She sighed. “It was wrong of me. But no one would ever recognize Norland in that fictional character, except…”
“Except that you wrote about it in that letter to Jonathon,” Rand finished.
“He’d seen the likeness and reproached me,” said Cecily. “I wrote that letter justifying my ridicule, point by point.” She blinked rapidly. In a brittle voice, she said, “Do you know, I don’t think I like my younger self at all. However, I did alter the way Sir Ninian looked in later episodes. And of course, after a time the character became his own person and not a caricature.”
“But if someone gets their hands on that letter, they could make it public.”
“Yes.” She swallowed. “It would ruin me and make a laughingstock of him. I couldn’t bear it.”
He hesitated. “You were a child, Cecily.”
She flung out a hand. “Do you think that will matter to the gossips? Of course it won’t!”
“And you thought that I would use this letter against you if I found it.” The notion that she’d thought him so base fired his anger.
She threw him a guarded look. “Well, I didn’t know, you see—”
“Are you ready to go now?” he said abruptly. “The others will wonder what’s keeping us.”
“Why yes, I—” She broke off. “Good God, Rand, are you angry with me?”
A muscle ticced in his jaw. “Angry? Why should I be?”
“Oh, not the least reason in the world,” she retorted. “Yet you are. I can tell. You might think you are the iceberg of the ton but your eyes give you away every time.”
He stared at her. She bit her lip, as if sorry to have said so much.
“Tell me this,’ he said abruptly. “You wrote that scathing summary of your betrothed’s character many years ago,” he said. “But has your opinion of Norland altered since then?”
She took a deep breath. “I was a silly, headstrong little girl, puffed up in her own conceit. I bitterly regret writing that letter.”
“That is not an answer.”
She remained silent.
Harshly, he said, “Did you truly think that I would go to the scandal-sheets with that story?” Try as he might, he couldn’t erase the wounded outrage from his tone.
“No, I thought you would hold it over my head as blackmail,” said Cecily, looking him straight in the eye.
Her words slid beneath his ribs like a stiletto. The pain of it nearly robbed him of speech. “Charming notion you have of me!”
“Well, you’ve shown yourself to be utterly ruthless when you want something,” said Cecily, her gaze averted now. She shrugged. “How should I know where you would draw the line?”
He reached out and captured her pointed chin in his fingertips, turned her head so she faced him. “You know,” he said softly. “You know me better than you want to admit.”
For a breathless moment, her eyes seemed to darken with emotion. He wanted to pull her to him and love her with all the intense heat that burned inside him, incinerate her objections, claim her for his own. He wanted to explore every inch of her—body, heart, mind, soul. He wanted so very badly to know her, in every sense of the word.
With a small gasp, Cecily jerked her head away, as if he’d burned her in truth and not only in his imagination.
She planted the point of her parasol in the ground and jumped to her feet. “This is absurd and wrong and … and we ought to join the others before they wonder where we are.”
Chapter Sixteen
Rand maintained a smooth, unruffled demeanor for the rest of the day, but he seethed inside.
Cecily had told him she intended to leave his house tomorrow. She must lose no time in locating that missing piece of correspondence, she said. If she didn’t find it in one of those trunks tonight, she must search Lady Davenport’s house.
As it happened, he had an imminent appointment in town himself. If what the Duke of Montford had written to him was true, he needed to cut short the house party almost as soon as it had begun. Which was excessively bad form. However, he didn’t care if he offended his relations. He must simply trust that Garvey and his sister would understand.
Norland walked among the clouds at the moment, having secured an in principle agreement from Grimshaw to fund his next scientific project. Not even veiled threats from Rand could move Cecily’s betrothed downstairs for dinner after the meeting with Grimshaw.
Rand decided it didn’t matter.
His world had narrowed to one person. The rest of them could go to hell.
He had made the cataclysmic discovery today that Lady Cecily Westruther had the power to wound him. Which was laughable, really, considering how thick-skinned he’d been in his pursuit of her until now. Nothing she had said or done had deterred him from chasing her once he’d set his mind to it.
Nothing she had said or done since had convinced him she didn’t want him, too.
He’d as good as told her he’d go to any lengths to win her. He planned to take extreme measures; she’d discover as much when she returned to London.
So when she accused him of keeping that letter so as to blackmail her, why had he all of a sudden become thin-skinned? Why had that barb stung?
He wanted her and resented her power over him in equal measure. If Garvey were privy to all this mess of thoughts and emotions, he’d counsel Rand to let her go. After he stopped rolling about the floor laughing, that was.
But he couldn’t release her. It wasn’t within his power to do so. Without even meaning to do it, she’d captivated him.
He couldn’t let another man have her. Couldn’t allow her to deny what was between them any longer.
He’d make one last attempt to persuade her tonight, before she left.
One last chance to settle this amicably, before he declared war.
* * *
When dinner was over and she had spent a decent amount of time in the drawing room afterwards, Cecily claimed fatigue and retired for the evening.
Instead of going to her bedchamber, she went straight up to the attics with a renewed sense of urgency but without an awful lot of hope. Tonight should see the completion of her search, for good or ill.
Disregarding the toll kneeling on the attic floor took on her fine muslin gown, she threw open one more trunk and attacked its contents.
With only the candle Ashburn had given her to light the room, Cecily’s eyes soon grew tired. All the late nights and early mornings were catching up with her.
Her vision blurred and she had to keep blinking it clear, but she pressed on, sorting through the great morass of papers. It was past midnight when she’d finished the last trunk.
As she went slowly down the stairs, she felt defeated. If that incriminating letter had been anywhere, surely it would have been in that trunk she’d found with all the other personal correspondence. Slim chance of finding it among the rest.
On the landing, she saw the glow of another candle moving up toward her and heard a firm tread on the stair.
Rand, of course. He rounded the staircase and looked up. “Ah,” he said softly. “I hoped I’d find you up here.”
He came swiftly up the staircase and stopped on the landing, where she stood next to a deeply recessed window.
The sky must have cleared, for moonlight streamed over them, making candlelight scarcely necessary.
“Any luck?” He set down his candle on the windowsill.
“Only a dusty gown and a paper cut for my troubles.” In an offhand gesture, she indicated the index finger that still smarted from the place where a piece of foolscap had sliced it.
He captured her hand and tilted it to the light so as to inspect the damage.
Her stupid heart bounded into her throat. One touch brought her body tingling to life. This was madness!
“Ah.” He located the tiny cut. His gaze flicked to hers and his stern mouth quirked up at one corner. “Shall I kiss it better?”
Before she could refuse him, he brought her fingertip to his l
ips and pressed a kiss to the small cut.
Heat flashed over her. She gasped and would have drawn her hand free, but he took her fingertip a small way into his mouth and gently sucked.
The warm, moist pressure of it lasted but a moment, but in that moment, her insides turned warm and moist, too.
Briefly, she closed her eyes, and her body swayed a little toward him. He removed the candle from her grasp and set it down.
“Are you still angry with me about today?” he asked in a low, gravelly voice.
“No,” she said. “Though I thought it was rather you who was angry with me.”
“What a pity,” he replied, ignoring that last sally. “I like it when you’re angry. You have the most speaking eyes, Lady Cecily Westruther. They tell me all kinds of things you would not wish me to know.”
“How indiscreet of them,” Cecily said. She made her tone skeptical, but she could not help wondering if what he said was true.
“Do you want to know what they are saying to me now, Cecily?”
Yes. “No.”
“They are saying ‘take me.’”
She tried for a scornful laugh but it came out a little shakily. “Take me?”
“Do you deny it?”
“Of course I deny it.” How could she possibly do otherwise?
Ashburn was in a strange mood tonight, she thought a little desperately as he moved toward her. She retreated a pace, an involuntary response, but he followed. One more step and her back was to the wall. Mere inches separated their bodies.
Candlelight warmed his features, burnished his eyes to gold. There was both a wildness and a firm sense of purpose to him tonight. Something deeply feminine within her responded to it, wanted to feel that wildness, capture it for her own.
His low voice seemed to speak from inside her. “Shall I obey those eyes of yours, Cecily? Shall I make you forget everything but the feel of my touch? Shall I do things to you that will bring a blush to your cheeks whenever you think of them? Give you a taste of how it could be between us?”
Cecily’s mouth had gone dry. Her heart pounded so hard, the sound of it seemed to crowd her brain. She brought her hands up in a halfhearted, defensive gesture. He caught her wrists, pinned them to the wall on either side of her head.
She felt exposed, panicked, helpless to escape him, and the combination set her ablaze. Dimly, she knew it was a fiction that he held her completely in his power. She might have called a stop to this restraint at any moment. But it was a fiction she wanted—needed—to preserve.
His tone grew softly menacing. “Shall I?”
Another flare of heat. She swallowed hard but said nothing. Let him read the answer in those chatty eyes of hers.
“Have it your way,” he ground out. “I am tired of waiting for you to come to your senses. If this is how you want it, so be it.”
With his hands clamping her wrists, Rand kissed her with such force that her head pressed back into the cool, hard wall. He ravished her mouth with deep strokes of his tongue, unleashing upon her all his frustration and pent-up desire. She was trapped, overwhelmed, overcome. And she’d never felt more alive in her life.
His mouth was everywhere, at her throat, at her breast, his teeth gently biting her nipples through layers of gown and corset. Shock at such boldness held her silent at first, but she soon abandoned any thought of resistance. He did not release her wrists until she sagged, boneless and mindless, against the wall.
Her arms dropped to her sides. They both knew she would not take advantage of her freedom and try to leave. The time for running had slipped into the past like a dream. Now was all that mattered. Now, with his mouth on her, sliding, nibbling, licking. Now, with his hands, those large, dexterous hands caressing, touching, building her pleasure, stoking her need.
The intensity of feeling was something she’d never experienced before. The tall, shadowy form who ravished her thus was Rand, Duke of Ashburn, she reminded herself, and she shivered at the mere thought.
Her eyelids had long since lowered in languorous enjoyment of the moment, a string of delicious sensations that shocked her and delighted her in equal measure.
As Rand used one hand to gather the material of her skirts, her eyes flew open.
“’Sh,” he said against her mouth.
Cool air flowed around her ankles, then her stockinged legs. She felt the heat of his hand on her bare thigh, just above her garter.
The place between her legs ached and throbbed as he stroked upward, tantalizingly close, but not nearly close enough. His breathing was harsh and hot in her ear. “Tell me you want this and I’ll give you everything you desire.”
A frown creased her brows. She didn’t know precisely what he meant. She didn’t know what she wanted, but of course he knew better than she did. Which was vaguely galling, but desire and need won over caution and pride.
“I want this,” she murmured, clutching at his shoulders. “Show me.”
Without hesitation, his hand found the place between her legs. She’d grown embarrassingly wet there but the sharp gasp he made when his fingertips found her moist folds of flesh told her he didn’t mind that at all.
The terrifying, awestruck excitement of it was almost unbearable. He was touching her there! So gently, with such attention and care. She trembled at the shocking sweetness it. The intimacy, the knowing.
He bent his head to touch his forehead to hers. His breath, warm and soft and faintly laced with wine flowed against her parted lips.
His eyes were closed, she realized, his expression intent as he learned the contours of that secret place.
And then he touched something exquisitely sensitive that made her breath catch in surprise. He circled slowly, stroked, rubbed, until the very soles of her feet tingled with a strange, intense heat.
And then the warmth gathered in that place where he touched her and all of her seemed to draw tight, bunching, winding tighter until her quickened breathing turned to sobbing, ragged cry. He took her mouth and plunged one finger inside her, swallowing her cries as she exploded into shimmering brilliance, like a firework in his arms.
He crushed her to him, kissing her as if he might drink in all the pleasure he’d given her. Her body shaped itself to his in the most intimate manner; she felt the hot hardness of his member pressing against her. Dimly, she understood what she might never have comprehended otherwise, the craving for that part of a man. The need to be filled by it, by him.
Because even well-pleasured as she was, she made the shocking realization that she was far from sated. The aching need to return the pleasure he’d given her surprised her almost as much.
All of these jumbled emotions came to her through a barely conscious haze. He made no attempt to take advantage of this rare moment of pliancy, but he kept her senses befuddled with kisses.
His lips drifted over her cheek. “You are special, Cecily. So very special,” he murmured into her ear. “I won’t rest until you’re mine.”
Suddenly, and far too late, the awful truth of what she’d done came home to her. She tensed in his arms.
He was so attuned to her, he reacted at once. “Don’t,” he said fiercely, pulling away, taking her by the shoulders as if to shake her. “Just don’t, Cecily.”
And he was right. What a fool and a hypocrite she would be to start bleating about her betrayal of Norland now, when she’d been the one to take and take that exquisite torture and offer nothing in return.
So she made no recriminations, silently hating herself and her weakness.
She had to make herself say it. “This doesn’t change anything.” She could not betray Norland like this! It would never, ever happen again.
“No, it doesn’t,” he agreed, his expression harsh. “I still want you. I want you to be my duchess. More, I think, than anything I’ve wanted before. And you are too stubborn, too frightened to see what’s best for everyone concerned.”
His voice rasped. “Damn it, Cecily, admit you want me too. Is that so hard?
”
She squeezed her eyes shut and let her head fall back against the wall. Yes, it was hard. Impossible, she thought wearily, as her body turned cold and her pulse slowed and her mind slowly but surely sharpened back into focus.
Impossible. Wrong. And she was a fool, a traitor and a coward but she’d wanted him so much …
Once again, Rand took her silence as an answer. He sucked in a breath. “You’d throw it all away, wouldn’t you, so that you can be untouchable, so you can be safe.”
Her lips were numb. She had to force the words through them. “I will never break my betrothal.”
He stared at her for a long time. “Very well, then,” he said. “You leave me no choice. No more diplomacy, no more games. This, dearest Cecily, is war.”
* * *
Rand’s words rang in Cecily’s ears all the way home from Cambridgeshire. When he kissed her, touched her, when the world fell away, she was more than tempted to agree to anything he demanded of her.
But that was folly of the worst kind. Quite apart from the scandal and the insult to Norland and his family, if she broke her betrothal and married Rand, she would soon become precisely the sort of female she’d vowed never to be. Dependent on him not only for material things, but for her happiness as well. She’d vowed long ago never to let her happiness rest on any one person. Especially not a husband.
Rand would never let her live her own life in her own home with a large enough income at her disposal to do as she pleased. She would not be permitted to bat an eyelid without consulting him first. He was that kind of man: powerful, arrogant, altogether too accustomed to getting his own way.
No, she must try to put him out of her mind and concentrate on finding a way to search Lavinia’s room for that confounded note. If she had no luck there, then she must take her chances and pray that the letter in which she had lampooned her future husband never came to light.
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