Page 53 of One Perfect Dance
“Chalky, where are you taking me,” she demanded, determined to wring an answer from him this time.
He flashed his grin as the hackney slowed. “We are here, Mrs. Paddimore.”
He opened the door and exited, turning to offer her his hand.
Hereproved to be a row of anonymously ordinary houses. In the dark and the rain, Regina had no time to take in more, as Chalky ushered her up the steps, opening the door into a small hall, poorly lit by a single candle shielded in a glass holder.
A flight of stairs, uncarpeted and unpolished, ascended in front of her, and doors stood to either side. Each had an impressively solid keyhole and a knocker. Apartments, then.
Chalky confirmed her assumption, as he finished lighting another candle from the standing one and put a glass cover over the candle holder to shield it from draft. “The apartment we want is on the third floor, ma’am. Shall we?” He waved to usher her ahead of him.
She climbed into the gloom, feeling for each step with her foot, since the candle behind her deepened the shadow before. One flight and a turn. Another flight and a landing. Up and up until she paused at the top of the sixth flight and Chalky passed her with the candle, opened a door out of the landing, and stood aside to let her enter a long passage, lined with more doors.
“It is the third on the left,” he said.
She hurried forward, hoping for more light, for Geoffrey, for her own comfortable home with her servants around her.
Chalky lifted the knocker and let it fall. Once. Twice. “Geoffrey will be pleased to see you,” he suggested.
Even with that assurance, she hesitated when the door opened, and nobody was there. “What is—?” She got no further. A buffet between the shoulder blades sent her stumbling forward, the door crashed shut behind her, and she heard the click of the tumblers in the lock even as she caught hold of a hall table to stop herself from falling.
She did not need to look to know who had locked the door, or who it was that had tricked her into coming here alone. If she had needed confirmation, it was there in his voice, shrill with glee but still recognizable.
“Now, Mrs. Paddimore, we will finish what we started, and this time, you will have no choice but to marry me.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Ash walked throughthe streets of London in something of a daze. Fullaby followed along in the curricle, shaking his head at his employer’s unaccountable decision to walk through the drizzling rain, but making no comment.
All of his intimate encounters had been, at root, transactional, though he had been fond of each of his mistresses and, he hoped, they with him. They said so, in any case. Being with Regina was so different he was utterly at sea.
Their first kiss had rocked his world. It had been a carnal meeting of lips, teeth, and tongues, but he had kissed before. And with women who were far more experienced in receiving and giving pleasure. This was Ginny and that made all the difference.
He had, somehow, managed to keep that encounter to a meeting of mouths. Her innocence helped. She followed his lead, but she initiated nothing. It was, as he’d thought at the time, as if she had never been kissed as a lover kissed.
Unlikely as it seemed, he was even more certain now that his first impression was right. She was a quick learner, though. As soon as their lips met tonight, his self-control almost escaped its leash. He managed to retain enough consciousness to keep his caresses within bounds; to slowly introduce her to the feel of his hand on her breasts, to kisses that crept ever closer before he had one of her lovely nipples in his mouth.
Her fragrance, her soft skin, her moans of pleasure, the arch of her back as she lifted towards him, all tempted him to take it further, but he managed to resist. When she gave herself to him, and he was almost sure she would, it would be a free choice, not one coerced through seduction.
A choice of forever, for he could bear no less. To bed her without promises was to risk destruction. Already, it was too late for him to walk away without a broken heart.
Fullaby drew up beside him. “Sir, you are walking the wrong way.”
Ash realized that the drizzle had turned to a serious downpour. Fullaby must have decided he had had enough, and he was right about Ash’s direction, too. They were farther away from Rex’s townhouse than they had been when they left Regina’s.
“Let me drive,” he said, and leapt up into the driver’s seat of the curricle, taking the reins from the servant.
The wise thing would have been to take the fastest route home, but he could not resist driving back past Ginny’s townhouse.
Fullaby cast him a worried look when he made the turn. Ash couldn’t possibly subject the poor man to a prolonged loiter outside the building while he dreamed beneath his love’s lit window. But he wanted to.
He turned another corner to the street than ran past her townhouse. Wasn’t that hackney leaving her house? Yes, because Charles was standing at the foot of her steps, watching with a worried expression as the vehicle turned a corner and went out of sight.
Ash drew up in front of the house. “Problems, Charles?” he called.
The first footman’s face cleared. “Mr. Ashby! A man came with a message for Mrs. Paddimore. Apparently young Mr. Paddimore has been injured. Mrs. Paddimore has gone off with the man, and she would not let me go with them. Not enough room, she said.”
Ash asked a couple of quick questions, and his concern soon matched the footman’s. The young man had never been to the house before, had not given his name, had offered no evidence he was from Geoffrey, and had been the one to declare there was no room for a footman.
