Almost Heaven

by Judith McNaught

  He grinned at the contrast between her words and her voice. “I know.”

  “You might have told me.”

  “I hoped to surprise you.”

  More correctly, he had hoped she didn’t know, and now he had his proof: Just as he had thought, Elizabeth had agreed to marry him without knowing anything of his personal wealth. That expression of dazed disbelief on her face had been real. He’d needed to see it for himself, which was why he’d instructed his butler to bring her to him as soon as she arrived. Ian had his proof, and with it came the knowledge that no matter how much she refused to admit it to him or to herself, she loved him.

  She could insist for now and all time that all she wanted from marriage was independence, and now Ian could endure it with equanimity. Because she loved him.

  Elizabeth watched the expressions play across his face. Thinking he was waiting for her to say more about his splendid house, she gave him a jaunty smile and teasingly said, “Twill be a sacrifice, to be sure, but I shall contrive to endure the hardship of living in such a place as this. How many rooms are there?” she asked.

  His brows rose in mockery. “One hundred and eighty-two.”

  “A small place of modest proportions,” she countered lightly. “I suppose we’ll just have to make do.”

  Ian thought they were going to do very well.

  He finished his meeting a few minutes later and almost rudely ejected his business acquaintances from his library, then he went in search of Elizabeth.

  “She is out in the gardens, my lord,” his butler informed him. A short while later Ian strolled out the French doors and started down the balcony steps to join her. She was bending down and snapping a withered rosebud from its stem. “It only hurts for a moment,” she told the bush, “and it’s for your own good. You’ll see.” With an embarrassed little smile she looked up at him. “It’s a habit,” she explained.

  “It obviously works,” he said with a tender smile, looking at the way the flowers bloomed about her skirts.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because,” he said quietly as she stood up, “until you walked into it, this was an ordinary garden.”

  Puzzled, Elizabeth tipped her head. “What is it now?”

  “Heaven.”

  Elizabeth’s breath caught in her chest at the husky timbre of his voice and the desire in his eyes. He held out his hand to her, and, without realizing what she was doing, she lifted her hand and gave it to him, then she walked straight into his arms. For one breathless moment his smoldering eyes studied her face feature by feature while the pressure of his arms slowly increased, and then he bent his head. His sensual mouth claimed hers in a kiss of violent tenderness and tormenting desire while his hands slid over the sides of her breasts, and Elizabeth felt all her resistance, all her will, begin to crumble and disintegrate, and she kissed him back with her whole heart.

  All the love that had been accumulating through the lonely years of her childhood was in that kiss—Ian felt it in the soft lips parting willingly for his searching tongue, the delicate hands sliding through the hair at his nape. With unselfish ardor she offered it all to him, and Ian took it hungrily, feeling it moving from her to him, then flowing through his veins and mingling with his until the joy of it was shattering. She was everything he’d ever dreamed she could be and more.

  With an effort that was almost painful he dragged his mouth from hers, his hand still cupping the rumpled satin of her hair, his other hand holding her pressed to his rigid body, and Elizabeth stayed in his arms, seeming neither frightened nor offended by his rigid erection. “I love you,” he whispered, rubbing his jaw against her temple. “And you love me. I can feel it when you’re in my arms.” He felt her stiffen slightly and draw a shaky breath, but she either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. She hadn’t thrown the words back in his face, however, so Ian continued talking to her, his hand roving over her back. “I can feel it, Elizabeth, but if you don’t admit it pretty soon, you’re going to drive me out of my mind. I can’t work. I can’t think. I make decisions and then I change my mind. And,” he teased, trying to lighten the mood by using the one topic sure to distract her, “that’s nothing to the money I squander whenever I’m under this sort of violent stress. It wasn’t just the gowns I bought, or the house on Promenade . . .”

  Still talking to her, he tipped her chin up, glorying in the gentle passion in her eyes, overlooking the doubt in their green depths. “If you don’t admit it pretty soon,” he teased, “I’ll spend us out of house and home.” Her delicate brows drew together in blank confusion, and Ian grinned, taking her hand from his chest, the emerald betrothal ring he had bought her unnoticed in his fingers. “When I’m under stress,” he emphasized, sliding the magnificent emerald onto her finger, “I buy everything in sight. It took my last ounce of control not to buy one of these in every color.”

  Her eyes lifted from his smiling lips, dropped to the enormous jewel on her finger, and then widened in shock. “Oh, but—” she exclaimed, staring at it and straightening in his arms. “It’s glorious, I do mean that, but I couldn’t let you—really, I couldn’t. Ian,” she burst out anxiously, sending a tremor through him when she called him by name, “I can’t let you do this. You’ve been extravagantly generous already.” She touched the huge stone almost reverently, then gave her head a practical shake. “I don’t need jewels, really I don’t. You’re doing this because of that stupid remark I made about someone offering me jewels as large as my palm, and now you’ve bought one nearly that large!”

  “Not quite,” he chuckled.

  “Why, a stone like this would pay for irrigating Havenhurst and all the servants’ wages for years and years and years, and food to—”

  She reached to slide it off her finger. “Don’t!” he warned on a choked laugh, linking his hands behind her back. “I”—he thought madly for some way to stop her objections—“I cannot possibly return it,” he said. “It’s part of a matched set.”

  “You don’t mean there’s more!”

  “I’m afraid so, though I meant to surprise you with them tonight. There’s a necklace and bracelet and earrings.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, making a visible effort not to stare at her ring. “Well, I suppose . . . if it was a purchase of several pieces, the ring alone probably didn’t cost as much as it would have . . . Do not tell me,” she said severely, when his shoulders began to shake with suppressed mirth, “you actually paid full price for all of the pieces!”

  Laughing, Ian put his forehead against hers, and he nodded.

  “It’s very fortunate,” she said, protectively putting her fingers against the magnificent ring, “that I’ve agreed to marry you.”

  “If you hadn’t,” he laughed, “God knows what I would have bought.”

  “Or how much you would have paid for it,” she chuckled, cuddling in his arms—for the first time of her own volition. “Do you really do that?” she asked a moment later.

  “Do what?” he gasped, tears of mirth blurring his vision.

  “Spend money heedlessly when you’re disturbed about something?”

  “Yes,” he lied in a suffocated, laughing voice.

  “You’ll have to stop doing it.”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “I could help you.”

  “Please do.”

  “You may place yourself entirely in my hands.”

  “I’m very much looking forward to that.” It was the first time Ian had ever kissed a woman while he was laughing.

  * * *

  The afternoon passed as if it were minutes, not hours, and he kept glancing at the clock, willing it to stop. When there was no way to avoid it, he escorted her out to her carriage. “I’ll see you in London tomorrow night at the ball. And don’t worry. It will be fine.”

  “I know it will,” she answered with complete confidence.

  27

  Five nights before, when she’d arrived at the Willingtons’ ball, she’d been terrifi
ed and ashamed. Tonight, as the butler called out her name, Elizabeth felt neither dread nor even concern as she walked gracefully across the balcony and began slowly descending the steps to the ballroom beside the dowager duchess. With Jordan and Alexandra behind them she saw people turning to watch her, only tonight Elizabeth cared nothing for what expression was on all six hundred faces. Wrapped in an incredibly sumptuous gown of goldembroidered emerald silk, with Ian’s emerald and diamond necklace at her throat and her hair caught up in intricate curls at her crown, she felt carefree and calm.

  Partway down the steps she let her gaze pass across the crowd, looking for the only face that mattered. He was exactly where he had been two years ago when she’d walked into Charise’s ballroom—standing not far from the foot of the steps, listening to some people who were talking to him.

  And just as she had known would happen, he looked up the moment she saw him, as if he’d been watching for her, too. His bold, admiring gaze swept over her, then it returned slowly to her face—and then, in shared memory, he lifted his glass and made that same subtle toast to her.

  It was all sweetly, poignantly familiar; they’d played this same scene two years ago, only then it had ended wrong. Tonight Elizabeth intended that it would end as it should have, and she didn’t care a whit about any other reason for being here. The things he had said to her yesterday, the husky sound of his voice, the way he held her—they were like sweet music playing through her heart. He was daring and bold and passionate—he had always been those things —and Elizabeth was mightily tired of being fearful and prim and logical.

  Ian’s thoughts were also on the last time he’d watched her enter a ballroom—that is, they had been until he got a clear look at her and logical thinking fled his mind. The Elizabeth Cameron coming down the steps and passing within a few yards of him was not the beautiful girl in blue of two years ago.

  A breathtaking vision in emerald silk, she was too exquisite to be flesh and blood; too regal and aloof to have ever let him touch her. He drew a long strangled breath and realized he hadn’t been breathing as he watched her. Neither had the four men beside him. “Good Lord,” Count Dillard breathed, turning clear around and staring at her, “she cannot possibly be real.”

  “Exactly my thoughts when I first saw her,” Roddy Carstairs averred, walking up behind them.

  “I don’t care what gossip says,” Dillard continued, so besotted with her face that he forgot that one of the men in their circle was a part of that gossip. “I want an introduction.”

  He handed his glass to Roddy instead of the servant beside him and went off to seek an introduction from Jordan Townsende.

  Watching him, it took a physical effort for Ian to maintain his carefully bland expression, tear his gaze from Dillard’s back, and pay attention to Roddy Carstairs, who’d just greeted him. In fact, it took several moments before Ian could even remember his name. “How are you, Carstairs?” Ian said, finally recollecting it.

  “Besotted, like half the males in here, it would seem,” Roddy replied, tipping his head toward Elizabeth but scrutinizing Ian’s bland face and annoyed eyes. “In fact. I’m so besotted that for the second time in my jaded career I’ve done the gallant for a damsel in distress. Your damsel, unless my intuition deceives me, and it never does, actually.”

  Ian lifted his glass to his lips, watching Dillard bow to Elizabeth. “You’ll have to be more specific,” he said impatiently.

  “Specifically, I’ve been saying that in my august opinion no one, but no one, has ever besmirched that exquisite creature. Including you.” Hearing him talk about Elizabeth as if she were a morsel for public delectation sent a blaze of fury through Ian.

  He was spared having to form a reply to Carstairs’s remark by the arrival of yet another group of people eager to be introduced to him, and he endured, as he had been enduring all night, a flurry of curtsies, flirtatious smiles, inviting glances, and overeager handshakes and bows.

  “How does it feel,” Roddy inquired as that group departed and another bore down on Ian, “to have become, overnight, England’s most eligible bachelor?”

  Ian answered him and abruptly walked off, and in so doing dashed the hopes of the new group that had been heading toward him. The gentleman beside Roddy, who’d been admiring Ian’s magnificently tailored claret jacket and trousers, leaned closer to Roddy and raised his voice to be heard above the din. “I say, Roddy, how did Kensington say it feels to be our most eligible?”

  Roddy lowered his glass, a sardonic smile twisting his lips. “He said it is a pain in the ass.” He slid a sideways glance at his staggered companion and added wryly, “With Hawthorne wed and Kensington soon to be—in my opinion— the only remaining bachelor with a dukedom to offer is Clayton Westmoreland. Given the uproar Hawthorne and Kensington have both created with their courtships, one can only look forward with glee to observing Westmoreland’s.”

  It took Ian twenty minutes to walk ten yards to his grandfather because he was interrupted at every step by someone else curtsying to him or insisting on a friendly word.

  He spent the next hour on the same dance floor where Elizabeth danced with her own partners, and Ian realized she was now nearly as sought-after as he was. As the evening wore on, and he watched her laughing with her partners or listening to the compliments they lavished on her, he noted that while he found balls occasionally amusing but usually boring, Elizabeth thrived in their setting. She belonged here, he realized; this was the world, the setting where Elizabeth glowed and sparkled and reigned like a young queen. It was the world she obviously loved. Not once since she’d arrived had he seen her so much as glance his way, even though his gaze had constantly strayed to her. Which, he realized grimly as the time finally came to claim her for his waltz, put him among the majority of the men in the room. Like him, they were watching her, their eyes acquisitive, thoughtful.

  In keeping with the farce he was forced to play, Ian approached the group around the Townsendes and went to Jordan first, who was standing between his wife and Elizabeth. After giving Ian a look of amused understanding Jordan dutifully turned aside to draw Elizabeth from her crowd of admirers into their own circle. “Lady Cameron,” he said, playing his role with élan as he nodded toward Ian. “You recall our friend Lord Thornton, Marquess of Kensington, I hope?”

  The radiant smile Elizabeth bestowed on Ian was not at all what the dowager had insisted ought to be “polite but impartial.” It wasn’t quite like any smile she’d ever given him. “Of course I remember you, my lord,” Elizabeth said to Ian, graciously offering him her hand.

  “I believe this waltz is mine,” he said for the benefit of Elizabeth’s avidly interested admirers. He waited until they were near the dancers, then he tried to sound more pleasant. “You seem to be enjoying yourself tonight.”

  “I am,” she said idly, but when she looked up at his face she saw the coolness in his eyes; with her new understanding of her own feelings, she understood his more easily. A soft, knowing smile touched her lips as the musicians struck up a waltz; it stayed in her heart as Ian’s arm slid around her waist, and his left hand closed around her fingers, engulfing them.

  Overhead a hundred thousand candles burned in crystal chandeliers, but Elizabeth was back in a moonlit arbor long ago. Then as now, Ian moved to the music with effortless ease. That lovely waltz had begun something that had ended wrong, terribly wrong. Now, as she danced in his arms, she could make this waltz end much differently, and she knew it; the knowledge filled her with pride and a twinge of nervousness. She waited, expecting him to say something tender, as he had the last time.

  “Belhaven’s been devouring you with his eyes all night,” Ian said instead. “So have half the men in this ballroom. For a country that prides itself on its delicate manners, they sure as hell don’t extend to admiring beautiful women.”

  That, Elizabeth thought with a startled inner smile, was not the opening she’d been waiting for. With his current mood, Elizabeth realized, she was
going to have to make her own opening. Lifting her eyes to his enigmatic golden ones, she said quietly, “Ian, have you ever wanted something very badly—something that was within your grasp—and yet you were afraid to reach out for it?”

  Surprised by her grave question and her use of his name, Ian tried to ignore the jealousy that had been eating at him all night. “No,” he said, scrupulously keeping the curtness from his voice as he gazed down at her alluring face. “Why do you ask? Is there something you want?”

  Her gaze fell from his, and she nodded at his frilled white shirtfront.

  “What is it you want?”

  “You.”

  Ian’s breath froze in his chest, and he stared down at her lustrous hair. “What did you just say?”

  She raised her eyes to his. “I said I want you, only I’m afraid that I—”

  Ian’s heart slammed into his chest, and his fingers dug reflexively into her back, starting to pull her to him. “Elizabeth,” he said in a strained voice, glancing a little wildly at their avidly curious audience and resisting the impossible impulse to take her out onto the balcony, “why in God’s name would you say a thing like that to me when we’re in the middle of a damned dance floor in a crowded ballroom?”

  Her radiant smile widened. “I thought it seemed like exactly the right place,” she told him, watching his eyes darken with desire.

  “Because it’s safer?” Ian asked in disbelief, meaning safer from his ardent reaction.

  “No, because this is how it all began two years ago. We were in the arbor, and a waltz was playing,” she reminded him needlessly. “And you came up behind me and said, ‘Dance with me, Elizabeth.’ And—and I did,” she said, her voice trailing off at the odd expression darkening his eyes. “Remember?” she added shakily when he said absolutely nothing.

  His gaze held hers, and his voice was tender and rough. “Love me, Elizabeth.”