Chapter 20

CHAPTER TWENTY

T he ride home was a test of endurance such as Lillian had never known. She had spent weeks of rain battened under a canvas tent when her parents refused to leave a dig, when the chill damp crept through her coat and into her bones. She had been caught in weather when she tramped too far on a plant-drawing expedition and had to lie on a hillside praying lightning would not strike her, or forge through lashing rain toward the last cottage she had seen, hours before, seeking shelter.

She had stood for hours of interminable chat at soirees and parties during the Season, and she had sat for hours more of gossip and false kindness, shoving her mouth full of sweets to keep from saying something untoward during calls and visits. But every jounce of the chaise on the rutted road back to Ashbury was a question of how many blows she would take for Leo. Another? And another? And one more?

“You are determined to press on to the manor tonight?” she asked as they crossed the mill bridge into Shrivenham. Leo wheeled the carriage around the stately Beckett Hall, seat of the Barrington family, and she thought longingly of the feather mattress on her bed, the brocade coverlet curling softly about her, the pillow stuffed with down easing her aching head. If they ever reached that refuge, she would sink into the comfort and forget the hours just passed.

“Another hour,” he said tersely. “I can slow Boreas to a walk if you’re tired of being jolted.”

At least he recognized the trot was jarring her bones, not to mention increasing the chances that the horse could injure himself on the road. There was no one about, it being darkest night and all humble folk sound asleep in their beds, resting for a day of productive labor on the morn. The moon sailed a pond of translucent cloud, its outline clear and cuttingly bright against the star-battered sky.

“Are there demons chasing us?” she asked mildly. “Or will the demons be with you wherever you arrive?”

“My family behaved abominably tonight. I cannot begin to apologize for their treatment of you.”

“They were as horrible to you. Saving your aunt, Lady Melina. I quite like her.” It seemed necessary to salvage some good from the inquisition.

“I delayed accepting the invitation because I feared they would demean me and everything I’ve accomplished. But I never anticipated they would be so cruel to you. I have been too long under your influence, around people who are kind and good at heart. I forgot how they could be. And my uncle the worst among them.”

“He is grieving, Leo. It is plain to see your cousin’s death has shattered him, and not just because he needs a new heir. I gather Rupert was beloved of you all.”

“A far superior man in every way.”

She touched his hand, rigid through the driving glove. “Not to you. You are not less. Just…a different person. With qualities that, regrettably, it does not seem your mother and uncle place much value upon.”

“Nor does the world, I’m afraid.”

“Why…” She hesitated, for it was not her place to ask. But what she and Leo meant to each other had no conventional label, not in the polite language she’d been taught.

“Why do they think your brother could not handle the estate?”

His jaw tightened, his knuckles gripping the ribbons, his shoulders one solid plane. Lillian was about to retract and say he must disregard her prying when he answered.

“The matter is less one of deserving than of being capable. You said you’ve always known, from a baby, that Hester was different. She was born…”

“Simple, as they said,” Lillian said quietly. “That is how people refer to her.”

“Joshua was quiet, but he was otherwise no different from other boys. Sweet, deliberate, slow to anger. He would do anything anyone asked of him, if he thought it made them happy. Hester has that quality as well.”

The horse flicked its ears, as if catching the current beneath his words.

Lillian nodded. “It is wonderful, that obliging temperament. Up to the point when people try to take advantage.”

“As they did of Joshua. I knew this. I am the older brother. I ought to have protected him. But he liked to fish and I didn’t, so I would leave him went I went digging, and sometimes I left him alone for a long time. We knew not to let him have coin, he would simply give it away, always believing the person who asked deserved it more than he did. But he did have his treasures that he always carried about, and those he would not part with. The only way to agitate him was to try to take away one of his little artifacts.”

“Valuables?”

“Not even close. A stone he found in a river. A coin I gave him from one of my digs. Small bits and bobs that meant something only to him. But he would guard them so fiercely, and these older boys, not from our estate but from Highworth, took it into their head that Joshua’s things were valuable. We avoided them as much as we could. But I saw them one day when I was exploring the ruins I told you about, the remains of the old medieval village. I should have known they were headed to the lake where Joshua liked to fish. I should have known that they might…hurt him.”

“Badly?” Fear laced her tone, her throat tight and hot. She recalled, against her will, the image of Lord Bacon putting Hester’s hand on his leg. A bully who knew he could bend the girl’s will to his, and Hester had not the presence of mind, nor the physical strength, to resist him.

“Bad enough. One of them bashed him on the head with a rock, hard enough to black him out. I brought him home and our nurse tended to him. And when he came to his senses…he was not the same boy any longer.”

“Like Hester?” she asked quietly.

“In some ways, yes. He struggled to learn after that. He has a hard time remembering something you told him five minutes ago. He simply cannot pay attention—there was no hope of him attending a boy’s school. He managed to pass university with the help of his tutor, because he is not unintelligent. But he is easily upset. Sensitive to certain things that never used to bother him. He is skittish in new environments. I think being a curate is the only job he is fit for, as he still loves to read and is as sweet-natured as ever. But he would never be able to handle very great demands. In some ways he will be a child all his life.”

“That is not your fault, Leo. The blame lies with his injuries, and the boys who hurt him.”

“Yet that attack never might have happened if I were there. Or had returned sooner.”

He would always blame himself, Lillian saw, because he loved his brother. She grabbed the wooden side of the chaise as a sudden tilt of the wheel threw her toward Leo. His body was warm and firm, hard and unyielding. He was a man who had been carved by blows, hammered into form like the flint arrowhead they found in the cave, and yet his heart had not become hard, and his character had not been twisted into bitterness.

She wanted that body next to her. She wanted to hold him in her arms until all his sorrow fled.

She let herself slide against him, fitted to his form, and leaned into him, placing one hand on his arm.

“Take us home, Leo,” she whispered.

By the time they reached the ivy-clad walls of the Manor House, with its windows dark like sleeping eyes and only the moon to light their way to the stable, Lillian was bread dough that had been punched all over, left to rise, and then punched all over again. An exhaustion of the spirit pulled at her, so many confused emotions slithering in her chest, like eels. She hung up the harness while Leo brushed the horse, which they would return the next day, then left Boreas with his head in a bucket of oats. Leo climbed the stair beside her as she held the chamberstick, candle flickering against the carved wooden ceiling, and paused at the door to her room.

“Hester is not here,” he reminded her. With his low voice, his undone cravat, the hair that needed barbering curling over his brow, he was a dark incubus, the force of seduction luring her to surrender.

He had never been in her bed; she always went to his.

Some dormant sense of self-preservation that she had tamped down all this time teased a wagging finger in the back of Lillian’s mind. What was she to him? What was this ? This dinner had brought to her attention, with painful clarity, the writing on the wall she’d been pretending not to see.

She wasn’t a woman who could stand boldly at his side in the eyes of society, claiming a station equal to his. She was the woman he brought to his bed in secret, and in the daylight they drew the pretense of their betrothal around them like a sheer muslin veil that could disintegrate in a sharp wind.

She could never be his companion. His wife.

“It has been a trying day,” she said, searching for the way to resist, to protect herself.

“I hurt you, taking you there. I all but tossed you to the wolves.” A haunted shadow lurked in his eyes, and it was that, more than the warm, heavy hand he slid around the back of her neck, that made her weaken. With his thumb he rubbed the aching base of her skull, and that need for self-preservation subsided at once, curling and settling in its bed with a sigh.

“Let me make it up to you,” he whispered.

It was easier to surrender, and it was what she wanted. She didn’t want to lose him, not yet. He must know, too, all the reasons a marriage between them was impossible. They were too different in station, in expectation, in wealth, in pedigree. She would always be the lagging horse, not pulling her weight, the subject of speculation and gossip that would follow him wherever he went, the arbiters of society wondering why a Westrop and the presumptive heir to a marquessate would bind himself to an antiquarian’s daughter.

He pulled the round gown from her and let her hang it on its peg while his hands skimmed the skin he had uncovered. She closed her eyes in bliss as he unclasped her stays and rubbed the flesh beneath, freed to resume its natural shape. He did so adore her breasts. It was the one weapon she had to remedy their inequality; she would be able to win any argument with him, all their lives, simply by flaunting her bosoms.

“They are not wrong, your family,” she informed him as he lay her on the bed and pushed up the hem of her shift so he might unroll her stockings. “I am unfit.”

He paused to meet her eyes, his catching the shadows that flitted and lilted about the room in the light of the dancing flame. Her skin trembled where he had kissed, and where he had yet to kiss.

“You fit me very well, Lillian, and you know that.” The brush of his erection against the inside of her leg left no question of what he referred to.

“The very shape of me is an abomination.” She let her head find the pillow as he resumed his task of examination, touching and kissing every inch of her.

“I dote on the shape of you. Every inch of you is perfect. At least, what I have seen so far. Let me explore the rest and I will make my final pronouncement.”

He meant to take his time with her tonight, and she let him. His touch, his kisses, the light sweeps of his tongue soothed the inward hurts, drew her mind away from the knowledge that was taking shape inside her, like a barrister marshaling his arguments. He ended his survey of her body between her legs and she rose at once to the pleasure, eager, familiar, yet devastating each time, razing her to the ground. When he entered her he took his time again, his strokes long and slow, and she shivered with delight as she swept her hands over his back and buttocks. So much man, so much brilliance, and all hers for this moment in time.

“Leo.” Her pleasure burrowed deep, bright and fierce, desperate.

“Do I have you?” He watched her face so carefully, like a man on his grand tour studying the art, eyes opened to the splendors of another world. She squeezed her eyelids together, afraid to be so bare to him, so needful.

He had her. That was the painful beauty of it all. He moved in her, with her, as if nothing mattered more than her pleasure, than bringing her to this new place, and when she tumbled over the edge into a place brighter, further than she had ever gone before, she was alone, because he pulled out to spend in his hand, his body shuddering alongside, but not with her.

“It isn’t fair,” she said drowsily as her body drifted back to earth, as he curved his body around hers and nuzzled his lips in her hair. “I get to enjoy everything, and you…”

“Could ask for nothing more, Lillian. Being with you is a pleasure greater than anything I’ve known.”

“Not anything ,” she demurred, because she wanted honesty between them, finally. He was a man. She knew something, pieces overheard here and there, dark hints from her aunt about the way of the world. “Surely there have been others.”

Though there hadn’t been for her, and wouldn’t be, later. She knew quite firmly and clearly, as if it were a lesson spelled out on a slate, that Leo Westrop was the only man she would find this with. The man who had awakened her and the man who would hold all her memories when he left. There would be no other after him.

He tugged a hand through her hair, coming free from its pins. She would have a rat’s nest to untangle in the morning. “There was only one other,” he said finally. “And that barely counted.”

“How can it not count?”

“It was arranged by my mates for my eighteenth birthday. I was away at university. I was the only one of my friends who hadn’t…well. They saw this as a problem to rectify and arranged a night with a woman. Paid her well, I hope. She was very accommodating, but so…” He shook his head, burying his face in her hair. She wondered if his shudder was from laughter or revulsion. “I could tell by how very encouraging she was that I was doing everything wrong. It was an embarrassment all around. I deduced after that, from the way my mates talked, that there was something…different about me. I need to be fond of a woman before I have any interest in intimacies.”

“I had thought you much more practiced.”

He smiled, a sleepy, satisfied curve of his lips. “Perhaps you mistake eagerness for skill. You are very lovely, Lillian.”

Not to anyone else, she wanted to tell him. Leo was the only man who found her beautiful.

Her heart clenched, a string pulled tight as the mouth of a purse. “You said—tonight, at dinner—you said, the woman I love.”

He stilled. A long lock of hair fell from his fingers, like folding silk. “I did, didn’t I?”

A hot rush, the need to retreat. “If you only said it to rile them?—”

“What if you married me, Lil?”

The hot rush rolled over her and whisked away, taking her ability to breathe. “You—what?”

He slid a hand from her shoulder along the curve of her side. He knew she was too sensitive to tease, that her nerve endings were still raw and open, singed by the pinnacle she’d reached. Her mind was a calves foot jelly, shuddering.

He had called her Lil. Only her family could call her Lil. Only the people she most loved were allowed that intimacy, that access, that knowledge.

The candle threw its light, the flame diving into her, sweeping through.

She loved Leo Westrop. She hadn’t been imagining or infatuated, before. She loved him true.

His lips brushed her temple as he whispered. “What if we made this real?”

A laugh shook from her, mortification, disbelief. He would ask this now? After the night they’d endured?

“We couldn’t possibly. Didn’t you see what your family thinks of me? For that reason alone, even if everyone else…”

A hot weight blocked her throat, and she couldn’t swallow nor choke it up. He would eventually be accepted by his family if and when the marquessate passed to him. He, without her, could mend what had been frayed tonight. She couldn’t be the source of such friction, or the reason she broke with his family. A couple couldn’t survive in the cold, alone.

“It’s not to be thought of, Leo, not now. The only way to save face is to jilt me.” The thought was a sword through the chest. She blinked with surprise at the strength of the blow, waiting for the roaring pain to follow.

His voice was even, neutral. “I already said I wouldn’t be the one to end things.”

Of course, because he was a gentleman. He wouldn’t sully his reputation in such a way. They’d agreed; she must be the jilt. The woman foolish enough to cut free the heir to a marquess.

The woman foolish enough to leave Leo Westrop.

“Very well.” Her heavy breath scratched her throat. “The sooner I jilt you, the happier you’ll all be.”

His arm tensed around her, cradling her ribs. “ I won’t be happy.”

Perhaps not at first, but he would be, in time. He’d come to his senses and know relief, might even mend things with his family without her crowding the way. It was only the pleasure they shared that had befuddled him. His first experience of bliss that disordered the senses, that made rational thought flee and crouch in the shadows like a mouse chased away by the light.

“I don’t want to lose this,” he muttered, and she agreed. This —the touching, the pleasure. She wanted it, too. She reveled in their bedsport as much as he did. But she wanted more from a marriage.

She wanted the impossible.

She wrapped her arms about him, tears seeping through her eyelids. “I won’t leave just yet. This is…rather nice.”

But no matter how she lingered, she was in the cart carrying her to the guillotine. She’d known from the beginning there would be an end to them, and the reasons had been made painfully clear. She could draw out the time until their parting, but leave him she must. And the blow, she already knew, would be unbearable.