by Lora Darling
“Yes, well,” she said to the room, “sorry, Grandpapa, but I’ll not have this fiend’s blood on my hands, no matter his intentions toward me.” Though if Petley truly meant to do away with her once in possession of her fortune, she might have to revisit her opinion of his death. Self-defense was vastly different from murder, after all.
The scrape of footsteps from the outer corridor drew her gaze toward the door. Likely the maid had come to clear the plates. As she moved toward the door she wondered if she should mention the bad food. Assuming the maid did not know. There was always the off chance the girl had been fully aware of the poor quality and simply did not care. After all, Petley had struck the girl with alarming force. Perhaps the bad food was meant as retaliation?
Eirene pulled open the door, but it was not the maid who stood on the other side. “Adrien?”
She blinked, but he did not vanish. He stood there as real as could be, dressed in riding clothes and several layers of road dust. His ashen complexion, gaunt cheeks, and dull gaze did nothing to improve his appearance, yet she’d never laid eyes upon a sight more welcoming.
He had come for her. Adrien, looking as though he had escaped his own funeral, had come for her.
She had never fancied herself a female to be moved by such a display of masculine possession, and yet, she was. Very moved. Almost to tears, damn the man and his ability to muddle her emotions.
His gaze took in every inch of her. “Are you hurt? Did he touch you? Where the devil is the bastard?”
He shoved past her to enter the room and drew to an abrupt halt as he caught sight of Petley sprawled, naked, upon the bed. The thin, worn, oft repaired sheet offered little modesty.
Adrien whipped around to face her, his eyes no longer dull. “I see.”
“No, you do not see, at all.” How dare he stand there and jump to such an offensive conclusion. Yes, Petley was naked in the bed, but was she? No. She slammed the door and crossed her arms. “Do not look at me like that, sir. That”—she gestured toward the bed—“is most definitely not what it appears to be.”
“No?” He too crossed his arms. “So it is not Lord Samuel Petley naked in bed?”
“Of course it is, but he is not in his current state for the reasons your corrupt mind has invented.” Had she really expected Adrien to sweep her into his arms and profess how relieved he was to find her well? How foolish. No wonder she had never allowed herself to become enamored of fairy tales.
“No?” He shot a venomous look toward the bed. “The man looks as if he’s been ridden near to death.” His stare returned to her. “And I must say, you look a tad feverish as well.”
She fisted her hands at her sides. “If I were not so damned relieved to see you, I would blacken both your eyes.” Her threat drew her attention to the darkness that marred the left side of his jaw. Her ire eased as she recalled Petley’s boast about attacking Adrien and reached out to brush her fingers along the bruise. “It is not as bad as his words led me to fear.”
Adrien clasped her wrist, not to remove her touch but to prolong it. “Outwardly, no, but my ribs tell a much different tale. Riding hell for leather after you did them no favors, I might add.”
“I’ll not apologize for that which is in no way my fault.”
“No, you will not.” He used his hold on her wrist to tug her forward. When her body collided with his, he flinched and sucked in a sharp breath but would not allow her to break the embrace. “No. No. Let me hold you. Please.” He wrapped his arms around her and tucked her tight to his chest. Propping his chin atop her head, he sighed into her hair. “I was terrified I would be too late.”
Eirene said nothing. She simply absorbed the feel of being in Adrien’s arms. Odd to think she had decided to live without this, whatever this was. It felt like the nonsense her mother used to wax poetic about. Before her father had turned into a drunken cheat and broken the woman’s heart. Her mother had called it love. She had told Eirene, time after time, she would recognize it when it happened.
There’s no ignoring it, my darling. Mark my words. You’ll feel equal parts sick and giddy. You’ll believe you’ve lost all reason, but it’ll be your heart you’ve lost.
It sounds dreadful, she’d told her mother.
Her mother had laughed at that. It is only dreadful if it ends, my darling.
A prophetic statement, though neither of them had known at the time that her father would cease loving her mother in order to bestow his affections upon cards, drink, and loose women. When the combination had finally killed him, her mother had become a different woman. Gone was the dewy-eyed, lovestruck bride. In her place was a cynical, shattered shell who begged her fourteen-year-old daughter never to fall in love. Never to allow a man to destroy her. Never to surrender her heart.
Less than a year later, her mother had died in her sleep, an empty bottle of laudanum upended on the pillow beside her.
The unpleasant chill of moisture upon her cheek brought Eirene crashing back to the present. She pulled free of Adrien’s embrace and turned her back so he would not see her tears. But she had not been fast enough.
“Eirene?” His hands landed upon her shoulders, and he turned her back around. “Anything but tears, ma couer, I beg you.”
His heart. God help her, he had referred to her as his heart. Did he believe himself in love with her? Yes, he had proposed, but she hadn’t believed the offer to come from a place motivated by love, for heaven’s sake. Affection? Perhaps. Attraction? Most certainly. But love?
A tortured groan sounded from the bed, drawing her attention and Adrien’s as well. Petley kicked about under the light weight of the sheet, dislodging the covering in a most inappropriate fashion. She did not bother to avert her gaze. She’d been the one to strip the man of his clothes, after all, and after witnessing the repeated emptying of his bowels and gut, nothing about his body could possibly shock her.
“You claim this is not what it looks like,” Adrien remarked with his gaze locked upon Petley. “What, exactly, is it then?”
****
Adrien stared at Eirene, waiting for her response but wanting nothing more than to drag her from the room, toss her onto Chevalier and hurry her back to London. Why the hell he did not was a mystery he seemed too fatigued to sort.
She sighed, dislodging a coil of hair that lay plastered to her moist cheek. “The idiot consumed a bad meat pie.” Crossing her arms, she looked at him and shrugged. “At first I thought he’d been poisoned, and I imagined all sorts of horrific scenarios, all ending with me dangling from a noose.”
“Jesu.”
“Quite.” Her gaze fell upon the bed. “I had to do something about his screams, lest they wake the dead, or worse, the local magistrate.”
“Assuming this God forsaken place has a magistrate.” Adrien’s comment earned him a brief smile before she continued to explain how Petley had come to be naked in bed.
“Carried on like a man having a limb amputated, screaming about being on fire, about wanting to die.” She looked to Adrien. “At one point, he begged me to let him die. How’s that for being tested, hmm? As tempted as I was, I had no desire to have his blood on my hands, so I smacked him a few times across the face to settle his hysteria and asked what I could do to relieve some of his discomfort. I barely had time to remove his clothing before the meat decided it had spent enough time inside his body.” She arched a brow at Adrien lest he mistake her meaning. “What followed does not need to be revisited. Suffice to say, his lordship will survive to inflict more of his offensive arrogance upon the world.”
“How is it that you were not similarly afflicted?” He had noticed the two empty plates upon the small table beneath the window.
“I have an aversion to eating anything that smells like a horse’s arse. Petley obviously does not possess such standards.”
“So it would seem.” Moving to the side of the bed, Adrien picked up Petley’s discarded coat and dropped it across the man’s poorly concealed groin. “Forgive
me for assuming—”
“That I would fornicate with that man?”
The sharpness of her tone brought him around to face her. The expression she wore was no softer.
“Hamish suspected Petley meant to take you to Gretna?”
“Yes, and once we were legally wed and he in control of my vast fortune, I imagine I would have found myself locked in the attic, buried in an unmarked grave, or committed to Bedlam.” She frowned. “What would provoke a man of Petley’s standing to go to such extremes? I understand he might require money to pay off debts, but surely he could have courted and married any number of the young heiresses running about London. Why me?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say it was your status as a recluse that moved you to the top of the list. After all, who would miss a recluse?” Adrien saw Eirene visibly shiver, but he did not go to her. As much as he longed to soothe the sting of his words, he did nothing. She had turned away from his embrace in an attempt to hide her tears. If ever there was a woman disinclined to accept the comfort of a man, it was Eirene. Forcing such affection would get him nowhere.
And doing nothing would gain him what?
He shook his head and cursed Fate for allowing him to fall in love with such a prickly, complicated, amazing woman.
“I do not believe we should be here when Petley comes around,” she said, breaking into his musings. “His mood is bound to be as sour as his digestion.”
“Of course, oui.” He raked a hand through his hair and frowned at the palm of his riding glove, which now bore a thin layer of dust. Mon Dieu, he had to look a fright. “Chevalier threw a shoe—”
“We will borrow his lordship’s carriage. His team has had ample time to rest.” She nodded once, as if he had voiced approval of the idea, then made quick work of shrugging into her spencer and cramming a few pins into her tangled hair.
“Eirene.”
She glanced over her shoulder and arched a brow in lieu of speaking, and he saw the pins wedged between her lush lips. “Hmm?”
“When we return to London, what are your plans?”
She spit the pins into her hand. “I will collect Hamish and leave for the country. This time, I shall refrain from taking a walk, though I never would have imagined his lordship so bold as to snatch a lady from the street in broad daylight.” She scowled toward the bed. “I have learned a great lesson about underestimating one’s enemy.”
“I do not want you to leave London.” He halved the distance between them and halted as she began to back away. “Eirene, please, hear me out.”
“No.” She shook her head with enough force to dislodge some of the recently placed pins. They fell to floor unremarked. “We are not having this conversation. Not here. Not in London. Not ever.”
“You have no idea what I intend to say.”
“No?” She threw up her hands, then let them fall to her sides as if they were made of stone. “I believe I know exactly what you mean to say, Adrien, and it will prove nothing. I have no desire to wed, not you, not any man. My opinion of the matter will not change, so I am begging you to say no more on the subject or I will be forced to forgo the pleasure of your company on my return trip to London.”
“The pleasure of my company?” How dare she use such words after throwing his affections for her in his face? He was beginning to wonder if Lady Rowe-Weston possessed a heart or if it had been lost amidst the militant lessons of her grandfather. If ever there was a man Adrien wished he could challenge to a duel, it was the late earl. What right did the man have for treating his granddaughter like a soldier? For raising her to be cold and calculating? To leave her all alone, believing herself unworthy of being loved?
Anger fueled his next words. “If it’s the pleasure of my company you crave, never let it be said, I left a lady disappointed.”
Chapter Sixteen
Eirene backed away as Adrien advanced. His pewter eyes flashed with anger. She threw up her hands. “You would not dare force yourself upon me.”
He halted, as if he’d reached the end of an invisible tether. “Force myself upon you? Mere de Dieu.” He raked a dusty glove through his hair and cursed and peeled off both gloves before throwing them across the room in an impressive display of temper. “Is that what you truly believe my intentions are in this moment? No.” He held up a hand to silence her before she could reply. “Allow me to hazard a guess, hmm? Was it your grandfather who informed you that a man must never be trusted when in the grips of his passion? Or perhaps your mother? Did she teach you that a man will always take what he wants from y—”
“Stop.” She did not yell. Nor did she need to. He snapped his mouth shut like a hound closing its jaws around a fresh kill. “No, I do not believe you intend to take me by force. Of course, I do not believe that.”
“Then, please, explain why you said what you said.”
She threw her hands up in helpless surrender. “I do not know. Damn it all to hell. I. Do. Not. Know.”
A soldier must never show weakness in the face of the enemy—
Oh, do shut up, Grandfather!
“Eirene.” Adrien stood before her, her hands clasped in his, his pewter eyes no longer flashing with anger. “Talk to me.”
Talk to him? Talk to him? What did he want her to say, precisely? That he confused her? That he had disrupted her well-structured universe with a mere glimpse of his bloody collarbone? Ha! Talk to him, indeed. She was tired of talking. Tired of calculating every word before it fell from her tongue. Tired of… Well, she was simply tired. She’d been kidnapped, dragged across country, forced to prevent a scoundrel from choking to death on his own vomit, and that was not even the worst of it.
Oh no. The worst, the absolute worst, was coming to the realization that she was in love. She, Lady Eirene Rowe-Weston, a cold-hearted, reclusive woman of great wealth, who had vowed to live out her days in a state of euphoric independence with not a gentleman caller in sight, was in love. And with a rogue, no less. A French rogue. A French rogue masquerading as a French noble. Dear God. How was any of this happening to her?
“Eirene? I cannot read your thoughts, but your expression is rather terrifying.”
“Adrien, I…” She shook her head, unsure how to proceed. Perhaps a list would help. If only Adrien didn’t have a hold of her hands.
He tightened said hold and pulled her toward him. “Adrien, what? I wish to return to London? Regret my poorly constructed plan for ruination? Wish I had allowed Petley to die? Want you madly? Love you?” He flashed a boyish, crooked smile that pierced her heart like a sharpened hat pin while toppling what might remain of her well-constructed universe.
“Adrien, I want you to kiss me.”
He blinked. Then again. “Pardonez moi?”
“I believe you not only heard me but understood perfectly.”
“Oh yes, I heard you and understood you.”
“Well? What are you waiting for then?”
He smiled. The cad smiled. “You did not say please.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Like her grandfather always said, if you want something done correctly, simply do it yourself.
Eirene lurched toward Adrien and slammed her mouth into his. The move lacked any semblance of grace or finesse, but it achieved the goal. That of their lips pressed together. She relied on his instincts as a rogue to take over—ah, yes. He released her hands in order to wrap his arms around her and pull her tight to his body. He angled his lips just so. The kiss changed. Softened? No. There was nothing soft about the pressure of his lips against hers or the insertion of his tongue into her mouth.
One of his hands gripped her nape, angling her head back just a tad. His tongue delved deeper. God help her…
She clung to his shoulders and attempted to find a way to rationalize how a kiss could make her feel as though the blood in her veins had turned to molten lava. But as his tongue stroked alongside hers and as his teeth nibbled oh-so-gently at the fullness of her upper lip, she realized one crucial fact. There was n
o rationalizing the way she felt while in his arms. Passion could not be dissected or analyzed in any way that might make it easier to understand. It was simply there. To be experienced.
“I do believe I can actually taste the depth of your thoughts, Eirene.” He spoke against her lips, between nibbles. “Care to share what has the power to distract you from my kissing expertise?”
She separated her mouth from his. Really? Did he actually expect her to formulate coherent sentences while their lips were pressed together? “I was contemplating passion.”
His eyes widened. “Oh? And? What has that analytical brain of yours deduced?”
“That it cannot be analyzed.”
“I see.” He stepped back to hold her at arm’s length. His gaze swept her head to toe, then fixed once more upon her eyes. “You are wrong.” He shook his head as she parted her lips to speak. “Oui, passion as an emotion cannot be weighed and measured, no more than love or hate or fear, but the effects of passion can be studied.”
“The effects? Do you refer to—” Before she could finish the question, he had her hand pressed to the front of his trousers. “Oh…” She flexed her fingers around his arousal, marveling at the thought that, although he had been wedged between her legs and pressed against her sex, the feel of him in her hand seemed so much more intimate. Especially when he pulsed against her palm.
She tightened her grip in an effort to have the tantalizing phenomena repeated.
“Are you attempting to make me go off?”
Her gaze snapped to his. “Excuse me?”
“Continue to squeeze the trigger and the gun will fire. Surely, your grandfather taught you that simple lesson?” He encircled her wrist with his fingers when she attempted to snatch her hand back. “Oh, no, no, no. I like it. Your hand on me.”
Her cheeks flared hot. Lord. Had she ever blushed in her entire life as much as she had in the brief time spent in this man’s company?
She met his pewter gaze. “What do we do now?”
His smile was patient. “I am but your humble servant, my lady. I will do whatever you ask of me.”