He did it harder. Her hips tilted up to meet the motion of his hand. Up, lowered, up, lowered—impossibly exquisite friction against his erection. Her other hand clamped over his forearm. She turned her face and kissed him just above his collar—wet, hungry kisses that shot straight to his testes.
All her muscles tensed. She cried out. He felt the tremors beneath his fingers. It was too much. He dipped his head and bit into her shoulders—no, he would allow nothing for himself. The pressure of his teeth only made her climax more violent. He almost wept, in awe of the beauty of her pleasure, in pity for himself.
Her tremors subsided. His near-crisis faded into the usual insistent, painful need she aroused. Then she kissed him again above the collar, and parts of him leapt in response.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Let me return the favor for you,” she said earnestly.
It was a marvel he didn’t ejaculate upon those words. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because that would be wrong.”
“More wrong than what we just did?”
“That wasn’t wrong. That was…” Sublime, breathtaking, and so intense it would monopolize his dreams for years. He could only repeat himself. “That wasn’t wrong.”
She exhaled, a sigh of Shakespearean complexity. Her arm lifted and hooked behind his neck. She snuggled closer to him, her cheek against his jaw. He banded his arms about her middle, unwilling—and unable—to let go.
“Thank you,” she said. Her breath was sweet, sweeter than apples—she’d eaten a perfectly ripe medlar.
For the pleasure, he supposed. “No, thank you,” he said.
“What for?”
For this wordless embrace. For the warmth, comfort, and substance of it.
“For all the memories, old and new. For the madeleines. For having loved Bertie. For—”
She twisted in his arms. Suddenly her lips were upon his and he was too weak and too glad to resist. She kissed him solemnly, urgently, deeply, as if he were a sweetheart at last returned from a long, long war, and she’d waited until her youth had fled and her hair turned white.
When they finally pulled apart, her cheeks were wet. And so were his, he realized with a jolt.
“I love you,” she said. “Always.”
After she left—Mrs. Abercromby would return early today, she’d explained, because of the dinner on the morrow—Stuart remained a long time in the bath, in the dark, thinking of her.
There were ways he could hold on to her, and still remain faithful to Lizzy. As much as he burned for it, he would survive not making love to her—as long as he could have her in his arms once in a while.
It wasn’t enough, of course. In their predicament, they could never have enough, only bits and scraps, stolen encounters of powerful pleasure and equally powerful anguish.
But to give her up altogether now was unthinkable. He would keep her close, for as long as she would let him, and live as did those natives of rainy climes who spent the vast majority of their days under an overcast sky and made the most of their rare, glorious glimpses of the sun.
Chapter Seventeen
Stuart’s hopes died abruptly twenty-four hours later, as his fiancée was shown into his drawing room. “Sorry I’m late.” She squeezed his hand briefly. “I didn’t mean to be. When you are prime minister, you will do something about the logjams, won’t you?”
She smiled at him, looking very young and very stylish in a dinner gown the color of evergreens in winter.
“Of course, I shall banish them all,” he said, as his heart sank without a trace.
He had betrayed her. There was no other word for what he had done. In the confines of the bath, it had been easy to pretend otherwise, to believe that what he had done and what he wanted to do were both beyond the judgment of the simplistic sexual mores of his time.
It was not the simplistic sexual mores of his time that he faced now, but the trust in Lizzy’s eyes. It didn’t matter that he never had taken and never would take any pleasure with Madame Durant, not even when he was alone. He had touched her and kissed her and held on to her as if he were a beggar and she his last shining penny.
He loved her—in ways he understood only marginally, an emotion too powerful, too primal for a civilized man. And that was the ultimate betrayal, far worse than furtive touches in the dark, far worse than even outright fornication.
“Banish them all, eh? Now, that will indeed make me the most popular hostess in London,” said Lizzy, her smile widening.
Her smile was a corrosion of acid upon his conscience.
“Anything to make you the most popular hostess in London, my lady,” he said.