“May I ask why you have never…”
“You may ask,” he replied in a tone he hoped indicated he had no intention of answering. He’d never spoken of that particular grief to anyone, let alone a lady he’d just met. She smiled. He picked up her bonnet and reticule and handed them to her. “You came in a carriage?”
“In a hackney. My footman is waiting with the driver at the back entrance to this establishment.”
“There is a staircase to the left of my office that leads to the mews. Do you know the way?”
“Yes. Thank you.” With her bonnet and reticule in her free hand she slowly withdrew her other hand from his grasp. “Good day, Lord Whitcombe.”
“Good day, miss.” He returned to his desk, waited until she was out of sight, and subsided onto the worn leather with a groan. He propped his head in his hands. “Thirty years old and a virgin.” He groaned again. “I wouldn’t touch me either.”
His office door slammed open. The lady in black marched across the room and threw her things on his desk. She came toward him with such a fiery look in her eyes Daedalus leaned back and nearly fell from his chair. She clasped his face in her hands and pressed her lips to his with such force he forgot to breathe. Her kiss was fierce and hot and seeking. She ravished his mouth until he opened to her and then the real ravishing began. Her tongue curled around his. She sucked long and hard and then slowly slid out to lick his lips, then nip and bite and kiss until Daedalus feared he might burst into flames. His cock roared to life so hard and fast he gasped. His vision blurred and tiny stars of light burst before his eyes. Somewhere in the middle of her kiss his spectacles had abandoned him. His chest heaved in an effort to draw in some air that was not aflame with her passion. He grasped her elbows to keep from falling backwards.
She finally drew back, her lips clinging to his as if loathe to let him go. Daedalus lay back in his chair gasping for breath. She ran her hands over his shoulders and pushed herself upright. “Well,” she said as she shook out her skirts and smoothed her hair. “This might prove interesting. I must give your proposal some thought. I will send along a note with my decision.” She dipped into a brief curtsy. “Good day, Lord Whitcombe.”
“I…” He closed his eyes, blinked a few times and when he looked up she was gone. His chair slid from under him. He flailed his arms and swept the books off the shelves behind him as he fell. He glanced down at the hard bulge behind the falls of his breeches just before a stack of heavy ledgers crashed onto his groin. “Bloody buggering hell!” He subsided flat of his back, his entire body shaking. Heavy footsteps clumped down the corridor and stopped at his office door.
“Awright, guv’?” Ox bent over him and pushed some of the books aside.
“No.”
“Want to get up now?” The big man offered Daedalus his hand.
“No.”
Ox glanced about the room. “What ’appened, guv’?”
“I…She…” His ears were ringing. He managed to pull himself into a seated position and touched his mouth. “She kissed me.”
“Aye,” Ox said as he helped Daedalus to his feet. “That’ll do it.”
“Do what?”
“That’s the question, ain’t it?” And Ox began to laugh.
4
The hackney had rattled halfway to Gracechurch Street before Cordelia’s legs ceased to shake.In some sort of dream state, she had stumbled down the backstairs at Whitcombe’s and allowed Andrew to hand her into the hired carriage. Thank goodness Andrew had insisted on riding on the box with the driver. She was in desperate need of the time it took to cross London to compose herself. Recover? What on earth had she done?
You kissed him, you silly chit!
Kissed him? That was perhaps the understatement of the year, more likely that of the last five years. She’d practically ravished him into the floor. Her lips still hummed with the taste of him. The clasp of his powerful hands on her arms had seared through her clothes. He had no right, damn him. She pounded against the threadbare squabs with her fists.
She’d gone by the shop on several occasions in the last year, not to deliver any of her manuscripts, but only to look. The shop itself was fascinating with its maze of shelves and little alcoves where people sat in mismatched chairs next to plain rather indifferent little tables and perused a stack of books at their leisure. Upstairs there was a warren of private rooms surrounded by bookcases where one might fill an entire table with books and invite a few friends to sit around and go through their literary choices in deep discussion.
All this time she’d assumed the rather distinguished white-haired gentleman in the office toward the front of the shop to beMisterWhitcombe, the owner. No, he was the head of the printers and printers’ apprentices who worked on the upper floors.Lord Whitcombe. Lord Whitcombe, despicable man, was the owner!
He had no right whatsoever to be…to be…
“Ooooh!” Cordelia kicked her booted feet against the bottom of the seat as the hackney rocked to one side and then the other in a sharp turn. “No man has the right to be that pretty.”
Lord Daedalus Whitcombe was not simply handsome, he was beautiful. His features put her in mind of the drawings of DaVinci, the curve of his cheekbones both soft and sharp at the same time. The perfect symmetry of his face, the set of his jaw and the hard line of his chin, gentled by the slight dimple at the center, made one wonder what rare combination of parents created such a man. His hair contained every shade of gold imaginable and had slid over her fingers like the finest silk. His eyes were blue-green framed by lashes entirely too long by half.
She should not have looked when he stood there in naught but a bath sheet. She most definitely should have turned away when the bath sheet fell to the floor. When had she ever done what she was supposed to do? His body more than matched his face. She’d wanted to run her hands over every taut muscle, every drawn sinew. The man had anarsemore magnificent than any statue in the British Museum. She shivered and shifted in her seat to settle the pressure building between her legs simply at the thought of all that gorgeous golden flesh.
“I want you to tutor me in the art of pleasuring a woman. I have read your books again and again. I want to learn from you so no woman will ever regret taking me to her bed.”
Of all the things he might have said, once she recovered from the alarming reality of his appearance, those words were the last she ever expected. He, the owner of the largest purveyor of erotic materials in London—books explicit in their presentation of every titillating physical profession of love, passion, and arousal between two people, and, dare she say, sometimes more than two people—herequiredherinstruction? There was something in his request, something within the words of his plea, that drew her. More than his divinely sinful face, more than his tempting-as-original-sin body Daedalus Whitcombe needed her. And as certainly as the events that set her on the road to writing her first scandalous novel, Cordelia knew she was going to fulfill that need.
