Lady Lovett's Little Dilemma (9 page)

At least it was better than any other alternative that involved procreation.

She felt him go rigid but he said nothing, just placed his hand gently on her head and breathed out in one long sigh.

Emboldened, Cressida drew the length of him into her mouth. How hard and hot it was.

Another groan. Surely of pleasure?

Obviously, for he was as tense as an arrow’s bow. The moisture between her thighs was a sign of her own excitement. She was balancing the score and she was enjoying doing it. She could do this every night without ever having to worry about conceiving again.

On this happy thought she focused her attention upon pleasuring Justin, using her tongue to contour the length of his shaft—just as she’d seen it done at Mrs Plumb’s—circling it before taking him deeply into her mouth in a series of languorous thrusts.

“Cressida…darling…” His voice was hoarse as he dug his fingers into her shoulders. He seemed to be straining, using every ounce of willpower to keep still. She sensed what he must be feeling. She’d felt it many times, herself, when Justin’s pleasuring had brought her to the cusp and she’d held back, feeling a strange mixture of both terror and ecstasy before spiralling into the glorious abyss.

She wanted Justin to feel the same wonderful sensations to which he’d introduced her. Exultation, pride and satisfaction welled up inside her. Without Mrs Plumb’s help, Cressida had discovered the secret to bringing her husband pleasure without implicating herself in anything that would return to haunt her.

Like another baby.

His breath was quick and shallow. The sound made her feel all-powerful. Her nipples ached and her sex pulsed in response but she tried to close her mind to her own bodily sensations. They could most definitely not be acted upon.

“My glorious…darling…wife,” he whispered, gripping her shoulders and kissing the top of her head, and all the pent-up tension and fear Cressida had felt during these last months at the thought of intimacy with Justin simply drained away.

Until, with a gasp, he gently pushed aside her head, deftly drew her up beside him, rolled her on to her back and covered the length of her with his hard, needy body. She felt his erection press into her stomach before he adjusted himself lower.

Lower, so that his manhood was near her slick, wanting entrance and she was balanced on the edge of well-trained silence, contemplating the destruction of all her well-laid plans.

Being plundered by her husband was so very far from them, yet this was Justin, wanting her, needing her. Even as he slid into her she felt her heart cry out at the rightness of this physical coupling, yet her brain roared its terrified objection.

One more week.

That’s all she wanted. One more week so she could learn how a man could come inside a woman without making her pregnant. It was possible. Having learned this for fact, she knew she couldn’t become a tacit collaborator in her own destruction, however much she wanted it at this moment.

Dragging her mouth from his she struggled beneath him, pushing him away and wriggling her hips in clear objection rather than escalation of the sexual act.

“No!”

Her cry sounded much too harsh and her breathing, fast and clearly distressed, reverberated through the room.

Instantly he released her and she rolled onto her side. “Cressida?” His voice was thick with concern. “What is it?”

What is it?

What could she say? What should she say?
I don’t want your child, Justin, and am busy investigating ways to ensure I need never become pregnant again, if you’ll just be patient another week.

If they were having this conversation before becoming intimate she might have fumbled her way into making some semblance of sense. Right now, however, with fear and terror and guilt bombarding her with equal relentlessness, she did not know what to say.

“I’m so sorry, Justin,” she whispered, withdrawing from his embrace and putting her hands to her temples as she swung her legs over the side of the bed, “but I feel another megrim coming on.”

His hands fell away from her. She felt his withdrawal, both physical and emotional, as he slowly got out of bed.

“You should have said something before, darling.” He rose up before her, his look puzzled, but suspicious also.

At the irony in his tone, she nearly abandoned her resolve to hurl herself right back into his arms.

Nearly.

Only the fear of a fate equal to death in nine months stopped her.

Chapter Six

“You seem distracted, Justin? Bad news?”

Justin glanced up from the little writing desk in the corner of Mariah’s sitting room at which he’d been working for the past hour, reconciling, yet again, the list of orphans who’d been delivered and removed from Sedleywich eighteen years ago.

“I wish I could offer you concrete answers but we have to be patient, Mariah,” he muttered, though it was not his apparent preoccupation with the task with which Mariah had charged him that accounted for his distraction.

Cressida. Her behaviour defied logic. Last night it was as if she’d enticed him to her merely so she could repulse him when that was not at all her nature. He closed his eyes and shivered with remembered longing as he recalled the brief feeling of being wanted once more by his wife.

Brief. He nearly snarled his bitterness. Where had she learned such a thing? Why had she started on an act so calculated to whip up his desire only to reject him at the end?

He was confused and hurt. Suspicious, too. Not that she’d indulged in activities he’d not condone but as to the source of her inspiration for such extraordinary bedroom antics. Antics that
she
had initiated.

Only to reject him.
That’s what it all came down to.

For the first time since he could remember, Cressida had not been at breakfast this morning. Though he’d endured a hellish night, he’d forced himself to take his seat at the usual time, hoping to glean
something
over their habitual haddock and toast, even if no actual allusion were made to the previous evening’s several extraordinary encounters.

Mariah came to stand beside him, bending to look over his shoulder. She looked grey and drawn and Justin reached up to squeeze her hand.

“I agree with you, Mariah, that the most likely candidate is this Miss Madeleine Hardwicke, Lord Slitherton’s betrothed. As you know, I’m on the Sedleywich board with her sister-in-law, Annabelle Luscombe.”

“Which makes muddying the trail all the easier.” Mariah sighed. “Miss Hardwicke looks just as I did as a young girl, Justin, with her blue-black hair and Castilian features, yet she has Robert’s nose.” She twisted her hands. “Surely you can trace her origins and reveal the deception? I’m going insane, Justin, unable to think of anything but the growing suspicion my beloved Robert’s evil mother retrieved my child from the Sedleywich Home for Orphans and somehow engineered that she be brought up as the child of Robert’s sister.” She covered her face with her hands. “Lord knows, I was in no position to keep the child, I know that, but I was used, deceived, abandoned. Where was Robert when I needed him? We were so in love.”

Justin squeezed her fingers tight, then he rose and put his arms around his old friend. “Hush, Mariah, you are overwrought,” he murmured as she clung to him and her body convulsed with tears. “Do not blame Robert. You think men are all-powerful creatures? They are equally at the mercy of women when the balance is not in their favour.” A frisson of despair speared through him at the thought of Cressida and the power she wielded over him. “Love is a wonderful thing when two people are of one mind
and
that love is sanctioned by those around them who wield the power. Robert was not yet of age. He could do nothing in the face of his mother’s opposition.”

Mariah drew back, sniffing and attempting to smile, then she resumed her seat on the sofa while Robert returned to his desk. “You are a sensible man, Justin. Of course, I know what you say is true.”

He drummed his fingers upon the document. “But I have to tell you that another possibility has presented itself.” His smile failed to banish the rawness of her feelings. He knew desperate hope hovered beneath the surface of her restraint.

Wearily, she said, “Who is she, Justin?”

He shook his head. “It would be unfair to divulge names until her identity is confirmed.”

Mariah rose and trailed to the window.

“If you have narrowed down the list to two, and indeed you know Miss Hardwicke’s family, tell me if your investigations have concluded this at least…” She closed her eyes and the whitening of her knuckles, which matched the pallor of her face, tugged at Justin’s heartstrings. “Will she want to know me?”

Justin pondered the question. Although he was navigating these dangerous emotional waters as best he could, he felt close to being overwhelmed.

He shuffled the papers, wishing he’d been able to confide in Cressida from the start and cursing his promise to Mariah that he not breathe a word of her affairs to his wife. Cressida’s wise counsel would have helped ensure he was dealing with the matter as sensitively as possible.

God, he certainly needed a lesson in that!

His overtures to Cressida last night only proved how utterly lacking in sensitivity he was. He’d completely misread the situation between them.

Impatiently, he pushed aside the document, desperate suddenly to leave Mariah’s sitting room. He needed to return home so he could confront Cressida and learn why she ran hot and cold with him these days.

Why had she followed him to Mrs Plumb’s and enticed him so overtly only to reject him later?

“It is never possible to predict a person’s desire to know another,” he said, hoping to do justice to Mariah’s question while his thoughts remained with his wife. “This other young woman whose identity I discovered yesterday was removed from the orphanage the same day and it is possible the two names were confused. I can tell you this, however—she lives in desperate poverty and your patronage would be gratefully received, I’m sure.” He hesitated, then pressed on, his voice tinged with doubt. “However, the initial subject of my inquiries—”

“You mean Madeleine Hardwicke? Please suspend the lawyer speak, Justin.”

Mariah’s voice was bleak as she crossed the room to stand before Justin, forcing him to look her in the eye. “If it
is
Madeleine Hardwicke
she
won’t want to know me…” she drew out the pause, adding quietly, “will she?”

Taking Justin’s lack of response as confirmation for her worst fears, Mariah whispered, “Then my daughter is as lost to me as she ever was.”

She turned away, saying brokenly, “I know I am being selfish and unreasonable. Would I wish her to have spent
her
life in poverty? Of course not. But what can I offer…someone like that…in my current position when I was so hoping my suspicion to be entirely off the mark and that you would discover a young woman to whom I could be of some small use?”

Insensible to his soothing answer, her agitation increased as she paced. “I just cannot believe it of Robert’s family. They wanted nothing to do with me. Robert, himself, abandoned me! Now this! Surely the risk would be too great if the truth were discovered?”

Justin tapped the desk with his fingers, mulling over everything he had learned during the past weeks. He’d spent hours studying the Sedleywich orphans register and following the complex chain of events that had obscured the origins of the child later presented to the world as the legitimate daughter of one of London’s leading families. The daughter Mariah believed was her own.

“It’s all in my report, Mariah,” he said, indicating the document on the desk. “Soon I shall receive information which will confirm, I suspect, that this second girl has no relevance to my investigation. As I’ve told you, Miss Hardwicke’s family has gone to great lengths, and expense, to guard against any possibility of discovery, making my task so difficult. The only thing they could not factor into the equation was family resemblance and a mother’s need to know.”

Mariah appeared not to have heard him. Only the rise and fall of her bosom revealed her feelings as she stared through the window into the street. “After all these years to finally discover my child…” Her voice trailed away before she added bitterly, “A child I can never claim!”

Her pain sliced at him but he had nothing to offer except platitudes. She spoke the truth.

Turning back to him, Mariah gave a wry laugh. “Only yesterday I told a young woman I was childless. Indeed, it is the truth, for I have never known my daughter and, now, it appears, I never will.” Dropping her eyes, she added, “In a twist of irony, this poor young woman’s anguish was caused by her ever-growing brood. Five, she said she’d had, in eight years, and suffering torments because she believed a sixth would kill her.”

Justin watched her push her dark hair back from her high forehead and wondered when it had become so tinged with grey. Just as he’d been struck by her handsome Castilian features when he’d first met her nine years before, he’d been struck by the continued rich gloss of her hair when she’d approached him the previous month. Now it seemed dull and lifeless.

She was talking again and he realised she was still referring to the young woman she’d met the previous day.