Prudence blushed at Mary Elizabeth’s insight, knowing it was most likely true.
“Well, there’s no time like the present to begin as we mean to go on. Didn’t my brother buy you new gowns, Mrs. Pru? Why sit about, waiting for the men, when we can be upstairs, picking out your dress for the dance tomorrow night?”
“I can’t wear those gowns,” Pru said, blushing even more. Catherine certainly would think her a lightskirt for even accepting them.
Catherine Waters, however, was not the judgmental sort. She smiled in delight at the mention of them. “I would love to see them! What is tea with the men compared to new gowns?”
Alex and Robbie were nowhere to be seen, so Pru let Catherine and Mary Elizabeth take her between them and walk upstairs to her sumptuous room overlooking the park. The duchess was as true as her word, and would not treat the daughter of the Earl of Lynwood like a servant, but had housed her in the best guest room in the house. Pru was a little embarrassed to have the other girls see her accommodations, but neither seemed to notice or care. Mary Elizabeth closed the door behind them with an emphatic click while Catherine went straight to Prudence’s bag.
“Ooohh…such lovely silks! You can’t leave them scrunched up and hidden away, Mrs. Whittaker,” Catherine said, drawing gown after gown out to lay them on the bed. “These are far too pretty to wrinkle. My new maid can make short work of this. She’ll have them all right as rain by morning.”
Prudence swallowed hard and tried to sound like the elder in the room, which was what she was. “I thank you, Mrs. Waters, but there is no need. I could never wear gowns given to me by a gentleman who is neither my father nor my husband.”
Catherine frowned at that, not sure how to answer. Clearly she had been raised in a gentle household and did not disagree. It was Mary Elizabeth who spoke up next, frowning, clearly unwilling to consign such beauty to the black depths of Pru’s bag.
“Leave Robbie out of this, Mrs. Pru. He spends the family money the same as I do. Just tell yourself that these gowns are gifts from me. Surely you will wear my gifts, and not say me nay.”
Prudence fingered the sapphire silk under her hand.
Mary Elizabeth must have seen her weakening, for the girl came forward and took Pru’s hand in hers. “Mrs. Pru, try these gowns on, just for a lark. Let’s see how you look in them.”
Catherine clapped her hands once, smiling with pure joy. “It will be such fun!”
Pru gave in at the sweetness of these girls, the pain of her guilt sharp. The lies she had told them were a burden she could not bear much longer. She had to obey the duchess and tell the Waterses who she was. But she must begin with Robbie. So for the moment, she held her tongue and went to dress behind the painted screen at the edge of the room.
When she stepped out in the sapphire gown, Catherine and Mary Elizabeth stopped their talk of hairdressing. They turned to her as one, and stared at her as if amazed. It was Mary Elizabeth who recovered first.
“Come sit at the dressing table. Don’t look in the mirror, but let Catherine have at your hair.”
“I have a great skill with curls,” Catherine said. “I never had a maid until this week, so I always had to do my own.”
Prudence pushed aside another pang of guilt. The girls took such pleasure in treating her as a doll that she decided to let them have their fun. She felt like a princess, wearing the gown Robbie had bought for her. It was almost as if the silk were his hands, touching her everywhere at once. She blushed, and Mary Elizabeth smiled at her as if she knew the cause, but did not speak of it.
Pru sat in silence while the girls worked on her, Mary Elizabeth handing pins and brushes to Catherine when asked. Finally, the girls took her between them and stood her before the tall pier glass in the center of the room.
“You are a beauty, Mrs. Prudence,” Mary Elizabeth said. “No wonder Robbie loves you.”
Prudence could not find her voice. It was as if her tongue had dried up, as if her vocal cords had snapped. She simply stood and stared at the woman in the mirror as if she looked at a stranger.
The dark blue she wore brought out the blue of her eyes. Her glasses had been left behind, Mary Elizabeth setting them aside on the dressing table as soon as Catherine started to work on her hair. Her honey-brown curls fell in soft ringlets around her face, the majority drawn to the crown of her head, with no false widow’s cap to hide them.
The light of the setting sun came through the windows behind her, and caught the sheen of the silk along her hip and over the curve of her breasts. The scalloped neck was not too low, but she had not seen her own curves in years, if ever. She wondered if they were why Robbie followed her about, if he saw more beneath her ugly gowns than she had thought possible. Perhaps she had not hidden herself as well as she had meant to, these last five years.
Or perhaps it simply took the right man to see her as she truly was.
Catherine asked at last, in a still, small voice, as if she feared to offend her, “Who are you hiding from?”
Prudence blinked at the simple question, and at the answer. She was hiding from the ruin she would never escape. Her family name had become infamous, for her dead brother had destroyed not only the Lynwood fortune and her future, but the fortunes of many in the ton.
She felt a hint of nausea at the fact that her ruin would raise its head again tomorrow night, if the duchess revealed who she truly was. People would come far and wide to a ball thrown by the Duchess of Northumberland. All the people she had hoped never to see again would be there, and would turn their backs on her as they had five years before. She could not face them, not in a borrowed gown, and not in one of her own. Though she hated the thought of having all of good society turn against her once again, she also knew that the duchess was right. She had to stop lying to Robbie, and to Mary Elizabeth. It was time to come out of hiding, to accept the consequences of her past, and of her lies.
Pru did not know what Robbie would say when she told him. He might cast her out, and she could not blame him. But she knew that she would not live a lie any longer.
Mary Elizabeth kissed her cheek, and led Catherine to the door. Before the girls left, she turned back and gave Pru a clear-eyed look. “You’ll wear that gown to my party tomorrow night,” she said, as if reporting on the weather, or the state of the roads.
With that, she and Catherine left, closing the door behind them. Pru looked at herself in the mirror for a long time, at the life she might have led, before she took the dress off.
* * *
When Pru could not sleep for thinking of Robbie, she donned a dark brown woolen wrapper, tied her hair back with a brown ribbon, and went down to the library. The guests for the house party and ball would not arrive until the next day, the duchess must certainly be asleep, and the Waterses, too. It left her feeling free to skulk about.
What would Robbie be doing right now? She considered the question as she opened the door to the library. She also wondered if the duchess read novels, and if there might be one or two tucked away among the fancy leather-bound books. She got the answer to the first question when she stepped into the library, one lamp still burning in the corner.
Robbie stood over a table, glasses perched on the end of his nose, staring down at some large piece of vellum. Pru froze like a deer, but he had already seen her, though he did not turn and he did not greet her. She was tempted to go back the way she had come, but when he finally looked up at her over the rim of his spectacles, she felt the heat leap between them like a bolt of lightning. She knew in that moment that she was not going anywhere.
At least, not yet.
She said something inane to break the silence, in the hope that it would also break the power that seemed to bind them across the length of the large room. “What are you reading?”
He looked at her for one long moment, and she wondered if he would answer her. She had the sneaki
ng feeling that he knew already—somehow, he knew she had lied to him, and he had already begun the process of cutting her off. First from him, and soon, from the rest of his family. That would be his right, of course, but she felt the pain of that possibility like a three-sided blade piercing her lungs and heart. She forced herself to take a deep breath, but the pain did not go away.
Robbie stood then, coming to his full height, and she lost that breath. He wore no coat, and his cravat was gone as well. His shirt was open, and she could see the curve of his throat. Now that it seemed she would lose him, he was more beautiful to her. She supposed it was the perversity of humankind that made it so. One did not treasure a thing, or a person, until they were gone.
“They’re Portuguese charts,” he answered her at last. It seemed to her as if his voice were a kind of song, deep and commanding, and that she had forgotten the music of it, though it was a song she heard every day. “I’m looking at ways of escape to China, and the lands in the Indian Ocean beyond.”
“Planning a voyage, then?”
He smiled his crooked smile and her heart seized at the sight of it. “No,” he answered. “I’ve too many family obligations for that sort of nonsense, too many things here that need to be put right.”
“I think I’m one of them,” she said.
He took his glasses off and cast them onto the chart behind him. “Aye, that you are.”
“I’ve lied to you,” she said.
Pru could not believe those words had come out of her mouth. She had not meant to tell him like this, alone in a strange room in the dead of night. He was a gentleman. At least she knew he would not turn her out of the house until the morning.
He perched one hip on the table and faced her head-on. “Lying, are you? What about, Mrs. Prudence?”
She felt her heart hammering in her ears, but she ignored it. She would be brave. Albert had taught her that, before he died. “I’m not married, for one thing.”
“You’re a widow.”
“I was never married. The Reverend Whittaker is a fiction.”
His gaze on her seemed to sharpen then, and she took another breath. She felt as if she had become prey in that new moment of truth between them, as if he had suddenly turned dangerous. But she couldn’t think like a fool; she must continue her confession.
“My name is not Prudence Whittaker. It is Lady Prudence Farthington of Lynwood Hall. I am the daughter of the late Earl of Lynwood, sister of the notorious thief Viscount Stanhope, who now lies dead at the bottom of the western sea.”
“I am sorry for your loss.”
She stared at him, and he stared back at her, still perched on his table, unmoving. Her anger rose, even though she knew she was being irrational. But shouldn’t he care that she was a liar, and from a family of liars?
“I am sorry I lied to you.”
“No doubt you had your reasons.”
Though the heat still smoldered between them, he seemed as remote and removed as if she had just met him on the street. Indeed, she had felt more connected to him and his on the day they first met than she did in that moment, standing across from him in the shadows of the duchess’s library.
“I was not raised to be a liar. But after my brother died and the earldom failed, I was not received anywhere. I could not go out of the house without being spat on, or ignored completely by people who had known me all my life. And then the house was gone, and I was forced to live on the charity of my aunt. The disgrace was more than I could bear. So I took another name. I became someone else.”
“You didn’t do a proper job of it,” Robert Waters said.
Her eyes narrowed at him. “I fooled you.”
He smiled at her then, but it was a wolf’s smile. She backed up instinctively toward the door, but even as she felt the knob under her hand, he was there, and on her, crushing her back against the heavy walnut.
He used his body to box her in, and she could smell the cedar on his clothes, and the sweet scent of his skin beneath that. He smelled her, too, not hiding the fact that he was taking her in, his nose cresting over the curls at her temple, his lips brushing the soft contours of her cheek.
Robert Waters did not kiss her, but ran his lips along her skin in gentle caresses until it was all she could do not to whimper. Prudence wanted to press herself against him. She wanted to feel the hard muscles of his body against hers. She wanted to taste his skin on her tongue, and lick the salt from his neck. She shook with the need to touch him, pressing her hands into the walnut behind her so that she would not do it.
Then she wondered what she was hiding from. If she was to lose this man, and all he meant to her, why not allow herself a few kisses first?
Pru raised one hand and pressed it to his chest. His muscles leaped beneath her palm, and she could feel the hammering of his heart. He stepped back, as she had meant him to, as she had known he would. He did not touch her again, not even when she turned her back on him. He did not raise his hands to keep her from going. That was when she knew that she loved him, in the same moment that she knew without a doubt that she was going to have to let him go.
But not yet.
Prudence turned the key in the lock of the library door and left it there, so that no passing servant might peer in and see what they were about. She turned back to him, her arms at her sides, her hands drawn tight into fists. For one hideous moment, she thought he might reject her. She thought he might lean past her, unlock the door, and send her away. But he did not.
Robbie closed the space between them, taking both of her hands in his, kissing first one closed fist and then the other.
He raised his hands slowly from her elbows to her shoulders, where he caressed her, massaging away the tension along her neck. His lips replaced his hands then, skimming along the contours of her flesh. One hand moved up the front of her dressing gown, tracing the skin along the edge of it, just over her breasts. She felt his body press against her, just once, like a threat—or an invitation. She did not feel threatened. Instead, the heat inside her rose like a wave of fire—a fire that would consume her.
“I don’t care who you are,” he said, murmuring against her skin. He ran his tongue down from her throat to the hollow of it, and stopped just where her wrapper began.
She wanted him to touch her, in places he never had. She wanted to feel his hands on her flesh, whatever the sin of it. If that made her reckless, and a whore, then that was what she was.
“If you stay in this room, you’re mine tonight.”
Twenty-five
She shook with longing, drinking in the darkness of his words. No matter what he said, or what he did, if she asked to go, he would release her. He had promised to protect her. In the end, it was that knowledge that made her stay.
It was she who kissed him first, running her lips along the line of his jaw, which was all she could reach. She felt him sigh against her as much as she heard it, and then both of his hands started roaming, moving over the ugly brown wrapper she used to hide herself. The lamp was far across the room, so she knew she was in shadow. She did not protest when his hands untied the fastenings, one ribbon at a time, until the wool robe fell open under his hands.
Her nightgown was thick cotton, but suddenly she felt as if she were naked, standing pressed between him and that door. He looked down at her body beneath it, and she felt as if he could see through the cotton, straight to her naked flesh.
She knew she was a wanton woman then, and she was surprised by how little she cared. He met her eyes, and she could not see the blue of his in the dark. But she could see the hunger in them.
His mouth opened over hers, and she reveled in the heat of his tongue, and the taste of his lips. But before she could lose herself completely, he pulled away, and took her with him.
“I won’t have you up against this door,” he said.
She thrilled at the sound of
his voice, dark with the desire that was coursing through her, too. She wondered why she wasn’t afraid. She thought that virgins were supposed to be afraid, and missish, and skittish at least. But she felt only hot desire.
“I rather like this door,” she finally managed to say.
He drew her hard against him, kissing her deeply, once, before letting her lips go. “I don’t.”
He lifted her into his arms then, and she wondered how he could take her weight as if it were nothing. She felt delicate and small in his grasp as he carried her across the room like a conqueror, and she laughed a little as he set her down on the table where his lamp still sat.
He was not laughing though, and when she caught the heated look in his eyes, she stopped laughing, too.
He swept the vellum chart he had been reading onto the thick-carpeted floor, and his glasses followed them. He drew her wrapper off her shoulders, tossing it after. She trembled a little, and he kissed her, as if asking permission to go further. She lost herself in the kiss almost at once, and pressed herself as close to him as she could get, almost falling off the table in the process. It was his turn to laugh, lifting her by the bum until she was firmly back in place. He held her fast between his powerful thighs so that she would not slip, and she felt his manhood, hard and heavy against her stomach. She squirmed to get closer, and he kissed her fiercely.
“Stay still, leannan,” he murmured against her cheek. “I don’t want to drop you.”
“You won’t drop me,” she said. She thought of the lamp. “Don’t let me catch my hair on fire.”
She had lost her ribbon somewhere between the table and the door, and now her honey-brown curls fell over her shoulders and down over her breasts, hiding the silhouette of her body where it showed against the cotton of her nightdress in the lamplight.
Robbie smoothed her hair back from her face, and kissed her, his lips lingering on hers as if he would drink her down. He did not press her, but held her lightly, his passion in check. But she could still feel his manhood against her stomach and she wriggled against it, experimenting.
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