“Perhaps that is enough.” He could kiss her neck, take the lobe of her ear between his teeth.
“The time we spent together… you were not yourself.” He wanted to curl up in her low, husky voice and live there. He wanted to drop to his knees and beg.
He placed his hand beneath her chin and lifted it with the softest feather of a touch. “Allow me to court you. We can come to know one another as Keaton and Lucy, the marquess and the viscount’s granddaughter. But you’ll find nothing different about me. I have always been myself with you. Perhaps more so than anywhere else.”
Her entire body shuddered. She swayed into his embrace. He’d won!
She stepped away, pulling her wrist from his hold and circling it round with her own fingers. “I’ll take it intoconsideration.” Nothing at all in her voice now, not even anger. She turned her back to him and left Hawthorne House.
And he found himself making a vow into the empty sunlight of the cold hall. “I won’t disappoint you, Lucy.” Never again.
Eleven
The girl in the mirror seemed brave. She seemed poised, her head held high, her pink skirts smooth. Her bodice and neat little spencer both practical and modest, no hidden slit hemmed up the side. The girl in the mirror was as much of a lie as Mr. Keats was.
Lucy turned her back on the reflection. “Are you ready, Alex?”
The marquess’s sister looked a little pale, but she, unlike Lucy, looked perfectly proper in a green gown she’d brought from London. It was of a finer quality than Lucy’s, and the lovely muslin seemed to mock her.
She’d thought Keats—no, Rainsly—a mere stable hand. Had thought herself higher in the world than him. How he would have laughed at her.
Wouldn’t he have?
“Your brother…” Lucy wandered toward her bed, where Alex sat, and leaned against the bedpost. “You claim he is not a cruel sort of man.”
“He is not, at least that I have seen.”
“What of all those duels you said he fought?”
“He possesses an overblown sense of justice. I’ve seen him tolerate a fellow until that man took idle chatter too far, making some sort of statement well beyond the pale. And then he puts a bullet in the fellow’s shoulder.” Alex shrugged. “That, too, shows he’s not particularly cruel. Always aims for the shoulder, never to kill. And then he walks off whistling as if he missed entirely. Did he… do anything to you, Lucy, while he was here?”
Oh, he had doneeverythingto her. And Alex, a woman who had also been seduced, would understand. She sat carefully on the edge of the bed. “The gentleman who made you feel he loved you… How did you know he did not? You do not have to answer if you do not wish to. I hate to bring up something painful.”
“I do not mind speaking of it. He made me feel… beautiful and special, unique. But he was not willing to defy the world for me.” She chuckled. “It’s too much to ask, isn’t it? Ask a man to defy the world for you. And he did not even really have to defy the world… just his father, Lord Palmerson.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes. There’d been plenty of opportunity for us to become acquainted with one another while his father was courting me.”
“It makes more sense for you and his son to marry. The son being the heir and needing an heir of his own.”
“Yes, well, Palmerson is quite competitive. I believe that his son, Hutchens, seduced me in order to… defeat his father.”
“How awful.” Lucy squeezed Alex’s hand.
“It is done. And I will move on.”
“Of course you will.”
There was a short knock on the door, and then it opened, and Lucy’s sister-in-law, Ophelia, slipped in. “Are you ready?”
Lucy and Alex stood, smoothed their skirts, and followed Ophelia into the small drawing room on the ground floor.
Lord Finley stood at the window in a fresh suit of clothes, and Keats—Lord Rainsly—stood beside him, stiff and stern, his jawnewly shaven and dressed more finely than she’d ever seen him. He turned and caught her staring, offered a weak half smile as he crept toward her.
“The clothes belong to your brother. We’re of a size.” That blush stealing across his cheeks, how he could not quite meet her eye… was he feeling shy?
And could she not find it adorable? She flattened a grin. Apparently not.
