“Julian,” she whispered. “Please. If this distress persists, I shall go mad. And since you caused it, you must make it stop. If you want to do one kindness for me, do this.”
She gestured at herself. Her lips were swollen from his kisses, pink from abrading against his unshaven skin. Her nipples were hard beneath the thin fabric of her girlish nightdress. Her arms and chest were flushed.
She was, indeed, the picture of distress.
Exactly the kind of distress he was, quite literally, an expert at relieving.
Would it be so wrong to offer her a kind of … lesson? Like he might teach her how to string a bow if she’d expressed interest in learning archery?
“I’m sorry, but I can’t do what you ask,” he said slowly.
Her lovely brazen confidence seemed to deflate all at once.
She buried her head beneath a pillow. “Of course,” she muttered. “I don’t know why I ever expect anything from you beyond dejection. I’m sorry I asked. I’m sure it’s perverse of me to even want it.”
Fuck.
He’d already bruised her so many times. The last thing he wanted was to embarrass her for making such a vulnerable, intimate admission. For years it had been a kind of calling to make his lovers feel safe expressing their desires, no matter how unusual. He would not fail on this count with the woman he treasured above any of them.
For someone who was so candid on other matters, Constance rarely spoke about her feelings. He realized he knew little of her private dreams, her secret heart.
He’d never asked.
Damn him, he’d never asked.
Perhaps if he had, he would not have ruined things before they’d ever started.
He put his hand gently on hers, until she peered out at him from beneath the pillow’s edge.
“Constance, there is nothing about you that is perverse. But I can’t … touch you. And not because I don’t want to, or because it’s wrong for you to wish for it, but because it isn’t right for me to take such liberties if there is to be no future between us.”
She groaned.
“But I could offer you some guidance in soothing the … distress … if you would like.”
She played with the corner of a lacy sham. “Oh?”
He was speaking with exactly the same tortured vagueness she had used, and he rolled his eyes at himself. He was a grown man with a history of having far more frank and detailed conversations on such matters with women he’d known for as many minutes as he had fingers. “What I mean is, if you don’t know how, I can help to teach you how to come.”
Constance blinked. “To come?”
“To experience a relief from distress … a sort of climax of pleasure. You don’t need a lover for that. You can do it yourself, whenever you like.”
She widened her eyes at him in a way that suggested she had not discovered this on her own.
“To come,” she said. “What a strange expression.”
“The French call it la petite mort. You can call it whatever you like. The important thing is not what you call it, but how it feels.”
“And how does it feel?”
He could not even begin to answer that question.
“There is really only one way to find out.”
What had she just convinced him to do?
Surely, judging by the way Apthorp’s voice had grown low and gravelly, he thought that whatever it was would land him very thoroughly in hell.
Which did nothing to change the fact that she very much wanted whatever this death was, particularly now that Apthorp was perched beside her in her bed. One could not be held responsible for the effect that such a sight engendered in one’s most private places. The sticky heat between her legs that had plagued her whenever she spent too much time recalling their encounter in the powdering room was more insistent than ever, and the nagging pulse of it went straight to her brain.
If there was a cure for this restlessness, by God or by Beelzebub, she must have it. Her mortal soul was no doubt intended for the inferno anyway, if Mrs. Mountebank had anything to say about it.
“What do I do?” she asked.
Apthorp—no. Julian, for she could not think of him as stiff Lord Apthorp when he looked at her that way, his eyes banked fire, the heat of his body making her bedsheets so warm her skin was prickly to the touch—swallowed a breathy noise. Half laugh, half sigh. Like a man who longed for something that he didn’t want to want.
“Lean back on your pillows,” he said huskily. “Try to relax.”
She could not imagine being relaxed with Julian in her bed.
Nevertheless she arranged herself as he instructed. But now that she had asked for this, she felt very, very shy.
“I am not relaxed. Quite the opposite. I’m terribly nervous.”
He nodded. “That’s all right. It can be hard to let go in the presence of another person. Try closing your eyes.”
“Perhaps if you kissed me, I would be less nervous. Is that not how this works?”
“I told you. I won’t touch you. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t touch yourself.”
“Being rejected does not induce in one the desire to be witnessed touching oneself by the very person who finds one undesirable,” she said, taking a prim tone because if she said it any differently, she might burst into tears. Tortured elocutions were the only comfort she had left.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was smiling at her.
“Is that what you think I am doing? Rejecting you? My God, Constance. I … Look at me.”
She did so, reluctantly. His eyes were dark, the way they had been when he kissed her.
“Not there,” he whispered.
He looked down to his lap, and dragged a hand across his breeches, which strained with the evidence of male excitement.
“Do you see how hard I am?” he asked in a low voice. “I would love to do what you ask. But I can’t. So instead, know how badly I want to, and close your eyes.”
She did. And knowing that she was not alone in this bloody state of wanting made the wanting so much worse. She felt frantic with it. Like she’d do anything to make it go away.
“Good,” he murmured. “Now focus on how your body feels. Where you might want to be touched.”
Breasts. I want your hands on them again.
“I can’t say,” she whispered. “I feel so bashful.”
“You don’t have to say anything, sweet girl. Just touch yourself. Pretend I’m not here.”
She shook her head. This was absurd. He was beside her like the golden dawn itself with his tousled damp hair and glinting amber eyes, swollen in his most intimate places because he wanted her, and what she wanted was for him to take her in his arms and make her feel better. Not to observe her performing some scientific inquiry into lust.
She opened one eye and peeked out at him. “I can’t. It’s too odd. It won’t work.”
He reached for his cravat and began to unwind it from his neck.
“Perhaps it would help if you couldn’t see me,” he said softly. “Lift up your head, and I’ll make it a little easier.”
She obeyed, if only because it was an excuse to let him touch her.
Gently, he lowered the linen around her eyes and wrapped it snugly, tying it behind her head.