St. Raven, page 36
They turned into a narrow lane, and Cressida prayed. She prayed that Tris still be in his room, that he had not proposed to Miss Swinamer before the event.
As soon as they arrived in the busy stables, she jumped out of the curricle. Jean-Marie joined her and they hurried into the house.
He led her to narrow servants’ stairs, and up to a wide, carpeted corridor. They entered a grand bedchamber hung with red velvet that was embroidered in gold with some heraldic device.
Tris’s room. Cressida knew it by its grandeur, but also by sandalwood and every other sense.
And Tris wasn’t here.
They explored the whole of the grand suite, but Tris wasn’t here!
Jean-Marie swore again. “Stay here!” he said, and disappeared.
Cressida paced the bedchamber wringing her hands, almost running out into the house a dozen times. But she would look like a madwoman. Servants would probably throw her out.
Then Jean-Marie was back with a nun. A nun, complete with winged wimple. A nun who pulled off her complicated headdress, then began to strip.
“Go away,” Miranda Coop commanded her lover. “Go and make sure Tris doesn’t do anything stupid.”
Cressida didn’t need to be told. She began to tear off her gown, grateful she didn’t need help. And that this time she didn’t need to take off drawers, shift, or corset.
“That’s a quite decorous nun’s habit,” she said.
“I’m reformed,” said Miranda with a grin. “Here.”
She tossed the long black gown, and Cressida struggled into it, aware with some amazement that being in the company of a former whore, both of them in underwear, was not shocking her.
As she knotted a rope round her waist she noted that Miranda’s drawers were pink silk, and her corset was embroidered with pink roses and laced with scarlet ribbons. Her flesh-colored stockings had vines embroidered up them to flower near the black garters. She suspected Tris might like underwear like that.
She draped the white yoke around her neck, and Miranda tied it, then the half-mask over her face. Then Miranda pushed her into a chair and settled the headdress on, tucking away curls and fixing it with hairpins.
“There,” she said. “Go!”
Cressida shot to her feet but paused. “What’s he wearing?”
“Jean-Marie’s Crow outfit. But there’s half a dozen here.”
“Heavens! What’s Miss Swinamer wearing?”
Miranda grinned. “She’s a shepherdess. All pink ruffles. Go! Turn left, follow the corridor, the ballroom is at the other end of the house, but he might be anywhere.”
Cressida shot into the corridor and ran left, but then a door opened and she slammed to a halt. A couple in medieval clothes emerged chattering, inclined their heads to her, and went on their way.
Damnation, now she had to progress at the same stately pace as they or look peculiar. What was the price of looking peculiar? At this point, she didn’t care. She pushed past and ran, despite exclamations of affront.
Two turns in the corridor, one of which took her across a landing above the main entrance. She stopped to hang over and search the crowd. This was a masquerade, so the host wouldn’t be receiving his guests. Even so, a fat woman in a long velvet robe and a diadem was doing just that.
She saw three big hats with sweeping plumes, but none were Tris. Two shepherdesses, but she didn’t think either was Miss Swinamer.
Please let Jean-Marie have found Tris in time to stop him from committing himself. Or let Mr. Lyne have him in control.
She went on, walking now, since people were all around, wishing she were taller and could see over the growing crowd. Wishing she didn’t have the stupid horns that kept bumping into things.
She came to the ballroom. Music played, but not yet for dancing. Four chandeliers cast light along with lamps on the walls. Cressida paused to breathe, to calm, to collect her wits.
A Puritan, complete to steeple hat, stopped by her side. “Jean-Marie’s with him, but he’s looking for Miss Swinamer.”
“Mr. Lyne.” Extreme urgency popped, letting in doubts. “Perhaps she’s what he wants.”
“Since driving away from your coach, he hasn’t allowed his wants to show. If you’re looking for guarantees,” he added with puritanical sternness, “there are none. You may have hurt him too much.”
She bit her lip. “He might have explained.”
“You might have trusted him.”
He’d asked her to trust him, but she wasn’t a person for blind trust. “Only help me find him. Where should I start?”
“I left him as he entered this room. I don’t know where the Swinamers are.”
Cressida couldn’t see farther than the people nearby. She looked up and saw small, curtained balconies in each corner. “I could go up there and search.”
He followed her gaze. “I’ll go, and I’ll direct you.” He smiled. “At least those starched horns make you easy to spot.”
She spent the waiting time maneuvering through the guests, fending off the occasional flirtation. As was the custom, people were acting in part, which made it easy for her to reject advances.
Then she saw Mr. Lyne’s head, minus hat, poke around the corner of the curtain. He scanned the room, then pointed urgently to her left.
Relief washed over her like . . . like perfumed oil. She pushed left as fast as she could, but her headdress made navigation difficult, especially in an encounter with a medieval lady in a steeple cap.
She emerged from that, shoved her headdress straight again and glanced at the balcony. The Puritan was frantically pointing down below him. Cressida switched directions and headed that way, keeping more of an eye on her guide.
She bumped into someone.
A shepherdess.
And this time it was Phoebe Swinamer, with only the tiniest of masks to conceal her beauty.
“Be careful, do!” Miss Swinamer snapped, twitching her ruffled elbow-cuffs back into line. She turned back to a woman who wore only a domino cloak over her gown, and an equally small mask. Phoebe’s mother.
“I quite expected St. Raven to speak before this event, Mama. It is such a crush.”
“His first major entertainment here, dear. Of course everyone attends.”
“Mostly country bumpkins.” The beauty made no attempt to speak quietly.
“Now, now, dear, mind your manners. These people will soon be your dependents, and it will be a grand audience for the announcement.”
“I do hope St. Raven will not wish to spend too much time in Cornwall. It is so far from anywhere. Traveling here took days.”
Cressida had been so fixed on this conversation that she’d forgotten to watch her guide. She looked up to see him making a frantic gesture that she couldn’t interpret.
But then she realized he meant that Tris was coming her way and would encounter the Swinamers first!
With a muttered excuse, she pushed past them. Pheobe spat another complaint, but Cressida watched her guide. A Le Corbeau blocked her way and she grabbed him.
He looked down, startled. He was a stranger.
“Tripped!” she gasped, and escaped, headdress slipping over one eye.
Then she came face-to-face with Tris, in black, masked, but without the beard and mustache. It made her smile. Clearly his heart hadn’t been in any of this.
“Miranda? Jean-Marie was here a moment ago.” He glanced around.
Should she be offended that he couldn’t tell the difference? Carried on a wave of mischief and relief, Cressida stepped forward and walked her fingers up his jacket.
He caught her hand. “You disappoint me.”
He really was disappointed, angry even. Because he thought his cousin’s love was unfaithful.
Cressida looked into his masked eyes. “It’s not Miranda.”
He froze. “I’m brandy-mad.”
She realized then that he’d been drinking. He wasn’t staggering drunk, but there was a slight slur in his voice and a slackness in his features.
What to say? The Swinamers could be close behind. What had she imagined would happen now? Him asking her again, giving her another chance?
“St. Raven!”
Lady Swinamer’s piercing voice. They were coming.
She raised her other hand, so she held his with both. “You’re not mad. My name is Cressida Mandeville, and you asked me to marry you.” Desperately she added, “You asked me first!”
He frowned, and for a dreadful moment she was sure he had changed his mind. It had been a whim, now passed.
“St. Raven!” Lady Swinamer again, nearer, almost here.
He changed their grip and turning, pulled her away, away from that demanding voice, out of the ballroom, through an arch, along a corridor, and down a curving stairwell. He stopped suddenly, on the curve with no sight of top above or bottom below.
“Cressida?”
They’d passed a flickering lamp, and it provided some light, but chancy here, around the bend. She couldn’t see him clearly, but his voice told her what she needed to know.
By planning or accident, he’d stopped with her one step higher so she could easily cradle his face. “I want to change my answer, if you’ll let me. But I have a boon to request.”
His hands covered hers. His eyes seemed entirely black. “What?”
“I don’t have the right to ask. I’ve been a fool. I heard you were at Violet Vane’s and assumed the worst. I heard you’d come to my ball from an orgy, on a wager, and I believed it.”
“Cressida—”
She sealed his lips with her thumbs. “But for both our sakes I ask you now. Please, Tris, can you swear to be faithful to me, all the days that we live? If you swear that, I’ll never doubt you again.”
He held her thumbs against his lips, and she felt his words as well as heard them. “I do so swear. I can’t imagine wanting anyone but you.”
An explosion of happiness struck her dumb, and then she said, “I ate a cake with pink icing.”
Why that? At a moment like this? He’d think her an idiot.
But he smiled. “Why not? If we eat oysters, eating insects is not so strange. And honey, after all, is insect food. . . . I’m somewhat drunk, my love. Forgive me.”
“Only if you kiss me.” She leaned to him, but one of her horns collided with the wall, knocking the wimple all over her face, and the other pushed off his hat.
Laughing, they freed her, sliding down to sit on the stairs. He tossed his hat and her headdress to roll down the stairs. She pushed his mask up and off his beloved face. He untied hers, cleverly loosening her hair so she felt it tumble down her back as he kissed her as she’d hungered to be kissed over long weeks of separation.
It wasn’t enough. Desire built in her—physical desire, but more than that. A burning need to be his, and to claim him as hers. Even as they kissed, she climbed onto him, slid her hands beneath his jacket. She needed more. Skin. She began to tug his shirt loose—
He moved back, captured her hands. “Cressida, love . . .”
But then his eyes met hers and she saw practicalities explode into dust. He rose with her still latched around him with arms and legs and climbed the stairs up to the light. In the corridor, he put her down, but her protest was brief. He swept her into his arms and carried her away—away from the music and chatter of the ballroom, up stairs, along a corridor. . . .
Cressida wasn’t paying attention to anything but him. She’d undone his cravat and was stroking his neck, his jaw, tangling her fingers in his hair. Drawing his head down.
He stopped. They kissed again, passion building so fiercely that Cressida could imagine she’d drunk Crofton’s brew, could imagine surrendering to Tris, here, in a corridor.
She heard something and opened her eyes, then pulled back from the kiss. A maidservant was passing, carrying a pile of cloths, watching them with high eyebrows and a crooked-tooth grin. Once Cressida would have been appalled, but now she grinned back.
Tris looked at the maid, not quite grinning, but not straight-faced either. “My duchess,” he said. “You’ll be seeing a lot of this.”
The woman chuckled as she bobbed a curtsy. “Many blessings on you, zur,” she said in a heavy Cornish burr, and hurried away.
“She’ll tell everyone,” Cressida said.
“We’ll tell everyone. Soon.”
They weren’t kissing. They were talking coherently, but that seemed close to a miracle. Cressida wanted only one thing.
Shyly, in a whisper, she said, “I want . . . I want to be closer to you, Tris, than I’ve been to anyone since I slid messily from my mother’s womb. Now.”
She saw her words hit him, and then he moved quickly, carrying her along the corridor, opening a door, then kicking it shut behind him.
She was in his bedroom.
He walked to the huge bed and slid her to her feet beside it. She immediately turned so he could untie her yoke. “Just one little knot this time,” she said, unable to manage more than a whisper.
His touch at her nape sent ripples of desire through her, and she could feel the unsteadiness of his hands.
“Which almost defeats me,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “But there.”
It came loose. She turned back, holding the yoke, then letting it fall. Eyes on his, she unknotted the rope belt as he tore off his jacket.
Cressida dragged the black gown over her head and flung it away, then she recognized the same old problem. “My corset.”
Gloriously naked down to his breeches, he laughed, but walked to his washstand and picked up his razor. For a second she thought of protesting, but urgency beat in her, too. She turned her back and felt the blade slice right down the laces.
She tossed the corset on the black gown and stripped the drawers and stockings off beneath her shift, back to him. An awkward shyness was creeping over her now.
“Miranda has scarlet ribbons on her corset and flowers on her stockings.”
Hands grasped her shift and pulled it up over her head. He turned her toward him. “And you’ll look splendid in such things, too. But now is a time for nakedness, my dearest love.”
He was naked. Magnificently naked, rampant with desire.
Cressida sucked in a huge breath of satisfaction.
“Tris, my love.” She placed her hands on his chest, and now everything seemed perfectly natural, perfectly . . . perfect. “Make me yours. Now.”
He went to the bed and dragged the rich covers back, exposing white linen, as he had once before, on that special night. All the feelings he’d summoned that night rushed back over her so she walked to join him on unsteady legs and leaned on him for support. He swung her up and laid her gently on the bed, then lay beside her, big, strong, hot. . . .
Hers.
Cressida slid a hand from strong thigh to broad chest, trembling. “I keep thinking perhaps I’m dreaming.”
“I’ve dreamed of this,” he said, and kissed her again, his leg moving over hers, between hers as his knowing hand stroked. This time she opened her thighs eagerly, arching at his lightest touch, as if long into this game.
She heard him laugh softly, but it was almost a groan, then his clever mouth was on her breasts and she began to tumble off that cliff.
“Tris!” she cried, wrapping herself around him, afraid he’d let her fall alone again. But his hot weight came over her, stretching her wider, as wide as she longed to be. Hardness pressed.
“Yes, yes!” She could hear herself as if from a distance.
“Oh, yes . . .”
The pain was sharp and startling, but didn’t seem to matter because now, at last, they were joined fully, deeply, one, complete. She’d never felt anything so glorious in her life.
Until he started to move.
“Oh, my. Oh, my. Oh, yes!”
She thought she kept saying it, but she wasn’t sure for her mind seemed far from her seething body. This wasn’t like throwing herself off a cliff into mist. It was like spiraling in fire, like becoming one with his strength, his heat, his potency.
She arched, gripping him tight, feeling him arch against her as fierce, burning ecstasy consumed them both.
A thumb brushed her cheek. “I hope those tears aren’t regret, love.” He didn’t sound at all unsure of himself, and confirmed it by his next words. “Because you’re mine now.”
She knew she was smiling as she opened her eyes. “And you are mine,” she said, cradling his face. “I’m so sorry for almost plunging us into disaster with my doubts.”
He shook his head, brushed a kiss on her thumb. “I’m sorry my sad career was food for those doubts.”
“Without that sad career, would you be able to give me so much pleasure?”
He laughed, moving off her a little. “You are, as I once observed, a minx at heart, Cressida Mandeville.” One hand rested on her hip, sweet possession. “Cressida St. Raven, soon. How soon? I’m not sure I can bear one more night without you in my bed.”
She felt heat in her cheeks, but it was heat of pleasure at his frank desire. Tris Tregallows, the wonderful Duke of St. Raven, burned with desire for her.
“Soon,” she said, unable to stop looking down as if bashful. It was simply too much, too overwhelming at this moment. “My parents are due to sail shortly.”
“Blessed parents.”
“And they’re on their way here. They might be here. . . .”
“Excellent.” He tilted her chin up so she had to look at him. “My dear Miss Mandeville, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife and my duchess? Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Can it be done so fast?”
“Your parents will be here, and if a duke cannot obtain a license in short order, what use is he? You haven’t said yes, yet, you know.”
She relaxed into a laugh. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Oh, Tris, I’ve been so miserable without you. I’ve felt half alive.”
He cinched her into a tight hug. “And I feel like a man sentenced to hang who is suddenly reprieved. Not just reprieved, but given a glorious reward.”
He swept her long hair forward, then kissed her breasts through it with a hum of pleasure that made her feel faint.
