“I didn’t know any better,” she said. “I thought Eric was courting me, and I was pleased to think it so.”
“You would have married him?”
“At the time, I would have rejoiced to marry him. I was infatuated.”
“How old were you?”
“Past twenty. I’d had my Seasons and was facing yet another year as the tallest, plainest, most awkward woman in every ballroom. Marriage to Eric would have spared me that. He hasn’t a title, but his father is gentry and prosperous.”
Gentry, prosperous, and conniving as hell. “This lovely, discreet gentleman married your sister.”
She was a ball of hurting female against his side, and Worth kicked himself for not having the patience to prompt this story from her before. This part of her past mattered to her, so it should have mattered to him.
“I was increasingly willing to permit him liberties. I thought we were anticipating the vows.”
Oh, my love. “What happened?”
“I let him…have me, and it was awkward and untidy, and he was so pleased with himself over it, I said nothing. He hadn’t finished buttoning his falls before he was explaining to me that his father believed a married man should make his own way, so it was Daisy he’d have to marry—she had that nice little settlement, after all—but there was no reason he and I couldn’t continue to enjoy each other’s company.”
“He got your portion, and your sister got him.”
“She’s welcome to him,” Jacaranda said. “I’ve saved some money working for you, a fair bit for a housekeeper, and if I invest it well, I’ll manage. And as for Eric…”
Worth had invested that money for her, lest she forget—a discussion for some other day. “He deserves the French pox, at least, for how he treated you. Do your brothers know?”
“Grey suspects.” Jacaranda fell silent for a moment, still leaning on him. He wanted to store the moment up like a happy memory, except it wasn’t happy. Not for her, not for him, but it was important. “When he wanted to demand answers and create a fuss, I argued him out of it. He made them have a long engagement, but my oldest nephew was born four months after the wedding.”
“Eric is a randy bugger, isn’t he?”
“He seems devoted to Daisy.” Jacaranda was trying to convince herself, because how could she know this when she dwelled far from her family—unless her sister tortured her by correspondence? “Leaving was far easier than staying and watching them raise their children, but now it has been five years, and I still haven’t put things right with my only sister.”
“One can understand that a reckoning would be important to you. If it makes any difference, I am sorry.” Particularly when wounded pride had also sent one fleeing his own home more than a decade ago.
“Sorry? For?”
“For what you went through. I’m not sure I would have importuned you if I’d known.”
“You knew I was used goods; you did not know that I was also a lying baggage of used goods. I’m sorry for that. I could not find the right time to explain my situation to you, and I knew I was bound to return to Dorset soon anyway.”
She still hadn’t entirely explained her situation to him, though Worth had acquired a fine grasp of the havoc unfinished business between siblings could wreak.
“Hush, Jacaranda Dorning. You are not used goods any more than I am. We’re adults, we’ve taken some knocks. Are you sure you don’t want to remain here, though? You don’t have to marry me. You don’t even have to see me. I’ll go north, I’ll stay in Town, I’ll buy a few more properties and keep myself from your sight.”
What was he offering? Lies, certainly. He might try to stay away, but some pressing contrivance would see him on Trysting’s doorstep within a month. He’d ride William the Pig if it meant he could share a roof with Jacaranda.
“You don’t like it in Town,” she said, smoothing her palm down his lapel.
“I realize that now, but I don’t want you keeping house for that lot of handsome louts when they couldn’t even see your heart was broken.” Though he did want her to put things to rights with her sister. That was important, when one had only a single sister.
She looked away, and Worth felt his frustration with her rising again. What had he said? What had he missed? He understood that this house party nonsense required her presence in Dorset for a time, but why was it so important for her to stay away from him?
“Would you do me a very great favor, Mr. Kettering?”
“Anything, Mrs. Wyeth.”
“Hold me.”
And while she cried as if her heart were breaking all over again, he held her and knew for a certainty his was breaking, too.
* * *
“I’ve been meaning to tell you something.” Hess settled in beside Worth on the library sofa.
“We have brandy left?” Worth marveled as Hess passed him a drink.
“Your cellar has been kept in good stock, probably thanks to old Simmons.”
“Thanks to my housekeeper, who thinks she’s abandoning me.” Hess was turning him into a sot, that was the trouble.
“That is what I wanted to bring up. I haven’t known exactly how.”
Worth took a sip of good brandy, the everyday having fallen victim to the Dorset tribe of Visigoths.
“There’s nothing to bring up. We got through dinner with the plague of locusts, now we’ll go to bed. When I wake in the morning, the only woman I’ve loved will ride out of my life, because assigning beds at some house party is more important than being in my bed. End of fairy tale.” He would muster the determination to fetch her back, of course—Ketterings were determined—but what if she didn’t want to be fetched?
“Mrs. Wyeth is the only woman you’ve loved?”
The way Hess posed the question, so delicately, alerted Worth to the focus of the discussion.
“You loved another,” Hess said. “Years ago, and yet I married her.”
“Must we?”
“I was never quite sure why you hared off.” Hess’s voice was meditative. “Did she say something to you?”
“No words were necessary. She and I had arranged to meet in the stables, and I saw the two of you there. Your attentions to her were not those of a future brother-in-law.”
“The stables.”
“In the saddle room, embracing rather enthusiastically.” Consuming each other, or so it had appeared at the time. “This is excellent brandy. My compliments to the host.”
“Ah.”
“What does that mean? ‘Ah’? Maybe earls understand such profundities. I can’t fathom them. Perhaps if you refresh my drink my comprehension will improve.”
“Have you ever wondered why, of all the young ladies in the shire, I chose to single out your intended?”
Worth slugged back the rest of his drink. “We’re brothers, we were occasionally rivals. She was pretty.”
“She was neither the prettiest girl in the shire nor the wealthiest.”
She’d apparently been the most determined—and lo, she’d ended up a Kettering. “She was wealthy enough. Pretty enough.” Except sitting there with good brandy sloshing in his brain, Worth couldn’t exactly recall the lady’s looks. Blond, he was fairly certain of that.
Only that. He couldn’t say what color her eyes had been or what the texture of her hair had been.
“I’ve suspected for some time that we were played for fools, Worth.” Hess rose and brought the decanter to the low table before the sofa. The flames from the hearth gave the brandy a depth of color, like a magic potion.
“No more for me. Tomorrow will be difficult enough without a bad head.”
Hess sat on the table—did earls sit on tables?—and poured himself another finger.
“You did not see me kissing Elise.” Hess set the decanter aside. “You saw her kissing me.”
“A distinction without a difference, as we solicitors say.” He saluted with his now empty glass.
“Not so. She came to me, claiming your ar
dor was cooling, so prettily distressed, so young, and so uncertain. I told myself I was comforting her when she threw herself into my arms. She began to throw herself into my embrace frequently.”
“You were young and lusty.” Worth eyed the decanter with desperate longing. “We really do not need to revisit this.”
“I was young, lusty and stupid, and so were you.” Hess put his drink down. “She began to kiss me, all the while apologizing for forgetting herself. I was so very like her dear Worth, you know? And what was I supposed to do, peel her off of me and scold her soundly? I did, several times, but by then you’d drawn your own conclusions.”
“Why not scold her again and send her on her way?” Worth asked, though the question was moot when Jacaranda was leaving with her fraternal forest in the morning. “Why did you have to marry her, Hessian?”
“She said you’d had carnal knowledge of her and begged me to grant her the clemency of marriage.”
Silence, while Worth considered his empty glass and his empty life.
“Were life a stage play, her falsehood would have been hilariously clever,” he said. “I might have once run a glancing hand over her corseted and clothed breast, Hess. Nothing more. I swear it.”
“I concluded that even before the wedding night confirmed it.”
“God’s holy underlinen.” Worth set his glass down rather than smash it and earn a scold from his departing housekeeper. “She simply wanted the title and saw a way to get it.”
“I took several years to come to the same conclusion, and when she was ill, she apologized for as much.”
“And you were married to her. I’m sorry, Hess. It never occurred to me you were the injured party.”
“We were both injured parties.”
Earls did not sit on tables, but brothers did. Brothers also put the past behind them. Entirely behind them.
“Elise wrote to me,” Worth said. “I carefully opened the letter, read her plea to rescue her from your cold and indifferent company, sealed it back up with equal care, and returned it to her, to all appearances unopened.”
“At least you got that much right.”
“I know you never be cold and indifferent to your countess.”
“I came to be.” Hess ran his finger around the lip of his glass in a slow, perpetual circle. “She tolerated my advances with all the warmth of a martyr at the stake, and each time I wondered if she was thinking instead of you.”
“I stopped thinking of her within a few months.”
Another silence, equally considering, not as pained.
“Will you come north with us, Worth?”
“You want me underfoot when I was the reason you ended up leg-shackled to a brainless, grasping twit?” Who hadn’t even presented Hess with a needed heir?
“I should have taken the brainless, grasping twit by the hand, dragged her to you, and accused her to her face of scheming behind your back, but I was young, full of my own consequence, and eager to impress Papa. Then you wouldn’t have spent half your life as a stranger to the only home you’ve known. Of course, then Papa would not have got his hands on her settlement, which was likely why he was so happy to bless the union.”
Worth considered that and admitted Hess had put his finger on a truth, and a relieving truth at that: They were both injured parties. Worth didn’t have to be careful around his brother anymore, didn’t have to suspect Hess’s motives, didn’t have to tiptoe around their past for the sake of the girls.
If Jacaranda remained at Trysting, she’d never reach this sort of understanding with her sister, much less with the tribe of louts who could not be bothered to keep mud out of their own home. The awkwardness would grow, until the rift affected the next generation, and even the next after that.
He could not reconcile with her family for her, and he did not want her to choose him simply because he preserved her from dealing with old hurts.
“I’ll go north with you,” Worth said. “I’m not saying I’ll stay all winter, but I’ll get you home, show Avery the family seat and do the pretty.”
Hess shifted to sit beside his brother again. “Grampion is beautiful in winter.”
“I remember. Truly beautiful.”
And Grampion truly had been his home, once upon a time.
* * *
Jacaranda loved Worth Reverence Kettering. She’d been infatuated with Eric, though at the time she’d had no means of comparing an abiding tenderness for a man with the combustible combination of ignorance, insecurity, rebellion and loneliness that had propelled her into Eric’s skinny arms.
She’d go home to Dorning House, to the rough and tumble of life with her brothers and the beauty of the Dorset coast. She had messes to tidy up there, and she had missed her home.
Though not for a moment had she ever missed it as much as she already missed Worth Kettering. That mess might well not admit of any tidying.
The house was silent and dark around her, and if she’d been able to sleep, she would have passed the night in dreams. She hadn’t been able to sleep. Worth was one floor below her, and they wouldn’t share a roof ever again.
She rose, belted a night robe around her waist, and left her rooms.
He was abed when she let herself into his suite, the click of the door latch sounding loudly behind her.
“You might as well lock it.”
Worth’s voice came from across his sitting room, and Jacaranda could just make out his shape in a rocker by the cold grate.
She locked the door and waited, feet growing cold in more ways than one.
He held out a hand. “I was about to go to you. You couldn’t sleep either?”
She crossed the room, feeling awkward and desolate. No room for her in the rocker, giantess that she was.
He tugged her onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her.
“If you have come merely to talk, Jacaranda, I’ll try to listen.” His lips grazed her temple. “I’m somewhat the worse for drink, though, and I’ve spent a lot of nights behaving with you. I’m not sure I have another increment of saintliness in me, not when I know you’re leaving me tomorrow.”
His arms tightened around her, but she was holding him, too. Beneath her, he was becoming aroused, and what a relief that was. She curled in his lap, battling a longing for him that had simmered inside her since she’d leaned against him weeks ago in the kitchen, wet, angry and bruised.
“No saintliness,” she said, stroking his hair. “Not for you, not for me. We deserve this night for ourselves.”
He pressed his face to her throat, and Jacaranda wasn’t sure, but she thought his shoulders hitched, almost as if he’d been weeping.
“Take me to bed, Worth, please.”
He rose with her in his arms, as if she weighed nothing, and crossed to his bedroom. “You’re sure, Jacaranda?”
“Of this much, yes.” If he’d followed his question with another proposal, her answer would have been very different from her previous replies. A lifetime managing messes and counting somebody else’s silver had abruptly lost its appeal.
Worth laid her on the bed and peeled off his dressing gown and pajama pants with gratifying haste. He sat at her hip, untying the bows of her chemise, one by one as they marched down the center of her body. Gently, he spread the sides of her clothing, leaving her exposed in the moonlight.
“Gorgeous,” he said, “breathtaking, wonderful, lovely, sweet, adorable, beautiful, luscious.” He leaned down and pressed his cheek over her heart. “We should talk, of course. You doubtless want to talk, until I’m nearly agreeing that you should go. I’d rather not be put through that, if you don’t mind, though I understand that you must return to Dorset.”
“No talk then.” For he wasn’t entirely wrong.
“I don’t think I can go slowly, Jacaranda. Not the first time. I’ve wanted you too badly for too long.”
“Not slow, then. Not for either of us.” She held out her arms, and then he was over her, settling the magnificent length of hi
s body snug up against her, the velvety heat of his arousal probing at her sex.
“You’ll tell me if you’re uncomfortable?”
Jacaranda wrapped her legs around him. “I’m uncomfortable now. Uncomfortable with wanting you, needing you. Stop fretting and dithering, Worth, and love me.”
He laughed, a strained gesture toward humor, but he also got a hand under her backside and shifted the angle of her hips. Then he was there, right there at the entrance to her body, big, hot, and blunt, exactly what she craved, almost where she craved him.
She wiggled, she strained, she smacked his muscular backside, but he wouldn’t move.
“Kiss me, Jacaranda.” He kissed her on the cheek, the forehead, the jaw, and slowly she surrendered her will to his. Her body softened, she let herself kiss him back for long, quiet moments.
“Better,” he murmured against her mouth. He ran his nose along her jaw and cradled the back of her head against his palm. Jacaranda had just formed the thought, How much longer? When his cock nudged gently at her sex.
“Worth, please…”
“Hold me.” He tucked her leg up higher around his flank, then began to move his hips in the smallest increments of forward and retreat. He teased at her until she was mindless with yearning, her ankles locked low on his back, all but dragging him into her body.
“Such a managing little thing you are,” he said.
“Now, Worth, please, God, now.”
“Soon,” he said, his voice a whisper rasped in her ear.
“But I need…”
He’d shifted over her, the first thick inch of him penetrating her heat, then withdrawing to penetrate again. She couldn’t help it, didn’t know how or why she’d want to stop herself, when her body clamped hard around him in sheer, blinding ecstasy.
“That’s it,” he whispered, surging into her deeply. “Let go for me.”
And holy angels, did she let go. She let go of reason, dignity, past and future, her body and soul flying to pieces in the pleasure he gave her. She moaned against his throat, the delight shuddering through her and rebounding to leave her shaking and keening in his arms.
“Worth Reverence Kettering, hold me.”
My Favorite Rogue: 8 Wicked, Witty, and Swoon-worthy Heroes Page 75