Page 28 of A Proposition for the Comte
She became a part of him and he of her, her breasts plastered against his chest, the junction of his knees riding the line of her upper thighs. Hard. Fast. Like a fantasy, but a thousand times more vivid. When he bit her lip she nipped him back and he broke off the kiss.
Close up, his eyes were ringed in yellow and feathered in a dark gold-green. The scar on his chin stood out in a welt. But she felt the truth of him, felt the pull of lust and the answering surge of delight. No, that was too tiny a word, too shallow for all that was happening.
‘Trust me, Violet. Trust me and live.’
She could hear the accent of France in his words, a foreignness that was bone deep. She could hear the hope, too.
Darkness was all about them, the night, the moon, the shadows, the silence. She wanted him to strip off her clothes and take her hard here, on the floor without resistance. She wanted him to hurt her with love to make her live again, make her real, make her want and cry and laugh. Her hands reached for the buttons of his shirt and slid inwards, her fingers tweaking at the bud of one nipple.
His breathing was as loud as her own, husky, unrestrained and desperate, the kettle drum of his heartbeat roaring in her ears.
A disturbed rhythm, no constant within it, his sex nestled against her stomach, thrust into awareness. Not tame. Not quiet. Neither biddable nor easy. Masculine. Unashamed. Illicit.
Impossible, too. She could suddenly see it in his eyes as he pulled back, there in the quiet of his truths.
‘You are beautiful, Violet, and you deserve so very much more...’
The words were so absurdly old-fashioned she wanted to cry. Another man telling her what she did or did not need. Breaking away, she knotted her hair, wiping the fabric of her sleeve across her mouth to remove the taste of him.
‘Perhaps you are right.’
She could not argue, not with the world as she knew it changed and unrecognisable. Not at this moment when the future had been stretched before her in a beautiful and flawless line, but was now broken into small and jagged bits.
She was pleased when he was no longer beside her.
Outside he leaned back against the tree he had climbed down, not trusting himself to go any further.
He felt dislocated and empty.
Violet Addington had taken some part of his essence that he could not regather, left there in her room among his passion and lust and need.
The only way he could protect her was by staying away and here he was like a rutting stag in season, a man panting like a green boy to simply climb back up to her chamber and claim what she had offered.
‘Hell.’
No one who knew him would have recognised him in that room, a man who had always held full control of his emotions, a man whose secrets were so far buried he could barely remember them himself. And there he had been spilling everything, figuratively as well as almost literally.
He swore again beneath his breath and moved towards the road, careful to stay within the boundary of the winter shrubs and the fence line. If Shay had been in London he would have gone to see him, but his friend had returned to Sussex.
He’d go home to his town house and think. It was past time to crack this ridiculous farce of the missing gold wide open.
Cummings was involved, he was sure of it, and Mountford was trying to keep a lid on every new discovery because the Government both here and in France did not want this scandal to be played out in the public sphere.
Napoleon was interred on Elba and the tides of war were turning towards other things, the hope of diplomacy being one.
Aurelian was happy with that, for the clandestine world of intelligence held its own safeguards. He just wondered why Violet kept slipping into the middle of it with such alarming regularity.
Pray to God it was because of her husband’s involvement and not her own, but something was telling him that she was in it much deeper than she let on.
She stood in the place he had left her, listening for the last small noise of his going. She made herself wait even when she could no longer hear him, reaching out in memory, feeling things she had been so very long without.
The memory of Harland’s death dropped into the middle of her stillness, how her husband’s face had contorted with rage as he died at her feet, the blood running down the side of his temple and into the blonde wispiness of his hair.
She had led the stallion into the stall as soon as Harland ceased to breathe and left the horse there with the body, taking the bloody hammer in her full and voluminous skirts with shaking fingers.
Nothing was ever as it seemed. A lesson she had learned over and over and over again.
Harland’s death. The lost gold. Aurelian de la Tomber’s appearance in the middle of a road on a sleet-filled night.
Connections linked them, joined them, wound them into each other like skeins of wool, knitted together by expedience and sorrow. And politics.
What was it she had missed in all of this, what final quiet and tiny clue lay there for her to use wisely? She was so good at puzzles, at finding the missing pieces. Even Harland had admitted that.
Shaking her head, she dismissed him, a man of foolish greed and threadbare hopes. She thought she had dismantled the potency of the French gold by sending a letter and the ornament to the embassy in Paris, Harland’s greed knowing only the bounds that others might place upon him.
But she had not counted on those who surrounded her husband, the sycophants and the lie spinners. She had not taken their deceit into consideration and she should have.
That had been her mistake and it was one that she would not make again.
Trust no one, not even a man who fired her blood and set her heart racing. Perhaps least of all him.
