Beauty and the Earl (15 page)

“I can’t,” she moaned. “It’s too much.”

He shook his head. “It’s not. Just hold on to me.”

She forced herself to stay eye-to-eye with him as her orgasm built fast and heady. When she exploded, she clung to him, crying out his name as he kept moving, kept holding her, kept watching her so closely that she felt utterly and perhaps permanently joined.
 

Even when he withdrew, crying out as he poured out his seed in release, she knew they were bound in a way they never had been before. They had made love. That term was overused and false most of the time, but this was it.

And as he gathered her to him and she slipped into a warm and contented sleep, she wondered how in the world she could ever separate herself from him again.

For the first time in nearly two years, Liam felt free. He looked down at Violet, sleeping in his arms as she had been for nearly an hour, and he felt utterly and completely whole. He hadn’t moved because he was both terrified and filled with joy and even…
hope
at this feeling.

When Matilda had breathed her last, he had been torn apart inside, and he had assumed he would never be right again. He had accepted that, but now…

Now things were different. Somehow things had changed and all with the arrival of an unexpected woman who seemed to understand him.
 

He shook his head as he slipped his arm from beneath her shoulders and sat up. She made a soft sound in her sleep but curled up without waking.

He watched her, relaxed in slumber. She seemed younger now, without her knowing smiles and come-hither stares that had tempted him so much since her first intrusion in his bath. He saw the vulnerability he had come to know she experienced, he saw the woman who had been abandoned and mistreated by people who were supposed to take care of her.
 

He got out of the bed. He was all wrapped up in these thoughts because the physical connection between them was so intense. Anything else he felt couldn’t be real.
 

He pulled his trousers on swiftly and looked around the room. In the time she’d been here, she had taken over the space. Her robe lay draped across a chair, her toiletries were set along the dressing table. The air smelled of her perfume. Would he ever come in here and not think of her?

“Stop,” he muttered to himself.

On the end table on the side of the bed there was a stack of blank sheets and a pen and ink. There was also a burning candle, which he moved to blow out before he left the room and hopefully left these thoughts behind him. But as he leaned down to douse the flame, he noticed that some of the sheets stacked there weren’t blank. There was one with the beginnings of a letter that had been shoved amongst the other sheets to hide it.

Just as she had hidden whatever other missive she was writing the other day.
 

It was none of his business who she wrote to. To look at the paper would be a violation of her privacy. And yet he found himself reaching for the paper anyway and pulling it away from the others. He held it up to the light, first looking at her neat, feminine handwriting before he swallowed hard and read what she had written. It was only two lines, but he staggered slightly as he read them:

My Dearest Peter,

I am writing to tell you how much I miss you, but we’ll be together soon.

She had obviously been interrupted, probably by him, before she could write more. But what he saw was more than enough.
 

There was another man in Violet’s life. One she cared for.

The jealousy hit him hard, and he forced the paper beneath the others and walked out of the room and back across the hallway to his own chamber, leaving behind the rest of his clothes.

He shut his door and leaned against it, his heart pounding and his hands shaking as the line she had written bobbed in his head incessantly.
 

Peter.

She had never spoken that name to him, even in all of her confessions of secrets and pains which had bound them together. Who was he, this man who inspired Violet to yearn for him? Was he another lover? A past protector? Was what she said a manipulation for the sake of self-preservation, or did she mean what she had written?

The questions tore at him, and he strode across the room and poured a glass of water from a pitcher. He downed the entire thing before he sank down in a chair before the fire.

The strangest part of how he felt was that he wasn’t angry with Violet. They had made no promises; in fact, Liam had been careful to tell her again and again that he would not, could not keep her in his life. Being with him offered her pleasure, but no security.

So how could he hate her for having another man in her life?

And yet he despised that man, that mysterious
Peter
, for the fact that Violet wanted him. He wondered how long she had known him, how they had met, what the circumstances had been in their apparent parting.

He wondered if she loved the other man, and he burned when he considered that possibility…because
he
cared for her.

He jolted as the thought entered his mind, but as much as he tried to deny it to himself, he couldn’t. It was true. He did care for Violet.

That was far further than he had gone with a woman since Matilda. But feeling it now didn’t seem odd or out of place. It simply…
was
.

But it wasn’t love. No, he couldn’t love Violet. That would go too far and be a betrayal of Matilda’s memory.

Caring for Violet seemed less so. He didn’t want her to go to this other man. He didn’t want her to want to be with anyone but him.

And yet if he offered her no future, how could he expect her to do anything except leave his side in a few days and go to another man? This Peter person or someone else.

“Could I keep her?” he asked himself out loud, jolting at the sound of the question, even in his own voice.

Keep Violet. When he heard it, it didn’t sound as mad as he thought it would. He could offer to be her lover, her protector. She would have security then, she would have a reason to stay with him. He knew she cared for him—their connection could not be pretended. And if she thought Liam would be there for her, perhaps she would push away this other man and whatever he offered her.

They could come to an arrangement. It could work. It had to work, otherwise he would see her leave his side and know she would go straight to someone else.

And suddenly that thought was unbearable.

Chapter Twelve

Malcolm had a small office in the servant area of the house where he completed his duties as estate manager for Liam. That was where Liam was waiting the next morning, pacing the room as he considered everything he had come here to say.

When the door opened, he pivoted and faced his friend. He flinched at the shadow of a bruise beneath Malcolm’s left eye and at the way his friend’s mouth turned down in an angry scowl when he saw him.

“What do you want?” Mal growled.

Liam stiffened, but refused to take on the “lord of the manor” attitude that would only make this situation worse. Mal deserved his outrage after yesterday; Liam didn’t.

“I came here to tell you I’m sorry for my reaction to our conversation yesterday.”

Mal’s eyes were still narrowed. “Are you now?”

Liam pursed his lips. “Yes. I am. More than you will ever know. I’m especially sorry I punched you, which was entirely uncalled for.”
 

His friend’s arms were still folded. A bad sign. “It was,” he agreed.
 

Liam swallowed. It seemed he would have to go further than a mere apology to make this up to Malcolm.
 

“You are my best friend,” he said softly. “In truth, my only friend. I recognize the value of that, even though I rarely show it and probably less often express it. And I owed you a great deal more than I offered when we last met. I hope you’ll accept my apology.”

For a moment, Mal’s face remained unreadable and Liam nearly went weak at the thought that he had irrevocably damaged his friendship, but then the other man smiled slightly.

“I would only just call it a punch,” Mal said. “It hardly hurt.”

Liam found himself grinning, part in relief and part in true humor. “I blackened your eye, didn’t I?”

Mal shrugged as he motioned for Liam to sit across from him at the desk. “Ladies always like a man with battle scars.”

“Olivia tended to you, then?” Liam teased as he took a seat.

Mal’s smile grew, but there was something behind it that Liam couldn’t quite place. “Indeed she did.”

“So perhaps you should thank me.”

Mal shrugged. “I’ll keep that in mind, though I certainly hope we don’t go around coming to blows regularly just to impress the women into comforting us.”

Liam shook his head. “Amen to that.”

“How are you, other than suffering from wracking guilt that obviously brought you down to my lair this early in the day?” Mal asked as he turned his attention to papers
 
on his desk.
 

Despite the fact that his friend didn’t look at him, Liam could feel Malcolm’s regard fully focused on him. He shifted slightly. Now to move to the other topic he needed to discuss.

“I’m well, especially now that we have resolved our differences,” he said. “But I do need to talk to you about something.”

“Yes?” Mal continued to focus on his desk.

He swallowed hard before he said out loud what until now was only a wild notion in his own mind. “I-I am going to offer to become Violet’s protector.”

Slowly, Mal lifted his gaze to Liam’s face. His eyebrows were raised and his eyes were wide, though he seemed to be able to contain his shock from the rest of his neutral expression.

“Her protector,” he repeated, his tone noncommittal.

“Yes.”
 

Liam nodded. Mal’s shock was to be expected. After all, he had spent a long time expressing how he would never allow any woman near him for more than a night. This was a turn around, for certain.

But Malcolm didn’t say any of those things. Instead, he asked a question that hit Liam in the gut harder than the punch he had aimed at Malcolm the night before.

“Will it be enough?”

Liam pushed up from the seat and paced across the room. That was the very question he had been avoiding thinking about, though he had been less than successful at the avoidance. It was the question that had continued to force itself into his mind and his dreams since last night.
 

“It is all I can give her,” he said softly. “I have nothing else—the rest was buried with Matilda.”

He turned to find Mal with an incredulous expression, but his friend didn’t argue. “I know you well enough that I doubt this confession doesn’t have a motive. What do you need me to do?”

“I haven’t had a mistress in years,” Liam admitted. “And even though I trust Violet, I still have things I want to know, to be certain of…”

He trailed off as that blasted letter invaded his mind again. He wasn’t going to mention
Peter
to Mal. He didn’t even want to speak the other man’s name.

“Would you like a cursory investigation, some basic background?” his friend asked, saving him from expanding and perhaps revealing more than he wished to say.

“Exactly.” Liam shifted despite his swift response. Investigating Violet behind her back seemed a bit like a betrayal, but it needed to be done. “How soon could you complete something like that, being in Bath?” he asked.

“If I send a missive to the solicitor this moment, I could have it reach London by tonight,” Mal said, glancing at the clock. “With a day or two for investigation and a return message, I would say it would be no more than three to four days before you’d have the answers you’d like.”

Liam tensed. Suddenly that seemed like a very long time to have to wait to forge a longer bond with Violet.
 

“Windbury?” Mal asked, tilting his head.
 

Liam blinked. “Yes, that is perfect. I can wait.”

“Then I’ll compose something and send it immediately.” His friend drew a sheet of paper from his drawer and began scribbling.

“Excellent,” Liam said, backing toward the door. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”

Mal nodded as he wrote, and Liam left him to his business, but as he walked away there was anxiety heavy in his chest that told him to forget the investigation. To take Violet, claim her and run before something happened that would change everything between them.

Violet stepped into the breakfast room, and her breath caught as she saw Liam already at the head of the table, a paper open beside him. He lifted his gaze from his reading and smiled.

“Good morning.”

She moved in, almost without meaning to, and pressed a kiss to his cheek before she sat down at his left-hand side.

“I was surprised to wake and not find you with me,” she said, hoping her voice would be calm and not reflect her true feelings at waking alone.