Pam Rosenthal - The Slightest Provocation

She thought of the tiny gesture he’d made downstairs and how it had brought the serving girl running. At Rowen, the servants were equally attentive, as though honored to feed and dress the neighborhood’s first family. Most natural thing in the world, she supposed, for him to describe it as loyalty.

But she wasn’t as loyal as that. Nor as complaisant.

He was speaking so softly that she found herself obliged to lean forward in order to hear him. “A pity,” he said, “to pull little Peggy out of bed at this late hour, wouldn’t you agree?”

As though it were all a rather bouncy bedroom farce.

For what if she’d demurred back there at the bottom of the stairs? Hadn’t he considered that she might have murmured a polite “No, thank you”?

Of course not. He’d taken it all as rather a lark-this business of men and women, of urgent desire, and of a stupid, passive, even servile eagerness to forget the wrongs of the past. As though it should be an easy, rather jokey matter for her to fall back into bed with him.

She shrugged.

It had been an exhausting, confusing day. It was her last night on the continent.

“Indeed,” she replied-a little too loudly; the pounding started up again. She found it difficult to control her voice; at this moment she was finding it difficult to control-or even to comprehend-a great many things.

She whispered, “Quite unnecessary to fetch Peggy, now that I’ve got you to undo my stays for me.”

Her mouth had taken an ironical curve, but her hand was firm around her husband’s as she drew him into the room and shut the door behind them.

The pounding had ceased. She folded her shawl over a chair by the window while he prowled about the room, picking up stray items and laying them down again. The air seemed to hum. His nervous energy had a familiar resonance; they might have been back in her bedchamber in Curzon Street. He’d deposited the bottle on the dressing table and was fiddling with the books atop the bed stand.

“Diderot, eh? Lying supine beneath the witty lady who wrote Pride and Prejudice. An excellent arrangement, don’t you think, for the both of them?”

If she weren’t careful, she’d laugh along with him.

“Come here,” she said, “so I can look at you more closely.”

In truth, to do more than simply look: she’d have to employ all her senses, to encompass the fact of his presence. Her lips trembled, parting to take a deep, heady breath of him. As once she’d taken greedy, icy gulps of water from the brook at the border of Rowen and Beechwood Knolls.

He’d taken hold of both her hands. Holding them down at her sides, his own large, strong hands about her wrists. They exchanged a tiny, conspiratorial smile; she gazed serenely upward, to take his measure.

The curtains stirred in a sweet salt breeze. A serene, temperate night; one wouldn’t guess at the ferocious weather they’d been having just a few hours earlier. The fire burned low and even, its mellow warmth spreading upward around their legs.

Time was when the two of them would fall asleep like puppies on the floor, in front of just such a low, comfortable fire. Sated by some newly discovered pleasure, exhausted and beguiled by some elaborately contrived private diversion, congratulating themselves on one or another highly athletic position they could almost believe they’d invented. Housemaids and butler would have gone to bed long before, or might even be beginning their workday, if Lord and Lady Christopher had made a really late night of it.

Shaking her hands free of his, she lifted her fingertips to trace the lines of his face: curl of lip, bump at the bridge of a nose broken so many years ago, swoop of eyelid fringed with straight, thick black lashes.

Difficult to cease her explorations, even more difficult to turn away. “I meant it,” she said, “about my stays.”

“I’m quite at your service,” he replied, “but we’ll have to start with your dress, won’t we? Such a sweet pale green… it’s very pretty on you.”

She turned to allow him to get to the hooks at her back.

“Pistachio green, it’s called.” Uttered so softly that she doubted he’d heard her.

A ridiculous state of affairs in a civilized nation-how had it come to pass that a lady was unable to get out of her clothes without assistance? If assistance was what you’d call what he was offering.

Peggy would have had the buttons and hooks undone in a trice. But Kit wasn’t bad at it. (Of course he isn’t bad at it, she reminded herself. It’s not as though he hasn’t unhooked a lady’s dress during the past nine years.) He fumbled now and then, cursing good-humoredly at the dress’s formidable array of hooks, the buttons being more for show than function. Still, he had marvelously deft hands for a gentleman. When he’d been bored, he’d sometimes amused himself by carving little birds or animals out of wood.

She’d burned all the ones he’d left behind.

His breath-slow and warm on the back of her neck-came more quickly now, a low, cool whistle of triumph at getting through all those fastenings. She glanced sideways at the window, at their reflections against the black night sky. He was grinning, a slightly chipped right front tooth catching a ray of moonlight just an instant before he bent his lips to trace the curve of her nape. The tip of his tongue, rough as a cat’s, began its nimble descent down the bumps at the top of her spine.

Her dress would have slipped down around her if she weren’t holding it up, her hands on her breasts, the chambray falling in uneven folds-high around her shins in front, drooping down to the floor behind her, from the V it made, open to the middle of her back.

He’d lowered her shift around the tops of her arms, his lips continuing downward to her shoulder blades at the verge of her corset.

Her wings, he’d once said. If she’d had fairy wings, they’d have sprouted right there. Like water lilies, from those pads of bone and muscle.

You’re a poet, she’d exclaimed, like Ovid. Don’t tell my brothers, he’d responded-so quickly that they’d both laughed at how scandalized he’d sounded.

He must be surprised, she thought, at how primly she was holding the dress about herself. The two of them had been so careless back in Curzon Street. Returning home late at night, you could trace their path through the house by a trail of discarded garments-coat and waistcoat, cloak and lace mantilla… Neckcloth and petticoat like snowdrifts on the entryway’s black marble floor.

His hands had crept around her, to grasp hers, prise them open and cause her to loose her hold on the fabric. Oh, all right . She sighed, and so, it seemed, did her gown, expelling a puff of air as it fell to the floor about her feet. Impatient and untidy as she’d ever been, she kicked the heap of cloth out of their way.

He cupped her breasts through the stiff fabric of her stays… No, wait, there’d been a sudden loosening-he’d taken a lucky tug at the drawstring; his inquisitive, leisurely fingertips moved closer to her skin, taking the time, she thought, to remember the shape of her nipples, which were stiffening at an alarming rate. Caressing her through her shift-she was wearing an old one; damnable to be so short of clean undergarments; the silk had once been very fine but now it was almost threadbare-he could be touching her through a cobweb.

She must have leaned back against him. Her naked shoulders chafed against his coat; she could feel his hips, his belly-no use denying it, she could feel his cock-hard against her, through her petticoat.