Linda Needham (24 page)

And then he was at the core of her, teasing her with his steamy breath, taking her curls between his lips, toying, kissing. Unable to abide another moment, Hollie arched her hips to meet his intimacies, as stunned that such a kiss was possible as she was certain that she would die if he didn’t do it quickly.

“Oh!” She wanted him—all of him. Wanted him to hurry with his clever convincing. Though she could never give in.

But he was maddeningly slow in his torment, dazing her with a blinding stroke of his fingers, and then a nibble on her breast, an ardent calling that made her feel ripe and sun-warmed, that drew her pulse in a thousand and one directions and created new cravings for this man who was drawing these ecstasies from her.

“Charles, may I…?” He rose up from his amazing love-making, kissed her temple.

“What?” His eyes were glazed with a smile.

But then she decided not to ask permission. Fair was fair, after all. She braced her arms against the bed and sat up, driving him backward onto his haunches.

And there was the root of her curiosity, blissfully rising up between his thighs, surpassingly rigid, erect because she’d made it so.

Oh, the power of a kiss.

Charles watched in disbelief as Hollie rose up on her knees and kissed his mouth and nearly shot out of his skin when she closed both hands around his penis, the full throbbing length of it, holding firmly. So perfectly, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move for the terror of spilling himself into her hands.

“Oh, I like this, Charles.” She sighed into his ear and fondled him, the sensation deep and binding and drawing great, gasping breaths from him.

“Stop! Please, Hollie!” He grabbed her hands and stopped her movement.

“Not fair, Charles.” Her eyes glittered as she dropped her hand into the space between them, gathered up his scrotum with her gentle fingers and sighed. “I like this part of you too.”

Christ, he couldn’t breathe for the sweet ecstacy of her kneading, the delicate grazing, could only drop his forehead onto her shoulder and groan. His tether was as taut as a thread, near to breaking. He couldn’t last a moment longer with her hands roaming free.

But two could play at this game.

And he was larger, stronger. With a lifetime of passion and miracles in the balance, he lifted her onto his lap, where he could better tease and toy with her.

“Oh, my! Charles!” Her eyes widened, and her hands grabbed at his hips with a fury and brought the length of his erection against her dampness.

“Much better, my love.” Then he carried her back to the pillows, while she whispered that she really couldn’t and certainly shouldn’t and wouldn’t ever, ever marry him, interweaving every other denial with her sweet words of love for him.

He needed her like he needed air and the sunlight, needed to be inside her. With her. His bones ached and his muscles had long ago cramped into thick, useless ropes.

“Just come to me, Charles.”

The very miracle he wanted to hear.

“I love you, Hollie.”

“I didn’t mean you to, Charles!” But she sighed and tugged at his hips and watched his eyes as he slipped his hand between them where she was wet and ripe for him, her thighs lush and welcoming.

“Too late, Hollie.” He nibbled at the peak of her breast, tried not to think about her belly wriggling and rolling against his erection. “I’m mad for you.”

“No, Charles. Please don’t be!”

Impossible woman.

“Dear love…” Charles suspended himself above her, his mind a fog of peach and lavender and sweat and his beloved gazing up at him with her clear green eyes. She tilted her hips in a heady, pulsing greeting, made little sounds of awe, grew bolder with her squirming and ringed him with her fingers, then slid them upward around his shaft.

He laced his fingers through hers where she held him, then shifted his hips and nearly lost his way in blinding pleasure when their flesh met.

“Oh, Charles, you are very large and warm.”

“And this will pain you, I fear.”

“I’ve heard as much, Charles.” She slipped her arms around his neck and snuggled while he pinned her hips to the mattress to keep her from moving another inch; his restraint was far too tattered. “I’ve also heard that I ought to lie still and think of pruning roses. But I’m not thinking
that at all. Only that I want you and I don’t care. You won’t hurt me.” She was open to him, taking him slowly inside her until the barrier wouldn’t give.

He caught her smile and held it in his heart. “I think you’re going to have to budge just a little, my love. For now. For us.”

“Oh, yes, Charles!”

Like a man possessed, and with Hollie urging him home with her ankles clasped around his hips, he drove upward through her maidenhead in a single, exquisite thrust, joining himself to her with a ferocity that must have hurt but drew only a singing sigh from her.

She was tight and flexing and fever-hot, and he wanted to thrust and drive and lose himself in the heat of her. But tears were sliding from the corners of her eyes. He lifted his hips to withdraw, but she gasped.

“No! Charles! Don’t leave.” She tightened her legs around him and tilted her hips, taking him more deeply.

“Hollie!” He propelled himself forward again, filled her selfishly, so stunned by the sense of utter possession, he couldn’t move. He was on the knife-edge of his restraint, held there by nothing more substantial than the need to see to her pleasure before his own.

“I have to warn you, Charles.” Her eyes widened as she took up a stirring measure with her hips, a rolling, rising rhythm that was fast be
coming the surging of his pulse and the thrumming of his heartbeat. “I think I’m about to squirm.”

“Too late, sweet.” He loved her impatient grin, loved that she was moaning shamelessly and that her lips were rosy and damp from his kiss.

“Please, Charles!” she breathed against his ear, tearing at his control.

“Marry me, Hollie?”

Oh, Charles, if only I could
. Hollie loved her wickedly handsome earl, the savage power of him, the tethered straining of muscle in his thickly corded arms, and the deep concentration he focused on her eyes. She loved the rich roughness of his breathing, the flare of his nostrils as he drew himself out of her and then filled her again.

She loved the slow convergence of his hips against hers, as though each tightly coiled stroke might undo him if he broke this delicately controlled rhythm that was driving her to madness, that had her threading her fingers through his hair.

And him—she loved him. Adored him. Ached for all that might have been between them.

“I do love you, Charles.” She knew he was doing this for her sake, holding back something of himself as a gift to her, not knowing that this would have to be enough to last a lifetime. This shattering intimacy between them, his nose beside hers, his nuzzling, his sweat mingled with hers, his hair damp against his forehead.

Hollie broke his cadence, dipping her hips into the mattress and then raising them to take him deeper this time. He groaned, sending a hot surge of pleasure licking upward from where they were joined, as though his tongue were there lighting fires.

“Christ, Hollie, I don’t know that I can last.” His breath was thundering out of him as she arched her back and met him, as she moaned and paced his rhythm and then increased it. She cried out his name when he closed his mouth over her nipple, aching with the sundering pleasure of it.

“Oh, Charles, I—” He spread his fingers down her belly, then slipped his broad hand between them where she was waiting and wet and already filled with the thickness of him.

“You what, my love?” he whispered. His dark eyes glittered as his simple, skiffing touch filled her with an undefinable bliss, a longing for him that only deepened, that broadened and left her breathless and wanting more of him.

All of him.

He was all around her now, in her nostrils and on her lips, feathering his words of love against her ear, making dear promises, and watching her, smiling down on her.

“I love you, Hollie. Marry me.”

And then the heavens exploded. The stars and the constellations scattering into bits. Pulsating pleasure upon pleasure. A bedazzling radiance and wave after wave of brightness. Blinding
peaks and pulsing valleys that rose and fell and rose again.

And in the midst of this dizzying explosion of unimaginable bliss, Charles called her name, caught up her bottom into his splayed fingers, and then plunged into her far, far deeper than he had been before, hotter still, and again and again and again. Then, with a convulsive groan, he filled her with a rapturous, spilling heat—his seed.

A child? What a blessed joy that would bring to him, to her.

But it wasn’t to be. This wasn’t the right time in her cycle, and she wasn’t the right kind of wife.

She caught her magnificent earl as he fell back to earth, held him as he nuzzled and kissed her, leaning on his elbows like a tent over her.

“Marry me, Hollie.”

She kissed his mouth, savoring the raspy closeness of his cheek against her.

They were still connected, steamy and pulsing, making her want him again.

“Can we do this again, Charles?”

“Why? Do you need more convincing?” His dark eyes shimmered under his soft, sooty lashes.

He was already sliding his huge hand between them to find her nipple and dragged a gasp out of her when he rolled it between his fingers.

Another weapon in his arsenal, a stunning pleasure that seemed tied directly to her sex.

“I still can’t marry you, Charles.”

“You’re squirming again, my love. Fully budged.”

“I can’t seem to help it, Charles.” So Hollie rocked her hips and took him deeply again.

And prayed for the miracle that would keep the dawn away.

H
ollie woke to the emptiness of the bed and a desolate darkness in her heart. Panicked that Charles had left her, she reached out for his pillow but found him standing at the foot of the bed, fully dressed but for his jacket, a look of suspicious confusion on his face that made her stomach roll.

“What’s this doing here, Hollie?”

The broadside. The breaking point between them. She couldn’t keep this truth from him, not for long. The meeting was to take place soon, and she would announce the government’s secret new strategies, even though Charles would be standing at the rear of the assembly room. He’d realize then that she was a thieving radical, not a wife.

Besides, she could no longer pretend ignorance of his own secret, even though her heart would break along with his.

“What is it, Charles?”

“This.”

She heard him shake the page at her, and knew he was frowning. Next would come the demand that she read to him, like a lion rattling a tree for his food.

“Oh, that,” she said, yawning dramatically and sitting up, because he would soon be in a towering rage and she would need to calm him. “It’s a broadside.”

“Yours?”

So brusque, so well rehearsed. She should have seen through it long ago.

“Yes. The one you saw in the conservatory.”

He dropped the page onto the bed as though it burned his fingers. It fluttered sideways and landed on his pillow.

“You printed this on the Stanhope?”

“I did.”

“Against my orders.”

“You weren’t watching.” She hated his look of helpless fury, the squaring muscle in his jaw, hated it because it hurt him deeply. So deeply that he didn’t even ask why she’d acted so blatantly against him.

“Read it, Hollie.”

Dear God, she didn’t want to hurt him this way. It took every ounce of courage and compas
sion and determination to slip her legs out from under the covers on her side of the bed and stand up.

And even more courage to refuse him. “I don’t think I will, Charles.”

Hollie heard him go still, like a forest of hornbeams coming to rest in the instant before the wind whips a storm across the landscape and uproots them.

“You wrote it, Hollie,” he said evenly, though his breathing hinted at raggedness and his hands were shaking slightly. Her arrogant, self-possessed earl. The man she loved with all of her heart. “You’ll read it.”

She braved his growing thunder as she left the bed for her shirt laying on the floor, his shirt tossed there in his passion to convince her that she should marry him. In his belief that there was a chance for them. What a damnable liar she was.

“But I don’t need to read it, Charles.” She lifted her shoulder as though she didn’t care, as though her heart wasn’t breaking to bits. “I already know what it says.”

“Yes, but damn it, Hollie, I d—”

“You
don’t
?” She finished his sentence flatly and made no other move. It was his turn now. God keep him.

She knows
.

Charles couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t find a single one of his defenses, because she’d dismantled them, scattered them. Because she was
standing adorned in his shirt and scented with their lovemaking.

Waiting for him, for his confession.

“Never mind,” he said.

“But I do mind, Charles. I mind terribly. And so do you.”

Her gaze never flinched, nor her challenge. He wanted to leave her to her damnable supposing, but he was rooted in place by his fear and by his relief that she must have known for a while and hadn’t told anyone.

At least, not yet.

“Leave it where it is, Hollie.”

“Don’t you want to know what that says, Charles? It might be important to you. To me. Maybe even to us.”

He snatched the page from the bed, balled it up in his fist, and tossed it to the ground. “I told you not to put yourself in the way of things.”

“But I’m already here, Charles. You led me right to it.”

“I said leave it be.”

“Charles, I had no idea at all that you cannot read until the day before yesterday.” She hugged the shirt tighter around her slim shoulders, her limbs quaking in the cold.

“You’ve known that long, madam, and you haven’t run off to London to spread the word? To have my shame printed on one your damnable broadsides and flogged on every street corner?”

“Don’t be absurd, Charles. I’d print this broad
side against you and your Privy Council, but I’d never print anything that would shame you. It’s none of my business at all, except that I love you and that it hurts you deeply.”

It took every bit of courage to ask, “How did you know?”

“By chance, Charles. You’re an artist at this masquerade. I only suspected because…”

“How?”

She dropped her gaze. “One little clue after another until I finally realized.”

“That the great earl is a clod who can’t read,” he said bitterly.

She shook her head, and tears welled up in her eyes. “That’s not what I thought at all. I would never.”

“Have to be pretty stupid to have attended Oxford, to have reached the grand old age of thirty-two, and not know how to read.”

“That takes unimaginable skill, Charles.”

He hated her concern, her pity. “It takes everything, Hollie. And shreds it.”

“Is that what your father did?”

Christ, had he confessed his entire life to her? “He was a miserable man and an even more miserable father. But you suspected. Not even a month in my care and I’ve given myself away to you. How? What made you so certain?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He grabbed the back of the chair and jammed it out of his way. “By Christ, it
does
matter.”

She caught her breath and stepped back, as though he’d struck her, new tears in her eyes. “You’re right, Charles. I owe you that much.”

A shadow crossed his vision, a muting guilt and that dark shame that ambushed him when he wasn’t on his guard.

Hollie had turned from him to sift through her satchel. “I had to be sure, Charles, and so I…”

“You did what?”

“I tested you.”

“You…” He swallowed back the bellow of shame. “Tested me how, dammit? Did you stick a pin in me to see if I would cry out?”

“Oh, Charles!” She flinched as she unfolded a note that had been tucked in her shirt pocket, against her heart, then offered it to him. “I wrote this and put it in the conservatory where I knew you’d find it.”

Her simple gesture hurt him deeply, widened the ache in his chest, the rawness of his shame. But he took the note anyway, because it was scented like a summer orchard and still warm.

And it was hers. He looked down at the scrawling lines, the swells and swirls. He remembered seeing it in the conservatory.

Believing her without question.

“Do you mean to humiliate me completely? I obviously fail your test once again. You know very well that I can’t read this.”

“I would never do anything to humiliate you, Charles. You mean too much to me.”

“And so you pity me instead? Me and my convenient shortcoming.”

“No, Charles, never.” She reached for his hand as if he were a wild animal, and held it at a distance. “You may not believe this, but you’re the most remarkable man I’ve ever met.”

“And is that what this says, madam? Or is it, ‘I’m running off to meet the husband I never married, you great clod.’”

She dropped his hand. “It says nothing of the sort.”

“Then what else could it say? ‘I’m deserting you and your son.’ ‘I’ve betrayed your trust.’”

“You
are
a clod, Charles Stirling, if you really believe that I could choose to blithely hurt you. Or Chip. You don’t know me at all if you think that. My note has nothing to do with reading or writing or books or broadsides. It has all to do with you.”

Charles hated this moment most of all—the swimming ink, the scent of the woman he adored and still couldn’t have, her words that he couldn’t read. “Then what, madam?”

She had her fists stuck against her hips, fury on her brow. “It says, ‘I love you, Charles Stirling.’”

He couldn’t breathe. He looked down at the page, at the lines and squiggles that had suddenly become the most important thing in the world.

“This does? You wrote that here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted it to say the most meaningful thing I could imagine, in case I was wrong. ’I love you, Charles Stirling’ seemed quite a perfect sentiment at the time. It still is.”

She whirled away from him and stood in the middle of the room, her chest heaving as she jammed her slim legs into a pair of large linsey-woolsey trousers that hung loosely at her hips, until she cinched up the fat belt.

“And this, Charles, is the reason that I can’t marry you. Not now or ever.” She picked up the balled-up broadside and tossed it at him. “I’m a liar and a thief.”

He caught it in his fist and tightened his fingers around it, because her words were sinking slowly into his brain, melting his outrage and the fear in his gut.

“I stole it from you, right off your desk. Outsmarted the earl of Everingham, and through you, the entire Privy Council.”

A new, unnamed fear slipped over his shoulders; not for him, but for her. “What have you done, Hollie?”

“For a start, I’ve read every letter you’ve received from the Home Office.” She sat down on a chair and pulled on a tall boot that went to her knee.

“Not very sporting, madam, but I knew that.”

She lifted her brow. “How could you have? I was careful.”

“One of the skills I learned long ago. Never lose track of exactly where you put a piece of paper. Bavidge knows better.”

“So Bavidge knows—”

He shook his head, his heart beating again, thrumming for her. “Only you, Hollie. And now you wield a great deal of power over me. All the power you’ve ever wanted.”

She pointed to the broadside in his hand. “That, my lord, is all I need. Six acts of law that Parliament plans to enact against me and the people I love. Six vindictive measures to silence the opposition forever.”

So that was her deadly game. “That’s privileged information, madam.” And high treason to steal it.

“It’s the truth. And all I’ve ever asked for, Charles, is the truth about my father’s death. I just want someone to care that children died and wives and mothers and sons. I want someone at Whitehall to tell me that the Peterloo Massacre matters. And that it won’t ever happen again.”

Tears had welled again in her beautiful eyes and spilled over. His blindsiding radical.

“That’s not possible, Hollie—”

“Damn you, Charles, how can you say that? The truth is here in Wolverhampton; it’s at Everingham in your files. It’s in the depositions.”

“I’ve studied those.”

“You couldn’t have, Charles. You can’t read the bloody words, can you?”

Cold fury came instantly. “I’ve gotten by for thirty-two years.”

“And look where getting by has taken you: to a botched investigation into the death of nearly a dozen citizens. And reports that have so many holes in them, you don’t know what’s true and what’s assumption.”

“I get by as I always have.”

“How?” She stood before him in trousers that didn’t fit and a single, too-large boot, her arms spread, the shirt hanging up on her elbows.

“Bavidge reads to me.” He didn’t want to meet her eyes, but he couldn’t stop himself.

“Everything, Charles? Every word?”

He glared hard at her. “He tells me what’s important.”

“What’s important to him. And how do you know what’s in all those other reports?”

“I have a staff at Westminster. They cover that.”

“But that’s their truth, Charles, not yours. It’s Liverpool’s truth. And Sidmouth’s. I know you well enough to stake my life that you wouldn’t knowingly allow a falsehood or a misstatement. You’re a good man, Charles, the very best. I expect better of you.”

She waited a beat for his denial, then screwed up her face into a teary scowl and turned her back on him to pull on the other boot.

You’re a good man, Charles, the very best.
His heart was slamming around inside his chest again.

He lifted a knobby woollen scarf from the table, then a tattered tricorn hat with a tangled curtain of black, shoulder-length, theatrical curls attached to the inside of the crown band. And draped across a chair, a long black cloak and a huge coat.

Christ Almighty.
His blood suddenly ran cold.

Spindleshanks. The rage felt good and just, a righteous blaze of anger that would separate him from her and her falsehoods. And break his heart in two.

“Are you expecting him soon, Hollie?”

She turned to him in her boots and trousers and oversized white shirt.

“Him?” she asked, grabbing the cascade of her hair and beginning to plait it.

“Your captain.”

She hung her head for a moment. “No, Charles, I’m not expecting anyone. I do this alone. It’s the best way I know.” She grabbed the scarf and the hat from him and bundled them into the cloak along with the coat, then stood at the door as though she was leaving him.

“I’m sorry, Charles—for so many things. But
I’ll never be sorry that I love you. Give my love to Chip. Tell him that I’ll miss him.”

And then she was gone. Vanished with his secrets and his shame. And that blasted costume.

Hell-bent on treason.

He was out the door and after her a moment later. He made the lobby, but she was nowhere. She couldn’t possibly have gone through there without causing a stir in that shoddy pair of trousers, her shirttails flying.

She took the back stairs, of course, and the back roads to her damned meeting. To give her bloody captain his costume.

Charles dashed behind the inn, to the small alleyway there. His gut twisted with helpless anger and molten jealousy for this nothing of a man whom she would follow to the ends of the earth.

Charles breathed a grunt of relief when he saw her bootheel disappear as the narrow alley turned, and he caught her by the shoulders a few moments later.

She whirled on him. “Stop it, Charles. It’s over. Let me go.”

“Don’t be a bloody fool, madam; there are magistrates posted at the meeting.”