“Wait!” Anna cried, running after him. But however fast she ran, he drew further and further away.
At last, when he was no more than a shimmering image in the distance, she stopped. Her heart swelled, throbbed, as she watched him vanish from sight.
Her hands rose to press against her mouth. He had left her, with a smile and a wave, to continue his journey alone. And so, she realized clearly, must she.
Her heart ached with loss. Her eyes filled with tears as she stared at the place where he had been, but was no longer.
“Oh, Paul,” she said.
XXVIII
J
ulian lay on his back, his eyes half closed, savoring the feel of the naked woman curled against his side. Her head lay on his shoulder. Her glorious hair spilled across his chest. He stroked those tumbled tresses, marveling that, after all they’d been through that night, her hair still felt like silk. Her naked breasts pressed into his side. Sated now, they were soft and beguiling, small innocent mounds tipped with rosebud nipples that could have belonged to a young girl.
In the past, he’d liked his women fully grown and fully developed. But in this slip of a girl he’d found woman enough to take his breath.
He’d wanted to make love to her the first time he’d set eyes on her. Her slender blond beauty combined with those breathtaking green eyes would alone have been enough to intrigue him. Add to that a nature that was as blazingly passionate as her exterior was coolly innocent, and enough gumption to knock him cold and then make off with the emeralds, and the lady was dazzling. She appealed to him in ways that no other woman, however witty or voluptuous, ever had.
He even liked the fierceness, so at odds with her fragile appearance, with which she protected her daughter. A fine mother, she was. She’d been a fine, loyal wife too, which he supposed was also to be chalked up to her credit. Although every time he pictured her wed to his late, unlamented half-brother he wanted to grit his teeth.
Everything he’d ever striven for, his brothers had managed to get without even trying. Including, in Paul’s case, Anna.
He’d never actually met the younger of the Traverne brothers. He’d only seen Paul from a distance, once or maybe twice at Gordon Hall and several times when Paul and Graham had been brought up to London on some whim of their father’s. It had been after he’d attempted to force his father to at least acknowledge his existence, so he’d been about seventeen. Paul would have been at least six, but he’d looked like a mere infant to Julian. Guarded by a nanny-dragon, Lord Ridley’s two wanted sons spent most afternoons of their visit to town in the park, and Julian felt himself drawn irresistibly to their vicinity. He had never identified himself, never made any attempt to approach them, but only watched.
They were dressed like little princes, in velvet and lace, with pristine white stockings that made him green with envy even when they dirtied them playing. Each of them had hoops, which they would roll with a stick along the paths, and small wooden boats, which they sailed on the pond. Julian, whose only toys had been crude ones that he or his granny had found or fashioned, had coveted those toys with a fierceness that, given his age, had embarrassed him. Years later, he had the maturity to wonder if what he had longed for was not so much the toys but all that they represented.
Those clean, well-dressed, and well-fed boys were his brothers, born of the same father. The father who appeared to dote on the younger pair, while scorning the elder so much that he refused even to acknowledge his paternity.
To Julian, who still had moments when he remembered his granny’s words, when he believed himself legitimate and the two favored sons the bastards, his father’s rejection was a bitter pill to swallow. He fantasized about going to Gordon Hall again with proof that he was the real heir. They would fall on his neck then, and he would cast them out. Or maybe he’d be generous and let them stay.
The choice would be his.
The hardness of his own life compared with the softness of theirs had rankled him well into manhood. The world had been handed to them as their birthright, while everything he’d ever acquired he’d had to scrabble and fight for and wrest from the hands of an uncaring fate.
Including the chit whose sleeping breath now whispered over his heart.
It galled him that one of his fortune-blessed half-brothers had had her first. Had loved her, wed her, fathered a child on her, and even in death retained her affections.
She was the first woman since the green days of his boyhood that he’d had to work to win. From the time he’d been taken on as footman by a lecherous countess bent on seduction, to his acquisition of the lovely but ultimately fickle Amabel, he’d found himself in the enviable position of the wooed rather than the wooer. They had all wanted to take him to bed, but only the whores and the barmaids and the serving girls had wanted to wed him. Ladies—like the countess, who had laughed in his face when he, in his youthful innocence and infatuation, had believed that sex equaled love and love equaled marriage and had thus proposed—would have none of him as a husband. With his half-gypsy heritage, he was beneath their touch.
Without conceit, he knew that there was something about him that appealed to women. There were handsomer men, certainly richer and more powerful ones, but not many who were more successful in bedding the ladies. After the countess, he had never again cared if he’d won or lost at the game of love, which he supposed added a certain fillip to his appeal.
But with Anna, he discovered to his growing dismay, he did care. Too damned much. He’d thought that, once he coaxed her into bed, the battle would be won. To his somewhat horrified amazement, he discovered that such was not the case: he could only claim victory if he could also claim her heart.
When, drawn from his bed by some instinct he could not name even now, he’d looked out his bedroom window to find Anna abroad at well past midnight, he hadn’t been able to believe his eyes. Down in the wind-tossed darkness of the garden he’d seen a figure, all in white, gliding across the ground without seeming to touch it. At first he’d thought he was seeing a ghost. A shiver had run down his spine.
Then the moon had come out from behind a cloud and its light had touched her hair, making it glow an unearthly silver. He’d been reassured to discover that the spectre was not, after all, a ghost: nobody but Anna had hair like that.
Scowling, wondering what the hell she could possibly be thinking to roam the grounds in the wee hours of the morning, he’d dressed and gone after her. It had started to rain before he’d found her, and he’d been about to give up under the misguided notion that she must have come to her senses and decided to return to the house when he had seen her, crouched on the ground by her husband’s grave. Just kneeling there, in the pouring rain.
Fury such as he’d rarely known had sent him storming after her. When he’d tilted her head back and seen her tears falling faster than the rain, he’d wanted to strangle her. Anger had fueled him as he’d lifted her into his arms and carried her back to the house. Anger had fueled that first fierce kiss.
Then, suddenly, he hadn’t been angry anymore.
He’d known, from the first touch of his lips to hers, what he wanted. She’d been as eager as he, clinging to him, begging him with every movement of her body to make her his.
At last.
He’d waited so long that he craved her like an addict craved opium. He hadn’t been able to get enough of the sight of her, the feel of her, the taste of her. Those soft moans that had marked her pleasure had driven him mad. He’d wanted her endlessly, and even now, after the two exhaustive sessions they had shared, he still wasn’t sated. Would never, he feared, be sated.
If he’d known what he was risking, he would have stayed safely in England. Not even the recovery of the emeralds was worth this torment.
For almost the first time in his adult life, Julian acknowledged to himself that he was frightened.
He had committed the unthinkable and fallen in love with his golden half-brother’s still-grieving widow.
And now he was horribly, hideously afraid that she might not love him back. At least not in the way he wanted her to love him.
His eyes slid down to the lovely little face that snuggled so cozily against his chest. She was smiling in her sleep, and Julian knew a faint heartening of his spirit. She was no lightskirt who would bed a man just because the notion took her.
But she had bedded him, and hotly, too. When those breath-stopping green eyes fluttered awake, he would put the matter to the test. He would ask her point-blank if she loved him. And if she said yes, he would take his courage in his hands and ask her to marry him. He wanted Anna in many ways, but most of all for his wife.
In her sleep Anna sighed and muttered, shifting as if she were on the verge of coming awake. Julian reached down to smooth the hair from her brow. Anticipation was making him nervous.
Her brow puckered, and she shifted again, restlessly. Willing to wait no longer, Julian bent his head, pressing his lips to her temple. He’d kiss her awake.…
Then she sighed something that made the blood turn cold in his veins.
His teeth clenched as, in her sleep, she called him by his despised half-brother’s name.
XXIX
J
ulian got out of bed, not really caring if he woke Anna or not, and reached for his breeches. He stepped into them, yanked them up, did up the buttons, found his shirt, and shrugged into it. When he started to fasten it, he discovered that he had it on wrongside out. Not that he cared. Leaving it unfastened, he grabbed his boots and headed toward the door.
Behind him, Anna still slept. Julian slanted one quick, furious look back at her, sleeping with one hand pillowing her cheek and looking for all the world like the angel she wasn’t, and cursed under his breath.
He had to get out of there before he wrapped his hands around her soft little neck.
He shut the door not at all gently and, stomped along the hall to his own room. He didn’t dare let himself think too much.
He hadn’t hurt over a woman since the countess and he didn’t mean to start over a silver-haired chit of a girl who was, once a man got her where he wanted her, not one bit better than she should be.
The door to his room was closed, but a light glimmered beneath it, although no light had been lit when he left. Julian all but kicked it open, too savagely angry to be cautious.
Jim leaped up from the chair where he’d been lounging, started to say something, took one look at Julian, and shut his mouth. His eyes widened as he absorbed the evidence of the wrongside-out unbuttoned shirt, the partially undone breeches, the bare feet and carried boots. And the utterly ferocious scowl.
“Ah, hell, Julie, you done done it now,” Jim muttered in disgust, and spat toward the spittoon Julian had acquired for his friend’s use.
“You got something else to say?” Julian asked, his eyes challenging, his voice dangerous. He felt ripe for a fight.
“Yeah.” Jim eyed him again and shook his head. But even as Julian felt his temper find a welcome focus, Jim spoke about something else altogether.
“If you can get your mind out of the bedroom for a minute, I think I’ve found your bloody emeralds.”
“Where?” Julian’s response was sharp. It was a relief to have something to focus on other than his own bruised and battered heart.
“Anyour—Anour—ah, some bloody ’eathenish town. A fat Khansamah’s bought ’em for one of his wives. It’s gonna take some doin’ to get ’em back, though. Especially seein’ as we’ve got no money to bargain with.”
“Hell, we’ll steal ’em back.” Sitting down in the chair Jim had vacated, Julian started to pull on his boots.
“But these ladies are kept in purdah. Like an ’arem. Ain’t no men allowed to even see ’em but their relatives. And the jewels are in there with ’em.”
“We’ll figure something out.”
Jim watched glumly as Julian dressed. “I was thinkin’ about waitin’ till morning to set out. Seems the sensible thing.”
“I want to go tonight.”
Jim sighed. “I figured that’s what you were thinkin’. The bug’s bit ya bad, ain’t it?”
Julian looked up from tucking his now rightside-out shirt into his breeches. “What bug are you talking about?” he demanded, scowling fiercely.
Jim shook his head and turned to take aim at the spittoon again. “You’re in love, Julie lad, and there’s no earthly use your flyin’ off the ’andle at me and deny in’ it. I’ve been there meself a time or two, and you’ve got my sympathy. And that’s all on the subject I’m going to say.”
“Good,” Julian said through his teeth. “Because if you say another word I’m liable to pitch you headfirst through the nearest window. Get what you need together and let’s get the bloody hell out of this house.”
Anna awoke with a beatific smile. She felt wonderful, absolutely wonderful! Stretching, she arched her back, throwing her arms up over her head as she luxuriated against the cool, smooth sheets. She hadn’t felt so good in months. No, make that years.
Bright sunlight spilled through the single open curtain, attesting to a day outside that exactly matched her mood. What time was it? It felt as if she had slept for hours. She’d never felt so rested—or so energetic. She wanted to bound from bed and embrace the day.
It struck her suddenly that beneath the bed coverings she was naked.
For a moment she was dumbstruck. Then, like a dam bursting, explicit memories of the night before flooded through her.
Julian. Her head turned, seeking him, but of course he wasn’t there. With her mind she was pleased that he’d had the decency to vacate her chamber before anyone found them together. But her heart—ah, her heart. Did she wish he hadn’t gone?
At the thought of coming face-to-face with him, after all they’d done together, her cheeks went hot. What did one say to a man after spending a night of illicit passion with him?
Maybe it was best to say nothing at all.
However, knowing Julian, she doubted he would permit her to get away with that. As soon as he set eyes on her again he would probably sweep her off her feet and carry her back to bed, to repeat the whole delicious performance once more.