A Gentleman Never Tells by Juliana Gray Read Free Book Online Page A

once, in the lonely dark hours of the night, curled in her bed, eyes dry and aching. She’d imagined more than that. She’d imagined how his body would feel atop hers. She’d imagined how his face would soften with passion as he looked down at her, how his legs and belly would stroke against her, how their limbs would entangle afterward as they drifted to sleep.
    Imagined it, and despised herself in the cold light of morning.
    No one would ever know
, she thought. Tomorrow she and the other women and Philip would be off to hide in a hillside castle, and Roland would be off to Rome or Venice or somewhere equally amusing. They wouldn’t meet again for ages, if at all. He was an honorable man; he’d never tell a soul. He’d take the secret to his grave.
    Why not?
    He was a man. He wouldn’t refuse her.
    Only God would know. And surely God would understand, would forgive her. It seemed—it almost seemed—that He had arranged this meeting, just for her.
    Do it. Do it. Regret it later, if you must. But do it now, before it’s too late. Before he’s gone forever.
    She lifted her hand and brushed his cheek with her fingers. “Yes. I suppose it
is
good-bye.”
    She couldn’t see his reaction, but she felt it: a flicker of rigidity beneath her fingertips.
    His hand appeared out of nowhere to cover hers. “Not good-bye,” he said. “Never good-bye, you and I.”
    She was never sure, afterward, who kissed whom. One instant they were apart, his hand holding hers against his cheek, breaths mingling in the dank air, and in the next his mouth brushed her lips, gentle and tender, and his other hand cupped the curve of her head like an infant’s.
    “Lilibet,” he whispered. “Oh, Lilibet.”
    “Don’t say anything. Don’t say a word.”
    He gathered her up and kissed her again, a lover’s kiss, working her lips apart and tasting her, his mouth like silk and champagne and every forbidden thing. She could not hold back, not any longer; she met him unstintingly, stroked his tongue with hers, spread her fingers across the sides of his face, strained her body upward into his.
    They kissed for the longest time, more than six years’ worth of kisses, gentle and urgent and then gentle again: his lips sliding across her face to her ear, her jaw, her neck, and then returning to her mouth to absorb her sigh. Each movement, each tiny detail, rent a tear down some fabric at her core and sent an electric current of sensation sparking through her bones to the extreme tips of her fingers and toes and scalp.
Alive, I am alive
, she thought, and thrust her fingers up through the soft waves of hair at the back of his head.
    His hands slipped downward. One came to rest at her waist; the other fingered the top button of her coat, inquiring.
    She could not say the word
yes
. But she could arch her neck for his lips. She could drop her own hands to the smooth horn buttons of his coat and work them free with fingers that were no longer cold and numb, but tingling and dexterous. She could spread his unbuttoned coat apart and slide it across his broad shoulders until it hit the hay-strewn floor with a whispered
plop
.
    Without words, he returned his hands to her coat, sliding each button out of its hole, his head bent forward and his rapid breath warming her face. Words jumbled together in her head,
darling
and
love
and
please
and
more
and
oh
, but she held them all in and concentrated only on Roland, on his hands uncovering her body and his face bent toward hers. Her eyes, accustomed now to the darkness, could just pick out his features in the ghostly light from the distant lanterns; she could just glimpse the way his lids half covered his eyes, as if he couldn’t quite bear to open them fully.
    The last button fell free, but he didn’t remove her coat. Instead his fingers moved back to her neck, to the fastenings of her jacket, until the two sides hung apart and only her white silk shirtwaist and underclothes lay between them.
    Her heart