Lady Derring Takes a Lover - Julie Anne Long Page 0,94

Dozens, hundreds, fanning out from there, people depended upon his wisdom and judgment and experience to bring them to justice.

And the questions he yet needed to ask her mattered. Who had taken that room on the first floor? For instance.

But he kissed her again, because he could not lie next to her and not kiss her, and apparently he was Achilles and she was the heel.

It began slowly, slowly as they dared knowing they had very little time, their hands moving over each other’s bodies, finding the hollows and knobs and angles and silky hidden places that made each other breathe swiftly, to ripple and beg for more. But in moments it was a frenzy of tangled limbs and little bites and deep kisses and urgency rather than finesse. She clung to him as he dove in her again and again; he buried his cry of release against her throat as she shook and shook beneath him, saying his name as if he’d wrought a miracle.

Side by side again, her head against his shoulder, his heart pounding harder than it had when that pirate had shot at him, Delilah sniffed.

She was weeping! He stiffened with alarm.

She smiled a little and said, “I’m sorry.”

“For biting me? I rather liked it.”

She laid her forearm across her eyes and gave a laugh which contained a little sniffle.

The reflexive ease with which he pulled her closer into his body unnerved him. The ease with which she came to him and burrowed her head into the hollow of his shoulder for comfort was unnerving, too. The realization that there was very little difference between comforting her and soothing himself was the most troubling thing of all.

“It’s that we’re given such a limited repertoire of ways to express emotions, and I’m feeling a number of complicated things all at once,” she said.

Never in his wildest dreams did Tristan think he would ask a woman the next question, or genuinely want to hear the answer.

“What are the things you’re feeling, Delilah?” He dragged his hand slowly down the luxurious satiny skin of her back.

He would never again call her Lady Derring. Knowing that she’d once belonged to someone who had not seen, appreciated, or loved her.

“I was just thinking that . . . if Derring had lived . . . I might have gone my entire life and not known what this . . . lovemaking . . . what you and I are like together. And though every day of running this boardinghouse is a veritable walk on a cliff edge of uncertainty, I can’t regret it. And yet Derring had to die for me to know it. I suppose I feel regret at what could never be with Derring, and also a sort of terrible fear, knowing that I might be nearly losing something. Isn’t that silly?”

“No,” he said shortly. He wished he had more words. “Not in the least.”

He lay there tracing the little pearls of her spine, thinking about the pearls she had sold to open this boardinghouse.

“Do you miss him?” he asked gruffly.

“No.”

He quietly, ungraciously, exulted.

“Sometimes . . . I feel like I can sense his presence here. Every now and again I think I catch a hint of his terrible cigars. Mostly in the kitchen, near the scullery, where I can’t imagine Derring spent any time whilst he was alive.”

Near the scullery.

The scullery, if he recalled correctly, was more or less beneath that mysterious suite of rooms.

And what was under the scullery?

Hell’s teeth.

All that glorious, hazy aftermath of release was burned off by the reason.

He should not ask the question now. When she was vulnerable and tender in his arms. When she saw him as comfort, strength, and pleasure. She trusted him, this lovely woman who had vowed never again to trust a man, and who had been a means to an end for people her entire life.

But her vulnerability was also the reason he needed to ask the question now.

There would be no undoing it if he asked it. But he knew it was already too late, and that he was destined.

“To whom did you let that suite on the third floor, Delilah? I’m concerned, you see. More importantly, does he or she play Whist, or the pianoforte?”

“The suite on the third floor?” She smiled drowsily. “Do you know, it’s the oddest thing. A prim, supercilious, well-dressed man paid us two entire sovereigns to keep it for his mysterious employer.”

It wasn’t quite at all what he’d expected to hear. “That