There wasn’t any of the pain or discomfort she had read about, only rightness, as if she had been specifically designed just for him and him for her. With absolutely no thought at all, her body knew how to move against him and she stopped fighting the pleasure. She accepted it all, allowing it to build in waves, possess her, take control of her completely, until all there was, all that mattered, was Max and the blinding stars he showed her when they fell off that imaginary cliff together.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Five stolen kisses...
Max couldn’t wait for the day to end so he could spend another night with Effie. Unfortunately, as it was the antiquarians’ last day at Rivenhall before they left first thing the next morning, all three of them were keen to maximise their remaining time. It was past six and Lord Percival was still digging, deep in a baffling conversation about something to do with blasted Tacitus with the woman of his dreams and clearly in no immediate hurry to stop.
Not that he was jealous.
After last night, he was in no doubt she was as besotted with him as he was with her, which was a blasted miracle he still couldn’t quite get over, but one he was determined to enjoy for as long as he had breath in his body. But he wanted this interminable visit done so they could just get on with for ever. Now that he had a future, he wanted to start it. They had plans to formulate. Vows to take. Dark-haired, ridiculously clever babies to make. Things he couldn’t begin to do with a bunch of irritating academics in his house. He’d barely managed to steal a few stolen kisses from Effie since breakfast. All of them much too short.
At least Lord Denby and Lord Whittlesey had finally called it a day. Both were headed back towards the house with buried treasure in their pockets which Max had graciously donated after Effie had assured him she already had enough axe and spear heads from the site and wouldn’t miss them.
‘I hate to chivvy the pair of you on—but Eleanor will have my guts for garters if I don’t get you back in time to change for dinner.’
‘It’s all right for you, old chap.’ Sir Percival stared wistfully at the ruins before sighing. ‘You take all this for granted. You get to come back here tomorrow with your charming fiancée and dig to your heart’s content whereas I am still desperately waiting for a second invitation to come back here to Rivenhall.’
‘You are welcome any time, Percy.’ Effie clearly had a soft spot for the man. ‘And I can keep you regularly apprised of the dig via letter. Once Max goes back to sea, I shall be glad of the distraction and the company.’
It was a throwaway comment.
Not intended as a dig or barb, but it wounded him all the same, because after they had made love they had talked for hours and she had let him wax lyrical about all his forgotten dreams of building up his own fleet of ships and not once did she try to talk him out of it or ask what his prolonged and continued absences would mean for them.
She had just accepted them.
Selflessly.
Because she loved him and knew he loved the sea.
But as much as he loved it, it had suddenly lost a great deal of its appeal. The last thing he wanted to do was to have to wave her goodbye and not see her for potentially months on end. Effie hated to be lonely. He knew that now because she had entrusted him with the truth only moments before she entrusted him with her body. Yet here he was, offering her an equally as lonely future while he went off to chase his own dreams and left her to her own devices.
He watched Percy help her out of the trench and purposefully lagged behind them on the way back to the house, much too busy pondering this new revelation in just a few scant days of nothing but revelations to pay much attention to their conversation. The pair of them were halfway up the stairs before he had the wherewithal to call her back, claiming some domestic pretence so that the devoted Percy wouldn’t follow her, and because he did not want to waste a second, tugged her into the closest room.
‘I’ve decided I’m staying here.’
She frowned. ‘All right... But Eleanor is going to expect you to at least change before dinner.’
‘Not here in the drawing room. I meant I am staying here. At Rivenhall. Indefinitely. I do not need to go back to sea.’
‘But you love the sea.’
‘I love you more and I never want to have to wave goodbye to you from the dock.’ Just picturing it made his heart ache.
‘I am not Miranda, Max... My affection for you will not wane in your absence.’
He shook his head, grasped her hand. ‘This has nothing to do with her. I know you are nothing like her.’ Was that what this was about? Was he worried history might repeat itself? That she might regret shackling herself to him, too, and think better of it? Philosophically, everything he had had with Miranda had begun to unravel the moment he had sailed away.
He cast his mind back to that fateful day in Portsmouth. Saw Miranda on the dock next to his sister. Saw the charts and orders on his desk in the cabin. His crew nudging him and congratulating him on such a bonny catch. Saw the vast horizon that had always called to him and it all became very clear. He suddenly remembered how eager he had been to be gone and on to the next adventure. The adventure had always been more important then. More important than anything or anyone else.
And it wasn’t now.
He’d been a fool not to have seen it before.
‘I shall be waiting for you when you get back, Max... I promise.’
‘Which is exactly the problem! I don’t want you waiting for me, I want you with me, woman! Sailing away from you wouldn’t be like sailing away from Miranda. I was ready to go then. In fact, I was eager to go. I’d been on land too long and the ocean was calling me.’
‘It’s still calling you.’
‘It is... But my heart is calling louder. Sailing away from you would be like cutting off my arm. I couldn’t bear it.’
‘I don’t want you giving up your dreams for me, Max. We’ll find a compromise to make it work.’ She smiled in reassurance but he saw the sadness in her eyes. ‘Perhaps I could take an active part in the business? Run your offices at the port? Be closer for when you get home...’ The compromise would be all hers and he couldn’t bear that. Effie would drive herself mad not exercising her mind with complicated purpose. She could balance the books and whatever else needed doing in her sleep. Then what? Embroidery? Knitting bonnets for their babies? A lifetime of only being his wife? His chattel? He wouldn’t do that to her either. She was never made to fit in a traditional mould.
‘I don’t expect you to give up your dreams either, Effie, to traipse around following me and mine. That’s hardly fair either. I’d much rather stay here and be part of your life. Digging is your calling and I make an excellent assistant...’
‘Having you and our family is more important.’ She seemed sincere—yet she still deserved more.
‘But it is your dream to have your work published.’
‘As validation, Max. To prove to myself there was some reason I was given this odd brain which the world tries to continually prevent me from using. At some point, I will have exhausted all of Rivenhall’s secrets and I shall have to find something new to occupy my mind. I’ve always known that. Digging is the latest of many obsessions. How do you think I came to be fluent in Greek or Norse or Saxon? I pick up a new distraction and completely exhaust it. Digging was the one that helped me to get over my bereavements and cope with the prospect of eternal spinsterhood. I made it my dream. I can find another, Max. One that doesn’t impede on our future...’ Her lovely eyes clouded. ‘I would feel awful knowing you had given up your lifelong dream of the sea for me. You are worth more than just swinging a pickaxe—no matter how much I might enjoy watching you swing one.’
‘I don’t want you to be the one who has to make all the sacrifices and I certainly do not want to have to keep saying goodbye! I could still buy ships—just not sail in them.’
Something which would leave an empty hole inside. He knew that, just as he knew Effie would always have a part of her missing if she gave up uncovering the past and digging up treasure. They were both free spirits. It was who they were. Both adventurers in their own way.
‘You’d hate that. I’d hate it, too. Unless we? No...’ She shook her head, rolling her eyes in that self-deprecating manner he had come to adore. ‘Ignore me... It’s probably a stupid idea...’
‘You have an idea?’ Of course she did. Effie always had an idea. A solution. A hypothesis. No problem was too big for the alluring genius he was going to marry.
‘I’d drive you mad... Although...’ He watched the myriad emotions skitter across her lovely features as the cogs of her brilliant mind turned and she considered and discounted things. Asked herself questions which she typically answered just as quickly. ‘It might work... I’d certainly enjoy it... And you’d also get to...’
‘Would you and your big brain mind including me in this discussion?’
‘It’s a silly idea... Certainly unconventional... What I mean is...’ She suddenly gazed into his narrowed eyes and smiled. And loudly inhaled before blowing it out. ‘How would you feel about doing both together? A proper compromise.’
‘I’m all for compromise if it means I never have to part with you. What do you have in mind, Miss Knowledgeable and Wise?’
‘Part of the year we could stay here at Rivenhall so I could dig it up while you look ruggedly handsome wielding that pickaxe, and the other part...’ she slanted him a hopeful glance ‘...we could...perhaps...sail the seven seas together.’
The idea had merit. Glorious, logical, ridiculous merit. ‘You would be prepared to go to sea? To leave all the comforts of home behind? All your books and holes in the ground? To live in a cabin?’
‘I’d live in a burrow as long as it was with you! And who says I have to leave all my books behind?’ The golden flecks in her whisky eyes positively gleamed. ‘Just think of all the things I could learn, Max. All the new places I could visit. All the new history I could discover. The languages. The culture.’ Then those beguiling eyes clouded once more as they sought his for reassurance. ‘Unless it’s not the done thing for a woman to go to sea?’
‘It’s not the done thing in the navy—’ He felt the corners of his mouth curl up as the weight on his shoulders lifted. ‘But I wouldn’t be in the navy! And who cares what the done thing is anyway? They’ll be my ships and I get to say who sails in them.’ He allowed her unconventional proposal to sink in and marinade and decided he approved of it in every possible way. He liked being at Rivenhall and he liked digging with Effie. If they had a family, and he would move hell and high water to make that dream come true for her, then he would need to have solid roots somewhere. He loved the sea, but did not want to leave her. Her dream and his dream. Shared dreams. Dreams he couldn’t wait to live. ‘I’m game if you are.’
She beamed and the world felt brighter, their future exciting. The old thrill of adventure burning as bright as it ever had—except better. Because he had her.
‘Then we have the foundations of a plan...’
‘Which knowing your brain, will doubtless be fully fledged before the dinner is done.’
The big clock chimed the hour in the hallway, reminding them both that the meal was imminent. They both stared at it and sighed.
Effie traced a button on his waistcoat. ‘As much as I don’t want to, I need to bathe and change for dinner. Eleanor has spent hours planning this final meal on my behalf.’ Max wound his finger around one of the stray tendrils which had fallen out of her pencil, trying, and failing, not to think of her in the bath. ‘We could discuss it all later. Shall I visit you tonight?’
‘I was rather hoping you would...although doubtless, I’ll be stuck playing blasted billiards with your antiquarians till midnight.’
‘You know I will wait up.’
‘No... Go to bed. I’ll wake you when I’m done... And I’ll enjoy it.’
She shot him a wicked glance out of the corner of her eye as he escorted her back into the hallway. ‘Make sure you do. I shall leave my door scandalously unlocked because, as you already know, I am incapable of playing hard to get where you are concerned. But I should warn you, it is a warm night...’
‘What has that got to do with it?’
She leaned close to whisper, her warm breath tormenting his ear, ‘I cannot guarantee I will be wearing a nightgown.’
All his blood seemed to pool in his groin. ‘Until midnight, then, Miss Nithercott.’ He kissed her hand, thoroughly enjoying their flirting and the havoc she was playing with his body. ‘I shall count the seconds—alongside the panelling and the billiard balls, of course.’
Max watched her disappear up the stairs and turned towards his study, then stopped dead when he encountered Lord Percival staring at him open mouthed.
‘Did I hear you say Miss Nithercott?’ His blood ran cold. ‘As in Miss Euphemia Nithercott?’
‘It’s not what you think, Percy.’
‘The Miss Nithercott who submits paper after paper to the Society? The one Lord Whittlesey has banned?’ Max could tell by his wide eyes that the man had heard a great deal more of their conversation than just her name and was rapidly piecing it all together. ‘She is not Miss Jones... You are not really engaged... This is all a ruse!’
‘Not entirely.’
‘Are you really Lord Rivenhall, sir? Or is that an alias, too? Is this whole thing a deception?’
‘Of course I am Rivenhall and Effie really is my fiancée—or at least she is now. And the dig is real. All the finds are real. The only deception is the name on the paper, and in her defence, she had no choice.’
‘She wrote the paper!’
‘Well, of course she wrote the paper. I cannot write for toffee! I’m a sailor, not an antiquarian. I can barely string two long sentences together because my schooling stopped at twelve! But Effie knew you would never publish the damn thing if it came from her, so we put my name on it instead! That hardly matters in the grand scheme of things.’
Perhaps he could appeal to Sir Percival’s better nature. The man adored Effie. The pair of them were as thick as thieves. Too ridiculously intelligent peas in a pod. ‘You said yourself you had never read an essay so thorough, so compelling or so well written.’
‘That was before I knew it was plagiarised!’
‘How can it be plagiarised when Effie wrote it?’
‘Because you are attempting to take the credit for it, sir!’
‘Out of necessity because your stupid Society refuses to consider anything written by a woman.’
‘Archaeologia is a respected publication, Lord Rivenhall. It cannot be party to a fraud. This is a travesty! I have to tell Lord Denby.’
And just like that, one of her two dreams would be shattered simply because Max had opened his big mouth.
‘Then put Effie’s name on it and it won’t be a fraud. Then Denby and his minion will definitely not publish it for sure and the entire world of antiquity will be denied her discovery! That, sir, is the travesty.’
‘She was to be denied anyway if it was to be published in your name.’
‘And isn’t that the greatest travesty of all?’
* * *
Effie awoke with a start to the sun shining through her bedchamber window and an empty space next to her in the bed. She could see by the covers he hadn’t been there and wished she knew why he hadn’t come.
The last thing she remembered was the raucous sounds of what appeared to be a very drunken game of billiards downstairs shortly after the clock struck twelve. After that she must have dozed off and there was every chance he had stuck his head in, seen her sleeping soundly and decided to leave her to rest.
Even though he had promised he would wake her and even though she was scandalously naked and had brush
ed her hair one hundred times and left it loose. Now she was still outrageously naked, but her shimmering curtain of beguiling hair probably now resembled a bird’s nest.
She took one look at the clock and was horrified to see it was already eight. With the antiquarians leaving at nine, breakfast was probably already in full swing and she was in grave danger of missing it as well as the elusive Max. She shrugged on her unused nightgown quickly, called for the maid and tried not to read anything untoward into his absence. He loved her. She was sure of it. He wouldn’t be having second thoughts. Would he?
Downstairs, there was still no sign of him. Nor his sister. But their three guests were all seated in the breakfast room unattended, so she hastily abandoned her plans to hunt for her lost lover and joined them at the table.
‘I am sorry for my tardiness, gentlemen. I am afraid I overslept.’
‘It seems to be a common problem this morning as your fiancé is yet to make an appearance, too.’ Although not half as condescending as he had been upon his first arrival, it was still apparent Lord Denby had taken Max’s absence as a slight. ‘Mrs Baxter has said he was called to urgent estate business, but would be here as soon as he could.’
Estate business? As far as Effie was aware, Max hadn’t involved himself at all in any estate business yet, which threw up a hundred questions as to what was really afoot. ‘I am sure he will be here presently. Running Rivenhall does take up a great deal of his time.’
Eleanor burst through the door smiling, but Effie couldn’t help noticing it was forced. She looked drawn. Pale. As if something had happened and the prospect made Effie panic further. ‘Hello, Eleanor...’ Their eyes locked across the room. ‘Are you...well?’
Redeeming The Reclusive Earl (HQR Historical) Page 23