Now sitting on the ground, cradling his head in her lap, she could hardly see for the torrent of tears pouring from her eyes and streaming down her cheeks to dribble onto his brow to mingle with the sweat there. She tugged up a corner of her cloak and used it to clean his beautiful face—his face that for a horrifying interval she had hardly recognized—all the while whispering through shallow breaths, “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Please wake up.”
His cheek turned against her palm. She gasped and choked back tears.
“Horace,” she whispered, smoothing her hand along the side of his face and willing his eyes to open.
They did, hooded. They were blue, bright blue as they should be, not the filmy white they had been for a million terrible seconds.
His breaths were shallow, his features still slack. But his eyes remained partially open and his chest was beginning to move in a regular rhythm.
His lips moved.
“D—” His eyes clamped shut.
She stroked her fingertips over his temple and brow. “Yes?” she whispered, swallowing back tears of relief. “I am here. I am listening.”
“Disgrace,” he said thickly and she saw blood between his lips. “Disgrace myself?”
Dabbing at his lips again with the soft velvet of her cloak, she shook her head.
“You are my hero, Horace Church,” she said.
His brow creased. “Ch—Char—” His eyes tightened shut.
“No,” she forced out. “You did not disgrace yourself. You are still in one very handsome piece, albeit lying on the floor of a mill, so I suspect your overcoat might suffer for it. I have some experience tending wounds, but I haven’t ever—that is, I don’t know what to do for you now. Give me instruction, please.”
“Claytons,” he said. “Go.”
“I will not leave you. Give me a different instruction.”
“No—time to—waste.” His hand came heavily around hers that was curved about his cheek. “Charlotte.”
“All right.” She grasped his hand, choking back the fear clogging her throat. “I will go. Only promise me you will not die while I am gone.”
He barely moved his head, but his features seemed to relax, and his lips to curve ever so slightly.
“Worst is over,” he said still thickly, as though he were very, very weary. But it was more clearly actual speech. “Dreadful headache, though.”
Unclasping her cloak she folded it into a pillow and tucked it beneath his head.
“I would kiss you now,” she said, “but I think you’ve bitten your tongue and I do not want to hurt you.”
“You could never hurt me.” He did not open his eyes. “Now, run.”
“I don’t—”
“Run.”
Her skirts were awkward, but she hitched them up between her legs and without the cloak she was light. She ran faster than she ever had before.
Lord Fortier returned to the inn just as she was pouring her story into the innkeeper’s ears. They had been wrong about Sheridan. Along the road the tradesman had stopped at a farmhouse and, upon entry, introduced Lord Fortier to his sweet elderly mother and three orphaned nieces and nephews, whom he was visiting for the holiday. Despite his low appearance, it seemed he was not a cozener of unprotected women, after all, rather simply a friendly gentleman. Lord Fortier had turned back immediately.
Now he asked her pointed questions about the duke’s state. Then, after speaking with George, he departed in pursuit of the Claytons.
With her guidance, Fields and the innkeeper retrieved the duke from the mill and discreetly assisted him to his bedchamber.
“T’ain’t right, my lady: His Grace lying to everybody like that,” her coachman said afterward with a shake of his hoary head.
“It was for a noble purpose, Fields.”
This was proven when Lord Fortier returned again as the sun fell, with the announcement that Mr. and Mrs. Clayton were now languishing in the magistrate’s jail two counties away. They had confessed to their crimes, which Mr. Clayton typically perpetrated alone, but, as it was the holiday season, he preferred to be with his family.
Justice had been done.
But Charlotte could not be still. Miss Mapplethorpe and the inn mistress plied her with delicacies all evening, but her stomach was too tight to admit food. She was pacing the corridor when Lord Fortier emerged from the duke’s room.
She ran to him. “How is he?”
“He sleeps,” he said. “The headache is fierce for many hours afterward. Sleep relieves it.”
“You have seen this before, been through this with him, at other times?”
“I have known him since we were boys,” he said with a gentle smile.
“That was not an answer.”
“Oui. It has happened enough times so I know that by morning he will again be his arrogant self.”
“Is he ill?”
“Not any more so than he was fifteen years ago. Better, in fact. It has been some time since the last.”
“How much time?”
“Years.”
“What is it?”
“That is an unsettled mystery. The priests in my country will tell you he has been possessed.”
“By the devil?”
He shook his head. “Nothing so unkind. In my people’s religion, the gods are many. Occasionally they enjoy speaking through the living.”
“Please,” she said. “Give me an explanation that I can understand—that I can reconcile with the man I know.”
“It is a trouble of the brain. A discomfort and an inconvenience, particularly when snow or water makes sunlight bright and inconstant.”
“That is why he wore that cloak and held onto the horse as we walked! He was trying to avoid seeing the sunlight reflecting off the snow. Wasn’t he?”
“He has learned methods of avoiding the dangers. But sometimes the danger comes when he cannot anticipate it. Mostly it is a frustration. This time, I suspect, his pride will be the greatest casualty.”
Because she had witnessed it.
She nodded.
“If you would like to see him . . .” he said, eyes glimmering with playfulness now. He gestured toward the duke’s bedchamber door. “I will tell no one, not even him if you wish it.”
Gulping a big breath, she went into the bedchamber. The draperies were closed and the man on the bed was very still, his breaths shallow. As the door clicked shut, he did not wake.
Standing beside the bed, she studied the noble line of his brow, the delectable cut of his jaw now shadowed with whiskers that obscured the fading bruise, his strong hands that had held her with such passion, and his lips. Her throat was so thick she could hardly breathe.
“I do not entirely understand what happened to you,” she whispered. “But it is clear to me that you bear a burden, two burdens, both this—this thing and the burden of keeping it a secret from everybody. How you have done so for so many years, I cannot fathom.”
There had been blood too, that day she had found him on that path in the wood at Cheriot Manor. She had thought he must have fallen from his horse and been knocked unconscious. That would have been sufficient cause for a boy of seventeen to feel shame enough to ignore her afterward. Perhaps he had fallen from his horse on that occasion.
So many years of hiding his secret.
Everything inside her was tight and hot and anguished. Her heartbeats would not slow. Yet he slept so deeply; he showed no sign of waking.
Sliding her feet out of her slippers, she crawled onto the bed and turned onto her side to face him. Tracing the familiar, beloved silhouette of his features with her gaze, she swallowed back yet more tears.
“Today I thought you were dying,” she whispered. “Until you opened your beautiful eyes, I thought . . .” Her throat clenched. “So, here is the situation, Horace Church: you mustn’t die. You see I have learned how to live quite happily without you, that is, with the certainty that you will never be mine. But I do not think I could learn how to be happy i
f you were no longer in the world. I think then that I would want to die too. So, there you have it. You are forbidden to die.”
A fresh tear leaked out of her eye and dripped onto her hands folded beneath her face. She wiped it away.
His chest rose on an abrupt breath, and his lips parted. Before Charlotte could leap off the bed, he turned his head.
“Charlotte Ascot,” he said slowly, enunciating each syllable. His eyes shone brilliantly blue. “You are in my bed.”
“I . . . That is . . . I . . .” She pushed herself up.
In one fluid movement he turned and rose above her, entrapping her on the bed between his hands to either side and the magnificent wall of his chest that hovered just above hers. Where his hip and thigh leaned against hers, explosions were happening inside her, and glorious heat. A lock of his hair tumbled over his brow and his gaze was all over her face. She couldn’t breathe.
“Best Christmas gift ever,” he murmured huskily, then bent his head and captured her lips beneath his.
Chapter Eleven
No one’s paying attention to the time.
The Duke of Frye’s bed.
It required no urging for Charlotte to sink her hands into his hair and accept his kisses with total wanton abandon.
He gave her more than kisses. It began on her face, trailing to her throat, then her neck, his hands and lips creating a havoc of sensations inside her and all across her skin. The tender, maddening rasp of his tongue felt especially good, so good that she found her hands reaching for his shoulders and then his chest, then the tail of his shirt and pulling it up so that she could feel his skin beneath the linen. Taut, hot, smooth. Perfect.
When her hands spread on his waist, the rumble that came from his chest made her even hungrier to feel him. Sweeping her palms up, she moaned as she touched his chest, the contoured muscle there. His breaths hitched.
“Don’t stop,” he whispered against her throat with a raw, urgent sound.
“I won’t.”
Then he was kneeling above her, drawing off his shirt, and she could hear her own panting. The firelight cut shadows across male muscle and ribs and the dusting of dark hair and brown nipples.
There was not enough air in the room. In the world.
“Are you all right with this?” But his eyes asked more than his words. They asked if she still desired him.
“Much more than all right.” She reached for him.
He tossed away the shirt and lowered himself to her and she let her hands have him.
“Finally we agree on something,” she said, and he kissed her, openmouthed, hungrily, his hands tangling in her hair, dashing pins this way and that.
“Each touch of your lips,” he said against those lips. “Each caress of your tongue, each moment of your hands on me makes me want more.”
“I am all right with more too.” She was discovering that a man’s spine offered gorgeous shapes for a woman’s fingertips to memorize, gentle little undulating mountains, and that the tight muscles of his buttocks encased in thin wool were also magnificently shaped. Touching them did wild, uncontrolled things to her body. He was a banquet for her hands.
He looked into her eyes from about an inch away. “I want to give you pleasure.”
“I am all right with that too.”
He smiled, a half smile with his mouth, and an entire smile with his sparkling eyes.
He kissed her lips, her throat, then her earlobe. She was sighing and clutching his sides by the time his mouth reached her neck, tingles racing through her and the throbbing ache between her thighs building to a reckless pounding.
Then he touched her breasts and she relinquished every wish she had ever had for anything except to be here, now, with him touching her.
He kissed her through her gown, through the layers of clothing she had donned that morning, which now she understood were foolish contrivances meant to inconvenience everybody. When his mouth covered the peak of her breast, she gasped and pressed her hips to his. Holding her breasts in his hands, he brought his teeth into play. She moaned. It was beautiful, maddening, not enough. She wanted his mouth against her skin, his tongue caressing her actual flesh.
As though he knew this, his hand found its way beneath her skirts, first skimming over her stocking to her knee, then to the top of the stocking, his fingertips circling the garter, making shivers race up and down her leg. He lifted his head and, with his gaze on hers, he caressed her thigh.
“You are beautiful, Charlotte.”
“What is your hand doing beneath my skirt?”
He smiled, and to see that and feel the heat of his palm on her at once was nearly more than her heart could bear.
He brought his lips close to hers but did not kiss her. “Fulfilling one of my fondest dreams.”
“You dreamed about this too?”
“I dreamed about everything with you,” he whispered.
Reaching up to his face with both hands, she drew him down and kissed him with all of the relief and happiness and anguish and love inside her. That was when he brought his hand fully between her legs and, with the lightest and most astonishing accuracy, caressed her precisely where her body wanted it most.
After that, it was not very long before she fell apart entirely. She knew she made sounds, perhaps several times, and possibly asked for more, again and again. She wasn’t entirely certain, but if she did plead aloud, he didn’t seem to mind it. He kissed her and touched her perfectly for some time, and when she was trembling and clutching his gorgeous arms and whimpering, and her body was rippling upon waves of heat and pleasure, he kissed her again.
She never wanted to release him.
Gulping air into her lungs, she smoothed her palms over his shoulders.
“I feel as I do after I have run a distance,” she said breathlessly.
His smile was slow and decidedly triumphant.
A knock came on the door.
“Shall I dive under the bed?” she said.
He laughed. Taking her face between his hands, he kissed her again, a long, beautiful, leisurely kiss.
“Lady Charlotte Ascot,” he murmured against the corner of her lips. “I could kiss you forever.”
But of course he had already said that he would not do that. And she had not given him leave to anyway. While the day had brought with it a revelation that she thought could explain his reticence to marry, she must still speak with Serena. Kissing a man who had once been betrothed to a dear friend was one thing, but planning a future of kissing him forever was another altogether.
When he drew away, this time he rose from the bed. Taking up his shirt, he pulled it on, and went to the door.
Through the crack, she heard Lord Fortier’s voice.
As he shut the door she sat up and smoothed her hands over her hair.
“Fields wishes to depart for Kingstag at dawn,” he said. “He is concerned about more snow in the morning.”
“Where are you going?”
“Kentwood.”
She stood up and went to him.
“I will not beg you to come to Kingstag,” she said. “I will not beg you for anything.”
A smile cut across his mouth.
“Anything else.” She rolled her eyes as heat gathered in the most predictable place, but also very thickly in her chest.
“Good,” he said, though softly.
Then he did the most foolish thing: he took her hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed her knuckles.
“Good-bye, Charlotte.” His voice was beautifully rough.
Calling up the fortitude that her Aunt Imogene had praised during their American sojourn, Charlotte drew her hand away with smooth aplomb. Forcing her lips into a smile, she opened the door and left him.
Chapter Twelve
Boxing Day morning.
Kingstag Castle, Dorchester.
When Charlotte arrived at Kingstag, the castle was a merry whirl of activity. Throughout childhood she had visited the three Cavendish sisters so
often, she felt entirely at home now. A vast medieval fortress with ample modern additions and comforts, Kingstag included rooms aplenty for all sorts of shenanigans. This was a good thing indeed, as Bridget, the youngest Cavendish sister, was producing a play. She had engaged most of the guests to build sets, design costumes, and perform roles, and had entirely taken over the ballroom for the production.
That there was no possibility of a ball at this party suited Charlotte ideally. Dancing would only make her long for a cozy little inn and a spice-scented kitchen and the perfect kisses of a man who preferred bachelorhood to her.
After reuniting with friends she had not seen since before leaving for America, finally she escaped the melee and went in search of Serena. She found her old friend amidst a group of guests.
“Charlotte!” Serena reached out with both hands and clasped Charlotte’s tightly. Her eyes light and smiling. “Welcome back to England. How we have missed you!” She seemed as far from miserable as could be. She positively glowed.
“And I you.”
“My mother is abed,” Serena whispered. “It’s only a mild fever, but since Gareth and Cleo are away, keeping everybody happy has fallen to me.”
“It seems as though you are accomplishing it splendidly.” She couldn’t very well drag Serena away from her hostess duties to interrogate her in private as to whether she was in fact heartbroken and only masking it valiantly. And since she had no intention of taking part in Bridget’s play, she sought out distraction instead.
She found it with Alexandra. The middle Cavendish sister had taken up a spot in the corner of the ballroom from which with one eye she watched the unfolding of Bridget’s haphazard masterpiece and with the other eye studied the gentlemen involved.
“Lord Gosling is exceptionally handsome,” Alexandra said, glancing at the charming viscount Charlotte had only just met.
Charlotte nodded. “Mm. Very nice.” He was indeed attractive, but nothing to compare to the Duke of Frye’s warm, brilliant eyes and dashing smile and perfect shoulders.
At the Christmas Wedding Page 24