Page 34 of Along Came a Rogue

“I ran away when I was ten,” he continued, both with his story and with his tender assault on her body as his fingers closed around her toes and gently squeezed. “That was when I made up the story about having a blacksmith for a father and lied about being a runaway apprentice. Lots of apprentices run away, so I became just another. Eventually, I found a job as a stable boy for Viscount Henley.”

“Henley?” Closing her eyes, she licked her lips as he decadently rubbed soap between her toes, one by one. Oh, how much she liked that…and she suspected he knew, too, and was using her own body against her in distraction. “I know him—I mean, his family.”

Another long stroke up her leg to her thigh. “You know the dowager viscountess, I’m sure.”

“Lady Henley is a friend of my parents. She’s very…” Her voice trailed off into a soft whimper of disappointment at the retreating strokes back down her thigh to her knee, moving his hand away from the part of her that craved his touch the most and now pulsed hard in aching syncopation with her heart.

“Formidable,” he finished.

If his hands hadn’t been on her body, she might have heard the affection for the viscountess in his voice. But she was only aware of the way his fingers continued to erotically lather the soap against her skin and knead her muscles, sore and stiff from the long carriage ride. With a deep sigh, she melted beneath his seeking hands.

“So I grew up in the Henley stables and discovered I had a gift for working with horses.” He gently scratched his fingernails seductively along her inner thigh. “As soon as I could, I joined the army.”

“As a Scarlet Scoundrel.” Squirming as he drew slow circles against her skin, unable to sit still beneath the delicious torture the bath had become, she fought back a whimper. Well, he was certainly a scoundrel for bathing her like—

Her breath caught as she suddenly realized where the regiment’s nickname had come from. Little to do with battle, more to do with women. And if Grey were one of its most scoundrel-minded officers…God help her.

“Then you became a hero,” she breathed, unable to speak above a whisper.

“No,” he corrected, “I became a lurker.”

She opened her eyes, her lips parting. A lurker? She couldn’t have heard him correctly. “Pardon?”

With a devilish smile, he took her surprised reaction as an invitation to brush soap bubbles over her bottom lip with his fingertip.

“That’s what I do, brat. I lurk.” He traced the outline of her mouth, and the tingling of tiny bubbles bursting against her lips reverberated with the force of fireworks and made her tremble. “I live on the fringe of society, never completely part of that world.” His eyes slowly followed his hand as he trailed his fingers away from her mouth and down her neck. “Your world.”

But he was wrong. It wasn’t her world, and it never had been. As the daughter of an East India Company official, an exiled schoolgirl, then a widow, she’d spent her life exactly as he had…on the outside looking in. They were two of a kind, and knowing that made her feel even closer to him.

His hand paused at the hollow at the base of her throat. She forced herself to breathe calmly beneath his touch, but her heart beat so hard and fast at the realization of how much they shared that the blood pounded through her ears in a loud rush. He was the one she’d been searching for since she was sixteen, the man who understood how it felt to be an outsider, to be surrounded by people yet feel so terribly alone. And any doubts she had about him disappeared beneath the soft strumming of his thumb against her racing pulse. The same soft stroking that now throbbed through every inch of her.

“I’ll never have their respect nor their confidences.” His fingers traveled lower, down into the water-beaded hollow between her breasts. She gasped as he began to draw small, tantalizing circles against the inside swells in the lather clinging to her skin. “I’ll never be welcomed into their drawing rooms or to their soirees.”

But he would be, and she’d make certain of it. Even as she bit her lip to keep back the soft whimper that rose inside her when his hand drifted lower, she promised herself that she would somehow find a way to make that happen.

His fingers slipped over her breast in a flutteringly light touch, barely grazing against her nipple, but the unexpected sensation jolted her with the force of a lightning bolt. She shuddered and bit her lip to keep from moaning, to keep from begging for more because she feared that if she did, then he would stop, the same way he’d stopped in the carriage. Yet between her thighs the pulsing ache continued to grow, and she shifted her hips against the side of the tub to keep her legs from shaking so hard they splashed the water.

“But it’s never bothered me.” Thoughtful reflection tinged his voice, oddly contemplative considering that he was drawing slow circles across his palm with her hard nipple. “In fact, it’s given me the freedom to move between social classes as I wish, belonging to whichever is most useful. I have the best of both worlds.”

When his hand closed over her breast, the low moan she’d been holding back fell helplessly from her lips. Shamelessly, she arched herself to press his hand even harder against her. Shivering, aching, yearning for more…only Grey did this to her. He aroused her in a way her husband never had, and when he gazed at her with heated desire, she knew what it meant to be wanted as a woman.

Every terrible minute of his life had brought him to this night. With her. Even as her mind fogged from his touch until she could barely think, she instinctively knew that if one piece of him were different she wouldn’t crave him like this nor feel the arousal he radiated through her. It was all of him that did this to her, and she wanted all of him.

“I have the freedom to enjoy those parts of society I want and never bother with obligations nor consequences. I gamble in their clubs, hire their tailors, and enjoy their finest entertainments, including their widows and their wives.” His thumbs circled her nipples as they poked achingly out of the lather, drawn into hard points. “But I’ve never wanted any of their daughters.” His voice was husky and oddly strained. “Until now.”

Her eyes flew open. “Grey—”

He dipped his head to capture her wet nipple in his mouth. He relentlessly suckled and licked and nipped until she panted helplessly beneath him, her words lost beneath a throaty moan of sheer delight. Struggling for breath, she ran her fingers through his still-damp hair, wanting to feel him, needing to feel all of him.

“The daughter of a duke,” he murmured as his tongue laved her nipple. “Graceful and kind.” He took the bud between his teeth and worried at it until her fingers dug against his skull with arousal, and he chuckled against her flesh. “A bit devilish.” Then he shifted to begin the sweet torture anew with the other nipple, coaxing another shivering moan from her. “So damned seductive.” As his mouth suckled at her breast, his hands reached beneath the water to stroke down her body. “Simply beautiful.”

Arousal flashed through her like a wildfire, tickling at her toes and burning the ends of her hair, tightening hard between her thighs. Barely able to breathe beneath his heated attack against her senses by his mouth and his words, she felt herself running toward something she couldn’t name, something only Grey could reveal to her. Something she desperately needed.

She’d never felt this way with Andrew. Her body had never craved possession and surrender the way it did now with Grey, who seemed to want to touch and taste all of her, slowly and torturously, because he knew she would find pleasure in it. Even now, as he lifted his mouth to take delicate nips up her throat to the underside of her chin, the thought curled through her like a ribbon zigzagging through a stay that he’d lied to her in the carriage. He would never see her as one of his merry widows to ravish and leave. She knew better. Any man who touched her this gently, this affectionately, could never be the coldhearted rake he described.

“Kiss me,” she begged, having waited far too many years to have his lips on hers again.

“I told you, it won’t be nice,” he warned as his teeth scraped along her jaw.