Captivated by a Lady's Charm (Lords of Honor Book 2) (22 page)

“You do not deny writing it?”

For a brief moment she considered that cowardly route. But then, what was the point of that? She clearly knew that he clearly knew those words belonged to her. “I do not.” Prudence snatched it from his fingertips and he started with surprise at the alacrity of her movement. Or perhaps it was her bold commandeering of the note? Either way, an unsettled Christian was vastly preferable to her own uneasy self. “You, however, do not have leave to read another man’s correspondence.”

“Even if said other man saw fit to share the missive with me.”

A curl tumbled over her eye and she blew it back. Blasted Lord Maxwell. The recalcitrant strand promptly fell over her eye once more. “That was not well done of him,” she imparted. Nor had that particularly deceitful action fit into her entire plan of how this day would go. “You were not supposed to learn of that,” she said at last, hating the faint, breathless quality of her voice.

Christian captured the bothersome lock and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. How could that slight movement rob her of thought? “
That
, as in your note to Maxwell?”

She managed a nod. Her body thrummed with an awareness of his hard, powerful form nearly flush against hers. He placed his lips close to her ear. “Why the letter, Prudence?” The hint of coffee tickled her senses. How could that bitter, aromatic scent be this potent aphrodisiac?

She closed her eyes. “Y-you were not—”

“Supposed to discover it, yes, you said as much.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why?” Had that demand come out as a sharp, authoritative command, it would have been easy to deny. Yet, his husky baritone wrapped about that one syllable so that she could deny him nothing.

She drew in a slow breath and raised her eyes to his. “I wanted to discuss…” He compelled her with his powerful gaze to finish that thought. “I wanted to discuss you,” she finished.

Then he briefly touched his lips to the sensitive shell of her ear. Oh, God. She’d carefully planned every aspect of her meeting this day. In all her planning, however, Christian and the seductive pull of his caress had never fit into her scheming. As such, he filled her senses, killing all the carefully thought out words and her hopes of a future for her and him. Her knees knocked together and she gave thanks for the shelf at her back that prevented her from collapsing in a muddled heap at his feet.

In meeting Prudence in Maxwell’s stead, Christian had resolved to discover what it was she’d summoned the other man for. Cool, systematic logic had driven him here. Yet all the while, he’d suspected by the title of the book she’d instructed his friend to search for there was one reason prompting that clandestine meeting. Still hearing her say it, hearing her acknowledge it was Christian who’d driven her here this day, braving scandal, filled him with a sense of male satisfaction. The alternative—she’d sought out Maxwell for reasons that did not include him—had dug at his insides with a vicious envy that had gnawed at all reason and sense.

Christian trailed his kiss to her cheek. “What was it you wanted to discuss?” He forgot his earlier plan to avoid the honorable, good Prudence Tidemore and shifted his lips to the corner of her mouth.

Her body sagged against the bookcase and he quickly anchored her with his frame. He effortlessly disentangled the book from her fingers and set it upon the shelf behind her. “D-discuss?” she breathed, angling her face, presenting her lips in a way that begged him for more.

He touched his mouth to hers in a fleeting kiss meant to entice. The air filled with the rapid intake of her breath. Or was that his? He no longer knew whether the pounding heartbeat was hers, his, or both merging as one. “The note,” he whispered against her mouth. The reason for his being here. And yet, it had only been about her. The need to see her, share in her goodness; a goodness he had no right to. But then, he’d always been a selfish bastard.

She forced her eyes open. “A-are you attempting to seduce secrets out of me, my lord?” The husky contralto of her voice wrapped around those intoxicating words.

A wave of hot, powerful desire slammed into him and he brushed his mouth over hers once more. “Is it working, my lady?”

“A-a bit.” Prudence’s lashes fluttered wildly and she leaned into him.

“Just a bit?” He swallowed her reply with his kiss, slanting his mouth over hers again and again until the soft whimpers of her desire filled his mouth. Their tongues clashed in a hungry meeting and the note fell from her fingers as he passed his hands searchingly over her body. Christian ran his palms down the curve of her hip, around the gentle swell of her buttocks, and then dragged her into the vee of his legs where his shaft pressed the front of his breeches. He wanted to know all of her, in every way a man could know a woman. Wanted to kiss the swollen tips of her breasts and know the color of that pebbled flesh. He dragged his mouth down her neck and damned the fabric of the cloak between them.

“Ch-Christian,” she moaned as he shoved the garment wide and caressed her modest décolletage with his mouth.

A sputtering snore cut into the thick, potent spell she’d woven and Christian drew back. He caught Prudence against him and held her close to his chest. Their breaths came hard and fast in a matched rhythm that could only be calmed by finding the ultimate fulfillment in one another’s arms. He placed his lips against her temple.

“W-was this merely a ploy?” There was a pained hesitancy to her unsteady question.

And he stilled. For all the ways in which he was a worthless bastard, he respected her too much to use her body’s desires against her. He kissed her once more and then drew back. “Do you think I’m capable of such treachery?” Regret twisted inside him. Since he’d first waltzed her across Lady Drake’s ballroom, he’d not wanted her blind to the man he truly was. Seeing that jaded cynicism there, directed at him and his honest intentions just now, ravaged him, leaving him exposed and weak before her.

She hesitated and color slapped her cheeks. He braced for an unnecessary apology. One that a man such as he didn’t deserve. Except, she continued to surprise him. “Are you aware of the details of my sister’s scandal?”

He would not lie to her. “I am aware of a failed elopement and nothing more.”

Nor had he cared to know even that detail. As a man who valued the secrets of his past, he’d not care to know or share in those held by anyone else.

Prudence dropped her gaze to the latch upon his cloak and gave a slight nod. “She believed herself in love with a gentleman,” she said quietly. “To a man who proved himself to be no true gentleman.” Her mouth tightened with a harsh anger that took him aback so that he wanted to hunt the bloody bounder who, through his vile actions against her sister, had left her cynical in this slight way. “They eloped, but it was really just a plan to ruin my sister and hurt my brother, and as such,” she pressed her palms together and stared at the interlocked digits. “We were all ruined.”

“We?” he prodded, hungering for each shred of herself she would provide that told him of who she was and all that mattered to her.

“My sisters Poppy and Penelope, and myself,” she said by way of explanation.

“Ah, yes.” Poppy, the girl close in age to his sister. There was another.

“I have three sisters. Two unwed, and Patrina, who eloped, and then some months later found herself married to the Marquess of Beaufort. They said she never would. My mother and all of Society that is,” she said rambling in a manner he struggled to keep up with. “But she did. And she is blessedly happy. In love.”

Those two whimsical words gave him pause, hinting at the danger in being here and speaking to the romantic Prudence who believed in love and goodness.

Seeming filled with her own inner tumult, she stepped past him and began to pace. “Most courtships are not born of love,” she spoke quietly, more to herself. A soft smile played about her lips. “Nor was Patrina and Weston’s first meetings fueled by love. But then with each meeting, the more they came to know one another, the more they cared, and then eventually,” she stopped abruptly and squarely held his gaze. “They fell in love.”

The warning bells clanged louder and louder in his ears and he, who’d entered into this exchange with complete and utter control, now eyed the path behind him as a means of escape. “And this letter pertains to your meeting with Maxwell, how?” His voice emerged garbled.

“I want to know what Patrina and Weston know. And Sin and Juliet.”

He tugged at the collar of his cloak, choked by the garment. Or was it terror over the words she spoke that restricted all ability to breathe? After Lynette’s betrayal, he’d disavowed that sentiment called love. His faulty judgment where that emotion was concerned had shaken his ability to trust his own heart. Now, this bold, fearless lady would speak of a dream for that very thing.

Prudence set her small, narrow shoulders, proudly. “However, I gave up on the hope of someone overlooking that scandal to see me.”

Those words, jaded and wounded all at the same time, drew him back from his own disquiet. He ran his palm along her cheek. “You are too young to give up on hope.”

“I thought you did not believe in that sentiment,” she said softly, leaning into his caress.

He paused. For he didn’t. Life had proven nothing ever truly came from hope. No matter how much a man wished for something, fought for it, or longed for it, be it surviving a bloody battle, or knowing peace and happiness, it was all ultimately futile. If it wasn’t the lead musket ball lodged in a person’s heart, it was the creditors and debt collectors, which ultimately proved the futility in hoping for more.

“You may say that you don’t believe,” Prudence, in a like manner, ran her gloved palm over his cheek. “But your prolonged silence indicates you must.”

Ah Christ, he’d never known the power of a woman’s innocent touch such as her gentle caress could feel like this. Even Lynette’s caress had been the practiced touch of a skilled courtesan that was nothing compared with his hungering for this slip of a woman before him. Desire to take Prudence in his arms and continue his earlier exploration of her trim, delicately curved frame slammed into him with the force of a too-fast moving carriage.

“I want to marry you.”

Christian blinked several times. “I…” He opened his mouth to speak and then promptly closed it. He tried again. “Did you…?” No words were forthcoming. For it had sounded as though she had said—

“I want to marry you,” she said with a gentle smile.

Yes, it would seem there was nothing faulty with his hearing.

Prudence retrieved the letter and thrust it toward him. He accepted the paper in his numb fingers. “That is why I asked Lord Maxwell to meet me.”

He’d never been accused of being a lackwit. In fact, he’d earned respectable marks at Eton and Oxford and had been often applauded by his tutors and instructors for his wit and yet, by God, he could no sooner make sense of the lady’s words than he could stop the Earth from spinning and set it into motion in the opposite direction. As such, to regain some control of the confounding situation, he employed the same droll, careless, roguish responses he’d affected through the years. “You intended to ask Lord Maxwell for my hand in marriage?”

“Well, not ask him for your hand,” Prudence said gesticulating wildly. “But rather for his help in
securing
your hand.”

And just like that, she’d kicked the world to spinning in the opposite direction. “You wish to marry me.” Surely he’d heard her wrong.

She nodded.

“You sought to enlist my friend’s assistance in securing my hand.”

Another nod. “Indeed.” He backed away from her and the prey now became the predator. She stalked toward him, wearing that wide, unfettered smile that stole into his waking and sleeping thoughts. Then she came to a stop. “You see, I put a good deal of thought into our circumstances and realized there is no other course except for marriage.” Her smile slipped and a slight frown hovered on her lips as though she’d tasted a too-bitter piece of fruit. “That is, marriage between us.”

Perhaps he was merely dreaming the entire exchange. Christian ran his hands over his face, wrinkling the paper. When he opened his eyes, the lady remained fixed to the floor staring expectantly back at him, expecting an answer. Nothing. He had not a blasted word.

“Do you have nothing to say?”

By the wounded edge to those six words, he needed to proceed with caution where the lady was concerned. “I am honored?”