Mary Balogh (44 page)

“Don’t talk like that,” she said crossly. “Am I to believe that you have conceived a grand passion for me? Am I to feel sorry for you? You want to bed me. That is all. And I will not be bedded.”

“Mary.” His hand pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet and tossed it aside before she realized what he was about. “Give me that half-hour of your time. That is all I ask. I will not bed you here, though the conditions are tempting. I promise. Just give me that half-hour.”

Sometimes she tired of fighting. It would be such a relief not to have to fight any longer—after the next half-hour was over. But first there was the half-hour. She let her head relax sideways against his arm and closed her eyes as his hand lightly caressed her cheek and her ear. His thumb feathered across her closed eye, across her eyebrow. Across her mouth.

“Mary.”

There was a lump in her throat. She tried to swallow it. She wanted to fight when his mouth took the place of his thumb, first against her eyelid, and then lightly, and closed, against her own mouth.

“Mary.”

And she wanted just to stay still and let it happen. It was hard to believe that she had allowed so much at Vauxhall and afterward. She could no longer remember quite why she had done so or quite how pleasurable it had been. When it was dark, as it was now, and when
she closed her eyes and her mind to the identity of her companion, when she allowed herself only to feel and not to think at all, she could feel the urge to give in to his caresses.

His tongue was tracing the outline of her lips, sending sensation sizzling through her. It was too raw a feeling. She parted her lips to imprison his tongue between, and opened her mouth to suck it inside. He moaned.

It was so good sometimes just to feel, not to think or to reason. So very good to feel a man’s strong arm about her, to feel his other hand stroking over the side of her head and down over her shoulder to her breast, lifting to slide inside her dress, warm and slightly rough over her soft skin. To feel his thumb rubbing over her nipple until that raw ache began again. It was good to feel a man’s mouth wide on hers, his tongue exploring and caressing inside.

It felt good to want and know oneself wanted. Good to feel totally and merely woman.

“Mary,” he was saying into her ear. “Oh, my God, Mary.”

And she knew again who he was. It was impossible to block thought for more than a few brief minutes. But she did not much care, she thought, lifting her hand from his shoulder and running her fingers lightly through his hair.

“I will not bed you against your will,” he said. He was running one hand hard up and down her arm. Her shawl seemed to have disappeared. “Tell me you do not want it.”

“I do not want it,” she lied.

He pressed her head into his shoulder and held it there with one firm hand. His arm about her held her like a vise. They rode thus the rest of the way home. And he held her so for a few moments after the carriage had
come to a halt, while the coachman opened the door, set down the steps, and discreetly withdrew.

She did not know whether he had had her conveyed to her own home or to his love nest. She did not much care.

“Mary.” He released his hold on her head so that she tipped it back to look up at him. She could see his face dimly in the light from the street—her street. “I must ask you now, though I know the answer. Will you see me again?”

She swallowed and heard an embarrassing gurgle in her throat. She shook her head and watched his jaw harden.

“There is nothing else but this,” she said. “I cannot explain this, my lord, but it is all there is. There is nothing else. This is not enough.”

“No, it is not,” he said unexpectedly. “If you can find nothing else in me to want but my lovemaking, Mary, then I do not want to see you again, either. I have a life to get on with.”

She looked at him rather uncertainly and made to move away from him, but the arm about her shoulders tightened.

“I wanted you to want me,” he said fiercely. “Me, Mary, despite everything. But it was a foolish wish, was it not? And now I reap the final harvest of that night of drunkenness. The final punishment. The final hell. If I could go back and change things, I would do it, you know. Do you think I would not change things if I could? For Dick, Mary? And for you. I would change the last fifteen years for you if I could, relive them, put something of some worth into them. But I cannot. And so I have nothing whatsoever to offer you except the ability to give you pleasure, learned appropriately enough in the beds of countless whores. I want to offer you all the precious things the world has to offer, and all I can give you is that.” He laughed harshly.

She stared at him, dumbfounded.

“You did not suspect that a man like me was capable of love, did you?” he said. “It will work to your advantage, though, Mary. I will stay away from you. I will keep my promise to you because I love you. You have nothing more to fear from me, you see.”

He lifted his arm clumsily away from her and jumped out of the carriage. He turned to lift her down, not waiting for her to set her feet on the steps. The front door of the house was already open.

“Go, then,” he said, sliding his hands hard down her arms and gripping both hands hard enough to hurt. “And be happy, Mary. That is all I want for you. Please, be happy.”

He squeezed her hands even more tightly and raised one of them rather jerkily to his lips before releasing both and jumping back inside the carriage without even waiting for her to disappear into the house.

T
HE CARRIAGE TOOK
him to Watier’s, as instructed. He sat inside, still and silent, for five whole minutes after the coachman had opened the door and stood politely to one side, waiting for him to descend.

“Take me home,” he said at last.

He did not want to be alone. But he certainly did not want to be in company. And it seemed there were no other choices.

“Bring the brandy decanter to my dressing room,” he told his butler as he passed him in the hallway of his home and began to ascend the stairs. “No.” He stopped. “Bring two.”

He filled a glass to the brim when the decanters arrived, and took a large gulp of brandy, which burned its way down his throat and into his stomach. And then he stared down into the liquid for a long while. His worst
enemy. He had proved it before. It had helped him kill Dick. It had made a terrifying hell out of the months that had followed. He had used it since then only in public, as part of the image he had chosen to give the world of a man who really did not give a damn.

Was he to use it again now in private—his worst enemy in the guise of a friend? Always in the guise of a friend, but in reality nothing but the archenemy. Nothing but the devil himself.

His glass shattered against the washstand a little distance away from him. The two decanters would have followed, but at the last moment he had mercy on the poor maids who would have to clean up the mess. Already it was bad enough.

He got to his feet and wandered through into his bedchamber. So what really had happened? He had been rejected by an unlovely and unattractive bluestocking, and one of not quite impeccable virtue, either. She was no great loss. If he could just force his mind back to three weeks ago, before Vauxhall, he would realize that she was no great loss.

He had never believed in love—at least he had not for many weary years. It was no time now to start believing in it. Not at the age of thirty-six, when no decent woman could be expected to afford him a second glance.

What could he do? He must do something to drag himself out of the gloom that assailed him at frequent intervals, this time caused by a foolish infatuation for a woman.

The Season was at an end, to all intents and purposes. He could go to one of the spas as he often did during the summer. Or to Brighton. He thought with distaste of Brighton. He could go to the Continent, travel about for perhaps a year or so. Or he could go down into Hampshire. His estate there was not really far away, and yet it was almost two years since he had been there last.

Perhaps he would go there. It would be soothing perhaps to be in the country with nothing and no one to remind him of a wasted life.

Yes, he thought with sudden decision, he would go into the country—the very next day.

He rang the bell for his valet.

M
ARY WAS ANGRY
. A
WEEK HAD PASSED SINCE THE
garden party at Lady Eleanor’s, and he had kept his promise. Oh, he had kept his promise, all right, but in such a way that she began to despair of ever being free of him. He had done it deliberately. Somewhere he was laughing at her, knowing very well what he had done to her.

She hated him with a passion.

In many ways it had been a gratifying week. She had seen Viscount Goodrich every day or evening—sometimes both—and he had been flattering in his attentions to her. If he had indeed hoped to make her his mistress the week before, he had not pressed the matter since. He had even apologized to her the day after the garden party. He had called on her during the morning.

“You are not well?” he asked her after they had greeted each other. He was looking closely at her.

She had cried for an hour the night before, and lain awake for at least another two. She smiled. “Just a little headache,” she said. “Nothing some fresh air will not blow away.”

And so he took her for a late-morning walk in the park. And asked her politely about the day before. She told him how she had liked Lady Eleanor and how
the lady had said she would try to attend Mary’s literary evening the following week.

That was when he apologized. He covered the hand that was resting on his arm with his own and looked down at her. “Forgive me for my manner and words two evenings ago,” he said. “I was behaving in a possessive manner that I have no right to—yet. And I am afraid the suggestion I made was very improper. Please believe that it arose purely from my deep concern for your safety and peace of mind.”

“You are forgiven,” she said, smiling at him. “And I was indeed upset that evening. But no longer. I will be seeing no more of Lord Edmond Waite.” Strangely the words were like a heavy weight on her shoulders.

He squeezed her hand. “I am glad to hear it, ma’am,” he said. “Such a man can only mean you harm. I am convinced that there is not a decent bone in his body.”

She did not immediately reply.
I will stay away from you. I will keep my promise to you because I love you
. She did not want to remember those words. After she had cried bitterly over them for a whole hour, she had no longer believed them. She agreed with Lord Goodrich.
And be happy, Mary. That is all I want for you
. No, the man was a fiend. The very devil. How could she be happy?

“I believe you are right,” she said.

They went walking and driving together over the coming days, and visited the Tower and Westminster Abbey, where they spent a happy hour reading the tombstones and epitaphs in Poets’ Corner. They attended the theater and the opera and a concert in the home of the Earl of Raymore.

He talked to her of his home in Lincolnshire and of his two sons, who were away at school and of whose existence she had not known before. He was very close to declaring himself, she was sure. And she would accept,
she had decided. She liked him. Life with him offered stability and security and the chance for a permanent contentment.

She wished that he would kiss her, but he never kissed more than her hand. She wanted him to kiss her. She had some ghosts to banish, and she needed him to banish them. But apart from that one suggestion during her literary evening, his behavior toward her was perfectly correct.

It was a happy week. She was deep into what appeared to be a serious courtship, and her friends approved. Both Penelope and Hannah were relieved at the abrupt ending of her association with Lord Edmond, and delighted with the development of her attachment to the viscount.

She was happy. Lord Goodrich could offer her all the companionship she had known with Marcus—though there had been a very special affection between her and Marcus that had not yet developed with the viscount. But it would develop in time. And Lord Goodrich could offer more. He could offer her the permanency and respectability of marriage, with none of the uncertainties and dangers that had marked her marriage with Lawrence.

She was happy. And yet anger grew in her as the week progressed. Lord Edmond Waite—she had grown to hate the very sound of his name—had proved even less honorable and less of a gentleman than in her worst fears. For if he had continued to pursue her, she could have been righteously angry with him. She could have fought him. And if he had broken off his connection with her as he had promised, she could have been exuberant with the relief of being rid of him. But he had managed to do both and neither.

He had made very sure during that drive home that she had felt again all the unwilling attraction for him
that she had denied since Vauxhall. He had played on that attraction until she would gladly have lain with him right there in his aunt’s carriage if he had chosen to take her. Or she would have gone with him again to that most vulgar love nest. She did not know quite how he had aroused such feelings of surrender, but he had. And she could not even openly blame him for them. He had used no apparent coercion. Indeed, he had given her a way out and then scrupulously allowed her to take it.

So that she would look back in longing? So that she would continue to ache for him long after he had gone? So that she would forever regret that night, which they might have spent together?

To her horror, she had been quite like a puppet on a string. She had done all of those things. All week, while her mind—her real self—was happy with Lord Goodrich and looked forward to a more permanent relationship with him, her body longed for Lord Edmond.

She had cried and cried for him after he had left her that one evening. For one mad hour she had convinced herself that he really did love her. Worse, she had been convinced that she loved him, too.

The fiend! He had planned it all. And now he very carefully kept himself out of her sight. She looked for him—unwillingly—wherever she went, but never once set eyes on him. He was doing it deliberately. He knew that if she only saw him again, she would see him for what he was and be free of him.