by Eloisa James
“I knew you wouldn’t,” he replied. He was leaning back against the wall, and the moonlight glinted on his bricklayer’s face, stubborn maleness evident in every pane of his face.
Was he that sure of her? Did he see her as such a lovesick fool that he never doubted she would keep herself for him? She turned pink with fury, as much at herself as at him. “I have had many proposals! I could have married within a week of debuting.”
Without answering, Rothwell reached out for her hand and then began nimbly undoing the buttons fastening her gloves.
“Did you hear me?” she demanded. “You had no right to assume that I would remain unmarried. Especially when you never wrote! Four letters in four years?”
He managed to peel off one of her gloves, and she let it happen. When he didn’t look up, she just waited, her heart beating a sickening rhythm in her chest. Would she accept the hand of a man so arrogant that he apparently believed she would wait for him forever?
The silence was intolerable. “What if you had never bothered to return? I should have married years ago!”
He had started on the second glove, his head still bowed, now over her left hand. Violet glared at him, willing him to look her in the face. But he didn’t, and when he spoke, his voice was calm and unruffled. “If you had accepted a proposal, my solicitors had instructions to send for me, and to make a proxy offer of betrothal to your father.”
She gasped. “You were arrogant enough to think that I would accept a betrothal offered by a solicitor? You have been gone for years doing lord knows what, and now you think you can simply marry me, as if it were only yesterday that you left England?”
Both gloves were gone, and he caught her right hand up as well. Despite herself, her fingers curved around his large hands. He finally looked up, and the expression in his eyes took her breath away. There was desire, and anguish, and something she recognized as love, even given the haze of her anger.
“I love you, Violet. I didn’t think I would be away so long. I thought of you all the time. Every day. Many times a day.”
She suddenly became aware of the silence around her, the pensive twitter of a night bird. Surely she wasn’t going to give in and accept his hand, not after all the tears, after the heartbreak, after the four years of silence. “I am not a proper match for you,” she said weakly, grasping at straws. “You have become a duke. You must marry into the aristocracy.”
He raised both her hands to his mouth and kissed them, one after another, his eyes fixed on her face. “I wouldn’t care if you were an apple-seller’s daughter.”
“That’s absurd!” But she could see the truth in his eyes. Rothwell wasn’t a liar. He was a careless, non-letter-writing fiend, but an honest one.
“Why didn’t you come back to me?” she whispered, her voice breaking. “You promised. I waited for you.”
With one swift movement he pulled her into his arms. “I have never wanted to marry anyone but you,” he said, his voice low and rough. “I would have been home sooner, but the Nile was hard to reach, and various things happened.” He paused and swallowed. “Then the letter arrived saying that both my brothers had died. I never meant to hurt you. I would never hurt you, Violet.”
“I am so sorry,” she whispered, raising her head, forgetting everything else, reaching up to caress his cheek. “I know how much you loved them. How much the three of you loved each other.”
“I should have been with them,” he said, his voice gravelly.
“No!” she said fiercely. Everyone knew that the Duke of Cambridge’s three sons sailed together every week. She had shook with fear for days after hearing the news, even though she was already angry at him . . . at that point, the two years he’d planned to travel were almost at an end. He hadn’t written, but she had still had hope. She didn’t lose hope until another twelve months had passed.
“I went a little mad, and I didn’t want to come home to you like that.”
“Oh, Rothwell, I’m so sorry,” Violet whispered.
“There were no other women. I spent my time climbing mountains, sailing into storms.”
“You shouldn’t have!”
“The only thing that kept me sane was the fact that you were waiting for me. But I kept thinking that if we had married, Violet, you would have been on the boat with my brothers and myself. Your life would have been lost along with theirs.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know that, Rothwell. No one can say what might have happened. But I do know that your mother’s heart would have broken if you hadn’t returned home. She didn’t—” She stopped.
“I know. She didn’t sleep for two days, hoping they would walk through the door.”
The aching question in his face told its own story. Without conscious thought, Violet pressed her mouth against his. “I wouldn’t have slept for two days either,” she whispered.
He opened his mouth, or she opened her mouth . . . and suddenly they were kissing again, and all the heat and sweetness that had bound her to him four years ago was still there. Just the touch of his tongue sent crazed streaks of fire down her limbs. He kissed her fiercely, his arms pulling her tightly against his body.
“There’s never been anyone but you,” he said, a while later. Deep in those green eyes was a glint of something . . . As their eyes met, Violet felt a passionate joy bloom in her heart, a feeling different than the feverish desire aroused by his kisses: it was something deeper, that would only grow stronger over the years.
“I lost a year in Africa, and another year after I became a duke, but I knew I’d come home to you,” Rothwell said. “I never touched another woman, Violet. I swear it to you.” His voice rang true.
A smile trembled on her lips, and she pressed her palms to his chest. “I didn’t know . . .”
“How could you not know?” he demanded. “I loved you the moment I saw you. I told you so. I wooed you.”
“With strawberries!” she said, laughter in her throat.
“I gave you my heart.”
“Oh,” Violet breathed.
“I never even desired another woman. Not after you.” A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Not after the strawberries.”
Tears came to Violet’s eyes, and she swallowed convulsively. “I couldn’t bear to think of a husband who wasn’t you. I drove my father mad turning down proposals.”
The possessive glow in his eyes soothed the pain of all those miserable years. “So we were in a similar state,” he said, satisfaction as rich as heavy cream running through his voice.
He pulled her closer for a hot, open-mouthed kiss, and then his hands slid down her back, rounding her bottom. “You shouldn’t!” she breathed. But rather than push him away, she stood on tiptoes so she could run her tongue along the deep line of his lower lip. He smelled so wonderful, like a night garden, and she had longed for him so much.
“My carriage waits just outside the gate,” he growled into her ear. “Please come with me, Violet.”
“I couldn’t . . . My mother will die of shame.”
By way of answer, he scooped her into his arms. She laughed, “Are you kidnapping me?”
“Your mother has surely been told that you will be a duchess by tomorrow evening. Your father or my mother will have informed her.”
“My father?”
In the lane was a great black carriage with a ducal crest emblazoned on the door. A liveried groom snapped open the door at the sight of them. Rothwell placed Violet on the upholstered seat and then straightened. “Drive on,” she heard him say. “Bring us back to the Bracknell’s front door in precisely one hour.”
The door slammed and the carriage started with a lurch. They weren’t in darkness: two small lamps affixed to the walls threw golden light across the seats.
Violet felt as if she had cracked open, lost her mind. What would people think of the way she had left the room, hand in hand with a duke? What were they saying about her at this moment?
But then she looked up, and Rothwell
was there, finally in front of her. She let the wonderful truth of it grow in her heart: he was in England; he had come back for her. His eyes were burning with desire, and yet he sat opposite her, tensely waiting for her to say something. Do something.
The rightness of it resonated deep in her chest. She let a smile shape her lips that hadn’t been there in four years, not since a halcyon day in a strawberry patch. “Rothwell,” she breathed. And held out her arms.
A second later she was borne backward on the wide seat as a hard body settled on top of her curves. “It’s been four years, Violet,” he whispered, his voice soft as old velvet. “I might lose control.”
She slipped her arms around his neck and wiggled against him. All that heat and muscles pressing her into the seat felt so good. Gladness flooded her with the suddenness with which a river overflows its banks during a spring flood.
“I want you,” she said bluntly, skimming her lips along his throat.
His left hand was sliding up her leg, over the fine silk of her stockings, heading toward her most private place, which had only been shared once before, in a berry patch.
“A gentleman wouldn’t do this,” he said, a thread of desperation in his voice. “I arranged for the carriage because I thought we needed privacy to talk; I knew you were angry with me. But I didn’t mean to—”
His voice broke off. He had discovered that Violet’s gown slipped readily off one shoulder and that its sleek design had precluded wearing a corset. Her breast was luminescent in the soft light of the hanging lamps.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said hoarsely.
“I’m a good deal larger than I was at sixteen,” Violet said, laughter catching in her throat at the intoxication in his eyes. But then his fingers slipped from the curve of her breast to her nipple, and a choked sound replaced her words as raw need flared between them.
She was enflamed by the sensual weight of the heavy body lying between her thighs, and when his mouth replaced his hand, a cry tore from her throat. And then she discovered that where his shirt had pulled from his breeches, she could slide a hand over hot, silk-smooth skin.
Every moment she was filled with more reckless joy, the sort of emotion that defies the rules of the ton, and everything she’d been told as a child. “I thought you wouldn’t come home. I thought I’d never feel this, with you.” She arched against him again, turning her body into a caress.
“You really thought I would make love to you, and never return? That I would break my promises? That I could do such a thing—or that I would?”
“You didn’t write.” But she couldn’t work up any fervor over the complaint. Her fingers were caressing broad muscles that hadn’t been there four years ago. “You’ve changed,” she whispered.
“I have never been very good with words.” His fingers on her leg stilled, and she didn’t want them to. “I thought you knew how I felt.”
She let her thigh fall open slightly, the better to encourage an upward climb. “It’s all right,” she said, kissing his neck.
“I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make up for it.” Rothwell captured her mouth again. His kiss was a promise, and she drank in every heady word of his unspoken vow.
They were still kissing when his hand slid up and over her garter, setting her skin on fire, then drifted toward her very core. She cried out at the touch of his fingers.
“How could I be with anyone else?” he demanded, looking up from her breast and meeting her eyes. “After you, there was no one. The taste of you, the feeling of you . . . I am damn sick of my own hand, Violet. It’s been a long four years.”
A choked giggle broke from her throat, even though she had to clench her teeth so as not to moan. His hands were callused and strong, the hands of a man who had sailed the seas . . . and come home.
“We shouldn’t do this,” she gasped. The sensation of his fingers stroking her was so overwhelming that her fingernails bit into his skin.
“I’m marrying you tomorrow with a special license. I arrived home last night; I got the license in the morning; I met with your father this afternoon.”
That shocked her out of her carnal haze for a moment. “What? I forgot that you mentioned him. My father knows? And he didn’t tell my mother?”
“He couldn’t tell your mother or little sister as they wouldn’t be able to keep the secret. My mother insisted it be a secret. I wanted to come to your house at six this morning, but she wouldn’t allow it.”
“Why—why not?” A delicious wildness was creeping up Violet’s body. A hand pushed at her knee and she lost all claim to ladylikeness and allowed that leg to fall from the seat altogether, leaving her open, completely vulnerable. She didn’t care about being a lady anymore.
“My mother pointed out that the ton had never seen us together,” Rothwell growled. His warm body lifted from hers, and she realized dimly that he was wrenching down his breeches. “She thought I ought to pretend to fall in love with you at first sight so there wouldn’t be a scandal.”
“There will be a scandal,” Violet said, not caring, reaching out for him again. “You took my hand. We left together.” She closed her eyes so she could see only cherry-dark velvet, so that she could simply feel what he was doing. His thumb . . . his fingers . . . .
Then he was kissing her again, hard and sweet at the same time. Her mind reeled at the fact Rothwell was back, that he was touching her, that he was loving her . . . A brush of his callused thumb across her nipple, and pleasure flooded her body so vividly that she cried out.
“Please,” she cried against his lips. “Now!”
“Last time I had a French letter,” Rothwell said, his voice ragged and low. “This time you might find yourself with child, Violet. Are you certain that you forgive me?”
Her smile spread to his. He braced himself above her, dropped a kiss on her mouth, and then he was there.
The feeling was so welcome that tears fell from her eyes. She heard him mutter something . . . her name?
It was all too much, all the heat and fire and glory of it, and the happiness. “I missed you!” she cried, her voice choked. “I thought I might die when you didn’t come home, and you didn’t write me.”
Rothwell froze, and then he kissed away her tears. “I’m an ass. All I can say is that I was true to you, and I was stupid, and I thought . . .”
“You thought I understood.”
“I knew you were mine.” He took a deep breath and then he drove into her, slow but fierce. They both gasped at the pleasure of it, and for a moment there was no sound but the rumble of the carriage wheels. He slid back, thrust again, spoke through clenched teeth. “I was too stupid to think about it from your point of view.” Again, and again. Then: “I was certain I would never hear from the solicitor that you had accepted another man’s hand. You are mine, Violet. You love me. I always knew that. Always.”
Violet would have answered—she had things to say—but they had a lifetime to say them. Instead she wrapped her arms around his neck and hung on, hearing her breath sobbing from her chest, feeling the way pleasure gripped her, the way he moved faster and faster, until suddenly she lost all objectivity and found herself lost in a whirl of color, as if darkness had suddenly exploded with stars.
She drifted back to herself, as nameless and humble as any creature on God’s earth.
Neither one of them stirred for a time. Then Rothwell kissed her neck, and her forehead, and finally her lips.
“Habibti,” he whispered.
“What?” she asked, her lips drifting along his jaw.
“My love, as they say in Egypt. I learned it last year so that I could say it to you.”
A little sob rose in her chest, and she answered him with a kiss.
“I’m still shaking,” he remarked conversationally, sometime later, gently pulling from her arms and sitting up. He produced a large linen handkerchief.
Violet had never been more happy in her life. She lay back, boneless on the seat, and let him t
ake care of her. He eased her skirts back down, and soothed her bodice back in place. Finally he gently pulled her to a seated position, just as the carriage drew to a halt.
“My mother must be beside herself,” Violet said dreamily.
“Luckily, you look as beautiful as ever.” He leaned forward and pushed open the door. A second later he plucked her from the seat, and put her on her feet. “Come on, darling. Lady Bracknell’s ball awaits.”
“We can’t!” Violet protested. But Rothwell simply drew her past the butler standing at the open front door. She frantically felt her hair, which by some miracle was still caught up by pins. “My gloves!” she gasped, looking back at the carriage.
But then they paused, having reached the very top of the steps leading down into the ballroom. The room went instantly silent. Rothwell led her down the steps. Then he turned, and with one smooth movement dropped to one knee. “Miss Violet Leighton,” he said, his voice clear and forceful, “would you do me the great honor of becoming my duchess?”
“Oh,” Violet gasped, watching helplessly as he slid a glittering jewel over her finger.
“A fire opal surrounded by diamonds,” he said, still on one knee, looking up at her. “It was the only thing I saw in four years that was almost as beautiful as you.”
Violet scarcely looked at the ring. Instead, she bent and put her hands on her cheeks. He was so tall that she hadn’t far to bend.
“You do me too much honor,” she said, with all her heart.
And then, because the smile in his eyes was for her and no other, she kissed him on the mouth with an audience of a hundred: because he was the only man she had ever kissed, and the only man she would ever kiss.
Her kiss was a promise that said everything she didn’t wish to voice in public.