Page 29 of Unmasked by the Marquess
She kissed his jaw. Really, she could spend all night appreciating the way that coarse stubble rasped against her lips. Every inch of him was so impeccable, polished and refined and perfectly coiffed, but then there was that stubble, hinting at vast wells of ungentlemanliness. She nipped at the soft skin of his neck and he muttered an oath, his hands clamping down on her hips like a vise.
This was probably another level of deviance to add to her ever-mounting list, but she wished she could see them. She wanted to see him in his perfect evening clothes and barely rumpled hair, his strong arms wrapped around her own similarly but less elegantly attired body. What she would have given for a looking glass.
She wanted more of him. She needed more. She leaned into him, trying to press her body against his, chasing the sensation she was craving. He groaned at the contact, and she felt the proof of his desire hard against her belly.
Good. She liked that, knowing that he was as far gone as she was. If she dropped to her knees and worked open the front of his breeches, he wouldn’t stop her. But she wouldn’t do that to him, wouldn’t ask him to take his desire off its short leash. Not in the garden at his own ball, at least.
She eased back, letting some cool night air slip between them. She lightened her kisses until they were merely what was strictly necessary to maintain contact between her lips and his body.
And then she finally took her lips away too, and dared to look at his face. Would he look scandalized? Regretful? She promised herself that she wouldn’t care what she saw there.
He looked slightly dazed, as if he had been spun around a few too many times in a game of blind man’s bluff. She waited for him to say something. “I...” he started, and shook his head. Still looking faintly distracted, he took her hand and pressed it into the placket of his breeches. The gesture was so coarse, the very last thing she would have expected from him. “I’ve never been this hard in my life, not without actually, you know.”
You know?She was delighted by this coyness. “Idoknow,” she said, gripping him through the fabric and feeling his erection leap in approval. “But we’ll leave that for another time.” She patted it consolingly.
The sound he made was practically a growl, and she thought her face would split in two if she smiled any more broadly.
A few bars of music drifted in from the ballroom. “You ought to go back. Somebody will notice that you’re gone,” she suggested, wanting to give him an easy excuse. They couldn’t stay out here all night.
“Not so fast,” he murmured. “This is a waltz. Nobody in their right mind would expect me to waltz when I’ve avoided all the other dances.”
She would never understand why he didn’t dance. “I love to waltz. Louisa and I practiced it for hours.”
He took her hand and drew her back toward him. “Dance with me,” he whispered in her ear, resting his other hand on her waist as he steered her into a slow circle.
It didn’t feel even remotely right, and she realized that it was because she was used to dancing the gentleman’s part. But she tried anyway, with the result being that they trod on one another’s toes and bumped gracelessly and repeatedly into one another.
“This isn’t working,” she said, frustrated. Their bodies had fit together so seamlessly when they had kissed, but now it was a shambles. “I don’t know how to dance the lady’s part.”
“Neither do I, I’m afraid.”
As if he’d ever offer to dance the lady’s part. She made a dismissive sound and shook her head.
“Try it like this.” He tugged her close again. They stood still, listening to the strains of a song they could barely hear, unable to work out the steps to a dance they shouldn’t have been attempting in the first place.
She rose onto her toes and pressed a kiss to his cheek, before slipping away toward the ballroom.
Chapter Nine
When Charity was about ten, she went with the Selbys’ cook to the market at Alnwick. The cook wanted to buy a special cheese to tempt old Mr. Selby’s appetite, and she brought Charity so she wouldn’t have to carry her own parcels or do her own sums.
Charity had never seen so many people in one place, or perhaps even cumulatively over the course of her short life. At Fenshawe there were a bare dozen people, even when the cook’s niece came from the village to help with the laundry. The tiny village church near Fenshawe might hold fifty people, and that was on Easter Sunday. At the dimly remembered parsonage, where she had been brought as a baby and kept until the vicar died, there had been scarcely anybody at all. She remembered quiet, dust, and the vicar’s patient lessons.
Alnwick had been a revelation. All those people, loud and purposeful and fast-moving. She had never even dreamt of such a thing. Coins flashed in the sun, exchanged for mustard and apples and sharp new needles. She had clung to the cook’s apron, not out of fear of being lost, but so she wouldn’t be tempted to run off and join the throng.
Looking back, she supposed there had been perhaps two hundred people present that day in the market square. But that was more people than Charity had conceived of existing in the entire world.
That was how Louisa’s drawing room seemed on the day after Pembroke’s ball. It was a magnificent crush. There were, according to Keating, carriages all the way down the street. The ladies wore gowns the value of which Charity would not allow herself to calculate, the gentlemen had a degree of polish that Charity could never attempt to emulate, and they all had the unmistakable lightness of people who had never worried about where their next meals would come from.
And they were all here for Louisa. Well, technically some of them left cards for Robert Selby, but they were here for Louisa and everybody knew it.
After Charity fled from the garden, Alistair upheld the promise he made last month and stood up with Louisa, while Charity watched the news of Lord Pembroke’s dance with the beautiful Miss Selby ripple through the crowd.
They made a completely unobjectionable pair: his rank and wealth matching her grace and beauty, his dark good looks contrasting pleasantly with her golden loveliness. “A striking couple,” the ladies murmured. “I dare say he’s done for,” the gentlemen jested.
Charity had never been so jealous of another human being as she was that moment of Louisa. And she hated herself for it—to be jealous of Louisa was like being jealous of a field of daffodils. It simply made no logical sense. All the same, she felt almost sick at the sight of how they danced perfectly together—it was a minuet, nothing so intimate as a waltz, but still it happened, which was more than she could say of her own attempted dance with him.
But at the same time, this was her own triumph. These whispers of curiosity, these sighs of admiration, they were all signs that their gamble hadn’t been for nothing. Louisa would be safe, protected, provided for. They had done it.
