When the moment came, he held her, and she did not shatter into pieces or break or fight him. Instead she clung to him and when she would have cried his name, she bit her lips.
His skin glimmered with sweat, his chest rising and falling in heavy breaths. She ran her palms down the contoured muscle to his belly and allowed her fingers to cover the wound so near to where they were joined.
“You lived,” she whispered.
“I was well motivated.” He stroked the hair back from her face and pulled her to him. He kissed her tenderly, gratefully, she thought. Her heart was too full.
She drew away and separated them, and he lay back on the mattress and released a great breath. Cold in her damp skin without his body to warm her, Arabella wrapped the coverlet around her and curled up on her side facing him.
“Have you had what you wanted, Captain?”
His eye was closed but a smile lurked at the corner of his mouth. “I have had what I wanted, little governess.” His voice was a quiet rumble, as though he were already half asleep.
“I am leaving here in the morning.”
“The hell you are.”
“I am.”
“How?” He turned his head then rose onto his elbow to face her. “Will a caravan of wandering Gypsies arrive and steal you away?”
“There will be no stealing away. I will simply leave as I arrived, through the front door, in a carriage.”
He stroked a fingertip along her shoulder, pushing the coverlet down her arm, his gaze following. “I don’t believe you. But if I did, I would not allow it.”
“Will you instruct the servants not to let me go? Will you lock the doors against my departure?”
His nostrils flared like an angry horse. “No.”
“Then I will leave.”
He got off the bed, and pulling his breeches over his tight buttocks and fastening them, moved to the bellpull and snapped it down. “Then you will need sustenance for your journey,” he said in an unremarkable voice, with the same lordly charm he used with the rest of his houseguests. He took up the dressing gown he had draped over a gilded chair and shrugged it over his shoulders. It was black and satin.
She sat up, drawing the bedclothes with her. “Even dressed as a lord you look like a pirate.”
He smiled and went to the door. “If you believe I look like a pirate, then you’ve never seen a real one.”
“Have you known real pirates?”
He went into the corridor, drawing the panel nearly closed behind him. But his speech with the servant he had summoned was sufficient to announce to the household that they were lovers, if the gift of the tiara had not already.
He returned, closed the door, and crossed to the hearth.
“I was eleven years in the navy during wartime,” he said, placing a fresh log on the grate then taking up the fireplace poker. “I have known everyone.”
“You were heir to a dukedom. Why did you go to war?”
He settled in a chair before the restored fire. The scarred side of his face was lit with gold light. “My uncle wed a young bride. I was never expected to be the final heir. In any case, after the Treaty of Paris, I withdrew from the navy.”
“But you did not return to England. And you did not answer my question.”
“I was at Cambridge when my brother escaped his guardian and disappeared into France.”
“France?” In the middle of war against England.
“Though I tried for a year, I could not find him, protect him. I . . .” His brow drew down. “Gavin Stewart was our family’s physician for many years, and a friend. He suggested that I put myself to good use instead of fretting to distraction.” He rubbed a hand over his face, pressing his fingertips momentarily against the scar. “And I am fond of boats.”
“Did you . . .” She had never imagined he had lost someone too. “Did you ever find your brother?”
“He found me. By then I had control of an allowance through the property my father gave me, although not yet my fortune. But my brother was still too young to claim independence from the man who had been our guardian after our father’s death, and our uncle, who was our legal guardian, refused to intervene. So I sent Christos money.”
“You sent money into France? Was that not illegal?”
“And so we return to the subject of pirates.” He grinned but there was little real pleasure in it, and although he sat relaxed, his hands draped over the chair arms were tight.
“Where is your brother now?”
His eye shuttered. “Paris, I believe.”
A knock sounded on the door.
“Ah,” he said. “Sustenance arrives.”
He brought the tray inside himself, not allowing the servant to enter, and he set it on the bed. She removed the silver lids.
“This is enough food for half-a-dozen people,” she exclaimed.
“Or one underfed governess.” His voice was quiet.
She looked up from the delicacies before her to his face and saw a mixture of satisfaction and vulnerability. The back of her throat tightened.
She ate, and she drank the wine he poured for her. He leaned back on the bolster with a silver plate of ripe purple figs balanced on his flat belly, the dressing gown falling in satin folds to either side, and Arabella lost her appetite for anything but watching him. She wanted to caress him with her mouth as he had done to her. He made her blood run hot and fast and he frightened her. With him, she could forget everything. She could forget even her need to know who she truly was. She had denied it for weeks, fought it and him, yet still she fell.
She pushed the tray to the bottom of the bed and crawled toward him. Afraid to touch him and renew the feelings from before, she only lay down on her side and watched him.
“Luc . . .”
I love you
.
He set the dish of fruit aside, bent over her and kissed her. “Call me by my name again, beauty, and I shall give you a dozen tiaras. A hundred.”
“You cannot purchase me.”
“I do not wish to purchase you,” he murmured against her neck. “I wish to make you happy.”
“Diamonds will not make me happy.” She held onto his shoulders as his kisses descended.
“What, then?”
“I want to know my family,” she whispered the truth finally that she had never spoken aloud to anyone.
“Your adoptive father, Reverend Caulfield, pastor of a poor parish in a tiny border hamlet,” he said. “Your elder sister, Eleanor, spinster scholar. Your younger sister, Ravenna, in service to—”
She pushed him off. “How do you know this? I never told it to you.”
His brow creased. “It was not difficult to discover, duch—”
She pressed her fingertips to his lips. “You mustn’t call me that.”
He kissed her fingers, then drew one into his mouth. The caress of his tongue on the sensitive pad echoed between her thighs and in her toes. She closed her eyes and let herself feel what he did to her.
Just this
. She must want only this now, not anything else of him. Now that she knew her weakness, she could guard against wishing for more. She could still save herself from being completely lost.
He set his lips to her palm, then to the tender inside of her wrist. “How then shall I bring you happiness, little governess?”
“Let me go.” She stretched her neck and he kissed her shoulder, pushing the coverlet aside then entirely off her.
“I cannot.” He traced a trail with his tongue between her breasts, then he circled the swell, and finally the hungry peaked nipple. “Everyone would think I was a terrible scoundrel for seducing the governess then discarding her. Would ruin the reputation of the family, you know.”
She arched to his kisses on her belly, breathless. “You tease but you do not understand.”
“I understand that when I am with you, inside you, there is nothing else.” His hands circled her hips.
“There is always something else.”
“What else is there but your speaking eyes, your glorious hair, your sharp tongue—”
“My mistrust of you.”
He urged her knees apart and placed his mouth upon the inner curve of her thigh. “Your scent of roses.”
My heart that can now be broken
.
He bent to her and his tongue skimmed her most tender flesh and she gasped. “Your intoxicating flavor.” He licked again, slowly. Her back bowed.
“What—” She struggled for breath. “What are you doing?”
“Tasting you.” He dragged his tongue across her. “Intoxicating myself upon you.”
It was perfect pleasure, soft and wet, and she was drowning. “I am not brandy.”
“You are heaven. My heaven.” He sucked gently and she almost jumped off the bed. She clutched the bedclothes and held herself still and he sucked on her until she was blind with the pleasure and weak with yearning for more than this alone.
“This must be wrong.” She struggled for control beneath the caresses of his mouth, fighting her need.
“Trust me, Arabella,” he said and his hands held her securely.
She wanted it. She wanted to be his whole world as she feared he was now hers.
She let him do to her with his tongue what he wished, and she cried out when the pleasure came through her, rocking her body with such force that she could not withhold her cries. He came into her then, his thick shaft driving into her without tenderness or murmured encouragement this time, but urgently. He thrust hard, then harder. After the soft seduction of his mouth she welcomed it, and she imagined he needed her. She pulled him to her.
“My God, Arabella,” he growled. “You drive me mad.” His shoulders caped, and with a powerful moan he finished inside her.
He did not release her at once. Instead he wrapped his arms about her and held her beneath him, and dipped his brow to her shoulder. She ran her hands along his damp sides, memorizing the texture of his skin and the shape of him. When her fingers came to the wound, he sucked in a sharp breath. He pulled away but his gaze remained upon her.
“You should not have done that,” she said.
“I could not stop myself from doing that.”
“In that manner,” she clarified, touching a single fingertip to his side.
Moving carefully, he drew the coverlet over her. “I am undisciplined.”
Another lie. He was so thoroughly confident of the discipline he imposed on his crewmen and friends and servants that he could not even fathom deviation from his will.
She closed her eyes and turned her face into the bolster. He touched her brow, stroking back a lock of hair, his fingertips lingering on her cheek for a moment before he drew away.
“Why do you mistrust me, duchess,” he said quietly, “when I would give you everything?”
“Why do I mistrust you,” she whispered, “when you lied to me and continue to withhold the truth from me?”
She needed him to deny it, to assure her that there was nothing he was hiding about the reason for their wedding that had been done in such haste, and why his injury was kept such a secret.
He said nothing and she pressed her face into the linen that held the scent of him.
“Will you accept the diamonds as my wedding gift to you?” he said quite seriously.
“I cannot.”
He left her then. She had expected him to leave, but the bedchamber grew cold swiftly. She pulled the blanket around her, burrowed into the mattress, and waited for sleep.
“A
re you in there, your grace?”
Luc cracked his eye open. His valet stood in the open doorway of the boathouse. The sunlight framing his compact silhouette suggested midday.
Luc leaned forward on the cushioned bench and rubbed his face in his hands, then through his hair, shaking himself awake.
“What is it?” After a night of making love to a beautiful, passionate woman, he ought to feel spectacular. But his side hurt like the devil and despite all she had remained intractable.
“A letter arrived this morning from Canterbury, your grace, and another from Mr. Parsons.” With military precision Miles proffered the correspondence. Luc scowled. His valet’s gesture reminded him too much of how Arabella had thrust that blasted tiara into his hands the night before.
He had made a mistake. Yet another mistake with her. She was too proud to be cajoled. But what the woman wanted from him he could not fathom. He had never met a female who didn’t turn sweet over jewels. Or seduction. Apologies hadn’t even worked.
He took the letters. “Coffee. Pack. Traveling coach. In that order.”
“I have taken the liberty of instructing the butler to instruct the cook to prepare another breakfast for you and several of your guests who have arisen late due to the festivities last night. Before she departed, her grace—”
“The
comtesse
.”
“—and her royal highness breakfasted—”
“Departed?” Luc’s head snapped up.
His neat little man milliner of a valet—dressed to the nines, starched and pressed as impeccably as he’d always been when playing cabin steward on Luc’s ships—turned his nose into the air.
“Her grace wished to pay a call on the mantua maker in the village. I assured her that the woman would come to her, but she expressed a keen desire to be away from the house, where it seems she is the object of considerable scrutiny today among your guests—my lord Bedwyr and his and her royal highnesses excepted, of course.”
Luc rubbed his sore neck. Sleeping upright never bothered him unless he slept particularly hard. But his troubles were not truly physical. She had exhausted his body while leaving the rest of him a confounded mess. She was passion and courage all bound up in fiery audacity that he now knew masked tender uncertainty. With each touch and each word she made him need her more.
She might fight it, but she had no choice in the matter. She was his.
He flipped over the letter in his hand and snapped apart the wax seal. “The mantua maker?”
“Her grace wishes to purchase a traveling gown.”
“Mm hm.” The letter was short and to the point. The archbishop would not accept the validity of the wedding ceremony performed by a priest of the Roman confession under uncertain circumstances and without benefit of the proper banns being read. Lord Westfall was urged to make haste in returning home and securing a license to wed Miss Caulfield with the full sanction of the Church of England or risk the danger of placing his mortal soul in peril through the sin of fornication.
Luc stuffed the letters into his pocket.
Damn prelates. It was a mere inconvenience. If she conceived a child now, however, it could prove a problem if it were born short of nine months from the valid wedding date. He would take her home to England swiftly and the issue would be moot.
He stood up and Miles stepped back for him to exit the boathouse. He had not returned to his bedchamber after visiting hers. After she rejected his gift again, he had come here without thought. Only close to water did he sleep well. His ancestor who purchased Saint-Reveé-des-Beaux might have had him in mind.
Miles trailed after him, his Louis XIV heels clicking along the dock beneath the arched tunnel.
“Will we be departing soon for England, your grace?”
“Today. And stop calling me your grace. It’s disrespectful and not a little ghastly.”
“Very well, your grace. And shall I instruct Monsieur Brissot to place the household under her grace’s authority when she returns?”
“From the dress shop?”
Miles’s pencil thin brows rose. “Do forgive me, your grace, but I assumed her grace would return here from Paris. But perhaps she will continue on to join you in England afterward.”
“After what? What in the devil are you talking about, Miles?”
“Monsieur Brissot informed me that her grace intended to depart for Paris today directly from the modiste’s.”
Luc halted and closed his eye. He should have known. She had told him. He was a complete fool. Worse, he was blind. And he was coming to see his little governess’s character in a whole new light.
“When did she leave for the village, Miles?”
“Not a quarter of an hour ago.”
“Make the arrangements for our departure today. We will spend the night at Guer and wherever else necessary en route to Saint-Malo. And inform Lord Bedwyr that I will be leaving within the hour. If he wishes to join me and my wife
,
he should be prepared to depart then.”
He strode across the dock and into the bottom level of the house where the clean, alive scent of the river mingled with aromas from the kitchen of baking bread. He would find her at the dress shop and then . . . He didn’t know what. She was irrationally resistant. What woman did not wish to be a
comtesse
and next in line to be a duchess, for God’s sake?
She wanted him; that was obvious enough. He need only maintain a steady course until he came within range of her guns. Then, as the more experienced of them, he would outmaneuver her. As he had already tried to do several times without any success.
Perhaps if he got himself stabbed in the belly again she would come to him willingly. He must keep that in mind.
Striding to the stable, he pulled the letter from Combe’s land steward from his pocket. Parsons had nothing good to report. The estate was producing well enough; its income had not decreased. But the tenants were suffering. The famine was over, yet the farmers seemed to be less prosperous than ever, laboring hard yet with nothing to show for their struggles. And now Parsons was begging him to see to it. The estate could not wait until the matter of the title was settled. The steward was calling on him to return as swiftly as he could.
He must, and not only because the estate was in dire straits. Parsons’s letter confirmed it: Theodore had named his old friend and Adina’s brother, Absalom Fletcher, principal trustee should Adina’s child be a boy. Luc had been named second. In two months time the Bishop of Barris could be de facto master of Combe for the next two decades.
Luc needed no further urging. He was eager to return to England. As eager as he was to know who it was that wished him dead.
The men who attacked him on the beach had not done so in retaliation for their companion killed in the alleyway. That she had come upon them first was sheer unlucky coincidence. Or perhaps they knew she had come off his ship and meant to use her to draw him out. But the sailor Mundy continued to insist that he had been hired in Paris without any notion of what he was to do with the poison once he acquired it. Tony and his lieutenant both believed him.
In England he would find answers.
Cam found Luc in the stable as he led his horse into the yard.
“I understand that your lovely
comtesse
has gone shopping for gowns.” He leaned a shoulder into the door and crossed his gleaming Hessians. “How you could convince her to do so when I could not, I confess I am in astonishment.”
“Perhaps my powers of persuasion are greater than yours.”
“I doubt that.”
Luc adjusted the stirrup and ran his hand along the animal’s sleek withers. “You are not dressed for the road.”
“I regret that you must make this journey without me, cousin.” He glanced across the drive to where Princess Jacqueline rode with a groom. “I have interests I must see to here before returning home.”
Luc frowned. “She is an innocent, Cam. And, I needn’t add, she is also our friend Reiner’s sister.”
“Then why did you add it?” He grinned lazily. “But that is not the sort of interest I have in her, so be at ease, oh ye stalwart defender of ladies’ virtue. Excepting one lady’s virtue, of course.”
“Take care how you speak of my wife,” Luc grumbled.
His cousin accepted the reins of a great white horse from a groom.
“Perhaps it is you who should take care, Lucien, or despite the effort I have gone to on your behalf, you will lose her.”
“I will take that under advisement.” He put his foot in the stirrup and hauled himself up, biting back on the pain.
“I see we are not yet entirely ourselves again, are we?” Cam said. “Are you certain you wish to set out quite yet?”
“I’ll not hide in a hole like a frightened rabbit.” He shook his head. “Tony’s men have returned from Paris. Christos is not to be found there.”
“And the portrait found on the Sicilian who tried to kill you?”
“I haven’t an explanation. But Christos did not hire them.”
“You are concerned for him. For his safety,” Cam said, because he knew.
“Always.” He ran a hand around the back of his neck and released a hard breath. “When I saw him last, in December, we quarreled.”
“I assumed as much.”
“Did you?”
“I could not imagine another reason for you to accuse me of misusing a girl of twelve,” Cam said smoothly. “After our little conversation with swords, I wrote to your brother. He told me that before you found me in Paris you and he had spoken about Fletcher.”
“I asked Christos to return home with me.”
“He refused, presumably.”
“He said he had no wish to return to England or Combe.” He took a breath. “My reaction to finding you with the girl was a regrettable consequence of my . . . frustration.”
“Ah.” Cam tapped the crop against his boot.
“How is she?”
“My ward is well, thank you. She would send you her affections, I’m sure, but she is deathly afraid of you. Understandably so.”
“If you had shared with me that you had a ward for whom you were searching before I found you alone with her in a Parisian brothel, I might not have reacted quite so violently.”
“I daresay. What were you doing in that brothel anyway, cousin? Never seemed quite your style.”
“I was looking for you, of course. I hoped that since you were in France you might talk sense into my brother.” His scar ached. Both of them. “He hides here from the past, and yet I don’t think he remembers any of it, Cam.”
“Would that you did not as well.”
Luc met his cousin’s sober gaze. “I was a fool to have imagined even for a moment that you resembled Fletcher in any manner.”
“Ah, he finally apologizes.” He sighed theatrically. “What a tangle. And now you are blind because of it. But it cannot have been helped. The timing was unfortunate, and you are predisposed to protect the weak. You poor chivalrous fool.”
“Enjoying the speechifying, cousin?”
“Merely reveling in the freedom that my lack of concern for the good of others provides me.”
Luc pressed his mount forward. “Enjoy the chateau, Cam, if not the princess.” He spurred toward the village.
T
HE DAY WAS
warm and the door of the dressmaker’s shop stood open. Luc halted upon the threshold, heart in his throat.
In the center of the shop she stood with her face turned away from him. She wore a gown of blue the color of the sea that caressed her subtle curves and exposed her neck and arms and the dip of her bosom. Her hair, cinched with a simple ribbon, tumbled down her back in waves of fire.
“Wear that on our wedding day, duchess, and make me the happiest man alive.”
She whirled toward him, her eyes wide. “Wedding day?”
He stepped into the shop. “A formality for the Church of England’s satisfaction only, of course. But it must be done soon. We depart today.”
“To—” She looked to the modiste. The woman’s brows were perked high, her attention eager.
Luc gestured for her to depart. She curtsied and scurried into the back room of the shop.
Arabella stood poised upon her toes as though she would flee momentarily. “You wish to depart for England today?”
He seemed to study her. “Unless it interferes with your travel plans.”
She pressed her hands against her waist. “You said that you would not stop me from going.”
“I said I would not allow my servants to lock you into the house. I said nothing of myself.”
“You will
lock me in
?”
“Of course not.” He walked toward her. The ruby and gold ring on its plain ribbon glimmered in the crevice of her bosom. “Did you intend to leave alone?”
“Yes. The princess offered me the use of her brother’s traveling carriage and the escort of a guard.”
“Ah. You concluded that you could not effectively escape me in my carriage. That is, your carriage.”
She said nothing.
He reached up and she did not flinch as he took the ring in his palm and studied it.
“Is it the man who gave you this costly trinket that you go to meet in Paris?” The words came from him without his will. “Is it he that draws you away in such haste?”
She did not respond at once. “If you imagine me capable of giving myself to you as I did last night while intending what you suggest,” she said, “then you have much to learn about me, my lord.”
She might have slapped him. He dropped the ring but could not move away from her. She bound him as surely as if she used lock and key. He could not outmaneuver her. He was moored securely.
“Why do you wish to run away to Paris, Arabella?” His heart beat hard. “What do you hope to find there that I am not able to give you?”
“A man.” Her hand wrapped around the ring and she held it tight to her breast. “But not as you imagine.”
“What do I imagine?”
“I have told you before what sort of woman I am, yet you do not believe me.” She backed away. “Tell me, my lord, is it my hair alone, the harlot shade of red, that convinces you I know nothing of chastity or constancy? Or is it my beauty? Or perhaps it is the immodesty I have exhibited with you. It would not make you unique among men to believe the worst of me. Rather, quite common.”