Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore
Chapter 11
Awaiting ravishment wasn’t quite as pleasurable as she’d anticipated. She had taken a warm bath, put on a thickly ruffled nightgown, and slipped deep under the covers of her new bed. The scent of clean linen surrounding her should have been comforting. She was still shivering from head to toe and could not stop watching the fiery flickers dancing across the door to her husband’s chamber. A tray with two glasses of champagne was on her nightstand, and once and again her gaze strayed to the silently pearling drink, for she was parched and her nerves tense enough to snap.
A brief knock, and the door opened. Her belly clenched. Lucian stood frozen, his face in the shadows. A reddish glow delineated his still form, and for a mad moment, the Prince of Darkness came to mind. Then he closed the door and moved toward the bed, slowly, his expression calm, but she was instinctively pressing back into the pillows. His black silk robe exposed a V of bare chest and she hadn’t expected there to be a pelt. When he sat on the edge of the mattress, her breathing became embarrassingly loud. He didn’t notice. His gaze was roving over her unbound hair and it consumed all his attention, drew him closer, transfixed. He reached for a lock and lifted it carefully, his eyes examining the satiny strand as if it were some treasured artwork, and the unguarded reverence in his expression stunned her a little. He must have realized it, too, for faint color crested on his cheekbones and he pulled away. He drew the coverlet back from her trembling body and patted the space next to him. “Come sit with me.”
His voice was low and husky, and it made her shake harder. She moved awkwardly and settled at a proper foot’s distance away from him. With casual ease, Lucian slid his left arm around her waist and pulled her flush against his side as he leaned across her to pick up a champagne glass.
“No, thank you.” Her head was already swimming, from the fresh pine soap scent on his neck, from the intimate feel of a hard, warm torso against hers. At least he wore a pair of soft trousers beneath his robe.
He shrugged and returned the glass to the tray. His hand had moved down from the dip of her waist over her hip, and she was acutely aware of the proprietary splay of his fingers on her thigh.
His gaze glided to the flutter of her pulse in the side of her neck. The heat she found banking in the depths of his eyes burned through her courage as though it were paper. She may have made an anxious sound. He brushed a loose strand of hair back behind her ear, then lingered to caress the delicate spot below with his thumb.
“You know what is to happen between us?” he murmured.
His bluntness made her cheeks burn. “Yes.” She was still uncertain what to do. She had decided to ignore Ruth Smythers’s Instructions and Advice for the Young Bride.
Rough fingertips skated along the curve of her jaw, and the gentle friction against her soft skin sent sparks across her vision.
“You’re very pretty,” she heard him say, the words emerging clumsily and unpracticed. “In the church today … when I saw you, I thought you were the prettiest lass I’d ever seen.”
She said the first coherent thing that came to mind: “My dress was ghastly.”
He stroked her throat. “That so?”
“My mother,” she said. “She chose it. She chooses all of my gowns.”
“Have new ones made, then,” he said. “The kind you like.”
His warm hand curved around her nape.
“I should love a few new dresses,” she said weakly. The way he was looking at her mouth, dark and intent, made her lips tingle with a phantom touch.
“Order as many as you want,” he said, sounding amused. “But try to not mention your mother while we’re in bed.”
A nervous laugh burst from her. Was laughing allowed in bed? All thinking ceased when he leaned in and kissed her. His tongue lightly moved against hers, the sensation still so alien and intriguing, she held still to absorb it. So silky, so forbidden. His hands felt dangerously strong, but his mouth was soft. She tentatively matched his movements, and his grip on her thigh and neck tightened. It should have startled her, but a part of her liked it; she liked being held so firmly by him, but that, too, was confusing. The kiss slowly melted into another, and another, until a drugging heat sank through her lower body. Somehow, she was on her back, her head lolling in the crook of his arm while their tongues were sliding together. She was half-trapped beneath a heavy, muscled body, but he was intoxicatingly warm and solid, inviting her to cling to him. She didn’t; she turned her face away, panting and with her lips sensitive and swollen. He lowered his head to her neck. The featherlight touch of his lips against her pulse point kindled a throb between her legs, an elemental beat that lulled her deeper into hazy stupor. Too late came the awareness that he had undone the bows down the front of her nightgown. His fingertips were grazing over bare skin. She stilled under his explorations, her languor fading. His hand shaped around the heavy round weight of her right breast, and he made a sound low in his throat. His eyes locked with hers. “I want to see you,” he said hoarsely. “All right?”
She struggled to fill her lungs. I advise you to please your husband … you can hasten it along by letting him look at you …. She hadn’t wanted to hasten anything along a moment ago, adrift in the voluptuous sensations of his kisses. As the pause drew out, he seemed to sober, and focused on her face. “You want to wait?”
He meant waiting for all of it. His hand was still on her breast, and he probably hadn’t planned to ask. She had thought about waiting, but then she had pictured herself wandering around the house in nervous anticipation and with little reward in the end. The truth was, when one’s husband was such an unfortunate match, the passing of time would never transform him into the gentleman of her dreams. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to wait.”
He sat up and shrugged out of his robe. She saw pale skin and sculpted muscle. Dark hair scattered across a powerful chest. It took her a moment to understand that the purple and silvery marks on his arms and abdomen were scars. When he turned his attention to undressing her, she closed her eyes. She kept them closed when cool air brushed her bare limbs. In the silence, she heard Lucian breathing harder, and her exposed skin prickled under the heat of his gaze. She had seen bodies like hers in prints of paintings they hid away from the ladies, scandalous works by Falero, for example, who painted his female nudes as lusty witches, with lushly rounded hips and thighs and bellies, and breasts too ample to suit fashion. The unabashed indulgence in feminine curves had enchanted her. Now that Lucian was studying her, a tiny voice amid ambivalence and breathlessness wondered whether he found her beautiful, too …. Her eyes popped open when he put his hand on her breast again. He plumped it up with a satisfied growl and dipped his head, and she felt the now familiar silky slickness of his tongue. Warmth flooded her middle and she squirmed. It seemed to encourage him; he used his teeth on the tip, biting gently, then he sucked, and she choked back a moan. He glanced up, his face looking fever flushed. Her nipple was stiff and glistening wet from his mouth. “Make noise if you want,” he said.
Unsettled that he could read her when she knew nothing, she pressed her lips together and only noticed when she saw Lucian frowning at her mouth.
He raised himself up on his elbow. “I don’t know what you were told,” he said slowly. “But you needn’t be scared of me. I won’t hurt you.”
“I’m not scared of you,” she said, truthfully, for what he did was arousing and done gently enough. And yet … “I’m uncertain,” she guessed, “uncertain about all that is to happen, and how.”
“I see,” he said. “I …” He gave a small shake and began again. “You don’t have to do anything. You can, if you want, but you don’t have to.”
He was absently stroking the soft underside of her breast with his thumb, as if he couldn’t quite keep from touching her.
“And you,” she murmured, “what will you do?”
His eyes darkened. “I’ll lick your cunny in a moment and then I’ll come to you.”
“Lick me?” she repeated with a mindless stare.
“Well, here.” He slid his broad hand down her stomach and rested it between her thighs.
“Oh no,” she said quickly. “I wouldn’t like that.”
His brow furrowed. “How’d you know?”
Because she felt all sorts of emotions at the thought of his soft tongue on her most sensitive place and like was not one of them.
“I’d rather we just got on with it,” she said.
Lucian stilled. Then he gave a shrug. “As you wish.”
He rolled to his side and worked on his trousers, and she tried to keep her gaze averted, but of course, she looked. That was when matters began to go wrong. Something was wrong with him. Or with her. Sweat broke over the length of her body—he had lied; he would hurt her, because there was no part of her anatomy where he could safely put that.
He placed his knee between her thighs, and she reared up. “We … won’t fit.”
He looked bemused. “We will,” he murmured, “trust me.”
She flattened herself back into the mattress. Lucian palmed up her left calf and braced her knee back, and then both his strong thighs were between hers. Trust me. He glanced down at her cramped form, at how her fingers were gripping the coverlet.
“Put your hands on my shoulders,” he said, and the low, steady timbre of his voice touched on something inside her. She obeyed. His skin was scorching against her palms, the strength of hard muscle and sinew beneath unyielding, and her limbs went strangely loose in response. Trust me. His face was tense above her. A stranger’s face. And he was about to hurt her, and about to tie her to him. How on earth could she trust him? She felt blunt pressure at her entrance.
“No.” She pushed back. “No.”
“What?” His gaze was unfocused.
She dug in her nails. “I want to wait; I’ve changed my mind.”
His expression blanked. “Now?”
“Yes.”
He held himself above her, their bodies twin mirrors of frozen tension. Neither one of them blinked.
“Right,” he said. He sat back on his heels, and the curves of his shoulders were peppered with sharp little white crescents—her nails had bit deep. He turned and faced the wall and locked his fingers behind his neck. A thin sheen of sweat gleamed on his back.
Hell. This was hell; a mortification more broiling hot than she’d ever felt. She had to watch her husband’s shoulders rise and fall with uneven breaths, and when she made to speak, he shook his head before a word passed her lips. There was a flash of a very white, muscular bottom when he rose and pulled up his trousers. As he tied the belt of his robe, he glanced down at her, the hollows beneath his cheekbones deeply shadowed. She hid behind her hair, hoping to become invisible.
“I’ll see you in the morning, then,” he said, and dipped his head. “Good night.”
He left through the door leading to the corridor and closed it behind him softly.
Her breath shuddered out of her. She did not inhale for a long moment. She almost wished he hadn’t left; the silence filling the room was deafening and made the riot inside her head roar all the louder. She pressed her cold hands to her hot cheeks. There really was nothing to do in such a situation other than have a drink and a lie-down, was there? She took a glass from the tray and gulped the now flat champagne as if it were water. What a disaster of a wedding night. But she could have ogled every artful depiction of the male form and none of it could have prepared her for the chest hair and scars and certainly not his thing. Man’s anatomy had certainly evolved since the glory days of Olympia. After a brief hesitation, she slid a hand between her legs. It felt slippery, as if her monthly courses had arrived. But no. She carefully poked inside, which she never did. No, not an obvious fit. Why then had she a creeping suspicion now that she might perhaps have reacted rather too dramatically? She put down the empty champagne glass and grabbed the full one.
When her head lay heavy and buzzing on the pillow, she admitted she hadn’t just refused him for fear of being hurt. Her life had changed too quickly in ways she had never envisioned, and this now was her stubborn streak asserting itself, that indelible part of her that despite everything a woman was taught from the cradle, made her want to bend the world to fit her feelings rather than bend and bend herself until she fit whatever situation had been inflicted upon her. But now she had revealed that part to her husband. In a most delicate situation no less. It would be … interesting to face him come morning.
No.Her rejection should have worked like a bucket of ice water over his head, but here he was, prowling along dark corridors overheated and with a raging cockstand. No. She was imprinted on his senses, on his tongue and his palms, salty sweet, arousing, velvet soft. Her no was a physical thing, too, jabbing away into his muscles, sharp like needles, and it eventually drove him toward his gymnastics room. He braced his forearms against the door, waiting and breathing while the sweat on his neck cooled. An inanimate sand sack wouldn’t do right now. He needed a reaction, the bracing energy of an opponent. He gritted his teeth. Every single person of consequence in England knew he had married Harriet Greenfield today, and if he showed anywhere in London at this hour for a sparring, rumors about a piss-poor wedding night would spread like wildfire among the toffs.
He leaned his forehead against the smooth oak wood. It was his fault. Matters had gone to shit because he had done something he never did—he had dithered. But when he had first seen her on the bed, his mind had blanked. She had looked so fine, with her hair streaming over the pillows like ribbons of red silk. His wife. A visceral feeling had reared its head: mine. Followed right by: not for you. Like when he had first seen Rutland’s estate looming from the mist, both desirable and antagonizing at once. And if he had learned one thing in life, it was whatever he wanted, whatever he needed, he had to take it. Unless he took, he went hungry. But his usual way didn’t apply here. Instead, he had made a clueless attempt at tenderness. His hands clenched in frustration, and he went to the washroom for a cold shower.
He returned to his study a while later, frozen beneath his robe and in no better temper. He grabbed the book on flower language Matthews had brought him the day before: Flower Lore, written by a Miss Carruthers from Inverness. He flicked through the pages, skipping over chapters on monks and herbs and Ruskin waxing lyrically about filigree petals until he found the alphabetical overview at the very end. Apparently, red chrysanthemums communicated love. They both knew love wasn’t a part of this, but she might appreciate the sentiment. Camellias stood for loveliness. Laurustinus, cheerfulness in adversity. Definitely would get a dozen of those. He was disgusted by his own sarcasm—he should be upstairs, tupping his wife to make the marriage contract count, not picking out flowers. He scribbled his selection down on a piece of paper and went to Matthews’s rooms on the other side of the house, because it was only ten o’clock. The muffled, mournful melody of Matthews’s traverse flute sounded behind his door when he knocked.
Matthews yanked the door open after a minute, still fully attired in an evening suit. He must have expected Nicolas or Tommy the lad, for his stance became submissive the moment he was aware who was in front of him. But as his gaze scurried quickly, furtively, over Lucian’s robe and his damp hair, an emotion flared in his eyes. Raging antipathy. Odd.
“You were out?” Lucian asked.
A nod. “The opera. Puccini. Magnificent interpretation.”
“Right; I need you to go to the hothouse flower traders in Covent Garden at dawn tomorrow,” he said, and handed Matthews the folded paper. “Have her lady’s maid make them into a bouquet, which she is to put into Mrs. Blackstone’s chamber before she rises.”
Matthews took the list without looking at it. “Will do, sir,” he murmured. The room behind him was bright and golden from the light of two dozen candles. His flute glinted like a silver scepter on his desk.
“One day you you’ll burn down the house,” Lucian told him as he left.