Jeremiah came to stand beside her, looking down at his younger brother. “I heard him ask about secrets.”
“It was a good question.”
“Did you ever tell your brothers?” Jeremiah asked, still frowning at Joshua’s sleeping form.
“I did not,” Alice said, wondering what mysteries were churning in Jeremiah’s too-busy little brain.
“Maybe you should. I think I’ll take a nap too.”
“You don’t have to,” Alice said. “If you’re not tired, it can just make it harder to sleep at night.” And God knew, the last thing she wanted was for the little boys to be up wandering around when she was misbehaving with their father at night.
* * *
Ethan slipped behind Alice in the library and wrapped his arms around her waist, feeling her curl back against him on a sigh. “Can I ask you something?”
Lemon verbena had become his favorite scent. It brought to mind not just Alice, but the sheets on her bed, where Ethan had spent many pleasant hours.
“You’ve asked me a great deal lately, Ethan Grey: my favorite flower, my favorite author, my political opinions, my name day, and my birthday.”
He hadn’t asked her to make love with him, and they both knew it. She wrapped her hands over his at her midriff. “Ask me, Ethan.”
“We have on occasion mentioned the scandal in your past,” Ethan said. “If there were scandal in my past, personal in nature, would you want to know?” The answer to this question mattered, and had something to do with Ethan’s reluctance to consummate their dealings, much as he wished that were not so.
Also with his inability to go for long without touching her.
“I know about your wife.” Alice slipped from his hold and turned to face him, defeating his hug-her-from-behind-so-she-won’t-see-your-face strategy. “And you’ve told me Joshua may not be your son. What could be more personal than that?”
“Joshua is every bit my son. But about the scandal, you’d want to know?”
“If you wanted to tell me, I’d be happy to listen, but what befell you in the past matters a great deal less than who you are now, at least to me.”
Bless this woman. “Even if it’s a very bad business, Alice?” Ethan looked past her, out across the back gardens in the direction of the Marquis of Heathgate’s holdings. Part of him wanted to tell her, not to weather her reaction, but to repose his whole self, past, present, and future, in her keeping. “Even if it’s something that might make you ashamed to consort with me?”
“I could never be ashamed of you, and as to that, we don’t quite consort, Ethan. This is beginning to puzzle me, because I am willing, and you seem interested, and yet we don’t… Have you lost interest?”
She sounded bewildered and a trifle hurt. He could not abide either.
“No, never.” Ethan jammed his hands into his pockets to keep from reaching for her. “But conception is an issue, and the timing hasn’t been right.” That was true, as far as it went.
“I don’t understand.”
“Your courses came just after…” Ethan paused, searching for delicacy. “After the picnic at Heathgate’s.”
“And?”
“And I would not importune you at such a time.” Ethan felt color rising across his cheeks. He took her by the wrist and pulled her to a printed calendar hanging behind his desk. There were marks on it in pencil—ships arriving, contracts due, payments to be made—but he tapped his finger on the date of the picnic.
“I think you started your courses here.” He shifted his finger two days. “Am I right?”
“You are.” And it was Alice’s turn to blush. “How did you know?”
“Your breasts were more sensitive then.” Ethan kept his gaze on the calendar. “And you were… affectionate and quiet, but would not encourage certain types of advances, and then you asked me to let you catch up on your sleep for a few nights.”
“And you took that to mean I was indisposed?”
“I hoped it meant that.” Ethan glanced at her fleetingly, not sure whose modesty he was sparing. “Not that you were having second thoughts.”
“Why would you think that?”
Ethan’s gaze went back to the calendar. “Perhaps we might finish with our earlier topic?” He was dodging. He knew it, and she knew it, but they tacitly agreed not to confront the knowledge—yet.
“Please. I can’t help but feel embarrassed you should know of these things and I would not.”
“I kept a mistress,” Ethan reminded her, “a woman with whom procreation was my last intention. The knowledge became relevant too late to do me any good.”
“This is very… intimate.”
There, on that date a few days after the picnic, Ethan had made one small mark—a little cross, and the significance of it was known only to him and her. He liked that; she was probably mortified by it.
“Personal, and having a child with someone more personal yet, whether the act is intended or not.”
A look passed across Alice’s face, one of stark, undisguised longing. Ethan dared not comment on it, for having a child with Alice—many children with Alice—would be a gift of miraculous proportions. She might be dallying with him out of curiosity and loneliness, but she would love her children.
He could trap her with that love, just as Barbara had trapped him with duty.
Ethan wrenched his thoughts back from that moral precipice and completed his explanation of contraceptive timing.
“And you think Barbara lied to you regarding her cycle?” Alice worried her lower lip, her expression disgruntled.
“I know she did. I interviewed her lady’s maid when Barbara announced her pregnancy. I wasn’t visiting her very often at that point and had bought her a parting gift, so I wasn’t as attentive to her calendar as I might have been. After we married, Barbara boasted of her scheme to me.”
Alice’s eyes filled with ire. “She tricked you. Is Jeremiah even yours?”
“Painful question.” Though Alice’s mind, confident with facts and knowledge, would have leapt to it. “The same lady’s maid kept careful track of her mistress and went everywhere with her. She assured me my wife was too set on having my wealth to give me any cause to repudiate her before the license was procured.”
“Some comfort there, I suppose.”
“Some little comfort. Once we were wed, the magnitude of our unsuitability only grew.”
“She was not remorseful.”
That succinct observation gave Ethan a pang, for it pointed to a larger reality: Barbara had expressed remorse—not loudly, not often—though Ethan had not offered her forgiveness, not until it was too damned late.
“Her brazen infidelity was the excuse I needed to stop trying, to stop deceiving myself.” To give up hope. “We struck terms, with me agreeing to support her in the style she preferred, and Barbara agreeing to do nothing to harm our child, and at least exercise some discretion. When I was certain I’d found reliable staff for the nursery, I kissed my son good-bye and went traveling as often as I could.”
“I am so sorry.” Alice wrapped her arms around his waist and hung on. Ethan said nothing, but held her to him in the quiet of the library, wondering why’d he’d burdened her with his unhappy history.
And yet these disclosures, while by no means the worst of his past, did not bring the awkwardness they might have with another.
These confidences.
“It’s in the past,” he said softly. “I have two wonderful sons, I tell myself Barbara is at peace, and I have much to be grateful for.”
“You do. We both do.” She looked right at him when she said it. “I want you to come to me tonight. I’m not going to change my mind, Ethan, and if you are, you’d best tell me now.”
“Tomorrow night,” Ethan said, thinking of that small mark on the calendar. “It will be safer. And I won’t change my mind, either, Alice. If we’re to develop a conscience at this stage, it will be your doing.”
She slipped from his embrace
and went to stand at the French doors, looking out over the gardens that were in the riotous, slightly untidy glory of late summer. “I would feel a greater burden on my conscience if I did not consummate our dealings, Ethan Grey, than I would if we suddenly succumbed to a false piety now.”
He said nothing, realizing he shared her sentiment. Again, he slipped his arms around her from behind and pulled her back against his body. He wanted to give her words, to tell her he cared for her, but it wouldn’t be a gift to speak of his feelings.
Alice had offered him a sort of friendship, an intimate friendship that would include pleasure and companionship for a time. If he cared for her—hell and the devil, if he loved her—he’d give her that, and not impose his own dreams and wishes on her.
“You are very dear, Ethan Grey. Promise you’ll come to me.”
“I promise.” Ethan kissed her cheek and gathered her more closely. He’d never stood quietly with Barbara like this, never been content just to hold her and treasure her closeness. She hadn’t wanted it, had made it clear she hadn’t.
“It’s Friday.” Ethan reminded her. “Will you and the boys join me for dinner?”
Alice turned to smile at him over her shoulder, and in that instant, Ethan lost a piece of his heart. Her eyes were clear, steady, and pleased—maybe pleased to have secured his intimate attentions as a lover, but also pleased simply to take a meal with him and his sons.
Fifteen
When he joined Alice and the boys at dinner, Ethan looked a little tired, but pleased to see his children. The boys must have sensed their father’s fatigue, because they were subdued—for them—as well. Alice herded them up to bed then occupied herself with duty letters to her siblings Reese, Priscilla, and Leah.
A soft tap on her door had her glancing up, expecting to see Clara with some laundry or fresh wash water.
“You’re sending off the monthly epistles?” Ethan kept his hands in his pockets as he peered over her shoulder. “Have you heard much from your brother Benjamin lately?”
“I have not, which isn’t so unusual. I think your brother is keeping him busy, among others.”
“He is. I’ve been meaning to tell you Nick has reason to suspect I’m legitimate, in the legal sense.” He studied her mundane correspondence as if it were a complicated column of figures.
“Does this matter to you?”
“It does.” Ethan sat on the bed, facing her. “Though not in the sense you think. It matters because Nick is afraid we’re not related, or he was. Seems my mother was married to some soldier, about whom she neglected to tell the earl when she went larking about with her betters.”
“Maybe she thought her soldier was dead.” Alice watched as he pulled off a boot. “It doesn’t change who you are.”
“So I told my fretful little brother.” Ethan smiled at her, his expression tinged with an odd tenderness. “And it really doesn’t matter to you, does it?”
He was determined of late on ascertaining her opinion on every irrelevant detail.
“Of course not, except it impacts upon you. What are you doing, Ethan Grey?”
“Getting comfortable.” He pulled his second boot off and set them beside the bed. “And don’t look at me as if you’ve never seen me comfortable before.”
“I thought you said tomorrow night…” She trailed off as he shucked out of his breeches and smalls, then pulled his shirt right over his head.
“I did say I’d come to you tomorrow night.” Ethan pulled back the covers then ambled around to stand behind Alice. “And I will, but there’s somewhere I’d like to take you tonight, if you’ll allow it.”
“Dressed like that?” Alice closed her eyes when she felt his fingers at the hooks of her dress.
“One gets there most easily in just this attire.” Ethan bent to kiss her nape. “Besides, I love the way you look at me when I’m naked.”
And she loved to look upon him, but this, this complete nudity in a well-lit room was more than just a pushing aside of clothes by moonlight. “I suppose you want me that way too?” Alice bent forward so he could reach the rest of her hooks.
“Say it.” He leaned down near her ear. “Ethan wants me naked.”
“Ethan wants me to blush myself silly.”
“We’ll blow out the candles,” he said as he started on her laces, “if you really don’t want to see me as God made me.”
“You as God made you is one thing.” Alice struggled for reason when Ethan drew her to her feet. “Me as God made me is another.” And where on earth was she to affix her gaze?
“Another.” Ethan drew her dress over her head. “Another entirely glorious thing.”
“Ethan…” She stood barefoot, in shift and loosened stays, knowing he was looking at her.
He waited until she found the courage to glance at him. “This is part of it, this simple, mundane sort of trust. I want to see you, just as you wanted to see me. I like the sight of you. I want to have pictures of you in my head, to appreciate and treasure. We can do this in the dark, if you like, but I’d really rather you let me see you, even if it’s just this once.”
“I do like looking at you,” Alice said, letting her gaze travel the muscular expanse of his chest, down past his flat stomach, his groin, his legs, and over every lean, sculpted inch of him. She nodded at his erection. “Does that inconvenience you?”
“Mightily,” Ethan said with a slight smile. “Stop trying to change the subject.”
“You’ll have to do this. I haven’t the nerve.”
“You’re just shy.” Ethan’s smile broadened, blinding her with its warmth. “Hold still.” He untied her tapes and bows and had her naked as Eve in less than a minute, her braid swinging freely down her back.
“God in heaven, you are lovely, Alexandra. How could you be shy about sharing this?” He walked around her, as if she were some treasure from antiquity, a marble goddess come to life at Tydings. “I feel sorry for Mr. Durbeyfield, I’ll say that much.”
“Can we please, please, get under the covers?”
“There is no place on earth I would rather be than naked under the covers with you,” Ethan replied with an odd gravity. Alice didn’t wait to decipher his mood. She hopped under the sheet, ignoring the view she gave Ethan of her backside. The mattress dipped as Ethan’s greater weight joined her, and then he was over her, balanced on his forearms.
“Ethan?”
“That would be me.” He kissed her cheek. “And you are the lovely Miss Portman. Attend me, Miss Portman, for I’ve a lesson to impart, and you’re the kind who appreciates learning.”
She brushed his hair back. “You are ridiculous, Mr. Grey.”
“Disrespect will be punished,” Ethan informed her sternly. “Seriously, I want you to heed me.”
“I’m listening, Ethan.” How could she not listen when he was naked, lying on top of her, all warm and lean and touchable?
“I’ve asked you before to be honest with me. It’s more important than ever with what we undertake now.”
“I know. I will not play you false, Ethan. I hope you know that.”
“I do know it, and you have the same promise from me, but this is a different kind of honesty. You have to tell me if I’m asking too much, if I’m going too fast, if I’m hurting you.”
She gently pushed his head to her shoulder. “Hush. Enough talk. Tell me what I must do to please you in this bed.”
He angled back up, her meager strength nothing compared to his determination. “Promise, first. You’ll tell me if you don’t like something, if you’re the least bit uncomfortable with it.”
“I promise. Now stop fretting. I took off my clothes for you, sir, and not so you could lecture me to sleep.”
“Wench.” Ethan nuzzled her ear, which tickled, mostly. “Now you’re going to talk to me.”
“Oh, more talk.” Alice huffed, then squeaked with alarm when Ethan shifted off of her. “Where are you going?”
“To a better listening post,” Ethan sa
id, tucking her against his side. “Think back, Alexandra, to all the times we’ve been affectionate, and tell me what touches you enjoyed the most.”
“That is a ridiculous question,” Alice scoffed, hiking her leg across his thighs—how bold he’d made her. How wonderfully bold. “I like it all, every bit of it, which makes me wanton, I suppose.” What a lovely notion. She was proud of herself to consider it.
He hiked her leg a bit higher and drew patterns on her knee with one finger. “It makes you passionate and open-minded. But what do you like the best?”
“It isn’t so simple to choose. Your kisses are exciting and wicked and wonderful, but the way you use your hands on me…”
“Yes?” That one finger on her knee was a case in point, bespelling her with a tactile pleasure she would never have guessed a knee might feel.
“You know where to touch, Ethan.” She sighed mightily, for this recitation wasn’t in any governess manual. “And no matter where you touch, it brings me pleasure.”
* * *
Alice’s words lodged in his soul, because Ethan knew—he knew without asking, without questioning, she didn’t mean simply his erotic touch. She liked it when he tapped her nose with his finger in the middle of some argument, when their hands brushed over the teapot at breakfast, when he pulled rank on his sons and assisted her to a seat.
To her, he was not dirty, shameful, second-rate, or anything less than deserving of her caring and respect. He could not have joined her in this bed had she thought him in any way unworthy.
And yet, direct questions were getting him nowhere on his stated agenda of the evening.
“Do you like it when I rub your back?”
“I adore it. If you want to make me purr like a cat, you put those big hands of yours on my back, Ethan Grey.”
“Easy enough,” Ethan said, rolling her to her side. He glanced at his hands, pleased for once at their size. He spent the next few minutes honestly rubbing her back, and she spent those minutes sighing and wiggling and sighing some more. When she’d had her fun, he let his hand trail down lower, over her buttocks.
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