His wife had morphed from miserable bride into a bewitchingly enthusiastic companion, both in and outside the bedchamber, and it made Lucian nervous. The pleasure between them came at a cost. The urge to please her forced his hand, no matter how outrageous her demands—see the matter of Rutland, the whoreson. Naturally, she had sniffed out what mattered to him the most and had fixated on it. I’ll try, he had said, for it had felt impossible to promise her anything less. That wasn’t all. She demanded more, that he share of himself, not explicitly, but he had noticed she was especially receptive when he did, so he tried. Talking of himself felt rusty and cumbersome, like operating outdated machinery, and sometimes a vent broke and he couldn’t stop blabbing. One by one, she drew secrets from him.
Last night, she had asked if he had truly purchased his first properties from the proceeds of the antiques shop sale on Leicester Square. “It was part of the budget,” he had said, his fingers playing over her hip, trying and failing to distract her. So he had admitted to stealing valuables from posh houses, and that he had been boxing for money in East London for a while, too. And when she hadn’t fled the bed after those revelations, he told her about Renwick, the noise-sensitive artist she had met on their first day. “He came to Graham’s shop to collect some old chest,” he had said, “and in passing, he pointed out that one of the Louis XIV tables was a forgery. Now, Graham, the owner, who was a decent fellow, had been really troubled that his own keen eye hadn’t spotted it.”
Lucian had noticed things about Renwick instead: the man’s gaunt cheeks and scuffed boots, that his shirt had been turned inside out and was still dirty. The look of a man who might be interested in making coin. “I followed Renwick through the alleys and made him a proposition. If one could recognize a well-done forgery, just like that, one could probably tell how to create really well-done forgeries, too.” During the negotiation, he had understood Renwick’s problem: the man had no notion how to interact with fellow men, was blunt to the point of rudeness, and had no patience for business affairs. He had been sent down from the best art school in Florence despite his remarkable artistic talents. “His rudeness didn’t bother me because he was always right on the facts. He wasn’t even keen on coin; he liked making excellent forgeries and having clueless toffs pay for them.”
As an artist herself, Harriet had disapproved, but then she had pressed herself against him and fallen asleep with her sweet head resting on his shoulder. It seemed the shagging fogged her brain as much as it clouded his. It had to be the shagging that made him so careless, so eager. Admitting that he was madly, brutally, in love with her would open Pandora’s box; it would hold him somewhat accountable to his promise about Rutland, for once, even when the promise had been vague. Besides. Everyone he loved was eventually lost to him.
This night, she was curled up by his side and playing with the silvery scars that snaked across his abdomen. She was tracing, kissing, gently nipping. “It’s from the girdle, isn’t it,” she had asked a while ago, “from pulling the tubs?” He had confirmed it and had explained that they had ponies to do the pulling these days. He hadn’t told her about how the girdle had caused him blisters that would hurt like hell before they broke, how the harness would stick and his shirt would be blood soaked by the end of every shift, over and over, until the tender boyish skin had hardened enough to stand it well most days. Something told him that she knew; she made a point of lavishing attention on these ruined parts of him, as though she were trying to kiss them better … He didn’t particularly enjoy it; he wasn’t a bairn with a scraped knee.
She flicked her soft tongue a few inches below his navel, and his nerves lit with awareness. All right, so he enjoyed some of it.
“You’ll be flat on your back again if you keep doing that,” he murmured.
Another flick. Cheeky chit.
“When you kiss me,” he heard her say, “down between my legs …”
He raised his head. “Yes?”
Her eyes were hazy with erotic mischief. “Is it something a man would enjoy, too?”
“Can’t you tell?”
She rolled onto her side and rested her chin in her palm. “I meant when he receives it.”
A white roar filled his head.
“It’s considered a perversion,” he then said.
“But would it please you?”
“Yes. But it’s not something one would ask from a wife.” He added this with reluctance.