Striving for control, he sat next to her and lifted one of her twisting hands. He wanted her to feel safe, to know he’d mastered his ravening hunger. But his fingers trembled as he touched her.
“Tell me,” he repeated, beating back the lust that writhed and screamed inside him.
Her hand curled around his in a gesture of trust he didn’t deserve and she sucked in a deep breath. The faint color receded from her face, leaving her even paler. “Your uncle said unless I…coax you into my bed before Saturday, he’ll kill me.”
Jesus, why hadn’t he guessed?
Through the humiliation and fear writhing in her belly, Grace struggled for words. “And before…” She swallowed again, then spoke in a frantic rush. “And before he kills me, he’ll give me to Monks and Filey.”
“God blast him to hell,” Lord Sheene said viciously, his hand tightening around hers.
“I’ve betrayed you in the worst possible way.” The shame that had shadowed her all night rose to choke her. How could he be so kind when she’d set out to suborn him? She lurched to her feet, desperate to escape to the lonely privacy of the bedroom.
Roughly, he pulled her back down beside him. “What are you going to do about Saturday?”
She searched his eyes for the disgust he must feel. She only found concern and the banked fires of anger at his uncle’s machinations.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, although she shuddered because she did know.
At that moment, she reached a difficult decision. She’d never allow Monks and Filey to touch her. She’d kill herself first. Her death had been inevitable from the moment those foul thugs had abducted her. Better that death came before the final degradation. After tonight’s fiasco, she’d never again muster the nerve to try to seduce Lord Sheene.
Her course was set for irrevocable ruin. She wouldn’t take him down to destruction with her.
“You should have told me this,” he said gently.
“What could you have done? Apart from say there’s no hope.”
“We could deceive my uncle. If we share a bed…” He stopped. “If we share a bed, no one need know we’re not lovers.”
For one bright moment, rescue beckoned, then she remembered what the ruse would cost him. “Then your uncle will think he’s won. After what you told me today, I know the stakes.”
“My pride isn’t worth your life, Grace.”
But pride kept Lord Sheene alive. If he conceded victory to his uncle, he was lost. She couldn’t let that happen. “No.”
His expression twisted with pain. “I vowed I wouldn’t hurt you, Grace.”
Useless tears welled up again. She felt so utterly helpless. “Everything’s impossible.”
Surprisingly, he gave her the sweet smile that made her heart cramp with futile longing. “It won’t look so bad in the morning.”
The comfort one offered a child. Grace recognized its essential falseness. Still, when Lord Sheene drew her into his embrace, she slid up the sofa to lean against him. He cradled her upon his bare chest as tenderly as if she were indeed a child. But when she rested her sticky face on his cool skin, the feelings that flooded her were unmistakably adult.
Her failed seduction had opened the doors to forbidden knowledge. After tonight, his smell and his taste had permeated her bones. She wanted his arms to bind her to his side forever. She wanted him to kiss her again and again with his open mouth. The unsatisfactory kisses she’d forced on his unwilling lips only whetted her sinful curiosity. She wanted him to push her onto her back and thrust inside her, solid, heavy, possessive. She wanted him to make her his in a way her husband never had.
He said she could trust him. And she did. It was herself she didn’t trust.
Especially now she knew she didn’t yearn alone.
Chapter 11
As Grace slept in Matthew’s arms, he read exhaustion and unhappiness on her face. She’d come to him tonight to whore herself. The candlelight revealed what that decision had cost. Even in sleep, she looked strained to breaking.
Matthew eased along the sofa so her body curved into his side and her head rested on his shoulder. For once, the cramped space was welcome. Whimpering, she snuggled closer and her bare legs tangled in his.
He’d seen her naked body. He’d touched her skin. The world had changed for him tonight. He groaned softly into the fragrant hair on her crown as he recalled how she’d straddled him. Spending daylight hours with Grace stretched control to the limits. Nights holding her in his arms would test him beyond bearing.
Yet he had to convince Lord John they were lovers.
He had to protect her. What did his struggle with his uncle matter if it meant her destruction? He’d die before he let anyone harm her.
Even asleep, she seemed to sense his turmoil. One slender arm, clad in his shirt sleeve, slid across his naked chest in a protective gesture.
The thought was absurd. He meant nothing to her. How could he? Malicious fortune had catapulted her without warning or consent into his tragedy.
He lay awake watching her as the candle guttered and gray predawn crept into the room. His eyes traced the pale smoothness of forehead. The elegant arch of eyebrows. The straight, delicate nose. The determined chin.
He’d likened her to a painted Madonna. But this particular Madonna was stubborn. Courage and will tempered her sweetness. Grace was no pliant reed.
Thank God. Or his uncle would crush her.
Or mold her into an obliging puppet.
His eyes rested on her mouth, soft and vulnerable in relaxation. The mouth she’d used on him tonight. He couldn’t call that violent meeting a kiss. Although the fleeting possibility of a kiss had trembled between them.
What would it be like if she kissed him in genuine passion?
God help him, he’d never know.
The next morning Grace discovered the marquess standing in a clearing. Unreliable sun glanced across his dark head and gleamed on the boots he wore with black breeches and a loose shirt. Her heart missed a beat at his magnificence.
Apprehension and unquenchable curiosity warred inside her. She’d kissed him. Touched his body. Flaunted her nakedness before him. Cried in his arms. Slept next to him wearing only his shirt. She’d felt the contained power in his long sinewy muscles.
It was a level of intimacy she’d never achieved with her husband. She’d done her duty by Josiah but the act was always quick, furtive, performed in darkness while they remained clothed.
In silent fascination, she hovered behind Lord Sheene. She watched him aim a pebble at a small patch scraped into the bark of a beech about thirty yards away. The sharp ping as the stone struck the makeshift target explained the noise she’d followed to find him.
He bent and scooped more stones from the heap in the wildflowers at his feet. With dogged persistence, he threw each one at the tree, every time hitting the center of his mark. The accuracy was uncanny. And sad. His skill was stark testament to the solitary hours he’d spent perfecting this.
When he’d pitched the last pebble, he glanced over his shoulder. Although she’d approached quietly. Although she hadn’t said a word.
“Grace.”
Nothing else. Just her name. It lay between them like a challenge.
The potent memory of her naked skin gliding against his rose like lava in her blood. Before she met him, she’d never felt lust, but she felt lust now. It blinded her to everything but her need to touch the marquess.
Cursing her blush, she stepped forward. “Lord Sheene.”
He turned slowly. She wasn’t sure how he’d react to her. Anger? Disdain? Disgust? After her failed seduction, she deserved all three, although at least he knew now that his uncle had forced an impossible choice.
She was astonished to see unveiled hunger burning in his eyes. She shivered as the charged silence built. Extended.
A soft sound of yearning emerged from deep in her throat. Her heart thumped out an erratic, heavy rhythm. His eyes deepened to dark honey and
he made a convulsive movement toward her.
“When you came to me…” His voice was ragged.
“No.” She flung out a hand to ward him off. How could she find words to express what she’d felt last night? The fear. The shame. The desire.
She couldn’t. Not in daylight.
“Very well.” His jaw adopted a granite line. She suddenly remembered that he stemmed from a long line of ruthless magnates. “But we will discuss it.”
“Just…just not now.” She grabbed a steadying breath. “What were you doing with those pebbles?” Her color rose higher at the question’s banality.
He dusted his hands off and stepped closer. “My father taught me to shoot. This keeps my eye in—and helps me think.”
She didn’t need to ask what he thought about. Lord John’s threats still preyed like ravenous leopards on her own peace. His gaze sharpened on her. “What do you want, Grace?”
You.
She bit back the swift answer. Although, heaven help her, it was true. And after last night, she knew he wanted her too. That knowledge lay between them like an unsheathed sword.
She stepped over the invisible but deadly blade. Her lips stretched in an uncertain smile. “We could walk.”
“We could.” He bent his glossy head in grudging assent but his eyes held an implacable glint as they focused on her. “You can tell me about your life.”
She started back as if he’d punched her. She never spoke to anyone about her past. Never. Never. Never.
“I can’t.” It was the whine of the indulged child she’d left behind with her life at Marlow Hall. The girl who wouldn’t practice her pianoforte or do her French translation. That girl was a ghost she’d banished years ago. “It’s not an edifying story. I don’t…”
How could she reveal the depths of her selfishness to this man she admired above all others? She didn’t want him to despise her, as he would despise her when he knew the damage she’d caused.
“Grace, your secrets are your own,” he said gravely. “Keep them or share them. I have no right to insist.”
The calm acceptance in his rich eyes soothed her fears, lured her to contemplate unprecedented confidences. Suffering had granted Lord Sheene a unique wisdom. If anyone could understand her topsy-turvy history, the mad marquess would.
No other man had seen her naked body. Perhaps it was fitting that he should glimpse her naked soul.
She squared her shoulders. “No, I want…I want to tell you.” Strangely, it was true.
Both were silent as they stepped onto the faint track through the trees. Wolfram bounded out of the undergrowth and trailed after them, although he soon grew bored with their sedate pace and set off on exploratory tangents of his own.
The narrowness of the path meant only a couple of inches separated her from Lord Sheene. Close enough for his warmth to tease. The loamy woodland smells carried a tempting hint of his soap. Even through the anxiety swirling in her mind, she was unbearably aware of him as a man.
“I know you’re from a good family,” Lord Sheene eventually said, his voice gentle. He’d used the same tone when she was sick and he’d believed her his enemy. Even then, his voice had quieted the screeching devils in her heart. “Were you an only child?”
She’d been struggling to work out how to begin. Although talking about Philip was always painful, she forced herself to answer. “I had one brother. He died two years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, I am too.” And sorrier still for the mess he’d made of his life. Philip had been clever and handsome and charming, but spoiled. He’d died in a duel over another man’s wife after a drunken quarrel in a Soho gambling hell.
With an abrupt movement, she bent to pluck a late bluebell. She nervously twirled the frail flower in her fingers. Heavens, why was it so difficult to find the words? “When I was sixteen, I fell in love with a poor man. Worse, my suitor was in trade and a radical.”
She waited for some derisive comment but the marquess remained silent as he followed the shaded track at her side.
Eventually, she went on in a more natural tone. “Josiah was the local bookseller. He used to talk to me about big things, important things. It was so flattering to be treated as an intelligent woman and not just a silly girl. Of course, I was just a silly girl. Conceited and headstrong and selfish and with far too high an opinion of my cleverness.”
“You’re not the first chit to have her head turned by male attention. You’re being too hard on yourself.”
“No,” she said hollowly. “No, I’m not being too hard on myself. My vanity and foolishness broke my father’s heart.”
“Grace.”
Just one word in that deep, deep voice. He reached out to still the busy fingers that shredded the bluebell. The touch lasted the sheerest instant. Still it scorched her to the marrow. She relaxed her deathlike grip on the ruined flower and dropped it to the edge of the path. She sucked in a steadying breath.
“When Josiah realized I was interested in his cause, he lent me books, books that would have given my father an apoplexy if he’d known. Shelley. Southey. Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin. Cobbett.”
“That’s a list to chill the heart of every landlord in the kingdom.”
She read his carefully neutral response as tacit criticism. “You disapprove.”
“Not at all. The country groans under inequality.” He stepped in front of her to hold a dripping branch out of her way. “Although I wonder what sympathy I’d have for the downtrodden if I hadn’t suffered my own injustice. My uncle’s an unregenerate reactionary who invokes the death sentence for the most minor offenses. I loathe that he uses my fortune to support his merciless conservatism.”
She ducked under the branch and waited for the marquess. “When I met Josiah, he was in his fifties but still on fire to save the world. He was like a prophet out of the Bible.” How she remembered the vivid excitement of those weeks. Her sheltered existence had never offered anything to match it. “Even after my maid betrayed me to my father, Josiah still smuggled letters to the hall. Wonderful letters about how he and his followers would create heaven on earth. I was so eager to join the crusade.”
“Even so, it’s a huge step for such a man to offer marriage to a well-born miss of sixteen. Or was he blinded by the family fortune?”
The sardonic note in Lord Sheene’s voice made her curious. She cast him a searching glance under her lashes, noticing the severe line of his usually expressive mouth. He claimed to support reform, yet his demeanor reeked of hostility.
Having started her story, though, she found herself determined to finish it, whatever it cost. Something in her was desperate to reveal the sorry, disastrous facts. Perhaps because if the marquess scorned her, it would break the growing intimacy and attraction that bound her to him.
“No, I proposed to Josiah. I couldn’t share his quest without the world calling me harlot. That would only harm the great mission. I was a forward baggage. I didn’t think how my actions would affect my family. All I cared about was what I wanted.”
Lord Sheene hooked his hand around her arm, swinging her round to face him. He dropped his hand quickly. Once she’d have thought that was because he didn’t want to touch her. Now she knew better.
“Jesus, Grace, Paget didn’t have to agree. You were little more than a child and he was a man in his maturity.”
Yes, the marquess was angry. She wondered why he cared about the fate of a harebrained girl and her overbearing old lover. She began to walk again. Motion somehow made words come more easily. When Lord Sheene caught up, she began to speak in a flat voice.
“Josiah wasn’t happy about the marriage. Family life distracted him from his glorious task. But I was so dedicated, so avid to learn. Nobody else was. Josiah had such hopes of founding the New Jerusalem. When it didn’t happen, he was a disappointed man.” In spite of her attempt to sound composed, sadness seeped into her tone. “Disappointment became his stock in trade, much more than his shelv
es of dusty unsold books.”
How it had hurt to discover that her idol was a sanctimonious, narrow-minded prig. She’d soon learned that she’d been tragically mistaken in her judgment of Josiah’s qualities. By then, it was too late to undo the harm she’d done to herself and others, including Josiah. She’d exchanged a loving family for a ranting martinet who never forgave her for being better born than he. Her disillusionment and his disappointment had combined into a bitter brew that tainted every moment of her married life.
The marquess frowned at the path ahead but she sensed his vision remained fixed on a purely internal landscape. “Your father must have been furious when he learned what you’d been up to.”
“Furious. Frustrated. Disbelieving. He’d planned a great match, a viscount at least. I wasted myself on an indigent shopkeeper forty years my senior and a blasted democrat as well. After he found out, he gave me a terrible scolding. He banished Josiah from the village, easy when you own every stick and stone.” She took a breath, striving to reclaim her unemotional tone. “Josiah left and set up in York and we decided to run away, then seek forgiveness. He was never happy I disobeyed my parents—the Bible says you must honor your father and mother.”
“So you eloped?”
The marquess still didn’t look at her. Was he condemning her as she’d condemned herself so often in the lonely reaches of her soul? He should.
“Yes.” How thrilled she’d been. She’d always wanted to see the world. See the world? What a laughable notion. She’d consigned herself to nine years of a prison barely less constricting than her present captivity. She stifled the caustic thought. “I’d always been my father’s favorite. He’d come round once he recognized Josiah’s great soul.”
“I doubt rich fathers care for poor men in any guise, even poor men with great souls,” Lord Sheene said dryly.
“I learned that with experience. Josiah and I married at Gretna, then returned for my family’s blessing. My father granted me five minutes to inform me I was no longer his daughter. Mamma and Philip were forbidden to say goodbye.”
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