Lord Langley Is Back in Town (34 page)

The world began to spin around her, and she couldn’t see much beyond the look of pure desire in Langley’s eyes. He groaned deeply as his movements became more hurried, more frantic. He was going faster and faster, and she met each thrust with her own clamoring passion.

And then the world gave way, and she reached her crisis, her body dancing amongst the heights, freed from every constraint, a celebration of desires finding their place in the very heavens.

She knew in that moment there was nothing else but this night, this man, this very dangerous passion.

For here was Langley, having found the same dizzying bliss—wildly thrusting into her, over and over again, as if he never wanted to stop chasing the passion between them, and with each movement filling her with his seed, claiming her as his own.

His only. For this night and forever.

“W
here are you, Langley?” Minerva whispered sometime later.

After they’d both found their completion, they’d fallen into each other’s arms, exhausted and languid.

“Lost,” he told her.

“Found, I would hope.”

“Aye, that too.”

“But it frightens you,” she guessed all-too-wisely. Minerva rose up on one elbow and looked over at him.

He paused, for this was venturing into an honesty that he’d never crossed into. Had avoided with a rake’s practiced expertise. “It should.”

“Should it?”

He laughed. “That is the odd part. It doesn’t. You leave me breathless. Taken unawares. And odd as it sounds, I feel as if I have come home.”

“Home? Here?” She laughed. “Your standards are sadly lacking, sir, if you find this ramshackle house comforting.” Minerva waved her hand at the painting hanging over the bed. “With its fine artwork and tumbledown drainpipes.”

He tipped his head back and glanced up. “Certainly such a painting wouldn’t have been found in Versailles, not with that folly. I daresay, is it lopsided?”

She nudged him with her elbow. “You are looking at it upside down.” Minerva glanced up at it as well. “And yes, it is crooked.”

He laughed and rolled atop her, then looked back up at it again. “Decidedly crooked. Perhaps we knocked it loose from its nail when we were—”

“Langley!”

“I know how we could straighten it out,” he teased, and began to kiss her anew, his hands seeking out the spots he was coming to love—her lush breasts, the curve of her hips. Immediately, his body came to life, and happily so did hers, rising up to meet his, and her lips eagerly seeking his own.

“If you think this will help,” she said in that arched way of hers. “I’ve never liked a lopsided folly.”

“Most decidedly this will straighten out everything,” he promised as he filled her again and they rocked together, her every touch a reminder of what he’d found . . . and what he was risking.

Chapter 14

Choose a
lover
husband carefully. Do not dally with any man who cannot love you senseless.

Advice to Felicity Langley from her Nanny Tasha

M
inerva awoke to the clamor of the bell over the front door and the strident cries of a lady ringing her own peel through the house.

Good heavens, whatever was the matter now?

She blinked her eyes and gazed at the hint of dawn peeking through the windows.

Then in a flash, the events of the last few days sparked through her thoughts.

The kiss in the carriage . . . The report of the pistol as it fired . . . The kitchen shrouded in the light of a single candle . . . Langley naked and over her . . . the hint of dawn peeking through the curtains . . .

Langley! The duel!

She bolted upright, even as Aunt Bedelia burst into her bedchamber. “Where is he?” she thundered.

Minerva looked with some shock at the empty spot beside her, and instinctively her hand went to the curve in the mattress.

The sheets were cold. He’d been gone for some time.

“He was here . . .”

“Dear God, gel! You had him in your bed and couldn’t manage to keep him there?”

Minerva shook her head, running her fingers through her thoroughly tousled hair. “I had no idea he’d left.”

“Harrumph!” Aunt Bedelia sputtered. “But I must admit, Chudley did the same thing to me.” She crossed the room to the corner closet and flung the door open. Almost immediately she began tossing clothing over her shoulder at Minerva—a chemise, stockings, a gown. “Don’t just sit there gaping, gel, get dressed! And don’t forget to take off those diamonds.” The old girl paused for a moment and then asked, “Whatever were you doing with them on in the first place?” Then she shook her head. “No, don’t tell me!”

Minerva did as ordered and scrambled out of bed, pulling on her clothes as quickly as she could. Then she removed the Sterling diamonds and settled them in their case, and as her fingers ran over the velvet lined box, she trembled. “Oh, Aunt Bedelia, I tried to divert him, it was just that . . .” The night had been everything and more than she could have imagined, but still he’d left.

And now . . . and now . . .
Her vision clouded with tears as all she could see was a green meadow with Langley lying atop the thick grass in a pool of his own blood.

Like the worst sort of simpleton, a regular watering pot, she burst into tears.

This gave Aunt Bedelia pause. The lady who never stopped for anything, the veritable whirlwind of activity, actually stilled and stared at her niece.

“I think I love him,” Minerva confessed between gulping sobs. “However did this happen?”

And then Aunt Bedelia did the unthinkable. The old girl wrapped Minerva in her arms and held her like a mother might.

“There there, child. I should have known that rogue would love you until you were insensible. He has that look about him.” She smiled at her niece and brushed her rumpled hair out of her face. “Just like my Chudley.”

“I am not worthy of Lord Langley. I am not even—”

Aunt Bedelia pushed her out to arm’s length. “Sssh,” she chided. “You are the woman you were meant to be, and that is all that matters to a man. How you got to be Lady Standon is of no consequence.”

Now it was Minerva’s turn to still. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean,” Aunt Bedelia whispered, “that you are as much or more of a marchioness as that featherbrained sister of yours ever would have been.”

Chills ran down Minerva’s spine, and they had nothing to do with the drafts running in from the cracks in the window frames. “You know?”

The lady huffed with impatience. “Of course I know who you are, Maggie. Known since the day that bosky fool of a brother of mine married you off in Minerva’s stead. Oh, you two gels always bore a startling resemblance to each other, so I can see why he thought it would work, but I knew. How could I not?” She nodded toward the bed where Minerva’s stockings still lay, while she returned to the closet, bending over to hunt around for a pair boots. “Tell Agnes to have more care with the state of this closet. Why, it’s a disgrace.”

Minerva sat down on the bed, albeit to put on her stockings, but quite honestly she didn’t think she could stand. Aunt Bedelia knew the truth? “You knew and you never said a word?”

Truly, given that this was Aunt Bedelia, it was rather hard to believe.

But she was underestimating Bedelia’s loyalties.

The lady glanced over her shoulder. “And what was to be said?” She went back to hunting around for shoes and plucked free one boot, then another. “Good heavens, the scandal would have ruined us all. And heaven knows, the Sterlings would not have taken the deception lightly. The weight of their wrath would have fallen not only on your shoulders—but your father’s and mine as well—if they’d ever learned the truth.”

“But you’ve said nothing! Not once in all these years.”

“Oh, I had my say when I realized what your father had done. Confronted him right after the ceremony—told him exactly what I thought of the entire debacle! Utterly unfair to you. Not that he saw it that way—thought you were landing in the clover. Married to an aging sot twice your years! Rotten clover that, not that he would listen to me.”

“No more than he’d listened to me,” Minerva said softly.

Bedelia laughed. “Yes, he mentioned you weren’t all that cooperative. And what he threatened you with if you didn’t follow through.”

“My mother,” she whispered.

Her aunt shook her head. “Threatening to put her out. He’d never have done it. But how were you to know that?”

“Not that it would have mattered,” Minerva said. “She was gone before I could ever—”

“There there,” the older lady said, setting the boots at Minerva’s feet and sitting down beside her. “You carry her nerve and wits with you, and thankfully not the Hartley nose!” She tapped her own hawkish beak and smiled. “But you definitely have her way of seeing things, of being able to make sense of the oddest connections.”

“You knew my mother?”

Aunt Bedelia laughed. “But of course I knew her. She and I grew up together. She was like a sister to me. Oh, how I loved your grandmother’s cottage, though I wasn’t supposed to go there or even know the trade she practiced or that some called her a witch.” The lady paused for a moment, smiling at the memories. “So I’ve kept your secret, not so much for your father’s sake, but for hers. I failed her when I didn’t stop the wedding, but I’ve done my best for you since, as well as I could.” Her eyes glistened with tears and she wrapped Minerva in another hug. But the rare show of affection didn’t last long, for Aunt Bedelia was soon on her feet, pulling her composure together. “Now now, this isn’t doing either of us any favors nor stopping that foolish pair of devils we love from shooting each other.”

Minerva nodded and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Aunt Bedelia, what if . . . what if we don’t make it in time?”

“Chudley doesn’t dare die. I told him quite roundly I would use my widow’s portion to buy a brand new wardrobe—no widow’s weeds for him—and have a new husband before the month was out. Some spendthrift pup who would run through Chudley’s fortune in a fortnight and leave me with naught but my garters.”

And knowing Aunt Bedelia, Minerva mused as they hurried out to her waiting carriage, she would do just that.

P
rimrose Hill, where once Henry Tudor hunted and his daughter Elizabeth rode with abandon, was a popular spot for the aggrieved of London. Cuckold husbands, cheated gamesters, and insulted rivals came to settle their differences with honor across the grassy knoll rising at the far end of Regent’s Park.

Aunt Bedelia’s driver had been ordered, threatened, and harangued not to let anything get in his way—so the good man gave the horses their heads and the usually staid beasts raced through the empty streets, the carriage rocking and tossing the occupants back and forth in their seats. Minerva clung to the strap on the wall and prayed they would make it in time.

How could a few hours change one so?
she wondered. For now she understood what it meant to love another, and this wretched duel could end it all in a single shot.

“Oh, I do wish he would hurry,” Bedelia complained as the carriage rattled and screeched around another corner and began to climb the hill. “We will be too late and they shall both be dead.”

Minerva glanced over at her aunt. “I daresay we may be joining Chudley and Langley in the afterworld if your driver hurries much more.”

As it was, a few minutes later the careening carriage came to a plunging stop and both ladies tumbled out on wavering legs. The hillside swirled in an early morning mist, and it took Minerva a few moments to get her bearings.

Not so for her aunt. “Oooh!” Bedelia gasped, pointing the way.

Minerva turned to find the two men about fifty yards away. As the wisps of fog began to curl away on a hint of a morning breeze, it revealed Chudley and Langley, having marked off their paces, turning to aim and fire. On either side of the field stood the witnesses—their seconds and a black-clad surgeon, none of whom paid the newly arrived ladies any heed.

Besides, it was too late.

Even before Minerva could protest, both pistols barked to life, the sharp retorts and the puffs of smoke tearing through her heart as if she’d been struck. She sank to her knees.

Langley’s bullet neatly trimmed a small branch over Chudley’s head, dropping the leaves like a May Day crown atop the viscount’s dignified beaver hat.

She would have smiled at such a roguish feat if it hadn’t been for the sight that caught her eye as the last of the mist cleared from atop the hill.

There, just beyond the opponents, sat a man atop his horse, his hand outstretched with a smoking pistol aimed directly at Langley.

For Langley and Chudley’s shots hadn’t been the only ones fired at that moment. And while Langley purposely fired honorably up into the tree above his opponent, this man had fired with deadly intent.