Wayward by Carole Mortimer
Chapter Nine
“I feel the same way,” Lydia assured him without hesitation.
Gideon didn’t need to explain to her any more than he already had. Not now that she knew he had been suffering, through choice, that same burn of need inside him for her this past week that she had been feeling for him.
A need that had only been reignited as she touched and stroked the sleek, velvety bareness of his engorged shaft. When she touched it. Tasted him. The sweet and the slightly bitter. Both were the very essence of Gideon, reflecting as it did thesweetness he tried to hide and the bitterness he showed to the world in general.
Lydia was determined that with her, he should know only the sweetness mixed with the heady spice of awareness which flared between the two of them whenever they were together.
But she also needed him to understand that she wanted all of him, what he considered to be the bad, as well as the good.
“Come with me.” She held out her hand to him.
Gideon eyed that hand warily. “I am not so old I cannot find my own way to the bed.”
She smiled. “You are not old at all. But we are not immediately going to the bed.”
“Then where— No!” He came to an abrupt halt, putting his cock away in his drawers and rebuttoning his evening trousers the moment he realized her obvious intention was for them to stand in front of the cheval mirror in the corner of the bedchamber.
Lydia lamented the disappearance of his cock and the refastening of his drawers and trousers. But it would be easy enough to unfasten them again when she was ready to do so.
“Please, Gideon,” she beseeched as she reached up to gently touch his clenched jaw. “My only wish is for you to see how beautiful we are together.”
He gave a harsh snort. “The beauty and the beast!”
“Never.” She moved up on tiptoe to lightly kiss his scarred cheek, then the filigree of silver scars down the length of his throat and across his left shoulder and chest.
He closed his eyes. “You are being unfair,” he groaned.
“You told me that life is unfair.” Lydia could sense how much his need warred inside him against what he believed was the reality of his scarred body. “I only want you to see the two of us together,” she encouraged. “To find the same excitement and pleasure in us that I do.”
His breathing was uneven and erratic. “I never look at myself in a mirror. I have not done so in the ten years since the fire.”
“Then do it now. For me,” she encouraged softly. “I think when you do, you will find that your scars are no longer as unsightly as you must once have thought they were.”
Gideon had never thoughthis scars to be monstrous. He knew they were.
Or had been?
Lydia seemed to think that was no longer the case.
He fought a war inside himself for several more seconds before allowing Lydia to once again take his hand and lead him the few more steps to the cheval mirror. It took several more long seconds before he could actually look at his reflection. Seconds when Lydia waited patiently for him to turn his head toward the mirror.
He was prepared to recoil, as he always had in the past, at the sight of the horrific scars upon his face and body that proclaimed him to be the monster Society had called him.
Instead, he stared at what were now, as Lydia had told him, only a web of silvery lines where once raised red ridges had puckered and distorted the skin down the left side of his face and body.
“I decided when we met”—Lydia smiled as she stood at his side—“that these silly scars are what prevents you from being just a little too handsome for any woman to resist you.”
Gideon glanced at her. “Even then you were not repulsed by my appearance?”
“I admit my pulse quickened and my body sent out messages of a reaction to you, but they were of arousal, not repulsion.”
He turned to face her, his arms moving about her waist to pull her closer as he gazed down at her. “You are a remarkably honest and beautiful young woman, Lydia,” he said admiringly. “Which is why I do not understand why some lucky young Society gentleman did not make you his wife long ago.”
She reached up to smooth the frown from between his eyes. “The reason for that is not because of a lack of offers. I do believe my father turned down at least a dozen proposals of marriage on my behalf.”
Gideon felt what was becoming a familiar tightness in his chest, this time at the thought of Lydia being married to one of the young gentlemen who had offered for her. If she had accepted one of those proposals, then it was unlikely the two of them would ever have met.
“Why did he?” he prompted curiously.
Lydia smiled. “Because he loved me and knew that I would not be happy married to someone with whom I was not in love and who did not love me in return. We both knew that as the only child of an earl, with a personal fortune left to me separately by my mother and father, I would one day be a very wealthy young woman and so obvious prey to the attention and machinations of fortune hunters.”
Gideon wished now that he had kept up his friendship with Michael Montague. Not only had the other man served as an exemplary member of the House, but he had also successfully brought up his beautiful motherless daughter to be a confident young lady who knew her own mind and was not afraid to speak or act upon it.
“Why do you think he chose you to be my guardian rather than any of his friends or acquaintances in Town?”
Gideon stared at Lydia’s reflection beside his own in the mirror, as if he would learn the answer to her question that way.
Instead, she simply smiled at him with mischief openly shining in her expressive green eyes. “I was surprised by it too at first.” She nodded. “But I have had time since arriving here to reconsider the question.”
“And your answer?”
Her smile widened. “That no fortune hunter would dare to suggest marriage with, let alone ever consider compromising, the ward of the Duke of Esher.”
Gideon eyed her quizzically. “You really think that is why he made me your guardian?”
“It is the only answer I can think of as yet.” She quirked an auburn brow. “Unless his gift to you informed you otherwise? My God, Gideon.” She gasped when he turned his gaze away from meeting her questioning one. “You have not even opened the parcel my father left for me to give to you, have you?”
There was no actual accusation in her tone, but Gideon nonetheless heard her surprise and shock. After all, that parcel represented her father’s final gift, along with the guardianship of Chessington’s daughter. Both given into Gideon’s safekeeping.
And how had he repaid the other man’s trust?
By making love to his daughter and allowing that same daughter to make love to him.
“Whatever you are thinking, I really wish you would not rebuke yourself so soundly as I can see you are doing.” Lydia once again stood in front of him. “It has only been a week since my arrival, after all, and I did not give the gift to you until the following day.”
Gideon winced. “After which, I gave it to my butler to put in the library and immediately forgot about it.” He had been keeping himself busy every moment of the day and evening since then in an effort not to think too much of Lydia and his desire to make love to her again. This evening, his resolve had been broken, and he had been unable to bear the rift between them for a moment longer.
Knowing the true reason for that did not absolve him from blame. He had been cold and unreasonable in insisting Lydia wear black in mourning for her father. Damn it, as far as Gideon was concerned, in future, Lydia could wear whatever color gown she chose, pink with purple spots if she so wished, and he would make no word of criticism as to her appearance. Well…perhaps the pink and purple together might be a bit much. They would also clash dreadfully with her auburn hair.
“We could go downstairs to the library and open it together now,” he suggested.
She eyed him teasingly. “I have not finished making love to you yet.”
“Lydia—”
“Gideon.” She stepped close to him again, so that their torsos were now touching. “I may be inexperienced, with a very limited knowledge of sexual pleasure, but even I know that what we have done together so far does not in the least compromise either one of us.”
He gave a shake of his head. “So, when the time comes, you will happily tell your future husband of the intimacies we have shared?”
Lydia shrugged. “I do not consider those intimacies to be serious enough for me to need to tell anyone else about them, least of all a future husband. After all, you are my guardian, and a guardian very often guides his ward.”
Gideon’s brows rose. “The things we have done together are not ones a guardian teaches his ward.”
“Have you been a guardian before?”
“No.”
“Then how can you possibly know that for certain?”
“Everyone knows—”
“Even in the short time I have known you, I did not think you to be a man who is interested in everyone’s opinion.”
“It is common knowledge—”
“Or in anything that has to do with the word common!” she finished mockingly.
His nostrils flared as he breathed in deeply. “You, my dear Lydia, are well on the way to having your arse spanked.”
She remained unconcerned by the threat. “Is that something you are interested in doing?”
“Lydia!” he snapped in frustration.
“I have heard it said”—she leaned forward conspiratorially—“by some of my married friends in Society, that their husbands occasionally like to spank them and that afterward it intensifies the pleasure of the fu—”
“Lydia!” His second warning was sharper still. Really, he had no idea who these married friends of Lydia’s were, but it would seem that they spoke altogether too freely in the presence of an unmarried young lady.
She gave him a disappointed look. “I am only telling you what I have heard said. It was enough to make me curious, in any case,” she added brightly. “So, if at any time in the future you again feel the inclination to, as you said, ‘spank my arse,’ know that I would not be averse to the experience.” She eyed him gleefully. “It will be another new experience my guardian has taught me.”
Gideon sighed his frustration. “It was not my intention to teach or guideyou when I licked and sucked your nipples and between your thighs.”
“But it did enable me to decide that I more than like both.” Warmth now colored her cheeks, but her gaze still didn’t flinch from meeting his. “My virginity also remains intact.”
“Nor should I have allowed you to suck my cock this evening.”
The color in her cheeks deepened. “Unfortunately, not to completion.”
Gideon frowned his frustration with what sounded like her disappointment in regard to that fact. “Then what intimacy would you consider serious enough you would need to confess it to your future husband?”
Lydia gavethe matter some thought.
Their lovemaking a week ago and this evening had stepped over the boundaries of acceptable behavior between a man and a woman who were not married to each other.
But she remained adamant that it had not been enough so that they ever needed to share it with anyone else, least of all this mythical “future husband” Gideon kept referring to.
Annoyingly so, as far as she was concerned.
“Nothing we have done together so far,” she maintained firmly. “Which is not to say”—she began to unfasten the buttons on his trousers—“that will still be true by the end of this evening.”
She murmured her approval as the flap of his trousers fell open again and she was able to unfasten the tie of his drawers and part that material as well. His still-engorged cock once again sprang free.
Lydia immediately fell to her knees in front of him. “Watch the two of us together in the mirror, Gideon,” she encouraged throatily.