‘Dinner will be at eight in the blue salon.’
Pulling the banter back, he answered promptly, ‘I shall look forward to it.’
She dressed carefully that night in a dark blue gown that she had put aside for exactly this purpose. Seduction was an art form, after all, and a woman of almost twenty-five with only one night of loving behind her needed all the help she could muster.
She did not wear undergarments and the feel of the silk bodice against bare skin was exciting, her womanhood beating in a throb between her legs.
Anticipation.
Even the perfume she dabbed profusely on parts of her body that she had not before added to the tension.
Her hair she wore unadorned, the length of it spilling across her shoulders and down towards her hips, curling in the damp. She had dismissed her lady’s maid for the night to sit in the nursery.
She wished she had the courage to wear nothing. To turn up at the dinner table wearing only stockings and pearls, but a lifetime of caution harboured inside her and she was still not quite certain of his intent.
Could this be just another night for him, just another coupling?
She shook her head firmly, but it was not the action of a woman who would place much weight on warning. No. It was the knowledge of one who finally felt whole and welcomed what might happen next with all her heart and soul.
Cristo Wellingham was the man she had loved from the very first second of meeting him and every other suitor dulled in comparison. In Bath over the last months there had been many who offered more than just a casual friendship, given that Martin never accompanied her to any function whatsoever—men who were honourable and decent and good, but she felt nothing for them. No lack of breath or altered heartbeat. No rush of delight or a thrill of meeting glances. Only one man, even with his distant presence in a house as big as this one, had the ability to affect her.
Tucking back an errant curl, she took one last look in the mirror before she left the room to meet him.
The thin silk of her gown barely covered her and the outline of her nipples could be plainly seen. Beckoning. Cristo felt like simply stepping forwards and ripping the flimsy thing off, but he had travelled that path once before with Eleanor and knew enough to realise this time he needed to leave the power in her hands.
‘My lady.’ Hard to say with any sense of decorum to a woman dressed as she was.
‘My lord.’ Manners simmered above pure sensuality. Her lips were deep cherry red. ‘I have asked the servants to leave our supper out and dismissed them for the night. I hope you don’t mind helping yourself?’
‘Indeed, I do not.’ He felt his manhood rise another notch with the words so artlessly said, and moved to ease the tightness of his breeches.
The cravat at his neck was strangling, the starched collar rough against the skin at his throat. A hundred pounds of material seemed to hang upon his frame when all she wore was the lightest of gossamer silk.
Her feet were bare. He had seen that in the first second of meeting her, peeping out beneath the hem of her skirt. The scent of gardenias and violets was strong on her skin.
‘Florencia …?’
‘Is in her room in bed. My maid is watching over her.’
‘So it is just us?’
The beginning of a smile played around her lips and he looked around the room to gather his wits. A chaise longue in velvet was pushed against the far wall. On the table near the food flowers stood, the urns they were displayed in etched with woodland scenes.
Two heavy carpets lay on the floor, a pile of cushions heaped next to them. Almost accidentally. In the grate at the far end of the room a fire blazed.
‘Would you like some wine?’ She gestured to a bottle and glasses and he nodded, feeling like a man who had strayed into a pleasure dome, the woman before him a culmination of every young boy’s fantasy.
‘How much would you like?’
At her words he removed the glass from her fingers, placing it on a table behind her. Up this close he was taller than she remembered him and a lot bigger; the boy she had known in Paris replaced by the man.
‘I want as much as you would give me, Eleanor.’ His voice broke on her name and he gathered her close, warm breath against her cheeks and the glorious brown of his eyes locked into hers.
‘Ma chérie,’ he said as his lips came down and his hands threaded through her hair, the lover suddenly there again, gentle but firm. She could not have pulled away even had she wanted to.
But she didn’t want to.
Opening her mouth easily, he came inside, his tongue finding hers as he slanted his head. Heat and breath and anger mixed with want and love and regret; a recipe matured by time and by memory.
She was eighteen again, and shameless, her need wild beneath cold clear silk and the sharp edge of discovery.
This time she had lured him to her. The power of it was exhilarating, yet still she pulled back and placed her hands upon his chest.
‘Not yet, monseigneur.’ Muscles bunched along the line of his jaw, but he let her go. A gentleman who would not coerce a lady. Smiling, she looked down and saw how very much he wanted her.
‘For I wish to undress you first.’
She was a hundred times more experienced than she had been when he had taken her last and more lethal than any courtesan he’d had the pleasure of since. The regret that it had not been him to teach her surfaced as he stood perfectly still, feeling her fingers at his neck unlacing the cravat, her skin playing havoc against his own. He seldom allowed anyone dominion over his body, but he made himself relax. Beneath his shirt were the scars endured at eighteen, scars he had never willingly shown anyone before, stigma drawn in the opaque ridges of flesh. When her hands began to peel back the linen he froze.
‘I generally like to keep it on.’
‘Because of the marks upon your back?’
He was irritated by the shame that surfaced, over a decade ago and still having the power to hurt. He was also surprised she had remembered at all.
‘You have a good memory.’ He tried to keep the tone as light as he could, airy, inconsequential and nonchalant.
‘As I have only ever lain with one man it is not a thing easily forgotten.’
‘One?’ He could not understand what she was telling him.
‘Martin was impotent.’
Now he did.
‘Lord.’ The blue in her eyes had darkened, bruised with truth. ‘Lord,’ he repeated again. ‘So it has only been me?’
‘It was why I was out on the town so much in Bath, for he suddenly seemed to want a closer relationship in other ways and I could not give it to him. By staying out late it meant he was always asleep in his room when I returned.’
The world he lived in reshaped into something unrecognisable. Just him. Just her. Throwing off his shirt, he turned so that she could see the marks.
‘After Nigel I took passage on a ship run by a captain who thought hurting others was fun. It was a full month before I escaped and for a long time after that …’ He stopped because he could not go on.
‘You trusted no one?’ Eleanor’s words were whispered, an understanding in them that made him want to weep.
‘If I could go back, I would have trusted you.’
She smiled. ‘And if I could go back, I would have knocked on the door of the Château Giraudon and taken up your offer of protection.’
‘Over