Linda Needham (18 page)

“Hairy?” Charles bit the edge of his tongue before continuing. “The vote belongs in the hands of citizens of property and income and learning.”

“Which immediately excludes women, doesn’t it? No matter their education or their class, because women obviously haven’t the sense to own property.” Her lovely cheeks grew crimson in her outrage; that fine, slightly inky finger was leveled at him again. “Yet women have the sense to clean this same property and to
manage it and secure it from theft; they pay the bills, make repairs, they raise their sons on it, while their husbands go off to work for the day and then stop by the public house on their way home, completely unaware of what it takes to manage a household.”

Hollie nearly lost her balance when Charles said softly, “Touché, madam.”

Unswayed, she shook her finger at him again, because he had to be teasing her. He was a man, after all, though not an ordinary man in the least. “Don’t mock me, sir.”

“I wouldn’t dare, Hollie.” He stood and straightened, nearly too tall for the ceiling and hopefully unaware of the hornet’s nest he stirred in her chest when he said her name. “You’re probably right.”

“I am absolutely right, Charles. The country would be a far superior place if women were allowed to vote their convictions.”

“Women, Hollie?”

The lout! “As though you men were made wiser by virtue of your codlings.”

“My codlings, madam?” His sultry eyebrow arched, thoroughly, charmingly scandalized.

She hadn’t meant to shock the man, but the word was out and there was nothing dangerous in it—despite his catching her up in the unhurried curve of his smile, despite the intimate tugging at the center of her, the coiling thread that tightened between them with every breath.

“I am terribly sorry, Charles. I was raised in a print shop—a man’s world. I’m afraid I know them all.”

“All?” Less scandal, more amusement.

“Indelicate euphemisms.” Gad, this was a dangerous direction to take. “But you know what I meant.”

“My testicles, I assume.”

Oh, dear. Oh, God. She shouldn’t have glanced down at the front of his well-fitting breeches, at the strong, straight shadows of him, the erotic maleness of him. She flushed to the roots of her hair.

“No, that’s not what I—”

“I’m afraid my codlings don’t make me wise, Hollie.” He became awfully tall again, encompassing, drawing the air out of the diminishing distance between them. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“They make you unwise?”

“Extremely.”

Oh, my. There was far too much of him to fight off, and far, far too little left of her sensible self to want to try. Because it seemed like he was about to kiss her. “We’ve gotten well off track, Charles.”

“The subject was yours, Hollie. I was merely following.”

“The female vote.”

“Ah, yes.” His smile slanted off center, a slight easing of the delicious tension. “Just don’t look for your right of suffrage to happen soon.”

“Of course not.” Dizzy from the nearness of him, Hollie ducked away and collected the chalk into its box and set it on the mantel. “But how can that ever happen when my fellow sisters can’t even bring themselves to demand authority over their own lives? Or maybe they’ve just been seduced by their men. I’ve pledged myself never to be.”

His gaze smoldered and strayed to her mouth, making her wonder when he’d come so near, realizing that she’d gone to him.

“Never to be what, Hollie? Seduced by a man?”

“That’s right.”

He dipped his head as though he didn’t quite understand and asked the oddest question. “But doesn’t he object, Hollie?”

The fluttering in her chest spread deeper, making her breathless and yearning for something more than a kiss could bring. “Doesn’t who object, Charles?”

“Your husband,” he whispered, his breath as palpable as a kiss.

“My…? Oh.” She suddenly wasn’t following the strain of the conversation very well. It had turned somewhere, this new path wildly different and intoxicating, because Charles was standing very close, looking very intently at her mouth.

“Doesn’t he object to what, Charles?”

“I’d think your husband would insist upon se
ducing you regularly.” The blaze in the hearth limned his features in shimmering orange; the shadows sharpened and deepened them, scattering her thoughts and making her dizzy with wonder. “I know I would.”

A flush rose out of her bodice to make little spots of heat at her cheeks. And it all had to do with the half-lidded look in Charles’s eyes, the low murmur of his voice. His broad shoulders, the lean trim of his waist.

His codlings. And the hard shape of him. The breadth of her imagination.

“You’d what, Charles?” She couldn’t recall the subject.

“Seduce you regularly, Hollie.”

Regularly. Oh, my!

N
o, he’d said something about her husband. And seduction.

“Well, Charles, he…uhm…no, he doesn’t.” All this soft and close conversing had drained her will and tipped her off balance. The only remedy was to brace the flat of her palm against Charles’s chest.

Oh, he was warm beneath her hand and thrummingly alive, the sense of him speeding up through her fingers.

“You mean that Adam MacGillnock doesn’t seduce you regularly?”

“I mean that he—”

“Not much of a marriage, Hollie, if he’s that neglectful.”

“What? Oh.” She could hardly find a breath to
answer. “You misunderstand completely, Charles. What I mean is that I won’t allow my husband to…to seduce me from my thoughts and my opinions.”

Oh, this was a fine and dangerous how-to, watching his mouth as he spoke, wondering how it would feel to be kissed by him.

“Ah, your thoughts.” He trailed the pad of his thumb lightly across her mouth, a traveling kind of kiss. “And what about the rest of you, Hollie?”

Oh, the rare way the man’s lips caressed his words—though she really ought to be listening better to him, answering him. Yet her chest ached with the need for air.

“The rest of me, sir?”

His eyes were tracking hers, as soft as his lashes, as intensely as the thudding of his heart beneath her hand; he followed the course of her jaw, drew his fingers to her chin, and tilted it up to him.

“Your mouth, Hollie?” His gaze was steady and warm, his breathing as unsteady as her own, breaking across her mouth like a kiss. “Does he take time with you here? To seduce your mouth as it deserves?”

“My mouth?” This wasn’t real, of course, none of it. She wasn’t standing in a cozy gatehouse with Charles Stirling, 7th Earl of Everingham, towering over her in his untamable splendor. And he wasn’t exploring her lips with his fin
gers, shooting stars out the ends of her hair, warming her from the tips of her fingers where she was clinging to his vest, to her toes and to that growing fever so low in her belly.

“And your eyes, Hollie. Does he see you as I do, I wonder? Does he know the color there? This remarkable green.”

“Of course he…” Oh, this millstone of a husband she’d created. She’d lost track of the conversation entirely. He was leaning against the arm of the sofa, and she was standing in the crook of his long legs.

“I shouldn’t be thinking this way about you, Hollie.” He caught her face between his exquisite hands; threaded his fingers through her hair with blissful care.

“Which way is that?”

“Thinking that I want to kiss you.”

He’d looked at her this way many times before, following his gaze with his feather-light touch, his smile crooked and his breathing ragged and wild. But it had always been followed by one of his furious frowns.

He wasn’t frowning now. He was…

Oh, my, he was nuzzling her temple, lighting fires along her hairline, whispering at the ridges of her ear, breathing softly there.

“You’re thinking that about me?”

“Constantly,” he said keenly against her ear. “And I haven’t the right. Bloody hell, woman, you’ve turned my life upside down.”

“I’m sorry.”

He touched her lips with his trembling fingers. “Don’t ever say that, Hollie. You shame me with your apologies.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, Christ.” He left her, growling as he scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “You have me at a disadvantage, madam.”

“I do?” Her printing press forfeited, living in his gatehouse, completely at his mercy while he plotted with the government to have her hanged at the next quarter sessions? “In what possible way have I disadvantaged you?”

He paced to the entry and braced his hands against the doorframe, looking thoroughly disgusted with himself. “Do you know that I’m holding you here in the gatehouse in the hope of luring your husband onto my estate so that I can capture him?”

And do you know, my dear, unwary earl, that I plan to steal your correspondence with Lord Sidmouth and share it with my fellow radicals?

“I’m not a fool, Charles.”
And I’m not married.
“And you’re the magistrate.”
And we’re even.
“I assumed that was your plan from the first.”

But her deeper confessions were too dangerous for any sanctuary but her heart, so she let him struggle with his moral dilemma, admiring him all the more for it.

“So why hasn’t he come to claim you, Hollie?”

Oh, what a roundabout, exhausting discussion. “Because he doesn’t want to be caught.”

“Have you sent him messages?”

It was so awkward and hateful, speaking in riddles and evasions. “You know that I haven’t.”

“But he bloody well knows that you’re here, doesn’t he?—the way the rumors fly in his circle.”

“I’m sure he knows where I am.”

“You know how his rabble-rousing annoys me. The fact that he calls me and my commission corrupt irritates the blazing hell out of me. But nothing matches my disgust for his leaving you to defend his actions on your own.”

It had been so easy to dislike him for his aristocratic arrogance, for a hundred other offenses she’d once charged him with. These startling moments of gentleness drained her, made her heart ache with the loneliness that would come when she turned her back on him.

“It’s all right, Charles. I don’t mind and I really don’t expect him to—”

“To what, Hollie?” He blocked her from tidying the remains of her tea tray, slipped his fingers between hers, and tucked their clasped hands into the draping folds of her apron and the warm wool of his trousers. “To come rescue you from the wicked earl? You should expect nothing less from the man who loves you.”

Dear God, he was actually worried about her,
this prowling lion of hers. She wanted to soothe him, or to tell him that she was safe here with him. That she couldn’t possibly be safer. That his hands were amazing.

“Hellfire, Hollie! If you were my wife, I’d have torn through solid rock to get to you.”

“You would?” It felt so good to believe, in this little moment, that he cared so much, that he truly would tear though solid rock to save her from harm.

“With my bare hands I would.”

His bare hands! He was trembling in his anger, his fingers quaking as he smoothed his free hand along her neck and down to the base of her throat, his flesh on hers, his pulse matching the beat of her heart—a caress so profoundly gentle that tears filled her eyes. “Does he know how magnificent you are?”

“Am I?”

He caught the tear that spilled down her cheek. “Has he ever told you that, Hollie?”

“No one has.”

“Has your dear Adam ever risked his life for you?”

She shook her head, hating this obnoxious strawman she’d created so blithely. She wanted him and all her falsehoods gone from her life. Wanted to stand up for herself and let Charles believe the worst of her instead of believing the best.

Because it wasn’t right. They should be honest enemies.

“Does he tell you that he loves you? Does he show it at all?”

“He’s not—We’re not—Oh, Charles!” Tired to her soul, Hollie slipped away from him, went to the mantel, and doused the lamp.

But he came up behind her, lifted her hair off her shoulder, and whispered, “Do you really want to have children with a man like that, Hollie?”

“I do want children.”

“With
him
, Hollie? What kind of father would he be if he doesn’t even have the courage to protect his wife? He’s a threat to you. He’ll drag you down with him. There are courts for this sort of thing—extenuating circumstances can dissolve a marriage.”

“I can’t, Charles. It’s a dangerous relationship.”
Heartbreaking, in fact
. “He wouldn’t like to be thwarted.”

“What the hell do you mean?” He turned her, studied her clinically, carefully felt the bones in her arms, her ribs. “Does that bastard strike you? Is that the sort of coward you’re married to?”

“No. He’d never hit me.” She had to get away from all his questions, to turn him from the subject. “He’s rarely home to talk to me, let alone to strike me. Gone for weeks at a time.”

“Weeks?”

“Oh, weeks and weeks. But that’s the life of a radical, my lord.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“Gone for weeks in only two months of marriage? What sort of wedded bliss can that be?”

“Well, more like a soldier’s marriage, I suppose. Though my dear Adam stays away only weeks at a time instead of years.”

“I’ll wager that your dear husband Adam has a wife in every camp.”

She should have resented the idea, but it was so utterly silly, and she was so weary, she wanted to cry. “Oh, I doubt that very much.”

“He’s a very selfish man, isn’t he, Hollie? Out for his own pleasures and glory. I know the type.”

He’s me, you lout.
“Just because you would cheat on your wife if you had one, Charles—”

He went utterly still, grew taller, more intense. “Why do you assume that?”

“Because you and your lordly class marry for power and wealth, not for love. You find your love matches outside of marriage.” She’d never seen him quite so calmly outraged. “Don’t you?”

“Mark me, Hollie,” he said, in a deep and dark voice, “when I marry, it will be to a woman that I love well enough to blind me to any other.”

She wanted to believe this of her earl, that his
heart was loyal and true. “You cultivated quite a reputation in your youth.”

“I’m no longer that man, Hollie. The marriage bed is far more attractive to me now than any brief dalliance could ever be. And I’d make it so for my wife.”

“You would?”

“Her pleasure before mine. An adoring husband’s duty, one that I would take very, very seriously.”

Sweet aching heaven. That’s just what she needed to hear from him. She didn’t want to be dreaming of him when she was gone and he’d found a lucky wife to cherish and adore. “So you’re discounting my marriage to Adam because he travels?”

“Hollie, I mean that two months ago you married a man you’d only known a week.”

“Yes, I fell desparately in love with him.” What a flat-sounding litany that had become. Yet the great man flinched when she said it.

He gathered back his determination. “MacGillnock’s gone most of the time, isn’t he?”

“Alas, he is.” She wanted her bed, wanted his arms around her there and his bristly cheek next to hers, the scent of him in her bedclothes, his breathing matched to hers.

“You last saw him a week ago, and then for barely twelve hours.”

“That’s right.” She hadn’t the slightest idea
where Charles was going with his heartrending inquest or how long it would last. She pinched out the candles on the side table and the room went nearly dark.

“He’s been seen all over the North and the Midlands in the last two months, spends days and days on the road.”

“So?”

“So, by my calculations, Hollie, you couldn’t possibly have been with your dear Adam for more than two weeks in the entire time you’ve known him.”

She opened her mouth and then closed it. “A sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

She picked up the remaining candlestick and started up the stairs to her room, not caring if he followed or not, hoping that he would.

“So how could you possibly know him?”

Indeed. “It seems like a lifetime, Charles.”

“It seems like a farce of a marriage to me. And what if he’s left you with child, this nearly invisible man who makes you support him with your printing?”

“He hasn’t left me with a child.” She heard his Hessians on the step behind her, heard the slightest hesitation in his stride.

“But he will, Hollie. One day he will.”

“He won’t, my lord. I can assure you of that.”

“Damnation, woman!” Charles could no longer abide her dismissive lack of interest in the magnitude of the mistake she had made in her
choice of husband. She looked like a sprite leading the way up into the forest canopy, among the crucked rafters and the bracing that laced the low ceiling just above her head.

“Where are you going, woman?”

Her shoulders sagged, and the candlestick. “I’m tired to the bone, Charles.”

“Well, I’m not finished.”

“I’m going to bed.” She disappeared in a whisper of skirts and a flare of slippers.

“Dammit, Hollie!” He had a point to make—though he wasn’t altogether sure what that was. So he followed her the rest of the way up the stairs.

“I know that you understand how children are conceived, Hollie. You made that very clear to me days ago.”

Her bed was tucked under the low-slung eaves, piled with pillows and a thick counterpane, the window opened slightly to the night air. There was a washstand at the wall and a small room beyond that, a closet perhaps, which glowed inside with the candle she’d taken with her.

“Of course I know how children are conceived, Charles,” she called, the barest lilt in her voice. “What exactly are you getting at?”

You, Hollie
. Yet he could only stand by the window and burn for her, grateful for the cool evening breeze, enjoying the sounds of her undressing, stealing a look at the deliciously dancing shadows she cast across the wall.

She was willowy arms and a waist he could span with his hands. Breasts that swayed, or that he imagined swaying, buoyant in the cup of his hand and uplifted, bare and sweet to his mouth.

Good Christ, spare me.

He cleared his throat and took a gulp of cool air from the window while he tried to recall the train of his thoughts. Something about MacGillnock getting Hollie with child—God curse the man with empty codlings and an unwilling prick.

“And so, Hollie, on those rare occasions when your dear Adam is at home…”

She came out of the dressing room in her nightgown, as familiar as though she belonged in his bed and he saw its flannel every night, just before he lifted it over her head and covered every part of her with kisses…

“You were saying, Charles?”

He was roused to bursting, hoping to hell she couldn’t see the front of his trousers. He cleared his throat again.

“I was saying, Hollie, that on those rare occasions when your dear Adam is at home, I assume that you and he have…that you have marital relations together….”