“You’re not abed,” he noted, strolling over with lazy, languid steps.
Damn him for being so captivating… even just walking. It was infuriating that he should take ordinary and transform it into spellbinding. She focused on drawing in an even breath. “No,” she acknowledged. “I was unable to sleep.” He sharpened his gaze on her face. Elizabeth hurried to clarify. “I was awake so long that my body has moved beyond rest.” Did he sense the lie? Did he gather that her own tortured imaginings of him with one of his lovers had robbed her of all hope of sleep?
“I see.”
And though there was not even a hint of arrogance or conceit contained in those two words, something told her that he very well knew. With his instincts and insight, he saw more than she wished to share.
Disquieted, she reexamined the wood structure. “I’ve never heard of a butterfly house.” He came over and took up a place beside her, standing so close their arms touched. Her pulse pounded, and she struggled to make her suddenly heavy tongue move. “I-it is like a birdhouse, then?”
“They are different,” he said, so even and pragmatic in that pronouncement that it effectively doused the haze he’d cast. “Birds require a sheltered place to raise their young. Butterflies don’t.”
“No,” she murmured, peering deeper into the darkened recesses. “They are delicate, but far more resilient.” A wistful smile tugged at her lips.
He lowered his lips close to her ear, and little tingles danced along her lobe, pulling a breathless laugh from her. “How many nights did we spend searching the grounds with nothing but a lantern to light our way, peering under leaves for slumbering butterflies?”
“Countless ones.” He’d been an unjaded boy, free with his smile, his garments as mud-stained as her own.
Whenever they’d been together, he hadn’t bothered with the constraints of a jacket or cravat. How singularly odd that he should be in a similar state of dishabille and yet with wholly different pursuits bringing him to that point.
Her smile faded.
It was a sobering reminder about the new divide between them.
“Tsk, tsk. I am disappointed, Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth drew her brows together. “I don’t—”
“The girl I recall never had fewer than a dozen questions on any topic. You possessed even more for those discussions on the butterfly.”
“I was different then.” We were different. “I’ve learned to be more measured. More restrained.” Her livelihood at Mrs. Belden’s had relied upon it. She gave him a meaningful look. “More careful.”
Crispin dropped a hip against the carved stone sundial and hooded his gaze. “I know you,” he insisted in the melodious, rogue’s murmur that conjured seduction and sin. “You might present one way for the world, but you’re the same girl you always were. Inquisitive. Eager to know and explore… everything.”
Her heart thumped an erratic beat.
Somewhere along the way, they’d shifted course, and they were no longer two adults speaking of butterflies or forgotten memories. She was a woman, and he was a rogue who, with his words, whispered of the forbidden.
“You presume much,” she said for her own benefit. Elizabeth wetted her lips, and his gaze homed in on that gesture. His thick lashes swept down, barely concealing the desire in the sapphire depths of his eyes—for her.
“Do I?”
“You do. I’ve changed.” She looked him up and down, lingering her stare deliberately on his wrinkled garments. “We’ve both changed.” In ways that made any hopes of any future impossible. Because she could not, even if he wished for her to remain here, do so if he were going about at all hours of the evening… visiting wherever it was he’d been. It would break her in ways their first separation hadn’t managed.
He narrowed his eyes. “Why do I believe that was intended as an insult, Elizabeth?” Frustration rippled off his frame.
She’d offended him. Why should he care? If he was an unrepentant rogue, happy for his freedom, what should it matter what she believed about him?
“Not an insult,” she said, shaking her head. “Rather, it was stated as a matter of fact. I don’t have time to run around hillsides and ponder a butterfly’s wings for the length of the day. I’m a finishing school instructor, Crispin. I’ll leave, and there won’t be room for endless hours of discussion on anything but those topics you rightly disparaged.” She could at least own the truth of that. He’d been correct. There was nothing honorable in the lessons she doled out. All of that, her future, her work at Mrs. Belden’s, left her bereft.
“You can stay here,” he said quietly.
Those four words, a suggestion and a question all rolled together, shrank the air between them.
“What?” she whispered.
Crispin straightened, unfurling to his full height. He closed the handful of steps between them, and capturing her chin in a delicate grip, he ran his thumb down her cheek. “Stay.”
Stay. Her breath stuck somewhere between her throat and lungs, trapped there as she stood stock-still, afraid to move, to breathe.
“You don’t have to have that life you described,” he continued in somber tones stripped of the earlier rogue’s murmur. All the while, he continued that delicate caress. Soft as the butterfly’s wings, it brought her eyes briefly shut, and she leaned into his touch, his offer, desperately yearning for both. “We can have a future together.”
And there it was. The dream she’d pined for in silence for ten long years, laid out. As a tender offering.
Crispin lowered his mouth to hers, and Elizabeth tipped her head back to receive the kiss, but the scent of whiskey wafted over her lips.
She turned her head, and his kiss grazed her cheek. Reality came rushing in. “You’re a rogue.” She drew in a breath and stepped out of his reach. “You smell like spirits and cheroots.”
His cheeks flushed. “I’m not ape-drunk, Elizabeth. And I wasn’t smoking. The smell is merely attached to my garments.”
“It is the places you go,” she entreated, needing him to understand. “It is the people you keep company with.” She paused. “It is the life you’ve lived since we’ve been apart.”
He opened and closed his mouth several times, but no words emerged.
Elizabeth scrunched her toes into the soft lawn. Oh, God. She silently begged with the earth to open up and take her under. “I do not begrudge you for… taking a lover… lovers,” she amended lamely. Liar. You hated him for it. And you hated them even more for having earned his affections. Even as it was her fault for leaving him and their marriage.
“Look at me,” he commanded with a quiet insistence that brought her gaze up to his. “I met with a friend this evening, Elizabeth. When I was broken with your leaving, the Earl of Fielding was the only one there for me.”
He’d had another friend in his life. He hadn’t been alone. How was it possible to feel joy and an aching sadness at the same time? When she’d been miserable and missing him at Mrs. Belden’s, Crispin had found another.
Her shoulders sagged. “You don’t owe me any answers, Crispin,” she said tiredly. “As you pointed out… I left. You were free to live your life, as you wished.” And as he would when she returned to Mrs. Belden’s.
Elizabeth pressed the frames of her spectacles back behind her ears and, bowing her head, started for the butterfly doors.
“You believe I was unfaithful to you?” he called after her. The annoyance and hurt wrapped around the question froze her midstride.
Elizabeth completed the step and turned slowly back. “I…” There had been the papers and his own relish several days past in throwing his reputation in her face.
The pale glow of the moon played off the chiseled contours of his face and illuminated the spark of regret in his eyes. “How low your opinion of me is,” he noted, and where there’d been anger before, now there was acceptance. “I gave you no reason to doubt my devotion.” He strolled over, the bulge of his corded biceps making a lie of any
feigned casualness. Crispin roved his eyes over her face. “There has never been any other woman, Elizabeth.”
That statement brought to a cessation the flow of all logical thought.
He quirked his mouth in an irreverent half-smile. “The papers?” he supplied for her. “The gossip? The world is content to see what they want to see. A bachelor duke, friends with a scoundrel, must be a rogue.” The knot in his throat moved rhythmically. “There was only ever one woman I wanted. One woman I desired.”
“Who?” she asked, giving him nothing more than that single, breathless syllable.
A pained chuckle rumbled from his chest. “Oh, Elizabeth. How is it possible for a woman to be so very clever and to know nothing all at the same time?” He dropped his forehead atop hers. “It is you, Elizabeth. There has only ever been you.”
And just like that, the world ceased spinning on its axis.
*
Elizabeth fluttered a hand about her breast. “You’ve never…?”
Crispin pressed his fingertips against his brow and rubbed. And he wished in this instance that he was the rogue the world had proclaimed him to be. For then he would have all the charming words expected of him. But so much of his life had been lived fulfilling expectations—those his family had of him, those the ton had for a duke. “I realized I loved you when I was six and ten, but I’ve loved you forever.”
She emitted a soft, whispery gasp.
And before she might again reject him, he covered her mouth with his and kissed her. Crispin kissed her as he’d dreamed of since a long-ago kiss stolen under the crisp Oxfordshire skies. Kissed her as he had just a day earlier, but this time without the restraint, giving himself over to the hunger tearing through him.
Filling his hands with Elizabeth’s slender hips, he drew her close, pressing her body to his.
Moaning, Elizabeth melted into his embrace, and parting her lips, she allowed him entry.
Crispin swept his tongue inside, sparring with hers. And on her lips and every breath she drew and exhaled, he tasted his own desire.
Through the thin fabric of her night shift, he searched her slender body with his hands. Reaching between them, he cupped her right breast, tweaking the tip through the fine cotton. Over and over. Until Elizabeth dropped her head back on an incoherent half plea, half sob.
Desire pumped through him, and with a primitive groan, Crispin guided her garment lower until her breasts lay bared before him and the London night sky.
He drew back slightly, and she cried out at the loss. Tangling her fingers in his hair, she tried to guide his mouth back to hers, but Crispin resisted.
His breath rasping in the quiet, still but for the errant breeze and the trickling water of the Grecian fountain, he worshiped her with his eyes. A handful of freckles dusted the column between her breasts, her large nipples a pale pink hue. The gentle swell of her cream-white breasts had been made for his palms, and he filled his hands with her.
Elizabeth bit her lower lip. Her lashes fluttered, and through those crimson lashes, she followed his every movement the way she’d contemplated any scientific study she’d launched.
Between his fingers, Crispin rolled the pebbled tips of each mound, teasing them with little flicks, and Elizabeth dropped her head. “Crispin.” She moaned his name, an entreaty.
“You are so beautiful,” he breathed against her skin. Bending his head, he drew a nipple into his mouth and suckled.
Elizabeth cried out.
He caught her as her legs went weak and shifted his focus to her other breast, lavishing it until keening moans echoed around the gardens.
“I have wanted you long before our first kiss,” he panted, his breath rasping against her flushed skin. He pressed a kiss to the place where her heart beat wildly. “I have dreamed of this…” Long after she’d gone. He hesitated, drawing back. “But you deserve more than being made love to out here on a—”
“Don’t,” Elizabeth ordered breathlessly, catching him by the shoulders. “This is how it should be.” Her fingers came up to clasp his head, and she drew his mouth back to hers. “This is how I want it to be.”
With a groan, Crispin claimed her lips. Never breaking contact, he guided Elizabeth to the grass so that they knelt there. He stroked his tongue over her lips, tracing their plump seam and then finding his way inside once more.
And she let him in. Welcomed him. Turned herself over to him with a searing fierceness that sent a stabbing ache of need to his shaft, fueling his hunger, raising the heat of the blood coursing through his veins. When he shifted his attentions to the delicate shell of her right ear, Elizabeth moaned. “Th-this is c-certainly d-different than our last em-embrace.” Her voice broke on a moan as he suckled at that lobe.
“Which ‘last kiss’ do you refer to, sweet Elizabeth?” he whispered against her ear, pulling a breathless laugh from her. “Outside the inn only last evening?” Not pausing to wait for an answer, he worshiped her previously neglected breast.
Her hips arched reflexively as she ground herself in a primitive dance against the hard ridge of his manhood. “N-never last evening’s kiss.”
“And here our first kiss left me ruined for any other woman,” he teased. And then all words, laughter, and pain of the past melted away, superseded by only their mutual hungering to taste passion with the other. Crispin wrestled with the buttons along the back of her night shift. It hadn’t been enough to simply worship those perfect swells. He wanted to see all of her cream-white skin, only flushed red from her desire, bathed in the soft light of the moonlit sky.
Crispin blazed a trail of kisses over the column of her neck to her jaw.
Elizabeth tipped her head sideways, allowing him complete access to her, opening herself to him in ways he didn’t deserve, but he was too much of a bastard to ever deny himself.
“So many damned buttons,” he gasped. He’d believed it wholly impossible to so despise an inanimate object such as a button.
“M-Mrs. Belden believes the button preserves a lady’s—” Riiiip. The tiny buttons rained down about them. “Virtue,” Elizabeth finished. Through the thick haze of passion swelling between them, they shared a brief smile. Crispin collected the hem of her night shift.
Then all humor faded away as he exposed inch by inch of her satiny, soft flesh.
All the air stuck in his chest, lodged there painfully. And he allowed himself that which he’d yearned to do—he caressed her with his gaze, touching his eyes upon every enticing freckle and delicate curve. Through his search, Elizabeth knelt there, proud as Athena.
As the seconds tripped by, she brought her arms up almost protectively about her breasts.
Crispin caught her arms in a delicate but firm grip, staying those attempts.
Indecision raged behind her smudged spectacles.
How could she not know her own beauty?
“There is no one more magnificent than you, Elizabeth. In mind, spirit, and beauty.”
Her lips parted, and she exhaled a soft, shuddery sigh.
She held her arms open for him. “Make love to me.”
It was a command, belonging to a woman who knew what she desired. Blood pumped to his shaft, and that organ sprang harder from his need for her.
Crispin guided her down so that the lush, emerald patch of earth served as their mattress.
And in this, she’d been correct. There was something only right that this moment should come here, like this… in this make-believe Eden.
Crispin sat up, and Elizabeth lifted her heavy lashes, watching him, a question in her eyes.
Not taking his gaze from her, he pulled his shirt from his trousers and over his head and tossed it aside. Next, he pulled off his riding boots, throwing them onto the forgotten pile of garments.
Elizabeth pushed herself up onto her elbows, and with wide eyes brimming with desire, she took in his every movement.
Crispin shoved down his breeches and kicked them aside, and then he stood naked before her.
&nbs
p; Unabashedly, she worked her passion-heavy gaze over him, leaving no swath of his skin untouched. There was an infinitesimal pause as she fixed on his abdomen, and then she proved as fearless and beautifully unashamed as she’d always been.
Her eyes fell to the organ that stood proudly erect, the crown pressed to his abdomen.
“You are magnificent,” she whispered in an echo of his very own thoughts about her. She stretched her arms up in a siren’s invitation, and he was as lost as those sailors at sea.
Groaning, Crispin came over her. Propping himself up on his elbows, he took her mouth in another kiss, and as she wrapped her arms about him, she met every lash and stroke of his tongue.
Crispin reached between them and found the downy patch of curls shielding her femininity.
A hiss exploded from her lips, lost to his mouth.
He palmed her, pressing the heel of his hand against her sensitive flesh.
“Please,” she whimpered, bucking into his touch. She let her legs splay in an invitation, and he slid an answering finger inside her wet channel.
An incoherent sound—neither moan nor groan, but rather, both rolled into one—soared to the glass ceiling.
“I want… I didn’t know…”
“Neither did I,” he managed to squeeze out, his voice hoarse as every nerve and fiber of him strained under the overwhelming need to lay himself between her legs and plunge deep. He teased her nub, explored the plump folds that shielded it. Crispin reveled in the feel and heat of her.
Sweat beaded on his brow, and a lone drop wound a path down his forehead.
Elizabeth stretched a trembling hand up and caught that moisture. She brushed his hair back behind his ears in a tender lover’s touch.
Crispin continued to tease and touch her, until Elizabeth’s hands fell away and wrapped about him once more, until she was scraping her nails down his back, gripping him tightly, pleading for him.
He settled himself between her thighs, nestling his shaft against her moist curls. An agonized groan ripped from him, and he waged a battle for control.
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