Sins and Scandals Collection. Nicola Cornick
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She laughed. “So that you could bar me from testifying against you?”
“No,” Garrick said. “So that I could make love to you.”
The air in the room seemed to heat and catch fire. Merryn’s eyes dilated in shock. She gave a gasp. A pink flush mantled her cheeks and she turned her back on him, hunting feverishly now for her slippers, the need to escape him evident in the tension enveloping her slim figure.
“You have outstayed your rather tenuous welcome, your grace,” she said. “If you will not leave, I will. I should return to the ball anyway. My sister will be wondering where I am.”
“A conventional excuse to escape,” Garrick said. “I would have expected something more imaginative from you. Besides—” he took a breath, looked her over from shining fair hair to bare toes “—you cannot go back to the ballroom looking like that.” His voice dropped. “You look far too disheveled. People would talk. You look as though we have already been making love.”
Something flared in her eyes. Her lips parted. She looked innocent, frightened but also bewitched.
Garrick knew that he should not touch her. It was one thing to use whatever advantage he could to persuade her to give up on her quest. It was quite another to take the step of seducing her. Her innocence and her openness fascinated him, she called to every one of his long-buried rakehell propensities, but even he was not such an unscrupulous bastard that he would deliberately ruin her. Merryn Fenner was the last woman he could ever have. Twelve years ago, after he had taken her brother’s life and destroyed so many other lives as a consequence he had sworn that the only way to redeem himself was through duty. He had given up his hard living. He had turned his back on those who had predicted that with his wife dead and so spectacular a scandal attached to his name he would go back to his debauched ways with a vengeance. He had proved them wrong because after Stephen’s murder and Kitty’s death, strength of character was the only thing he had left, the only thing that could save him. He had served his country and he had tried to atone for his past failings. And now what tarnished honor he had left did not permit him to pursue Merryn Fenner, innocent, untouched, a woman who had already been cruelly hurt. He could not be such an unmitigated scoundrel. Even so the temptation grabbed him by the throat.
Just this once …
He knew he was lying to himself even as he kissed her. If he tasted her response just one more time he would not be able to let her go.
He bent his head and his lips met hers.
That night in his bedroom it had been no more than a brief caress. At the library he had kissed her with ruthless intent. This time he did not hurry to force a reaction. This time he courted a response from her, teasing her lips until they parted to allow his tongue to slip into her mouth, tasting her, drawing out the pleasure. He felt her tremble and slid his arms about her to hold her still.
It was a thousand times more potent than Garrick had ever imagined. Her lips were soft and yielding beneath his, offering the sweetest of surrenders. Her tentative response, the hesitant way she touched her tongue to his, tempted him to deeper intimacies. Suddenly Garrick wanted to make love to her here and now, throw her down on the bed or take her on the rug before the fire, he who had not behaved like that with a woman in twelve years and had thought he never would again, the Duke whose emotions were ice-cold and whose only passion was for books and dry documents.
He deepened the kiss, plundering her mouth now, desire leaping to wild desire, passion laced with tenderness. He slid a hand into the bodice of the rose-pink gown and felt the curve of her breast against his palm, small and soft, the nipple tightening against his fingers. It was shattering, hardening his arousal to painful proportions. She made a sound deep in her throat, and her body seemed to quiver beneath his caress. Feral possession ripped at Garrick and set him gasping. He was within an inch of losing control and ravishing her body as fiercely as he took her mouth.
He fought a brief, violent struggle for self-control and let her go, stepping back.
And then he saw her face and almost dragged her back into his arms. There was a dreaming unawakened expression in her eyes and a little smile on her lips as though she had just discovered something new and so fascinating that she was enchanted by it.
It was there for a second and then reality smashed through her pleasure banishing the look of a princess in a fairy tale. Horror was etched on her face and she pressed her fingers to her lips as though to scrub the kiss away.
“No,” she said. “Oh, no, not you!” And she turned and hurried away from him, her stockinged feet making a soft slapping on the floor that seemed to emphasize her agitation.
Garrick understood what she meant. If he had had a choice she would have been the last woman in the world he would have wished to be so attracted to. It was impossible. It was madness. And yet it seemed he had no choice.
MERRYN DID NOT STOP running until she had reached the sanctuary of the library. Halfway down the stairs she realized that she was running toward people, not away from them, but with Garrick in her room there was only one other place to go that could give her solace.
There were plenty of guests in the hall. She fled past them, seeing their faces, curious and speculative, hearing the titters of laughter.
“Lady Merryn is such an original … Running into the library with her hair down and no slippers …”
Damnation, this time it was her shoes she had left with Garrick Farne. First her book, her spectacles, her underwear … Soon he would have sufficient of her possessions to equip a whole room.
She braced her forearms on the table in the library—such a pretty room, designed to a yellow floral pattern by her sister Joanna—and stared at her face in the mirror facing her on the wall. She was horrified by what she saw there. Long blond strands of hair snaked about her face. Her cheeks were flushed a warm pink. Normally she had very little color. From childhood she had been accustomed to people commenting on her disparagingly as “an odd, pale little thing …” She had not minded particularly. She had always thought looks were overrated. What use was it to be beautiful, unless to make a good marriage? People had spoken approvingly of Joanna and Tess because they were such pretty girls, as though that was the most important thing in the world. Merryn, with her reading and the stories in her head and her imaginary friends, thought it was better to be clever than beautiful, though that did not mean that sometimes she would not feel a tiny bit jealous … Jealous of Tess’s charm and dimples, jealous of Joanna’s thick golden-brown hair and vivid eyes … Jealous of the admiration and approval that was withheld from her because she was different.
But now, looking in the glass, she saw that her face had all the color and vivid animation it had previously lacked. Her hair was all disordered profusion. Her eyes glittered with a fierce light so deep and blue, her mouth looked soft, pink and stung with kisses. She pressed her fingers to her lips again. She remembered her words to him at the Octagon Library:
“I have never been kissed before …”
Well, she had now. Wildly, passionately, pleasurably kissed by an experienced rake. She had been kissed until her entire body had risen to Garrick’s touch.
It felt as though she could still feel the imprint of his lips on hers. An echo of primitive heat and tension clenched her stomach. The kiss at the library had shocked her, so brief and ruthless. This one had seduced her. It had been strange, something so far outside her experience, new and different. But it had also been so much more than that, a world she wanted to explore, a hunger awakened, a fierce desire stirred. She knew she would never be the same.
She backed away from the mirror and sat down heavily in one of the armchairs. How was it possible to feel like this? She had spent twelve years hating Garrick Farne with a clear, cold passion. Then she had met him and that cold hatred had become confused by a different sort of passion. Disgust and despair shredded her. She did not understand how she could so betray herself and all that she believed in. Yet she was still trembling from Garrick’s kiss even as she despised herself.
She tried