“You were worried your employer would see you talking with me,” Harry said as he closed the door and leaned against it. “Now she won’t.”
There was a window that led into a back courtyard of sorts. Nell eyed it, but abandoned the thought of climbing out. It would be ridiculous, and besides, she had no fear of Harry Morant. She looked at his tall, powerful body and his broad shoulders. His big fists were clenched.
She folded her arms and glared at him. “You’ve clearly gone to a lot of trouble to set this meeting up, so what is it you have to say to me? Say it and let me out. I don’t appreciate being shut in small rooms against my will.”
Harry frowned. “Say to you?”
“Yes.” She waited.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” he said finally. “Forcing that . . . kiss on you as I did. I apologize. I meant no disrespect, but that’s no excuse. I treated you like a wanton.”
She blushed, remembering the scene in the stable. He was not simply referring to the kiss, she saw. It was clear he’d realized where her hand had been, trapped between them.
But that had been unintentional. He’d treated her like a woman, not a wanton. She’d relived that kiss over and over in her mind ever since.
“I didn’t m—” She stopped. If she said she didn’t mind, he’d think her immodest, even a bit trollopy. She groped for an appropriate expression. “I forgive you” sounded too saintly. “It’s all right,” she said. “I won’t hold it against you.”
His expression abruptly went blank and she suddenly realized what she’d said, remembering how her hand had inadvertently pressed against his aroused flesh. Holding it against him . . .
“I didn’t mean that literal—” she gasped. She pressed her hands over her hot cheeks. “Oh dear.”
She glanced at him again and his face was so rigid she couldn’t help but giggle. “I was trying so hard for sophisticated indifference,” she confessed. “I’ve made a mull of that, haven’t I?”
He relaxed, rueful amusement in his eyes. “I think we both did.”
A short silence fell. “Well, if that’s all,” Nell began. She was well aware of the time passing. She did not want to get into trouble.
“No, that’s not why I brought you in here at all,” he said. “I didn’t even think of it until just now when you asked me what I had to say to you, and I recalled that I owed you an apology.”
“Then what was it? I don’t have much time, you know.”
He stared at her for a long moment, his eyes scanning her face in a way than made her prickle with awareness. “You’re not getting enough sleep,” he said finally.
She blinked. “You brought me in here to tell me that?”
His hand came up and cupped her cheek, tilting her head gently to the light. “You have lilac shadows beneath your eyes,” he said softly. “They’re beautiful but they shouldn’t be there.” His big thumb stroked gently along her cheekbones. “And you’re thinner. There are hollows here that weren’t there before.” His thumb caressed the hollows.
Nell swallowed, her mind suddenly blank. She was braced for an argument, for bullying even, but not for this . . . for this tender . . . concern. She had no defenses ready against that.
She stared into his smoky gray eyes. She could smell him, smell the clean, fresh scent of his shaving cologne, of clean linen and the faint scent of coffee.
“You need taking care of,” he said and his soft, deep voice shivered through her. “And I’m the man to do it.”
His big, warm palm held her, and she wanted to lean into it, to press herself against his big, hard body, so strong, so sure, to let him just take over and do with her what he wanted. It would all be so easy, so much easier, and he was so very strong and appealing. And beautiful. That mouth of his . . . so tender and so dangerous . . .
There was some reason she shouldn’t give in to him, some reason she had to keep fighting herself, as well as him . . . only just now she couldn’t think what it was.
Slowly, slowly his head bent toward her. She knew she should push him away, or turn her cheek . . .
But her cheek rested in his palm and she couldn’t bring herself to pull back, and those gray eyes wove a spell so that she could not move a muscle.
And she was tired, so tired . . . tired of battling against the world, of being alone, always alone, tired of resisting him, and tired of fighting herself. A kiss would do no harm, surely? One kiss, just for comfort . . . for the cold nights ahead . . . His lips touched hers, lightly at first, a warm whisper of sensation and she softened.
Both hands cupped her jaw and she felt like something precious, cradled in his palms. He bent his head to lavish her mouth with tiny feather kisses. She hadn’t really been kissed before—certainly nothing like this: she’d half braced herself for an assault on her mouth, but the sweet, unexpectedness of these soft, fleeting caresses had her melting against him.
His gaze burned into her and she closed her eyes against the intensity. She could still feel it through her lids, the way you felt the sun through closed eyes.
He ran his tongue along the seam of her lips. With her eyes closed, she felt each touch more intensely than ever. He did it again, and again, and she clutched at his shoulders, shivering helplessly at the warm, delicious sensations that quivered through her. Her lips parted and he kissed her with his whole mouth, and she shivered again at the heady taste of coffee and Harry Morant on her tongue.
She pulled him closer, loving the hard, solid feel of him against her. She could almost feel the whole length of him against her body; hard, leashed power, pressing against her, into her.
She kissed him back as he had kissed her, tentatively at first, then more confidently, tasting him with her mouth and tongue the way he had tasted her.
She pushed her fingers up through his thick dark hair, loving the feel of the hard, beautiful bones beneath, and as his tongue plunged into her, she arched against him and fisted a handful of hair, pulling him closer.
He groaned and pulled her hard against him.
“Come home with me,” he said. “Come home to Firmin Court and marry me. You don’t belong in this sort of life. And you’ll hate London.”
Shocked, she pulled out of his embrace. She staggered back against the wall. The feeling of the rough, cold brick against her palms braced her. “What did you say?”
“I asked you to marry me.” He frowned. “It can’t be that much of a surprise. I did ask you once before.”
“Yes, but you didn’t mean it.”
“I meant it.” He lifted her hand and kissed the hollow of her palm. “Don’t you remember?”
Her fingers curled with memory. Her cheeks burned. She snatched her hand away. Of course she remembered. She wouldn’t, couldn’t forget. “You’ve only met me twice.”
He shook his head. “It was three times—there was the forest, remember? But twice was all it took.”
She couldn’t take it in. “You know nothing about me and yet you want to marry me?”
“Yes.” There was no hesitation.
She stared at him, dazed. She had a clear choice; she could marry Harry Morant—the most beautiful man she’d ever met in her life. He wanted her. He’d made that more than clear; the imprint of his wanting still burned sometimes against her palm.
And she wanted him; her knees went weak at the sight of him.
He wanted her and he meant to look after her. He would, too, she knew it. It was more than she’d ever been offered in her life.
But she couldn’t go back to Firmin Court, not without Torie. It was incredible enough that this dark, intense stranger wanted Nell on such short acquaintance. But Torie, too? Hardly.
Even Torie’s own grandfather hadn’t wanted her.
She took a deep breath and said quietly, “Mr. Morant, I’m deeply honored by your offer—more than I can say—but I must refuse. I’m sorry. I can’t return to Firmin Court. It’s just not possible.”
“Why not?” he asked bluntly.
“I don’t have to explain,” she told him. “No should be enough for any gentleman.”
He folded his arms and leaned against the door. “Perhaps, but I’m not a gentleman.”
She tried to think of how to explain it. She couldn’t tell him about Torie, not after Papa had gone to so much trouble to shelter Nell from the scandal of her pregnancy. No. The more people who knew, the more likely the secret would get out. Her daughter would
not
be labeled a child of shame.
Nell had it all planned out. As soon as she found Torie, she was going to take her to some remote part of the country where nobody knew her and pose as a widow with a child. Torie would never know the circumstances surrounding her birth. Only three people knew, and one of them was dead.
“Believe me, Mr. Morant,” she said, “you’re better off without me.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Not the sole judge, I’m afraid. The choice lies with me, and I’m going to London with Mrs. Beasley. Nothing you can say or do will change my mind.”
He frowned. “Does she have some hold over you?”
“No, of course not. But the employment she gives me is very convenient.”
“Convenient?” he said savagely. “Two weeks in her company and you’re thinner than ever. Your eyes are haunted and you can’t tell me she doesn’t bully you. She treats you like a skivvy or an imbecile in front of your social inferiors. Convenient? To be sent running thither and yon at the behest of a harpy?” He reached out and cupped her chin and his voice deepened. “To be looking so damned exhausted when you should be blooming?”
A lump formed in her throat at his words, but she pulled back. She had to resist him. For Torie’s sake. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“Well, it damn well bothers me.”
“But it isn’t up to you, is it?” she said quietly. “Now will you let me out or must I scream?”
Recognizing the steel in her voice, he reluctantly stepped aside.
“
Y
es, Harry, that was wonderfully discreet, I agree,” Aunt Maude said as he walked beside her sedan chair on the way back up the hill. “I particularly admire the way after dragging her across the room, you stopped for a ten-second pause in which you stared down at the girl like a half-starved cannibal about to pounce—just in case there was a person in the room who had not already noticed—and then towed her through that back door out of sight. I wonder you never thought of joining the diplomatic corps, like your brother, Nash.”
“Half brother,” growled Harry stumping along beside the chair. “And all right, perhaps I was not as discreet as I’d planned to be, but that girl . . . rattles me.” It was hardly the word, but there was no word for what Nell Freymore did to him.
“Really? I would never have noticed,” his aunt said dryly.
Despite his frustration, Harry’s lips twitched.
“That’s better,” she said. “Now instead of you stomping along like a bear, I suggest you put a little more thought into what you want from this girl, and why. Are you sure it’s not just because she’s refused you that you’re so determined to pursue her? I imagine you haven’t had many knock backs before this.”
“Just the one,” Harry said, “if we’re talking marriage.”
“Oh yes, the Lady Anthea incident.”
Harry gritted his teeth. “Nell is nothing like her.”
“Not in looks, no—Lady Anthea might be a witch at heart, but she was and still is a stunning beauty. Whereas this girl is a plain little thing, though sweet when she smiles, and with pretty eyes, as you said. She could do with dressing, in my opinion.”
“This has nothing to do with Anthea,” Harry snapped, annoyed at the implication. “And Nell isn’t plain at all: as you say, it’s just her clothes.”
“Whatever their difference in looks, the fact remains that they are both the daughters of earls,” his aunt said, forthright as ever. “Except this girl’s father isn’t alive, nor does she have brothers to give you a public horse-whipping.”
Harry clenched his teeth at the blunt way his aunt referred to the biggest humiliation of his life.
His aunt reached through the curtains of the sedan chair and caught his arm. “Be sure, Harry, before you make a fool of yourself, that your pursuit of Lady Helen is not some deep-seated desire to prove to yourself and all the world that you
can
marry the daughter of an earl.”
He looked at her in shock. “It’s not,” he said automatically, but to tell the truth he wasn’t sure. Nell had asked him the same, only not quite in the same way. And he’d admitted it; part of her attraction as a wife was because of her title. He’d just never associated it with what his aunt called the “Lady Anthea incident.”
They reached his aunt’s house and Harry helped her from the sedan chair and paid the chairmen.
In the hallway, Aunt Maude said, “So you’re sure in your mind about your motives for wanting Lady Helen?”
“It’s nothing to do with that business.” Anthea was ancient history.
“You’re in love with her then.”
“In love? No!” He added firmly, “Good God, no,” in case she got any peculiar ideas. He’d been in love once, and it wasn’t like that, thank God.
She stopped and arched an eyebrow.
“It’s convenient, that’s all,” he explained.
“Convenient to pursue a destitute girl whose father left her with nothing but the scandal of his passing, a girl who has refused you twice in preference to employment with a harpy—
convenient
?”
For a moment, Harry didn’t know what to say. He could hardly tell his middle-aged, widowed aunt that he was motivated as much by lust as anything else. But his aunt was waiting and seeing as he’d involved her, he owed her some kind of explanation.
“She needs looking after,” he said.
“Agreed, but so does half the population of England. And in case you haven’t noticed, she’s employed, which half the population isn’t.”
That was true. But he didn’t know half the population, and it angered him, seeing those lilac shadows beneath Nell’s eyes. But somehow he couldn’t explain those feelings to his aunt.