“Jasper,” she whispered his given name in the darkness, and a part of him, long buried, responded to the sound of it. “He was grieving. He didn’t mean it. He couldn’t have.”
He ignored the words . . . the pain in them. “They couldn’t look at me, and so I left.”
He met her blue eyes. Saw the understanding in them. “Where did you go?”
“The only place I could think to go.” He stopped, knowing that this was the part of the story that most mattered. Considering his words.
He did not have to hide from her. She was already there. “To Knight’s.”
“I gambled for days. Straight. No sleep. I went from the tables on the floor of the hell to the beds above—tried to lose myself in gaming and women.” He paused, hating the story. The boy he’d been. “I swore not to look back.”
“Orpheus,” she said.
One side of his mouth kicked up. “You’re too smart for your own good.”
She smiled. “It helps when I’m with you.”
The words reminded him of how much he liked this woman. Of how much he shouldn’t. “Orpheus in reverse. From Earth into Hell. Full of pain and sin and every kind of vice. I should not be alive now to tell the tale.”
“But you are.”
He nodded. “I am alive, and Baine isn’t; I am well, and Lavinia suffers.”
“It’s not your fault.” She came into his arms again, wrapping her arms about him and repeating the words to his chest. “It’s not your fault.”
He wanted to believe her so badly. But it wasn’t true.
“But it is.” He held her to him and confessed his sins to her beautiful cornsilk hair. “I killed my brother. That is the cross I bear.”
She heard it . . . stilled. Looked up at him. And his brilliant Pippa understood. “The cross you bear.” His lips twisted in a wry smile. “That’s why you took the name. Cross.”
“To remember whence I came. To recall sins past.”
“I hate it.”
He released her. “You shan’t be around it much longer, love.”
Her beautiful blue eyes grew wide and sad at the words, and it was he who hated . . . hated this night and their situation and himself. He swore, the word harsh in the candlelight. “I couldn’t save them,” he confessed before vowing. “But, goddammit . . . I can save you.”
She jerked back. “Save me?”
“Knight knows who you are. He will ruin you if I don’t stop him.”
“Stop him how?” He met her gaze, and she knew. He could hear it in her voice. “Stop him how?”
“I marry his daughter, he keeps your secrets.”
She stiffened in his arms, brows snapping together. “I don’t care a fig if he tells the world my secrets.”
She would care, of course. She would care when Knight planted the seed of their time together in the ear of the aristocracy. In Castleton’s ear. She would care when it ruined her marriage and her future and her sisters’ happiness. She would care when her parents could no longer look her in the eye. “You should care. You have a life to live. You have a family to think of. You have an earl to marry. I won’t have your ruination on my head. I won’t have it alongside all the rest.”
She pulled herself up to her full height, caring not a bit that she was half-dressed and could likely not see very well. It didn’t matter, of course. She was a queen. “I am not in need of saving. I am perfectly well without it. For a scandalous, wicked man, you are all too willing to assume the mantle of responsibility.”
“You are my responsibility.” Did she not see that? “You became my responsibility the moment you entered my office.”
She’d been his from the start.
Her gaze narrowed. “I was not looking for a keeper.”
Irritation flared. He took her shoulders in hand and made his promise. “Well, you haven’t a choice. I have spent years atoning for my sins, desperate to keep from wreaking more destruction than I already have. I will not have you near it. I will not have you touched by it.” The words came on a flood of desperation . . . panic that he could not deny. “Dammit, Pippa, I have to do this. Don’t you see?”
“I don’t.” There was panic in her voice as well, in the way her fingers gripped his arms tight. “What of me? What of my responsibility? You think I will not feel the heavy weight of your marrying a woman you don’t know out of some false sense of honor?”
“There is nothing false about this,” he said. “This is what I can give you.” He reached for her, pulled her close. Wished it was forever. “Don’t you see, love? Saving you . . . it’s my purpose. I have tried so hard . . .” He trailed off.
“To what?” When he did not immediately answer, she added, “Jasper?”
Perhaps it was his name on her lips that made him tell the truth . . . perhaps it was the soft question—and something he was too afraid to name—in her blue eyes . . . perhaps it was simply her presence.
But he told her. “To atone. If not for me . . . Baine would be alive, and Lavinia would be well.”
“Lavinia has chosen her life,” Pippa argued. “She’s a husband and children . . .”
“A husband in debt to Knight. Children who must grow in the shadow of their useless father. A marriage born of my own father’s fear that he’d never rid himself of his crippled daughter.”
She shook her head. “That’s not your sin.”
“Of course it is!” he burst out, spinning away from her. “It’s all mine. I’ve spent the last six years trying to rewrite it, but that is my past. It’s my legacy. I am the contact for the girls at the Angel . . . I choose to be. I try to keep them safe. The second they want out . . . the moment they choose another life for themselves, I help them. They come to me; I get them out. I’ve helped dozens of them . . . found places for them, work that can be done on their feet instead of their back. Country estates where they can be safe . . . every one of them a placeholder for her.”
For the sister he could not save, whose life he’d destroyed.
For the brother whose life he’d taken as surely as if he’d crashed the damn carriage himself.
“It’s not your fault,” she said again. “You couldn’t have known.”
He’d thought the words a hundred times. A million. But they never comforted. “If Baine were earl . . . he would have heirs. He would have sons. He would have the life he deserved.”
“The life you deserve as well.”
The words came on a vision of that life. Of those little blond, bespectacled girls and laughing boys capturing frogs in the heat of a Devonshire summer. Of their mother. Of his wife. “That’s where you’re wrong. I don’t deserve it. I stole it from him. I robbed it from him while I was in the arms of his mistress.”
She stilled at the words. “His mistress. That’s why you didn’t touch me. Didn’t kiss me. Why you don’t . . . with other women.” How the hell did she know that? She answered before he could ask the question. “The lady at the card table . . . and Miss Tasser . . . they both implied that . . .”
Dammit. “Did they.” It was not a question.
She pinned him with that knowing blue gaze. “Is it true?”
He could lie. He’d spent half a decade convincing London that he hadn’t stopped the rakish behavior. That he’d made women his life’s work. He could lie, and she’d never discover the truth.
But he did not want to lie to her. Not about this. “It’s been six years.”
“Since you’ve lain with a woman?”
He did not speak, and the truth was in the silence.
She pressed on, eyes wide. “Since you’ve lain with any woman?”
She sounded so shocked. “Any woman.”
“But . . . your reputation. You’re a legendary lover!”
He inclined his head. “I told you that you should not believe everything you hear in la
dies’ salons.”
“Forgive me, but if I remember correctly, you did divest me of my clothes without the use of your hands.”
The image of her in his office, draped over his chair, flashed. More welcome than he’d ever admit. He met her gaze. “Luck.”
“You don’t believe in it.”
She was incredible. His perfect match.
“Six years without touching a woman,” she said in awe.
He paused. “Until tonight.”
“Until me,” she breathed.
He wanted to share that breath, to touch her again. “I can’t stop myself with you.”
Her lips curved into a smile of utter feminine satisfaction, and Cross was instantly heavy and stiff, even as he renewed his vow not to take her. Not to lose himself in her. Not even now, when she owned him inch by unworthy inch.
“It is your punishment, then? Your penance? Celibacy?”
“Yes.” On her lips, it sounded idiotic. Celibacy had no place near Philippa Marbury. Not when she was so obviously made for him.
Fifteen minutes in an alcove at the Angel had not been enough.
A lifetime would not be enough.
“I cannot. Not with you, Pippa. You’re to be married.”
She hesitated, then whispered, “To another.”
He ached at the words. “Yes. To another.”
“Just as you are.”
“Yes.” His ultimate penance.
She lifted one hand, settling the soft palm on his cheek and he could not resist capturing it with his own hand, holding her touch there. Savoring it. “Jasper.” His given name whispered through him, and he loved it on her lips. Wanted to hear it over and over again, forever. If he were another man, he might have a chance to.
But he had to leave her.
She was not his to touch.
“Jasper,” she whispered again, coming up on her bare toes, wrapping her other hand around his neck, pressing her beautiful body against him, nothing but a scrap of linen between his hands and her soft, lovely skin.
He shouldn’t.
Every inch of him ached for her—the product of too long a time without her followed by too brief a time with her. He wanted to lift her and throw her onto her bed and take her . . . just once.
It would never be enough.
“If you really want to save me . . .” she whispered, her lips disastrously close.
“I do,” he confessed. “God help me . . . I can’t bear the thought of you hurt.”
“But you have hurt me. You hurt me even now.” Her voice was low and soft, with a thread of irresistible wickedness he did not expect.
His hands came around her waist, adoring the heat of her through her night rail. “Tell me how to stop it,” he said . . . knowing the answer.
“Want me,” she said.
“I do.” He had wanted her since the moment he met her. Since before. “I want every inch of you . . . I want your mind and body and soul.” He hesitated, the words an ache in the room. “I have never wanted anything like you.”
Her fingers slid into his hair, tangling in the strands. “Touch me.”
He couldn’t deny her. He couldn’t resist looking back.
One glance. One night.
It was all he could have. It was more than he had ever deserved.
One night, and he’d leave her to her perfect, ideal world.
One night, and he would return to his Hell.
“I won’t ruin your life, Pippa. I won’t let you be destroyed.”
She pressed her lips to his, her soft skin making him mad, and whispered so quietly he almost didn’t hear it. “I love you.”
The words rocketed through him, and he couldn’t stop himself from lifting her into his arms and giving them both what they wanted. What would change everything and nothing at the same time. He lifted her against him, adoring the way she followed his lead, pressing herself to him, running her mouth across his jaw, setting him on fire.
She shouldn’t love him.
He wasn’t worth it.
Wasn’t worth her.
“You are a remarkable man,” she said, lips at his ear. “I cannot help it.”
One night would destroy him.
But there was no resisting her. Her brilliant mind. Her beautiful face.
There never had been.
Chapter Sixteen
He hadn’t touched a woman in six years. Had resisted them . . . until her.
Until now.
Until this moment, when he lifted her from her feet and carried her to the bed where she’d slept for her entire life, and lay her down, following her down with his heady, heavy weight, pinning her beneath him with long limbs and corded strength and the promise of a pleasure she had never known.
Eight days prior, she’d stood in his office and asked him to teach her about ruination; here, finally, was the lesson for which she had not known she’d asked. The one for which she was utterly, completely desperate.
He kissed her, entirely different than the one that shattered her thought and breath earlier in the evening, but equally devastating. This one was slow and lavish, a claiming of lips and tongue that had her clinging to him, instantly addicted to the pleasure that only he could give.
She sighed her satisfaction, and he captured the sound with another long, lush mating of lips and tongues before lifting his head and meeting her gaze in the candlelight. “You are the most incredible woman I’ve ever known,” he whispered. “You make me want to teach you every wicked, depraved thing I’ve ever done . . . ever dreamed.”
The words were pleasure and heat—threading through her fast and furious until she had to close her eyes at the sensation. He brushed his lips across one of her cheeks, leaning down to her ear. “Would you like that?”
She sighed her agreement, and said, “The room is spinning.”
His lips curved at her earlobe. “I thought I was the only one who noticed.”
She turned to face him. “What causes it?”
“My little scientist . . . if you have time to wonder about that, I am not doing my job well enough.”
And then she didn’t care if the room spun because the globe was off its axis, because his lips were on hers, and his hands were stroking up her legs, carrying the linen of her nightgown with them, and she wanted nothing more than to touch him in every place she could.
One long hand slid beneath the night rail, palming her bottom as he lifted his weight from her, before stroking fingers curved along her hip and urged her thighs apart.
When he settled between them, his hard heat pressing against her pulsing core, she thought she might die of the pleasure. She writhed against him, desperate to be closer to him, thinking of nothing but touching him, getting as close to him as she could.
He tore his lips from hers, gasping her name. Rocking against her once, twice, sending thick arcs of pleasure through her. He stilled above her, and she opened her eyes, instantly drawn to his beautiful grey gaze. He pressed his forehead to hers. “Shh, darling. I shall give you everything you wish . . . but you must be quiet . . . if your father hears . . . you shall be ruined.”
“I don’t care,” she whispered, rocking up against him again. And it was true. Ruination was worth it. She would be free of Castleton and could spend the rest of her life here, with Cross. In his den of sin. In his arms. Anywhere he liked.
He would never allow it.
The practical little voice whispered through her, and she pushed it away. Anything was possible now, tonight, with him. Tomorrow, she would face the rest of her life. But tonight . . . tonight was hers. Tonight was theirs.
Tonight, there was no room for practical.
“Show me everything. Everything that you know. Everything that you like. Everything that you desire.”
He closed his eyes, a wa
sh of something that could have been pleasure or pain chasing over his face, and she pushed herself up on her elbows, pressing against him, loving the feel of her breasts against his warm chest, loving the way her thighs cradled his lean hips and the heavy, hard, thickness of him was seated against the part of her that ached so much for him.
She rocked against him there, testing the way they fit, and he hissed at the movement, his eyes opening to narrow slits, grey gleaming pewter in the candlelight. “You will pay for that.”
She smiled. “You cannot fault me for experimentation.”
He laughed softly. “I cannot. After all, without that particular penchant, I would not have you here. Now.” He kissed her again, quick and intense. When they were both gasping for breath, he lifted his head again, and said, “How else can I help you with your research, my lady?”
She took a long moment, her gaze running over his beautiful face. Stay with me, she wanted to say. Let me stay with you.
But she knew better. Instead, she lifted her hands to his chest, pushing the lapels of his coat to the side and pressing her palms flat against his waistcoat. “I believe my research would be well served if you were nude.”
He raised a ginger brow and did not move. “Do you?”
She raised a brow in retort, and he smirked, rolling off her and shucking his coat, waistcoat, and shirt before returning to the bed. “Does this help?”
“In point of fact, good sir,” she said, letting one hand fall to the smooth skin of his torso, loving the way he stiffened at the touch, “it does. But you are not nude.”
He pressed a kiss to her neck, letting his teeth scrape along delicate skin until she shivered and sighed. “Neither are you.”
“You never indicated a wish for me to be.”
He lifted his head and met her gaze. “Make no mistake, my lady. I wish you nude every moment of every day.”
Her eyes went wide. “That would make teas and balls awkward.”
His white teeth flashed, and she loved him more with the wicked smile. “No teas. No balls. Only this.”
His hand rose to punctuate the sentiment, carrying the linen of her night rail with it, sending it sailing across the room, landing on Trotula, who gave a startled snort. They both looked to the hound, and Pippa laughed. “Perhaps I should send her away?”
One Good Earl Deserves a Lover Page 30