Unmasked by the Marquess

by Cat Sebastian

  He pushed her legs apart and knelt between them, still wearing all that clothing. Oh well, she’d just have to get a look at him later. His hair was disordered from where she had run her fingers through it, and his expression was almost solemn as he gazed down at her. With one hand, he slowly stroked himself and with the other, he absently caressed her thigh.

  She reached out, pushing his hand away so she could touch him herself. She wrapped her fingers around his shaft, letting her thumb slide across the slit. He groaned, and she felt a drop of moisture bead on the head. Tilting her hips up toward him, she guided him toward her core.

  Now he brushed her hand away. They were going to tussle over this, were they? That was fine by her. More than fine. He braced himself over her with one arm and positioned his cock so the head breached her entrance.

  “Yes.” She raised her hips to meet him, reveling in the stretching and fullness as she surrounded him. As he entered her.

  She had forgotten how good this could be. It was so basic a pleasure, so obvious, like drinking cool, clean water on a hot day. It felt so uncomplicated, so right, to have him inside her in this way, filling her and brushing against all those places that came alive with sensation.

  “Fuck,” he growled once he was fully seated inside her.

  That was the coarsest language she had ever heard him use, and now she wanted to hear more. She clenched around him, and was rewarded with an incoherent sound accompanied by a thrust.

  Yes. She already felt her desire begin to coil up inside her again. So simple. So easy. They ought to have been doing this for weeks now. Maybe if they had done this earlier—although that was impossible, because of her disguise and his propensity to self-flagellate—maybe this act wouldn’t have so many layers of meaning. It would have been two acquaintances, two bodies, a sufficient amount of mutual desire and the accompanying actions. Instead, every time he thrust into her, every sound and breath, every brush of his lips against her neck—it all added up to something more than that.

  She could smell his hair, clean and scented with whatever he used to keep it so neat. His starched collar was tantalizingly rough against her naked skin, and she tugged it aside in order to kiss his neck. She smoothed her fingers down the silk of his waistcoat to the wool of his breeches, feeling his muscles flex as he worked his body relentlessly into hers. She shifted her feet on the bed and felt her ankles brush against the cool leather of his boots.

  Surely, the fact that he was so thoroughly dressed shouldn’t add to her pleasure? It ought to be demeaning, or even absurd, to be lying here naked, getting swived into the mattress by a man who was dressed from cravat to boots, the only exposed part of him the very part that was inside her body. But it wasn’t. It was simply Alistair, and of course Alistair had on a pair of perfectly tailored breeches while he was fucking her silly.

  “Are you laughing, Robin?” Thrust. “Scamp.” Thrust. “No sense of gravity at all.” His voice was warm and rough, barely more than breath, and so very close to her ear.

  “Maybe.” She tightened around him again, just to hear him swear. And then her pleasure began to crest again, so she let it, and she did laugh. Just a little, and mainly from happiness.

  He let himself go then, pounding into her hard and fast, a few quick thrusts before withdrawing on a curse and taking himself in hand. She watched him spill onto the sheets beside her.

  Instead of lying down, he knelt there, seemingly dazed. He was wonderfully disheveled now, his cravat a wrinkled mess and his shirtsleeves askew.

  “We ought to have been doing this for weeks,” he said, and the way his words mirrored her own thoughts made her sit up and climb onto his lap. She straddled his legs, lowering her mouth to his and unfastening every button she could get her hands on. She stopped kissing him only when he was as naked as she was and they were sprawled side by side.

  She traced her fingers along the furrow of his chest, playing with the dark hair that dusted his lean muscles. But as her heart slowed to a normal rhythm and her body cooled off, she started to feel an uneasiness steal over her.

  “You’re not about to throw me into the street in a fit of regret?”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t throw you into the street under any circumstances. You ought to have grasped that by now.”

  “Not even because I’m a fraud?” It was likely pathetic, this need for reassurance, especially since she couldn’t imagine what he could possibly say to reassure her.

  He stared at the ceiling, the moment stretching out perilously far. “You aren’t a fraud.” His words came slowly, consideringly. “I don’t know what the right course of action was in your circumstances, so I don’t know that you’ve chosen the wrong one.” He pulled her closer, until her head rested on his shoulder and his arm wrapped around her, strong and sure.

  She wasn’t done yet, though.

  “Not even because I’m low-born? A housemaid, a foundling.”

  “Ha! I wish you were anything as dignified as a foundling.” His voice was somehow both lazy and haughty, and his hand absently stroked her back. “I’ve quite made up my mind that what you are is a changeling. Some very proper and well-behaved child was snatched away by the fairies and you were put in the cradle in her stead. That’s the only explanation for the mischief you’ve wrought among us mortals.”

  A changeling. She liked the sound of that, as silly as it was. She had been in between for so long. Neither man nor woman, neither servant nor gentlefolk. Neither fraud nor honest.

  “Seriously though, Robin. What more do you need me to tell you? I’m not good at guessing games. Tell me, and I’ll say it.”

  There wasn’t anything. There couldn’t be. She climbed on top of him. “This,” she said, leaning down for a kiss. “Only this.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Alistair went to Broughton with the hope that being at his ancestral seat would bring him to his senses.

  He ordered his post chaise almost as soon as Robin left his bed, so early that the sun had hardly risen. The horses were hitched, the portmanteau was packed, and Alistair, settled against the squabs, could still smell Robin on his skin. He took a deep, reluctant breath. It was her usual green scent, like a spring copse, but this time mixed with sweat and desire. So this was the scent of everything he’d never have, of everything he didn’t even know how to wish for.

  On second thought, he wasn’t sure if the scent was on his skin or only in his imagination. It hardly mattered. Olfactory hallucinations weren’t any more troubling than the fact that he had thrown caution to the wind for an entire night. He had not only gone to bed with Robin, but lying in bed with her afterward, talking and touching, he had allowed himself to believe they could go on in such a way. Worse, he had allowed her to believe it too.

  He arrived at Broughton Abbey long after nightfall, stiff and cold and very irritated with himself. He had chosen Broughton rather than the place in Kent despite the journey to Shropshire taking an entire day and the house itself lacking nearly all comforts. For most of the year the chimneys smoked and for the rest of the year the house reeked of damp. He had never known a meal to arrive on the table while still hot, the ancient kitchens being located far from the equally ancient dining room. One of the wings was literally a crumbled ruin, which had been entertaining to explore as a child but he now understood to be little more than a breeding ground for vermin.

  But this was the de Lacey family seat, in the family’s possession since the monks had been tossed out some centuries earlier. Alistair hoped the cold gray stone and drafty passageways would remind him of what he owed future generations of de Laceys: honor, security, living up to one’s obligations. These things mattered more than pleasure, more than whatever he had let himself feel with Robin in his arms.

  The housekeeper was exceedingly pleased with herself for having kept a few rooms in a state of readiness. Alistair was pleased with her as well, because there was a fire blazing in his bedchamber and freshly aired linens on his bed. He drank his
wine—his father had, if nothing else, kept the cellars stocked—and climbed into the vast oaken monstrosity of a bed.

  Some forgotten de Lacey ancestor had caused the family coat of arms to be painted on the wall facing the bed. It was the usual dragons—or were they unicorns?—and some coronets. Nil Penna Sed Usus, the motto read. The translation, as far as Alistair could tell, was “Not the pen but its use,” but he had always been fairly certain this was a Renaissance-era cock joke. Leave it to the de Laceys to let it all come back to that. Penises and comedy. Quite possibly this enormous bed had been constructed for orgies—and now how was he supposed to sleep? Perhaps coming to this house had not been the right idea.

  But no. He was not looking to the past but to the future. He had rescued his name and his legacy, he had paid off creditors, he had honored pensions and annuities. He had taken up his seat in the House of Lords and presented himself around town as a respectable gentleman. Now that the property was reasonably solvent, he would finance grammar schools and new cottages, repair the roads and put new steeples on the churches.

  He would leave no bastards, no string of discarded mistresses. There would be no disgraceful marriage, no rumors attached to his name.

  There was no room for Robin in this plan.

  He rolled over, trying to find a comfortable place on the bed, but he already knew there was none. Had he come to this monument to failed nobility and aristocratic dissipation as a kind of penance? Were the abominable chimneys and lumpy mattresses a way to atone for the pleasure he had last night?

  Last night. His cock twitched at the memory. So much for penance. He had wanted to hold her forever, to sink into her body again and again, to make her laugh and moan and shudder. He wanted his fill of whatever comfort she was offering, and he wanted to give the same to her.

  For his entire life, whenever he encountered a fork in the road where duty and righteousness lay to one side and pleasure to the other, he took the path of duty. He always chose the path he thought his father would not have chosen. It was little more than a primitive reflex. He had prided himself on his strict adherence to propriety, but now saw that there was nothing noble or praiseworthy in such a rote response. And suddenly that did not seem like a good enough reason to take a path that led away from Robin.

  What would happen if he tried to steer a course toward his own notion of rightness, rather than always leaning hard on the rudder away from what his father had done?

  With a sigh of frustration, he rolled over. He wouldn’t idly dally with Robin, but his heart—which organ he had evidently finally determined worthy of notice—insisted that it was wrong to abandon her. Marrying her, though . . . he tried to imagine Miss Charity Church beside him in this awful bed, gazing up with him at the lewd motto of the family she had married into. He wasn’t even entirely sure who this elusive Miss Church was—she didn’t feel like Robin in his mind—but whoever she was, she would hardly be the most objectionable feature in this appalling room.

  He was all too aware that this was not a strong argument in favor of a future wife, a future marchioness, no less. But he was Lord Pembroke, and if he determined that Miss Charity Church was to be his, then he pitied anybody who got in his way.

  Six days without so much as a note. Charity was quite proud of herself for having bypassed sorrow and gone straight to irritation.

  She had told him that she didn’t want any part of his regret or shame. But that had been naive. She had no control over whether he regretted being with her. For that matter, she wasn’t entirely sure he had any control over it. As far as she could tell, sometimes he wallowed in fits of rectitude the way a dog might roll around in something that smelled interesting but a trifle confusing to its tiny, sadly limited brain. Pembroke’s bouts of moral superiority were no better than one of the Fenshawe hounds covered in goose shite.

  Wherever he was, therefore, was of no interest to Charity. Sooner or later he’d return and she’d give him a bath. Metaphorically speaking.

  Purely out of curiosity, and certainly not out of any pathetic longing, she walked past his house to check for any signs that he had left town. And there it was—the door knocker had been removed and the curtains were drawn. That did nothing to put her mind at ease—even if he had been called away on urgent estate business he could have found time to dash off a note.

  When she arrived home she found Gilbert, Louisa, and Aunt Agatha in the drawing room.

  “Gilbert, where has your brother run off to?” She kept her voice casual.

  “Alistair?” he asked, as if there might be some other brother he had forgotten about. “I couldn’t guess.”

  Charity didn’t know whether to feel better or worse that Alistair hadn’t even let his own brother know his whereabouts. On the one hand, this wasn’t a special excommunication meant particularly for her. On the other hand, she was falling in love with a thoroughgoing bastard.

  Because that’s what this was. Love, or something near enough to it. It would end in heartbreak, but in Charity’s experience it generally did. That knowledge was never enough to stop it from happening, though, and thank God for that. Imagine if people carried their hearts around like fragile birds’ eggs, carefully preventing the smallest crack or injury. Everybody would keep a polite distance, safe and protected and utterly alone.

  She loved Alistair, arrogant piece of work that he was, and very likely he loved her back. But she knew there was no future between the Marquess of Pembroke and herself. Not that long from now, Robert Selby would disappear.

  By the looks of things, that would be soon indeed. Gilbert was plainly smitten with Louisa. Charity hadn’t the faintest notion as to why he hadn’t yet made a formal offer, but had to assume it was forthcoming. Instead, the pair of them clammed up whenever she entered the room. Could Louisa imagine that Charity would try to prevent the match? Even if Charity had any authority over Louisa, which they both knew she did not, an offer from the childless Marquess of Pembroke’s only brother would be nothing to sneeze at, even though Louisa could doubtless have done better. But if they found an added thrill in thinking their romance a forbidden one, then who was she to ruin their fun?

  Even now, they were sitting stiffly on the sofa where a moment ago their heads had been bent together.

  “Did he not send you a note?” Gilbert asked Charity.

  “No. I suppose he didn’t send you one either?”

  He looked at her blankly for a moment. “Why would he do a thing like that?”

  Charity wondered if Louisa could possibly have fallen for a lackwit. “Perhaps to let you know where he was?” she suggested.

  “Yes, yes, I know people do that. I would do that, of course. If I were to leave town, naturally I’d send a note to those who might miss me.” He darted a quick, candid look at Louisa, and then both of them blushed. “But Alistair would never.”

  No, he wouldn’t, would he. Such a gesture would be too considerate, it would make people wonder if he actually gave a damn about them. Much safer to avoid any indication of friendship entirely. She was being unfair to him and she knew it, but she was in too ill a humor to care.

  Gilbert, evidently unable to proceed in his wooing with Charity as an audience, left shortly thereafter.

  Charity sat on the side of the sofa vacated by Gilbert. “Lou, has he offered for you?”

  She blushed even redder. “Yes.”

  Why the devil was she only now hearing about it? True, Louisa didn’t owe her anything, but they were friends, weren’t they? Sisters, of a sort? Louisa was not like Alistair; she did not keep others at a distance for no purpose other than pride. “And did you accept?” She was frustrated by this coolness that had sprung up between them, and she could hear an unintended note of irritation in her voice.

  “I know I shouldn’t do anything without your consent.” Louisa was looking at her hands, neatly folded in her lap. “Technically, you’re my guardian.”

  Charity shook her head impatiently. She was nobody’s guardian. Loui
sa would need her signature—false, forged, and utterly illegal—on the marriage license, but that was the end of Charity’s involvement. “Why haven’t you spoken to me about this, though?”

  “I know you have grander plans for me and I don’t want to disappoint you.” Louisa never wanted to disappoint anybody and she seldom did. “Besides, it’s awkward to speak of these things. I don’t know how to even begin. You haven’t told me of your plans with Lord Pembroke, have you?”

  Charity felt like all the air had been sucked from the room and replaced with smoke. How on earth had Louisa figured out that there was anything between them? Was it that obvious? Was that why Alistair had left—fear of exposure? “I don’t precisely have plans with Pembroke.” That was God’s own truth. Her only thought was to enjoy being with him while she still could.

  “But there’s something . . . happening, I suppose. And you haven’t mentioned it.” She took Charity’s hand and squeezed it. “I’m not reproaching you, only saying that I know these matters are difficult to speak of.”

  Charity squeezed her hand in return. “He’s not that bad,” she said, and then wanted to smack herself for so describing the man she loved. “Most of his airs and graces are put-ons, and the rest are because he outranks practically everybody and doesn’t want anyone to forget it.” Really, she ought to try her hand at love poetry, she was so good at this. She made another attempt. “I’ve come to be very fond of him, and I feel certain that you will as well, in time.”

  Louisa let out a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a weak little sob. “I have to dress for dinner, and so should you.”

  As Charity changed her clothes, she tried to puzzle over why Louisa had been on the verge of tears when they were discussing what surely ought to have been a happy topic. Louisa had never been given to fits of emotion. She was practical, industrious, calm. She even seemed unmoved by the whirl of London in the height of the season. Charity, by contrast, had been almost dizzy with delight. Somewhere in the recesses of her memory, Charity recalled being spun around by an adult. Had it been the vicar’s housekeeper? Perhaps someone at a village fete? Somebody had taken her by the hands and spun her so fast that her feet lifted off the ground and she flew in the air, rooted only by the strong hands holding her own tiny ones. It had been wonderful and terrifying, and the entire world had collapsed into streaks of color.