Douglas: Lord of Heartache (11 page)

As Douglas headed off in the direction of the library, Gwen watched him go with a curious blend of fondness and despair in her pretty green eyes.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” she said.

Yes, she should marry the man. The sooner the better, damn it. “Ask. My discretion rivals that of the tomb, dear lady.”

“Was Lady Heathgate truly indisposed?”

Tricky ground, for it was entirely likely even Lady Heathgate—Greymoor and Heathgate’s mother—was conspiring to foster a match between Douglas and Gwen.

David infused his words with a physician’s clinical confidence. “Lady Heathgate nearly died of lung fever following that long-ago boating accident. Her constitution would be more susceptible to ailments than other people’s, and flu is tricky. I’ve seen it carry off hale adults in a matter of days, and the only nursing to be done is essentially to keep the patient comfortable. Willow bark tea and cool baths for fever, hot toddies, the usual tisanes, and so forth. I don’t believe she’s ill, so much as avoiding becoming ill, but that is not why I asked for your escort up to the nursery.”

“What was it you wanted to discuss?” Her tone suggested if David meant to lecture her about propriety, when the entire family knew he owned a brothel, she’d slap him, friendship be damned.

“As I was packing today,” David replied, winging an arm he half-expected Gwen to ignore, “I came across some papers Heathgate and Greymoor wanted me to pass along to you.”

Papers he’d been ignoring for the duration of his visit.

“This sounds serious.”

Already, without an inkling of their contents, she was fretting over the documents. “Gwennie, when will you believe your family loves you and wants to see you happy?”

She took his arm, a victory of sorts, though more of a victory for Douglas than anybody else.

“When I have title to my own property and can support myself and Rose thereupon, and my cousins still attempt to meddle. What kind of papers are they?”

She hadn’t remonstrated him for his familiar address, hadn’t bristled at taking his arm as they wandered up the stairs. Truly, Douglas was effecting miracles in the wilds of Sussex.

“These documents describe the terms upon which Greymoor established a trust for Rose, and name you as trustee for as long as you choose to serve. The trust holds a substantial sum, provided by the family, and is disbursable at your discretion for any purpose that would serve Rose’s well-being.”

Gwen stopped at the head of the stairs and dropped his arm. “Did you put them up to this?”

David took a leaf from Douglas’s book and resorted to cool politesse. “I do not believe that constitutes a thank you.”

Gwen paced ahead of him, skirts swishing. “I do not want to be beholden to them, or to you. Rose doesn’t need anything that I can’t—”

She stopped, her hems settling around her ankles.

“You were saying?” Gwen had been working up to a rousing tantrum, which David was rather relieved he would not see. He sauntered up to her but did not offer his arm.

“Rose needs options.”

She recited this, eyes closed, fists clutching folds of her skirt.

“We all need options.” But Gwen’s pronouncement sounded like a grudging concession to common sense.

“Many by-blows of titled gentlemen can occupy a place on the fringes of Polite Society,” Gwen said, gaze fixed on the flame of a mirrored sconce. “Rose will not be one of those so blessed, and if some decent fellow ever does take an interest in her, she can’t have her old mother’s wicked past standing between her and a happy future.”

David positively hated the determination in Gwen’s tone, hated the ruthlessness with which she relegated herself to the status of nuisance-at-large in her daughter’s life.

He put Gwen’s hand on his arm and patted her knuckles. “Rose will have options. Her titled relations have seen to it.” All three of her titled relations had seen to it, for David in particular knew what a child raised without a father faced when coin was in short supply.

“Thank you.”

Now he did not want Gwen’s thanks. He wanted to pass her his handkerchief, shake his finger at her, and tell her to damned marry Douglas for everybody’s sake.

“You’re welcome,” David murmured as they approached the nursery door. “I’ll leave you here, but I won’t depart so early tomorrow Rose can’t wish me well on my journey.”

“Good night, then.”

David Worthington had traveled much as an apprentice to a ship’s surgeon, seen much as the owner of a high-class brothel, and experienced much as a wealthy young man might when plagued by both curiosity and boredom.

Nothing in all that experience prepared him for the shock of Gwen Hollister going up on her toes to kiss his cheek. For God’s sake, the woman didn’t even kiss her cousins, or she hadn’t—prior to making this journey with Douglas.

“You will make some woman a wonderful husband. For your sake, I hope it’s soon.” Gwen left him standing in the corridor, David’s smile becoming not exactly sad but certainly thoughtful.

Did Gwen’s cousins know Rose was the offspring of a wealthy, titled gentleman? Did the gentleman himself know he had a daughter?

Did Gwen know she’d admitted more to David about Rose’s paternal antecedents than she’d ever allowed her aunt or her cousins to know?

And what confidences, if any, was Douglas teasing from Gwen when his lordship ought instead to be wooing the lady?

***

“Did you take your nightgown off for me, Guinevere?” Douglas’s words, just above a whisper, were followed by the sensation of his hand cupping Gwen’s buttock as she lay drowsing in her bed. His chest curved against her back, creating warmth wherever they touched.

“What are you doing here?” She scooted over onto her back and found Douglas propped on an elbow, regarding her by the light of the dying fire.

“I was holding you,” he said, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. “Now I suppose we’re going to indulge in that favorite female pastime,
talking
.”

By the light of the fire, he looked tired. Tired and burdened, like the Douglas she’d first met nearly three weeks ago. “You can hold me, and we can talk.”

“A compromise.” Douglas touched his mouth to hers. His hand rested on her abdomen, while his lips parted over hers. “I’ve missed you,” he murmured between kisses. “Missed touching you.” He brushed his mouth over hers again. “Missed your scent.” Gwen began to enjoy his litany and his manner of punctuating it. “Missed kissing you.” Her hand wandered up to caress his face. “Missed being kissed by you.”

Something warm and blunt nudged at her hip.

Gwen yipped and jerked away. “Douglas!”

“I have not missed startling you.” Douglas rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “It’s only me, and only a part of me you’ve known to achieve this state before. All it means is I desire you, not that you will allow me to act on my desires.”

“I wasn’t…” Gwen forced herself to take a slow, steady breath. “I’m awake now.”

“So you are,” Douglas replied, still staring at the ceiling. Gwen laced her fingers through his, though he at first did not acknowledge the gesture other than by turning his head to regard her. “How flustered are you, Guinevere?”

“I am not panicked.”

“What reassurances do you need?”

“Oh, the usual: You won’t rape me. You won’t demand from me things I’m not ready to give. You’ll allow me to stop you.” She’d tried for a flippant tone, as if she woke up to a man—a naked man—in her bed every night. Tried and failed. “Douglas?”

“Hmm?”

“This is hopeless. I am hopeless.”

“Nothing,” Douglas said with tired resolution, “is hopeless, and certainly not you. If I’d told you a month ago you’d find yourself naked in bed with me, how would you have reacted?”

“I would have slapped you. At least.”

“You’re not slapping me. There is hope, yes?”

Gwen didn’t share the humor. She wanted more than dogged hope, a function of Douglas’s stubbornness more than any real expectation. She rolled to her side and considered the bleak, set line of Douglas’s face.

“Are you angry, Douglas?”

“God, no,” he replied, frowning at her. “Never that. I should not have presumed a willingness to talk to me in your bedroom was the same as a willingness to have me naked in your bed.”

“You are unexpected in my bed, not unwelcome.”

“That’s something.” Douglas turned his gaze back to the darkness overhead. “Guinevere,” he recited patiently, “I will not importune you for favors you are unwilling to grant, I will stop when you ask it of me, and I will not cause you pain.”

He’d recited his oaths calmly, and she believed he meant them, but to Gwen, he also sounded unhappily resigned to having to offer them to her yet again.

“May we try something, Douglas?”

“If this something involves either one of us putting our clothes back on and leaving the room, then no, I cannot endorse it.” Douglas’s fingers curled around hers gently, for all his tone was brusque.

“I want…”

“Just say it, Guinevere. I cannot see you blush in the dark.”

“I want to hold you.”

“Any particular part of me?” Douglas asked, a note of anticipation in his voice.

“You,” Gwen said again. “I want to hold all of you, in my arms, in this bed, now.”

No rejoinder, no further interrogation, no further questions. Douglas rolled up against her side and laid his head on the slope of her shoulder. She wrapped an arm around him as he hiked a hairy, muscular thigh across her legs.

His hand drifted over her belly again. “Is this what you wanted?”

“Yes.” What she wanted and what she needed. His eyes drifted shut as her fingers feathered over his features—eyes, eyebrows, lips, the contour of his ears.

Could
a
man
have
aristocratic
ears?

Gradually, he relaxed against her and the sexual tension abated. His cheek was pillowed on Gwen’s breast, though, and desire would recede only so far.

“David says I have money.” She could discuss this with Douglas, in the dark. “Rose has money, rather, and I am to manage it for her.”

“You sound forlorn, Guinevere, but you are in truth blessed in your family. Rose is blessed.”

He had no family, save for a mother reported to be growing frail and half-daft at the family seat. Gwen cuddled him closer, and his sigh feathered over her chest. Did Douglas ever discuss his family, or his lack of family, with anybody?

“If you’d like to be intimate, Douglas, I think might be able to manage it.”

He nuzzled her breast. Gwen suspected she’d made him smile. “We are intimate now, Guinevere. Or do I mistake the matter?”

“I meant—”

“One grasped your meaning.” He grasped her hand, too, and brought it to his lips to kiss her knuckles. “We can couple throughout your cycle, but the risk of pregnancy exists even if I withdraw.”

Withdraw
. From Gwen’s body. Rose’s father had used a Latin term for it, which Gwen could not recall. “You can do that?”

Douglas’s fingers wandered up to her ribs, a strange, ticklish caress. “Of course, though it rather spoils the moment for both of us.”

“Conceiving another child would spoil more than the moment.” And create complications on top of complexities in addition to difficulties. “Did you mean to touch my… to touch me just then?”

“Touch you here?” Douglas let his knuckle brush the underside of her breast again. “Why, no, I didn’t. An accident, I’m sure. Beg pardon.”

“You are distracting me,” she complained, but he no doubt heard the smile he’d caused too. “How do we go about this if I don’t want you to… withdraw?”

“We have at least two choices.” Douglas’s words were businesslike, though his hand now grazed her breast again and again. When she made no protest, he graduated to caressing the soft skin on the underside of her breast. “We can copulate in the next day or two, or wait until you are no longer fertile, which would be in about two weeks.”

“You sound very matter—” Gwen’s mind went blank as Douglas gently lifted her breast in his hand. “You sound very matter-of-fact.”

“The decision,” Douglas said, “is entirely up to you.” Then he shattered her focus beyond recall by slipping his palm over her bare breast.

“Douglas…”

“I’m here.”

“Touch me.” He was a bright man. She was being as specific as she could be.

“I’m touching you.”

“
Touch
me
,” Gwen insisted, arching her back.

He kneaded gently, he stroked, he let her feel, for the first time, the exquisite pleasure of having her bare nipple pleasured by a knowing, firm touch. As her body began to undulate and soften with passion, Gwen closed her eyes lest Douglas see how desperate she was becoming.

Gwen at first did not comprehend the additional sensation. Her left breast was in Douglas’s hand, his touch sending spirals of restless pleasure through her body to her womb. He was taking her beyond the previous night’s inchoate pleasure to something hotter, darker, needier.

And then another heat introduced itself. A subtle wet, sinuous heat near her right nipple. Not his fingers. The heat touched her fleetingly, a flicker of warmth and dampness, too quick for her to sort out.

His
mouth.
His beautiful mouth was committing such naughty, lovely mischief on her person. “Douglas…” She clasped his wrist then pressed his hand more firmly against her.

“I’m here,” he murmured. For long moments, he explored her responses with his hands and his mouth, sending heat ribboning down into her vitals.

“Douglas…”
Gwen’s voice held wanting and bewilderment. She was engulfed in the sensations he created, in the strangeness and intensity of the pleasures he showed her. With her hands and her body, she tried to tell him she wanted more, not less.

Finally, he took her nipple into his mouth and suckled strongly in a rhythm mimicked by his fingers on her other breast.

“Oh God, Douglas,” she hissed. Her hips shifted restlessly, and her hand moved over the smooth muscles of his chest.

Douglas slipped a knee between her legs, and she instinctively clamped her thighs around him. He snugged his thigh against her damp sex and gave her the pressure she craved.