The Perfect Kiss (21 page)

She clutched at his sleeve. “Will you do something for me, please?”

Frey found himself saying yes.

“I don’t want you to see Papa yet. I am afraid . . . afraid, that once he has spoken to you . . .” She broke off, unable to go on.

That he will give up the ghost,
Frey supplied silently. “Yes, if you think it’s best, I will stay away. But if he starts to fail, you know I must go to him.”

She nodded, tearfully. “Yes, of course. Thank you.” She looked a little guilty. “He is bedridden, so . . . he will not know you are here unless anyone tells him. But I promise you if he—if the worst—”

Frey took her hand. “I know.” He closed his eyes to pray for her father’s rapid recovery.

Instead, he found himself remembering the taste of those soft, sweet lips . . .

He hadn’t meant to kiss her. He didn’t know what had come over him, actually. It was most uncharacteristic. Thank God she hadn’t reacted badly. It would have been frightful if she’d set up a screeching.

Come to think of it, she’d hardly reacted at all. His technique must be slipping.

Well, of course the girl hadn’t reacted, he told himself. Her father was dying. What did a kiss from a relative stranger matter when she was facing the unimaginable. He knew how he’d felt when his father had died. Poor little thing. His arms tightened around her.

She was so wonderfully soft . . .

Chapter Twelve

Thou strong seducer, Opportunity!

JOHN DRYDEN

 
 
 
 
 
GRACE REACHED THE SHORE OF THE LAKE AND BEGAN TO CLIMB OUT. He moaned and she turned to see what was the matter. He moaned again.

“Are you in pain?” she called.

“Agony,” he said, but he didn’t look like a man who was ill. His golden gaze roamed over her, gleaming with enjoyment. She clapped her arms over herself, striving for modesty. “Turn your back.”

“Not humanly possible.”

She turned her back and scrambled for her clothes. He moaned again. “Like a peach wrapped in tissue paper,” he said when she bent over.

She snapped upright, holding her clothes against her. “Will you stop that nonsense?”

“It’s not nonsense, it’s poetry. You are living poetry.” He began to wade out of the water and she got a glimpse of what she must look like to him. His drawers were almost transparent, clinging to his body, as he said, like tissue paper, only not around a peach . . .

She tried not to stare, but could not help herself. It was not material bunching after all . . .

“Stop there,” she croaked.

His eyes glimmered with amusement. “Willingly,” and promptly posed for her like a Greek statue, changing poses rapidly. Only none of Lord Elgin’s marbles looked a bit like this man. He was bigger, more masculine, and he lived and breathed. The taste of him was still in her mouth.

“Stop it,” she spluttered with reluctant laughter. “Cover yourself.”

“Can’t. My drawers need to dry first, otherwise when I return to Wolfestone they will be all wet in certain places and people will wonder what on earth I have been doing.” He looked at her and added, “And they will see damp patches on your dress, too, and they will add two and two . . .”

Grace bit her lip indecisively. She wanted to be securely covered from head to toe, right now, but he was right.

“As I see it, you have two choices—you can take off your wet clothes and put the dry ones on over a naked body.” He looked at her from under his brows. “In which case you will have to somehow hide your underclothes as you walk up to the house. I could put them in my pocket and carry them for you.”

There was no way in the world she was giving him her underwear.

“Or you can sit in the sun and let your underclothes dry and then you can get dressed. That’s what I’m doing.” He stretched out on the grass and she steadfastly avoided looking where she most wanted to look.

“Very well, I’ll do that, too,” she decided. He patted the grass beside him, but she shook her head. “No, I’ll sit over here.” She sat down on the other side of a bush where she felt securely screened.

“Ah, like Pyramus and Thisbe,” he said. “How sad.”

“Not at all like them,” she retorted. “We are not star-crossed lovers!”

“But we are lovers,” he said and stepped around the bush.

She sat shielding herself from him, knowing it was futile after what they’d done in the lake. She was silent for a moment, then said, “I can’t.”

He sat down a short distance away from her. “It’s all right, I know. You’re not ready for me yet. I can wait.”

She shook her head. “There’s no point waiting, I’m not going to change my mind.”

He just smiled. She shivered inside. It wasn’t from cold. Or fear. She turned her back on him. She could still feel his warm gaze slipping over her like a touch, a caress, but at least she couldn’t see him. She sat on the fresh green grass, hugging her knees, rocking back and forth. Her emotions were in turmoil.

They were not really star-crossed. Melly didn’t want him, but her betrothal was still official. Grace wanted him, but he acted like a free man, and he wasn’t. That disturbed her.

What did
he
want? To make love to her, yes. A few moments of passing pleasure, yes. But what else?

She didn’t know him very well, and what she did know wasn’t encouraging. He didn’t want a home. He didn’t want children. Ever.

There’d been no talk of marriage between them. Or even love. He’d called her “my love” once, but that was just an endearment, and he’d been in extremis at the time. Her breasts still tingled from his caresses. She hunched over them.

He thought she was a hired companion. Men had a double standard toward women of different classes, she knew. For all she knew he might be just wanting to tumble her as lords had tumbled servant girls for centuries. Droit du seigneur.

Of course she could tell him who she really was; there was no need to keep up the imposture now that Sir John was so ill. But she didn’t want to. Yet.

She’d never been in this position before, where a man reacted to
her
, to Grace herself. Not to Miss Merridew, a diamond of the ton, or Miss Merridew, heiress, but to simple, ordinary Grace, a girl who’d grown up in a cold, miserable house, and who, like her sisters, had nourished herself on dreams.

But dreams could deceive.

Two of her sisters had allowed their dreams of love to deceive them. Both Prudence and Faith had made disastrous mistakes at first, mistaking their own deep yearning for love as the real thing and falling for men who were unprincipled rogues.

They’d let their dreams of love blind them into taking terrible risks, giving themselves and their happiness into the hands of unworthy men. Both their lives had nearly been ruined forever. Luckily they hadn’t, but it made Grace wary.

She was not yet ready to take the same risk. Not for a man who she’d only known a few days, and who, despite his soft words and caressing ways, might turn out to be just another untrustworthy rake.

She needed more than soft words and tender caresses. The taste of ecstasy he’d shown her in the lake couldn’t be allowed to affect her.

Or that when he kissed her it felt like he was a man who’d come out of a desert and she was his first taste of water . . .

No, that couldn’t be allowed to matter.

He might seem to be the embodiment of all her secret dreams, but she couldn’t trust her feelings yet. Not while he remained betrothed to Melly. Not while she knew so little about him.

“I have other plans,” she told him at last. She rose to her feet and went behind a bush to don her dress.

“Do you want help with your corset?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” she said crisply. She had, in fact, left off the corset when she decided to come swimming but she didn’t want to alert him to the fact.

As she emerged, fully dressed, he said, “Ah, I see you’ve left off the corset. How delightful.” He’d dressed very rapidly, too.

She crossed her arms across her breasts and fought the blush.

“Why hide what I’ve already memorized, already tasted?”

His soft words threatened to melt all her resolve. She turned and hurried down the path.

He followed her. “What other plans?”

It took her a moment to realize what he was asking about. The way he’d looked at her made her so . . . flustered. “I want to travel. I want to sail into Venice at dawn, I want to see the moon rise over the pyramids, to stand in front of the Sphinx and know how small and insignificant I am. I want to sail in a felucca down the Nile and to ride a camel.” She turned and began to march down the pathway.

He followed. “A camel?”

“Yes, why not? I think it would be very exciting to ride a camel. A ship of the desert, isn’t that a wonderful expression?”

“Camels smell, they spit, and they sneer.”

“Sneer?” She laughed.

“No man on earth can sneer as well as a camel, I promise you,” he said. “And they’re vilely stubborn! And as for the ship of the desert, that no doubt comes from their rocking gait, like a ship on a rough sea. I hope you don’t get seasick.”

She ignored that. He was just teasing, she could tell. “Have you ridden a camel?”

“Many times. And I’ll tell you now, I’d take a horse any day.”

“Yes, but a camel is so exotic.”

“Not in Egypt.”

She beamed at him. “Exactly.” They reached the castle driveway and he took her hand and tucked it under his arm.

She told him, “If I hadn’t come here with Mel—Miss Pettifer, I would be packing now to leave for Egypt with the cousin of the British consul general.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it was all arranged. We were going to sail to Alexandria . . .” She looked at him shyly. “Would you tell me about Alexandria, please?”

He said nothing. He stopped and frowned as if in deep thought.

“Not, of course, if the memory is painful,” she said quickly.

“Oh, it’s not painful. It’s just that I remembered something more important.” He turned to her and said in a solemn tone, “Do you know, your freckles stop just below your neckline. There’s not a single one below here.” He traced a finger along the round neckline of her dress, leaving her skin tingling. “I was”—he darted her an intense look—“distracted at the time, but I’ve just realized it. Isn’t that fascinating?”

“Not a bit.” She stepped away from him. “I told you I had other plans. I’ll tell you something else, Lord D’Acre—I don’t dally with the
fiancés
of other girls. I don’t dally with husbands, either. In fact I don’t dally at all.” She bared her teeth in a smile. “So, now you can ignore me completely.”

“I don’t want to ignore you, Greystoke,” he murmured.

She made a careless gesture. “Then don’t. But if it’s dalliance you want, I believe the Tickel girls thrive on it, so you could try them.”

“I don’t want a Tickel girl.”

“Are you sure? They’re very pretty. I think Tansy is the prettiest, but Tilly has the lovelier smile and her complexion is a dream.”

“I prefer freckles. Especially where they stop.”

She blushed and tried to carry it off. “Oh, of course it must be Tessa; she’s by far the most curvaceous of the three. I know men set great store in curves when it’s a matter of dalliance.”

“Do they?”

“So I’m led to believe.” She was getting a little flustered by his stare.

He gave her an enigmatic look. “I have no interest in any Tickel curves. Nor Tickel smiles or complexions or any Tickel quality whatsoever. I like small, gray spitfires with freckles.”

“Well, you can’t have them—us—me!” She hurried up the driveway alone.

“Oh, can’t I?” He called after her. “I’m a Wolfe—we don’t wait for invitations. We choose our prey and hunt it down. Consider yourself warned, Miss Prey.”

 
 
WHEN DOMINIC ARRIVED AT THE HOUSE HE FOUND FREY ENSCONCED in a parlor eating lemon biscuits and sipping gingerly from a teacup, which Miss Pettifer refilled as he arrived. Dominic’s lips twitched. He’d heard Frey before on the subject of tea.

Frey rapidly explained his mission. “Sorry to thrust myself on you so dashed early, Dom, but the vicarage is in a mess, I’m afraid.”

“In what way?”

“Storm a few days ago, I’m told. Seems to have blown off half the slates. The roof has leaked, quite badly. Everything is wet and rotting—the stink is frightful. Dashed inconvenient, but act of God, y’know. I was hoping to prevail on your hospitality, Dom, and stay at Wolfestone.”

“Of course, Frey. You are very welcome, of course, though conditions here are rather more spartan than you’re used to.”

“Oh, not so spartan—Miss Pettifer here has made me very welcome.” He smiled at her, almost fatuously, Dominic thought.

She blushed and murmured something inaudible.

“I see you’ve met my betrothed,” Dominic said.

“Eh?” Frey’s jaw dropped and he spilled tea all over his dove-gray inexpressibles.

 
 
MRS. STOKES OUTDID HERSELF AT DINNER THAT NIGHT, TRIUMPHANTLY serving up trout with almonds, a fricassee of chicken, green beans, rice and veal soup, potato pie, roasted quails, something she called a fidget pie, made up of bacon and apples, which tasted surprisingly good, a grand salad, several jellies, a plate of lemon curd cakes, and a trifle.

“Well, miss, I’m trying me best to tempt Sir John into eating something,” she said when Grace complimented her on the meal. “He doesn’t eat enough to keep a bird alive.”

Grace raised her brows. “I would have thought chicken soup would have been more the thing for him.”

Mrs. Stokes blushed. “Ye’ve caught me out, miss. I did send chicken soup and bread and butter up to Sir John—not that he touched it, poor soul. ’Tis the vicar,” she confided. “Such a skinny, long lad he be, anyone can see he be in need o’ some good Shropshire home cooking.”

Grace laughed. It seemed they would all benefit from Mr. Netterton’s lanky build.

But despite the lavish spread, nothing seemed to appeal to Melly, she noticed. She picked at her meal, merely nibbling on a morsel of chicken and some green beans. She even refused the lemon curd cakes, which Grace knew for a fact were her favorites.

“Are you feeling ill, Melly?” she whispered as the final course was removed.