Lady Scandal Page 6

  “No. I want to know what you want of me.” Anything to avoid completing the dreadful letter. Only the sheerest of will allowed Zeus to refrain from crushing it in his fist. “Would I…what? Come now, if we’re seriously contemplating a union between us, should there not be freedom to speak? Regardless of topic?”

  “Aye, I would wish for that as well. Though I confess it is not a freedom that’s been granted me in the past.”

  “I am granting it now. Inquire away.”

  Again she hesitated, her eyes skittering like a scared rabbit, jumping all over the place but returning time and again to the area below his waist. The area that, despite his best efforts, kept responding to her undisguised interest. “Lady Juliet?”

  In a hushed voice, she quickly sped through, “Would you perchance show me your male part?”

  The silence after her whispered request weighed on him like a quarry full of stone, slowing his thoughts, stalling his response.

  Zeus was hard-pressed not to snap his fingers in front of his ears, to test their acuity. To bang a flat palm upside his head. Had he heard her aright?

  As if to tell him he had, the far-off grumble of thunder reached his awareness easily enough. It sounded like encouraging applause. And why should that surprise him? The Baseborn Bastard and Lady Scandal were putting on a grand show.

  “Did you not hear me?” She blinked up at him with equal parts sincerity, curiosity and, it looked to him, pure mortification. “Could you be persuaded to lower your buckskins and show me your…your…”

  “My male part,” he choked out, finishing what she couldn’t bring herself to utter a second time. “Aye, I heard you. I’m just attempting to ensure I understood. You…want…” He spoke clearly and plainly—possibly to shock the little she-devil clear to her toes? “To view my dirk? My cock? Now? Here? Have I got the right of it?”

  “You do indeed.”

  As that unruly appendage responded to her honest, if outrageous, request and his mantra changed from brains over ballocks to ballocks for brains, Zeus actually debated showing it to her. “Are you insane? Bound for Bedlam on the next cart out?” he asked, his dismay not fabricated in the least, trying to convince them both just how asinine this was. “Am I? For still standing here—like this?”

  Arms spread wide, with the blighted letter clenched in one outstretched hand, her pale stocking dangling from the other, and his silk neckcloth waving in front of his nude chest like a white flag of surrender, Zeus wanted to deliver a sharp slap to his deuced responsive male part, chastise it into calming down. Better yet, deliver several sharp slaps to her posterior to punish her for being so positively enchanting and without guile or guilt. To ask such a thing! And of a stranger!

  Instead of administering that well-deserved smack to either his person or hers, Zeus waited…wondered…willed himself to ponder…what might Lady Scandal do next? “At least you’re living up to your name, I’ll give you that.”

  Her lips pursed and she sniffed as though something soiling the very air she breathed wafted in front of her nose. “There’s no call to be disparaging. I—”

  “I meant it as a compliment.”

  “You did?”

  Chapter Four

  Magnificent Protrusions & Manly Paraphernalia

  A compliment?

  Hell if he knew anymore. About any of this. “Aye, I did. I like your gumption, woman—and before you reprimand me for any perceived slight, I know full well the honor you do me, reflecting upon my suit. It escapes me not that your inherent place in society elevates you so far above my reach you might as well reside in the heavens. As a man of no birth, no military accomplishments and nothing to recommend him save several heartfelt references and my own desire to claim your hand, I owe you deference and humility and should accord you every respect that is mind to command. Yet I tell you now—when we’re alone, if you act the part of a refined lady, so shall I treat you as one. If, on the other hand, you behave—”

  “If I do not?” she interrupted his tirade. “What then?” Her cheeks flushed again but this time ’twas not embarrassment nor timidity. No…’twas the flush of excitement, perhaps one of anger, that heated her skin and brought a spark to her eyes. “Perhaps I want to be treated as a female, as a woman, when we’re alone. No more, no less. What say you, Mr. Zeus Tanner?”

  How could he say anything when some inner sense told him this was the first time she’d allowed her mouth to unburden her tongue?

  “Would you treat a wife as one or the other but not both? Mayhap a lady,” the word dripped distain like venom from a viper, “thinks of her birth as blighted as you do your own, have you paused once to consider that? Mayhap a lady is trapped beneath both convention and propriety, strapped down by responsibilities and duty to those relying on her to the very detriment of her own self, her womanly self!” Eyes flashing fire, she pierced him with her sincerity, her wish to be anything other than what she’d been born—a L-A-D-Y.

  Both hands flexed with the need to touch the womanly lady before him, but he restrained the urge. Crinkling the letter in one and tightening his grip upon the stocking with the other, he remained resolutely silent, resolutely in place, instinctively granting her the freedom she’d been denied previously, that of airing her grievances against the very sex that sought to dominate and control her.

  “Have you ever, even for one second, given any thought to the plight of a young, aristocratic female, one locked by the unfortunate circumstance of her ‘exalted’ birth into a marriage—a union—not of her choosing? Well, by all that’s good and holy, I will choose this time!”

  Though bridled (she’d not raised her voice sufficiently to reach beyond the confines of the room), her very intensity screamed at him, each syllable slamming into his ears, pounding through his blood, and settling into his loins, weighing his staff with desire, and him with the desire to answer her in kind—as a man, and not as her social inferior. Two human beings, one male, one female, choosing to forsake the boundaries and strictures of the world to which they both belonged in order to reach an accord, together.

  In any other scenario, save this mad one she’d constructed amid solicitors and servants and shields, two strangers would never have such an occasion to talk and behave as freely, as scandalously, as they each continued to do so.

  That he stood before her, both attracted and appalled, more riveted than repulsed, spoke volumes as to how badly he wanted her. Lady Juliet. Her fire, her boldness, her pointy little chin and plump little breasts. As her heat and vivacity continued to warm him, thoughts of revenge faded to the background; images of her, challenging his head and warming his bed, surged to the foreground.

  “I will choose!” she repeated hotly. “Because— Because…” Her breath caught as a single, stifled sob worked free. Brandishing her arms in front of her as though warding off bad memories, she breathed deeply.

  When her splinted leg shifted, tipping her forward, Zeus feared her balance was soon to follow. He jumped toward her to assist.

  Shaking her head, she motioned him back.

  After several inhalations, she regained the control she’d lost for so short a time. Pressing her spine into the settee, she speared him with her earnest gaze. “I will choose my next spouse because I refuse to live with doubt and fear and regret for the rest of my life. If this marriage scheme fails to procure me the right husband, it won’t be for lack of trying. Or for lack of trying something different! Now… I acknowledge that my request is beyond the pale, beyond the bounds of everything and anything considered acceptable on any level of society, but…but the dreaded…ridge above your…your…below your waist has captured my attention thoroughly and I crave the sight of you, yearn to see what manner of man you might be.”

  As though acceding to her impassioned plea, the wrinkled letter drifted from his grasp.

  To prevent its escape, Zeus tightened his stranglehold on the stocking. Too bad his mind had already flown the coop, his sane thoughts scattering like wayward ch
ickens.

  More like a cocky rooster, his damn cock only wanted to do her bidding.

  She gazed up at him, enraptured, granting him a look of such pure adoration, Zeus had the ghastly feeling he could spend the rest of his life living up to the image of the man he could be in her sight but would never attain if he retained pride and walked away now.

  “For God’s sake, stop looking at me like that!” Brains over ballocks, he chanted. Mind over mattress.

  “I cannot help it,” she admitted with breathless abandon, motioning toward his randy rooster. “You appear so very…decisive where Letheridge was…was nothing but a wan imitation.” She lowered her voice as though confiding the veriest of secrets. “He really possessed a wimpy winkle, if you must know.”

  A growl scraped up his throat. He didn’t. He didn’t need to know.

  “Please?” So earnest, so innocently excited in her entreaty. As he stood there, wavering, her eyes grew big and round. “I have it! I’ll trade you my petticoats for a glimpse of your masculine protrusion,” she finished on an embarrassed, brazen whisper.

  But Zeus could no longer appreciate her adorably inviting and horribly inappropriate offer. He was too busy appreciating the delicate length of leg visible beneath her shift as she hastily untied and shucked the layers of petticoats bound round her waist.

  Allowing the last one to fall free on either side of her now discernible hips, she beamed up at him, bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked. “There! I’ve done it. ’Tis your turn now. Show me your manly projection. Your—”

  Afraid of what she might call it next, Zeus interrupted. “Good God, will you stop? My male part. My manly projection. My masculine protrusion? So you want to see my cock? If you want to see it, you damn well better be able to say—”

  “Aye!” she stared at him defiantly, determinedly, as if his crude language didn’t put her off in the least. “Your cock. Your pr-prick! Your phallus. Your sword, bayonet, yard, bodkin, dagger, dirk. Your penis,” she enunciated clearly, her fingers knotting over themselves in her bid to appear unaffected, “and if you want me to say more, then I’m afraid I shall disappoint because I’m completely out of euphemisms or naming knowledge in that particular arena. But I do so still desire to see it.”

  “Fine!” His hands went to the fall of his buckskins. “Fine! Good Lord, woman—” Fast, furious, his fingers undid the buttons on either side. “Fine, I say! Do not ever let it be thought I am not an accommodating applicant! By God, you’d try the patience of a saint.” Bracing his legs, he reached past his drawers to grasp his turgid rod. Keeping hand and dirk concealed, giving himself a sharp squeeze—and his brain one more chance to reconsider—he hesitated. He stood there and he stalled, nostrils flared, mind striving for the right course, lungs heaving as if he were a stallion scenting a mare. His mare. And perhaps he was.

  “A saint,” he pondered aloud, contemplating, Do I leave now, abandon all hope of gaining Amherst and the lovely lady who possesses it but walk away with a modicum of pride intact? Or do I remain and bare all…in every sense imaginable? The truth, my body, my longing… The urges storming his staff anything but saintly, Zeus concluded, “And yet, I have never been accused of being one of their exalted number.”

  She watched him, eyes flared, the hard point of her nipples thrusting upward with each of her ragged inhalations, the tiny beads visible through the thin lawn, that deuced corset cinched round her middle only enhancing the gentle swells.

  Every speck of her attention centered on his wrist where his hand had disappeared beneath his waistband. His straining erection grew impossibly thicker, stiffened to the point of pain when the tip of her tongue darted out as she licked her lips, giving him but a glimpse of one part of her he intended to explore thoroughly—the tempting cavern of her mouth.

  Her squeak of excitement was nearly his undoing. At the sound, his damn shaft jumped within the confining circle of his fingers and nearly poked a hole in his buckskins. But it was her hoarse cry of, “Please. Please do not make me wait any longer. I so crave the sight of you,” that convinced him to stop debating the merits of morality versus the sins of sexuality and release the death grip on his dagger after one final near strangulation at the root. Using both hands, he shoved down his drawers and buckskins.

  “There!”

  Throwing back his shoulders and anchoring fists at his waist, he balanced in place, proudly, awkwardly, awaiting her reaction.

  Her prim nod of approval, her scream of outrage or possibly a graceful swoon—none of those would have surprised him at this point. Of course she wouldn’t respond as one might predict, not his Lady Scandal.

  As he weaved on unsteady feet, his engorged dirk jutting toward her position on the settee like a dowsing rod divining heaven, what did she do but sweep both palms to her flushed cheeks, open her eyes as wide as they’d go, and breathlessly exclaim, “Oh my. Oh-oh-my. It’s— You’re—much more solid than I expected.”

  Hands hiding the bulk of her awed expression, she cocked her head as if that slight tilt would enable her to view him better. His damn hips preened under the unexpected admiration, twisting to the side so she could view him in partial profile.

  “Longer too,” she murmured appraisingly, regaining her voice in light of his willingness—stupidness?—to allow her to look her fill. “Undeniably longer when not constrained. Mercy. Definitely bigger. Gracious me.” She finally tore her eyes from his bobbing bauble and blinked up at him. “I must admit, your virile attribute is decidedly more…intriguing than I… Just… Oh!” And there she went, flailing her hands in front of her face as though to prevent that swoon he’d been expecting all along.

  Virile attribute? At least she’d progressed from the mouthful of Ms and Ps she’d massacred and pelted his anatomy with moments before.

  Buckskins bunched just above his knees, a draft threatening to wilt his erection, he braved her scrutiny. Draft? Nay, more likely daft, the foolishness of this entire encounter superseding any errant air currents whistling through the drafty abode.

  He was daft to be standing here when she was so far away, that was a certainty. Ready to remedy that and quickly, Zeus took one bungling step toward her.

  “Nay! Not yet.” She scooted back, trying to merge into the settee, exhibiting another unmistakable hint of shyness. One of very few, his beleaguered brain had to concede.

  She pointed to the floor where he stood. “Please stay there, where you are.” Her fingertips flew to cover her mouth then she brought them down and tangled them together. “I desire to look from…from afar.”

  “Bloody amazing.” How she could sit there, cheeks blazing, eyes glued to his dirk, hands now working frantically at the loose fabric of her shift as though they wanted to be on him and, conversely, she was doing everything humanly possible to occupy them elsewhere? Anxiety, boldness and bashfulness, all wrapped up in the most delightful package to ever cross his path.

  Damn daftness aside, how could he be so bloody hot, boiling on the inside, standing there nearly naked in her drafty abode? It had to be her enticing company, for it certainly wasn’t their surroundings. So she wanted to look from afar? Didn’t yet want to touch? Maybe he could hurry her along…

  “Why don’t you stroke me—with your mouth?”

  “Stroke you with…my…mouth?” she repeated in a whisper as if she was working through what he meant. He knew the second realization dawned. “Really? Touch it—with my lips? My tongue?”

  Though her forehead creased in dismay at the idea, Zeus caught the swift licking of her lower lip, that pink tongue slipping out to slick over it before venturing toward the tiny vee centered on the top. Her lips glistened after its journey; his dagger grew heavier still. Her mind might be rebelling at the thought of trying something so very wanton, so womanly, but the rest of her was obviously intrigued, her ladylike sensibilities unable to stifle the carnal awareness arcing between them.

  “Aye. One of the many varied sexual pleasures we can share in the marriage bed or
out of it—I’m not particular where I taste your charms—has to do with licking each other.”

  “Licking each other…” Uttered as though the idea was completely foreign. “Where exactly? Just…there?”

  “Certainly here.” His fingers found their way back to his staff. He supported its weight, palm up, as though humbly giving her an offering.

  The heat of his shaft seared through the silk stocking wrapped about his hand. Zeus steeled himself not to groan at the sight. His hardened, elongated flesh displayed upon pale pink, served up for her approval—or disapproval—like a trophy presented before a queen.

  Watching him with rapt attention, she gave an involuntary whimper when he circled his fingers and pumped himself.

  “You could lick me all along here,” Zeus pointed out, easing his tightened fist along his erection with excruciating slowness, the whispered hiss of silk against his skin echoed by his mouth.

  Like a lightning strike, the unexpected decadence of her sultry stocking caressing his flesh ripped through him. Flashed white-hot through his being and ballocks. When he reached the tip, he grazed his thumb across the slit, barely avoiding a whimper of his own. “Here too. But there are other places I might enjoy being licked or might enjoy licking you.”

  “Such as?”

  “The side of your neck.”

  As though feeling his tongue upon her person, she brought one restless hand up to her neck and caressed several fingers down the side. “Mmmm.”

  “Behind your ear. The inside of your dainty wrist. Your breasts…your nipples.”

  With each place he mentioned, her own fingers trailed behind, caressing the spots in lieu of his tongue, but just before alighting upon one of her breasts, they fluttered in the air. Again she brought them to her sides and bundled them in her shift. Her gaze skittered away from his. “All right, but not yet. I’m not ready to lick you. Not right now.”