Her nails dug into his biceps. The release on the periphery of her awareness, pressing at the very seams of her being, promising cataclysmic pleasure. She knew his must be imminent in the taut line of his jaw, the thrumming tension in his body. The way she’d lost him to his pleasure to the tempo of his body. She thumped his back with her fist, and it spurred him on. Her head thrashed back.
“I . . . Jules . . .”
And she came apart with a scream as he went still over her. His release shuddered through him, shook his big body like a rag, and he spilled into her.
They lay together quietly, side by side, his arms wrapped around her from behind. His rib cage swayed with his breath, which fell softly against her throat. The sweat cooled on their bodies. The fire hissed and popped, burning ever lower. Over in the corner, Charybdis was taking a noisy bath.
But his hands never stopped moving. Softly, slowly, they roamed over her, savoring her. Exploring. Soothing. And then, when she began to ripple again into his touch, his touch became deliberately arousing. She’d never been more grateful for her own skin, for her lips, for her fingertips, for the miraculous variety of pleasure that could be had from it at his hands.
He covered her breasts in his hands and nipped at the back of her neck gently. She rolled in his embrace to face him, sought his lips with hers, opened her body to him, pulling him down to cover her. He tasted dark and sweet as ever; kissing him was like falling through time, endlessly, blissfully. There was only him.
“Here,” he whispered.
He rolled her gently onto her stomach, pulled her hips up toward him, and slid his palms along her back. His hard cock brushed against her, then he slid inside, slowly, so that she felt every inch of him. She groaned at the pleasure of it, as he moved this time deliberately, with finesse, finding the places inside her that banked desire into ranging need. He drove himself into her body, and she urged him deeper, and harder, until they screamed together.
They slept like the dead, entangled.
Signora Licari isn’t the only one who snores, she thought, smiling faintly.
He did it softly at least, one arm outflung, the other folded protectively across his chest, as though he was guarding his heart. He looked exhausted and spent and happy and very young.
She propped herself up on her elbow and just watched him sleep for a time. What a gift it was to see him this vulnerable, this trusting.
The room was cool; the light easing into it was the pearl gray of dawn.
And she slipped out of bed, and tiptoed across the carpet. She gave Charybdis a good morning kiss, then tiptoed across the carpet, collecting her gloves, her slippers. She gingerly lifted the lid of her trunk and slipped her sketchbook out of it. She lowered it gently to the bed. And then she selected the first dress she found, a worn and wrinkled walking dress, and dropped it over her head. And then she ventured over near the bed to pluck up her pelisse. She bent over.
Which was when one of his arms snapped out and seized her calf.
She gave a little shriek. She tried an experimental tug.
Like a shackle, it was.
“You’re leaving.” A flat, incredulous statement. A guess.
“Yes,” she said softly. “Unhand me please.”
He hesitated, and for a moment she thought he wouldn’t.
And then he did.
He turned over and folded his hands beneath his head.
The silence was dense.
“Why?” he finally said.
“The only thing that’s changed is that we’ve made love. You want what you want and I want what I want. Last night was wonderful. And I am leaving. It’s that simple.”
“Phoebe . . .”
“Please don’t try to stop me. I haven’t the strength for it. I do not want to argue. I don’t want to be persuaded. We had one perfect night. Let it be enough.”
He heard it in her voice. The faint escalating panic.
So many things he could have accused her of then, and he knew he would have been right about all of them. He knew she was still afraid. That she was running away from him and from the fear that she would one day lose him. She was running away from the enormity and uncertainty of all that she felt and all this meant. He’d always tried to wrangle uncertainty to fit his notion of how the world should run, to regiment it. When she couldn’t control uncertainty with facts . . . she ran.
“I’ve . . .” he began.
He could have completed that any number of ways: “. . . botched everything.” “. . . loved you since I laid eyes on you.” “. . . been a complete idiot for you.” “. . . never deserved you.” “. . . been so wrong about everything that matters in life.”
“I love you.” He hadn’t planned to say it.
She went still.
She kissed her fingers, and laid them on his lips, stopping him from saying anything more.
“Thank you,” she said. “Don’t follow me.”
Chapter 29
It was inconceivable that she should be gone. He covered his face with his hands, and lay there like one shot in battle, trying to decide how wounded he was, and whether it was terminal.
He could blame his father again, if he wished, for the way he’d attempted to shape life to suit him. He could blame life, for so often obliging him. He could blame the ton for perpetuating his myth.
He took his hands away from his face and slid one over to the side of the bed, still warm and mussed. His hands encountered her sketchbook. He pulled it to him, astounded, moved, to encounter versions of himself as seen through her eyes: saturnine, passionate, one that was woefully smeared and green at the corner from grass. She’d tried to capture him.
Emotions are anarchic, she’d told him. They resist legislation. He’d never stopped trying to do just that. But his control was both his weakness and his strength. And he was a man who was precise, who did the right thing, the perfect thing.
And of course he hit upon it.
In the end, he knew there was only one way he could live with himself. He might never have her, he might never see her again, but he wanted her to know definitively what she meant to him, how she had changed him, what she had given to him.
The answer was simple.
Peace settled in. And for the first time in a long time he’d thought of his father with some sympathy, because now he thought he understood.
The hush when Dryden walked into White’s that afternoon was immediate and total. It was like the aftermath of a cannon shot; a momentary deafness. Reflexively, he handed off his hat and walking stick to the waiting footmen. He stepped forward two feet . . . and slowed when he heard . . .
. . . a meow.
He couldn’t entirely rule out Colonel Kefauver meowing in his sleep. But then he looked about . . . and he counted . . . one, two, three, four . . . young men. Holding cats. Striped ones.
Mother of God.
He closed his eyes, and shook his head. His life was a farce.
And he proceeded through the club, all of them watching him.
“Where’s your pussycat, Dryden?” someone ventured.
He didn’t turn.
Isaiah Redmond lowered his newspaper, looked up expectantly.
Dryden kept walking.
He found Waterburn at a table in the back. The blond monolith was seated with d’Andre, a number of other young bloods hanging on his every word. “Should have seen her face! Best ruse ever! The whole of the ton fell for it now, didn’t they? Hothouse flowers! A nickname!” They were laughing. “Well, I wager they’ll laugh about it one day.”
When he realized that his companions had stopped smiling and were staring at a point somewhere over his head. Waterburn swiveled.
Then shot to his feet, nearly knocking over his chair.
“Dryden.” After the initial alarm, he allowed a smirk to begin.
“Good afternoon, Waterburn. You’re about to earn one thousand pounds.”
The smirk arrested. Waterburn’s expression flickered between inter
est and puzzlement and greed.
When realization dawned cold horror settled in.
“Now, Dryden . . .” In an instant he was pale verging on green. “You don’t want to do anything foolish . . .”
“I have never done anything foolish in my life.” He realized now it was true. Nothing at all was foolish about loving Phoebe Vale. Not even being clocked in the head by his own hat.
“It was just a lark . . .”
“Name your second.” He issued the challenge almost conversationally.
The gasp that went up nearly lifted the heavy velvet curtains.
All the other bloods shoved their chairs back and leaped to their feet and stepped backward, as though duel challenges were contagious.
Waterburn choked. “. . . the devil . . . Have you gone mad, Dryden?”
“Absolutely.” Let the broadsheets try to make madness fashionable. “I should like to be very specific. I challenge you to a duel with pistols for your slur to the honor of Miss Phoebe Vale. First blood.”
Waterburn shook his head roughly in disbelief. “I . . .” He was stammering now. “Now, one moment, Dryden . . . it was just a bit of fun. We made a bit of blunt. And she’s just—”
“If you value your life at all, you won’t finish that sentence.” The sentence was as hollow and cold as the barrel of a pistol.
Waterburn clapped his mouth shut.
“Very good. Now, I want the next words out of your mouth to be the name of your second.”
Silence. Apart from the sound of creaking chairs. Even Colonel Kefauver was awake and staring.
“D’Andre,” Waterburn said finally, faintly. He swallowed audibly. “Are you certain you want to . . . That is, I’m leaving for Sussex tomorrow.”
“Perfect.” Jules sounded coolly bored. “D’Andre can meet with my second, Mr. Gideon Cole to discuss particulars. I suggest the Pennyroyal Green common at dawn tomorrow. If you don’t appear, mind you . . .” He leaned forward almost confidingly, and Waterburn, as if he was hypnotized, leaned forward, too. “I will hunt you down. You will never have a moment’s rest until I have satisfaction. And I cannot vouch for whether I’ll take satisfaction honorably. I find that honor has become rather tiresome, in fact. Because no one, no one makes a fool of someone I love.”
Waterburn listened to this, the skin of his face strangely taut. White lines appeared at either side of his nostrils. He’d rested a hand atop one of the chairs. Presumably he was clutching it in order to hold himself up.
Jules nodded once, then turned, wove through the tables, held out his arms for his hat and walking stick that the footmen appeared to hand to him, then paused by Isaiah Redmond’s table.
Isaiah stared at him as if he’d already committed murder.
“My apologies, Redmond. I had no choice.”
“You realize this is the end of it, Dryden.”
“A pleasure doing business with you.”
And that was all he said. He bowed shallowly.
And everyone watched, riveted, committing to memory to tell their grandchildren, as the Marquess Dryden left White’s after doing something he’d sworn he’d never do: follow in his father’s footsteps.
The silence settled thickly.
Colonel Kefauver was the first one to speak.
“Well, I think he’ll kill you, Waterburn,” Colonel Kefauver said admiringly, sounding surprisingly lucid. “Have you seen that boy shoot?”
Julian arrived in Sussex in the early evening, after spending the afternoon cleaning and oiling his dueling pistols. He’d purchased them from Purdey shortly after he’d left Manton’s for his own establishment, and he’d practiced with them at least once a month for five years.
Not on men, of course.
Mr. Gideon Cole had promised to join him in Sussex for dinner at the inn and for a celebratory drink after, upon which he would return to London, as the business of arguing in court never ended.
Such was the bravado that preceded duels.
And in Sussex the marquess took a room at an inn. Through his second, Mr. Cole, all parties were informed where he could be found should an apology be forthcoming. He wasn’t sure he wanted one.
He rather felt like shooting Waterburn.
He knew the land he wanted, his mother’s dowry, everything he’d maneuvered toward to date, was never going to be his. At least while Isaiah Redmond lived. He supposed the novelty of falling on his own sword, which still surprised him, would sustain him through the disappointment.
He had no doubts that he would live, of course.
He had doubts about the quality of his life thereafter, given that it had become fairly clear that Phoebe Vale would not be in it. But he decided to focus on the mundane things that stitched together a day, one moment at a time. Which was also very unlike him, as he was forever planning several moves into the future. He savored each bite of his early supper of a tasty but mysterious stew at the comfortable inn just outside Pennyroyal Green, with Mr. Cole. He savored the sight of a kind autumn sun, lowering on the green, benign Sussex hills unfurling out the window, undulating off toward the sea. The faces of travelers, the simple country clothing they wore.
And he had nearly finished his stew when the door to the inn opened, allowing in a gust of air. He stopped chewing.
Sir d’Andre and Lord Waterburn stood in the doorway.
He swallowed his bite. “Have your pistol loaded, Cole?”
“Of course,” Gideon murmured just as casually.
But the two men, Waterburn and d’Andre, looked unusually subdued. The spectre of death would subdue anyone, Jules thought.
“May we have a word, Dryden?” d’Andre, as the second, lifted his voice from the doorway. As if seeking permission to approach.
He hesitated.
“Join us,” Jules offered ironically.
The men moved in tandem, weaving through the tables, past the smiling faces of the other diners who were unaware that two of the men had made a gentleman’s agreement to attempt to murder each other this evening over a woman.
“I shall say this quickly. I apologize for the offense I gave, Dryden. I was wrong.”
Jules looked up into the man’s ice blue eyes. “Because you don’t want to die this evening?” he asked pleasantly. “The first sensible thing you’ve done in quite an age, Waterburn.”
“It got away from us, please understand. The wagering. I’m not as soulless as you might think.”
“Soulless” was an interesting word for a man like Waterburn to produce. And yet he was not entirely prepared to relinquish cynicism when it came to Waterburn.
“Did d’Andre pay you one thousand pounds?”
“A wager is a wager, Lord Dryden, and I honor mine,” d’Andre, he of the curls and forelock and tight trousers, said.
“And besides . . .” Waterburn added. “I should like very much to live to see what the ton does with the news that you’re in love with a teacher.”
A hint of humor. More than a hint of the old antipathy.
But Jules was not a fool. An apology was an apology.
He stared at Waterburn a moment longer, speculatively, thoughtfully. Enough to make both him and d’Andre shift their feet, even as they maintained admirably stoic expressions. He supposed he’d made his point in White’s; shooting the man might be superfluous in light of that.
He nodded curtly. “Apology accepted.”
Waterburn’s shoulders rose and sank in a sigh. “And now we’re off to the Pig & Thistle, Dryden. We’re wagering on darts this evening, though no one has yet defeated Jonathan Redmond. Join us if you’re interested.”
Jules watched incredulously as they departed.
He shrugged. And thusly the most dramatic gesture of his life concluded.
They finished their stew, toasted the apology, and Gideon Cole decided to return to London that evening.
Phoebe wasn’t new to broken hearts. When her parents had disappeared, one at a time, she’d sobbed herself to sleep for countless nigh
ts, only to wake again, heart hammering with terror, feeling the wind of the abyss howling behind her. She could not recall when she’d stopped. Somehow the crying had ceased to be a comfort.
She’d survived. Against all odds, she had in fact thrived.
She would survive this. She could not in truth say her heart was broken, since she’d kept it firmly from the marquess.
And yet the howling wrongness of not being near him consumed her. She moved through her room in a dull haze, a ringing in her ears. She knew the farther away from him she went, the easier it would eventually be, and she, like Jules, took each moment at a time, marking them off the way a prisoner etches marks on the wall of a cell.
She’d indulged in the extravagance of hiring a hack to take her back to Sussex, but she could just afford it, thanks to her winnings from five-card loo. In her rooms at the academy, she settled in at her writing desk, Charybdis sitting atop it staring down at her like a gargoyle, and she finally responded to the letter she’d received the very first day she’d seen Jules in Postlethwaite’s.
Dear Mr. Lunden,
I should be pleased to join your party of missionaries as a teacher, and am grateful to accept the position. I understand we sail within a fortnight. Until then, you may address particulars to me here at Miss Endicott’s academy.
There. It was done. The note that ended one episode of her life and began another.
Charybdis reached down and put a paw on her head.
After Jules bade goodbye to Mr. Cole, he rode out to have one last look at the Sussex property that would never be his. He expected to feel more than he did. As it was, he looked for only a minute. It might have been any piece of land.
And then he turned his horse to stare at Miss Marietta Endicott’s academy on the hill. He wheeled his horse about, as if the academy were a pillar of salt, and galloped, headlong, back toward Pennyroyal Green. The chill of the autumn evening stung his skin, and he welcomed it. Filmy clouds obscured a premature half moon. It wasn’t quite dark; the sky was a deepening indigo.
How the Marquess Was Won Page 29