An Heir of Deception (The Elusive Lords)

by Beverley Kendall

  “What was I doing in your dream? Was I kissing you like this?” His head ascended and his mouth rubbed gently over hers. Charlotte was too bemused and breathlessly aroused to do anything but part her lips.

  What started as a soft rub became something more all too quickly. Charlotte barely had time to savor the ecstasy of tasting him again, the slide of his lips against hers, before his hands cupped her face, angling her for a deeper, more thorough kiss.

  His tongue wanted more than her acquiescence, it thrust and parried, demanding full engagement. She gave that and more, twining hers with his, seeking, sliding, demanding, meeting him stroke for delicious stroke. He made a sound in his throat. Raw desire with a hint of impatience.

  Charlotte surrendered to feeling, submerged in pleasure so deep, so completely consuming she couldn’t think beyond the tangle of tongues and the hand that now moved from the curve of her cheek, gliding over the line of her neck, the hollow of her collarbone, to the swell of her breast.

  Her nipple pebbled even further in anticipation of his touch. A whimper escaped her lips when it came, the flick of his finger over her nightdress. Moisture pooled between her thighs and heat washed her from head to toe, settling to torment the bundle of nerves where she needed him the most.

  Suddenly his kiss grew fierce; he wasn’t playing with her anymore—if he ever had been. His tongue swept her like a windstorm, his kiss wild and out of control. Charlotte welcomed the pressure, the scrape of his bristled cheeks against her sensitive skin, the clash of his teeth against hers. Pushing the barrier of the light blue fabric aside, he first cupped then squeezed the roundness of her breast. On a labored breath, he tore his mouth from hers, his attention now wholly focused on the white mound of firm flesh filling his hand. With a glazed look in his eyes, his head began to descend.

  Then with the violent shake of his head that acted like a dousing of ice-cold water, he was on his feet. So swiftly did his expression change, Charlotte could hardly believe she was looking at the same man of seconds before. Alex was cold again; no give to his expression or form.

  She wanted to sink inside herself, but instead made haste to right her clothing and conceal her breast. Her hands trembled at the task. And worse yet, she was still shamefully aroused.

  “Were I the same fool for you as I was five years ago, I could not have stopped myself from taking you.” He paused, his gaze drifting to her nipple, now covered but clearly outlined under the thin fabric. His mouth quirked. “And you would have allowed it, wouldn’t you? Has it been that long, since you’ve had a man between your thighs?”

  His words bit like gravel into her skin, as he’d no doubt intended them to, but she remained silent, accepting his treatment of her as part and parcel of her due.

  “Don’t think to seduce me. It will not work. But as you have my son, what is between us is far from over.” If his words were not ominous enough, his narrowed eyes and rigid jaw punctuated his feelings on the matter.

  Seduce him? It had been he who had kissed her. But for her own wanton response, Charlotte could do little else but swallow and nod in mute affirmation, embarrassment lingering in her fiery cheeks and lash-veiled eyes.

  He turned to go and then stopped as if confronted by a wall. Angling his head, he pinned her with a stare as bitter and icy as the north England winters. “And by God, if you run again and make me chase you—because now that I know you have my son, I will chase you to the ends of the earth this time—I’ll make sure you regret it for the rest of your days. Am I clear?”

  Part of her wanted to do just that, run from the man he’d become. But an even larger part could not countenance the thought of being parted from him again.

  “I’ll not run.” Her voice was scratchy and barely above a whisper.

  “See that you don’t.” With that, he slipped from the room, disappearing into the dark hallway without hardly making a sound.

  Another minute of silence passed before Charlotte looked down and noticed the stark whiteness of her knuckles as she clutched her bed sheets. Unclenching her hands, she forced herself to relax. She inhaled a deep breath and pulled the counterpane around her, enveloping herself in its warmth.

  The risk had always been there that Alex would have deduced the truth about Nicholas. Her son could be a chatterbox when he got started and something—namely his true age—could easily have slipped. Hadn’t her sister guessed the truth, repudiating the existence of her conveniently dead husband with facile confidence?

  What had followed was Charlotte’s retelling of those pivotal events that had forever changed their lives. A guilt-ridden tale ripe with omissions and half-truths.

  She’d told her sister of the crushing weight of responsibility that had accosted her. When she’d agreed to marry Alex, he’d been the second son of a duke. But months after their betrothal Charles had died and suddenly she was to be a duchess. The culmination of it had all been too much. By the time she’d realized she was with child, she was so far from home and sick because of the pregnancy, she’d barely left her flat for four months thereafter. How could she return to England heavy with child? And then there had been her baby to consider. She could not have made the journey back pregnant and alone.

  Charlotte thought her reasons all terribly valid and plausible. She certainly would not subject her sister to the truth, unvarnished and with the unsavory overtones of a penny dreadful.

  But Lord, what was she to do now? Or perhaps a more fitting question was what would he do? Since he’d laid eyes on her, he treated her like something worse than leprosy. And then he had kissed her with a passion even he couldn’t disguise. She desperately wanted the kiss to mean something; an instinctive reaction to a passion long denied. She’d settle for lust if she must.

  But while her heart craved the happily ever after of reunited lovers, her brain, ever the pragmatist, told her he’d made his feelings for her clear. He despised her. He resented her. He would never forgive her. To him, not only had she abandoned him on the most momentous of days, but she was now the enemy who had denied him his child.

  Alex exited the bedchamber and glanced around the dimly lit hall. He knew every nook and shadowed corner of the manor. He’d played in it often enough as a child, and had frequented it plenty in the years Rutherford had resumed residence there.

  All was quiet, everyone asleep in their beds—save Charlotte. And if he’d joined her in hers, he’d have had her up until dawn attempting to slake five years of hunger. As it was, Alex would have a time of it himself when he returned to his bed alone.

  Having managed his midnight visit without discovery, he ought to make his escape as quickly as he could using the most direct route. But imprudence won out over caution.

  Silent as a thief, he made his way to the wing housing the children’s rooms and paused in front of the nursery door.

  Had the door been ajar, nothing could have stopped him from pushing it quietly open and peering inside to soak in the sight of his son, for Alex was certain Nicholas was asleep on the other side.

  But he could only permit his imprudence to lead him so far astray and Alex could not be selfish and risk waking him. Now that he knew of Nicholas’s existence, they had a lifetime at their disposal to become properly acquainted in the manner of fathers and sons.

  Alex turned from the door and soundlessly entered the narrowed hall of the servants’ sleeping quarters and then proceeded down the stairs to the ground floor.

  Five minutes later, he was riding down the narrow trail in the rear of the house that led to his property miles down the road. The night was cool, the air the kind one welcomed when drawing a breath.

  She had cried his name in her sleep. God, he wished he’d never heard it. The sound had shocked him, and his heart had skipped a beat. For a moment, he’d been taken back to that time before she’d left him. He’d loved her mindlessly then, but his feelings had left him vulnerable, blind and weak. And what had he gotten for opening himself so completely? Abandoned and betrayed.


  When he saw the light of his residence up in the distance, Alex spurred Shalais into a gallop with the slight pressure of his knees on his flanks. The greater distance he put between them, the better. He could already see—feel—the effect she had on him.

  His mistake had been in kissing her, touching her. His mouth tightened grimly while his pulse reacted like a fickle lover, quickening at the memory. For the last two years, he’d prided himself on his control. She hadn’t been in town for a day and he was instantly taken back to the one time in his life he’d ever gone mad over a woman.

  One woman and his one big mistake. An ache started in his chest.

  These past five years women had come and gone from his life without eliciting even a fraction of what Charlotte did with so little effort. Which made her dangerous in a way he resented deeply.

  I should not have kissed her.

  But there she’d sat, her fisted hands clutching her cover tight against her breasts, her mouth parted looking too rosy, her bottom lip shiny from the constant swipe of her tongue.

  He’d kissed her to prove to himself she meant nothing to him. That after all these years, he felt nothing for her. Not even lust in its most basic form. Bloody hell, he hadn’t expected her to kiss him back. Not to open up as she’d done.

  The ache in his chest drifted lower until it inconveniently settled between his thighs. Alex squelched the memory of the kiss. He couldn’t afford to dwell there.

  What he’d learned tonight was that his feelings for her were complex as well as wholly unwanted and patently unfair. He did not like her. No, he wasn’t that addled in the brain. But there still existed a physical attraction for her that frankly shamed him. After all she’d done, he simply could not believe his body had let him down. Hadn’t God given man superior brains for precisely that purpose? Men were not animals, led about like a show horse by their cocks.

  It would have been more merciful if she’d simply betrayed and abandoned him. Instead, she’d impaled his heart on the head of a very sharp pike…then wrenched it from his body because cleaving it nearly in two hadn’t wreaked quite enough damage.

  The air felt colder now and the night sky was relieved of complete darkness by the light of the quarter moon. Pulling up on the reins as they neared the stables, Alex brought Shalais to a sedate walk.

  He’d let his heart and body rule him when he’d courted her, made love to her, gotten on his knee and asked her to marry him. He wouldn’t ever be that naïve again. In all his future dealings with Charlotte Rutherford, they would play by his rules and currently the only thing he wanted from her was his son.

  Chapter Five

  “Did you not sleep well last night? Was the bed not to your liking?” Katie asked the following morning during breakfast. Without giving Charlotte an opportunity to respond, her sister rushed on. “Is it the mattress? We could easily purchase another.”

  “No, ’tis nothing, truly. The bed was par above the ones I’ve slept on since I left.” Charlotte smiled her assurance and then commenced to eat her breakfast—or at the very least, attempted to.

  “You are hiding something.”

  Charlotte might have taken her sister’s statement as an accusation had she not glanced into her eyes, which seemed to plead, Please don’t shut me out.

  “I know something has happened since we last spoke, so you may as well tell me. You know I’m nothing if not determined. I’ll discover it whether you wish it or not,” she finished teasingly, but her eyes were anxious and concerned.

  “I was thinking of Nicholas.” Which was partly true. “All of this is so new to him.”

  Katie bit into a piece of buttered scone, chewed it slowly and then wiped the corners of her mouth with a linen serviette. “Nicholas, I imagine, will do quite well here. When James and Missy return with the children, he will acquire three exuberant cousins and playmates. You see how quickly he devoured his breakfast so he could go and explore the playroom? Did he at all appear like a child whose welfare you need fret about?”

  Indeed he did not. Charlotte had joined him and Jillian this morning in the nursery, certain Nicholas’s lack of familiarity with his surroundings would turn him into something akin to climbing ivy as it had for the past two weeks. She could not have been more wrong. He’d been like the proverbial child in a sweetmeat shop, awed at the vast array of toys in the adjoining playroom. Oatmeal porridge—which he’d never had a particular fondness for—and coddled eggs had been consumed in fifteen minutes flat, unlike the half hour it normally took to coax it down his throat. Bribery was always the last resort to achieve success.

  After he’d finished, he’d scrambled from his chair, and with an absent smile in her direction, had hurried over to the shiny red train set spread out on the buffed wood floors. Charlotte had departed, assured he’d be occupied for the next few hours or more.

  “No, I suppose not,” she conceded.

  “So, if my nephew’s state of well-being is not a concern, what is it that has you looking strained and on edge?” Katie asked before taking a sip of her tea.

  Charlotte added a lump of sugar to her hot chocolate and stirred it slowly. Just as slowly, she peered up at her sister. “Alex was here last night—in my bedchamber.” She didn’t speak loud enough to be overheard by the footman posted near the entrance of the breakfast room. However, the impact of her words were certainly felt if one could go by Katie’s gasp as she jerked her hand and knocked over her teacup. The stain of the tea spread quickly, blemishing the white linen cloth covering the table.

  “Oh botheration,” her sister muttered as she righted the ivory cup.

  At her sister’s exclamation, the footman jumped into action, coming to the table to begin sopping up what little tea hadn’t already soaked into the tablecloth. With a negligent flick of her hand, Katie waved him away. “You can do naught else. The linen must be removed but that will have to wait until we have finished eating.”

  The young man—quite young in fact, for his smooth cheeks said he’d yet to reach his majority—halted. “Are you certain, Miss Catherine?”

  “Yes, you can tend to it later. Although, I’ll need some more hot water.”

  Placing the towel, now soiled with tea, over the sleeve of his fustian jacket, he gave a short bow and swiftly departed toward the kitchen.

  The moment he was out of view and earshot, Katie swung her gaze toward Charlotte. “Alex was here? Last night? In your chamber?” The questions came fierce and hushed.

  Save the kiss that had only stoked her passions and kept her tossing in her bed until dawn, Charlotte told her of the night’s events. By the time she was finished, the footman had returned and placed the piping-hot pot of tea on the table. With a nod, he resumed his post by the door, too far to hear their conversation if they kept their voices low.

  “So Nicholas resembles his brother Charles?” Katie said in wonderment, her words part question, part statement.

  “If I’m to believe Alex—which I have no cause not to—Nicholas is his spitting image.”

  Head tipped at an angle, Katie paused in the process of adding tea to her cup. “And he gave no indication as to what he intends to do? Do you believe he intends to acknowledge Nicholas as his son? Though that would be ruinous,” she muttered, almost as an aside. “What else did he say? Have you truly told me the whole of it?”

  Charlotte could barely keep up with the fury of questions being thrown at her. Questions she herself had no answer to.

  “I’ve told you everything.” The kiss was too private to be shared even with her twin.

  A smile touched the corners of her sister’s mouth. “I might have guessed he was Alex’s straight away had you not lied about his age.”

  “That matters little. You guessed the truth in no time a’tall.”

  “Humph. I cannot believe you expected me to believe that ridiculous story of falling in love with someone else while still here in England. I’d have more believed it if you’d told me you’d been abducted by pirates
,” Katie scoffed. In the very next moment she grew serious, pinning her with a penetrating stare. “I wish you’d told me you were afraid to take on the role of a duchess. There was never a doubt in my mind that you would make a fine one. Better than any who ever held the role.”

  Briefly, Charlotte looked away. She couldn’t help it. But came back, stolid as ever. “Sometimes I wish I had too.”

  Would things have turned out different if she had told her? Charlotte wondered. Well it did little good now to second-guess her decision. What was done was as good as engraved in granite. As if she’d had another choice.

  “Did you fear Alex would discover the truth about you—about us?” Katie approached the question with the delicacy as one might a wounded bird. There was also a starkness in her expression that spoke of an inner anguish.

  “I—I don’t truly know,” Charlotte said before quickly taking a large bite of her scone heavily laden with marmalade.

  Her sister didn’t resume eating. For long seconds she just watched her. “Mrs. Henley would never—” She broke off to correct herself. “What I mean to say is she never breathed a word of it to a soul.”

  Charlotte had never once considered Mrs. Henley to be the problem. But Katie did not know that for sure. Could not. “How can you be so certain? Have you any idea who she speaks to and what she says?”

  “Lottie, Mrs. Henley died a month after you left.” Katie added cream to her tea and then stirred it slowly as she stared fixedly into the swirling, hot liquid. When she swallowed, Charlotte could see what it was costing her to relay the information. And Katie had yet to meet her gaze.