Seduce Me, If You Dare by Alyssa Clarke
Chapter Two
Prue was still thinking about that dance with her husband, about his hands on her back and the fluid movement of their bodies together, long after the last of their guests had left. In fact, long after her maid had prepared her for bed, and she had slipped in between the cool sheets. The door directly across from her bed, the door that had always remained shut since she had been here in London, taunted her. That connecting door led to her husband’s bedchamber, where he would be readying himself for bed or perhaps already asleep. The way he’d looked at her tonight had made her want to be brazen. It made her want to open the connecting door.
Before she changed her decision, her bare feet kissed the carpeted floor. The sheets tangled into an unruly pile in her wake. Prue didn’t pause to glance at the vanity to check her appearance, but already had her hand on the latch by the time it registered to her that she should be nervous.
She opened the door before she lost her courage, though she didn’t release the latch.
Her husband was inside his bedchamber, bathed in candlelight, as his valet readied him for bed. Prue couldn’t recall the valet’s name—couldn’t recall much of him at all, at the moment—seeing as her husband was standing in the middle of the room in a state of undress.
Boots removed along with his stockings to show his bare feet, part of him she’d never seen before and found strangely attractive. His trousers concealed the shape of his legs, but his jacket was draped over a chair in the corner along with his cravat, waistcoat, and shirt. He stood in the room wearing nothing but his trousers. Prue’s hand tightened on the latch, rattling it. She’d forgotten how to breathe.
The valet took an uncertain step away from his master and stammered, “P-perhaps I’ll leave you to finish the rest on your own, milord. Countess.”
From the periphery of her vision, Prue noticed him give a hasty bow before scampering from the room. The latch clicked shut behind him, leaving the room enveloped in silence except for that of her own rapid heartbeat.
She still couldn’t remove her gaze from her husband. His shoulders were as broad as the jackets he wore had implied, fitted with lean muscle down a chest dusted in dark hair. That hair started to form a trail somewhere in the vicinity of his navel, only to be cut short by the fall of his trousers, still buttoned. She stared at those buttons for a good long while but wishes alone did not undo them.
“Why are you here?” Her husband’s voice was curt and gruff.
Prue drew in a breath, realizing only then from the spots dancing at the corners of her eyes that she’d still forgotten to breathe. She raised her gaze to his but couldn’t read the expression there. His jaw was tight, clenched, as were his hands by his sides. She half expected him to turn away in disgust, but his gaze was riveted on hers. Was he recalling the only other time she had entered his chamber?
Swallowing, she managed to find her voice and after it, a smidge of the confidence she’d felt in crossing her room. “I’m your wife. It is my right to open this door.”
A tic started in the corner of his jaw, almost shadowed by a hint of stubble. She wanted to kiss it away but feared removing herself from the threshold.
He found his voice first. “I’ll have to ask you to leave, madam.”
Prue clenched her hand until the metal of the latch dug into her skin. Madam? She was his bloody wife, yet he acted as if she were an aberration. Her face flushed with mortification, or perhaps fury. Even standing in the threshold of his bedroom in her nightgown was not enough for him to invite her into his bed.
Well, in that case, perhaps she simply had to be bolder.
She dropped her death’s grip on the latch to the connecting door and marched across the room. He didn’t move, though his eyes narrowed. Once in front of him, she steadied herself with her palms on his warm shoulders, the skin like velvet beneath her touch. Then she raised herself onto tiptoe and pressed her mouth to his in the fieriest kiss she could muster. His mouth was as hot as a brand, but that wasn’t the reason the kiss lasted mere heartbeats.
He didn’t kiss her back. His mouth was hard and unmoving above hers.
Mortification won over fury, and she released him as if scalded. Turning her back, she stormed from the room and shut the door so firmly in her wake it made her ears ring. Her mouth wobbled. She tried not to cry as she buried herself in the blankets of her soft bed.
But the truth now was inescapable. He hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t consummated their marriage, because he simply didn’t want her. Should he take a mistress it would shatter her, and Prue might possibly take her rapier and challenge him to an honor duel—for breaking their vows, and the faith she had in love and the possibility of their happiness.
A laugh hiccupped from her. Challenge her husband to a duel indeed. That would probably see him banishing her to the country forever.
Oh, God, how do I fix this?
Burningdesire licked through Oscar’s body like a living flame and his damn heart felt as if it would burst from his chest. He had never wanted any woman more than he wanted his wife after that achingly chaste kiss. As the connecting door rattled in its frame, his knees weakened, and he sat heavily down on the bed, nearly landing on his sleeping cat. Cleopatra made a disgruntled sound and swished her majestic tail out of the way just in time. Oscar barely heard her.
He was still trapped in that impossibly brief yet perfect kiss.
What in God’s name had happened? The lady who had marched over to him, fire spitting in her lovely dark green eyes was not his wife. No, his wife was painfully shy around him, and usually lowered her eyes to her hands, the tablecloth, or sometimes her damnable shoes whenever she spoke with Oscar. She was certainly not the wife who had fainted on their wedding night, confirming he was an ogre of the worst sort.
Prue had touched him with more confidence than she had ever displayed in his presence before. Gone was the shy girl who often stammered in his presence, the one he’d known during trips home to Fairfax Manor. Somehow, when he hadn’t been looking, she had matured in body and in mind.
The skin of his shoulders felt impossibly sensitive after the press of her palms and the curl of her fingers. He’d barely felt the edges of her fingernails, but that didn’t keep him from imagining the bite of them into his back while he had her in the throes of passion. Her kiss was inexperienced, but oh so achingly eager. It had taken everything in him not to respond and pull her flush against him, to finally feel the press of her hips and breasts and soft belly against him. But, if he’d done that, she would surely have noticed the state of arousal she’d put him in the moment her soft lips crushed his.
Surely he would have mortified her sensibilities and sent her back to that shy, stuttering girl who had served as a reminder he married someone barely out of leading strings. Someone unable to manage his insatiable passions and the primal and ungentlemanly way he could tup sometimes.
Oscar didn’t realize that he had been fumbling for the buttons on his fall until cool air washed his thick, overheated erection. He ran his palm over himself and shuddered at the thought of replaying that kiss a little differently. Gathering her close, stripping her of that flimsy nightgown and pressing her back into the bed—
He released himself as if he’d touched a flame. “What in the blazes am I doing?”
He stormed away from the bed and to the basin of water and splashed himself with it. It was lukewarm, not cool enough to douse his ardor.
Gripping the sides of the basin, he growled, “That lady is going to drive me mad.”
Behind him, he heard the soft pad of the Siberian cat hopping from the bed to the floor. A moment later, she twined herself around his legs, purring.
He sighed and reached for a towel to dry his face and chest. “I must wait until she is bloody mature enough to take a lover.” And even then, he would have to be very mindful of how he took her to his bed.
Oscar tossed the towel aside, not really caring where it fell, and undressed the rest of the way for bed. Cleopatra followed and when he sat on the edge of the bed, she joined him and rubbed against his nightshirt. He stroked the cat absently. Something heavy and uncomfortable sat inside his chest. Oscar looked at the closed door that connected their chambers. In her eyes just now, he had spied emotions that were not normally present. In truth, she had hardly met his regard over the years for him to assess her feelings to even comment on them. However, he had thought her content with the state of their marriage, and comfortable at the state in which their relationship meandered along.
“What more does she want from me? I’ve been a good husband to her. I talk to her every night over dinner, I take her out to Hyde Park to show everyone that I’m loyal and doting to my wife. I have never taken or thought of another woman since I saw her that first night in the ballroom. I have honored my promises to her and vowed to wait until she no longer seemed so damned fresh faced and innocent!”
With a sigh, he dropped his head into his hands. Cleopatra butted at them, disgruntled that he’d stopped with his ministrations. He patted her with one hand and tried his damnedest to forget that his wife had ever been in here.
“She can’t want love from me. We both know we married for convenience. I saved her from the bloody scandal.”
Cleopatra gave him a condescending look and turned her back, her tail waving through the air.
He grunted. “Yes, I know, and she saved the estate from ruin. It was a fair exchange.”
And because her dowry had helped to take the estate out of the red, to give his sisters respectable dowries and to give him the money he needed for the investment that had started to turn a tidy profit, he had tried to be a good husband. Being a good husband had nothing to do with fooling his wife into thinking he was in love with her. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in love, he just didn’t think about it, neither to yearn after it nor to bemoan the lack of it in his marriage. More important was to fulfill his duties and responsibilities to his title and to his family. That was what he had been doing these past few years.
Well, that, and trying not to think of how damnably young a wife he’d married. He had not been able to consummate their marriage, not with her so young, her breasts and hips barely formed. Not when on their wedding night, she had stood in the center of his bedroom looking like a little waif and trembling like a leaf. She had been frightened, but had lifted that pointed chin in brave invitation, her lush mouth firming in determination.
Then when she had tentatively touched him and he had allowed his hunger to show, his bride had fainted. Oscar had caught her, then carried her back to her bedchamber, tucked her into the bed, and returned to his own chamber knowing the entire encounter must have been an ordeal for someone so young.
He had taken a young bride who was painfully shy. So, he’d done the honorable thing and waited for her to grow up. Her sweet shyness and the way she avoided looking at him had made it feel like he would wait forever. She only became animated when she laughed and chatted with his sisters. He still recalled that dark feeling which would sweep over him whenever he entered a room, and her smile would dim. He had felt like a monster stealing the sunlight.
Oscar stood and padded over to the connecting door. A peculiar regret twisted in his gut, and he pressed one of his palms against the oak panel. Was she already asleep or had he hurt her just now with his gruff rejection? That was the last thing he wanted to do. Hurt her.
The memory of the unfathomable emotions swirling in her eyes rolled through his thoughts. What had she been thinking when she stormed inside his chamber? His hand dropped to the knob almost as if it had a will of its own, and he gripped the knob, tempted beyond measure to open the door.
And what would he say to her? What would he do?
Her actions tonight rattled him far more than he realized. Was his wife discontented with their marriage? Never before had any protestation about their arrangement fallen from her lovely mouth. With a wry twist of his lips, Oscar admitted her young age, shyness, and delicate sensibilities had prevented him from breaching certain topics with her, such as consummating their marriage, and the matters of having their heir.
Well, the woman who had kissed him tonight had certainly seemed far more mature. “Why?” He muttered aloud. “Why now?”
Forgive me if I wounded you just now.
Instead of opening the door, Oscar turned around and went back to his bed.
When he lay back and settled himself in, Cleopatra took her customary spot on the pillow next to his head. By morning, she would be suffocating him, but he didn’t mind. It made his bed a little less lonely. It made the door between the adjoining chambers a little less alluring.
“I should get that thing a bloody lock,” he whispered in the darkness of the room.
How he had managed to hold himself in check tonight, he didn’t know. But he’d made himself a vow when he’d married her. Oscar would not take her to bed until she appeared mature enough. Physically and emotionally. Perhaps when she was two and twenty, an age his sisters had seemed to have matured significantly into the lovely ladies they were today. Once, after firmly pointing out to his mother that he was waiting to fill his home with the patter of little feet, she had caustically mentioned that she had married at sixteen and had given birth to him by the time she was eighteen.
I will damn well wait!
If he went back on that promise, what honor would he have left? If he ravished her before she was ready, what the hell would that make him but a man not in control of his needs? He was not a damn rutting animal led by his cock.
Idly, he scratched at Cleopatra’s stomach. “I can wait. As long as she doesn’t do something like that again.” His heart couldn’t take it if she did. Because he bloody well did not like the questions rearing inside of him. Oscar was not a jealous man, but something savage moved through him. Where had his wife learned this new sensual confidence? One did not go from a bloody shy, stuttering virgin who fainted when she saw the lust in his gaze to a spitfire who flung open doors, planted fierce and defiant kisses on their husband’s mouth, and then slammed the door on her magnificent departure.
He shut his eyes, but the only thing he saw was the set of his wife’s mouth, the fire in her eyes as she crossed to him, the stain of color across her cheeks as she pulled away from the kiss. The nightdress she wore was infuriatingly high-necked, so he hadn’t been able to see how far down that color had gone. But he could imagine…
He threw off the covers before temptation curled its claws into him. He wouldn’t sleep tonight. After drawing on his breeches again, he slipped out of his bedchamber and made his way to the private room he always kept locked. He carried the candle with him and used it to light several others around the room when he reached it. For some reason, he had his best strokes of inspiration in the middle of the night, and always had a few candles handy in this private abode. It was the one thing he kept for himself, and only he and Cleopatra were privy to it.
Tonight, each candle illuminated another painting he’d made of his wife, irritating him with the depth of his obsession. He stood, canting his head, and observing the paintings he made of her, each different and capturing her doing different things. Here was one with her sitting on the lawn reading. Another with her lying in her secret gardens that she lovingly tended in the country, a beautiful array of flowers surrounding her. Oscar sucked in a harsh breath when he realized with each painting of his countess, the shape of her body had shifted from a slender beauty to a subtle voluptuous form.
His heart started to stutter inside his chest.
Not yet; she was far from ready for his passionate brand of loving. He should go back to bed and get a good night’s rest. He had estate matters to attend. Still, he found himself seated in front of his easel with a fresh canvas and a stick of charcoal to begin marking the lines. He could see her face altogether too clearly. The shape of her eyes, the set of her soft mouth and just the barest hint of one of her dimples. Before he knew it, the image was laid out in front of him, as fresh as it had been when she’d stood in his bedchamber.
He thought of sleeping then, and returning to it with fresh eyes, but instead he reached for his paints to mix just the right shade of pink to splash along the bridge of her pert nose. If he couldn’t share his admiration with her, at least he could immortalize it here, just for himself.