Obsession Wears Opals (18 page)

Chapter

14

In the morning, he ignored his housekeeper’s protests and announced that he would spend his days in his library and not staring at his bedroom ceiling. “Despite the appeal of cracked plaster, I can rest better reading in my study and in Helen’s good company, if she’ll bestow it. . . .”

“She will,” Helen said firmly from the doorway.

Mrs. McFadden rolled her eyes. “Who am I to stop a man from killing himself?”

Darius smiled. “That’s the spirit, Mrs. McFadden. May I have some more of that wonderful mint tea? I swear it works miracles in making my chest feel better.”

The older woman’s cheeks flushed and she crossed her arms, openly flustered. “I’ll—fetch a pot, but the only miracle I can see is how you’re still standing! Don’t go flashing that soulful look at me and think I’ll go soft!”

She marched off before he could thank her and it was Helen’s laughter that completed the scene.

“You should be more careful!” Helen chided him gently. “She’ll put more than mint in that tea to teach you a lesson.”

“I know.” He sat down in one of the chairs by the fireplace and pulled the king from his pocket. “She was worried, I think. Barking makes her feel better. And this . . .” Darius held up the dark, crowned figure. “Thank you for the gesture. It was unexpected and I’ll never forget it.”

He set it on the board as she took her place across from him.

“Nor I yours,” she replied, lifting the queen up from the ribbon at her throat and untying it. “I never took it off.”

She added the white queen onto the field, and Darius had to clear his throat at the lump that formed at the sight of their armies back in place.

“Our talismans kept us safe,” he noted.

“Are you revealing a superstitious nature, sir?” she teased him.

Darius shook his head. “Not at all. In all my studies, the only thing I seem to return to is a resounding belief that humanity is essentially the same, no matter where it is found. Palaces or mud huts, I think we are all more alike than we know.”

She frowned. “But there are so many differences in the cultures we’ve encountered.”

He shook his head. “On the surface, perhaps. But underneath, I think we all want the same things. Happiness, abundance, security, and family.”

“It sounds like paradise. But all the harm and conflict—”

“Stem from our universal capacity for good or evil, depending on how we apply ourselves,” he interrupted her, then leaned back in his chair. “No worse or better. Maybe it’s the flavor of the local religion that colors our views. In India, Josiah thought the Hindu religion had its finer points.”

“I don’t like the religion of that region, Mr. Thorne.” She shuddered. “That Code of Manu in particular was . . .”

“It was?” he pressed gently.

“Unfair to women!” she blurted out.

“Some if it but it’s not all bad. There’s a fair bit in there on self-reliance and telling the truth,” he offered with a sad smile. “I had a long time to think about what I might say, if I saw you again.”

“If?” she asked.

“Well, between spitting up my lungs somewhere outside York and the notion that you wouldn’t wish to wait for my return—I had my doubts.” He shrugged. “I’m only human, Helen.”

“Before you say anything,” she said, nervously smoothing out her skirts, “I have to know. Mr. Thorne. When you left for London, you . . . kissed me.”

“I did.”

“But you haven’t since your return. You’ve been ill and asked for Mrs. McFadden to attend you. I would have gladly—seen to your comfort but . . . I didn’t feel bold enough to push my way in. You’re recovering and . . .” She looked at him directly, her pale blue eyes flashing with emotion. “Have your—feelings changed?”

“Not at all. If anything, I’m more sure of them where you are concerned.”

“Oh! So how is it that we are sitting so formally, Mr. Thorne, with a chessboard between us . . . ?”

“Because I want to confess something—for there to be nothing I’ve hidden from you. I want you never to be able to accuse me of being less than truthful.”

“Yes.”

“You asked if I’d ever been in love, do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“I never was. I never permitted anything in my sphere that threatened my inner sense of self-discipline, and love was not something I’d ever allowed myself.”

“Why ever not?”

“My father . . .” Darius stopped himself, then squared his shoulders like a man about to face a firing squad. “I am the second son of a dockworker and a fishmonger’s daughter. I suspect I am as far beneath you as a grass field to the moon.”

Her brow furrowed. “Is love a question of the status imparted at birth? Is that what you’re saying? That the second son of a dockworker and a fishmonger’s daughter cannot love?”

He opened his mouth to answer and then closed it in shock, before he composed a response. Of all the reactions he’d braced himself to hear,
this
was nothing he’d anticipated. “No. I’m telling you because I thought it might alter your . . . perception of me.”

She crossed her arms. “Are you a different man than the one who raced off to save his friends and nearly sacrificed his life to return to me quickly so that I wouldn’t be alone?”

He shook his head, speechless.

“Then my perception is unchanged. Tell me why a man who is so noble and steadfast in his promises is not ‘allowed’ to love.”

“I’m . . . It isn’t just that my father was . . . rustic.”

“No?”

“It isn’t just that. It’s because of the man I feared I might become.” He took a deep, steadying breath. “My father was . . .” Darius tried again, finding it easier if he looked into the fire in the fireplace and not at her beautiful face. “He was a horrible man, the worst sort of man. When he wasn’t beating my mother or looking for an excuse to beat his children, he was drinking until he couldn’t walk. He was an ignorant creature and so sadistic I remember thinking that Satan must have sat at his feet in awe and admiration.”

“Oh, God!”

“I overheard my mother crying to a friend that she couldn’t leave my father because she
loved
him.” Darius closed his eyes at the memory. “I hated her for it. I didn’t understand how he could have such a hold on her that she would be willing to sacrifice so much—herself and her children—for love.”

Isabel couldn’t think of a single thing to say to comfort him.

Darius continued, looking back at her with clear eyes. “I’m an intelligent man and I’ll forgive her her choices. But I am still faced with the legacy of
that man
’s blood coursing through my veins.”

“But you are nothing like him!”

“No. I’ve dedicated my life to being nothing like him. He sent me into an apprenticeship when I was six and it was my salvation. It was a printing shop and the owner recognized that I was quick, and from there—I still don’t know how I deserved the miraculous chain of events that led to my education and elevation from that murky, hopeless start.”

“My goodness! You poor thing!” Helen reached out to put her hand on his arm.

“I’m not some character in a Dickens novel.” He shook his head. “Volumes have been written about the question of the inheritance of character, Helen. Blood will tell, isn’t that the saying? My father is long dead, but he haunts my every step. It’s why I said marriage is for better men. I vowed never to marry because I didn’t trust myself. What if I am doomed to repeat history? What if I’m no better than the monster you’ve escaped? You’ve run from a monster, Helen. But what if I am cut from the same cloth?”

“You aren’t and you could never be that kind of man.”

“You sound so sure. But Helen, of all the women in the world, I would rather die than ever hurt you. And after what you’ve survived, you don’t need—you don’t deserve any more ugliness. But here I am. So in love with you that I’m not sure how I’m still standing from the weight of it. I’m . . . a man with nothing but ugliness at his back, nothing but tragedy in his wake. You are a lady of fine quality and I am a product of an impoverished dockworker and the daughter of a fishmonger. How is it even remotely possible that you aren’t repelled?”

“Wh-what?” she asked.

Darius’s heart froze in his chest. Fearing a thing and experiencing it were two different things, and the strange expression on her face made it clear that he’d not really been ready to lose her. “It isn’t possible then.”

“Not that,” she said, shaking her head. “Did you say that you
loved
me?”

He was a man trapped in a spiral of despair, but he forced himself to stay calm, standing from his chair, readying himself to leave the room if he needed to. “I did. I am in love with you, Helen. But I won’t impose my feelings on—”

Helen stood immediately, matching his every move. “I don’t care, Darius. I don’t care about any of the—you aren’t a character from a Dickens novel. It’s meaningless.”

“It—It isn’t meaningless. And if I
were
a character in a novel, I’m sure this is the scene where the heroine says something complimentary about my selflessness and offers to shake my hand.”

“You are reading the wrong books, Mr. Thorne.”

“Am I?”

“I think you should kiss me.”

Darius held his breath for a moment. “Mrs. McFadden will be back any moment with a pot of mint tea.” Even as he spoke, his effort to look aloof failed completely as a grin overtook him. The entire conversation had become ridiculous and wonderful, and he was so completely out of his league that he found himself enjoying it. “God . . . what a thing to say when someone offers you your heart’s desire!”

She smiled back at him, a fierce joyful mischief lighting her eyes. “Kiss me, Darius.”

Darius purposefully walked to the library door and leaned out of it. “Forget the tea, Mrs. McFadden! I’ve changed my mind!” he shouted and then shut the door to muffle the sounds of the woman’s complaints and the rattling of pans. He locked the library door and turned back, a man on a mission.

Helen laughed. “Your lungs are much improved.”

“I would have walked through a dozen fires to reach you, Helen.”

“I want to somehow prove that I’m as brave.”

“You don’t need to prove anything to me.”

“Then—to myself.”

“I’m not prepared to be some kind of test, Helen. I care for you too much to be a gauntlet that you run through. I’m flesh and blood, and while the exercise may strengthen you, I don’t think my heart could withstand it.”

“And I’m not merely flesh and blood?”

“Tell me what you want. Whatever it is, Helen, you have all the power in this moment.”

“I don’t want to be in power. I don’t want to be the queen to move about the board.”

“Then say it.”

“I want you.”

“Then I’m yours.”

Darius closed the distance between them instantly, taking her into his arms and kissing her. Since the first time he’d trespassed in the library, the delicious feel and taste of her lips had haunted his dreams and sustained him along every agonizing mile from Edinburgh to London and back. He meant to be slow about this kiss, this singular kiss he’d longed for, but when her breath grazed him and her lips parted beneath his, Darius stopped thinking.

When kissing Helen of Troy, there was apparently no room for thought.

He lifted her up against him, so slight and warm in his arms, hungry for her touch, and driven by her own eager response. She matched his passion, suckling his lower lip, her tongue darting out to meet his own and give him all that he asked.

In a tender reclamation of all the ground he’d yielded, Darius kissed the corners of her mouth and drank in her sighs. She leaned against him and he felt somehow stronger and taller. She reached up to press one hand against his heartbeat, and with the other, splayed the soft blades of her hand behind his neck to wordlessly beg for more.

And in the space of a single breath, tenderness gave way to a blaze of desire.

Darius experienced a sensation like hot sand spilling down his spine to pool at his hip bones and stiffen his cock until he was certain the seams of his clothing would give way.

Not thinking may not be wise, professor.

“Helen, wait . . .”

“What is it, Darius?”

He was a man on fire but he still held himself in check. “I want . . . to keep my promises. I want to be gentle. I don’t ever want to hurt you. But this . . . this isn’t a soft passion or a polite affection I’m wrestling with—” He closed his eyes. “Damn it.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Darius.”

He opened his eyes, struggling with his warring emotions and the taut pull of his desires. “I’m no well-bred gentleman. I have only a vague idea of the rules of this game, Helen.”

“I married a gentleman, Darius, and have suffered for it. Don’t try to be a gentleman. Just keep kissing me. I feel alive, Darius . . . and I want so much to stay that way.”

To hell with the rules. . . .

A lifetime of discipline and denial had only primed him for a feast of the senses and made him feel like a starving man sitting at a banquet.

He lifted her up again, this time high enough to part her thighs and part her skirts, savoring the sensation of her body even through all the layers that separated them. She instinctively raised one of her legs to make it easier for him, and Darius slid one hand up into her skirts to trace the smooth lines of her thigh through the lace and gathers of her underskirts. The heat from the juncture between her legs pulsed against his hips and his body responded, urging him to press forward and betray the unmistakable evidence of his arousal.

Her eyes fluttered open a little wider at the sensation of his enormous erection, even through the barrier of their clothing. And Darius knew they were at the Rubicon, so to speak. Because if she wished to stop, it would be now.

“You’re sure?”

“I am certain.”

He eyed the wide surface of his desk for a brief moment but dismissed it out of turn. Instead, Darius lifted her off the floor to cradle her against his chest and carried her over to the hearth of the fireplace, where he roughly pulled down every cushion in sight to make an improvised place to lay her down.