Chasing Cassandra Page 9

As he moved forward, the pressure at her back eased, and he steered her into the first turn. He was very good at this, his body a perfectly supportive frame, his signals so explicit she could follow without effort. It also helped that the shoulders of his coat weren’t padded, as so many gentlemen’s were, so she could feel the flex of muscle at the beginning of each rotation.

  It was exciting and slightly embarrassing to feel the floor with her naked toes as he swept her into one luxurious full turn after another. Of course, the sensation of dancing with bare feet wasn’t entirely new: She’d waltzed alone in her bedroom more than once, imagining herself in the arms of some unknown suitor. But it felt very different when her partner was a flesh-and-blood man. She relaxed and abandoned herself, following his guidance without effort or thought.

  Although they’d started slowly, Mr. Severin had quickened their tempo to match the music. The waltz was flowing and swift, each turn making her skirts whirl in eddies of silk and glitter. It was like flying. Her stomach turned light, as if she were on a garden swing, soaring a little too high and coming down in a giddy arc. She hadn’t felt so free since she’d been a young girl, running recklessly across the Hampshire Downs with her twin. The world was nothing but moonlight and music as the two of them swept through the empty conservatory with the ease of mist carried on a sea breeze.

  She had no idea how much time had passed before she was panting from exertion, her muscles stinging with the need for respite. Mr. Severin began to slow their pace.

  She protested, clinging to him, reluctant for the spell to break. “No, don’t.”

  “You’re tiring,” he pointed out, sounding amused.

  “I want to keep dancing,” she insisted, even as she staggered.

  Mr. Severin caught her with a low laugh, holding her securely. Unlike her, he was barely affected by the exercise. “Let’s wait until you catch your breath.”

  “Don’t stop,” Cassandra commanded, tugging at the front of his coat.

  “No one gives me orders,” he murmured, but his tone was teasing, and his touch was gentle as he smoothed back a disheveled curl that dangled over one of her eyes.

  Laughing breathlessly, she managed to tell him, “You’re supposed to say, ‘Your wish is my command.’”

  “What is your command?”

  “Dance with me, and never stop.”

  Mr. Severin made no reply, his gaze riveted on her flushed face. He was still holding her, fast and close, in what had undeniably become an embrace. Even with the clouds of silk and chiffon skirts between them, she felt the hard strength of him all along her, the steely support of his arm. This was something she had never known but had always craved … to be enfolded, anchored, wanted … exactly like this. The sense of lightness left her, her limbs feeling loose and pleasantly weighted.

  As Mr. Severin felt the yielding pliancy of her body, he took an unsettled breath. His intent gaze slid to her mouth. A new tension invaded the muscles of his arms and chest, as if he were struggling with an impulse too powerful to resist.

  Cassandra saw the moment he broke, when he wanted her too much for anything else to matter. His head lowered, his mouth finding hers, and she closed her eyes at the careful, enticing pressure. Gently his hand came up to cradle the back of her head, his mouth moving over hers with erotic lightness … moment after moment … breath after breath. Embered warmth spread inside her, as if her bloodstream had been filled with sparks.

  A faint moan escaped her as his lips broke from hers, straying down to her throat. The shaven bristle of his cheek was an electrifying abrasion as he nuzzled into the soft skin. He worked his way down her neck, seeking the frantic throb of her pulse. His broad, hard palms slid up and down her bare arms, soothing gooseflesh, while his teeth closed gently against the tender muscle of her shoulder. The tip of his tongue touched her lightly, as if he were tasting something sweet.

  Disoriented, robbed of equilibrium, she sank against him, her head tipping back against his supportive arm. His mouth returned to hers with full, warm pressure, coaxing her to open for him. She gasped at the stroke of his tongue, silky and intimate as he searched slowly, until a knot of pleasure formed at the pit of her belly.

  He gripped her hard against him for a few searing seconds. “This is why we can’t be friends,” came his rough whisper. “I want this every time I see you. The taste of you … the feel of you in my arms. I can’t look at you without thinking of you as mine. The first time I saw you—” He broke off, his jaw hardening. “My God, I don’t want this. If I could, I’d crush it like a cinder beneath my boot.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cassandra asked unsteadily.

  “This … feeling.” He uttered the word as if it were a profanity. “I don’t know what it is. But you’re a weakness I can’t afford.”

  Her lips felt too sensitive, a little swollen, as if from a light burn. “Mr. Severin, I—”

  “Call me by my first name,” he interrupted, as if he couldn’t help himself. “Just once.” After a long hesitation, he added in a softer tone, “Please.”

  They were both motionless except for the matched rhythms of their breathing.

  “Is it … short for Thomas?” Cassandra asked hesitantly.

  He shook his head, his gaze not moving from hers. “Just Tom.”

  “Tom.” She dared to reach up and gently touch his lean cheek. A wistful smile fluttered at her lips. “I suppose we’ll never dance together again, will we?”

  “No.”

  She didn’t want to stop touching him. “It was lovely. Although I … I think you may have ruined waltzing for me.”

  His face, brooding and saturnine in the shadows, could have belonged to some lesser god in a realm far below Olympus. Powerful, secretive, enigmatic. He turned his head until his lips nudged her palm with a tenderness she knew somehow was reserved for her alone.

  After assuring himself of her balance, he let go and went to retrieve the shoe she’d thrown earlier.

  Feeling as if she were waking from a dream, Cassandra fumbled to set herself to rights, smoothing her skirts and pinning back a lock of hair that had escaped her coiffure.

  Tom came to her with both shoes, and she reached out to take them. They stood like that, linked by a mutual clasp on a few scraps of satin, leather, wood, and beading.

  “You’re returning to your room barefoot?” Tom asked.

  “I have no choice.”

  “Is there something I can do to help?”

  Cassandra shook her head. “I can sneak upstairs by myself.” She let out a quick little laugh. “Like Cinderella sans pumpkin.”

  He tilted his head in that inquiring way he had. “Did she have a pumpkin?”

  “Yes, haven’t you ever read the story?”

  “My childhood was short on fairy tales.”

  “The pumpkin becomes her carriage,” Cassandra explained.

  “I’d have recommended a vehicle with a longer date of expiration.”

  She knew better than to try explaining fairy-tale magic to such a pragmatic man. “Cinderella didn’t have a choice of transportation,” she said. “Or footwear, the poor girl. I’m sure those glass slippers were a misery.”

  “One must be fashionable,” he reminded her.

  Cassandra smiled up at him. “I’ve changed my mind about uncomfortable shoes. Why limp when I could dance?”

  But he didn’t smile back, only gave her a brooding glance and shook his head slightly.

  “What?” she whispered.

  His reply was halting and gruff. “Perfection is impossible. Most mathematical truths can’t be proved. The vast majority of mathematical relations can’t be known. But you … standing here in your bare feet in that dress … you’re perfect.”

  He bent over her, kissing her with pure molten longing. A shock of pleasure went through her, the sound of distant melody drowning in the heavy drum of her pulse. The shoes dropped from her nerveless fingers. She sank against him, grateful for the support of his hard arms as they
wrapped around her, locking her close and tight.

  When at last his mouth lifted, setting her free, Cassandra let her forehead drop to his shoulder. The smooth silk and wool fabric of his evening coat absorbed the fine sheen of perspiration from her skin as she listened to the undisciplined force of his breathing.

  “I’ll never be able to forget this,” she heard Tom say eventually. He sounded far from pleased by the fact. “I’ll have to go a lifetime with you lurking in my head.”

  Cassandra wanted to offer reassurance, but trying to think was like wading through a pool of honey. “You’ll find someone else,” she finally said, her voice not quite her own.

  “Yes,” he said vehemently. “But it won’t be you.”

  It sounded like an accusation.

  He let go of her while he was still able, and left her in the winter garden with the discarded evening shoes at her feet.

  Chapter 10

  BY ANY STANDARDS, TOM was an ass for most of the autumn. He knew that. But patience and tolerance required too much effort. He was brusque and short-tempered with Barnaby, his assorted private secretaries, accountants, lawyers, and the heads of his executive departments. Work was everything. He spared no time for friends, and turned down social invitations unless they pertained to business. There were political breakfasts and luncheons with financiers who’d agreed to supply capital for a continuation of his underground line.

  Near the middle of October, Tom had arranged to purchase an estate north of London, which comprised two hundred and fifty acres. The seller was Lord Beaumont, a viscount drowning in debt, like so much of the landowning nobility these days. Since few people could afford to buy large tracts of land, Tom had bought the estate at a bargain price, with the intention of developing it with shops and accommodations for approximately thirty thousand residents. He’d always wanted his own town. It would be satisfying to see that it was planned and laid out properly.

  Of course, the viscount’s family despised Tom for having bought their ancestral land. Their disdain hadn’t stopped them, however, from introducing him to one of their younger daughters, Miss Adelia Howard, in the hopes he would marry her and replenish the family coffers.

  Amused by their obvious struggle to hold their noses at the prospect of him as a son-in-law, Tom had accepted an invitation to dinner. The meal had been long, stilted, and formal … but the well-bred Adelia had impressed him. She seemed to share his understanding of marriage as a businesslike partnership, in which each party’s roles were separate and defined. He would make money and pay the bills. She would have the children and manage the household. After a sufficient number of offspring had been produced, they would pursue their separate pleasures and pretend to look the other way. No romantic foolishness about cozy cottages and walking hand in hand through country meadows. No poetry, no treacle.

  No moonlight waltzes.

  “I’m the best prospect you’ll ever have,” Adelia had said with an admirable lack of melodrama, when they’d talked privately at her family’s home. “Most families like mine wouldn’t dream of mixing good blood with common stock.”

  “But you wouldn’t mind?” Tom asked skeptically.

  “I would mind it far less than marrying a poor man and living in a pokey little house with only two or three servants.” Adelia had glanced over him coolly. “You’re rich and well-dressed, and you look as though you’ll keep your hair. That sets you above most of my potential suitors.”

  Tom had realized that, like a peach, the soft bloom of her exterior concealed a hard, tough core—which made him like her all the better. They would have done well together.

  It was an opportunity that wouldn’t come again for a long time, if at all.

  But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to offer for her yet, because he couldn’t stop longing for Lady Cassandra Ravenel. Damn her.

  Perhaps he’d ruined waltzing for her, but she’d ruined far more than that for him.

  For the first time in his life, Tom had actually forgotten something: what it was like to kiss other women. There was only the memory of Cassandra’s sweet, yielding mouth, the lush curves of her body molding perfectly to his. Like a melody that kept repeating itself throughout a symphony, she was his idée fixe, haunting him whether dreaming or awake.

  Everything inside demanded that he chase Cassandra, do whatever was necessary to win her. But if he succeeded, he would destroy everything that made her worth having.

  Unable to resolve the paradox on his own, Tom decided to consult the known authority on such matters: Jane Austen. He bought a copy of Persuasion as Phoebe had recommended, hoping to find an answer about how to deal with his personal dilemma.

  As Tom read the novel, he discovered to his relief that Miss Austen’s writing wasn’t florid or syrupy. To the contrary, her tone was dry, ironic, and sensible. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stand the story or any of the characters. He would have hated the plot if he’d been able to find one, but it was only chapter after chapter of people talking.

  The so-called heroine, Anne Elliot, who’d been persuaded by her family to end her engagement to Captain Wentworth, was appallingly passive and restrained. Wentworth, for his part, was understandably aloof.

  Tom had to admit, however, that he’d felt a few moments of kinship with Anne, who had such trouble identifying and expressing her feelings. He understood that all too well.

  And then he reached the part where Wentworth poured out his emotions in a love letter: You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. For some reason, Tom had felt a genuine sense of relief when Anne discovered the letter and realized Wentworth still loved her. But how could Tom experience a real feeling about someone who’d never existed, and events that had never happened? The question left him puzzled and fascinated.

  The deeper meaning of the novel, however, had remained a mystery. As far as Tom could tell, the point of Persuasion was never to let relatives interfere with one’s engagement.

  Soon, however, Tom found himself returning to the bookshop and asking the bookseller for recommendations. He returned home with Don Quixote, Les Misérables, and A Tale of Two Cities, although he wasn’t sure why he was compelled to read them. Maybe it was the sense they all contained clues to an elusive secret. Maybe if he read enough novels about the problems of fictional people, he might find some clue about how to solve his own.

  “BAZZLE,” TOM SAID absently as he read contracts at his desk, “stop that infernal scratching.”

  “Yes, sir,” came the dutiful reply. The boy continued sweeping around the edge of the office with a broom and dustpan.

  There was much about Bazzle that Tom had come to appreciate during the past few weeks. It wasn’t that the boy was particularly intelligent—he was uneducated and knew only enough math to count small currency. Nor was Bazzle a handsome lad, with his short jaw and slum-pallor complexion. But the boy’s character was solid gold, which was miraculous for anyone who’d come from dangerous and disease-ridden slums.

  Life hadn’t been kind to Bazzle, but he took each day as it was and maintained a sort of dogged cheerfulness that Tom liked. The boy was never late, sick, or dishonest. He wouldn’t take so much as a crust of bread if he thought it belonged to someone else. More than once, Tom’s assistant Barnaby had dashed off harum-scarum on some errand, and left the remains of his lunch—a half sandwich, or a hand pie, or a few scraps of bread and cheese—lying unwrapped on his desk. Tom found the habit supremely annoying, since uneaten food tended to attract vermin. He’d hated insects and rodents ever since his days working as a train boy, when the only room he’d been able to afford had been a freight yard shack crawling with pests.

  “Have Barnaby’s leftover lunch,” Tom had told Bazzle, whose spindly frame needed some bolstering. “There’s no use wasting it.”

  “Ain’t a thief,” the boy had replied, after a quick, hollow-eyed glance at the discarded food.

  “It’s not stealing if I tell you to take it.”

  “But it’s Mr.
Barnaby’s.”

  “Barnaby’s well aware that any food he leaves behind will be disposed of before he returns. He’d be the first to tell you to have it.” At the boy’s continuing hesitation, Tom had said curtly, “Either it goes into the rubbish bin or your innards, Bazzle. You decide.”

  The boy had proceeded to devour the hand pie so fast that Tom had feared it might come up again.

  On another occasion, Tom had tried and failed to give Bazzle a cake of paper-wrapped soap from the cabinet of supplies near one of the building lavatories.

  Bazzle had eyed the soap as if it were a dangerous substance. “Don’t need it, sir.”

  “Emphatically, child, you do.” As Tom saw the boy sniff beneath his arm, he added impatiently, “No one can detect their own odor, Bazzle. You can only take my word for it that with my eyes closed, I could easily mistake you for a dockside ass-cart.”

  The boy had still declined to touch it. “If I wash today, I’d be dirty again ter-morrer.”

  Tom had regarded him with a frown. “Do you never wash, Bazzle?”

  The boy had shrugged. “I runs under the pump at a stable, or splashes meself from a trough.”

  “When was the last time?” After watching the boy struggle to come up with an answer, Tom had glanced heavenward. “Don’t think so hard, you’re about to sprain something.”

  After that, since Tom had been occupied with several projects, it had been easy to ignore the issue of Bazzle’s hygiene.

  This morning, however, after hearing another burst of furtive, furious scratching, Tom lifted his head and asked, “Bazzle, do you have a problem?”

  “No, sir,” the boy said reassuringly. “Just a few chats.”

  Tom froze, a hideous, creepy-crawly dread racing over him. “For God’s sake, don’t move.”

  Bazzle stood obligingly still, broom in hand, giving him a questioning stare.

  After coming out from behind the desk, Tom went to inspect the child. “There’s no such thing as ‘a few chats,’” he said, gingerly nudging the boy’s head this way and that, observing the small red bumps scattered over the skinny neck and hairline. As he expected, a wealth of telltale nits littered the woolly tangle of hair. “Holy hell. If lice were people, your head would host the population of Southwark.”