Her muscles unwound like overcooked pasta. She lay back, gasping, her eyes blindly fixing on the darkness of the ceiling, the ghostly rippling silhouettes of trees, rising and falling, rising and falling as the train passed onward.
She had never felt so . . . replete . . .in her life.
A gentle kiss pressed against her cheekbone. She blinked slowly, then turned her sweaty face to him.
One might have thought it would be awkward. His hand was still pressed between her legs. But the sight of him, his angular bones, the long, dramatic sweep of his mouth, seemed so natural to her. As though she should see his face every night in the dark.
Slowly he removed his hand, sliding it gently over her bared hips.
“What of you?” she murmured. Her voice sounded slurred.
A soft breath escaped him. She knew enough now to interpret it: he liked the way her voice sounded, or the remark. It made him hot, as he’d made her.
He was still hot, in fact. The awareness stirred a small bit of anxiety. She was not so naïve as to imagine that this was why men visited brothels. She started to sit up. “You haven’t—”
“Shh.” Delicately he touched her temple, the feathery hair there. “Lie back, Gwen.”
“But I wanted—”
“No. We’re not going to do that.”
No? The words tripped off a flutter of strange panic. Weren’t they done with rejection? She’d looked up at him in those moments of immense pleasure and seen him gazing back at her, expression stark, and she’d felt as though they were attuned. Would he refuse her again tomorrow, then? She felt greedy for him now. The very pores of her skin seemed to be opening in order to inhale him, the scent of him. “But why not?” she asked, and her voice emerged so clumsily, sounding as small and petulant as a child’s.
He pulled away from her, rose from the bed, crossed to the small ledge built into the teak wall. He had ordered another bottle from the porter. As he splashed brandy into a glass, the moonlight caught his face again, outlining the sculptured contours of his mouth. He glanced up at her, as if sensing her inspection, and his eyes caught the light, glittering beneath the heavy fall of his dark hair.
“I can’t do this,” he said quietly. He put down the bottle with a thump and kicked around the chair so its back was to the bed. He fell into it, straddling the seat, one muscular forearm propped atop the back, the brandy glittering in the cold light.
She knocked her nightgown back over her legs. Did up the buttons above her waist. He sat in all apparent comfort, although he was naked from his trousers up. His torso—well, it distracted her briefly. As a boy, he’d been sent down from the Rugby School for beating Reginald Milton bloody—she knew this from Richard, whom his violent intervention had saved, and the twins besides. She knew, too, that he still studied violent arts, but his manner was so casual and his physicality so indolent that one did not imagine him capable of brutality, until one studied the muscled hew of his arms and chest.
“You can do anything,” she said. Her throat tightened; she spoke the next words with difficulty. “But if you don’t want to, that’s another thing.”
He leaned forward, quick as a snake, and caught up the chain around her throat. He let a length of it run through his fingers, setting Richard’s ring swinging over her breast.
Her stomach fell.
“I meant to take that off,” she whispered. She could not believe she’d forgotten.
“Did you?” He sounded contemplative. “We talked of Richard all night, you know.” He let go of the chain and took a sip of the drink, then added, “But we never talked of what he would have thought about this.”
Cold foreboding stabbed through her—through a body that still felt lethargic, weighted with the remnants of pleasure. The combination dazed her. “Perhaps we did not mention it because my brother is dead. His opinion no longer signifies.”
A caustic note entered his voice. “Of course I am aware of that. Let me be clearer: when I am speaking of Richard now, the person I am really speaking of is you. I begin to wonder at your motives, Gwen.”
She stared at him, utterly confused. “I have been as frank with you about my motives as I know how. I have told you again and again that I’m in search of a different life. Of something . . . something that is—”
“Irrevocable,” he said. “You are in search of a moment, an experience so irrevocable that you will never be able to turn back.”
She pondered this for a moment, looking for traps. But she found none. “Perhaps that’s part of it,” she said. But not all of it. If it had been, then any man would have served for seduction.