by Dare, Tessa
“I do not,” Penny objected, knowing very well that she probably did.
“You sigh like a fool, blush like a beet. Your eyes are the worst of it. They turn into these . . . these pools. Glassy blue pools with man-eating sharks beneath the surface.”
“I hope you’re not planning a career in poetry.”
“For the good of us both, you have to cease gazing at me.”
“Then you have to cease wooing me.”
“Wooing you.” He grimaced, as if the words were a pickled lemon on his tongue. “I don’t woo.”
“You do too woo.” She lowered her voice to match his gruff timbre. “‘I need you,’ ‘I’m not letting you go.’ A woman can’t help but go soft inside. Those sorts of declarations are unbearably romantic.”
“You know very well I don’t mean them that way.”
She couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “I suppose if I didn’t already, I would now.”
“Exactly. So don’t go swooning on me.”
“I assure you, you needn’t worry about that. If I did swoon, it would be from the heat.”
Pounding hoofbeats behind them announced the prospect of salvation. Penny turned, hoping to see the carriage.
It wasn’t Gabriel’s carriage, but it was the next best thing. A stagecoach, passing their way. Penny darted to the center of the road, waving her arms until the driver pulled his team to a stop.
“You’re a guardian angel,” Penny said. “Can we ride to the village?”
The driver looked them over warily, taking in their bedraggled attire. “In that state? You’d have to ride up top with the trunks.”
“We can do that.” Penny extended her hand to the driver. “Will you help me up?”
The driver didn’t take her hand. “Not so hasty. I need the fare in advance.”
“How much?” Gabriel asked.
“Let’s see.” The driver squinted. “Fare for the two of you, plus tuppence for the baggage—”
“Oh, this isn’t baggage.” Penny lifted the cage for him to see. “She’s a parrot.”
“Then that’s fare for two of you, plus thruppence for the parrot . . . A shilling, all told.”
Penny reached for her reticule.
She didn’t have her reticule.
Her reticule was back in the carriage. Along with Gabriel’s coat.
“Deuce it,” Gabriel said dramatically. “If only I had a shilling.”
She sighed.
“I was certain I had one here somewhere.” He made a show of patting all his pockets. “Oh, that’s right. Someone tossed it away.”
“Please,” Penny begged the driver. “Take pity on us. We’ve had an accident. It’s only to the next village.”
“Sorry, miss.” The driver flicked the reins, setting the horses in motion. “No fare, no ride.”
In silence, Penny and Gabriel watched the stagecoach travel down the road, until it rounded a curve and disappeared.
On they walked. There was simply nothing else to do.
“I always keep a shilling in my pocket,” Gabriel muttered after a few minutes of angry silence. “Always. Do you know why I always keep a shilling in my pocket? Because everything I am today, everything I’ve earned—it all started there. I was once worth a single shilling. Now I’m worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Shall I produce the bank ledgers to prove it?”
“Ledgers are meaningless. I have a sum placed on me, you know. A dowry of forty thousand. And yet if I were to lose my virtue, some would deem me worthless.”
“You could never be worthless.”
“I could certainly drive down the price of your house. You never miss a chance to remind me.”
He shook his head. “That’s not the point.”
“Here is the point.” She stepped into his path, forcing him to meet her eyes. Man-eating sharks and all. “No one can be reduced to numbers in a ledger, or a stack of banknotes, or a single silver coin. We are humans, with souls and hearts and passion and love. Every last one of us is priceless. Even you.”
She set her frustration aside and took his face in her hands.
He needed to hear this. Everyone needed to hear it, including her. Perhaps that was why she spoke the words so often, to so many creatures. Simply to hear them echo back.
“Gabriel Duke. You are priceless.”
Chapter Eleven
You are priceless.
Gabe’s heart kicked him in the ribs.
There were responses he’d prepared in his life—saved up for the day he might need them, no matter how unlikely. He had an acceptance speech ready for the London Business League award. He had his murderous threats well-rehearsed in case he crossed paths with that cruel bastard of a workhouse guardian someday.
Gabe even knew what he’d say to his mother, if she came back from the grave to hear it.
He had no idea how to respond to this. He couldn’t have possibly prepared. Nothing in his life had taught him to imagine those words.
You are priceless.
“Goodness, you needn’t look so panicked.” She smiled and gave his head a little shake. “It’s no more than I tell Bixby daily.”
Right. Of course it wasn’t. She was only exacting a bit of revenge after he’d mocked her for blushing and so on, and he likely deserved it. Gabe hated that he felt disappointed. Even betrayed.
He brushed her hands aside. “You’ve made your point. I’ll do my best not to swoon.”
“Gabriel, wait.”
He continued walking. “You needn’t worry about any further declarations from my quarter. We needn’t talk at all.”
At last, they reached the village and its lone inn.
“As you can see, we’ve had a traveling mishap,” Gabe told the wide-eyed innkeeper. “We’ll take your largest suite of rooms. My sister will need an attendant to help her undress and bathe.”
He could feel the questioning look Her Ladyship gave him. Sister?
“While she rests, her attire must be laundered and pressed dry. And we want dinner, as soon as it can be managed.”
“Have your choice, sir.” The innkeeper pointed toward a slate listing the kitchen’s daily offerings in muddled chalk.
Gabe skimmed the list. Kidney pie, stewed beef, leg of mutton, braised rabbit. Meat, meat, meat, and meat. Brilliant.
“One of each,” he said. “No, two of each.”
Lady Penelope nudged him in the side. “You needn’t order any for me.”
“I didn’t.”
“Beastly man.” She sighed under her breath.
“You’re not a child. You can read the board as well as I can, and you don’t need me to make choices for you.”
She sighed again. “Not-quite-so-beastly man.”
“That’s more like it.”
“Toast and butter, please,” she told the innkeeper. “A wedge of cheese and some preserves, if you have them.”
“One more thing,” Gabe said. “I require writing paper, pen, and ink. I need to send a letter. There’s a five-year-old boy in Buckinghamshire who’ll be heartbroken that he’s not getting his ferret.”
“For heaven’s sake,” she muttered. “He was never going to have a ferret.”
The innkeeper scribbled on a greasy bit of paper. “All together with the lodging . . . That’ll be six shillings, eight.”
“I don’t have the coin on me,” Gabe said. “I’ll pay you when my coach and driver arrive.”
“To be sure, you will. And I’ll feed you dinner when my Parisian chef arrives.”
Gabe cursed and pushed his hand through his hair. “Take my boots as collateral.”
The innkeeper peered down at the muddy, waterlogged boots. “Look as though they’ve been through a war.”
“I paid twelve pounds for them. They’re certainly worth six shillings, eight in any condition. Just hold them until I can pay you in coin.”
“Very well. I’ll hold the boots—and the lady’
Fair enough.
They took the largest suite of rooms the inn had on offer. A bedchamber for Her Ladyship to bathe and have a lie-down, a sitting room where he could eat and dash off a letter, and—most importantly—an antechamber between the two.
At the door to the suite, they parted ways. The serving girls brought hot water to her room; trays of food to his. All was as it should be. Completely separate.
Once alone, Gabe tugged his shirt over his head and draped it over a chair near the fireplace to dry. Once he’d finished a much-needed wash at the basin, he sat down to his dinner.
A proper dinner. Real, actual food, rather than falsehoods on a plate. No shmidney pie or braised crabbit or whatever fool name she would invent. He picked up a knife and speared a bit of stewed beef with a satisfying jab.
He was on his second plate of steaming-hot kidney pie by the time his chewing slowed. And that’s when he heard it. The faintest sounds escaping her room, sweeping across the antechamber, and sliding under the door to him.
The sounds of bathing.
A splash.
A trickle.
A faint series of drips.
It all added up to torture. Pure, liquid torture.
He pushed his plate away, propped his elbows on the table, and buried his face in his hands with a groan. Even plugging his ears didn’t help.
When he closed his eyes, he could picture her. Naked in a shallow tub. Her feet dangling over the lip at one end, and her head reclined against the other. And all that water embracing her with heat, lapping at her nakedness, pouring over her most secret curves and furrows.
He was immediately, startlingly hard.
Gabe drummed the table with his fingers. This would be the perfect time for a rainstorm. A riot, an explosion, a choir of tuneless schoolchildren. Something, anything loud.
Nothing.
Nothing but soft, devastating, erotic sounds.
Perhaps he could trick his mind. He might convince himself the sounds weren’t from bathing. Instead, he’d imagine her to be . . . making soup. Unappetizing soup. Workhouse soup. Watery broth with a few scattered lumps of—
She sighed a long, languid sigh.
Curse it. Strategy ruined. No one sighed languid sighs while making soup.
Christ alive, women took ridiculously long baths. Was it possible to die of priapism? Perhaps she’d volunteered him as some doctor’s investigatory case.
Make haste, he silently willed her. Be done with it.
In his mind’s eye, he saw her dipping a sponge beneath a blanket of soap bubbles, and then pressing it against the back of her neck—just beneath the frizzled golden curls at her nape. She gave the sponge a long, firm squeeze, sending a warm cascade down her back. One mischievous rivulet strayed, trickling over her collarbone, burrowing between her breasts, and sliding down to her navel before it disappeared into a tuft of honey-colored curls.
Enough.
He pushed back in his chair and unbuttoned his trousers. He took his cock in hand, spreading the moisture welling at the tip all the way down his shaft.
Closing his eyes, he pictured her naked. She was still in the bath, but now he was the water. Warming her. Caressing her. Licking her all over. He needn’t content himself with a single rosy-pink nipple. Not this time. He pushed her breasts together and feasted on both, nibbling and sucking. She moaned and bucked beneath him, gripping his hair and guiding him downward, where he ran his tongue along the seam of her sweet, wet—
He tightened his grip, stroking faster.
Now she was holding him in her arms. Wrapping her legs around him until her locked ankles dug into the small of his back, urging him forward. Inside. Deeper.
And as he thrust into her, again and again, she held him close to her. So close and so tight. She whispered his name.
Gabriel.
Gabriel.
“Gabriel?”
Gabe’s eyes snapped open. He nearly fell over in his chair. Grabbing the writing paper the inn had provided him, he launched to his feet, holding the paper strategically in front of his groin and praying like hell his loosened trousers didn’t slip to his ankles.
She’d opened the door just wide enough to angle her head around the edge and peek in.
“Nothing,” he declared.
She frowned in confusion. “Nothing what?”
“Nothing nothing.”
He was a fool, and his pounding heartbeat reminded him so, multiple times a second. You fool, you fool, you fool, you fool.
She looked at the paper. “Are you writing your letter?”
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “I am writing my letter.” Writing it with the tip of his cock, apparently.
“It’s growing dark,” she said.
“I’d noticed that.”
“The carriage . . . Even if the driver and smith were to arrive soon, the horses will need to rest.”
“Yes, I know.” Gabe inwardly cursed. He had no money to pay the innkeeper, let alone hire another coach. Thanks to his lack of foresight, they would be confined in this suite until first light. “So long as we’re stuck here, you may as well sleep.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Surely you’re fatigued.”
“Yes, but—” She bit her lip. “I need an animal in my bed.”
He could only stare at her.
“At home, I always have at least one in bed with me. Usually more. Bixby, of course, and a kitten or two. I can’t sleep alone.”
“What about the bird? Surely it can keep you company.”
“Delilah? She’s asleep in her cage. And even if she weren’t, one can’t exactly snuggle with a parrot.” Her eyes swept the sitting room. “I was hoping there might be a newspaper or book here, so I could pass the time.”
“Well, there isn’t.”
She pushed the door open further, revealing herself to be clad in nothing but a Grecian-inspired arrangement of draped bed linens. The graceful angles of her bared shoulders and arms stood bright against the darkness. Her knot of steam-dampened hair could be so easily undone. A flick of his wrist would send it spilling free, flowing like molten gold between his fingers.
And those bed linens . . . a single tug, and they’d be a puddle on the floor.
She was trying to kill him. He was sure of it.
“What on earth are you wearing?”
“You told them to take all my clothes for laundering.”
“I didn’t think you’d give them your shift, as well.”
“It was all mud at the hem. I couldn’t wear it in that state.”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Do you mean to tell me you’ve no garments at all?”
Don’t tell me that.
Please tell me that.
She stepped forward, trailing a swoop of white bedsheet behind her like the train of a bridal gown. “Are you certain there’s nothing to read? I thought I spied a quarterly of some sort on the mantel.”
“No.”
She shrank behind the door again, looking like a kicked puppy. “You needn’t shout at me.”
“Go back to your room. Cover yourself with something other than bedsheets.”
“I have a corset and I have stockings. Shall I wear those?”
Jesus God.
Holding his trousers closed with one hand, he lunged to one side and snagged his shirt from where it hung drying by the fire. He tossed it at her, and it hit her in the face.
As she slowly drew it downward, she gave him an offended look. “Was that truly necessary?”
“Yes. Go on, then. I’ll be in once I’ve finished my letter.”
Once she’d finally retreated and closed the door behind her, Gabe exhaled in relief. He tucked his now-softened cock back into his trousers. There was no way he could take up where he’d started. God only knew when she might decide to pop in again, and what she might be wearing—or not wearing—if she did.
Instead, he sat down and wrote his letter—with pen and ink. He took his time choosing every last word. His penmanship had never been so legible. But a few paragraphs simply refused to stretch into hours. Eventually, he ran out of excuses and crossed the antechamber. As he opened the door halfway, he sent up a prayer.
Please let her be asleep in bed.
She wasn’t asleep. She wasn’t in bed.
She was on the bed. Clad in his shirt, which he’d been a bloody fool to loan her.
Draped in bedsheets, she’d been a Grecian goddess. An aloof deity meant to be worshipped, adored, even feared—but never embraced.
Seeing her swimming in the billowing waves of his shirt, however, with her fair hair hanging loose about her shoulders . . . ? The intimacy of it shook him to his core.
She looked not only desirable, but necessary. A part of him. The better part, of course. The part where his redeeming qualities might be hiding, if indeed he possessed any. Gabe doubted he did, but he found himself longing to search her thoroughly, inside and out, just to be sure.
This was a dangerous situation. No otters. No carriage. No coachman. Just a man, a woman, and a bed.
“Gabriel?” Her voice was husky, sweet. “Aren’t you coming in?”
Don’t do it, he told himself. Let her be. She’s safer without you. Close the door, turn the latch, slide the bolt, and nail it shut for good measure. Leave.
Instead, he entered.
Chapter Twelve
When his silhouette appeared in the doorway, Penny gulped. Audibly.
This was an ancient coaching establishment, centuries old. The floorboards had worn to a dark, grooved polish, and the floors tipped at drunken angles where the walls had settled into the ground. The rooms had low ceilings and even lower door mantels.
When Gabriel entered the room, this all conspired to impressive effect. He filled the doorway, looming and large, and as he walked toward the bed, the floor groaned and creaked beneath his feet.
Out of an instinct of self-preservation, she wriggled to the far side of the mattress and drew the quilt up to her neck. Rationally, she knew she had nothing to fear. Not from him, that was. But as he slung his formidable, masculine body onto the other side of the bed, she was a tiny bit afraid of herself.
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