn. “I cannot abide gloves.”

“Poor darling,” he soothed on a yawn of his own.

“Perpetual perspiration, it is the bane of my existence.”

“What a charmed life you’ve led if a little sweat is the bane of your existence,” he retorted, snuggling against her unabashedly.

“My life has been rather charmed,” she agreed quietly, an odd note in her voice he might have examined had oblivion not chosen that moment to claim him.

Lilith slept right through dawn, right through what Alabaster would later claim was the prettiest sunrise she’d seen since leaving her native Scotland.

She might have slept straight through the morning had not someone, or a number of someones, commenced banging on the door to her bedchamber.

Except it wasn’t her bedchamber but instead a rather dismal room smelling of mildew and owned by the man who leapt from the narrow bed even as Lilith came fully awake.

Where Jasper thought he was going was anyone’s guess, but wherever it was he made it no farther than the center of the room before the door swung open.

“Goodness, that’s a sight worth waking up early to behold,” Alabaster said by way of greeting.

Lilith had only a moment to wonder why her grandmother, a woman renowned for her aversion to mornings, would be knocking upon her borrowed bedchamber door, before Harry sidled by Alabaster, quickly followed by Kate.

Two pairs of innocent eyes went unerringly to the naked man in the room, staring quite shamelessly even after Jasper whipped around and gave them his back. As if his taut, bare bottom wasn’t an equally lovely sight to behold.

Alabaster blithely stepped around Jasper to retrieve Lilith’s robe from the chair back where Tula had left it, precisely as she’d done every night since they’d arrived in this pretty little corner of Cornwall.

“Cover yourself, dearest,” her grandmother said, eyes twinkling. “Lest you give your sisters more reason than they already have to bemoan their bosoms.”

“I don’t think they’ve yet realized I am here.” Lilith rose from the bed and stepped over Jasper’s trousers balled up on the floor where she’d tossed them only hours previously. She held out the silk robe, waving it about when he didn’t immediately take the offering.

Without a word, and with surprising dignity all things considered, the ninth Baron Malleville donned a red silk kimono embroidered with bright blue and yellow dragonflies.

The garment did not begin to cover his muscled physique, the hem reaching only to his knees while the sleeves brushed his elbows, but with a minimum of pulling and tugging, he managed to cover the essential parts.

Harry giggled and, girls being girls, Kate joined in, the two of them tittering behind their hands, eyes round and cheeks pink.

“Out.” Lilith inflected the word with as much hauteur as a woman entirely unclothed possibly could, but all she did was draw the girls’ gazes her way.

Kate blinked and let out a forlorn sigh, looking from Lilith’s breasts to her own as yet nearly miniscule bosom.

“You’ve still time,” Harry said, her voice laced with the remnants of her laughter. “While I suspect I am quite doomed.”

“Oh, for mercy sake, they are merely breasts,” Lilith said.

“Only a woman with breasts that beautiful could ever say something so patently condescending,” Harry said.

“Lilith can be a tad condescending,” Kate agreed. “And the tiniest bit conceited about her beauty.”

“Out.” Jasper fairly shouted the single word, likely expecting the lot of them to scurry from the room as Tula had done the night before.

He ought to have known Dunaway’s daughters, not to mention the infamous Alabaster Sinclair, were made of sterner stuff.

“I trust you will seek an audience with Lord Dunaway straightway.” Alabaster turned her frostiest gaze on Jasper, though he would have to be blind not to see the amusement pulling at her rouged lips. “After you have donned appropriate attire, of course.”

“Of course,” Jasper agreed with a sharp nod.

“So long as we understand one another.”

“We do, madame.”

Lilith looked from Jasper to her grandmother, panicked by the speed with which events were moving, yet unable to form a coherent word that might stop them. Or at the very least, slow them down long enough for her to catch up and wrangle them back under her control.

“Then we shall bid you a good morning.” Alabaster crossed the room and held open the door, waving for Harry and Kate to proceed her out onto the balcony.

The door closed with a soft click, footfalls tapped out a slow measure on the warped boards beyond, echoing around the bedchamber where Lilith had foolishly believed she could steal one night of pleasure.

Jasper slowly turned to face her, his heavy-lidded gaze drifting over her from her bare toes to the top of her sleep-mussed coiffure before coming to rest on her face.

For the first time in her life, Lilith felt ugly in her own skin, soiled and stained by a past she could not alter, a past she had never truly regretted until she’d met him and realized all she would never have.

Lilith fought the urge to cover her nakedness, to hide the ugliness seeping from her exposed flesh, as grotesque as the perspiration springing up along her temples. “I’ll speak with Alabaster and exact her promise to keep silent. You’ve no reason to seek out Dunaway. He needn’t know anything happened between us. You can still marry Sissy.”

“Marry Sissy?” he repeated, something dark shifting in his eyes. “What sort of man would I be if I married your sister after spending the night in your bed?”

“The sort of man who is but five days from refilling his coffers, reclaiming his birthright, restoring his honor and saving his family from ruin,” Lilith whispered, horrified and shamed by the chaos she’d wrought with her selfish desires. “Please don’t risk it all for me.”

“Too late, love.”

“It isn’t too late,” she protested, capturing his gaze and holding it, nearly losing her composure at the molten heat of his eyes. “Promise me you will wait to speak with Dunaway.”

“Is this the part where you string me along?” Jasper’s voice was so quiet she had to strain to hear his words. “Just before you pauper me?”

“I’ll have no need to pauper you,” Lilith replied, ignoring his first question in favor of answering the second truthfully. “You’ll do a fine job of it all on your own if you seek out Dunaway just now.”

Jasper drew in a deep breath, his chest expanding, a thoughtful frown pulling at his lips. Then, without so much as a by your leave, let alone a promise not to speak with Dunaway, the ninth Baron Malleville turned on his bare heels and strode across the bedchamber, yanked the door open and strode out into the morning sunshine.

Dressed in only a red silk kimono, of all things.

Lilith yanked the sheet from the bed. Wrapping the threadbare linen around her body and tucking the end between her breasts, she moved to the small table upon which sat the basin of water, the forgotten cloth a sodden lump on the scarred wood beside it. 

Good Lord, what a shameless hussy she’d been, setting the stage and bathing in the candlelight, using every trick in her arsenal to tempt him to remain with her, to enjoy all the pleasures to be found in a single stolen night.

In punishment for her own foolish behavior, for believing there wouldn’t be a price to pay come morning, Lilith savagely yanked the pins from her hair, ignoring the pain scraping along her scalp and allowing the tangled mass to fall around her shoulders and down her back.

She would wear it down all day, a hair shirt of sorts.

And when she returned to Town, she would have it cropped short in penance for sins too numerous to count.

Only when Lilith could no longer avoid it did she look in the mirror above the table.

A stranger stared back at her, a girl with a pale, gaunt face, eyes shadowed and lifeless.

An old memory, deeply buried and all but forgotten, shivered on the periphery of Lilith’s awareness. One morning long ago, when she had been too young to understand the nature of her parents’ relationship and her place within it, she’d come upon Gwendolyn and Dunaway arguing in the foyer of her mother’s house. Spellbound by the spectacle of Dunaway’s uncharacteristic lapse of composure, by the disjointed movement of his limbs and the strident pitch of his voice, it had taken a moment for Lilith to notice Gwendolyn’s abnormal stillness, her absolute silence and the utter lack of emotion in her eyes.

Years later, after she’d become inured to Gwendolyn’s mercurial temperament, after she’d been able to pull forth anything remotely resembling sympathy or compassion, Lilith had come to understand she’d witnessed the end of her parents’ love affair.

As Lilith stared at the girl in the mirror, she realized she’d also witnessed the moment when her mother had torn out her own heart, shattering and crushing it beyond repair. 

It was a melancholy thought, that after all these years she might feel a kinship to Gwendolyn, a connection made over two hearts broken more than a decade apart.

“Stupid girl.” She watched her lips form the words, not entirely certain whether they were directed at her mother or herself.

Lilith attempted a smile, gave up when all she managed was a wretched grimace. “Stupid, ugly, shameless—”

A soft knock interrupted what promised to be a long list of insults. The door opened and Dunaway poked his head around the heavy wood. “Is it safe to cross the threshold?”

“If you are asking whether I intend to skin you alive, I’ve yet to decide,” Lilith answered, meeting his gaze in the mirror.

“Now, kitten, in my defense, I did warn Alabaster to mind her own affairs,” Dunaway said with a smile as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “In response, she shared the oddest tale of a missive sent by express delivery and containing a plea for her to do just the opposite.”

“A moment of sheer madness on my part, that missive which was not sent express delivery, seeing as such a thing does not exist in the wilds of Cornwall.”

“I tried to explain to your grandmother you had things well in hand.”

“I’ve had nothing well in hand since we arrived, as you are undoubtedly aware.”

“You have seemed a bit out of sorts of late.” The earl crossed to sit on the foot of the bed. “Care you share your troubles??”

“With you?” Lilith asked. “I’d sooner share my troubles with the serpent in the garden.”

“Temptation is a dreadful thing,” he agreed.

“And yet you dragged me to the country and waved it before me,” Lilith replied, battling the frustration and amusement a visit from the earl always evoked. “How did you know?”

“That you would find Malleville irresistible, you mean?”  Dunaway asked. “It’s quite simple. I know you, Lil.”

“You don’t know the first thing about me.” Lilith turned to glare at him.

“I know you become inordinately grumpy if you don’t eat approximately every three and one half hours, thus your stringent insistence upon afternoon tea. I know you wish Gwendolyn had been a better mother and I a better father, but you feel blessed to have had Alabaster there to take up the slack left in the wake of our poor parenting. I know you regret your entanglement with that smooth-talking, pasty-faced cardsharp, though I cannot imagine why as your heart was not engaged and only the faintest whisper of the affair made the rounds. I know you’ve a soft spot for orphans and donate a ludicrous portion of your pin money to the little buggers. I know you would lay down your life for your sisters.”

“I haven’t any sisters,” Lilith replied, unsettled by the litany of secrets she’d thought deeply hidden and the sudden sting of what might be tears in her eyes, blast it all.

Dunaway held up one elegant, long-fingered hand. “Hush now, none of that.”

Lilith wasn’t certain whether he referred to her words delivered by rote or the frighteningly real possibility she might cry in his presence. 

“I know you, Lil,” he repeated, smiling almost tenderly. “Of course I know the sort of man who would capture your heart.”

“You knew and still you offered it up simply to save yourself thirty thousand pounds?”

“You wound me.” Dunaway place his hand over his heart. “There is nothing simple about thirty thousand pounds or a father’s desire to see his daughter happy.”

“You intentionally sacrificed my heart and Malleville’s future to ensure Sissy’s happiness?” Lilith demanded, shocked though she couldn’t comprehend why.

“And you name me ridiculous,” Dunaway muttered with a shake of his head.

“You are ridiculous.”

“It was your happiness I was after, Lil.”

Lilith felt rather as if she’d run straight into a wall. Head first.

“I know a father ought not to play favorites,” he said with a sheepish shrug. “But there you have it. You are, and always will be, my favorite daughter.”

“I’ve no doubt you say that to all the girls,” Lilith replied on a wobbly laugh.

“Only the pretty ones.”

“Damn and blast, but you’ve made a muck of everything, Dun.”

“I don’t see how.”

“As we speak Jasper is changing into appropriate attire—”

“I doubt he owns any such thing.”

“In order to seek an audience with you.”

“So that he might swap one bride for the other, yes, I know. Why do you think I am here with you now?”

“You are avoiding a richly deserved pummeling.”

“From a man in a red dressing gown?” Dunaway replied with a rich, throaty chuckle. “How far do you suppose Malleville got before he was spotted?”