A Rake's Midnight Kiss

Chapter Seven

Richard woke with a start. Lying motionless in his monastic bed, he tried to work out what had disturbed him. Everything was silent. Moonlight flooded through his open window. The night was stifling and he slept naked, although his clothes were conveniently to hand across the Windsor chair. His door remained open a crack for air.

Sirius stretched out under the sill, his brindled coat lost in the shadows. His great dark eyes glinted. Something had alerted the dog too.

Richard heard a door squeak down the corridor, then a surreptitious rustle as someone tiptoed toward the stairs. The rumble of the vicar’s snoring next door, audible even through the thick wall, indicated that the old man slumbered. Dorcas slept in the attics. Which meant the nocturnal wanderer was Mrs. Warren. Or most intriguing of all, Genevieve.

Carefully so the bed didn’t creak, Richard sat and reached for breeches and shirt. In this heat, even such light clothing felt constricting. As he tugged his boots on, he heard the snick of the kitchen door. Whoever left was as light-footed as a sylph.

He stood at the window. Below, someone wrapped in a dark cloak slipped through the back garden, plotting a deft path between cabbages and lettuces. The figure was anonymous, but he knew that swift grace to his bones. It didn’t belong to middle-aged Lucy Warren.

No, another quarry roamed the Oxfordshire countryside this quiet night.

He traced Genevieve’s progress toward the stables. If she glanced up, she’d see him. But she remained intent upon her errand, whatever it was. The nearly full moon lit her way.

So where did the enchanting Miss Barrett go?

Did she meet a lover? The thought pierced his gut like a saber. He’d never encountered a female so unaware of herself as a woman. Her unworldliness compounded the challenge, along with her intelligence and determination to dislike him no matter how he tried to charm her. He respected Genevieve’s resistance. Although tonight in the parlor, for one blazing instant, attraction had spiraled unchecked between them. Now he faced the unpleasant possibility that his charm failed because her interest was engaged elsewhere.

Devil take that.

Within moments, he’d followed her from the house. At his side, Sirius padded soundless as a ghost.

Gingerly Richard opened the back gate, then realized he wasted his care. She was no longer in sight. It should be cooler outside, but the air was as still and heavy as a damp blanket. With an impatient gesture, he brushed his hair back from his forehead and bent to whisper in Sirius’s ear. “Find her. Find Genevieve.”

Sirius trotted toward the high brick wall separating the stables from the adjoining Leighton Estate. Feathery tail idly waving, he slipped through the rusty gate that sagged from its hinges. Feeling like he trespassed upon a fairy-tale realm, Richard pushed past the wildflowers tangled around the gate’s base.

Sirius waited on a path leading into the woods. Once his master followed, he loped ahead. Under the trees, progress was more difficult. Richard picked his way forward, keeping an eye on Sirius. Luckily the trail was well trodden, indicating someone—Genevieve?—used it regularly.

It was cooler too. Fresh scents surrounded him. Leaf litter. Green foliage. Sirius’s confident progress indicated that Genevieve was still ahead.

Unless, damn it, Sirius chased a rabbit.

The path ended so abruptly that Richard nearly tumbled into the clearing. Cursing his conspicuous white shirt, he slipped under an oak’s shadow. He sucked in a breath, heart racing. Then another deeper breath as stabbing relief weakened his knees.

She wasn’t meeting a lover. She’d wanted a swim.

As she stroked across the water, each ripple caught the moonlight, turning the pool to silver. No man with an ounce of poetry in his soul could fail to relish this scene.

Richard didn’t know how long he stood, astonished and entranced. Something about her ease indicated she’d done this frequently, probably since she was a girl. She didn’t check nervously for intruders, although surely that was a risk. But who would be about at such an hour? No poacher with his head screwed on right chanced his luck on one of Sedgemoor’s estates.

Without conscious thought, Richard circled the pond, keeping to the dark, seeking to see without being seen. When he stumbled over a bundle under a rowan bush, he smiled with wolfish anticipation.

Reluctantly Genevieve swam toward the bank. The secluded pool in Sedgemoor’s woods had worked its magic once again. She felt better. More like the woman she’d been before the break-in and everything turning topsy-turvy.

Soon after she and her father had arrived in Little Derrick, she’d started coming here in secret. She’d been a bewildered ten-year-old, mourning her beloved mother, coping with unfamiliar surroundings and unfamiliar people, not least an aunt she barely knew. In the fifteen years since, she’d never met another soul during her midnight swims. Sometimes she thought she was the only person on earth to know of the pond’s existence.

Tonight she’d desperately needed the pool’s tranquility. The week’s events had troubled her soul. And fear of encountering Mr. Evans, not to mention memories of the aborted robbery, had confined her to her room every night since he’d moved in. In this oppressive heat, she’d stretched out on her bed, chasing a thousand useless thoughts around her head. She could have worked, but what she’d longed for was freedom.

She’d stayed out longer than intended, but she couldn’t bear to leave the silky water. She found her footing and waded to the bank where she’d left her clothes and towel.

Something rustled in the undergrowth and she stopped, alert. Suddenly her recklessness in coming here while a thief prowled the neighborhood made her stomach cramp with disquiet. Just because there had been no trouble for over a week didn’t make it safe to roam the woods like a gypsy.

“Who’s there?” She cursed the quaver in her voice.

She edged toward her clothes, wondering if fleeing into the trees would be a wiser move. But she couldn’t stay outside naked until dawn. Another rustle set her heart banging like a trip-hammer. If only she’d brought her pistol, but it was safely locked in her desk along with the Harmsworth Jewel.

Frantically her eyes scoured the darkness, but shadows defeated her. Moonlit in the clearing, she was completely vulnerable.

An animal ventured out to stand a few feet away. She was in such a state that she needed a few seconds to recognize Sirius’s shaggy outlines. Relief made her legs feel likely to collapse.

“You scared me, you silly hound.” She stepped forward to collect her clothes with renewed confidence. “How did you escape your infernal master?”

She’d developed a healthy respect for Sirius’s intelligence. If he’d answered, she wouldn’t be altogether surprised. On such a night, animals could talk and frogs might turn into princes.

Fumbling after her towel, she found only her gown. Puzzled, she kneeled, patting around the area. She raised her head. “Have you eaten my towel, Sirius? If you have, I’ll sic Hecuba onto you.”

“Don’t blame Sirius,” a familiar voice murmured from behind.

As she stiffened into horrified stillness, her towel dropped around her naked shoulders.

“Dear God …” Genevieve breathed, frightened, humiliated, and furious. With herself and with the vile Mr. Evans. She stumbled upright on trembling legs and whipped the linen strip around her body. Too little, too late, she acknowledged with a sick twisting in her belly. She whirled around in outrage. “H … how long have you been there?”

From a few feet away, he stood watching. Tall. Lean. Outwardly relaxed. But that didn’t fool her. He was on the hunt and they both knew it. “Long enough.”

Mr. Evans’s calm response didn’t quiet her panic. “You had no right—”

“Of course I had no right. But I defy any man with blood in his veins to abandon you to the moonlight, Miss Barrett.”

She was such a fool. The worst of it, even as shame strangled her, was that he’d destroyed her sanctuary. Whether she never saw another person here, she couldn’t feel safe again. He’d stolen this source of happiness as blatantly as her father stole her work. At this moment, she loathed Mr. Evans.

She chanced a quick glance at his face, his smug expression clear in the bright moonlight. She bit her lip as fury overwhelmed embarrassment. No man had ever seen her naked. This felt like a violation. “You’re no gentleman, sir!”

“Come, Miss Barrett, you can do better than that.” His laugh played a chromatic scale up and down her spine. “A woman with your vocabulary can summon an archaic insult or two.”

“Well, you’re a filthy sneak. Is that better?”

“Much.”

Genevieve’s hands tightened on her inadequate covering as she backed toward her dress. Bored with the conversation, Sirius trotted into the shadows. “This is such a joke to you, isn’t it?” she snarled, fighting tears. “I’ll thank you to go now.”

“Surely the damage is done.”

Carefully she bent, then straightened, her gown dangling from her shaking hand. “Ha ha. So amusing.”

Her temper slid off him like the water trickling down her bare back. She shivered. As she stood dripping with the pond behind her, a wicked little breeze flirted around her.

“This sneak’s reward was a beautiful naked woman.”

Her cheeks threatened to combust. Self-righteousness was difficult to maintain when one only wore a flimsy towel. She struggled for control, even as the need surged to scratch and kick at him until he was bruised and bloody. “Please leave, Mr. Evans.”

“Wild horses couldn’t tear me away, Miss Barrett.” He stepped closer. “Given how our acquaintance has advanced this evening, can’t you bring yourself to call me Christopher?”

“I can bring myself to call you a self-serving rat,” she said coldly. He remained a few feet away, but that seemed too close. She retreated another unsteady pace, the grass scratching her bare feet.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“I can’t dress with you here.”

Moonlight silvered his features into beguiling black and white. “I could promise not to look.”

“You could demonstrate some honor and go.” She struggled to sound defiant. This was the most mortifying thing that had ever happened to her. And she had nobody to blame for this catastrophe but herself. How could she have been so foolhardy as to chance a swim when she knew Mr. Evans watched her like a buzzard watched a field mouse?

“Or I could just turn my back.” He suited actions to words.

For a fraught moment, she stared at him. She couldn’t trust him, but nor could she stand here covered in a strip of linen. She let the sodden towel drop and hurriedly tugged her old muslin dress over her head, fastening it with shaking hands.

“Can I turn around?”

“Yes,” she said sullenly, although she was angrier at herself than him. He’d only followed the dictates of his rodent nature. She should have known better than to come here.

“Do you feel better?” he asked neutrally, although the way his gaze ran over her body made her feel naked again. She resisted the urge to shield herself with her hands.

“Why did you follow me?” Although the answer was no mystery. He’d flirted with her from the first. Even without her flaunting herself, he’d leap at any chance to get her alone.

“I thought you met a lover.” The edge in his statement made her frown in consternation.

“I don’t have a lover,” she said quickly, before remembering that her swains weren’t Mr. Evans’s concern.

He arched one eyebrow in a fashion that made her shiver. Not with cold. “I could fill the position.”

This time she didn’t bother to conceal her retreat. “If my father knew you pestered me—”

“Do you intend to tell him?” he asked, as if her answer was of purely casual interest.

“Yes.” Although how could she? Anyone would say she’d asked for trouble by being out here. Anyone would be right.

Something dangerous flashed in Mr. Evans’s eyes. The breath caught in her throat and she chanced another step back, only to slosh into the pond. The shock of cool water around her ankles made her gasp. She stumbled as her bare toes sank into the mud. Mr. Evans moved swiftly to catch her arm and save her from a spill.

“Careful.” He spoke softly. She realized that he always did. Uncanny how much power that quiet voice exerted.

“Let me go.” She hated her breathlessness. She hated the easy confidence of his hold—and its radiating heat. She hated the way her nipples tightened painfully against her bodice. Fumbling, she raised her skirts above the water. She tried to wrench free, but his grip remained adamant.

“Seeing I’m to be hanged anyway, it may as well be for a sheep as a lamb,” he said thoughtfully.

Her belly dipped with dread and her knees wobbled. “What … what do you mean?”

He always watched her, but this time his gaze felt different. This felt like he placed his mark on her, claimed her in some atavistic way. “I want to kiss you.”

“You can’t.” Although if it cost only a few kisses to escape this disaster, she should be grateful.

“Indeed I can,” he said with one of those flashing smiles that always set her heart pounding. This time, her heart already pounded nineteen to the dozen. With fear, she told herself staunchly. Definitely not with anticipation.

“I … I won’t let you.”

Another laugh. Warm and lazily amused. He lifted his hand and stepped back. “Then by all means, return to the vicarage.”

She frowned, not leaving the water. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Then I wish you good night, Mr. Evans,” she said crisply, still not trusting him but desperate to escape.

Ignoring his proffered hand, she splashed out of the pond. She’d emerge unscathed from this encounter. Which was more than she deserved. Keeping a careful eye on him, she edged toward the trees, her sopping hem slapping her ankles.

She’d almost reached the woods before he spoke. “Such a pity.”

Trembling, she turned. Moonlight transformed him into a statue of silver and ebony. She’d survived twenty-five years happily oblivious to masculine splendor, but something about Mr. Evans made her heart skip a beat. Then another. He might be rotten to the core, but he was disgustingly picturesque.

A bristling silence built and her skin tightened with longing that she refused to examine. Safety beckoned. Still she poised in the shadows. Night scents filled her nostrils, strangely seductive.

Eventually curiosity won out. “What’s a pity?”

He tilted his hip, standing with a loose-limbed elegance that made her pulses race. “That you’re such a coward, my dear.”

“I’m not your dear,” she said automatically.

“I suggest a little harmless flirtation and you retreat to your books and dry old men. For shame, Miss Barrett. I thought better of you.”

He’s taunting you. He just wants you back within pouncing distance. Go while you can.

“I have no intention of being ruined,” she said coldly, while a sensation as far removed from cold as possible rushed through her veins.

“You have my word that I’ll stop at kisses.” He considered her thoughtfully. “Have you been kissed?”

Dear Lord. She felt giddy as forbidden images flooded her traitorous mind. “Mr. Evans, I’m twenty-five years old. It would be very sad if I haven’t.”

She’d hesitated too long. His features sharpened and his stare burned. Heaven help her, he guessed her embarrassing lack of experience. Although the lack only seemed an embarrassment in his company. Her flimsy dress felt invisible. From now until the end of time, she could never forget that he’d seen her as no other man ever had.

She waited for some derisive comment. But he merely nodded once as though confirming a theory. “Ah.”

God above, what did that mean?

Run. Run.

“Men have wanted to kiss me,” she said defensively, moving from one foot to the other but unable to convince those feet to remove her from this discomfiting conversation.

“I’m sure,” he said softly.

She expected mockery but detected none. “I haven’t wanted to kiss them.”

“That may change once you discover how good a kiss can be.”

“With you?” She wanted to sound sarcastic, but the words emerged as barely contained curiosity.

He shrugged, looking irritatingly at ease with himself as he folded his arms across his powerful chest. “Why not? I profess some skill and you’re quite safe.”

“Said the spider to the fly.”

She shifted restlessly, only stopping when she noticed his close attention. His expression indicated that he knew more than she did. Of course he knew more than she did. He was a rake and she was a scholarly spinster who had never been kissed.

Which suddenly seemed cause for regret.

His voice deepened to velvet enticement. “Doesn’t some part of you long for a man to touch you in desire?”

His voice possessed magic. That soft drawl made her think of all the wonderful, unprecedented things he’d do to her if she let him. She might be inexperienced, but some instinct insisted that when he claimed to be a skillful kisser, he wasn’t boasting.

Goodness, likely he could fling her to heaven and back without trying. It was both exciting and terrifying. She began to wish she’d encouraged those callow young men who had shown an interest in the vicar’s intimidating daughter. Mr. Evans had never found her intimidating. She suspected that Mr. Evans found very little intimidating.

She prepared to tell this encroaching charmer to leave her alone. Instead different words emerged. “This is purely an intellectual exercise. I’m not attracted to you.”

His lips quirked. “Understood.”

She stepped into the moonlight. In her loose, light frock with nothing beneath it, she must look completely brazen. Part of her howled protest at her intentions. But fascination and, yes, unwilling attraction kept her here.

After a couple of attempts to clear her throat, her voice emerged with gratifying firmness. “Show me.”

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