Poppy.
She was here.
So close.
And he was already striding through the townhouse, a townhouse that she’d since transformed; the covered portraits of his youth had since been uncovered and dusted. The floors and mahogany all gleamed from coats of varnish. Of course, everything she touched, she altered into a thing of beauty.
God, how he’d missed her.
He’d missed being with her.
And having her in his arms and in his bed.
And like a damned fool he was, until he’d left, he’d failed to realize how much he loved her.
Tristan staggered to a stop, skidding, off-balance upon the smooth flooring. He shot a hand out, catching himself at the wall. His pulse slowed, and then hammered away in his ears.
He loved her.
Since the moment he’d nearly trampled her, then a young girl, pressing him about his dogs, and reproaching him for hunting, he’d cared for her. But somewhere along the way, with all the times life had thrown them together, she’d matured, and he’d become hopelessly enraptured of Poppy Tidemore in all her spirited glory.
He didn’t want a marriage of convenience with her—he wanted all that marriage entailed, with her at his side, battling every challenge, and damning whatever society said because as long as they had one another…it would be enough.
It was enough.
Tristan found his legs once more, and took off running.
The sound of her laughter reached him first: perfectly Poppy in its clarity and abandon. It called. Beckoned. The light within him and source of all his joy; the only joy he’d known these past three months.
He reached the ballroom.
Wholly engrossed in her task, her fingers flew over her page as she sketched. Unchanged in their time apart, absorbed by the work she loved. And he drank in the sight of her as she’d only previously existed in his dreams and waking thoughts.
Poppy.
He knew the moment she felt him there.
Her body, expressive like her eyes, revealed her every emotion. She went completely still. Her gaze locked on her book. Her fingers trembled.
His did, too. His entire body thrummed from the force of a jumble of emotions ricocheting inside.
Her shoulders tensed, and then ever so slowly, she picked her head up. Of course she did. She’d always been braver and bolder than he. Braver and bolder than anyone.
Time stood still and for the first time since he’d raced to her, having thought of everything he would say, he came up devoid of any words, making a mockery of the previous image of rogue he’d attained. For with this woman, there was only real emotion.
“Hello, Poppy,” he said quietly, taking a step forward.
Poppy didn’t blink. Those enormous hazel eyes. “Tristan.”
He tried to make sense of that whisper; his name not quite a question, with shades of shock and confusion. Regardless, it pulled him forward, that soft contralto a song even when she spoke. Until he stopped on the opposite side of her art table, a slab of stone all that stood between them.
“I’ve found it, sweetheart.”
Tristan’s gaze slid to find the owner of the flat American accent…a man now approaching Tristan’s wife. A man casually rolling forth endearments that should only fall from Tristan’s lips.
Tristan’s entire body coiled a primal reaction that came from the threat he’d not known was lurking.
And learned how wrong he’d been. There was something greater than mere stone between he and Poppy.
Nearly seven feet tall and all heavy muscle, the man who took up a spot beside Poppy would never be considered handsome. In fact, with a broad-hooked nose and large jaw he leaned on the side of ugly. But Poppy, Tristan’s wife, the girl he’d known and the woman he’d fallen in love with, was never one who’d care about what a man looked like.
“Hello,” Tristan said coolly, when no introductions or greetings were forthcoming from the pair. He started forward; sizing up the stranger as he walked, this unexpected competition for Poppy.
Why should it be so very unexpected? You left your wife alone, lonely…you yourself know what becomes of lonely wives.
And never had he despised himself more for having bedded such women, in good conscience. Without a thought to what had brought about that loneliness, or separation in those marriages.
At last, Poppy stood, her stool scraped along the marble floor. “Tristan, may I introduce you to Caleb Gray.” She gestured to the towering figure at her side…as if there might be another man present, and therefore the matter required clarification.
“And should I know Mr. Gray?”
Either she failed to hear or note the deliberate emphasis he placed on that correct form of address for the man. Wagering man that he’d always been, he’d bet his very life it was the latter.
“He’s an artist.”
Tristan scraped his gaze over the long, black hair drawn back in a queue and the scruff on his face. A memory traipsed in of he and Poppy when life had been less complicated between them. Your hair is long. You’ve scruff on your cheeks…and you’re rumpled… Are you an artist…? “Of course he is,” he said, letting all the loathing and disdain he felt for the other man drip from his words.
Poppy frowned and moved closer to Gray: Gray, who looked mildly amused by Tristan’s response and by his very presence alone.
And it was when Tristan knew…he was going to take the other man apart with his bare hands. Tristan was several inches shorter, and two stone lighter, but he’d defeated far bigger men in battle and those battles had never been over Tristan’s wife. “Gray.”
He’d give credit where credit was due. Gray didn’t so much as acknowledge him with a greeting.
In the end, the only thing that spared Poppy’s artist from a thrashing was being interrupted by a clamor of barking dogs. The sharp click of nails striking the hardwood floor announced Sir Faithful and Valor and Honor, and Tristan found himself surrounded by a swell of noisy dogs. The trio danced and circled Tristan, yapping excitedly, lapping his feet.
At least there was someone excited to see him.
Falling to a knee, Tristan stroked each dog, lavishing them with the attention they craved. All the while, his gaze remained fixated on his wife. She stared at him with stricken eyes that he could not make sense of. Just like any of this damned day. In the brief time they’d been apart, his wife had become an enigma. No longer transparent, her secrets only hers. The irony was not lost on Tristan. Before he’d gone, she’d wanted him to share his secrets with her; now he was the one searching for answers to hers.
His gaze slid to the man hovering close at her shoulder, a primitive claim that the American intended to stake.
Over my dead body.
That brought Tristan back to his feet. He slapped his leg twice and the dogs immediately fell quiet.
“I should leave you, princess.”
Princess.
The bastard had affixed an endearment to Tristan’s wife. This one somehow different from the previous, for now he’d tailored it to Poppy, a secret that they two shared. A mark of their familiarity. Nay, worse—their intimacy.
Narrowing his eyes, Tristan followed the other man’s unhurried exit until he’d gone, and all that lingered in his wake was awkwardness.
Between Tristan and Poppy, when there never had been.
“Why does it not seem as though you’re happy to see me, wife?” His question came faintly goading, even as he knew he was a bastard for it. Even as he knew he was the one who’d left and the mistakes his own.
“Stop it, Tristan,” she chided, the adult of their pair, and it sent a guilty flush up his neck. “Of course I’m happy to see you. I…” Her voice faltered and her features, those delicate features, softened, in the first hint of tenderness since he’d entered. “I was not expecting you.”
“I thought I might surprise you.” Doffing his gloves, he beat the dusty articles against his leg. In the end, however, it had only be
en Tristan who’d been surprised.
“You’ve returned, then?” she exhaled her words on a single breath. Poised as she was on the balls of her feet, Poppy had the look of one about to take flight. At the thought of his being here?
“For three days.” Now two and a half. “I’ve papers to deliver to the Home Office in London.”
And just like that, she deflated, sinking back on her heels. “Oh.”
He didn’t know what to make of that “oh”. It was the same opaqueness that had met him since he’d stepped into this ballroom. Prior to it, he’d almost believed her happy at the prospect of his being here. Only, she’d since returned to the task that had occupied her when he’d arrived. Back when she’d been smiling and laughing and not this serious, somber shadow of Poppy. Before him.
Tristan stood there, watching her as she organized a series of metal tools, cleaning one, and then setting it down. Reaching for another. An endless routine that she carried out, which heightened this horrible sense of his invisibility.
Then, he asked it: “Is he your lover?” That question that had haunted him the moment the American had come striding up to Poppy, and into Tristan’s marriage. Nay, Tristan had opened that door long ago for the other man, and Poppy’s artist had stepped right through.
Poppy ceased washing off that already gleaming instrument.
He saw the way she tensed and could decipher even less from the way her muscles bunched. “If you have to ask that, Tristan,” she said softly, “you never knew me.”
“You asked for me to give you a pledge of my faithfulness,” he reminded her, as she reached dismissively for another instrument.
This time, Poppy glanced up. “Yes.” She smiled sadly. “But that’s because I did know you.”
“Is that what you thought?” Frustration ripped that question from him. “That I couldn’t be faithful to you? That I’m some manner of scoundrel incapable of honoring my vows to you?” He’d admired her all these years as a woman of character, strength, and spirit, only to be stung with the truth of the low opinion she’d carried for him.
Poppy sighed. “It wasn’t about loyalty.”
“What was it about then, Poppy? Tell me.”
“It was about love.”
Love. His heart thumped harder; that word he wanted from her but spoken as a vow, not as a single word that she left detached from his name.
“Or rather,” she went on, staring at her interlocked fingers, “a lack thereof.” When she lifted her eyes to his, the pain there squeezed the blood from his heart, leaving that organ hollow. “I loved you.”
There it was…the past tense. He’d been expecting it, but even having prepared himself for it, it landed like a blow to the chest. “Loved,” he echoed, in hollow tones, because he needed to say it aloud so that he couldn’t deny to himself that she’d said it.
“Oh, Tristan,” she whispered. “I’ll always love you. Always. You were my first love. You captured my heart the moment we met.”
“You loved the idea of me. The Earl of Maxwell with his dogs, who fished with you.” And who’d fallen in love with her along the way.
“Perhaps,” she conceded and that lance struck worse. “But Tristan…” She walked over, stopping so close they were nearly touching. “It was wrong of me to have expectations for you…or our marriage. I presented you one thing, and secretly expected another. It was wrong of me for so many reasons.”
“Is that supposed to make me somehow feel better?”
She lifted her palms. “You were drunk when I asked you to marry me. How could I have ever held you to more from that beginning? It was wrong to expect you to set aside that which mattered most, your honor and career with the military, for me. I know that now.”
She mattered most. Only, he’d failed to show her that. To let her see that with actions. “And this Gray fellow…” Trying to give some direction to the volatile emotion humming through him, Tristan beat his gloves together. “He makes you happy.”
“Do you think I’m trying to hurt you by Caleb’s being here?” Caleb. Not: Mr. Gray. Nor: My art instructor. “That I’ve set out to lash out at you?”
She had that wounded look again, and he shoved a hand through his hair. “No.” She wasn’t that manner of woman.
“I met Caleb at the Royal Academy for the annual summer exhibit. He offered to instruct me, and I said yes…not to hurt you but rather to do something I wanted. I should think you would be proud of me for not hiding my work away.”
This was because of him. He’d encouraged her to share her work with the world. In that, however, he’d never foreseen a Caleb Gray there. More the fool he.
It took a moment to realize Poppy had started for the door. Sir Faithful and Tristan’s own dogs—also strangers to him—hot at her heels. And as he watched his wife go, there should be some relief in what she’d confirmed: she and Caleb Gray weren’t lovers.
But what was worse…had theirs been a sexual connection it would rip his still beating heart from his chest and destroy him completely, but would still be preferable to the truth…that what she shared with her American was, in fact, more. A relationship born of emotion.
“Do you love him?” There it was. Another question he forcibly made himself ask, not wanting the answer, and yet, needing it, too. It managed to freeze her in her tracks and keep her silent. With her back to him, he was ravaged by the inability to see the honest response, whatever it might be, reflected in her eyes. Forcing a calm he did not feel, he eased his way over toward where his question had frozen her in the middle of the ballroom. “Your American,” he added, as if a clarification was needed, and yet, something was. Something to compel her to speak. To answer. So then he might know.
And be destroyed by her answer.
“He is a friend, Tristan. Nothing more.”
He hooded his lashes. “I saw the way he looked at you,” It was the same way Tristan himself did. “I saw the way he looked at me when I entered; that is a man who sees you as more than a friend.”
“You’re wrong.”
Tossing his gloves down, he stalked over to her. “I’ve been wrong about so much.” Most of it where she was concerned. All of it, really. “But I’m not wrong about this.” Tristan slid a palm around her waist, drawing her near, allowing her to pull back. The slightest hesitation, and he’d set her away from him, mourning yet another loss. But she didn’t. And he was emboldened by that willingness. “Is yours a friendship in the same way that ours is, Poppy?” he breathed against the teardrop-shaped birthmark. He flicked his tongue out, trailing the tip of it around that slight mark. Then, he suckled.
Her breath caught. “Stop it,” she whispered; her chest quickening. “Y-You know that is not the case.” Actually, he didn’t. Hearing her say it sent a thrill coursing through him.
“Were you asking me to stop kissing you?” he removed her combs and let her curls fall free around them. “Hmm?” Tristan threaded his fingers through her luxuriant midnight strands; silken waves that gleamed.
She arched her head ever so slightly, allowing him better access to her slender neck.
He’d have her say it, though. “Stop ‘this’, Poppy? Stop what is right between us?” He teased the delicate shell of her ear, drawing the flesh between his teeth. “Or stop mention of your Mr. Gray.”
Her lashes fluttered. “The…the…” Please, God, let it be the latter. “Latter,” she moaned as he lightly bit her.
And triumph flared. Along with it, hunger and masculine pride. She wanted him still.
There was something inherently weak in her.
She’d spent day after day crying for Tristan. She’d resolved to rein in her feelings and set herself on the path she’d laid out for them both that night at her sister’s hotel.
Only, her body didn’t care.
Nor did her heart.
Her heart still sang the same joyous celebration it had the moment he’d entered the ballroom. Rumpled, with the scent of horses clinging to him, his hair tous
led.
Poppy wanted him still.
She wanted Tristan in every way and in the absence of the ways that she’d never have him, she’d take this.
Poppy opened her mouth for him and whimpered as he stroked her with his tongue. His kiss, a homecoming that stirred every nerve-ending. He tasted wicked; the hint of brandy and cheroots and she gripped that queue holding his strands back. Ripped it free, tossed it aside, so that she could run her fingers through those dark loose curls as she’d ached to do every day since he’d left, and the memory of his embrace had remained.
“Did you miss me?” he rasped against her mouth.
Except, she could not answer. His hands, he glided them over every curve; her buttocks. He sank them in her hips. And then he brought them up to palm her breasts through her thin lawn shirt. “Is that a ‘no’, then, love?” As if to punish her, he removed his hands and she cried out.
She panted. “You know I missed you, Tristan.”
With a growl, he yanked her shirt free of her waistband, tossing it aside. Her undergarments followed suit. His eyes glittered with desire. For her…and this moment. Her body hummed in breathless anticipation as he lowered his head.
He teased both tips; circling them with his forefingers. He blew lightly, flicking his tongue over the bud tight with desire. Withholding that which she needed.
Poppy released a long moan; the sound wanton to her own ears. “Please,” her entreaty ended on a sharp hiss as he took the pebbled tip into his mouth.
Tristan shoved her trousers down, and the cool air kissed her skin, a temporary balm on her flesh that burned with her hunger for him. He reached between them, and undoing the placard of his trousers, he freed himself; his length rampant and swollen and angry with need, and Poppy collapsed a shoulder into the Doric column at her back and took his length in hand—hot silk in her fingers.
Groaning, low and deep, Tristan closed his eyes.
She luxuriated in the feel of him and ran her palm over him.
“I can’t,” he rasped. “It’s been too long.” Burying his head in the crook of her neck, he slipped a knee between her legs, parting her, and she let them splay wider.
Courting Poppy Tidemore (Lords of Honor Book 5) Page 29