I’m Only Wicked with You by Julie Anne Long

Lillias awoke to the smell of roses.

She growled and sat bolt upright in bed. A quick sweeping inspection of the room located the culprit: a fluffy portion of the dismembered bouquet had been stuffed into the little vase on her writing desk. Some well-meaning maid must have installed it there as she’d built up the fires. She wondered what Lord Eshling—had she even ever met him? She could not recall—would say if she told him that she’d shared his bouquet with everyone in a boarding house near the docks.

And then she wondered if one of those roses made it into Mr. Cassidy’s room.

She lowered her face into her hands at the thought.

She left her face there for quite some time.

The scent of roses had lingered in the parlor long after Hugh had departed for the smoking room. He had not looked at her from the moment he’d delivered the poem to her. And she could feel the severing of his attention, like a physical thing. It left a sudden, shocking void, as if he’d kicked down one of the walls of her house the way he’d kicked that bear away from his dog.

His icy, thorough, casual shunning made the jealous antics of the bloods of the ton seem like child’s play. He did not do things by halves.

If it had only been jealousy, that would be one thing. But she knew he’d formed a judgment, and it was a patently unfair one. His self-righteous implacability made her furious. As did the brutal effectiveness of it. It very nearly made her want to grovel, and she had never groveled for a thing in her life.

She would not like him for an enemy.

She also—and this seemed very nearly absurd—thought perhaps his feelings might be hurt. She could not quite say why she suspected this, only that she’d learned that emotions did tend to swing between poles out of defense. If not feelings, then at least his pride.

The very idea of even inadvertently visiting suffering on him when he’d already suffered bravely in so many other ways made her so restless with misery she could scarcely draw breath.

Still! He hadn’t the right to be hurt, had he? Or jealous.

She’d lingered in the drawing room for another twenty minutes or so after Hugh read that terrible poem aloud. The she’d pleaded a mal de tête and had gone upstairs, taking the poem with her.

It actually wasn’t a terrible poem, which made it somehow worse. How was she supposed to respond? Thank you kindly, the flowers are lovely but then that’s the job of roses, to look lovely, and oh, what about those appallingly familiar lines about my lips and hands? What about the contents of my heart? My brain? Who I am?

Once this nonsense hadn’t mattered. Then it had evolved into an irritant.

Now it flayed her. Back in her room, she’d gotten the little rock out of her reticule and held it, for no reason, except that it had been given to her by someone who knew her well. Someone she’d thought had seen her and also cared about her. It of course yielded no comfort.

She’d spent the rest of her evening with her lamp lit, her door closed, and her sketchbook open. And she had filled it with lines and color. It was the only thing she could control.

It was still remarkably early. The stillness of her little suite suggested her family were warmly bundled and sleeping in their own comfortable beds.

She slid out of bed and dressed quickly in the nearest wool walking dress to hand, a rich brown that colluded nicely with her hair. Then she laced on walking shoes and eyed the little vase of flowers speculatively. She wanted them gone, but she couldn’t countenance wasting them.

Inspiration struck. She lifted the two little cut blooms, dripping, from the vase. She could take them down to Helene Durand Park and cover them in the soil there. At least they could become mulch and help something beautiful to grow in this strange place by the docks.

She startled a yawning maid in the hall as she locked the door, then made her way quickly down the stairs.

She’d just passed the first little door to the ballroom—it was one she suspected led right up to the stage—and was just about to pass the second one when who should appear but Hugh Cassidy, striding in buckskins and rolled shirtsleeves, lumber tucked under his arm.

His eyes flicked over her. Apart from that, not one of his features so much as twitched.

But as he strode past her into the ballroom, he sardonically mimed tugging on his forelock.

FOOSH!

Just like that, her temper ignited and leaped.

She followed him into the ballroom, quietly, and pulled the door closed, none too gently.

He dropped his burden of lumber, brushed off his hands, pivoted.

And froze.

And then he planted his hands on his hips. His face, and stare, were as hard as if he was staring down an enemy soldier.

It was daunting.

He was about to learn how fierce she could be.

“Good morning, Mr. Cassidy,” she said pleasantly. “I wonder if you’d share with me what I’ve done to earn your contempt?”

An eyebrow leaped in cold amusement. “Was I not deferential enough, my lady?”

He said it softly. Mockingly.

She clamped down on her back teeth. “What if I said ‘yes’?”

He wordlessly, coolly contemplated her as though he were a bear deciding where to deliver the killing bite.

“Very well. Let’s just say that ‘contempt’ is an interesting choice of word for someone who said ‘take it away’ when presented with a bouquet of hothouse flowers.” He flicked his eyes down to the roses she still clutched in her fist. “I can imagine you saying ‘off with his head’ in the same bored tone.”

He turned his back on her again, picked up a plank from a stack of boards, then hurled it aside when he saw a hint of rot.

The echoing clatter made her start.

“And how, pray tell, was that contemptuous?” she demanded.

He paused and turned again. And then very slowly and carefully, as if he’d been up all night itemizing her sins and memorizing them for recitation, he said, “Well, let’s see. There’s contempt for the man who made the effort to choose and send the flowers. Contempt for all the other men who’ve sent flowers. Contempt for the fool who took the time to write a deeply stupid poem. Contempt, no doubt, for anyone who isn’t the heir to a duke. As if it’s simply your queenly due.”

The last words were almost but not quite a sneer.

She felt as though she were being piled with bricks. If she’d had something to throw, she might have, and she wasn’t the throwing-things-in-a-pique type.

“You don’t understand.” Her voice was frayed.

“I think I do.” He sorted through the boards and found the one he wanted, apparently. “You might want to step back. You might inadvertently get some manual labor on you, Lady Lillias.”

Her head was light now with fury. In slow amazement she said, “Why you arrogant . . .”

He whirled.

“Go right ahead,” he said silkily. “Tell me what you really think, Lady Lillias.”

His anger was daunting, but her own gave her strength. Still, she could hear her own breathing. The air she pulled in was hot. “Very well then, Mr. Cassidy.” She was so angry that her voice shook. “Given that you’re a simple American from the country, I’ll forgive you for not knowing it’s a sport to them. To all those men. The flowers and that nonsense. I’m a sport to them. They don’t seeme. They don’t care about me. They don’t know me. It’s a ritual. I’m the object. It’s what everyone does and I haven’t really had a say in it. And every time I get a bouquet I’m reminded of that.”

She realized her voice had escalated in pitch and now her eyes were burning and she was perilously close to furious tears. She went to brush her hand across her eyes. She realized she’d crushed the two roses in her clenched fist.

Oh, to be a man, able to stand there with an eyebrow up and not fall apart when ferocious emotion assailed you.

She uncurled her fingers. They both watched as the roses fell to the floor with a soft thump and a spray of red petals, like drops of blood.

And he had gone motionless. All traces of irony were wiped from his face. Something like epiphany lit it. Then, to her amazement, his head went back a little, and came down with a nod, as if he finally understood something. His expression gentled, and then went inscrutable, as he at once took what appeared to be an involuntary step toward her. His hand rose slightly, as if he meant to touch her arm.

He stopped himself.

He let her breathe.

She took a shaky breath, and another. “And that fool who wrote the poem has absolutely nothing else to do with his time, any more than my darling brother does.”

She said this more calmly.

They stood in this relative détente for another silent moment.

“But you’ll have to pick one eventually, right, Lillias?” He was only mildly ironic. Still gentle. “As long as he’s got a title.”

“Yes,” she said after a moment, quietly. A little desperately. “Of course. That’s what’s expected. That’s how it’s done.”

She swiped at her eyes.

But in silence, in the dim, dusty light of the ballroom, they regarded each other, and it was an absurd relief to have his attention again. To be heard by him.

And yet he’d still judged her. And her anger wasn’t spent.

“I want you to know . . . or rather, I should say I did like them, at first. The flowers. Who wouldn’t? It’s flattering, isn’t it? Flowers are lovely. It’s meant to be a compliment. And I know that I’m considered pretty, and I don’t dislike being told. And yet do you have any idea how often men are unkind about it? Do you know how ridiculous they can behave about it? It’s all wanting and competition and it colors their perception of me and I cannot free myself of it. All the men decided who I was. And you’re just the same.” She was ashamed that her voice was shaking. “You don’t even really like me. It’s the only reason you noticed me at all.”

He took this in, his expression inscrutable.

“Actually, I think it was the wreath of smoke around your head,” he said.

This surprised a short laugh from her.

It was the first time she’d said these things aloud to anyone. She felt shaky and a little exposed, but the liberation was dizzying.

“Well, let’s look at it another way,” he said, sounding deceptively reasonable. “Why did you notice me, Lillias? Wouldn’t I normally be beneath your notice? I’m practically a pagan from the wilds of America, after all. No title. No pedigree. My family tree has big bald patches. And yet you noticed me. And continue to notice me, as they say. Because that’s as good a word as any. ‘Notice.’”

The word, the way he said it, sounded like another world altogether, one that ought to have been worth one hundred pounds inserted into the epithet jar should it ever have been uttered aloud in the sitting room of The Grand Palace on the Thames.

She felt the heat on the back of her arms. “You’re impossible not to notice,” she said stiffly. “You take up a good deal of space in the little sitting room at night.”

“And in your mind when you’re in bed, I imagine.” He said this casually, almost sympathetically.

He was ruthless. But she stopped breathing. He was like someone cornering a magician into revealing her secrets.

He looked away for a moment. He pressed his lips together in thought. She took that opportunity to gulp him in like she’d gulped in the London view. Saw that dimple embedded like a crescent moon at the corner of his mouth, and the finest of lines about his eyes, and that little arcing scar he’d gotten from a bear because he always took care of his own.

Her own heart turned over hard.

He turned to her again.

“Lillias . . .” She’d never heard her name said in such a way. It had facets; it fairly shimmered with shades of emotion. Wit and exasperation and tenderness and frustration. The long pause that followed it betrayed just how much was going on in Mr. Cassidy’s head.

“I don’t dislike you.” His voice was solemn.

He moved slowly across the room, to close that distance between them.

“Yes,” she said wearily, dryly. “You might bestir yourself to do something if I were on fire, as it’s your duty to look out for the safety of women, and so forth.”

“Well, let me think. If you were on fire,” he said thoughtfully, “I would likely spring upon you, and perhaps roll you in a carpet. Give the carpet a good patting to make sure you were completely doused, lest you ignite the rest of The Grand Palace on the Thames, a place of which I’ve grown quite fond.”

She gave a short laugh. “Would you indeed spring upon me? Isn’t springing on a bear how you got that little—” And as if of its own accord, her hand reached toward him to touch his scar.

She went still. Stunned.

His hand was clamped around her wrist.

She hadn’t even seen him move. He’d captured her wrist mid-reach. It must have literally happened while she’d blinked.

She gave an experimental, minute tug.

His strength was reminiscent of an anchor thrown overboard.

He let her simmer in astonishment and a pure primal thrill of being held like that for a moment.

Then he spoke.

“In America,” he said, his voice low and calm, “we learn at a young age not to touch things when we can’t foresee the consequences. A lesson learned by a friend of mine who inserted his hand into a log and lost it to a badger.”

“That is a very colorful story.” Her voice emerged after a delay, because it had needed to traverse through a thicket of sensations. “You moved very quickly.”

There was a pause, during which the realization that his skin was touching her skin was slowly seeping in and mesmerizing both of them.

“I once snatched an arrow out of the air, shot at me by an irritated Indian.” He said this softly.

She managed a tense smile. “You are lying.”

He half smiled, too. “Am I hurting you?”

“No.”

He wasn’t. He was scarcely even touching her.

His fingers had loosened, and now circled her wrist in something perilously close to a caress.

And then that’s what it became. Gently. As if he were uncertain of his right to touch her. Inexorably. As if he simply couldn’t help himself.

Surely he could feel her pulse thumping away against his fingers. Because she certainly could. The blood was rushing in her ears like waves beating on a beach.

She gazed up into his face, and he gazed down into hers as if she were a landscape he was inspecting for hidden enemies. Or perhaps hidden wonders. Lost.

His voice lowered conspiratorially. “Would you like your hand back?”

The right words to say were bobbing around somewhere in the syrup her brain had become; she couldn’t quite fish them out. The truth was, at the moment, her hand seemed to rightly belong to him. As though it were a trophy he’d won for snatching arrows out of the air.

“You seem to have found a use for it, Mr. Cassidy. You’ve used it as a sort of . . . as a sort of . . . lever.”

Somehow, without either of them noticing, he had pulled her all but into his body.

Somehow, she had easily, willingly gone, as if she were on wheels.

He wasn’t smiling anymore.

His expression was taut. And enthralled, in the truest sense of the word.

“Lillias . . .” His voice bathed her senses like a too-potent liqueur. She heard more than a little pain in it. “I am not a toy. I feel it only fair to tell you that I do not normally enter into a contest—and we both know this has been a contest, so let’s not pretend any longer—of any sort unless I’ve a certainty of getting what I want. You cannot win this.”

Delicious quicksilver shivers of sensation traced her limbs, sent by his thumb.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Over her pulse, which was kicking like a trapped rabbit. Demonstrating to her his power.

“Do you want me to let you go?” he whispered.

Yes, she should have said.

But she couldn’t help herself.

“Tell me what you want,” she whispered.

She was going to make him say it out loud.

He closed his eyes briefly. “Which words would you like me to bludgeon you with this time? In the spirit of truth, I must warn you, ‘naked’ is likely to be one of them. Also words like ‘moaning’ and ‘cock.’”

She went rigid and sucked in a sharp breath.

He released her hand at once, almost roughly.

She took a step back.

And then another.

They regarded each other from this safe distance in silence.

And then he raised an eyebrow. Not unsympathetically. But once again, the “go inside, little girl” was implicit.

It was maddening.

“You aren’t really winning either, are you, Mr. Cassidy, if you’re helpless to stop playing the game?”

He instantly went as rigid as one of those boards he’d been hammering into place.

He wasn’t the only one who could raise a single eyebrow. She could, too, and so she did. And then she turned for the door.

She never got there. And she didn’t even have time to gasp.

In a single fluid motion he’d seized her, spun her about, and now she was enclosed by the bands of his arms, held flush up against his body.

One of his hands rested at the small of her back.

The other hand rested alarmingly much lower, a scant inch or so before the curve of her derriere.

Her breasts were crushed against his chest.

His groin was pressed hard, implacably, against hers.

He held her like that, for seconds or an eternity, his breath swift and angry, his eyes searching hers, his mouth a stern line. She stared furiously up at him.

And in seconds the length of his hard, hot body went to her head like laudanum. Until the breaths she drew were unsteady and hot, and ever swifter. She went pliant with surrender. Her body had transferred its allegiance to him with alarming speed.

In that moment, she wanted, very badly, for him to do with her what he would.

He’d probably always known how it would be. He’d tried to warn her.

His hand slid up her spine to cradle her head, to urge it gently back, and when his lips touched hers she moaned low in her throat, a sound she hadn’t known she could make. All want. All relief.

Shocking in its subtlety, at first, the kiss. A delicate slide of his lips against hers. But this was how he showed her that heretofore unimagined sensations could be coaxed from her lips alone. And that those sensations could ignite her entire body until she was trembling with a need she could not quite name.

She felt his own need humming in his body.

Her lips fell open beneath his. And that’s when the plunder began.

The hot satin of his mouth was a primal revelation. When she dared to meet the search and glide of his tongue with her own, his low groan vibrated through her body and he nearly crushed her against him. Together they turned that kiss into something furious and desperate, a clash fueled by futility and the forbidden. Every second of it uncovered in her new, fresh levels of erotic hunger.

Every second eroded the boundaries of her body and time. Until she was clinging to him to keep from spinning away.

His other hand slid down, down, and pressed her up against his hard cock.

Pleasure speared her; her head fell back on a gasp. He moved against her again. And then again. “Oh my God . . .” she moaned. “Hugh . . . ?”

She understood too late that if he didn’t stop this, she wouldn’t, either.

She heard her own breath sawing against his throat as he turned his head to kiss the pulse beneath her ear. He dragged his lips down, down, down to the soft swell of her breasts, to the valley between them, where her heart beat.

His lips lingered. And very gently, he kissed her there.

And that’s when he lifted his head. Slowly.

He brought his hand up to cup the back of her neck. His fingers played along the fine hairs there. Her body was still pressed hard up against his cock. And like this, he held her fast.

Their breathing mingled in a little storm, their lips still inches apart. She was as dazed as if she’d been trapped in an opium den.

“Do you see the trouble now?” He said this quietly, ironically, almost kindly next to her ear. His voice was still hoarse; the words staccato. “Now you will lie awake and think of nothing but this. You will desperately want what can never be. You will wonder about what awaits at the end of a kiss like this and yet I assure you, your imagination will never be able to do it justice. It is glorious. That is the curse of playing a game like this.”

She couldn’t speak.

Her eyes were closed.

Her breathing swayed against his.

“This can lead nowhere good, Lillias. Because we will not be able to stop. One day you will beg me for more. And then more. By then you will want it more than you’ve ever wanted anything. And there may come a time when I cannot help myself, and that way lies our doom.” He delivered the next words like the softest of whispered curses, right into her ear. “And rest assured . . . there is so . . . much . . . more.”

Her thoughts spiraled, chaotic as leaves caught in an updraft.

“Do you believe me?” His voice was low and almost stern, a little urgent. He sounded as though he were trying to shake her from sleep while the building around her burned.

She drew a struggling breath up from her lungs, hot and shaky. She took another.

“So this stops now,” he said abruptly. “Do you hear me?”

She managed to nod once.

His arms dropped and he stepped back from her abruptly, releasing her into a world that would never be the same again. She nearly staggered, but her formidable pride righted her.

There was silence.

She opened her eyes. But she refused to look at him. She looked steadfastly away, at the wall.

And a moment later, she turned and walked quietly out the door, closing it gently behind her.