Hope Tarr - [Men of the Roxbury House 02] Page 11

  He saw the hurt shadowing her face and hastened to reassure her. “Want you, Daisy? I’m on fire for you. You’re the embodiment of every fantasy I’ve ever had as well as those I dared not consciously entertain—until now. Be that as it may, I won’t take you like this. I want you for always, not just for the night.”

  Hearing how he wanted her must have made her feel on firmer footing because she summoned her Delilah smile and took a step toward him. “We can do it as many times and as many ways as can be fit into the next three weeks, how’s that?” She reached for his waistband.

  He pushed her hand away. “Stop it.”

  In the dim light of candles, he saw the flare of anger in her eyes. “And if I don’t care to stop, why should I? Why should either of us? We’re not children any more. We’re adults. We can please ourselves as we like.”

  He dragged a hand through his hair. “We’re friends, good friends. I brought you here to help you, not to make you my mistress.”

  She shrugged as though it was all merely semantics. “Whether you call me your mistress or your friend, you want me, Gavin. I know you do.”

  He knew better than to deny it. “It’s not that simple.”

  “It is. You make things too hard by half for yourself and for me. I want you, Gavin. I’ve wanted you ever since I was old enough to understand what wanting someone, a man, meant. Life is bloody short, or at least it can be, and if it’s in our power to grasp a little happiness while we may, then why the bloody hell not? There’s no one we need answer to and afterward, well, it doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  He’d come close, so very close to giving in, but her last statement reminded him why it was so very important he stay strong. Daisy had to learn that sex was neither a weapon nor a bartering tool but a gift—a precious gift.

  He shook his head and turned away. “That’s the very thing, sweetheart. It does for me.”

  Hours later Daisy lay awake, replaying the foiled seduction in her mind and touching herself in the bed. Gavin must think her a trollop and why shouldn’t he when she played the part of the whore to perfection? The truth was she was a good deal more at home seducing men than being friends with them. Attempts at the latter invariably landed her in someone’s bed anyway, so why not skip all the pretending and get on with the main event?

  Only Gavin wasn’t like the men she’d known in France. He wasn’t like any man she’d ever known before. Whether Frenchmen or British expatriates, they’d wanted something from her, sex in varying degrees. Whether it was several good whacks on the bum before calling it a night or a full-on fuck, afterward not a single one had shown the slightest interest in her feelings, her opinions, and most especially not her dreams. Gavin always treated her as a person, a friend, an equal. Since she admitted she always wanted to be an actress, he’d done his utmost to make that dream come true for her. If she had a jot of decency, she’d accept his friendship for the gift it was and learn not to ask for more than he was willing to give.

  Only she wanted more from him than friendship, and her mounting frustration was beginning to give their encounters a definite edge. Remembering the taste and texture of his mouth moving over hers, the perfect pressure of his warm palm and probing fingers, she slid a soothing hand between her thighs. Gavin had the most beautiful hands, broad-backed and long-fingered. Watching him do the simplest of tasks such as buttering his breakfast toast or fiddling with his fountain pen frequently brought her close to coming. Imagining he touched her now, she closed her eyes and circled her clitoris with a single damp digit.

  But self-stimulation was a poor substitute for the weight of a flesh-and-blood man pressing you into the mattress in the most delicious of ways. The problem, hers at any rate, was that she didn’t want just any man. She wanted Gavin and after tonight she knew he wanted her, too.

  What she hadn’t counted on was his stubbornness, his seemingly unbreakable power of will. He was easily the most self-disciplined person she’d ever known and while that was likely a virtue more often than not, she’d had her fill. She’d be mad as a March hare if he didn’t give in soon.

  She came, muffling her moan in the back of her hand. Afterward, she slipped into sleep. The dream was vividly erotic, engrossingly intense. She and Gavin were in bed together. For whatever reason, perhaps none at all, she knew it was their first time. Whose bed it was or where they were wasn’t clear, but the mattress was goose down, soft yet firm, and there were a great lot of fluffy white sheets. Gavin lay propped against the banked pillows, chest bare and the sheet riding low on his waist. Straddling him, she made a point of kissing him in all the places he liked best. She couldn’t wait to go down on him.

  “Oh, Gavin,” she murmured, still entrenched in sleep, the increasingly violent sounds forming the backdrop of her dream. “Oh, chéri, let me make it good for you.”

  Another cry, this one low and guttural, tore forth from his throat. Like that of a wild animal caught in a hunter’s snare, this wasn’t the sound of male satisfaction but one of deep pain and hopeless despair.

  Daisy bolted upright, her sex drenched and quivering. The cries weren’t coming from inside her head but rather from the other end of the hallway. Awake now, she recalled the nightmares Gavin had suffered while at Roxbury House and threw her legs over the side of the bed.

  Naked, she fumbled in the darkness for her wrapper. She found it draped it over the footboard and pulled it on, cinching the silk sash on her way out the door. Even in the midst of undertaking a rescue mission, her body couldn’t seem to settle, pubis pulsing and nipples swelling as if stroked by unseen hands.

  She padded down the hallway to Gavin’s door. Until now she’d never so much as peeked inside. She reached out, hesitated, and then made up her mind and wrapped her knuckles smartly on the wood paneling. No answer. He must be in a deep sleep. She started to turn back when from within another wail sounded, catching at her heart. She remembered the nightmares he had as a boy and wondered if this might be the same one or if the sad sights he saw as a barrister were fresh fodder for a heart and mind overburdened by compassion. Either way, she had to save him, she had to help, even if it was only for one night.

  His door wasn’t locked. The cut glass knob slipped in her damp palm. She hesitated, one foot hovering over the threshold. Before when she entered a man’s bedroom, it was always by invitation or at least a strongly worded hint. But the room she was about to enter unbidden was Gavin’s bedroom, forbidden territory. After tonight, that must be especially true.

  She stepped inside and pulled the door softly closed behind her. “Gav, it’s me.”

  The bedside lamp had been left burning. On the table beside it a book lay open along with a pair of wire-framed spectacles she’d never seen him wear. He must have fallen asleep reading.

  Gavin lay thrashing in the center of the bed, pulverizing a pillow between his clenched hands. Broad shouldered and leanly built, his arms were corded with muscle, his belly beautifully flat. Her gaze snagged on the sheet riding low on his waist. As in her dream, he wasn’t wearing a nightshirt or sleepwear of any sort, and the sweat sheathing his lean, muscled torso had her forgetting to breathe.

  She crossed to the bed and reached for the pillow. “Gavin, it’s only a dream. You’re—”

  Before she could get the rest out, he reared up. Grabbing hard hold of her, he hauled her onto her back and came down on top of her, pinning her to the bed. “Let me loose, you bloody fucker. Let me loose!”

  “Gavin, stop! It’s me. It’s Daisy.”

  “Daisy?”

  Her name seemed to penetrate the fog of the nightmare. His hold on her slackened and his hands fell away. His eyes flashed open. “Oh, God, Daisy, are you all right? Have I hurt you?”

  He helped her up and she sat, rubbing her wrists. No doubt there would be bruising on the morrow, but for the moment she was fine and so was he. “I’m all right. You were dreaming. I tried knocking, but you didn’t hear me. Was it the fire dream, the one you used to have at Ro
xbury House?”

  He raked a hand through his damp hair and looked over at her with haunted eyes. “It’s like a damned devil’s curse, a coiled snake that lies in wait to spring into my path just when I’ve told myself I’ve finally gotten beyond it, that I’ve made some sort of peace with the past. I’ll go for months at a time without incident and then suddenly it comes upon me for no apparent reason—the same, always the same.” He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Christ, I’m coming on thirty. You’d think after all this time I’d be able to put the past behind me and get on with my life.”

  A life she knew couldn’t include the likes of her, at least not in any meaningful way no matter what Harry might have said. Swallowing against the lump building at the back of her throat, she suggested, “Maybe if we walk through it together, scene by scene if you can bear it, I can help?”

  He hesitated and then nodded. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.” Leaning back against the headboard, he squeezed closed his eyes. “I’m standing outside by the fire truck helpless to do anything but watch the bloody building burn. The air is thick with smoke. I can taste it inside my mouth, feel it burning my nostrils and choking my throat. Inside the tenement, a baby, my sister, is shrieking. I want to go to her, to all of them, but a neighbor man who managed to get out in time grabs hold of me. There’s a terrific roar and then a crash, the roof giving way. Afterward, a sort of unnatural hush falls and I can hear every single sound in the throbbing in my head—the crackling of the dying flames, the blare of sirens in the distance, the rush of water from the fireman’s hose. And still the bloody bastard won’t set me loose.”

  Tears pushed against the backs of Daisy’s eyes. He was entirely too good a person to be in such perpetual torment. After all the years, it simply wasn’t fair. “Is that who you shout at so? You never would say when we were children.”

  He scraped both hands through his hair, pushing it back where it had fallen over his brow. “Yes. He came up behind me and braced my arms behind my back in a deadlock hold. No matter how hard I cried, how much I pleaded or threatened, he just held onto me that much tighter.”

  “He saved your life, then?”

  He nodded. “Not that I ever thanked him for it. All I wanted was to go to them, if not to save them then to be with them at the end. If I had the strength, I would have knocked him to the ground and run headfirst into the flames.”

  “If he let you loose, you’d have died as well and that would have been the world’s very great loss—and mine.” A world without Gavin in it—she couldn’t begin to wrap her mind about such an empty state of being.

  He turned to look at her, shaking his head. “God, how weak you must think me.”

  He was always so hard on himself, she couldn’t bear it. “Gavin Carmichael, you are the farthest thing from weak a person can be. Don’t you see losing your family shaped you as surely as a blacksmith’s fire forges metal, formed you into the brilliant barrister and good, kind man you are?”

  Without thinking, she laid her head on his shoulder and turned her face into his chest, the coarse hair teasing her cheek, his heart a comforting thrumming beneath her ear. She wasn’t accustomed to being held by a man. Actually, she’d shunned such intimacy the whole of her adult life. But leaning into Gavin’s solid warmth, reaping the benefit of his heat and strength and maleness, she could see how a woman might be tempted to make a habit of it.

  Instead of pushing her away, he wrapped his arm about her. “That boy headed for gaol, I suspect he finds my sterling reputation and supposed legal brilliance cold comfort now he’s watching the world go by through prison cell bars.”

  She looked up at him, gaze rueful and jaw hard-set, and shook her head. “Oh, Gavin, ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been saving things—birds with broken wings, one-eyed cats.” Me, most especially me. “But you can’t save them all, no one can, though already you’ve saved so many and done so very much good, not only for strangers but also friends.” At his puzzled look, she explained, “When Harry—sorry, I meant to say Hadrian—stopped by the other day, he told me about how you helped him set up shop as a photographer.”

  He shook his head as though helping a friend turn his life around was a matter of course. Seeing him thus, so hollow eyed and dispirited, it was all she could do to keep from leaning in and kissing away the cares from that world-weary brow—but of course he wouldn’t want kisses, not hers at any rate.

  He shrugged. “I made some introductions on his behalf to get the thing going, but it was the merit of his work that made a success of it.”

  “According to him, you did a great deal more than that. He didn’t so much as have the funds for a proper suit of clothes let alone the tin to let a studio off of Parliament Square.”

  “Hadrian has been known to exaggerate.”

  She reached up and brushed the damp hair back from his brow. “As certain other persons have been known to be overmodest. Only look at all you’re doing for me. In giving me this chance, you’re saving my life, in a way. Even if I fail to win a place in the company, at least I can look back and say I gave it a proper try.”

  He looked down at her for a long moment. “You won’t fail, Daisy. The other day when you were reciting Jacques’ soliloquy from As You Like It, you didn’t see me, but I was there watching just outside the study door. You’re wonderfully talented, really you are.”

  She looked away. Gavin’s praise was worth more to her than the applause of an entire audience.

  “For whatever small contribution my so-called help turns out to be, better to say I’m only repaying an old debt in part, not in full.”

  She tensed against him. “What debt could you possibly owe me?” Could he finally mean to admit he ignored her many letters?

  “You must know you’re the one who brought me back to life, coaxed me into talking and being with people again even if I did have that cursed stammer. The way you used to look at me, I felt as though … as though I were ten feet tall.”

  She relaxed against him, her cantering heart resuming a more regular rhythm. The middle of the night alone together in his room was neither the time nor place to address the subject of how deeply his cutting her out of his life had hurt her.

  “Helping you gave me something to do. It was the first time I ever felt as if I could be good at something.”

  “You’re talented at a great many things—singing, dancing, and acting.”

  “And let us not forget taking off my clothes.”

  Grimacing, he opened his mouth as if to say something and then closed it.

  Now that she knew he was all right, things had returned to normal between them or at least as normal as they might be, Daisy felt sleep weighting her eyelids. Before she might succumb and fall asleep in his arms, she pushed up to go.

  Swinging her legs over the side of the mattress, she turned back to look at him. “Gav?”

  Already half asleep himself, he cracked open an eye. “Yes, Daisy?”

  “About earlier tonight, are we friends still?”

  A peaceful smile played about his lips. “Yes, Daisy, we’re friends.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “The more pity, that fools may not speak

  wisely what wise men do foolishly.”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Touchstone,

  As You Like It

  Week Two:

  he day of Daisy’s audition at Drury Lane was upon her before she knew it. The first half of the agreed-upon month with Gavin had sped by. Never before in her life had time passed so swiftly.

  Standing on the theater steps amidst a fine spring drizzle, she waved to the hansom cab carrying Gavin away. Seeing the conveyance turn the corner and disappear, her heart dropped. Perhaps she should have relented and let him come in with her as he offered to do, but then she would have risked shocking him yet again. Granted, she wasn’t averse to doing her utmost to bring out his blushes in the privacy of his flat, but she also was sensible to the fact that the glittering world she was abo
ut to enter belonged to him. If anyone was to wither with disappointment or die of shame, let it be her.

  Her greatest fear wasn’t that she would fail to win a part but that failure would mean disappointing Gavin. Over the past two weeks, he’d made her dream his. While it was comforting to have a partner in her venture, she worried about letting him down.

  Keeping her cloak wrapped snugly about her, she took a deep breath and stepped inside the colonnaded entrance. Inside the theater lobby, she followed the signs to the auditorium. Standing beneath the vaulted ceiling hung with crystal cut electric chandeliers and facing the raised stage, the theater seemed enormous to her, much bigger than she would have supposed from the outside. Gavin had told her Drury Lane seated more than three thousand, but until now she hadn’t pictured just how big that must be. Even the Moulin Rouge, the most prestigious house she ever played, seemed small in comparison.

  The stage manager who turned her away weeks before walked up to her. Expression harried, he didn’t seem to recognize her, which was all to the good. Clipboard in hand, he gestured to the clutch of a dozen or so women congregating in the corner near the stage steps. “Stand over there with the others and be quick about it. We’re running behind.”

  Daisy did as she was told. The chatter stopped when she approached and a tall, elegant blonde heading up the queue broke off conversation with her line mate and turned to Daisy.

  “Nice cloak,” she said in a carrying voice, her deepset dark eyes sliding over Daisy from head to toe. “It reminds me of one I passed on to my maid just last month.” A collective chuckle rose up and every woman in line turned to stare.

  Daisy felt stinging heat settle into her cheeks, but rather than shrink into her cloak and try to make herself as small as possible, she forced her shoulders back and her chin up. “Why, thank you. And might I return the compliment by remarking on what a fine-looking frock you’re wearing. Surely I’ve never before seen a woman your age carry off a youthful fashion half so well.”