Her eyes flashed fire. “So you kept it from me, too? I can trust no one.” Her voice sounded small, like a child’s.
She had to understand how it was. He must try to explain it to her. “When directly confronted, Mrs Hazelwood confirmed it. But for you to learn the truth only to find out how they had excluded you—I didn’t see the need to hurt you with it.”
Beth stared at him, her lips slightly parted. Then her face hardened. “You think I am like Juliana. You think I cannot face life?”
“Good God, Beth, I certainly don’t think you’re anything like Juliana.”
“No—you think I am just as fragile as she was. Some blue-blooded little princess spoilt by her father. I never had a father to spoil me. I have had to be tough. I am tough—tougher than you know.”
She was not. He knew she was fragile inside. Beautifully soft-hearted, yet never appreciated for what she most had to offer—her love.
She stared down at the coverlet, tracing her finger along the piped edge of the blanket. “She was ashamed of me. She was so set on me never finding out.”
He didn’t know what to say. A raw, hollow clawing centred in his stomach. Why couldn’t he think of the right thing to say to make her pain go away?
“Ha!” The cynical sound echoed in the chamber. “Of course she was. Can’t have the dirty bastard girl knowing she is related to her betters.”
The pain in her voice increased the hollow feeling in his guts. He caressed her hand. “She’s a woman of strong beliefs.” What else could he say, when he didn’t understand the woman’s behaviour himself?
“So you just planned to keep this from me, Grey?”
“I didn’t want to hurt you. I thought maybe there would come a better time. A right time to tell you.”
“How could a moment ever be right for such a truth?”
It was a question for which there was no answer, so he moved closer to her and pulled her into his embrace. He couldn’t demand that Cornelia Hazelwood open her heart and be a true aunt to Beth. He couldn’t exhume the long dead Peter van Moerdijk and make him be a real father. Knowing how angry it would make his wife, he resisted the urge to make her the promise of some extravagant purchase.
His money couldn’t fix this. He dreaded to know but he had to ask, “What did Mrs Clark say of your mother?”
“Damned little.” She sighed. “And nothing I did not already know.”
Inwardly, he breathed a sigh of relief and thanked Nellie Clark for having half a brain in her head after all. What good would it do for Beth to know of her mother’s terrible end?
“Did you truly never guess, Beth? About your father?”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “She told me she didn’t know who my father was.” Her voice broke and her eyes closed. “She told me she didn’t know. I trusted her. I did not think she would lie to me. Especially over something like that.”
“Oh, my darling.”
Silence fell between them. Her shoulders were as stiff as wood beneath his hands. He caressed her gently.
“Tell me something, Grey.” The hardness in her voice settled like a lead weight in his chest.
“Yes, Beth?”
“Did you decide to marry me before or after you knew I had van Moerdijk blood in my veins and not that of some unknown man?”
“I love you and I wanted you for my own. No matter who sired you.”
Beth watched as Grey bent and her heart began to flutter wildly because she knew he was going to kiss her. Yet, if he did, her clear thinking would disappear. She needed talk more than kisses at the moment. She had to know and understand many things. To sort out some of the turmoil roiling in her mind. She placed her hand to his chest. “He was a wild, unprincipled man and I am so very much his daughter in truth. How could you have overlooked it?”
“I love you the way you are. I love your wildness.”
She shook her head. “No, you don’t know how bad I am.”
“Could I love you if you were truly bad?”
“You love me only because you don’t know how bad I truly am.”
A grin spread over his face, sending sparks of fire into her belly. “You are a naughty girl Beth—I suspected as much in the first few moments we met, when you propositioned me for sex. And when you let me fuck you in my carriage, well, I knew it for sure then.”
“Oh, don’t tease. Don’t make it sound so light. You don’t know everything about me. I’ve done things you don’t know about.”
He traced her ear with his fingertip. “How bad could those things possibly be, Beth?”
“Vile, dirty, disgusting…” She took a deep breath. “Utterly wicked.”
Chapter Seventeen
Grey’s dark brows rose infinitesimally. “Things Dr Wade taught you?”
She nodded.
He caressed her cheek. “Things that you enjoyed?”
She bit her lip and nodded more vigorously.
“Well, now you’ve intrigued me.” His rich, deep laugh did unspeakable things to her belly. A slow seep of wetness began between her legs.
She planted her fist against his velvet-covered, muscular chest. “Stop that. I am being serious.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me, then.”
She collapsed onto his chest, pressing her cheek against the soft fabric of his banyan, glancing down to hide her face from his view. “Oh God, I cannot.”
He caressed her hair. “Even after all we have shared of ourselves?”
“Yes.” She released the word in a long hiss, glad he couldn’t possibly see her face.
“Beth, I have a fairly good idea of what you are alluding to, here.”
“Oh God.” It was all she could say. Her arousal dried up in the face of her deep shame. She should have never brought this up at all.
“It’s no dark thing. It’s not that uncommon.”
Now he was just saying things to make her feel better. He was so kind that way. It made her heart lurch a bit, for she wished she was worthy of such chivalrous treatment. “No true lady would allow such a thing.”
“That’s just not so, Beth.”
“Even Joshua said you would be disgusted if you knew.” She blurted the statement without thinking.
He tightened his hands on her. “And when did he say this to you?”
She blew out in a great sigh. “It doesn’t matter.”
Now his whole body tensed against hers. “Beth, if men talk to you—or, God help me, touch you—in ways that are disrespectful, you must let me know.”
“So you can defend an honour that I never had?”
“Don’t talk like that. You’ve gone a long time with no one to watch over you, a time when you were led to believe you had no family, no honour—but that time is over. You must trust me to take care of you.” He caressed his hands down her arms. “You must also trust me enough to tell me what you want. Will you promise me that?”
“I’ll try.”
“And you must also stop thinking of yourself as a harlot or any other label you place on it.” He tipped her chin up to face him. “You must promise me.”
“I don’t know… He—he used to tell me how dirty I was, that I was so different from other girls, other women. I have thought all this time it was my mother’s wild blood, wanton by virtue of her low birth, as Mrs Hazelwood suggested. But now, to know it was my father…”
“Cornelia Hazelwood is a hypocritical prig.”
“Grey!” She tore her face away from his chest and gaped up at him.
He scowled at her. “What?”
“How can you say such a thing?”
“Would you prefer me to be more blunt and strike closer to the truth and call her a cold-hearted bitch?”
Beth took a hitching breath. She felt as though she might have an apoplexy at hearing anyone disparage the venerable old woman who was the only thing close to a mother she’d ever known. “I think I would prefer to change the subject now.”
“Very well—let’s discuss Dr Wade and
his opinions about your sexual tastes. I assume the first time was his idea?”
“Of course. I didn’t even imagine people did such things. I’d heard the word sodomy; I knew it meant something very dirty, but I didn’t know it meant quite…that.”
“So you didn’t use the lure of your wiles to force him into sullying his pristine self with such base acts?”
Her face heated. “You’re laughing at me.”
“Beth, I am trying to get you to see the situation as it was. He must have enjoyed it, too, or else he wouldn’t have persuaded you into doing it. I assume it took some earnest persuasion to get your compliance.”
“Well, yes it did. It didn’t sound like anything I would like. And after the first time I was sure of that, for it hurt like hell.”
“Yet you let him do it again?”
“Yes. He said it would get better.” She took a deep breath. “He was right, it did get better. It got too much better—that was the problem.”
“He liked it, too, Beth. He went to too much effort for me to believe otherwise.”
“But he’s a man. It’s different. He… He said if a woman likes a particular perversion, it’s hard for a man to deny her. The temptation is too great. Wicked women provoke men into—”
“He was just too young and ignorant of the world.”
“He was not ignorant of the world—he’d been to England for his medical education.”
“Yes, he’d been to England and fucked a few English whores. It doesn’t make a man a genius. Forget him. This is between you and me now.”
“Yes, I know, but it’s so hard to forget—the past is so indelibly imprinted on my mind.”
“Beth, could anything we did together, in our love, be vile or disgusting?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then do you want me to take you in the way that he did, that you enjoyed and he told you was so dirty and disgusting?”
The offer shocked her. It also excited her, quite insanely. Her breasts swelled and their tips grew hard even as her cunt began to flood with wetness. She swallowed against a suddenly dry throat. “Y—you’ve done it before?”
“Yes, I have.”
“With whom?”
“With women who enjoyed for me to do it that way.”
“But who were they?”
“You don’t really want to know, do you?”
She didn’t want to know…she had to know. “I want to know.”
“I did it with my former mistress, Maria.”
Of course he’d done it with his whores. That wasn’t what she wanted to know. But she hardly dared ask. She took a deep breath and plunged on. “Did you do it with Juliana?”
His body went rigid, as if with shock at her question. She didn’t expect him to answer, but then he spoke. “No, I didn’t. I was young then and I didn’t even imagine such things. In general, bedding didn’t hold much appeal for Juliana—after our marriage, we tended to keep things quite basic.”
“So you’ve never done it that way with someone of your own class, a lady?”
“My dear, it was a lady above my station who taught me to make love that way.”
“Oh.”
His Russian princess. Her lip curled up.
“It’s really not that uncommon.” He slipped his hands around her sides and cupped her breasts. “Did you do it with any of your other lovers?”
He rolled his thumbs over her nipples.
She shivered with pleasure at his touch and closed her eyes. “No, just with Joshua.”
“But you liked it?”
“Yes,” she said in the most shameful understatement she’d ever uttered. “It did hurt a bit, but I liked it.”
“It doesn’t have to hurt at all.”
“Oh,” she said again, at a loss for anything else to say to that last revelation.
“You’re trembling—are you scared now?”
“No.” She laughed shakily. “I am just very excited.”
He dropped a quick, hard kiss on her forehead. “I’ll be right back, then.”
She watched as he departed through the door to his bedchamber. A sense of unreality washed over her. She couldn’t believe she’d actually told him. And he was going to take her that way and, after that, there would be no sensual secrets between them.
She pulled her nightdress over her head, then moved to lie in the middle of the bed, her heart pounding against her ribcage, her whole body trembling and tingling.
She’d actually told him.
He wasn’t repulsed.
He wanted it, too.
Naked and bearing an amber bottle, he returned to her. Oil, she presumed. He set the bottle on the night table, then came to her and straddled her thighs. He dragged the head of his cock over her inner folds, slowly, teasingly. “I am going to fuck you this way first,” he whispered. “I want to feel your cunt come all over my cock.”
She moaned and trembled even harder.
He thrust into her on one swift stroke, stretching her, filling her full.
She cried out.
“Do you want that, Beth? Do you want to come all over my cock?” He began moving within her, rapid and hard. “Do you?”
“Yes, God, yes,” she chanted, catching her breath each time his erection slammed against the entrance of her womb.
He slowed, deliberately hitting that most sensitive place inside, along her forward wall. The deep, melting pleasure was driving her crazy.
“Come for me, come for me now,” he said, intensifying his efforts.
She rose up to cling to him with her arms and legs and allowed the sensations to culminate in a firestorm of pleasure.
She lay panting in his arms, gradually coming back to herself.
“You’re so astonishingly beautiful when you come.” He nipped at the side of her neck. Then he withdrew.
She gazed at his erection, huge and throbbing and glistening with her juices. Her hunger reawakened and her inner walls clenched and wetness gushed from her, running down the inside of her thighs. He had felt wonderful inside her cunt.
She couldn’t wait to feel him in her ass.
She scrambled over to take the bottle of oil from the night table, then she returned to him. Opening the bottle, she liberally coated her hands with the fragrant oil. She took his thick length into her hands and stroked him, preparing him for her.
The feel of his velvet-over-steel erection enthralled her. She let her hands linger, varying the way her hands moved on him with each stroke. His cock jumped in her grasp.
He seized her hand, rather violently, and stilled it. “No more of that.”
She laughed softly. He cupped the side of her face with his large hand and brought his mouth down on hers, open and heated. He kissed her deeply.
He lifted his head then he moved away from her and lay back on the bed. He took the bottle and oiled his fingers.
“Come here,” he said, motioning with his hands. “Back yourself up to me.”
He slid his oiled finger around her rosette, circling…and then it entered her.
She arched back. “Please, please hurry, I want to feel you in there.”
He pulled his finger out and inserted two fingers at once, stretching her. The pleasure was intense and she bit her lip.
“Turn,” he said, “Face away and sit on me.”
“What?”
“Just do it, you’ll like it. I promise.”
A vivid mental picture of what he’d asked flashed across her mind. Oh, she couldn’t possibly do that.
Anything but that.
It was one thing for him to take her in this forbidden way—to be a helpless object beneath him, subject to his will and desire. But it would be too much to risk for her to take the lead.
The responsibility.
And for him to ask worked on her like a biting cool breeze, taking the edge off her arousal. Awareness struck her of just how boldly she’d been behaving.
No matter what he said now, no matter his own partici
pation, the fact remained—he had withdrawn after her passionate response at Red Oaks.
“No, I can’t.” She looked down.
He took her hand. “Why not, Beth?”
“It just seems so…so very…”
“Yes? So very what, my love?”
She looked up. “Bold.” Her belly went all light and fluttery and she laughed nervously.
“Well, I have always adored your boldness. I have missed it.”
Excitement rose again, a little hopeful note singing in her blood. But she still wasn’t sure. “Gentlemen often do not know what they want. Oftentimes, the only indication a woman has that she has overstepped is when he loses his respect for her. The loss of his affection is soon to follow.”
“Do they really?”
His dry tone made her cringe. He was laughing at her.
She rushed into the rest of her misgivings. “Gentlemen want an angel, someone fragile, delicate. Someone they can put up on a pedestal.”
“You wish to be such a creature?”
“I wish to be whatever is wanted of me.” Oh, how pathetic she sounded. But no matter—she couldn’t help it.
He squeezed her hand. “That sounds very little like the girl I met and grew to love in Philadelphia.”
“I suppose it doesn’t.”
“In fact, it sounds disturbingly like Cornelia Hazelwood.”
Her tension escaped in a small laugh.
“I don’t want her poisonous pedagogy between us, Beth. I especially do not want her in our bed.”
She looked down at her lap. “Grey, there’s one thing you don’t understand. That girl in Philadelphia, Beth, the bold, worldly woman…she doesn’t exist. Not really. She’s just a fiction I created to escape the emptiness.” With all her excitement gone, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “She’s a fiction, just as dutiful Elizabeth is a fiction. I am neither. I am just a lost, frightened person with no place in this world.”
She had said this impulsively, because she had to. But she’d almost never dared admit so much even to herself. Now she had told Grey, the person she least wished to lose face with. Yet, somehow, it had felt safe to do so.
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