The Virgin Who Vindicated Lord Darlington

by Anna Bradley

  “Come here, love. Yes, like that.” Unable to stand it any longer, Gideon grasped her hips and eased her down on top of him. “Closer, sweetheart, so you’re…ah, God, yes. Yes, Cecilia,” he moaned when she was straddling him, her damp core nudging against his straining cock. “Let me just…”

  Cecilia braced her hands on his chest, her breath coming in short gasps as he slid his fingers through her silky folds. “Gideon,” she moaned when his thumb brushed against the aching nub at her center. “Gideon, please,” she panted as he circled and plucked at the sensitive bud.

  “So wet, Cecilia. You’re so wet for me.” He rubbed and stroked her until her hips began moving in an insistent rhythm, then he held her steady and positioned her over his throbbing cock. “Come down on me, Cecilia…slowly, sweetheart. Take your time.”

  Gideon gritted his teeth as she lowered herself onto him, fighting the urge to thrust into her seductive heat. But he held back, his hands shaking as she took him inside, her mouth opening in wonder as he slid deeper, one torturous inch at a time.

  They both sighed when he was seated all the way inside her at last.

  Gideon moved his hips in a restrained, shallow thrust, his gaze fixed on her face as he did, gauging her reaction. Her lips parted on a gasp, her body tightening instinctively around him. He thrust upward again, his eyes closing at the hot grip of her body around his cock. “Is it good? I’m not hurting you, am I?”

  She shook her head, her eyes dazed as she gazed down at him. “No, I need…do it again.”

  Gideon groaned as he thrust into her damp heat, setting an easy rhythm. “Move with me,” he whispered, his hands on her hips guiding her, showing her how to meet his thrusts. “Yes. So perfect, Cecilia.”

  Her fingers curled into the slick skin of his chest as she quickened their pace. Gideon surged into her, his climax coiling in the base of his spine, but he held off, fighting against the pleasure that threatened to rush over him. “Take your pleasure, love,” he begged, working his hips against hers.

  “Gideon, please, please…” Cecilia let out a cry and closed her eyes, throwing her head back as her release swept over her. Her body clenched around him, the sweet pressure tearing a guttural moan from his lips as his climax pounded through him. He held her tightly against him as they rode out their release.

  When Cecilia went limp, sagging against him, Gideon gathered her into his arms and eased her onto her side. He buried his face in the damp hair at the back of her neck and draped a possessive hand around her soft belly. They fell asleep curled around each other, Gideon’s lips pressed to her nape.

  They dozed for a bit—not long, perhaps an hour or so. When Gideon woke again it was dark still, but he could hear the faint stirring of the servants as they woke and began their work for the day.

  Cecilia was awake, her hands folded on his stomach and her chin resting on her hands. “I should return to my bedchamber before someone appears to lay a fire for you.”

  “Soon.” He reached for her and gathered her close, burying his face in her hair. “Not yet.”

  She sighed, but nestled into his arms and let him hold her until they heard the sound of doors opening and closing, and Mrs. Briggs’s voice in the downstairs hallway.

  “Gideon.” Cecilia gently disentangled herself from his arms and slipped out of the bed, draping the coverlet over herself as she reached down and snatched her night rail from the floor. “I can’t be here when Amy comes in.”

  “No.” Gideon didn’t argue, though he wanted to weep with frustration as all the smooth, pale skin he’d caressed disappeared under her night rail. “Wait, Cecilia. Promise me you’ll remain in your bedchamber today.”

  “My bedchamber?” Cecilia had crept across the room to the connecting door, but she turned back, a frown on her face. “Gideon, that’s absurd. I have work to—”

  “No, you don’t. Not today. You nearly froze last night. You need to rest today.”

  Cecilia braced her hands on her hips. “I take back what I said that first day about you not looking like a marquess, Gideon. You look quite lordly when you’re ordering people about.”

  “Then you won’t dare to disobey me, will you?” When Cecilia didn’t answer, his eyes narrowed. “Cecilia. Promise me—”

  “I promise I won’t leave the castle. Can you make do with that?”

  Gideon was about to refuse, but she gave him a winning smile, and he shook his head, a return smile rising to his lips in spite of himself. “You promise it? Not one toe over the threshold?”

  “Not a single toe. I swear it.”

  Gideon didn’t like it, but he gave a reluctant nod. She’d be safe as long as she didn’t wander the grounds. “All right. Haslemere and I have business to attend to that will keep us out all day. We’ll return for dinner, and when we do, I intend to find you and ask if you’ve kept your promise.”

  “Yes, my lord. As you wish, my lord.” She gave him a mischievous smile, but he must have looked as forlorn as he felt because her eyes softened, and she darted across his bedchamber, hopped onto the bed, and pressed a quick kiss to his lips before darting away again.

  “It’s fortunate you’re so quick. If I’d caught you, I wouldn’t let you go again.” He gave her what he knew to be a ridiculously foolish, infatuated smile, and waved his hand toward the door. “Go on then, before I change my mind.”

  * * * *

  Cecilia did not break her promise to Gideon. Not this time.

  She might have done so easily enough. By the time she pulled her gray work dress over her head, donned her apron, and bid Amy and Isabella a good morning, Gideon and Lord Haslemere were gone. Mrs. Briggs insisted she rest after her ordeal the night before, and chased her out of the kitchen after breakfast, so by mid-morning Cecilia found herself with a rare empty day on her hands.

  It couldn’t have come at a better time.

  Darlington Castle’s library was an impressive one. The bookshelves towered over Cecilia, stretching from the floor all the way to the ceiling. If she hadn’t had the great good luck to spy Culpeper’s Complete Herbal when she went searching for Mrs. Radcliffe the other night, she likely never would have found it among the thousands of exquisitely bound books.

  But it was right where she’d last seen it, lying on its side on the end of one of the lower shelves. She sat at the table with the thick tome, and rummaged around in her apron pockets for the plants she’d picked in the kitchen garden last night. They were wilted and shrunken, much as she’d expected them to be, but she was certain she’d recognize a picture of them when she saw it. The trouble was, she had no idea what the plants were called, so she’d have to go through the entirety of Culpeper’s Complete Herbal until she spotted them.

  All four hundred and eleven pages of it.

  Each entry included a detailed illustration of the herb, but it might take hours for her to find the illustration she needed. So, she settled in, her wilted stalks on the table beside her as she flipped through one page after the next, searching for the spiky purple plant.

  In the end, it didn’t take hours. Just when she was certain she’d go cross-eyed if she had to study another illustration, she found what she was looking for. Green stalks, spear-shaped leaves, topped by a spiky purple flower like a fuzzy starburst.

  Pennyroyal.

  She leaned over the book to read the page. The entry was brief, as all the entries were, but by the time she came to the end of the short series of paragraphs, her blood had turned to ice in her veins.

  …it provokes women’s courses, and expels the dead child and after-birth.

  Cecilia read it again, then again to be sure she hadn’t confused the words, or somehow misunderstood.

  Being boiled and drank, it provokes women’s courses, and expels the dead child…

  The tea Mrs. Briggs had mentioned hadn’t been spearmint at all, but pennyroyal. Cecilia slapped
a hand over her mouth as a horrible, sick feeling twisted in her stomach. An herb such as this, that brought on bleeding…

  What might it do to a lady carrying a healthy child? What might it do to the child?

  She blinked blindly down at the page, tears blurring her eyes, because she knew…she already knew. Cassandra and Gideon’s child, their son…someone had seen to it he’d never draw breath, and they’d taken Cassandra away too, ensuring she’d be laid in the cold ground before she ever conceived another child.

  Cecilia pressed her hand tighter against her lips as bile flooded her throat, gagging her. Dear God, she was going to be sick. She gripped the edge of the table, and sat for a long time, the library swimming around her, until at last she gained control of herself. She stared down at the book open on the table before her, not seeing it, her mind working to untangle the interwoven threads of the mystery of Cassandra’s death.

  Ugly questions, and even uglier answers, but in the end, there was only one question that mattered. Who at Darlington Castle stood to gain the most if the Marchioness of Darlington died before she could give birth to her child?

  Not Gideon, and not any of the servants.

  No one else had been at the castle during Cassandra’s illness and death but Lady Leanora.

  But why would she want to hurt Cassandra or her child? From what Mrs. Briggs had said, Lady Leanora hadn’t even been permitted in the sick room during Cassandra’s illness. It didn’t make sense, unless…

  They grew apart somewhat after Cassandra became the marchioness.

  Cecilia tapped her palm against her forehead, trying to think. There was nothing so sinister in Lady Leanora’s being jealous of Cassandra once she was elevated to marchioness, but could she have been so jealous she’d have poisoned her own cousin?

  No, surely not, but then…

  There was one odd thing that had struck Cecilia about Cassandra’s diary. She’d hardly said a single word about Lady Leanora.

  Cassandra had mentioned Isabella hundreds of times, and Gideon twice as many as that. She could hardly put pen to paper without saying how grateful she was for them both. She wrote constantly of the people she loved, including Mrs. Briggs and the other servants.

  The one person whose name rarely came up in those pages was Lady Leanora’s.

  Cecilia thought of Lady Leanora’s portrait in the small picture gallery—of her haughty expression, the petulant curve of her lip—and wondered how such a lady would have reacted to her cousin’s sudden elevation in rank. Cassandra had come to Darlington Castle as Lady Leanora’s lowly companion, and six months later she’d supplanted her as its mistress.

  Still, jealousy was one thing, and murder quite another. In any case, Cecilia strongly suspected it was the pennyroyal tea that had killed Cassandra, and according to Mrs. Briggs, it had been Gideon who brought Cassandra’s broth and tea on her dinner tray every night, so how—

  But no, that wasn’t what she’d said, was it? A chill rushed over Cecilia’s skin as she recalled precisely what Mrs. Briggs had told her.

  Lord Darlington brought her a tray of broth every night at dinnertime…only thing she ever touched was the spearmint tea he gave her much later in the evening, to help her sleep.

  The way Mrs. Briggs had described it, the tea hadn’t been on the dinner tray with the broth. Had anyone actually seen Gideon give Cassandra that tea? Mrs. Briggs had only mentioned seeing the teacup with the dregs of the tea when she’d taken the dishes down the next morning.

  Could it be Gideon had only given Cassandra the broth, and someone else had given her the tea? Someone like Lady Leanora, for instance?

  But why? Why would Lady Leanora go to such lengths to poison her cousin, and when would she have had the opportunity? Gideon was the only one permitted in Cassandra’s bedchamber. Lady Leanora could have crept past him and the staff, of course. But there’d been a great many people in the castle back then, and whoever had administered the poison would have had to sneak into Cassandra’s bedchamber every night for months. Surely, someone would have seen her?

  Lady Leanora as the evil villainess didn’t quite fall into place, yet Cecilia’s brain had seized on it with a familiar dogged determination born of instinct. She couldn’t let it go. Her hands were shaking as she rose from her chair and replaced the book on the shelf. She hurried down the deserted corridor, surprised to find she’d been in the library for hours, and the afternoon was waning.

  The stillroom was through an arched door off the back of the kitchen and down a narrow stone hallway that let out onto the kitchen garden. Cecilia had never ventured inside it. Given the shortage of servants, no one seemed to make much use of it anymore, but Lady Leanora would have been mistress of it in the years she’d been the lady of the castle.

  It was much like every other stillroom Cecilia had ever seen, but bigger and grander, with a large stone fireplace at one end, and a huge cabinet made up of neat little drawers and topped with a counter that ran the entire length of one wall. Beside the counter was a long table with a dusty wooden top, likely put there for mixing herbs.

  There was no window, but the beamed ceilings were high, to help disperse any smoke from the kitchens, and dried herbs were hung from the beams. Cecilia reached up to pinch a few leaves from one of the bundles. She crumbled the leaves between her fingers, raised them to her nose, and inhaled the woody scent of rosemary.

  She wandered to the cabinet, opened a few of the drawers, and peered inside. Fennel, sage, comfrey—the usual herbs one would expect to find in a stillroom. Another drawer held bunches of lavender wrapped in silk and tied with string, sachets for scenting drawers or closets, and a few bottles lined up on the counter held lavender oil, the scent faded now.

  There was nothing unusual or sinister in any of it. Even if she did find pennyroyal, it wouldn’t prove anything. According to Culpeper, it had a number of perfectly innocent medicinal uses, and many households favored an herb with such a strong scent of spearmint for use in soap.

  Cecilia turned in a circle, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. The stillroom fire hadn’t been lit in months, but for a room right off the kitchen it was colder than it should be.

  The draft was coming from this side of the room. The temperature here was at least a degree or two colder than the side closest to the kitchen. Not so surprising, perhaps, given all the cooking that took place there, yet Cassandra’s bedchamber was cold in this same drafty way, as if a window or door had been left open. But where? There was no window in this room, and only the one door—

  She crossed to the door that led out into the kitchen garden, thinking the draft must be coming from there, but a quick inspection revealed it to be locked and tightly sealed. Well, perhaps it wasn’t all that mysterious. Castles were drafty places. She turned from the door with a sigh and made her way back across the stillroom toward the kitchen.

  That was when she saw it. Hidden in a shallow alcove in the darkest and coldest part of the room was a stack of wooden boxes containing messy piles of glass jars, and behind it…

  Behind it was the edge of a door. Only the merest sliver of it was visible—if she’d blinked, she would have missed it. She approached the stack of wooden crates, her heart pounding. They looked heavy, much too heavy for her to move them, but just as she was trying to make up her mind whether to fetch Duncan or not, she noticed the dust pattern on the floor.

  Grime had accumulated over every surface in the abandoned stillroom, and the floor was no exception, but there was a wide space just in front of the boxes that was clear of dust and dirt, as if someone had shoved the crates out of the way of the door, leaving a length of bare floor.

  Cecilia nudged her toe against the corner of one of the crates, and to her surprise, it shifted easily out of her way. A quick rummage through them soon revealed why. The jars had been carefully arranged along the tops of the crates, but underneath they were filled with
sawdust and hay.

  Cecilia pushed them aside just enough to slip behind them. There was a bolt lock on this side of the door, but it wasn’t bolted. Just as she went to open it, she noticed a smear of something white on the iron latch. She touched it, then rubbed the substance between her fingers and thumb. It was thick and white, and a bit sticky, rather like…

  White face paint. The sort of paint ladies and gentlemen used to achieve the perfectly white skin considered fashionable some years earlier. No one had much use for it anymore, now that a more natural look had taken precedence.

  Unless…

  Cecilia stared down at her white fingertips, her heart rushing into her throat. Unless one was a white ghost, and then it might prove very useful, indeed.

  But she didn’t have time to consider it now. She turned her attention back to the secret door. A quick twist of her wrist revealed it to be, as she’d hoped, unlocked. It creaked open, but beyond was a darkness so thick Cecilia couldn’t see a thing. It was cold, too, terribly cold, with walls of damp stone.

  It was a passageway. Cecilia’s heart pounded with dread at the thought of being trapped inside it, but she wasn’t going to turn coward now. It was so narrow and so low she was forced to duck to pass through. It seemed to her as though she crept along it for miles, but it likely wasn’t more than ten minutes before a thin line of weak light appeared ahead.

  A few dozen steps more, and she came to a steep stone staircase, and embedded in the stone ceiling above them was a wooden plank fitted with an iron ring that served as a makeshift handle. A thin strip of light peeked around the edges, and as she drew nearer, Cecilia saw it was open just a crack, and a branch stuck into the gap to keep it from slamming shut again.

  Cecilia heaved it up the rest of the way, and with a little cry threw one arm up to shade her eyes. She knew at once it led outside, because the snow was still falling. The cold drops landed on the bare skin of her hands and neck, and the wind whipped her hair around her head.