Worth; Lord Of Reckoning

by Grace Burrowes

  “I remember. Truly beautiful.”

  And Grampion truly had been his home, once upon a time.

  * * *

  Jacaranda loved Worth Reverence Kettering. She’d been infatuated with Eric, though at the time she’d had no means of comparing an abiding tenderness for a man with the combustible combination of ignorance, insecurity, rebellion and loneliness that had propelled her into Eric’s skinny arms.

  She’d go home to Dorning House, to the rough and tumble of life with her brothers and the beauty of the Dorset coast. She had messes to tidy up there, and she had missed her home.

  Though not for a moment had she ever missed it as much as she already missed Worth Kettering. That mess might well not admit of any tidying.

  The house was silent and dark around her, and if she’d been able to sleep, she would have passed the night in dreams. She hadn’t been able to sleep. Worth was one floor below her, and they wouldn’t share a roof ever again.

  She rose, belted a night robe around her waist, and left her rooms.

  He was abed when she let herself into his suite, the click of the door latch sounding loudly behind her.

  “You might as well lock it.”

  Worth’s voice came from across his sitting room, and Jacaranda could just make out his shape in a rocker by the cold grate.

  She locked the door and waited, feet growing cold in more ways than one.

  He held out a hand. “I was about to go to you. You couldn’t sleep either?”

  She crossed the room, feeling awkward and desolate. No room for her in the rocker, giantess that she was.

  He tugged her onto his lap and wrapped his arms around her.

  “If you have come merely to talk, Jacaranda, I’ll try to listen.” His lips grazed her temple. “I’m somewhat the worse for drink, though, and I’ve spent a lot of nights behaving with you. I’m not sure I have another increment of saintliness in me, not when I know you’re leaving me tomorrow.”

  His arms tightened around her, but she was holding him, too. Beneath her, he was becoming aroused, and what a relief that was. She curled in his lap, battling a longing for him that had simmered inside her since she’d leaned against him weeks ago in the kitchen, wet, angry and bruised.

  “No saintliness,” she said, stroking his hair. “Not for you, not for me. We deserve this night for ourselves.”

  He pressed his face to her throat, and Jacaranda wasn’t sure, but she thought his shoulders hitched, almost as if he’d been weeping.

  “Take me to bed, Worth, please.”

  He rose with her in his arms, as if she weighed nothing, and crossed to his bedroom. “You’re sure, Jacaranda?”

  “Of this much, yes.” If he’d followed his question with another proposal, her answer would have been very different from her previous replies. A lifetime managing messes and counting somebody else’s silver had abruptly lost its appeal.

  Worth laid her on the bed and peeled off his dressing gown and pajama pants with gratifying haste. He sat at her hip, untying the bows of her chemise, one by one as they marched down the center of her body. Gently, he spread the sides of her clothing, leaving her exposed in the moonlight.

  “Gorgeous,” he said, “breathtaking, wonderful, lovely, sweet, adorable, beautiful, luscious.” He leaned down and pressed his cheek over her heart. “We should talk, of course. You doubtless want to talk, until I’m nearly agreeing that you should go. I’d rather not be put through that, if you don’t mind, though I understand that you must return to Dorset.”

  “No talk then.” For he wasn’t entirely wrong.

  “I don’t think I can go slowly, Jacaranda. Not the first time. I’ve wanted you too badly for too long.”

  “Not slow, then. Not for either of us.” She held out her arms, and then he was over her, settling the magnificent length of his body snug up against her, the velvety heat of his arousal probing at her sex.

  “You’ll tell me if you’re uncomfortable?”

  Jacaranda wrapped her legs around him. “I’m uncomfortable now. Uncomfortable with wanting you, needing you. Stop fretting and dithering, Worth, and love me.”

  He laughed, a strained gesture toward humor, but he also got a hand under her backside and shifted the angle of her hips. Then he was there, right there at the entrance to her body, big, hot, and blunt, exactly what she craved, almost where she craved him.

  She wiggled, she strained, she smacked his muscular backside, but he wouldn’t move.

  “Kiss me, Jacaranda.” He kissed her on the cheek, the forehead, the jaw, and slowly she surrendered her will to his. Her body softened, she let herself kiss him back for long, quiet moments.

  “Better,” he murmured against her mouth. He ran his nose along her jaw and cradled the back of her head against his palm. Jacaranda had just formed the thought, How much longer? When his cock nudged gently at her sex.

  “Worth, please…”

  “Hold me.” He tucked her leg up higher around his flank, then began to move his hips in the smallest increments of forward and retreat. He teased at her until she was mindless with yearning, her ankles locked low on his back, all but dragging him into her body.

  “Such a managing little thing you are,” he said.

  “Now, Worth, please, God, now.”

  “Soon,” he said, his voice a whisper rasped in her ear.

  “But I need…”

  He’d shifted over her, the first thick inch of him penetrating her heat, then withdrawing to penetrate again. She couldn’t help it, didn’t know how or why she’d want to stop herself, when her body clamped hard around him in sheer, blinding ecstasy.

  “That’s it,” he whispered, surging into her deeply. “Let go for me.”

  And holy angels, did she let go. She let go of reason, dignity, past and future, her body and soul flying to pieces in the pleasure he gave her. She moaned against his throat, the delight shuddering through her and rebounding to leave her shaking and keening in his arms.

  “Worth Reverence Kettering, hold me.”

  He was hilted inside her, unmoving, while he petted her hair and nibbled at her ear. Jacaranda’s breathing slowed, and her world gradually righted itself.

  “I like how you feel inside me.”

  “You are my every feeble imagining of earthly bliss made manifest ten times over,” he said. “I knew you would be.”

  “And yet we’ve wasted our summer.” She stroked his shoulders. Such broad shoulders, and they held up worlds of responsibility. She knew that now. “I will miss you, Worth.”

  “I’m here now.” He shifted slightly, setting of shocks of pleasure inside her. “I’m loving you, exactly where I want to be. You can abandon me for the charms of Dorset, Jacaranda Wyeth, but this is not finished and you will not forget me.”

  He moved inside her again, raising himself up on his arms. He met her gaze in the shadowy darkness, and Jacaranda had to close her eyes. He was watching her as he moved in her, watching her again lose herself to him, to the pleasure he deluged her with. Worth as a lover was as relentless as Worth in every other facet of his life. Twice more he sent her over the edge, each climb shorter and steeper than the last.

  When he finally followed her into pleasure, Jacaranda held him to her with every fiber of her strength. He was silent with his satisfaction. Silent for endless moments while passion racked the length and depth of him. When he subsided against her, Jacaranda was in tears beneath him.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “Never.” And he’d been right about something else: This was not finished.

  His thumb brushed her cheek, and Jacaranda was reminded of how they’d met, in the dark, her head ringing, her sense of balance unreliable. She felt as battered now, except her heart was the organ in jeopardy.

  When she woke up, it wasn’t light yet, but the birdsong coming through the window suggested dawn approached.

  “You aren’t returning to your own room yet,” Worth rumbled beneath her.

  “Let me
off of you,” she said, trying to hoist a stiff leg across his body.

  “I liked you where you were,” Worth groused. But he let her shift to a place beside him, then spooned himself around her. “I liked it a lot.”

  “I liked it, too,” Jacaranda said, an odd joy welling up from among all her sorrows. “I must thank you for this night, Worth.”

  “And I you. Will you write?”

  “I don’t think that’s wise, do you?”

  “I know you and Daisy must resolve what’s between you, and then there’s this Dorsetshire Bacchanal that your step-mother schemed to drop in your lap. I still have your money, though, and I intend to get it back to you.”

  He’d keep hold of her heart, though. “You’re good for the money.” She kissed the hairy male forearm banding her collarbones. “When will you go north?”

  “By Michaelmas. I haven’t committed to stay the winter, but Avery should see the ancestral pile, and it’s…it might be time I spent some time there. Hess and I had an interesting conversation last night.”

  “He’s protective of you,” Jacaranda said, treasuring the feel of Worth, big and warm, and dearly familiar cuddled around her.

  “Hess and I have wasted years more or less as a result of not being protective of one another. It leaves one sad, but I understand about you needing to go home.”

  “You couldn’t possibly.”

  “Yes, love, I could. We both left home in a towering pout and took on the management of the world. Well, the world’s somewhat taken in hand, the pout has worn off, and family is still family.”

  “You make it sound so prosaic.”

  “Prosaic and profound, like what passes between a man and wife in bed. Babies, snoring, cuddling, cold feet. Mundane existence with little doses of heaven mixed in.”

  “Life.” She nuzzled his arm this time.

  “You are my glimpse of heaven, Jacaranda,” he said, and she knew they were words of parting. “I will spend the rest of my life missing you if you insist on making this remove to tend your family permanent.”

  “Not yet.” She rolled to her back. “Please don’t start missing me yet.”

  He made love to her again, slowly, with a wealth of tenderness, his sorrow at their parting palpable in his every caress and sigh. Jacaranda didn’t want their joining to end, yet the twining of the sorrow with the delight became an unbearable combination, until she was weeping in Worth’s arms, even as she was consumed one last time by pleasure.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “So you’re simply letting her leave?”

  Grey Birch Dorning, Earl of Casriel, tossed the question at Worth as his lordship mounded omelet onto his plate at the sideboard. There probably wasn’t an egg in the whole of Surrey that hadn’t gone into the morning’s meal, and at least three entire loaves of bread were toasted and buttered as well.

  Jacaranda had kept the lot of them fed, clothed, housed, and more or less out of trouble since her girlhood.

  “You’d best eat,” Casriel went on. “Until Jacaranda comes down, the boys will think nothing of taking the food off your plate.”

  “Grampion was so busy pouring my best spirits down their thirsty little throats last night, I doubt they’ll be up and about this early.” Worth put a goodly pile of eggs on his plate for show. God knew he wasn’t hungry.

  “Sycamore—Cam—can out-eat any one of us,” Casriel said, setting his plate at the place to Worth’s right. “He’ll be the tallest, though he’s the youngest, and certain older brothers of his will regret some teasing they’ve done. You’re avoiding my question.”

  “Regarding your sister,” Worth said, passing the teapot over. The table boasted three this morning. “It’s gunpowder. Hess and I prefer it.”

  “I didn’t put the two together,” Casriel said, pouring his tea. “I know Grampion in passing, and I knew Jacaranda’s employer was some dithering little cipher in the City, Somebody Kettering. Never made the connection.”

  “I don’t dither.” Nor were his offices in the City. Worth pushed over the cream and sugar. The cream was in a milk pitcher today. Better than a quart of it awaiting the Dorset Horde. “Your sister is a lady in every sense. She should not have been allowed to go into service. Had I known her station, I would have returned her to you five years ago.”

  “I, for one, am glad you didn’t,” Casriel said around a mouthful of eggs. “I was having a grand time in Town, new to the title, years past university, and she sent me a letter warning me Daisy was being courted and telling me to get myself down to Dorset as head of the family, because Jacaranda was tired of cleaning up after me. She said if she had to spend a life in service, she at least wanted to be paid for it.”

  Worth poured himself more tea while he still could, wanting to toast the lady in absentia.

  And yet, the earl sounded genuinely contrite. “Go on, Casriel. The barbarians will soon sack the sideboard and take the teapots prisoner, unless I’m mistaken.”

  “Jack saw what I did not. I had no authority as head of our family because I was little more than a boy myself and acting as stupidly as most others in my position. My step-mother has ever enjoyed delicate nerves, and my brothers were terrorizing their tutors, the maids, the local girls. Jacaranda contained them as best she could. While my brothers and I weren’t looking, somebody stole a march on us and treated her ill.”

  “Do you know who the somebody is?”

  Casriel set his fork down, just so, on his plate.

  “That’s a bit delicate. A family as big as ours is a balancing act. If I buy Ash a horse, must I buy one for all five of my other brothers? If Daisy got flute lessons, did I owe Valerian the cello he claimed he’d practice five hours a day as well? You can’t always know what the just outcome is, and when you do, sometimes you wish you didn’t.”

  “Not in this case,” Worth said. “In this case, you let the man who abused one sister turn around and marry the other.” He felt not the least sympathy for an earl whose brothers were decimating Worth’s pantries and his stores of civility as they stole Jacaranda for their own. “Oh, and you let Jacaranda’s portion be tucked in among the wedding presents.”

  Casriel’s gentian eyes narrowed. “The trust was transferred by my own father, and that’s Lady Jacaranda to you.”

  On Jacaranda, those eyes were beautiful. On Casriel, they were merely odd, to Worth anyway.

  “Lady Jacaranda, my housekeeper. I at least gave her a generous wage for her hard work. You let her sister—or, more properly, her step-mother—steal from her.”

  “Daisy’s lungs—”

  “Were as hale as yours by the time this Eric weasel came sniffing around your sisters.”

  Casriel glanced at the door. “Look, Kettering. There I was, a grown boy, one sister begging me to let her go off into service, the other sister bound and determined to get her hands on this squire’s son. I could not afford many more Seasons for Jack, and Daisy would spare me the whole Town do if I could get her married. Haven’t you ever been young and stupid?”

  Well, hell.

  Worth had been young and stupid, and last night, he’d been not young but still stupid, because he’d taken no measures to protect Jacaranda from conceiving a child. He was still trying to untangle his motivations for that, and hers for allowing the risk.

  “What will you do now?” Worth asked. “Let her molder away on the coast, cleaning up after those bull calves you call brothers?”

  “I wish they were bull calves. Then my course would be clear-cut, so to speak.”

  “Good morning, all.” Hess sauntered in, looking well rested and elegant, damn him.

  “Hessian.” Worth poured himself more tea. “Casriel encourages us aging bumblers to eat before the locusts descend from their bedrooms.”

  “Jack can put away her fair share, too,” Casriel said, slathering jam on his toast.

  “Lady Jacaranda to you,” Worth retorted, balling up his serviette and rising. “She hates to be called Jack.”

&nbs
p; * * *

  Worth helped Jacaranda dress. His attentiveness broke her heart in a whole different way, but he topped that accomplishment by helping with the last of her packing, too.

  Both of those heartbreaks were different from the heartbreak of making love with him.

  Different from the pain of waking in his arms.

  Different from the anticipation of him coming home from Town.

  Different from sharing the single tea cup with him when her morning tray came up.

  And it all hurt unbearably.

  “Before you go downstairs,” Worth said, drawing her down beside him on the settee, “we need to discuss something.”

  “Not my money.” She could not bear to see him looking so solemn. “You may borrow it as long as you want. I’ll have a roof over my head at Dorning and coal for the hearth. We manage. I’m not sure how Grey does it, but we do manage.”

  “Not providing his sisters any dowry probably helps.” Worth’s scathing tone was at variance with the gentle caress of his thumb over her knuckles.

  “He has to see my brothers educated, Worth. Don’t judge him.”

  Worth’s smile was crooked and sad. “You love him. I’ll keep my judgmental mouth shut on that score. My dear, last night—”

  “Last night was lovely.”

  “Last night was beyond lovely,” he countered, “but there could be a child, Jacaranda. I want you to promise me we’ll marry if there is.”

  His words implied they would not marry unless a child came along. She had refused his proposals, after all.

  “Think of the child, love.” He brought her hand to his lips. “Think of the scandal to your family, when your brother ought to be finding himself a countess.”

  She studied their joined hands. “He ought, oughtn’t he? Given the timing, I doubt there will be consequences.”

  “Is Wyeth any part of your name?”

  “Jacaranda Wyeth Dorning. No missus, though. That was a misrepresentation.” Another misrepresentation.

  “A liberty,” he said. “Promise me, Jacaranda Wyeth Dorning. I would not force you into marriage, but it is my right to provide for my child and the child’s mother. My privilege.”