The Midnight Man. Charlotte MedeЧитать онлайн книгу.
hand. “Not from here, not from this.”
“Then from where?” The dark voice led her on, as surely as if he’d leaned closer, his lips hot on the curve of her neck. Beneath the heaviness of her limbs, she felt an unfamiliar need, a tightening in her chest that was equal parts desire and dread.
“Most people believe I’m mad.” It was more of a whisper than a statement.
“Why?”
She shook her head against the enveloping, smothering cushions. “Because of what I do and how I do it.” Explaining anything more would not help, even if she could.
“I saw your entries in the Salon des Refuses in Paris.” He cupped her cheek, sketching her ear, the slope of her shoulder. Her insides turned liquid and her skin hot.
Desire coursed through her, foreign and frightening, desire for this stranger whose face she couldn’t see. His voice and his body, the here and now that could blot out the terror that hovered in the air around her. From far away she watched herself as, with leaden arms, she reached up to pull him down toward her. His muscles were granite beneath her hands.
Her blood rushed and she breathed in his scent. “You’re what I need,” she murmured. “To escape, just for a little while…”
She was on the margins of awareness, her physical senses as keenly attuned as the finest instrument. The heaviness pooling in her abdomen and the swelling of her breasts were exotic terrain, her body suddenly alien to her experience.
She felt the heat of his breath with its tinge of warmed brandy and tobacco. “I can do that for you, Helena. I can do whatever you desire.” His voice caused a muscle to spasm low in her belly. A strong arm slipped under her back, caressing her waist with infinite slowness, burning through the protective layers of skirt and undergarments. His fingers ran up the middle of her back and her shoulder blades tightened in response.
Helena’s body inclined toward him with the inevitability of a magnet to the south pole. He was there, his warm breath inches from her mouth, and all she wanted to do was touch him and be touched by him.
“Good Lord, who’s that you’re rutting with, man?”
A voice intruded, like a rock hitting the stillness of a pond, heavy with alcohol. A shuffle of footsteps and then the slurred exclamation. “Not that I can see from this vantage point, but I’d swear by my dead mother-in-law, hellish harridan that she was, may she rot in hell, that you’re about to rut with the widow Hartford. Not bad, not bad at all, I’d say. You’ve done well for yourself, old boy.”
The words penetrated the thick fog of opiates and desire. Helena stiffened. Wide shoulders still blocked her view, but the man who held her was as fixed as a mountain range and didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t have to.
“You must have a death wish, Lord Beckwith.” The threat, in that low gravel voice, was as casually delivered as the crack of a pistol shot at dawn.
Helena closed her eyes, willing reality to disappear.
Lord Beckwith’s casual tone suddenly took on a distinct quaver. “Good God, I meant no disrespect…. Truly, I didn’t quite realize…who you…er…were…are.”
“I suggest you turn fast on your heels and exit this establishment if you’d like to see the next sunrise.”
All signs of dissipation in Beckwith’s manner miraculously cleared like rain on a summer’s day. “Of course, of course.” A restrained cough, the clasping of hands in supplication. “And you can count on my discretion. Certainly…”
“The alternative doesn’t bear contemplation.”
There was no response. Lord Beckwith had disappeared into the blue smoke of the salon, leaving behind a keen mortification and the unwelcome awareness of having been discovered virtually flagrante delicto, in a public space, albeit one of London’s most luxurious and louche opium dens. Helena opened her eyes against the panic that seeped like cold water back into her veins, the rising curtain of reason beginning to reassert itself. She struggled to sit up, pushing back her hair.
“Thank you.” She placed her hands at her temples to keep the room from spinning. “I’m not usually like this….” She took a shaky breath. “I just couldn’t deal with him…with anyone at present.”
They were sitting side by side, and for the first time, in the shimmer of the chandelier’s light, she saw his face clearly. As the momentary dizziness subsided, she was struck by an overwhelming masculinity, of sharp planes and angles, of unfamiliar ground. The men in her circle were and had always been refined, the cream of the aristocracy, their features softened by hours of leisure and undemanding days marked by nothing more important than a meeting with one’s tailor or a card game at White’s. Even the models she sketched were malleable clay, young and unformed, in comparison with this man.
This man was cut from a distinctly different cloth. The nose was strong, the forehead broad, the mobile mouth above the clean architecture of a stubborn jaw bracketed by lines. Lines of hard-won experience. Only a slight indentation in the chin alleviated some of the starkness. His eyes were light gray, disconcertingly opaque, revealing nothing.
“Are you all right?”
She felt like the fifth ring of hell on a bad night. A headache began its steady beat, deliberately mocking her. “I’m well, thank you,” she lied, sitting up straighter, hoping to clear the vestiges of stupor that still numbed her brain. Again, she was struck by his size as he loomed beside her, taller, broader, stronger. Her imagination careened wildly. This man, she sensed in the pit of her stomach, would not be easily dispatched.
“What to say in a situation like this?” She licked her dry lips, the words as brittle as a social cliché. “It’s a bit awkward, certainly.” The useless sentiment drifted into the smoke-thickened air. “No need for introductions. Better that we just take our leave without much more fuss,” she continued, fully aware that she was rambling. She couldn’t quite recall the words they’d exchanged and didn’t want to remember the strange feelings that had threatened to smother her with their strange intensity. With an evil eye, she looked at the pipe on the low table between them.
He caught her glance. “Opium is a powerful drug.”
“As I’m quickly learning.” Uncomfortable with the conversation, she smoothed the folds of her dress. Only then did she realize that her bodice was flecked with paint, lines of ochre and bright red, evidence of futile hours spent in her atelier earlier that evening.
A smile deepened the lines around his mouth. Strong white teeth flashed against darkened skin and she wondered if he had spent the past six months in an exotic clime. Whoever he was, unlike her, he seemed stone-cold sober.
She was never one for denying the truth. The headache urged her on, and on a shallow breath, she said, “You’re clearly familiar with my name, sir, and you believe I’m here to indulge in certain proclivities, which I don’t bother to deny. However, I would ask you not to consider these previous moments as representative of, well, of anything, of anything…” she faltered, looking down on her lap as though she would find the words there to continue. “It’s probably best that we forget this encounter ever occurred.”
His smile broadened and he threw an arm across the back of the chaise and crossed one booted leg over the other, the muscles straining against the superfine of his trousers. He was clearly not of the indolent class, and he clearly had no intention of making the situation easier for her.
“By that I mean you caught me at a bad moment, sir.” Her headache was a tight band around her forehead and neck, clearly her punishment for having explored forbidden territory. But the fog was clearing and she wondered whether it was for the best because, at the moment, reality was not her friend. And then she recalled Lord Beckwith’s hasty retreat.
She licked her dry lips. “Who are you?” She looked up at him, arching her neck in an attempt to loosen the knots that were in danger of cutting off her circulation.
He