The near interruption did not matter.
Nothing mattered.
Because he guided himself to her entrance. One pump of his hips, and he was inside her, filling her. And it was good. It was so good. With his mouth on hers, his grip on her hair, his staff sliding in and out in a delirious rhythm, she could not control herself. She spent, the pleasure quaking through her almost violent in its intensity.
He thrust harder. Faster. The table, heavy as it was, shook beneath the force of his movements. Her fingers bit into his shoulders as more exquisite decadence rocked her. His lips clung to hers. On another low growl, he stiffened, the warmth of his seed flooding her as he lost himself as surely as she had.
But she had no time to luxuriate in the languor that overcame her whenever he made love to her. For he jerked away from her almost at once. With swift, efficient movements, he adjusted himself, fastening his breeches before restoring her skirts.
She sensed his inner withdrawal just as surely as she felt his physical one. “Alessandro,” she said.
“Not another word,” he bit out. “I have done my duty to you for the day, and now if you will excuse me, I must see to the rest.”
“Alessandro, please,” she called after him, hating the way he could not bear to face their intimacy without resorting to a cool, aloof stranger. Hating the guilt he felt. Hating the past he had known with another woman, the love he had given her.
But her husband ignored her pleas. He did not even meet her gaze. He merely turned on his heel and strode from the chamber, leaving her perched upon the table where he had placed her, the carnage of their abandoned breakfast all around her.
Wondering how they had gotten to this place.
Wondering if they could ever get beyond it before it was too late.
*
Alessandro found himself back in his father’s study, this time by the light of day, a few hours of sleep none the wiser, and the ledgers his thieving steward had left behind laid out before him. Also, the heavy stone of regret lodged deep inside him.
Following his shameful inability to control himself at the breakfast table, he had spent the remainder of the day touring the estate. Discovering fallow fields, cottages in disrepair, others abandoned. The wing of Marchmont Hall that had been damaged by fire needed to be inspected by an architect. Rain had been pouring into the compromised roof in several areas, leaving the remaining walls moldy.
The ledgers before him offered incontrovertible proof that his steward had been swindling him for the last several years at least, growing bolder as time wore on. Perhaps the bastardo had even been robbing Alessandro’s father, though he had yet to dig back far enough into the records to determine the veracity of his suspicions.
All around him was the undeniable evidence he had done exactly what Catriona had accused him of that morning. He had indeed been avoiding his duties. Marchmont had been going to ruin in his absence.
For the first time since returning to England, his obligations hit home. There was more, far more, he needed to accomplish aside from making certain his heir would inherit the line. He needed to restore Marchmont, or it would be destroyed. All the funds he had reserved to keep it running beneath his steward’s careful guidance—so he had thought—had been depleted.
What he had on his hands was one hell of a mess of his own making.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, staring down at the ledgers, unseeing. He was beginning to fear his stay in England would necessarily have to be far longer than he had initially supposed. And that was a problem in itself, because he was also growing increasingly attracted to his maddening wife.
The mere thought of her was enough to make his cock go hard, even as he sat at his father’s desk, wallowing in the depths of his own failures. He could still feel her lips beneath his, soft and pliable, giving and sweet. Could still feel the silken heat of her sheath, gripping him, pulling him deep into the depths of her body.
He had lost his head with her last night.
And then he had lost his head with her again this morning.
He told himself now it was merely lust that made him lose control in her presence. He was ravenous for more.
He could be in her presence without needing to toss up her skirts.
Sí, he could.
Beginning today.
Or perhaps, rather, tomorrow.
Or the next day.
Maldición.
This was not good. Not good at all.
Chapter Twenty
Catriona sniffed the air. “You need a bath,” she informed Olly.
They were working on the Marchmont library, which was in desperate need of something else. Organization. Books had been haphazardly stacked on the floor. Others appeared to have been thrown from shelves by someone in a fit of pique. With the household a bustle of activity and her husband once more avoiding her, she had deemed the library an appropriate task to tackle as it killed two birds with one stone.
She would set the room to rights and would also discover how literate the little scamp was.
“I doesn’t need a bath,” declared Olly, his bottom lip jutting out stubbornly.
And it was becoming apparent the answer was not very literate at all. The lad was able to discern letters, but he could not read. Nor could he speak properly.
“I do not need a bath,” she corrected absently, tucking volume one of Jortin’s Erasmus alongside volume two on a shelf she had emptied earlier.
“Are you sure you doesn’t?” Olly asked, sounding suspicious. “If there be’s something foul in the air, mayhap you need to look no further than the end of your nose for the source.”
Rude fellow, wasn’t he?
She looked over her shoulder at him, noting the grime coating his face and hands. It looked as if it had been present for some time. “Are you sure you do not? That is the proper way to say it, my dear Olly. And as I have recently bathed and there are no flies buzzing about my head as if I am a cow in the pasture, rotten with my own filth, I am sure neither myself nor my nose is the source of the stench.”
“Here now, I doesn’t see any flies.” Olly tossed a book to the floor and crossed his arms over his chest, pinning her with a frown.
“Yes,” she said grimly. “When was the last time you bathed?”
“Last week.”
She did not believe him. “Olly.”
Olly shrugged. “Last month, maybe.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You are definitely the source of the odor. When one smells unpleasant, it is past time one removes the filth.”
Olly’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you wanted to get these books back on the shelves, my lady.”
“I do,” she agreed, taking up a volume of Shakespeare and settling it onto a different pile. “But not if I must suffer your smell all afternoon long. I am ordering a bath for you.”
“No!” Olly hollered, an undeniable expression of fear crossing his features beneath the dirt.
“There is no harm in a bath,” Catriona soothed, wondering why the poor child would possess such an aversion to cleansing himself.
“Perhaps the carpets is the source,” the lad bit out hastily. “Or look there. Rainwater got into the wall.” He pointed at a water stain marking the wall covering. “You smell rot from within.”
The stain in question was dry. Catriona had already inspected the damage herself. Likely, it had been caused by the nearby window, which appeared to have been fixed. Either by someone other than the horrid steward or well before the man had grown so bold in his refusal to perform his duties.
“The smell has one source, and I am looking at him,” she told Olly. “I will have my lady’s maid prepare a bath for you.”
“No,” Olly denied instantly, eyes wide. “No bath.”
His fear troubled her. “Come now, you must bathe at some point, and better now than before the flies circle you in truth.”
“I’ll be taking my chances,” the lad insisted, scowling.
“No,” she sa
id sternly. “You will not.”
Though she had no experience with children, Monty was her older brother, and he was something like the fully grown, man-sized version of one. Surely that had to count. She knew when to be firm, when to stand her grown, and when to concede the point.
If Olly wished to remain at Marchmont, he would need to win Alessandro’s favor. He would also need to render himself far less pungent. She could not allow him to run about Marchmont covered in grease and grime, holding her nose each time she held an audience with him.
“I doesn’t want no bath, my lady.” Olly stood equally firm, just as determined.
For a young lad, he was certainly sure of himself. But then, she supposed he had needed to be. Heavens knew what manner of deprivations and suffering he had experienced at the hands of his departed guardian.
“I do not want a bath,” she corrected gently, moving toward her quarry with slow, careful strides. Much as she would an untamed horse, lest she startle him. “You must learn the proper speech if you wish to grow up to a fine gentleman.”
“I doesn’t want to be a fine gentleman neither.” He took a step back as she approached. Then another. “Take me to the village if you like. It’s sure they has work for me there. Maybe in the tavern.”
The thought of any child working in a tavern was enough to send a chill down Catriona’s back. “No indeed, Mr. Olly. I am afraid that will not do. You must remain here. Lord Rayne is responsible for you now.”
Not entirely true.
Certainly not what Lord Rayne wanted.
But Olly needn’t know that.
“I doesn’t want a bath,” the lad insisted once more.
She caught his wiry arm in a firm but gentle grip. “Sometimes, Mr. Olly, life is not about what you want. Indeed, most times it is all about what you must do. Obligations and burdens, duties and requirements. I am sorry to tell you, but I cannot bear the smell of you for one moment more.”
Olly struggled to escape, but Catriona was far stronger, and she held firm.
“Here now, you cannot make me do anything!” he protested.
A new wave of odor overtook her as she hauled him from the library in search of her lady’s maid, a tub of warm water, and the requisite soap.
“Another sad life’s lesson you are about to learn,” she said grimly. “I can, and I will. You will thank me for it later, and so will Ashes. I should hate to have to feed him to my cat after all.”
“I doesn’t think so,” growled Olly. “And you don’t got no cat. Least not one I seen.”
“I do not think so,” she corrected again.
“Why not?” he asked.
Catriona sighed.
*
The startled expression on her maid’s face was the first indication Catriona received that something was dreadfully amiss.
The second was her words.
“My lady, forgive me, but Mr. Olly is not…that is to say, he is a she.”
Catriona blinked at Sadler. Being in possession of precious little experience with children, she had deferred to the domestic’s expertise in matters of scrubbing. But she had been hovering in the hall beyond the guest chamber, waiting for the deed to be done.
“What do you mean, Olly is not a he?” she asked, even though the answer to her question was already apparent.
It made no sense.
Olly was a lad.
Short haired.
Ill-tempered.
Evasive.
Dirty.
Pretty beneath all that grime, however. Perhaps too pretty for a lad.
“Olly has…a bosom.” The last was whispered into the silence of the hall, color rising to Sadler’s cheeks in the wake of the word. “And, and…”
Catriona held up a staying hand. “You mean to say the lad is a girl?” How could it be? How could she have failed to notice? “A bosom? How?”
“Bindings,” Sadler said simply. “I would guess her to be twelve or thereabouts. Dressed as she was, and covered in all that dirt, it was easy to mistake her for a boy of nine or ten. She is a slight thing, even for a girl. I would guess she has not been well-fed as a child ought to be.”
Dear Lord.
This development rather complicated matters.
“What shall I do?” she asked, perplexed.
Part of her felt betrayed by Olly’s deception. Part of her felt all the more concerned for the child’s welfare. What had led her to hide herself as a boy? To pretend she was a young boy when she was in fact a girl on her way to becoming a woman? It certainly explained Olly’s reluctance to bathe.
But it explained precious little else.
One thing was certain.
Catriona needed answers.
“You may want to ask her some questions, my lady,” Sadler offered. “She seems rather distraught that I’ve made the discovery.”
She sighed. “Thank you, Sadler. I shall see to her.”
Sadler dipped into a curtsy. “Of course, my lady.”
Hesitantly, she made her way to the guest chamber door, knocking soundly three times to announce herself before entering. Olly was seated on a chair by the bath that had been drawn earlier. Though she was once more clad in her breeches and shirt, the shorn ends of her hair sleek and wet, sans the layer of dirt obstructing her features, Catriona could see quite clearly that she was female rather than male. The soft, pretty lines of her face which had been mistaken for a younger boy’s, along with her slight frame, now seemed painfully feminine.
Olly’s legs were drawn up protectively against her chest, her chin resting upon her knees. “I told you I didn’t want no bath.”
“A bath,” Catriona corrected, going to the child’s side and dropping to her knees on the carpet, unmindful of her gown. They were eye to eye now. Nose to nose. “I did not want a bath.”
“I know you didn’t,” said the scamp.
“Olly,” she coaxed gently, resisting the urge to smile in spite of herself at the child’s willfulness. “What is your true name?”
“Oliver.”
She raised a brow. “Olly.”
“Fine.” She huffed a sigh. “Olivia. My name’s Olivia. But I prefer Olly. It’s all I been for years now.”
“How long?” Catriona asked, a maternal surge she had never before experienced coming to life within her. “And why?”
“Easier to be a lad than a girl,” Olly answered.
Her heart gave a pang. “What do you mean?”
“Lads doesn’t get touched the way girls do,” Olly said quietly.
“Oh, Olly.” Something inside her chest seized. She could scarcely imagine what had befallen this young girl in her life. “What happened to you?”
The child’s face became shuttered. “You doesn’t want to know.”
“You do not want to know,” she corrected gently. “And yes, I do. I care about you, Olly. If I know what happened, I will be able to better understand you.”
Olly nodded, biting her lip. Slowly, she began to reveal her past. “When Mother died, I was sent to my aunt, her sister. Her husband, my uncle…he did not treat me as an uncle ought to treat a niece. I doesn’t think Auntie Margery knew what he were about…if she had, he would have stopped. I knows it.”
Dear God. What had the horrid man done to her, an innocent child?
“Olly,” she began, “what did he do to you, your uncle?”
“He touched me,” Olly admitted, ducking her head. “Made me sit on his lap and touch him.”
Catriona felt ill. “Did he…”
She could not bear to finish the question.
The notion of a grown man forcing a child. His niece. It was repulsive. So horrible she could not even contemplate such a sin against an innocent. Such a blatant abuse of power and trust.
“Not like you think,” Olly said quietly. “Not long after I took up with them, a lung infection claimed him and my aunt. I were on my own, once more. But this time, I was smarter. I knew being a girl wouldn’t do me no good. I convinced everyone
I were a boy.”
“Oh, my dearest girl.” She could have wept at the revelations. But she knew she must remain stoic for Olly’s sake. “How did you find yourself here, Bramwell’s ward?”
“He be a cousin of my uncle’s. I doesn’t know he were like him, but I feared it…”
“You do not need to explain yourself, child,” she said, hating what had happened to Olly, or Olivia as she must come to think of her now. “I am so very sorry for what you endured. But please know you need not fear either myself or Lord Rayne.”
“I doesn’t fear you,” Olly said reluctantly.
“I do not fear you,” she corrected. “And good. That is excellent. Now do come along. The library can wait. We need to get you some dresses.”
“I doesn’t like dresses,” the child argued, frowning. “Breeches is better.”
“I do not like dresses.” Catriona smiled, a new sense of purpose dawning inside her. “And you will. This, I promise.”
*
It was almost dinner by the time Alessandro had finished poring over his mangled estate’s equally mangled ledgers. He was weary to his bones, disgusted with himself and with his inept, thieving steward Bramwell, and oddly, he found himself missing the presence of his wife.
Catriona.
Just her name was enough to make the longing he had been tamping down burst forth again. His hunger for her was disturbing. But worse than his desire was the undeniable realization he was fond of her.
There was no mistaking it.
He liked his wife.
As the unwanted revelation sank in, Alessandro stopped in the portrait gallery. To his left and right hung a handful of paintings, those hanging within reach nothing more than dark squares on the wall coverings where they had once adorned the plaster. Perhaps Bramwell had not been able to secure a ladder in his haste?
He could only hope the devil would be caught.
And when he was caught, he would be cast into prison for the rest of his miserable life.
But whether or not Bramwell and the stolen paintings were ever located—for Alessandro had a sickening suspicion the money he had filched was long since spent—there was something more troubling than being surrounded by the evidence of his failures.
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