Authors: Juliana Gray
TWENTY-EIGHT
A
shadow crossed the doorway of the automobile shed, blocking the dark red glow of the fading sunset.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Finn straightened from the battery, which he’d just hooked up for recharging. “Alexandra,” was all he could whisper.
After the tumult, after the confusion, he’d had to stay with the police for hours, giving statements. Wallingford had escorted the ladies back to the hotel. He’d caught a glimpse of her in the lobby, much later, on his way upstairs to change from his dirty clothes. She’d had a crowd around her, hanging on her every word, just as they had at the dinner last evening. He could see, now, why London loved her. The way she smiled, the way she tilted her head and listened to her companion, the way she laughed in her throaty way. The way she had irradiated the air around her. She was made for crowds, made for parties. She’d been in her element, as far removed from his world as the sun from the moon.
“May I come in?”
“Of course.”
She closed the door and moved forward in a rustle of skirts, looking elegant in her sapphire evening gown and intricate headdress, her waist cinched once more into a neat circle. “Wallingford is looking after Abigail. They told me you were here. I wanted to speak with you.”
He gestured with his hand. “Certainly. I haven’t a seat, I’m afraid.”
She smiled. “Yes, you have.” With graceful steps she walked to the automobile and perched on the passenger seat, the seat she’d occupied so many times before. Her feet rested on the edge, small pointed toes peeping out from the edge of her dress. “So you’ve sorted everything out with police?”
“Yes. I almost felt sorry for the chap, until I remembered how he’d nearly killed you.” He cleared his throat. “Of course, you’ve lost the race. I’m sorry about that.”
“Oh, God, Finn. When he might have done something worse. When
you
might have been killed.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, now. There will be other races. People have seen how fast the steamer can go. Maybe even Jellinek . . .”
“Damn all that, Alexandra!”
She closed her eyes. “I know. I’m sorry.”
Finn took a deep breath. “Look, I . . .”
She held up her finger. “No. Let me. I’ve been horrible to you, ever since I came to Rome. You’d made a kind gesture, an extraordinarily generous gesture, and I threw it back in your face. I insisted on racing, accused you of awful things, when you were only worried about my safety. I understand that. But
you
must understand . . .”
He reached out and touched the hair at her temple. “
Buy you
, you said. Before the race. Do you really think that?”
“Not . . . no. Of course not.”
“No man could ever buy you, Alexandra. I never even meant for you to find out, at least until later.” He let his finger drift downward to outline the edge of her ear. “Impossible woman. Why won’t you let me help you?”
“I won’t let you do it, Finn.” Her eyes were huge, the pupils fully dilated in the dimness. “I can’t let a single penny pass between us.”
“Christ, Alexandra.” He tore his hand from her face and ran it through his hair. “Don’t you see what you’re doing? You say you want to be something other than what you were, but that’s not true. You’ve always got to be the one in control. You’ve always got to be her almighty ladyship, always the immortal marchioness, as if money and titles are the only things that matter.”
She flinched, opened her mouth, and struggled for words. “I . . . That’s not true, Finn. I don’t give a fig about London society anymore.”
“Don’t you? Really, Alexandra?”
She looked at him steadily. “Really. These last few months, grubbing about in your workshop, have been the happiest of my life. I want to live like that forever. And I appreciate that you want to give me the choice, to have the resources to . . . to live with you, or not. It’s just . . . I simply can’t . . . I can’t have that money come from you. I’d be forever obliged, because you’ve made such a tremendous sacrifice . . .”
“Sacrifice?” He frowned. “It’s no sacrifice, darling. I
want
to buy the company.”
She tilted her head and began to remove her gloves, pulling at each fingertip with great care for the delicate satin. “It’s a steam automobile, Finn. What use would that be to you? You must give it up. I can’t let you do it for me.”
“For God’s sake, Alexandra. Do you really think this is all about
you
?”
“Isn’t it?” She tossed the gloves on the seat beside her and scoured him with her eyes.
He looked at her a moment and then turned away with a wrenching movement. “I need that company, Alexandra,” he said, staring across the little shed at the battery hulking next to the wall, feeding hungrily from the wires strung in from the electric generator in the main exhibition building. Tomorrow, it would all be taken down. Tomorrow, he and Alexandra would be on their way. Together, or apart? “I’ve been thinking of buying it for months. Didn’t you know that?”
“I . . . No. Not until Hartley turned up, a few days ago,” she said, in a small voice.
“Not because of you, Alexandra. Because of the building works. Have you ever been there?”
“No.”
He shook his head. “Your fortune’s invested in it, and you’ve never been there?”
“
I
didn’t invest it there. It didn’t seem to matter which company had ruined me.”
“It’s got a bloody marvelous workshop for research, and a testing ground, and the shell of a factory, ready for production. To build such a thing myself would take ages, and the devil of an amount of effort in planning and attention and supervision, which I can’t afford.” He looked back at her. She was watching him with wary eyes, her face shadowed by the wide curve of an ostrich feather. “I wanted Manchester Machine Works long before I met you, Lady Morley.”
“Oh. I see.” She fidgeted with the lace around her sleeves. “But the building isn’t worth fifty shillings a share, is it? You overbid.”
“In order to assure myself that shareholders would tender, yes.”
“But you could have bid twenty,” she insisted. “Twenty would have been more than enough.”
Something cracked inside him.
He took her by the shoulders, hard. “Yes! Yes, I could have! But I didn’t. I offered fifty shillings, Alexandra, and do you know why?”
She shook her head, wordless.
He moved his hands to her face, covering her cheeks and her jaw with his long fingers, and spoke in a harsh voice. “Because I love you. I love you desperately, ruinously. I can’t see you unhappy without wanting to help. To fix things for you, to make you whole again. So I offered fifty shillings a share for that damned company, and by God I’d bid a million if I had to. I’d borrow or beg or steal every penny I could lay my hands on. I’d pick the jewels from the Queen’s own crown and hang for it gladly, because nothing else on this earth means anything to me if a single wretched tear stands in your eye. Do you understand me?”
Her eyes searched his, round and astonished. From the other side of the thin wooden door of the shed came the sound of male laughter, hearty and unrestrained, and someone else joining in. It grew louder, drawing an almost visible line from the front of the shed to the center, before fading away to the back.
“Well then,” she whispered. “Well then.”
“Understood?”
“Yes.”
He leaned his forehead against hers and exhaled. “Good.”
She kissed him. A gentle kiss, and then another, her sweet breath mingling with his. Her arms stole around his waist, tugged his shirt from his trousers. Her shoulders shook; he realized she was laughing.
“Oh, God, how I love you,” she said. “I love you so.” She kissed him harder, met his tongue with hers, ran her fingers under his shirt to clutch at the skin of his back. “I love you, I love you. I . . .
Finn!
”
The last word came on a gasp as he dug his hands under her buttocks and lifted her up from the seat and onto the bonnet. Her skirts frothed around his legs, dark and endless. He reached up inside them and found her knees and drew them apart, settling himself between her thighs. “Say it again,” he said, pulling off her hat, letting hair and pins tumble free.
She looped her arms around his neck. “I love you.”
He pressed his nose against her throat and inhaled her scent, letting it wash through his head and body to awaken every last memory: kisses, laughter, bare skin, the hot quiver of her flesh against his.
“Oh, God,” she said.
He kissed her neck, her jaw, her chin; devoured her thoroughly, learning again the shape of her lips, the contours of her mouth and tongue. The golden taste of her shot through his blood. “Say it again,” he demanded.
“I love you.” Her hands went to his trousers, deft and eager, unfastening the buttons until his cock leaped fully erect into her palm.
He lost all thought, lost all sense of everything but pure animal lust. His hands went to her knees, traveled up her thighs, found the opening at the bottom of her drawers.
His breath drew in with a ragged gasp. “Good God.”
“I’ve been like this since yesterday,” she confessed. She turned her head into his shoulder as if ashamed. “Watching you as you stalked about, towering above everybody else. Wanting you. Imagining you dragging me behind some corner and tossing up my skirts and . . .
Oh!
”
He thrust inside her wet channel, burying himself to the root in a single stroke. Her head fell back with a cry; she braced herself on the smooth metal of the bonnet and wrapped her legs around him and met him, tilting her hips to take him deeper. Her dress fell away from her thighs in a cascade of lace and silk.
He pulled back in a long velvet glide. “Say it again.”
“I love you.” She was laughing, crying, singing the words.
He plunged forward and drew back. “Again.”
“I love you.”
He took hold of her round bottom and lifted her, impaled her on himself. He felt her snug embrace along his shaft, the grip of her legs around him, the dig of her heels into the tops of his legs, and he carried her back to the seat of the automobile and tumbled with her onto the dark beaten leather. “Again,” he growled.
Her fingers dug into his back. “I love you. I love you, Finn. Every atom of you. Oh, God,
now
, please, I can’t bear it.”
Neither could he. His need for her had been building for weeks. He rose above her and drove into her, hard and fast, while her hips lifted eagerly and her hands clenched in his hair and her back slid against the leather. He struggled for control, struggled to hold himself back, to wait for her; he felt himself rise inexorably toward the peak and gritted his teeth and reached down with his broad thumb, circling her in perfect rhythm with his thrusts, over and over.
Her back arched; she cried his name; her orgasm rippled around his cock and his own release burst from him in a blinding wave of pleasure.
* * *
F
inn collapsed against her breast, heaving for breath, an infinitely precious weight on her heart. “Sorry,” he gasped, and made a motion as if to roll away.
“Stay.” She tightened her legs around him. “Stay.”
“I’m crushing you.”
“Stay.” The smell of leather rose up from the seat below her to thread through the sultry scent of union. Her fingers stroked through his hair; down his back, damp with perspiration; around the hard curve of his buttocks. His shaft still lodged deep inside her, linking them together. “Stay forever.”
His chuckle rustled against her ear, mingling somehow with the distant echoes of climax lapping through her body. Her muscles seemed to have taken on the consistency of aspic.
She’d never been so happy.
They lay quietly a moment longer, listening to the sounds outside the shed: the distant rumble of someone’s motor, the rise and fall of a deep male voice. It occurred to her that someone could walk in at any moment and see them tangled together on the seat of the automobile, flushed and sweating and disheveled.
She found, to her surprise, she didn’t give a damn.
He rose up on his elbows and studied her with a worried expression. “Bloody hell. I’ve blundered it, haven’t I?”
She stroked his cheek and smiled. “Not in the least. No, don’t,” she added quickly, but it was too late. He withdrew from her with a wince and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket.
“Lord, I’m sorry, darling. What an ass I am. Stupid, blundering ass. Here.” He helped her upright and gave her the handkerchief.
“It’s all right. I wanted it. I wanted you.”
He cast her a rueful look. “Not a child, though, I expect.”
She took him firmly by the ears. “If I should be so fortunate as to bear your child,” she said, locking onto his gaze to make sure he understood, “I’d love it with all my heart. As I love its father.”
He didn’t say anything. The lines of his face, if anything, seemed to harden beneath her hands.
“Do you know what I mean?” she whispered.
He leaned his forehead against hers. “If you mean that you’ve finally come to your proper senses . . .”
“I think I have. I think . . .” Giddiness overtook her brain, at the feeling of his breath floating over her skin, quick and uneven. “I think, today, just now, I’ve finally discovered what I really want, Finn. Who I really am. And it isn’t the all-powerful Marchioness of Morley. It isn’t Lady Anybody.”
He pulled away and dropped to one knee, trousers still unbuttoned, long legs folded awkwardly between the steering column and the leather seat. He snatched her hands. “Marry me, Alexandra. I’ll give away every penny, if you like. Put it in a trust for our children. I’ll live in a damned hovel for you, if only you’ll share it with me.”
“Oh, get up.” She laughed and kissed his hands. “Of course I’ll marry you, though I shall require a good deal more than a hovel. Get up, before you hurt yourself.”
He buried his face in her lap. “Thank God. At last, you damned minx.”
She laughed again and tugged at his hair. “Oh, do get up, darling. Of course I’ll marry you. Darling Finn. I’d rather drive your automobiles, anyway. Poor old Hartley.”
He ducked under the steering tiller and straightened himself. “Poor old Hartley, indeed. He can drive his own damned machines.”