The Taste of Innocence (17 page)

Who would have thought it could be as bad as this? Charlie cursed the impulse that had prompted him to accept an invitation to the monthly Sunday-afternoon tea party at the vicarage; he’d heard that Mrs. Duncliffe had intended to invite Mr. Sinclair, and had accepted assuming Sinclair would be present, and that he’d be able to distract himself discussing investments while keeping Sarah in sight.

Unfortunately Sinclair had been otherwise engaged. Even more unfortunately, he’d underestimated the cumulative effect of his and Sarah’s nightly interludes; said effect had made itself known immediately he and she had drawn close enough to touch hands.

Just one look, that one touch, and they’d both felt the jarring jolt, the fierce tug. The powerful, elemental, all but overwhelming need to be together in a physically explicit sense.

In mutual shock they’d retreated to the safety of opposing corners of the lawn, to preserve some semblance of acceptable behavior and not risk shocking everyone present—most of their neighbors and both their mothers—by giving in to some action too suggestive to mistake.

He’d taken cover with Jon and Henry and a small group of other gentlemen. And Sarah was surrounded by the other young ladies, yet many feminine eyes, young and old alike, were watching him and her, wondering at their separation, given what was now transparently common knowledge as to their direction.

Regardless of the speculation, being close in public was no longer wise.

Which was one of several points he found difficult to accept. Never in his life had he been affected to this degree—even close to this degree—by a woman. By the pursuit of a woman. He currently had more in common with some rabid adolescent in the throes of his first affair, than the suave, debonair, and sophisticated man of the world he unquestionably was. He was thirty-three, for heaven’s sake! A gentleman of his ilk, of his age and experience, shouldn’t feel as if his continued existence hinged on sinking his far too active erection into the hot haven of a specific female body.

He shouldn’t feel as if possessing her was now the be-all and end all of his life.

Yet he did.

Accepting another tea cake from the plate passed around, he bit into it and shifted his gaze from Sarah—why torture himself? this was the vicarage; there was no hope what ever of doing anything to ease their burning itch while here—and subjected Mrs. Duncliffe’s rose garden to distant scrutiny while reliving again the events of the previous night.

He’d left the summer house satisfied and relieved. Relieved because he’d weathered the challenges, satisfied because from the battle he’d not just wrested control but had managed to establish a base, a rationale she understood, for pushing ahead with his plan.

While the relief had evaporated, the satisfaction at least remained.

Small comfort. No matter how he twisted the facts, what he couldn’t understand or explain, but likewise couldn’t dismiss, was that while he’d been seducing her, and succeeding, he’d somehow managed to seduce himself.

He could hardly blame her. Given the differences in age and experience, it simply wasn’t possible to credit that she could seduce him. Yet time and again, he’d found himself driven if not out of control then temporarily beyond it. And time and again he’d adjusted and changed tack; he would draw a line, determined not to step over it, then she’d press, and he’d find himself rearranging his plan.

It might have been she making the demands, but it had been he who’d acquiesced.

She wasn’t capable of controlling him, and there wasn’t anything or anyone else involved, so it had to be him, something within him that for some godforsaken reason was pushing him, seducing him, into doing things that were making this courtship so much harder.

He didn’t understand it, but he was determined to prevail. And he would.

His gaze returned to Sarah. She felt it, briefly met it across the expanse of the vicarage lawn, then she turned away. Lifting her cup, she sipped. He saw her hand tremble as she set the cup down on her saucer; he looked away.

The week he’d set himself ended on Tuesday night. To night he’d take her further, tempt her yet further, but every step of the way he’d remain on guard.

Against what ever it was that was invading his brain.

The moon hung suspended over the weir when she came to him that night. They were hungry, so hungry, both of them, that it was implicit from the first ravenously yearning kiss that to night he would show her more.

Much more.

Sarah burned and wanted, but it wasn’t simply the delights of physical plea sure she sought. She wanted to know why, and if she was starting to understand that it wasn’t reason, cold and logical, that drove his transparent desire for her, she’d yet to grasp any firm comprehension of what that elusive something was.

Yet the physical was linked with the ephemeral; it was an outcome of it. If she explored one, she would at some point understand the other.

Her plan, such as it was, had been reduced to that. To take his hand and let him show her what he would, and then encourage him to show her more. Until she saw and understood.

And if she shivered when his mouth closed over her breast, cried out, a primitive sound in the night when he suckled fiercely, if her limbs melted and her nerves quivered, coiling and quaking, as he lifted her skirts and stroked, then touched her, cupped her, lightly probed that most intimate part of her until flames licked down her spine and heat pooled in her belly, then it was, she told herself, a willing and necessary exchange.

If she wanted to learn more of him, she had to surrender more of herself.

How much more she was willing to surrender, of that she’d had no clue, not until they were once more a tangle of tumbled limbs on the sofa, and she was hot and needy and urgently greedy, with her hands sunk in the softness of his hair, evocatively gripping, with her lips parted, hungry and wanton beneath his, with her tongue tangling with his, challenging and taunting, even demanding. With his hands on her body, long fingers stroking between her parted thighs, again and again caressing the slick swollen flesh of her entrance.

She had to have more, then and there, not later. Needed that next moment more than she needed to breathe. Needed…she wasn’t entirely sure what, but she felt sure he did.

When he tried to hold firm to his invisible line and deny her more than that minimally greater intimacy, with lips and tongue, with her hands and her body, wordless in entreaty she begged.

Charlie discovered he wasn’t proof against her sensual pleading. She wanted, and he gave; some unruly, rampant part of his mind had taken that as its code, and stamped it on his brain. No matter his determination to remain in complete control, and through that dictating each caress, each moment of plea sure, each new delight to which she was exposed, he couldn’t deny her, couldn’t hold back from appeasing her wantonly explicit need.

Couldn’t deny himself that plea sure.

Driven by that passion he didn’t entirely recognize, by that need he couldn’t name, with one blunt fingertip he circled her slick entrance, then, when she clutched and begged, he pressed in, just an inch. But she was heated and urgent, lifting against his hand, inviting, enticing; he surrendered and gave her what she wished.

Felt her gasp through their locked mouths as he slid one finger deep into her sheath. Felt her virgin flesh ease, then contract, scalding velvet about his finger. He tracked her response, sensed and grasped the perfect moment when she’d absorbed that first shock to stroke, at first slow and deliberate, letting the full impact of the intimate penetration impinge on her whirling senses, then, at his direction, and hers, the beat gradually built.

Faster, harder, in time with their hearts, with the pounding in their blood.

She writhed, trapped half beneath him, her hips instinctively lifting into the intimate caress. Driven by her and his own compulsive need, he ravished her mouth, then settled to plunder there to the same escalating, undeniable beat.

He drove her onto the rising slope, then whipped her up it, higher and higher, until she found the peak, until she tensed, fingers sinking into his upper arms, until at last she soared, then fractured, shattered, and came apart in his arms.

The rippling wave died, faded away and left her; boneless, she relaxed beneath him, all tension released. He drew his hand from her, let her skirt fall. Hoped she was satisfied.

Breaking the now gentled kiss, he lifted his head and looked down on her face, pale and fine in the moonlight. An angel’s face, one that hid a will to match his own.

That was one reason why he wanted her.

The thought strayed across his mind, then drifted away.

Her features had relaxed into the blankness of satiation, but as he watched, they came alive, vitality reinfusing them.

Her lashes fluttered, then she lifted her lids, and looked at him. She frowned. “I want you inside me.”

The words were a sultry complaint. Although she didn’t quite pout, the impression was there.

He drew a tight breath and pulled back, only just managed to slam a mental door on his demons, slavering in anticipation and only too ready and willing to fall in with her suggestion. “Not yet.”

His accents were clipped, his voice strained.

He forced himself to sit up. Bludgeoning his unwilling body to his bidding, he lifted her and settled her, cradled across his lap.

Her hip rested against his erection, but there was nothing he could do besides grit his teeth and bear it. And sternly refuse to listen to his baser self report that he was so hard he was risking permanent injury.

He had to think, yet with her in his arms, the exercise seemed indescribably difficult; he concentrated, but all he seemed aware of, all he could find in his mind, was the sensation of the delicate swell of her cheek nestling against his bare chest.

She’d managed to rid him of his coat and waistcoat, and open his shirt, again. Managed to get her hands on his naked chest, skin to skin…perhaps it was that that had scattered his wits, although why that should be so he couldn’t imagine. He’d never been susceptible in that way before, not with any other lady, yet with her, Susceptible had become his middle name.

His arms closed around her, supporting her. Holding her.

Unexpectedly, she gave a little laugh, wry, faintly cynical. “After our performance at the vicarage, my mother wanted to know if anything was wrong.”

His mother hadn’t asked, although she’d wanted to. He was curious. “What did you say?”

“That we were finding being the cynosure of attention for everyone around us a trifle unnerving.”

Despite all, he smiled. “Excellent answer. Perfectly true as far as it goes.” He made a mental note in case of later need.

They sat on the sofa as the moon slid away and the comfortable dark closed around them.

Eventually, she stirred. Lifting her head, she touched a hand to his cheek. “Charlie—”

“No.” He caught her fingers, brought them to his lips, held her gaze as he kissed. His wits had returned; he’d started to realize what had—again—occurred. “Not yet,” he murmured. “We need to proceed at a slow pace.”

A slower pace.

Heaven help him.

The next morning Charlie sat at the desk in his library, chin propped in one hand, staring unseeing at the Aubusson rug, entirely unable to understand how matters had reached such a convoluted state.

His plan was straightforward, its execution well within his abilities, yet somehow his and Sarah’s interaction continued to escalate further, faster, propelled by some force he was unable to brake.

And now, even though he knew he had to—somehow—slow their sensual progress, a large, increasingly strident and powerful part of him wanted nothing more than to forge ahead. To simply dive into the passion that flared so hotly between them, to slake his ever-increasing lust, to gorge and drink his fill, then to revel and wallow.

Despite his long walk through the chilly night after he’d seen Sarah to the house, despite the ride home through winter’s bleakness, he’d barely slept a wink, unable to free either his mind or his senses from the promise of passion she embodied.

From all that his experience knew he could make of it, all he knew he could gain from it.

From that elusive, enticing taste of innocence.

It was that, he decided, that had invaded his brain—an addiction to the taste of innocence. Addictions, like obsessions, could drive men to do things they wouldn’t normally do, to behave in ways they normally wouldn’t, but addictions, thankfully, could fade. As this one assuredly would.

Once she’d agreed to marry him, to be his forevermore, once they were wed, then her innocence would gradually fade. A few weeks, a month at most, and his curious fascination with it would be sated, and it itself would have dissipated.

So he didn’t need to worry. This wasn’t an obsession, as love could be. This was fascination to the point of addiction, nothing more.

He turned that conclusion over in his mind, and found nothing in it with which he wished to argue. He could, therefore, press ahead with his plan.

Except that it was Monday, the day Sarah spent at the orphanage.

Despite a very real compulsion to have Storm saddled and ride up to Quilley Farm, and trust to his undoubted talents to make hay of whatever opportunities the day might afford to ease the compulsive itch to hold her, kiss her, touch her, the notion of trying to keep his reactions to her concealed from all the bright eyes in that place—imagining the sheer amount of teeth-gritting, jaw-clenching wrestling with his demons that would require—was enough to keep him in his chair.