Tempt the Devil (13 page)

T
he door to the bedroom slammed open with a crash, rattling the windowpanes and setting the closed curtains, with their bright embroidered peonies and peacocks, to billowing.

The Earl of Erith loomed in the entrance. Potent. Intense. Vibrating with the same fierce desperation Olivia remembered from the park. He brought the storm inside with him.

With a shocked gasp, she sank lower into the cooling bathwater. She clutched her half full brandy glass in front of her like a shield. Her maid gave a shriek and dropped the pitcher she'd lifted to rinse Olivia's hair. The pottery vessel shattered and water flooded everywhere.

“Lawks, miss!” Amy gasped. Her panicked gaze settled on Erith and she bobbed a clumsy curtsy. “My lord.”

“Get out,” he told the girl without shifting from the doorway. Dripping black hair clung to his drawn face and his clothes were a soggy mess. His feverishly glittering gray eyes remained unwavering on Olivia.

Amy was too startled to take warning from his calm tone. She began flinging towels onto the puddle. “The carpet will spoil—”

“I said get out,” he said even more quietly.

This time Amy heard the threat. She dropped the towels, performed another awkward curtsy, and dashed for the dressing room.

Olivia and the earl remained behind, sharing a charged silence.

For a fraught moment the memory of that wondrous kiss in the rain hovered between them. She tasted the spicy warmth of his mouth on hers. She felt his cold hands cradling her face. He'd held her as if he'd never touched anything so precious in his whole life. Her lips parted with trembling expectation, just as they'd parted under his gentle exploration.

That poignant kiss had sliced her soul in two.

She could hardly bear to recall it.

It was over an hour since she'd fled like a madwoman through the cloudburst. Blind with anguish after leaving Erith, she'd stumbled upon an empty hackney when she reached the rain-swept street. By the time she'd arrived home, she was chilled to the bone. She'd dashed out of the shabby hired carriage and into the house, intending to depart immediately, before he returned to confuse her with more demands and questions, and damnable tenderness that left her lost and defenseless and yearning.

Reason, self-preservation, experience screamed that she must end the affair. Now. This minute. Before the strange bond between them destroyed the powerful woman she'd created from the helpless, terrified, abused girl.

So why hadn't she left?

She met his wild silver eyes across the room and an electric jolt sizzled through her. Nerves? Fear? Resentment? Surely not excitement. Her fingers clenched on her heavy crystal glass and she couldn't look away.

Erith moved inside the room and shut the door with a stud
ied care that indicated how close to the edge he was. “You're still here,” he said softly, without coming closer.

“Yes.”

He lifted one tanned hand to tug away his sodden neckcloth. He dropped it to the floor. “Why?”

Dear heaven, she didn't want to answer. She wasn't sure she could. Or not in any way that made sense. Once, she might have said she stayed for the sake of her reputation as London's greatest courtesan. But that would now be a lie. Perhaps it had been a lie from the first. She could no longer deny Lord Erith had always drawn her like a magnet drew iron filings.

I'm here because you kissed me in the rain. You kissed me as if I broke your heart.

Ridiculous.

She sought to inject a practical note into the thickening atmosphere. “Erith, you'll catch your death in those wet clothes. Why not order a bath? I'll finish here and arrange supper if you're staying.”

“Oh, I'm staying, all right.” His sensual lips twisted in a grimace that wasn't quite a smile. “Why are you still here, Olivia?”

Confound him, he was as persistent as a mastiff with a bone. She decided to adopt the attacking position. Although how formidable could she be, crouching naked in lukewarm water with long strands of wet hair snaking around her?

She injected a sarcastic edge. “I gathered from your histrionics in the park that my presence was necessary for your continued sanity, if nothing else.”

As she should have expected, her childish attempt to annoy failed. His voice remained steady and low, although she knew him well enough to guess the turbulent currents swirling beneath his composure. An ocean of titanic emotion seethed under his impassive facade. She remembered the desperation in his voice when he'd begged her not to leave him. Seeing this proud man brought to such a state had moved her to helpless tears.

“I thought I'd find you packing. Or gone.” He shrugged out of his tight coat. With some difficulty, as it adhered soggily to his body. He threw it down next to the neckcloth.

Some devil made her say, “I have certain standards, my lord. I refuse to leave your protection looking like I've been dunked in the North Sea.”

The bathwater had become uncomfortably cold. She told herself he'd seen her naked before. But absurdly, the day with its astonishing crevasses of emotion had left her shy.

How laughable. She hadn't been shy since her first lover.

“You're not going anywhere.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No, it's an observation. An accurate one, as it happens.”

As if to prove his confidence, he reached down to relieve her of the brandy glass. He took a substantial mouthful then placed it near the few remaining towels folded on top of the sideboard.

The shiver that shook her wasn't entirely from the cold bathwater. When he drank from the same glass, it felt like he set his claim upon her.

Oh, heavens, she couldn't sit in this bath much longer. She already looked like a prune. “Pass me a towel, Erith,” she snapped. “If you can find a dry one.”

He grabbed a towel from the pile on the sideboard. “Here.”

She snatched at it and with humiliating clumsiness wrapped it around herself as she stepped from the tub. “Thank you.”

He'd prowled closer when he took her glass. Only about a foot of saturated carpet now separated them. She tried to back away but her legs hit the side of the bath hard enough to hurt.

“Careful.” He put his hand on her arm to steady her. Then he let go.

What was he up to? She knew men. Their impulses and weaknesses and contemptible thought processes that justi
fied everything they did. But for the life of her, she couldn't read Erith.

“You don't understand me nearly as well as you think.” Curse her sulkiness. She wanted to sound brave and defiant, not like a child denied a Sunday treat.

“You still haven't answered my question.”

His long-fingered hands rose to the buttons on his waistcoat. She remembered it as pale pearl silk with silver swans embroidered across it. It had been beautiful, unusual, eye-catching. Now it was an expensive rag.

He slipped the waistcoat down his arms and let it fall behind him. His relentless undressing only increased her nervousness. She took an uncertain step to the side like a mare scenting a stallion.

“I'm here because…”

Her voice trailed away as she really looked at him for the first time since he'd burst in. His wet shirt clung, revealing smooth planes of muscle and bone, outlining ribs and broad shoulders. Her eyes traveled over that square jaw, that determined chin, the haughty nose, straight and commanding. Those heavy-lidded, deceptively slumberous eyes under the thick black brows.

Not a hint of prettiness or softness. Until one looked at the thick fringe of black lashes or the suddenly vulnerable line of his mouth.

He was the handsomest man she'd ever seen, wonderfully compelling. The bones were so strong, just as he was strong.

Perhaps even as strong as she.

What business did she have finding a man compelling? Men were beasts and brutes.

But she couldn't prod the old, familiar bitterness to life. Not when Erith stared at her as if his world began and ended with her. Every ounce of moisture in her mouth evaporated. She licked suddenly dry lips and thought she heard him muffle a groan. Her pulse pounded so loudly in her ears, she couldn't be sure.

“Damn you, Olivia,” he gritted out, taking a step so she stood trembling within the shadow of his powerful body. “Touch me.”

The hand clutching the damp towel tightened. The breath caught in her throat. Her vision shrank to encompass Erith alone while the rest of the room faded to nothing.

God help her, she craved the feel of his firm, muscled flesh beneath her hands. She yearned to touch a man for sheer curiosity. For pleasure. For need. She didn't recognize this woman at the mercy of her feral appetites.

But nor could she gainsay what she wanted.

She bit her lip, torn between sensible fear and crazy daring. Daring won by a whisker. As if she took the greatest risk of her life, she leaned forward to place her palm flat on the triangle of hair-roughened skin revealed under his open shirt. The shock of contact vibrated through her. He quivered under her hand but didn't make any attempt to take charge of her tentative incursion.

Slowly, luxuriantly, she pressed her bare skin against his, feeling heat, strength. The touch was more intimate than taking him in her mouth. Almost as intimate as that brief, tender kiss in the rain that counted as the sweetest sexual experience she'd ever known.

He sucked in a great breath. His chest rose beneath her hand, connecting her to the vitality that flowed through his veins. This chaste joining made her one with another person in a way a man invading her body never had.

He closed his eyes as if in pain. His prominent cheekbones flushed with color, and the usually cynical mouth relaxed into a beautiful soft fullness.

“You're so warm,” she murmured.

After his walk in the rain, she'd expected his flesh to feel chilled, clammy. Without conscious thought, she edged closer. She'd been cold for so long that Lord Erith's radiant heat was irresistible.

“Let me warm you,” he whispered, curving his hands around her bare, damp shoulders.

No pressure. No compulsion. Just more warmth. And a feeling of safety she couldn't recall feeling with a man before. How had he crossed the invisible line between being male, and therefore enemy, to becoming…
what?
Her lover? Her friend? Her ally? None of those words seemed adequate to convey the strange new landscape she entered.

He bent his head to kiss her. She stood trembling like a deer in the hunter's sights. Then something inside her flowered and she moved forward, not away. For the first time, she stretched up to accept a man's mouth on hers.

She waited for the old revulsion to surface, the vile feeling of suffocation. Instead there was just the same glorious sweetness she'd tasted when he kissed her in the storm. And a tempting trace on his lips of the rich brandy he'd stolen from her.

He didn't demand a response. He didn't press her up against him and his hands clasped her arms loosely. If she wanted, she could escape. Everything about his stance silently indicated that any decision about what happened now was hers.

The hesitant kiss was as chaste as the buss of a child's lips. But there was nothing childish about the burning passion in his gray gaze when he raised his head and stared down at her. How could she ever have thought those eyes cold?

This man was in so many ways a riddle. She had no real reason to trust him. Except that those intent, intelligent eyes seemed to pierce through all her deceptions and pretenses to her shivering, lonely, longing soul. And she was so tired of being the diamond-bright, diamond-hard jewel of the demimonde.

But if she relinquished the courtesan, what was left?

“Do you want me to stop?” he asked softly.

An astounding question from a lover. And more astound
ing, she believed if she said yes, he'd step away. She'd never known a man like Erith. Still she hesitated. She'd learned in the hardest way to fear a man's power over a woman. “I don't know.”

“Olivia, I swear I'll abide by what you want.”

“I believe you.” Although life had taught her all men lied.

He leaned down and brushed his lips across hers. One glowing moment of contact. Over before she had a chance to respond. The touch left a tingling, tantalizing desire for more.

She made a strangled, needy sound deep in her throat. Then she forced out words she'd never said to a man in all her years of dissipation. Words she never thought she'd say. “Kiss…kiss me again, Erith.”

“Olivia…” he said on a long sigh. The murmur of her name in that deep voice soaked through her skin right to her bones. He sounded like an angel had pointed him toward a heaven he never thought he'd attain.

She watched his face change. The strain disappeared. The heavy eyelids lowered as his gaze narrowed on her mouth. She remained poised beneath his lips in quivering expectation. Something powerful held her captive, still, ready, like a sleeping maiden in a fairy tale, waiting for her magic prince to kiss her back to life.

Desperately she snatched at reality.
Angels? Maidens? Princes?
None of these belonged in her world. In her world, men paid her to service them, just as they paid their barbers to shave them or their grooms to feed their horses.

But that grim warning faded to a faint whisper at the back of her mind. It couldn't penetrate the mysterious enchantment that held her suspended between flight and surrender. A surrender she'd never offered any man, for all her wild and wanton history.

Erith's hands tightened, shifted their grip, drew her closer. The delicious heat of his clasp on the soft flesh of her upper arms made her tremble. “You smell like a garden in the rain. Flowers and fresh air.”

He blew gently on the skin where her neck joined her shoulder. The sensation of his breath on wet flesh shot a wild shiver through her. Strange but not unpleasant. Not unpleasant at all.