by K L Clare
And you know I’ll keep looking until I find the answer.
16
Director Martin took my mother’s hands and kissed them after we entered the foyer to see him off. “It no longer matters, Mary. The girl and her mother are gone. He loved you, not her. That’s all that matters.”
She caught the single tear that escaped her. The fact that she hadn’t cried or shown much emotion when I told her about Isobel was an eye-opener. Elle had warned me on more than one occasion that my mother was not the same naïve woman she had been when my father lived, and I could now see that she was right.
“There is a principle we live by in this family, something Richard taught us all, although quite clearly he abandoned his own declaration. ‘Blood is blood, no matter the circumstances.’ We could have raised her here and protected her. My sons would still have had their sister. That is what matters.” She paused, then added, “I’ve never been a compassionless woman, Randall. I would have accepted his child into my home.” My mother was grief-stricken over the stepdaughter she had never met.
Martin pulled her into his arms. “You are more than he ever deserved, Mary.”
I lay my hand on Mum’s shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze. I wouldn’t allow Martin to take advantage of her vulnerable state. He’d always been attracted to her. “Elle asked me to send you upstairs to help her dress for the photos. She’ll be waiting for you.”
My mother then hugged me, but before heading up to my wife’s dressing room, she said, “You gave me what your father did not. You gave me a daughter whom I love dearly. We can never lose her.”
As if she’d willed it, a knot developed in my throat, and I swallowed to release it. I had come close more than once to losing Elle in Connecticut. I managed to spit out the one word that came to me. “Never.”
Martin extended his hand to me. “Take good care of them both, William.”
“Yes, sir. Stay in touch. You know how to reach me.”
The director, my brothers, and I had agreed in the meeting resumed after lunch that there was no imminent danger with regard to reformation of the Order, although Elle’s pregnancy would be the trigger if it were to come about. Martin and I would keep our eyes on the targets most likely to incite membership and recruit assassins. There were two men, unrelated by any obvious means. Come the next morning in London, I would employ a retired SIS intelligence officer to investigate further and surveil the suspected extremists.
After that final meeting with Martin had ended, Elle and I had walked through the gardens alone, hand in hand, and I had filled her in. I meant it when I’d told her that I had learned my lesson—concealing the status of our enemies from her in the past was a mistake that I wouldn’t make again. Forcing my wife to walk blindly through this hell served no useful purpose. My woman was strong and tenacious, which meant keeping her in the dark only positioned her for greater risk.
During our walk, Elle had asked questions about my relationship with my father that I hadn’t been prepared to answer. I could tell her only that his intense drive had led to proportionately intense physical punishments and that I wanted to be different than he was.
You’re proving that with Lissie . . . and with John, she had said to convince me it was possible.
Martin placed his other hand on top of our clasped hands to pull me out of my head. “Since you won’t join me at the agency, I’m quite glad to have our arrangement.”
I gave a slight nod, and he walked out the door.
Thomas approached from behind, then, as I watched the director get into his car and drive away. “John and I are heading back to London. Jessica asked to ride along.”
“What?”
“I think she wants to be close to Ellie for a while. Your wife told her everything, and she wants to help with Ellie’s protection detail.”
“She wasn’t able to keep Elle out of trouble in Connecticut. Christ, Elle ended up saving her instead. No. My men do not need the distraction. Leave Jessica here.”
“I’ll make that call,” Elle said as she descended the staircase in the white lace gown she had worn on our wedding day. “She’s my best friend, and she can come to Kensington with me for a while. Let her ride to the city with your brothers.” She stood on the last step and smiled sweetly.
The curve of her lips, the exquisite gown that reminded me how she had given me everything, and those beautiful eyes—she stole my breath and my heart all over again. My mouth went dry, and my heart missed a beat or two inside my chest.
Mine.
I had to track backwards through my head to revisit the words she had just spoken.
Goddammit.
“As your friend, she may visit Kensington whenever you wish. But she may not get involved in security logistics. If she fucks with my team, I will send her back home.”
“She will earn your trust and then your permission.” Elle winked. “Can you go change so we can walk to the chapel? The photographer and her crew are waiting for us. I would really like to get them off the estate so we can spend our last evening at home with family.”
I went to her, gripped her waist, and placed a tender kiss on her lips. “You are so beautiful, Elle.”
She looked down, her long lashes touching the soft blush that spread over her cheeks.
I wished in that moment that I could read her mind. My ego sought assurance that her thoughts were of me and only me, while at the same time, I was filled with the warmth of satisfaction each time she blushed for me, each time she came for me.
This was the same flushed glow she wore on our wedding day after I kissed her long and hard in front of our guests. The bishop had declared her my wife.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Regret hit me. “You should have Jess with you if that’s what you want, baby. Who will help with the girls while she’s in London?”
The situation was similar to the one with my own best friend. We loved them both, and they were part of our extended family, though I’d been hard on Jessica. I was dissatisfied with the way she failed to protect Elle in Stonington. She was a good marksman, but that wasn’t enough. She was unable to shield her asset. When she’d asked to become part of the security team, I had said no without hesitation.
Elle wanted me to open my heart in order to see her friend for the lovely and capable person Elle believed she was, and I would find a way to give that to my wife. I owed Jessica as much when it came down to it. She had medically saved my life.
What bothered me right then was the idea that she was stringing Ben along. The day before, when I had mentioned it to Elle, she’d replied that it wasn’t the case and asked me to let them see their way through it unless the situation blew up or Ben came to me for advice. He had not.
Elle’s eyes hit mine. “Mary’s shop will remain slow for another month until warmer weather arrives, so she can kick in more time with the girls. Jess can’t be our nanny forever. It was meant to be a temporary solution. Your mother plans to start interviewing to fill Sue’s position.”
I nodded.
Thomas was standing there, still waiting for my answer. I watched him stare at my wife.
“Go on, then,” I snapped. “Take Jessica with you.”
“Fuck you,” he grumbled under his breath and walked off.
“He’s irritable more and more. What’s going on, Will?”
“Nothing for you to worry over, Elle. He needs companionship.”
“Companionship? Wait—do you mean sex?”
“I’ve warned him to use discretion.” I kissed the tip of her nose, then headed up the staircase. “Wait in the drawing room for me. I won’t be long.”
Her stare burned into my back. “But . . . do you mean . . . with Jess? Is that why he said she could ride to London with him?”
“No. Your friend isn’t quite his type.”
“Well, what is his type?” she called after me.
You are.
17
As Jim Elliot exited my office with T
homas, I assured him of my brother’s brilliance and wished him well. “We’ll see you at the gala. My wife is eager to meet yours,” he called back over his shoulder. It was a relief to see them go. I’d been spiraling into a black mood for hours.
Elle and I had been back in London for two weeks, and I couldn’t say if her distance was because Jessica was there, if it had been caused by the nonstop rain, or if my wife was tiring of my bullshit, but I could feel her slipping away from me. As she grew distant, my command of her became more severe, and I tightened my grip on her independence. I began questioning her about where and how she was spending her time.
I need to clear the way to Paris.
I needed to regain our footing. We could reconnect in a new environment, in Paris, where we would be free of distractions, and she could trust me to be her truth again. The same way she had when we fell in love and when she married me. I’d loved her before that, but she insisted we not count the years I spent longing for her as the beginning of our story.
Our story began the morning of Stonington’s blessing of the fleet. That was the first time I connected with your soul, and you mine, so that has to be the beginning, she had once said.
Truth was, the years before that were like black marks permanently stamped onto my brain. The yearning, the emptiness, the fight to drive her from my mind—battle scars on my heart from the only war I would ever lose.
Now, living without all of her was not an option for me. The darkness of my mood intensified, and there was but a single means to stop it from becoming something brutal.
Spend time alone with Elle.
I grabbed my mobile and rang her as I walked out of my office, unconcerned about the remaining commitments on my calendar, leaving Sean to manage the resulting chaos. Thomas and James Jackson were there. It was their job to cover for me, and they were quite good at it.
She picked up on the fourth ring. “I missed you this morning. You left earlier than usual.” Her voice was silky and filled with introspection, which meant she was painting.
“I know, baby. Board meeting. What are you working on?”
“I’m finishing Victoria and Albert. I really hope this modern interpretation goes over well at the auction. It’s our first gala, and the foundation could use a boost.”
Elle was captivated by Queen Victoria’s love story. She often depicted historical leads as contemporary survivors in her art. It was no surprise to me. Representations of her own history were omnipresent in those same works, displayed for all the world to see, though people could only understand which of her stories she was telling if they were close enough to truly know her.
That excluded most people. Admirers appreciated her talent but sometimes interpreted the idea of her pieces with inaccuracy. She never corrected them. Instead, she would remind me of the bias that lives in all art forms. I understood that, but she was mine, and my irritation with the misinterpretations was driven by a desire for others to see my wife’s beautiful mind as I did.
Elle was bold and reserved at the same time, and I imagined that was the reason she loved painting. It provided her with the opportunity to reveal her secret thoughts while her audience remained none the wiser about who she was.
She was the kind of woman who unwittingly tempted others with the promise of knowing her but left most with nothing more than an undefined craving.
The story she was telling now was ours—two people bound to one another by the circumstances of our births. We were, like Victoria and Albert, a woman and a man whose separate lives were thrust into one existence through the history of our connected families. . . . And like the Queen and Prince Albert, Elle and I had fallen madly in love despite the forced ties.
I stepped out of my car and stared at our London home. Large windows on the ground floor flanked the central entrance and created a warm invitation. The front-facing rooms on the first and second stories had exterior French glass doors and ornate stone balconies. Smart attic dormers ascended from a corniced parapet.
A delicate fragrance hit my senses as I entered the house. The fresh roses I had sent adorned every room. It was the first time I’d sent all red roses, a reflection of my anxious thoughts.
Taylor was standing in the foyer, his back to the wall beneath the staircase and a crime novel in his hand. He nodded once in greeting. “We weren’t expecting you so soon. I’ll head downstairs and give you some privacy.” A slight smile marked his face as he angled his head towards the dining room. “We put Jessica on a train this morning.”
“Good.”
Elle sat on a swiveling stool in front of a canvas larger than she was, lost in the examination of her work. Taylor had relocated her easel and supplies from where I’d last seen them to the dining room at the back of the house. Elle drifted from room to room like a gypsy when she painted at Kensington, following the natural light as it moved through the day, continually adjusting the perspective of her composition.
A chestnut strand fell from her upswept hair and landed on her cheek as she angled her head. She pushed at it with the back of her hand and left a smudge of pale blue paint in its wake. The same color streaked along the hem of one my T-shirts that she wore knotted at her waist. The tune she hummed was lovely, but I couldn’t place it.
I tossed my jacket and tie and watched without interrupting.
Christ, she was beautiful. I imagined her letting down her hair and how it would fall over her back. The blond tips would tease me, coming so close to her arse.
“‘A love like ours can burn down a city,’” she said without moving her eyes from the canvas. “He wrote those beautiful words to her in a letter.”
“‘My desire for you will never fade,’” I added.
She smiled at our surrogates on the canvas. “You opened the book.”
“I did. Found it in the kitchen. The original letters are preserved at Windsor. We’ll take a look next time we go.”
She set down her palette and rushed to meet me in the center of the room. “You came home early for me?”
Fuck yes, I came home early for you. As if she had to ask.
I cupped her face and kissed her lips, murmuring against her soft mouth about how I’d missed her and needed her. The desire to feel the instant when her soul mended mine consumed me and strengthened the intensity of my mood.
She locked onto my gaze and hooked her arms tightly round my neck, and I knew she recognized my desperation. “No words, Will,” she whispered.
It had been several days since we’d made love, and I wanted everything from her, every fucking exquisite bit of her. Her love was the one thing I would get on my knees and beg for. The only thing to satisfy the hunger of my addiction.
I was certain that if she had rejected me when I went to the States for her, I would drink more. And I was equally certain that, had she rejected me, I would find myself once again ducking into the toilets to spike my vibrating blood with blow. Without her, it would have become an enslavement rather than something with which I had carefully walked the line.
I lifted her into my arms and kissed her again. She parted her lips to give me more, and all of my sick fucking thoughts left me. All of the madness slipped away when our mouths came together.
We made our way up the stairs to our room, stripping from our clothes along the way, and when our naked bodies hit the bed, I gave in to another kind of madness. I gave myself over to the power that possessed me to love her fiercely, to protect her, to absorb all of her into myself.
She moaned and writhed beneath my touch as I kissed my way back to her mouth from the feminine curve of her stomach. I couldn’t help but smirk against her pouting lips as she pleaded with me for more. Nothing inflated my ego more than that, and it was the only thing that mattered. She wanted me as much as I wanted her.
“Turn over.” I lifted myself so she could do as I’d ordered.
Elle stiffened for a moment, her eyes beating into mine, then obediently turned onto her stomach beneath me.
I sm
iled again, this time against the sweet spot where the little white birthmark on her neck called out to me. I pressed my lips onto her skin and held them there until her breath and her body relaxed. I slid an arm under her hips to lift them.
My erection jerked. I pushed it against her and filled the cleft between her arse cheeks. She arched and grinded against me, sending rumbling echoes of energy from my chest to the back of my throat.
Ah, Christ.
If she didn’t stop that. . . . I needed to slow us down. Beneath her abdomen, I gathered her hands in one of mine and used the weight of my body over hers to command her submission.
“You are mine, Elle.”
She stopped pushing me then, but not before slipping a hand free to pull my face round to her mouth—to remind me that she was as willing to give as I was to take.
“Please. I need you, Will.”
I plunged my tongue into her mouth and tasted hers before dragging my kiss to her cheek, her neck, over her shoulder, and down the center of her back. There I kissed the pale blemishes that forever marked a dreadful period of time for us not so long ago.
Goose bumps bathed Elle’s flesh, and her breath quickened as I trailed soft kisses along her spine in a slow, deliberate manner.
I worked my way down each side of her arse, making my way to her thighs, and in turn, she whimpered and writhed against my grip on her hips. Those mile-long legs quivered beneath my touch, and I ran my fingers and my tongue down them again. I closed my hand round her foot and pulled that leg up and over my head, flipping her onto her back.
I pushed my fingers inside of her to stretch the tight little cunt that was my home, dragging my mouth along her inner thigh, and she moaned the way I knew she would. Seeing her parted lips and hearing the hoarseness of her voice as my name left them damn near killed me.
I needed to be inside her, needed to be where she needed me.
And I needed to taste her. I withdrew my fingers and pulled her to my mouth.
“Oh, God, Will . . .” Her hands grasped at my hair, nails dug into my scalp. She came fast, breath bursting from her lungs, her pleasure making me smirk again. I shot up to her mouth with mine and shoved my cock inside her with a sharp thrust. Her throaty little scream filled me, and I swallowed it, the vibration reaching my soul, satisfying the emptiness—causing me to go still and search for control.