“Why did you come, my lord? No wait, let me tell you—you came to make sure that you haven’t invested your time in damaged goods—
you
, who have bedded half of England! What would you call that, if not a double standard? Your male vanity is bruised. That’s what it amounts to, once the veneer is stripped away. Well, I shan’t stroke it for you. Think what you like—that he ravished me—that he helped me choose corsets and nightgowns and wrappers and shifts and—”
His warm mouth swallowed the rest. All at once she was on her feet and in his arms. He deepened the kiss, and she melted against him, a casualty of the harnessed power in that lean, corded body molded so magically to her own considering the difference in their heights. He tasted of brandy drunk recently, and his own male essence, heightened with arousal. As he slid his hand along the curve of her side, his thumb grazed her breast, and she groaned in spite of herself.
“You don’t need a girdle,” he panted, “you’re perfect just as you are.”
“I’m not perfect, Drake, neither are you, that’s my point. I have my shortcomings, just as you do. You are… experienced. I am… not.”
“And I don’t deserve you, I know,” he interrupted. His breath was warm as he spoke against her hair, and his fingers trembled roaming over her body through the thin nightgown underneath her wrapper. “I am the last man in England to aspire to your favors, and the first to admit it,” he confessed. “I shan’t make excuses for my past. That would be pointless. I can only make promises for my future… our future if you will allow.”
“I have never asked for excuses or promises,” she said levelly, though his feather-light kisses over her hair, her face, the hollow of her arched throat threatened to dissolve what composure she’d mustered.
All at once he held her away and searched her face. Were those tears in his eyes?
“Melly, all the while I lay in that bed downstairs unconscious, you were vulnerable. Jim nearly killed me, after seventeen years of living in my pocket, pretending to be my friend. I knew he was dangerous, and I was powerless to help you. Have you any idea how that made me feel? Do you know what it would have done to me if you had come to harm… if something had happened to you before I even had a chance to tell you that I love you?”
“Drake…”
“Say it,” he murmured, searching her face. “Tell me you love me, too. Say it, Melly, just…
say it
.”
It was no use. Her heart was pounding. Flocks of butterflies had invaded her body. They tampered with her balance. Her head was spinning, and while all these new sensations should have flagged caution, she wanted more.
“Say it!” he urged, shaking her gently.
“Yes, I love you,” she moaned, as limp as a rag doll in his arms, “but I don’t want to love you. We are too different, Drake. I don’t want to even dare hope to resolve those differences. We are both too strong-willed in our convictions. I couldn’t bear it if we tried and failed. Better that we make an end to it here and now… while we still can… while
I
still can.”
He crushed her close then and held her with the same gentle strength that had tethered her wrist in his delirium. It was the desperate grip of a man grasping at an apparition. Then, all at once he held her away.
“Will you give me a chance… let me get to know you,” he murmured, searching her face, “give yourself time to get to know me?”
Yes, those were tears she saw sparkling in the candle glow. The unlikely sight of them in the eyes of this robust, virile man brought a lump to her throat that threatened her resolve. Before she could swallow it down, he’d swept her up in his arms, laid her on the bed atop the turned-down counterpane, and gathered her into a tender embrace.
Scarcely breathing, she clung to him gazing into the misty eyes dilated black with passion holding her relentlessly. How they hypnotized her. They seemed to see into her very soul. His lips were almost touching hers, his long, lean body, turgid with desire, stretched out full length against her. His hand slipped underneath the wrapper and encircled her waist pulling her closer still. His heart was hammering wildly against her, his breathing deep and irregular as he lowered his mouth in the gentlest kiss she had ever imagined. It aroused her so totally her breath caught in concert with his moan. Both vibrations resonating through her body igniting firebrands of achy, icy heat that burned her defenses away like lit fuses. What would happen if those sizzling sparks ever conjoined?
“Do you feel how I want you?” he panted, his lips lingering over her arched throat.
His name in the shape of a groan was her only response. She was foxed by his closeness, lost in his tender strength, in the slow, lingering pressure of his fingers roaming her breasts, her belly, and thighs.
His hands were still shaking as he spread the gauzy wrapper wide and exposed her shoulder to his gaze. His skin seemed on fire—so scalding the body heat drifting from him narrowed her eyes. Fisting her hands in the damp cambric cloth of his shirt, she clung to his back as he gathered her closer still.
His warm lips traveled to her throat again and lingered over the blood-pumping pulse beating there, his tongue seeking—stroking—sucking—making her heart race until she feared her brain would burst. All at once, those renegade lips inched lower, displacing the gown, baring her breast to his kiss. The ghost of stubble on his face aroused her. The roughness of his skin against her tender flesh made her shudder with pleasure, and her breath caught as his mouth inched lower still. When his lips closed around the tawny tip of her breast, she thought her heart would surely stop. The nipple hardened beneath his skilled tongue, and crippling waves of pulsating heat ignited every nerve as they coursed through her body. He was awakening her to pleasures she never dreamed existed, pleasures she both feared and hungered for in equal desperation then.
Just when she thought she could bear no more without dissolving there in his strong arms, his lips freed her breast and found her mouth. But his hand began roaming her body again—feather-light caresses that made her quiver from head to toe. When his fingers strayed between her thighs, her body responded arching against him. She groaned again. It was a husky, primal sound that she scarcely recognized as her own voice—a throaty rumble dredged up from the depths his passion had plumbed.
“Are you all right in there, m’lady?” Zoe called through the closed dressing room door.
They both froze where they lay, eyes trained on the door latch.
“Y-yes, Zoe, q-quite all right,” Melly stammered. Struggling to an upright position, for fear the abigail mightn’t take her at her word, she quickly covered her breast and tugged the wrapper close about her.
Drake swung his feet over the edge of the bed, and raked his hair back with a shaking hand.
“Yes, m’lady,” Zoe called. “G’night, then.”
“G-good night, Zoe,” she replied. Did her voice sound as fractured and strange to the abigail as it did to her? Would she ever recognize it again?
Drake rose to his feet, pulled her up alongside him, and led her to the door on feet that made no sound. He was trembling. For one brief, magical moment, he held her close before he kissed her closed eyelids and let his hands slip away, sliding them along her spine, her hips, her thighs, before they rushed back to cup her face again guiding her toward one last, lingering kiss that left her weak and quivering, barely able to stand on her own.
“I have to go—now, while I’m still able,” he murmured, his voice grown deep with desire. He gripped the door handle. “Lock this after me,” he charged.
“Why?” she blurted. “I’m in no danger from Ellery here now.”
“Just… lock it.”
Twenty-Two
Melly didn’t see Drake at all during the next two days. The phantom had once again disappeared. Griggs’s hands had healed well enough for him to apply the comfrey salve to his master’s shoulder on his own, which had twofold results, since the operation aided the valet’s burns in the process. Drake’s distance puzzled her in such stark contrast to his passionate behavior at their last meeting. Would she ever understand the man? Did she even want to? Yes. She did. Desperately.
Dr. Hale still made daily visits to monitor both his patients’ progress, but Melly wasn’t sure if that had as much to do with their recovery as it did the good doctor’s piqued interest in the skullduggery afoot. By the end of the second day, she was convinced that the crusty old doctor had a genuine penchant for police work. However, his preoccupation with the investigation did quiet his usual ranting that Drake was quite mad, and headed straight for the asylum. Ironically, each time she was ready to discount those allegations, some bizarre twist in his behavior made her wonder. Being trapped as she was under the same roof with the man for the stars only knew how long in such circumstances was a very uncomfortable thing. Despite it all, no matter how she tried to deny it… she missed him. Terribly.
Bradshaw and Redmond remained in residence, though they were for the most part invisible as well, appearing only at mealtime, and that was sporadic. Bradshaw spent much of his time closeted with Drake in his sitting room upstairs, since he had yet to be allowed to come downstairs, not even to dine with the rest. Despite his bold actions in her bedchamber, his injuries were still very debilitating, and each foolhardy exertion set him back severely.
Redmond spent much of his time in the village. He haunted the coaching station and the livery, keeping watch, and interviewed the town folk and proprietors again and again gathering evidence, though they had all they needed to convict the steward. He was marking time, waiting for word from London that his colleagues from Bow Street had either caught Ellery, or inadvertently driven him back to the coast.
On the third morning of Drake’s self-imposed exile, a work crew arrived to clear out the study, and he joined them to supervise, despite the doctor’s warning that he shouldn’t overexert himself. This Melly learned from Mrs. Laity, since Drake had given strict orders that the study was henceforth off limits to everybody.
The noise the workmen were making echoed and boomed through the old Gothic corridors and passageway reaching as far distant as the servants’ quarters below stairs, where she spent most of her time out of sheer loneliness, since the Runner strictly forbade her access to the grounds after discovering that there were just too many ways for a person to invade the estate without detection. The southern approach was accessible along the beck, the north by the patchwork hills, the east by the forest that spread northeast clear to the vineyards, and the west, by all manner of secluded lanes and paths, to say nothing of the road between the Lair and St. Kevern village that intersected with the highway beyond the vale.
“I shall die if I have to stay cooped up in this house much longer,” she complained to Mrs. Laity. They were seated at the worktable in the kitchen helping Cook snap off the ends of the pole beans she planned to cook for dinner. “Being trapped on the estate was bad enough,” she went on. “I know I am forbidden to gather, but being banned from the grounds, from my plants—from even
seeing
them—is excessive, and unbearable, now that they are surely burgeoning after the storm. They’ll be gone with the next one, sure as check.”
“It’s for your own good, miss. We don’t want no harm to come to you,” the housekeeper insisted.
“And that God-awful racket in the study,” Melly said, pouting. “You can hear it all through the house—clear to my apartments. What are they doing up there? All that noise can’t be good for his lordship, considering. It’s given me a headache, and I haven’t got a cracked skull.”
“He’s right in the middle o’ it, too,” Mrs. Laity returned, “has been since the crew come at sunup. Nobody knows what’s going on except Prowse and Griggs, and they’re shut up tight as two clams in the sand. They say we’ll know soon enough and don’t bother them no more about it. Something’s going on besides clearing out all the slag and debris. A whole load of lumber just come up from the village, and a wagon full o’ glass besides. He must be daft, if he’s thinking o’ rebuilding that room outa’ wood. It won’t go with the rest o’ the place nohow. It’s going to stick out like a pig’s tail on a cow’s arse, and that’s a fact.”
“You know it’s flaw Season. Maybe he just means to board it up before another one hits.”
“Board what up? There’s nothing left o’ it but the hearth, and the ceiling up top. Though he don’t think Mr. Ellery would dare come back here, he’s got one o’ the footmen posted right outside on that hard old settle day and night, just in case, ‘cause it’s wide open to the outside. The lock works, but the door’s so charred a good gust o’ wind would likely blow it down. The whole room is gutted. I don’t, for the life of me, know what any one o’ the footmen would do if somebody decided to crash through it. They’d likely fall down in a dead faint, that lot. I think he posted them mostly just to keep us out ‘till the unveiling.” She clicked her tongue, and shook her head. “When I think o’ all that fine
Duncan Phyfe
furniture, the
Aubusson
carpet, and the liquor cabinet—all that crystal and glass—everything gone. Why some o’ the artwork in there had been in the family for generations. He’s daft, I’m telling you, building it back up with nothing but wood and glass. It needs stonemasons, not carpenters.”
“Stonemasons would have been quieter,” Melly said wearily, handing her beans to Cook.
“What’s the matter, Miss Melly?’ the housekeeper soothed. “You aren’t yourself today. I don’t think I ever heard you complain before since I’ve known you.”
“I don’t want to be here, Mrs. Laity. I want to go…home and I don’t even know where that is. His lordship should have his work crew out in the vale rebuilding my cottage… well, his cottage now, but we did strike a bargain after all.”
“Would you live in it if he did?” the housekeeper queried. “Begging your pardon, Miss Melly, but I don’t think you would.”
“What makes you say that?”
“It wouldn’t be the same.”
“Nothing is the same,” Melly murmured.
“Don’t you want to say what’s troubling you?”