The Lady Always Wins (6 page)

He gave out a half laugh, half groan. “Talking with your mouth full,” he managed. “In this case, it’s excellent manners. Ah, damn, Ginny. So bloody good. Why did we never do this before?”

She raised her head. “Because I was too good to volunteer, and you were too dumb to ask.”

That about summed everything up. Her hair hung around her shoulders, utterly disheveled. Her mouth was wet and bruised. She was so beautiful, so completely wicked. She leaned down to take him in her mouth again. He stopped her, setting his hand on her chin.

“Ginny,” he said.

“Mmm?” Her eyes were wide, her pupils dark with lust.

“Enough of this talk of revenge and foiling. I just… Can I please make love to you?”

She shifted back an inch. “Simon.”

“I know what I said and I know what I did, but it’s always been you, Ginny.” He loosened his shirt, the only garment she’d left to him. “I want to make love to you. No more pretenses.”

Some part of him waited for her to walk away, to leave him again. He couldn’t bear it if she did. He’d beg, if he had to. But she leaned forward and slid her hands up the muscles of his abdomen, up his chest. Her hands brushed his nipples, and he let out a gasp.

“Oh, Simon,” she whispered. “You’ve never been a pretense.”

He wasn’t sure how they got his shirt off. He wasn’t sure if he pushed her down to the divan, or if she pulled him on top of her. He wasn’t even sure how he got inside her—if it was his impatient thrust or her guiding touch. He only knew that they both wanted it, that they needed it. Then she was clasped around him, and he—after all these years—was seated in her. There was no revenge to it. Just Ginny, giving herself to him freely.

Finally.

She pushed up on her elbows and nipped his shoulder, and he began to move. She was warm. Soft. The intensity of the moment threatened to overwhelm him in a haze of pleasure. She was everything he had ever hoped for. He could feel her clenching around him. Her hips ground against his. He leaned down and took her nipple in his mouth, just to feel her muscles tighten involuntarily about him. And he pushed into her again and again and again, until she cried out, her whole body shaking around him. After that, he took her harder still, thrusting into her until he found his own ecstasy. It burned him to pieces, and he didn’t care.

Afterward, he was almost afraid to break their silence. He played his hand along her face, caressing her cheek, fingering little wisps of her hair. His lips found her jaw, her temple. It seemed almost sacred, this moment—like the first rays of a spring sun hitting the top arch on some pagan monument.

“Look,” he finally said, “as it turns out, I have a special license in my coat pocket.”

She drew in a breath, buried her face in his shoulder and laughed. “Of course you do.”

He stroked her hair. “I have to go back to London in the morning. Will you marry me first?”

“And of course it has to be tomorrow. Not Thursday or Friday, nor a week from now. You never were good at waiting.”

“I’ve waited seven bloody years. I’m done waiting. Marry me.”

She didn’t say anything. He could feel her muscles go from relaxed to tense as she considered the matter.

“And what about revenge?” she finally asked. “I don’t think that was entirely a jest on your part. You’re still unhappy with me.”

“I can’t pretend there is no lingering bitterness.” He reached up and touched her lips gently. “I can’t pretend that I’m not furious about those years I lost. But I wouldn’t be so angry if I didn’t love you so well. I can’t let you walk away again. Not for one day more.”

He shut his eyes. It was true—all of it. He wanted her. He needed her. He wasn’t going to let her go. But his gut clenched with what he wasn’t saying. If he waited any longer, she would find out the truth of his finances. She wouldn’t marry him.

Oh, she’d be furious when she discovered his lies. But at least she’d be his. And just as he knew he’d let go of his own lingering animosity, he knew he could coax her out of hers.

“You came here with a special license,” she said.

He nodded.

“This is madness.”

He nodded.

“If this is madness,” she said, “let nobody ever accuse me of sanity.” And finally, finally, she broke into a grin. “I’ll do it. Oh, Simon,” she said, nestling against him. “I’ve missed you so much. You forgive me?”

“Do that again,” he said, “and I’ll forgive you anything.” But even though he smiled at her, his stomach turned. In a few days, he’d be the one begging her. But for now, she didn’t know.

She simply smiled up at him brilliantly. “Then let’s scandalize Alice,” she said. “Take me up to bed.”

Chapter Five

G
INNY WOKE IN HIS ARMS
the next morning. He’d been caressing her as she slept—a gentle, sweet rhythm. When she opened her eyes, she was almost surprised at the look on his face: somewhere between stunned and solemn.

“Good morning,” she whispered. It wasn’t just a good morning: It was a great one, great and terrible. She’d agreed to marry him in a matter of some hours.

“See here,” he said. His mouth curled down with the look of a man who had been planning a speech for a while. “I have to say something. I know you don’t love me as much as I do you, but I’m going to change all that. I don’t care how long it takes.” He leaned in and rested his forehead against her shoulder. “You are going to love me.”

For the first time since they’d kissed yesterday, a cold chill ran through her. “You think I don’t love you?”

He snorted. “For Christ’s sake,” he muttered into her shoulder. “You married someone else. What was I supposed to conclude?”

She turned away from him. “That I didn’t want to be poor? That you were threatening to cart me off to Gretna Greene, no matter what I said? I didn’t know how else to stop you. I was in a panic.”

“I wasn’t threatening!” he said. And then, as if he remembered how hot his temper might have run, he threw out: “At least, not seriously. If you loved me enough, the money wouldn’t have mattered!”

He’d said that so many times, and every time, she’d felt a burden of lead collect in her belly. It was an old argument, this one. “I have a horror of being poor,” she said. “It wouldn’t have mattered how much I loved you. It wouldn’t have mattered how much you loved me. Only saints can love through hunger, and neither of us is a saint.”

He sat up, resting on his elbow. “You’re only saying that because you don’t know how I feel. If you loved me the way I loved you—”

She heard herself make an inarticulate cry, and she batted at his questing hand. “No.
You
wouldn’t say that if you’d ever really been hungry. You’ve never eaten bits of coal out of the refuse pile just to have something in your belly. You’ve never been so cold that you couldn’t sleep at night, and yet hadn’t the strength to shiver. It doesn’t matter how much you love someone. If you’ve not got enough, you resent every scrap that they have and you do not.”

He frowned at her. Her breathing had grown faster; her heart was racing. “We weren’t so poorly off when I was first born. But Papa lost everything, betting on the ’Change when I was eight. And after that… I remember ripping a crust of bread from my elder sister’s hands one time. I was practically an animal.” She shut her eyes. “When she died of diphtheria, I was sad. But part of me, some horrid part of me deep down, thought—‘Good. That means more for me.’”

He was staring at her in consternation now. “You were a child,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the same, now.”

She shook her head and drew her knees up, to curl into a ball. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t come to my aunt because my father died, you know. He kept trying to win his money back, and it kept going more and more wrong. At the end, just before I left, a man came one night. I heard him tell my father that he would settle it all if he could just borrow me for a week.” She could feel those old shivers taking her now. “I was ten, but I knew what he meant to do with me. So I left. I slipped out the window while they were arguing, before my father had time to consider how many debts he might put to rest with a ten-year-old’s virtue. It took me two weeks to walk the sixty miles to my aunt’s house. When I arrived, I begged her to take me in. That’s what it means to be poor. I shouldn’t have had to doubt whether my own father would sell me. But love is not stronger than fear.”

She drew a deep breath and looked at him. His eyes were round, fixed on her.

“It doesn’t matter. Just thinking about that—it still makes my stomach hurt. I told you I had a horror of poverty. I didn’t mean that I required silver-plated spoons and liveried footmen. I meant that I fear it, with every part of me. I have an absolute horror of it.”

“You’re shaking.” He put his arms around her. “God,” he said. “You’re cold. You’re so cold.”

His arms were warm. And perhaps he was not the only one who had stored up bitterness, because her next words spilled over from some wounded place, buried deep in her heart.

“You could have waited,” she said. “I asked you to wait. Wait until you had a trade of your own, until you could provide for us without begging your parents. But no. It always had to be now—today, and not tomorrow; this month, and never next year. Don’t tell me I didn’t love you. You weren’t willing to hold off a few years for something that mattered so deeply to me.”

He had grown utterly still as she spoke.

She drew another shuddering breath. “It was
not
all my fault. It wasn’t.”

“Oh, Ginny.” He kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was just…used to pushing at you. I thought it was just another aspect of the game we always played—my insisting on one thing, and your demanding another.”

“I loved you,” she said. “Just because I knew it was impossible didn’t mean I loved you less. And I
hated
you for forcing me to choose.”

He was wrapped around her, warm and solid. Their breaths combined in a ragged symphony. As much as it had hurt, it had felt good for Ginny to let out that tightly-controlled emotion, to release it into the air. Every breath she took was charged with the pain she’d buried for so long.

But his arms around her told another story. Yes, they’d hurt one another. But he could still make her feel better.

And then he took a deep, shuddering breath.

She opened her eyes. “But here we are,” she said. “After all these years. Maybe it can still be possible.”

“No.” His voice was quiet. Too quiet. “It can’t. It bloody well can’t. I can’t do this to you.”

She tilted her head. His mouth was set in a grim line; he’d made fists of his hands.

She had been so certain that he’d been joking in the beginning. When he’d threatened to hurt her—he’d never meant it. She gave him a watery smile. “Is this the part where you rip out my heart and stomp on it?” she asked.

“No.” He let out a long, slow breath. “This is the part where I rip out my own. I told you I was a wealthy man. It was...not exactly a lie. But, you see, I’ve made an investment. I’ve mortgaged everything I have to finish a railway line. We’re weeks from completion. If I’d managed it, it would have created a direct line from London to Castingham, the first ever. I would have been richer than I’ve ever dreamed.”

She looked down. “I knew that. I’ve followed your company’s progress in the papers.”

“Ha. There’s something you should know that is
not
in the papers. There’s a canal owner who wants to stop me. He’s bought a majority of my company. Tomorrow, he’ll record the transfer of shares, and after that, he’ll call a special meeting of the shareholders. It’s only a matter of time until he stops work altogether. I have liens on everything—my home, my business, even my expectations from my father. All of my debts are about to come crashing down on my head. I’ll have to sell my damned cuff links just to make the final payroll. When everything has settled, I’ll be destitute.”

She didn’t know how to describe the emotion that filled her—hard and impossibly prickly. She hadn’t known the extent of his debts. And…he’d believed that he had nothing, and he hadn’t told her?

She was still reeling from this when he spoke again. “That’s why I had to marry you today,” he said flatly. “Not tomorrow or next week. Because if I’d waited even twenty-four hours, the news would have become public. And you wouldn’t have married me.”

She’d buried all her worries next to her heart for so long that they’d become second nature to her. This time, she wasn’t going to let them fester. She didn’t try to hold back how upset she was, didn’t try to smooth it into calm politeness. “You knew I had a horror of poverty, and you were going to trick me into it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s awful.” She was crying, now. She didn’t care if he saw it—she wanted him to know, this time, how furious she was.

“Oh, Ginny.” His thumb traced the tear down her cheek. His hands were still warm.

She still loved him. She could have forgiven recklessness on his part. But to deliberately imply an untruth about the one thing that he knew would matter to her? He’d intended to put her back in the hell she’d gone through before—only this time, he would have bound her into it with matrimony, swallowing any chance of escape. She loved him, but right now her love seemed a painful thing.