Part 8 (2/2)
”You'll wear the blue. Everything else is packed.”
”But...but the blue was ruined in the mud.”
”A few stains, here and there, but good enough to ride in a coach, bad enough to not suffer too much if you see a puddle you might wish to jump up and down in...my lady.”
”Danica, you're impertinent, do you know that?” Alina wanted the woman gone, not just from her bedchamber at this moment, but from her life, her employ. ”And clearly you are unhappy here. Perhaps you should return home. I am certain his lords.h.i.+p can arrange suitable transport.”
The dresser didn't burst into tears, nor did she throw herself at Alina's feet and beg for her position, but her stern face did take on a faintly wounded expression. ”This is how I'm thanked for leaving my homeland in order to serve the daughter of the good and kind General Leopold Valentin, so beloved of his countrymen, so mourned upon his death at the hands of the outlaw Bonaparte, so-”
”Oh, Danica,” Alina exclaimed in a horror of remorse, clasping the unbending woman to her. ”I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.”
Danica took hold of Alina's shoulders and sternly put her at arm's length, her hatchet face once more implacable. ”Gut. Good. Then that is settled, you have apologized as you should, and we will speak no more of this. You will wear the blue.”
”Uh...yes?” Alina said, caught between surprise and an insane urge to laugh. ”I will wear the blue. Most definitely. I can't imagine why I thought otherwise. I'll braid my hair myself-you just go to bed now. Good night, Danica.”
Once the woman was gone, Alina stripped off the offending night rail and climbed back into her chemise, which at least didn't b.u.t.ton to her chin, and then wrapped herself in the ermine-tipped cloak already laid out for the morning chill.
Before she could reflect too much over what she was about to do, she then opened the door to the hallway, stuck her head out far enough to be certain she would not be observed, and then raced on bare tiptoes down the length of the corridor before entering Justin's chamber, closing the door and flattening her back against it to catch her breath. She'd made it!
And then she very nearly leapt out of her skin when Justin spoke to her.
”You were somehow detained? I'd expected you a full ten minutes ago, and was just now feeling I'd misjudged you. How gratifying to see that I haven't. You're as foolish as you are brave.”
The silky voice had come from somewhere in the dimness lightened by only a few candles. ”And looking quite fetching, I might add,” Justin said as he stepped forward, making himself visible in the candlelight.
”You knew I'd come? You've been waiting for me?” Alina shook her head at her own foolishness. ”Yes, of course you did, of course you are. Now I feel foolish and...predictable.”
Justin took her arm and led her toward the fire and the pair of facing leather wingback chairs that were much like the pair in her own chamber. As she'd already decided these chairs were less than comfortable, she sank to her haunches on the hearth rug, the cloak forming a velvet puddle around her.
Justin looked toward one of the chairs, and then shrugged his shoulders as if to say why should he be any different than his guest, at which point he also lowered himself to the floor, still holding a snifter of brandy delicately in one hand. He looked...magnificent. Without his evening jacket, with his s.h.i.+rtsleeves hanging loosely, the neat ruffling of his cuffs tickling at the backs of his hands, with his neckcloth gone and his waistcoat undone, he managed to look both wonderfully groomed and approachable. Human.
She should remember that he was probably neither.
”How did you know I'd come to see you?”
”I couldn't be certain,” he told her, swirling the brandy in the snifter. She felt her eyes drawn to it, losing herself in its honeyed highlights. ”If you hadn't, I would have found my way to your chamber. Charlotte, you see, apologized to me after you'd gone. She believes she may have been indiscreet.”
With some effort, Alina tore her gaze from the brandy snifter. ”About your dead wife, yes. But you would have told me in your own good time.”
”If I didn't disappear again, as I did from Portsmouth.”
”I hadn't thought of that, but yes, I suppose so. But mostly, if you were to go through with the marriage, that is, which you aren't, so I really have no reason to be curious about your...personal past.”
”Ah, but you'd give that fine cloak to know, wouldn't you?”
”I most certainly would not,” she protested, finally unable to resist looking him in the eye. He had such arresting green eyes, different from any color she'd ever seen. ”But I do have a perfectly lovely reticule with seed pearls st.i.tched all over it in the design of a peac.o.c.k, if you think you'd fancy it.”
”Now I've upset you.”
”You can't upset me, my lord, if I don't wish to be upset. I am only curious about the man I am not going to marry. Anyone would be, you know. You're exceedingly strange. May I have a sip? I've never tasted brandy, but I like the smell of it. You warm it with your hands, don't you?”
He offered her the snifter, and she took it with both hands, holding it beneath her nose and breathing in its heady fragrance before touching the gla.s.s to her lips. The moment the warmed liquid hit her tongue she had to force herself not to gasp, and determinedly took a long swallow before handing the thing back to him.
”Here,” he said, holding out a handkerchief he'd produced from somewhere on his person. ”Your eyes are tearing. You are supposed to sip, kitten, and then hold the brandy in your mouth for a few moments, allow it to caress your tongue, and only then swallow. When something is good it is to be savored. Not gulped.”
And then, without taking his eyes off her, he raised the snifter to his own mouth and demonstrated what he meant.
Those slumbering parts of her had clearly only been napping since she'd first seen him again this afternoon. Now they yawned, stretched and slowly began to wake up once more. ”Why do you make me feel this way when you look at me?” she asked him before she could stop herself. ”I don't like it.”
”No, kitten, you don't understand it. There's a difference.”
His gaze was steady, unwavering and mind-shatteringly unnerving. She tried to get up to leave this man and his unsettling way of saying what she didn't think he knew. But when he held out his hand she subsided, sighing.
He took her hand in his, stroked his thumb against her palm.
The entire world seemed to have suddenly narrowed to include only the two of them, wrapped inside the soft glow from the fire. He was so intensely male. She, for the first time in her life, believed she might know what it meant to be a female.
”You want to kiss me again, don't you?” she asked him quietly.
”No, kitten. That is precisely the last thing I want to do.”
She looked down at her hand, lost in his, believing his touch put the lie to his words. ”Forgive me. There was a time, my lord, when I thought I was a fairly intelligent person. Do you think it's that the air here in England is different? Is that why I've been so very stupid ever since I left the s.h.i.+p? Or...or perhaps it was the brandy, because, you know, I've never really drunk strong...”
His finger beneath her chin signaled that he wanted her to raise her head, look at him. Her heart beating madly, her breath somehow gone, she couldn't seem to refuse.
”Have you ever wondered about the difference between what we know we shouldn't do and what, against all good sense, we find we have to do?” he asked her, his face close to hers, the smell of brandy on his breath somehow intoxicating her more than the drink itself. ”And, much as I shouldn't want to do this, kitten, I find that I have to.... I really, really must....”
Alina's eyelids fluttered closed as, only his light touch beneath her chin holding her in place as if she had lost the power to move, he put his lips to hers. And this time he didn't move away again.
She didn't know what to do, how to react. She tried pursing her lips, but that didn't seem right. She tried simply tightening them against her teeth, and half felt, half heard his soft chuckle, so she knew that had to be wrong, as well. She probably looked like Danica in one of her disapproving att.i.tudes.
So when Justin put the pads of his thumbs to either side of her mouth and began to lightly ma.s.sage her skin, she simply relaxed, deciding that he knew much better than she what a kiss between a man and a woman was all about.
”Better,” he breathed, moving back slightly, just enough to look into her eyes. He tipped his head slightly to one side, his eyes alight with mischief. ”Now let's try that again, shall we?”
”I...but I...”
He didn't allow her to finish, which was probably a good thing, as she had no idea what she might have said, but just captured her mouth even as she was speaking.
He kissed her, and then he kissed her again, and yet again. Each time she felt she learned more, until she actually became frustrated each time he withdrew, and found herself lifting her face to him, seeking out his next kiss.
He nipped lightly at her upper lip, which rather tickled. He actually drew her full bottom lip between his teeth, and ran his tongue along the soft underside of it, sending a trumpet blast to her sleeping parts and rousing them to full attention.
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