Unmasking the Hero, page 18
“You did not write,” she pointed out, trying to keep her voice steady. “Not once.”
He closed his eyes. “I know. That was more pride. And the sheer impossibility of writing chatty letters to a woman I had wrongfully abandoned.”
“Was Maria Fitzwalter your lover?”
His eyes flew open again in shock. “God, no. Why would you think such a thing?”
She laughed, and he had the grace to blush.
“She was on the ship as far as Lisbon,” he admitted. “Pandering to my male pride. She was not happy in her new marriage either, so it seemed we had something in common. Although I never told her about the letter, about Anthony, or the reasons I had chosen to sail, after all, she must have known some serious quarrel between us had to have taken place. She implied you were a flighty friend and had a past your parents were not proud of, hence the extent of their relief to receive my offer.”
“That was all to do with money,” Grace said cynically. “And birth, a little. You were certainly a better option than a wealthy cit.”
“I don’t seem to have been. But to answer your question: no. Mrs. Fitzwalter was never my lover. In fact, despite many and varied opportunities, I was boringly faithful to the wife I thought unfaithful.”
“I gave you a disgust of all women?”
He smiled ruefully. “Hardly that. I think it was more self-righteousness, coupled with the simple fact that no one else measured up to you. I really was horribly in love with you.”
“Horribly,” she repeated, unreasonably hurt in the midst of the words that should have been balm for her soul.
“Well, it was horrible when I believed you loathed me in return.” Slowly, he reached across the table, palm upward.
With butterflies soaring in her stomach, she laid her hand in his, watching his long, firm fingers close around it. There was a graze across his knuckles.
“Did you hate me?” he asked.
The heart and core of all my hate, and all my love. “I think you know the answer to that.” Her fingers gripped his convulsively. “Phineas told me I should not regard your little adventures abroad, that it was bound to happen when a man was away from home for so many months, and that it meant nothing.”
“Did you regard them?” he asked steadily.
She thought about it. “It was merely part of the whole, swirling pain.” As soon as the words were out, she cringed at her own honesty, but his fingers tightened on her.
“Would it surprise you to know,” he said, “that Phineas wrote to me that I should not regard the rumors concerning you either because you were young and flighty and meant no ill.”
She frowned. “Phineas knows nothing happened. He was my chaperone often enough! Such implications amount to downright lies. Why would he tell you lies about me?”
“Why would he tell you lies about me? Things he could not have known at the time, even if they were true.”
Her breath caught as she stared at him, thinking, going over old memories from the point of view that Phineas lied.
“To keep us apart,” she said slowly. “Phineas is your heir only so long as you do not have a son. Could Phineas have forged the letter you saw?”
“He could—or paid for someone else to do it. And he must have paid to have it inserted into your luggage. Whatever happened to that abigail who came with us from London? For it wasn’t Henley.”
“No, she ran away to France. I had to travel home without a maid and engaged Henley when I returned to London.”
“A suddenly wealthy maid, able to live abroad without a character from her last employer? The trick gave Phineas two years to live on his expectations of inheritance. He probably hoped I would be lost at sea or die of some foreign fever.”
“And when you didn’t, he tried to kill us at Maida.”
“And then, I suspect, at this morning’s duel. He wrote to me, informing me of the time and place, begging for my intervention, never guessing I had already begun to intervene. Yet, according to Meade, he was pretty half-hearted in his attempts at reconciliation, the first duty of a second. He meant me to turn up at the duel and get in the way of the bullets, and if I didn’t, or the duelers were too careful of me, I suspect he meant to shoot me himself—he carried his own pistol—and blame either Rollo or Boothe, whosever’s gun he could manage to fire in secret later.”
“Phineas, your cousin… I trusted him because he was your cousin.”
“I trusted him, too, though only in certain matters. I grew up with him and so never bothered to look beneath the surface. He was just amusing Phineas, who, out of the goodness of his heart, would look out for you while I was away. It makes my blood run cold just thinking about it. Thank God for Leyton.”
“Phineas must hate you,” Grace said. “Really hate you, for he is not so very poor, is he? He wants to inherit your wealth and title, but he must also be jealous and resentful, and…” She shuddered. “One never really knows anyone, does one?”
His thumb moved, idly caressing her wrist. “I think you have to look. With your eyes and heart open.”
“Is that how you look at me?” She didn’t mean to ask, but the words slipped out before she could stop them.
“I did once,” he said softly. “And I am beginning to do so again.”
“Do you see that I meant to punish you for hurting me? To humiliate you and make you a laughingstock?”
With his free hand, he rubbed his eyes and jaw. “I see that I deserve it. I see that only total honesty will serve between us now. But I have been up all night, and I am suddenly too tired to think, let alone speak more right now. On top of which, I have an insane urge to fall asleep on your bed, surrounded by the scent of you.”
Wordlessly, she rose, leading him by their joined hands across the room and into her bedchamber. Without releasing her, he sat on the bed and kicked off his boots. He loosened his cravat, unbuttoned his coat and waistcoat, and lay back against the pillows.
The movement tugged her closer.
“Lie beside me,” he whispered. “I will not touch you.”
Her heart beat a strong, quick rhythm, and her mouth went dry with fear as well as with hope and something perilously close to desire. She sat on the bed beside him, and he bumped himself farther over to make space.
As she lay down at his side, their hands still joined between them, he closed his eyes. He inhaled and smiled, as though the scent of her pillow, her person, pleased him. And his scent, woodland and cinnamon, Oliver and “Rudolf,” filled her senses, too. With wonder and a knot of delight in her belly, she watched his face relax into sleep.
Even when his fingers loosened on hers, she did not move, just lay beside him and felt.
She only rose when Henley came into the room, and that was largely to shoo the maid out.
Chapter Seventeen
For once, Grace had no desire to leave the house. While her husband slept on her bed, she crept downstairs to the ballroom at the back of the house to find Lord Tamar putting his finishing touches on the mural. Footmen were busy lugging large potted plants to place around the floor and the terrace according to her instructions.
“This is marvelous, my lord!” she said, standing back to admire the painting. “I could actually believe it is real and try to go inside.”
“I don’t advise it. Apart from the bruises, the paint is still wet.”
She laughed. “I cannot thank you enough for this. I hope we’ll see you and Lady Tamar at the ball, duly disguised.”
“Serena loves a masked ball. We’re looking forward to it. I shall be off now. Don’t let your servants brush against it until the day after tomorrow.”
“I shall threaten them with direst retribution.”
Once she had bade farewell to the marquess, she issued a few more orders concerning the preparation of the ballroom and then made her way back to her sitting room in order to write a few letters.
She could not resist tiptoeing across to the bedroom door, which was not quite shut, and peeping through the crack. In her heart, she really didn’t expect him to still be there. She expected him to have wakened with the discomfort of his clothing and taken himself off to his own chamber.
But he lay where she had left him. Except he had somehow got under the covers and was sleeping like a baby. She couldn’t help smiling, though she didn’t know what to do with the surge of emotion in her breast.
She closed the door over once more and returned to her desk, where she wrote a quick note to her sister. And then, more thoughtfully, set about an invitation to Frances Caldwell, and wrote to Sir Ernest Leyton, too, to tell him what she had done.
Leave before the unmasking if you both wish it. But I am also happy to receive Mrs. Caldwell under whichever name she chooses.
That done, she took the letters downstairs to be delivered by hand and consulted with Cook about a few outstanding details to do with the ball supper. And then, because it seemed she couldn’t stay away, she returned to her sitting room to sit down on the harp stool and think.
While she softly plucked the harp strings, she let her mind wander over what Oliver had told her, about the duel and about Phineas Harlaw. And about the letter and his reasons for abandoning her.
So much anguish could have been saved if only they had spoken to each other two years ago. Instead, they had each endured two years of supposed betrayal, been constantly fed with drips of Phineas’s subtle poison, all spilled while claiming the opposite of what he was implying.
Oliver would not stray from you, not in any way that matters.
He is putting a good face on things. According to his colleagues, no one would know he is in pain. He is the life and soul of every gathering, and the ladies adore him…
You must be patient with him if he seems reluctant to come home. The reluctance cannot be real with you here waiting for him.
She thought of their distant wedding night, of more recent kisses with “Rudolf.” Of her ruined plans for revenge and her sudden, thrilling hopes…
Some movement made her turn her head toward the bedchamber door. All the air left her lungs. Her fingers stilled in delicious shock.
Her husband leaned in the doorway, clad in nothing but a tangled sheet held loosely about his hips. Tall, lean, muscled, and rumpled from sleep, he was stunning. More than that, the hunger in his eyes devoured her, melted her in their heat.
“Don’t stop,” he said huskily. “I love to hear you play.”
She swallowed and forced a breath. As if the harp burned her now, she leapt to her feet, backing away from the instrument—which took her closer to him.
“I was not playing so much as thinking,” she blurted.
“About me?” he asked steadily.
Little flames seemed to dance in his eyes. Like the fires of hell or of domestic bliss. At this moment, she didn’t care which, didn’t know what to do or what to say.
“Yes,” she managed.
He straightened, took a step nearer her, to the imminent danger of the sheet falling off him altogether. He didn’t seem to notice. “Do you forgive me? Can you?”
When she said nothing, he laid one hand on her shoulder and used the other to tip up her chin for his urgent scrutiny. His fingers were warm and caressing, shooting little shards of pleasure and desire through her whole body.
“I don’t think it matters,” she whispered achingly. “You are the center of everything. All my emotion and all my desire.” She didn’t mean to cry, but the tear trickled down her cheek unbidden. She tried to dash it away with the back of her hand, but she was too late. His head bent, and it was his lips that caught the tear, softly kissing her cheek and then her lips.
Her hand had found the back of his head and clung to his hair. Helpless, almost fearful, she gazed at him without making any effort to move away. His bent closer again, and his lips sank into hers.
Oliver’s kisses… This one was everything she had dreamed of in her loneliest moments, her hottest lust, even her bitterest tempers. Firm and sensual, exploring her mouth like a long-lost friend, passionately missed and fiercely welcome. And with the passion came a new tenderness, a new awareness. And then there was only raging desire.
He swept her up against him, and the sheet fell around their ankles. Her eager fingers remembered the warm, velvet skin of his shoulders and back, the hard muscle beneath, and the delightfully rough stubble of his jaw. The hard column pressing against her hip.
She kissed him back with an urgency that matched his own and almost sobbed with joy when he lifted her right off the floor and carried her into the bedchamber, kicking the door shut behind him.
Even the sheet was warm where her back landed on it, and then there was his weight, hard and wonderful between her legs. She wished the gown gone and her petticoats with it, but she could not bear to move and miss a moment of his wonderful embrace, his bone-quaking kisses.
His hands smoothed up her legs, rucking her skirts with it, and then his mouth opened wide and he groaned. “Damn it, Grace, forgive me something else. I am that scoundrel Rudolf as well.”
“I know.” She took back his mouth, wriggling beneath him to find a better position. Between her legs was fire and need, but he paused, breaking the kiss.
“You know? Since when?”
“Since the night of the fireworks. I should have known before, but it seems I had forgotten so much. When did you know me?”
“From the beginning,” he admitted, his fingers caressing her inner thigh now and moving upward. “I overheard a conversation and, instead of coming home, curiosity drew me to Maida.”
“To spy on me?” she gasped as his fingers caressed her most secret places.
“Yes. At first. And then to know you.” His fingers slid aside, and at last, she felt again the wonder of him inside her.
She moaned.
“Honesty,” he whispered. “No more pretense, no more hiding, or keeping things to ourselves. I never stopped loving you, Grace, even believing the worst.”
She tried to answer, but words seemed to be impossible, so she spoke with her body’s movements, with her kisses and caresses, sighs and gasps of bliss that led all too quickly to wild, explosive joy.
*
Wenning lay in his wife’s bed, still at last. Grace curled languorously against him, her arm flung across his chest. Although she was still half-dressed, there was enough naked skin to content him.
He had not really had enough sleep, and the strains of harp music that had filtered into his semi-consciousness a bare half-hour ago, had been too quiet and too pleasant and should not have disturbed him for long. But finally, after two years, he had been again surrounded by Grace’s perfume. And the combination of that scent with his waking desire was powerful. Then he had worked out that Grace must also be responsible for the harp music, and any notion to sleep on had fled.
He had meant only to watch her before returning to his own chamber and giving her back the privacy she was used to. But he had seen how he affected her and was suddenly flooded with desperation not to lose this chance. Aching tenderness had kept his ravenous hunger in check—mostly—but even so, he could not hold out for the long, sweet loving he had once planned so optimistically. Urgency and passion had taken over, driven by Grace’s blissful moans and bold caresses.
Somehow, he had made sure of her pleasure before giving in to his own massive release. But it had been a near thing, a mere shadow, he feared, of gentlemanly care.
Lethargically, Grace’s fingers twined among his chest hair. A beam of sunlight shone through the bed curtains onto her tangled curls which fell across his shoulder.
“I’m glad it is daytime,” she said. “I won’t fall asleep and wake to find you gone.”
His arm beneath her, lightly holding her against him, tightened. “I’m so sorry, Grace. I must have hurt you very much.”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“If it’s any consolation, I hurt myself at least as badly.”
She considered that. “I think it is consolation of a sort, because at least it means you loved me. Even if you behaved like a bigger idiot than even Rollo has ever been.”
“I did, didn’t I?” he said ruefully. “I wonder about that sometimes. If we had not married so quickly, if I had known you just a little more, would I also have known better than to believe such tripe? If I had been a year or two older and wiser, would I have been so quick to condemn you unheard?”
“It doesn’t matter. We can’t undo the past.”
“But we can make the future. And delight in the present. I delight in you, Grace Wenning.” He pushed a lock of hair off her face and kissed her brow. She smiled and kissed his shoulder. But his smile was twisted, “And then I worry that I, who trusted you so little, can never win your trust again. Even now, you think I will vanish if you close your eyes.”
Her hand slid up his chest to his cheek, and she propped her chin up on his shoulder. “I think it will take time for both of us. To get to know each other again, to understand who we have become. Because we must have changed in those two years.”
She kissed his lips, a voluntary gesture that moved him far more than mere submission to his demands.
“I will enjoy that journey,” he whispered and kissed her back.
With the edge of his hunger assuaged, his arousal was deliciously slow and languorous, fed by her kisses and caresses, by her softness in his arms and her scented, responsive skin beneath his lips. He undressed her properly, little by little, removing the remaining pins from her hair.
“If you have no objection,” he murmured huskily, “I propose to lock the door and spend the rest of the day here with you.”
“I believe I have no engagements,” she replied, only a little unevenly.
He rose from the bed, padded across the floor, and turned the key in the lock. When he swung back to face her, she was watching him avidly, and he felt like swaggering across to bed, proud of her desire for him, and excited by it in a way that felt new and wonderful.
“I think,” he said, moving over her and beginning to kiss her all over, “I should simply worship my countess.” For she had only known the intrusive physical intimacy of love twice in her life, with two years between. Now, more than ever, she deserved his care, his tenderness, and all the selfless joy he could bring her.
