The Importance of Being Wanton by Christi Caldwell
Chapter 10
THE LONDONER
GENTLEMEN WILL BE GENTLEMEN
Even as the Earl of Scarsdale is seen frequently at his clubs, well into the early-morn hours, his personal club continues to thrive. Is there nothing he cannot do?
M. FAIRPOINT
RapRapRapRapRapRap.
An incessant banging cut across Charles’s slumber . . . and forcing his eyes open, he blinked and wrestled back the fog of sleep.
His gaze took in the inky-black cover of his chambers, the low fire in the hearth, the crack in the curtains that revealed the dark night sky.
Stretching an arm sideways, he grabbed the small, ebonized table clock from his nightstand and dragged it close to his face so he could make out the silvered numbers.
Two o’clock in the morning.
RapRapRapRapRapRap.
There was no escaping them. That rapid, determined knocking was the one that signified his butler’s panic, and his parents’ arrival.
Bloody hell.
Charles searched about for the Tulipwood nightstand, depositing the timepiece.
What in hell was it now? Dragging a pillow over his head, even as he knew his efforts were futile, he ignored that rapping . . . as long as he possibly could.
“My lord?” Tomlinson’s voice came muffled by the pillow and the panel. “You have—” The butler’s words ended on a loud gasp.
Really? After ten years employed by Charles and well accustomed to the marquess and marchioness’s nighttime visits, he’d still not learned the lay of the land?
Well, the last damned thing Charles needed was being caught in the buff by his mother.
Giving up on sleep, he tossed aside the pillow and hurriedly swung his legs over the side of the bed.
He made it only two steps before a pale-faced Tomlinson opened the door and staggered into the room. “Company,” the young man croaked.
“For the love of God, before they come up here, go back and tell them I’m not . . .” Charles’s words trailed off as a person sailed through the door, neither of the ones responsible for his birth. A woman in a crimson cloak with a deep, black velvet-lined hood. Blast and damn. Charles quickly headed for the other side of his bed, to the garments he’d left littered about. The last thing he needed was for Emma to learn he’d received a nighttime visitor so that she could only further her bad opinion of him. “I’ve said no women in my townhouse,” he said tightly. His nephew visited often, and he’d not have the respectability of the household questioned by carrying on with women under that same roof.
The minx, however, seemed to take that as an invitation to stroll deeper into his rooms.
“How . . . honorable of you, Lord Scarsdale,” she said.
Charles froze. He knew that voice. Husked even as it was, there was no disguising the lilting, lyrical quality to it. Nay, impossible. After he’d discovered her emasculating Lord Newhart, he’d thought of her. He’d imagined her as she’d been . . . and then in ways that broke the bounds of everything respectable. He’d imagined her here . . . as she was now.
“It is so good of you to be bound by some rules of respectability.”
It was the smile; who knew a voice could smile? But hers did, and it pulled him back to the moment.
Cursing, Charles dived for the bedding and became tangled over the damned boots he’d shed hours earlier. Coming down hard on his arse, he grabbed for the sheets. Yanking at the coverlet, he tugged it down from atop the bed.
“My lord?” Tomlinson called over. “Should I fetch a constable—”
“Get out,” he croaked. “You can get out, Tomlinson. I’ll receive . . . her.” For all his rules about not allowing women in his household, for her he’d make an exception.
Her, as in his former betrothed, in his bedchambers, cloaked like a siren, with him naked as the day he was born.
There came the rushed footfalls of Tomlinson’s bare feet as he retired from the room, and then the click of the door closing behind the servant. Silence fell, punctuated by only the crackle of the slowly dying fire. Sprawled on his back, on the floor, with only the quiet for company and absolutely nothing happening . . . he found himself blinking back the haze of confusion. Mayhap he’d merely dreamed the whole exchange, after all. Because nothing else explained why Emma would be here, and attired in a shimmering, suggestive cloak befitting a woman who took delight in seducing scandals. Scrambling onto his knees, Charles caught the edge of his mattress and raised himself slightly, peeking over the side.
Emma shoved back the deep hood of her cloak, revealing a pleased smile and a teasing glimmer in her eyes, the pairing of which knocked the breath from his lungs. Before he registered . . . this was Emma staring back at him.
His innocent, virginal, almost-was bride.
Cursing, he dived back to the floor and dragged the sheets atop him once again. Then he stretched up, grabbed a pillow for good measure, and held it protectively between his legs.
The click of her heels upon the hardwood floors resonated as she drew nearer. He looked up. Emma peered down at him with a mix of glee and boredom. It was an unexpected blending of emotions, as contrary as the woman before him. “What are you doing here, Emma?” he squeaked, his voice climbing to a pitch it hadn’t attained since he’d been a boy of fourteen.
With slow, languid movements, she peeled off her gloves, shedding the black leather like a snake he’d once observed with Seamus at the Royal Menagerie, coming free of its bothersome skin. “You can rest easy, Lord Scarsdale,” she drawled, gesturing to his prone form with her gloves before tossing the articles upon his bed.
“I don’t think I’ll ever rest easy again,” he said hoarsely. Not after this. From this moment forward, any time he entered his townhouse, and these rooms, he’d see her here. See her as she was now, looking ripe for seduction.
Emma laughed, the sound low. Throaty. Charles swallowed hard, or he tried to. Alas, who could have known the simple sound of a woman’s laughter could cause Charles’s shaft to rise and throb as it did now.
“No need for modesty.” Lowering her hands to her knees, she bent over him, leaving her cloak gaping, and revealing the low-necked crimson gown she wore behind that garment, the daring neckline which forced his eyes to those gently rounded breasts on perfect display. His mouth went dry, and he cursed the fire that had dimmed for failing to illuminate her body as it should, for denying him the true shade of that flesh. “It is not anything I’ve not seen before,” she drawled.
His gaze fixed on an intriguing crescent mark on the top of her right breast, it took a moment to register the words the young lady had spoken.
Nay, not the young lady. His betrothed. His former one anyway. But still.
Emma straightened and started away from him. Charles stared after her retreating frame, watching her as she took a small tour of his room.
It is not anything I’ve not seen before . . .
Which implied she’d seen . . . men. As he was now. Naked. Fury edged out the desire that had been coursing through his veins, a red-hot anger fueled by jealousy.
She thought she could simply deposit that revelation, and not speak any further on it?
Charles shoved himself up onto his elbows. “Which . . . men have you been seeing?” he asked with all the calm he could muster at the thought of Emma with . . . anyone. He’d choke the life out of the bastard. And then he’d revive him so he could kill him all over again. That nameless-for-now man his former betrothed had seen.
Or men?
Emma stopped her perusal of his room and glanced over her shoulder. Her lips pulled up at the right corner, in the hint of a smile. “You, Charles,” she drawled. “I’ve seen you.”
He opened and closed his mouth. Before . . . now?
Her crimson lips tipped up at the other side, forming a complete smile, bewitching him completely and freezing his breath in his lungs.
“Before now,” she said, following his silent questions with an unerring and unnerving accuracy.
“I don’t . . . recall that.”
“You should pay greater attention to your surroundings, then.” With that matter-of-fact set-down, she loosened the large crystal clasp at her throat. It gave with a faint click, and the garment slid in a noisy, shimmering heap to her feet.
Charles stilled for the second time since she’d stormed his chambers.
The daring red gown clung to her form, a figure he’d once taken as coltish, too foolish to see . . . and appreciate . . . her lithe frame, which conjured a warrior woman who, with her regality, grace, and strength, transcended time. Her legs that went on forever. The understated curve of her hips served only to accentuate lusciously curved buttocks. She was the very reason sailors dashed themselves against those jagged rocks.
“When?” From where he still lay sprawled on the floor, he asked that question quietly. “When did you . . . see me?” When really, the question that needed to be asked and answered was how in blazes had he been so much a fool to have been naked before Emma Gately, and been so oblivious to her nearness?
She caught one of the posters of his bed, and wrapped her arms about the mahogany pillar, studying Charles from around that carved wood. “The better question is how many times.”
He’d still argue his previously unasked question was the better one.
“You made something of a habit of swimming nude at your parents’ house parties, did you not?” Emma didn’t give him a chance to answer, clearly already having one. “And here I’d been so certain those swims had been deliberate, to raise their ire, and yet if they had been, surely you’d have recalled them.”
Actually, she had been correct.
“Alas, it was not a habit you quit, though, did you, Lord Scarsdale?” she murmured in contemplative tones. “There was the time two years ago . . . I came upon you . . .”
She left that to dangle in the air, a memory she had that included Charles, but one which he had no memory or knowledge of.
And . . . he wanted it. He wanted so very desperately to reverse time and find himself in that moment with her . . . creating a future recollection that they two shared. What would it have been? What could it have been?
There was, however, no going back. Hell, at this point, Charles wasn’t entirely certain there was any going forward with Emma, and that acknowledgment he made for the first time to himself struck in his chest. But he’d also be damned if he didn’t try, still.
“Did you?” he asked, adding a layer of huskiness to his response.
“Oh, yes,” she said, with a little lift of her shoulders in a bored shrug.
Charles narrowed his eyes on the saucy woman he’d almost wed.
Emma pushed herself away from the poster and took a step closer. “I had quite a view of . . .” She dropped her gaze to the blankets—nay, more specifically, square between his legs.
Heat crept up his neck, and he squirmed, his bare ass cold on the hardwood floor. Surely she was not looking at—
“Your bits and pieces.”
Charles choked. There was something utterly horrifying in hearing the woman he desperately wished to wed use that same term his own mother had in these rooms about his . . . about his . . . bits and pieces.
Emma flicked a bored stare over his person, and with a yawn, she resumed walking.
By God, she had . . . yawned at him. Because of him? And about his, as she’d called them . . . bits and pieces? It was really all the same. And it also happened to be the first time in the whole of his life that a woman had done so.
That heat continued its climb all the way to his cheeks.
Emma flared her eyes. “My goodness, are you blushing?”
Nearly pitch black as the room was, the minx missed absolutely nothing.
“Hardly.” Charles clenched his jaw. “I am . . . merely hot.” He wasn’t given to lying, but he also wasn’t one who was readily going to own a blush.
The young lady cast a glance over her shoulder, giving him a cursory up-and-down look before resuming her turn about his room. “Given you aren’t wearing a stitch of clothing, I’d say that is rather hard to believe.” She moved with ginger steps. Careful ones. All the while she did, she passed her gaze over the items assembled upon his desk, and the furniture situated around the room, as if all of it were infinitely more interesting than Charles himself. Which, given how she’d initiated their breakup and received his pursuit following it, wasn’t that hard to believe. Still, her indifference chafed. Emma’s ankle turned ever so slightly, and she immediately righted herself, so quick with that correction that had he not been studying her as closely as he was, he would have missed it.
She cleared her throat and, carefully lowering herself to a knee, grabbed his trousers. Straightening, Emma tossed them down at Charles.
Refusing to give up the death grip he had on his sheet, Charles made no effort to catch the garment. Instead he let it hit him in the chest.
Wordlessly, she presented him with her back and made her way over to his desk.
As he stood, he kept his gaze upon Emma. Emma, running her fingers over his book. His inkwell set. There was an intimacy to her exploring those particular items, even deeper than her being in his rooms. “It does occur to me, since you stormed my household, you’ve not provided the reason for your . . . late-night appearance,” he called over, clutching the sheet carefully about him.
“No.” Emma released the corner of his notebook and faced him; there wasn’t the blush he’d worn moments ago, which he would have expected any young lady to be in possession of, given his state of undress. Rather, standing with the hearth at her back, the fire casting a glow about her, Emma’s sharp features were a study of concentration. “No, I have not.”
He waited for her to say more.
Alas, he could have kept waiting until Boney was revived from the dead and made the march on back to Corsica.
Very well. Charles sighed. He knew why she’d come. What her visit here was about. “You were angry at my seeking out your father. I promised to no longer do so, and I’ve not. Your father paid me a . . .”
Her lashes swept low, her eyes forming narrow pinpricks. So she’d not known, and he’d said too much.
“You didn’t come to see me.” Sadness stole the previously spirited glimmer from her eyes. “Let us be clear. Every time you called, you came to my father.”
“Is that what it was about?” he asked quietly, that possibility sinking in. After all, she was a founding member of a women’s society where ladies came together, demanding more of a place in a world so determined to prevent such a reality for them. “Had I gone to you that first time,” he murmured, “would your answer have been different?”
“No,” she said, so softly, her reply so confident, so assured . . . so . . . automatic, his face heated for a second time that night.
Emma resumed her stroll, and no, he’d not imagined it. Her steps were slightly unsteady, and as he released his sheet and shoved a leg into one of the holes of his trousers, he peered at her. Periodically, as she went, she shot out a hand to steady herself. And that uneven gait was why she occasionally gripped items about his chambers: the bed poster. His desk. He glanced down at her heeled shoes, and when he returned his focus to her face, he found her eyes upon him.
Adjusting the front falls of his trousers, he started across the room, and stopped before her.
A few inches shy of Charles’s six feet two inches, Emma was taller than most men and any woman he’d ever known. And yet, even as all she needed to do was tilt her neck back a fraction to meet his eyes, her gaze did not meet his, but lingered instead upon his bare chest.
And close as he was, he not only saw that but heard the rhythmic movement of her swallow.
And he reveled in it. Finding himself, once more.
Charles brushed two fingers down the curve of her cheek, exploring those angular planes that had come to be an endless source of fascination for him.
Her breath again hitched, and she raised her gaze to his.
He lowered his mouth close to the shell of her right ear. “So then why are you here, Emma?” Though he wished to know that answer, he’d no regrets at her being here. Alone, with him, in this moment. “Why have you come?” He whispered the question, arranging those words in a different way.
Her body curved into his. Her flaxen eyelashes dipped a fraction, and he exulted in the telltale evidence of her desire for him. That triumph proved short-lived.
“Why . . . why . . . ?” Emma widened her eyes. “Never say you’re trying to seduce me?” She burst out laughing.
And he was so distracted by the sound of her laugh, full and bold and husky, seductive in sound, and so very different from when she’d laughed that day in Hyde Park, that it took a moment for it to sink in.
He bristled. “Are you laughing at me?”
“Y-y-yes,” she stammered, her mirth doubling, and this time she bent over and promptly lost her balance, landing on her knees.
Charles’s frown deepened. Oh, well, this was really enough.
Still, her amusement didn’t let up. She dabbed the tears of hilarity streaming from the corners of her eyes, and using her palm to leverage herself from the floor, she attempted to get to her feet.
Charles was immediately there. Leaning down, he swept an arm about her waist, and the other under her knees, effectively killing her mirth, as it ended on a shuddery gasp. He made to release her; sliding her body slowly down his frame, Charles set her back on her feet.
Emma pressed her hands against his bare chest . . . as if to push him away? And yet ever so slowly, her fingers unfolded, as soft as a butterfly’s caress, upon him, curling and uncurling in the whorls of hair that matted his chest.
His heart pounded hard, his hunger for her blazing all the stronger.
“I could, you know,” he said huskily.
“You would have to do far better than that, Charles.” Her rebuttal emerged as a breathless whisper, one that dared him, challenged him to do just that.
