Unveiled (23 page)

He shut his eyes and breathed in her breath. He
needed another chance. More time to erode her objections. To make her choose
him.

“Well. May I say my farewells to you properly, then?” He glanced pointedly at the servant who sat at the edge of the room, pretending not to hear. “Without company?”

She nodded, and dropped her voice. “You know where, don't you? Not your office. Not any longer. They're watching that.”

No. Not there.

“I know where,” he said quietly.

S
HE HAD KNOWN HE WOULD
meet her in the conservatory.

Perhaps that's why she'd twirled the knob on the oil lamp all the way up, until it radiated heat. She had hoped the light would drive away the darkness of the night.

It hadn't; instead, the lamp's yellow illumination had driven long shadows into every corner of the room. Margaret turned around, looking for him. But the only movement she saw was the flap of her wrapper. The fine silk and painstaking embroidery seemed too smooth against her skin, after weeks of staid wool and linen. Not at all proper attire, but then, etiquette had little advice to give on the apparel a well-bred lady wore to greet a man at midnight.

As she completed her turn, he stepped from the shadows, his footfalls making almost no noise at all. Margaret met his eyes. She was unsure what to say, uncertain how to start and entirely unable to speak the words she knew he had to hear. Instead she gestured at the cutting she'd planted several weeks before, the night she'd pelted him with clods of earth. “I think it will take.”

He came forwards, still silent, and placed his thumb against the cane of wood. There was not much to show
for those weeks—just two little nubs of growth, hints of green glinting in the lamplight.

“It might take some time, though. Perhaps it might be best to keep it indoors through the winter. The groundskeeper has a formula he uses, to manage new growth—”

Ash set his fingers against her lips, capturing the rest of her sentence. “You sound as if you are delivering instructions.”

“Come this winter, only one of us will be here. It might not be me.”

As she spoke, her lips brushed his thumb, a whisper of a kiss.

He took her head in his hands, gently tipping her chin up. “When I first met you, I thought there was something…almost sad about you. You hid it well—you're too strong not to. But your mother passed away not so long ago. Mrs. Benedict once told me that the old duchess loved roses.”

That wound was still too tender to be probed. Margaret turned away.

But he didn't stop. “Your father seems to have no care for anything any longer. Your brothers have been too busy, scrambling to save their own hides. When have you had a chance to mourn, Margaret?”

She stepped away to examine the pots that stood on a window ledge. “She's still
here,
” Margaret said. “She loved this house. The gardens. And the roses especially. Sometimes I can almost hear her footsteps around the corner. I can see her nodding in approval when the house runs smoothly. So long as—”

She caught her breath as the end of the sentence slammed into her.

Pick a house,
her mother had once advised her on
love,
not a husband. Husbandly interest will fade. But a house will always be yours—yours to arrange and command, yours to gift over to your sons, warmer and more welcoming than you found it, when the time comes. A house will hold all your affection and shower love back upon you.

That philosophy hadn't worked so well for her mother. At the end of her life, even the house hadn't truly been hers any longer. And whatever fiction Margaret maintained about this place, once Ash took the reins…

“So long as what?” Ash asked quietly.

“She'll be here,” Margaret said, her throat closing, “so long as nothing changes.”

But everything was changing. Over the course of the next few months, her brothers would present their case to Parliament. Her father's remaining health might slip away. She couldn't bear to stay here, to see the last vestiges of her mother's care disappear. And that meant that this was goodbye.

To the house. To her mother. And to Ash, as well.

She'd known it the instant her brother had spelled out precisely what marriage to Ash would mean. She'd always known that whatever time they had was transient and fleeting. She'd just assumed that
he
would be the one to end it.

She walked back to him and set her hands on his shoulders. He acquiesced when she pushed him to the bench. But when she leaned over him and straddled him, he pulled back from her kiss.

“There's something I must tell you,” he began.

She put her fingers over his lips as she settled her thighs against his.

“Be quiet, Ash. I am trying to remember you.”

In the lamplight, shadows collected on his face as his eyebrows drew down. He must have taken her meaning, because he shook his head. “Well. I am trying to
have
you.” His voice was fiercely possessive. “Not for one night, nor even two. I want you every evening—mine outright, not a few hours stolen here or there. I want you during the day, on my arm. I want to know that when we're apart you're missing me; I want to know when we're together, I'm the one who puts the smile on your face.” He punctuated each phrase with a kiss—against her chin, the line of her jaw, the hollow of her neck. As he spoke, his hands drifted down her sides. The light silk of her wrapper rendered his touch diffuse.

“Not that. I can't.” But she didn't push his hands away.

“You will.” His fingers cupped her breasts lightly, sending little shivers through her. She'd wanted one last night with him for physical comfort. She hadn't wanted this intimate courtship.

“I'm leaving on the morrow.”

“So you have claimed,” he said, his breath hot against her neckline.

“This is the last time we can speak—
Oh.
”

He had slid her robe aside and taken her nipple in his mouth, almost roughly. His tongue circled the tip, and she could feel it draw up into a tight bud, could feel the corresponding pulse of desire between her legs. As if he, too, felt that need, he reached between them and undid his breeches. The rough fumblings of cloth rasped against her legs.

But he continued to taste her, almost leisurely. As if he were sure of her physical surrender—as sure as he was of everything else. There was no urgency in his caress, just languid pleasure. He was firmly in
command, in control. His other hand freed his erection from its confines. She could feel it, straight and rigid and hot, against her thighs. With his free hand he steadied her against it, moved it into position between her legs. She felt her wetness rub against him.

“Hear this,” he growled in her ear. “I didn't withdraw last night. I'll be damned if I do it now. And if I get you with child—and Margaret, I hope I have already done so—you
will
marry me.”

She'd known it, deep inside her. She just hadn't let herself think it.

“I will never do to you what your father did to your mother. I will
always
be here for you.” He sat on the table, and pulled her down to him.

He would. She knew it. Loyalty was in his nature, as surely as patience, understanding and the steady offer of support.

His hand stroked her back. She could not think, could not gather up enough logic to ascertain how to go forwards. Every path she could take seemed to double back into dishonor for her family. There
was
no forwards. The only direction she could imagine was
down.
And so she let gravity think for her. She slid down him an inch. His breath caught. His hands settled on her hips, and he guided her on top until she clasped him tight, her thighs resting against his.

Yes. This was what she wanted—risk and all. She wanted him. She wanted his body, the feel of him against her, inside her. Some dishonorable part of her even wanted his child, wanted an excuse to escape the dilemma that stretched before her.

She sank lower, her passage stretching to accommodate him.

“God, Margaret,” he whispered in her ear. “You're so tight. So damned hot.”

And now that she'd encompassed him, a more pressing matter emerged. “What should I do?”

His fingers clenched her side. “Whatever feels best for you.”

“But I want to know what feels good for
you.
”

His eyelids shivered shut, and his member twitched inside her. “It
all
feels good for me. Trust me. At this point, it's all exquisite. You're exquisite.” His hands cupped her hips.

Tentatively Margaret rose up on her knees. Pleasure drifted through her. Through
them.
She sank down on him once more, and his hand drifted to her breast. A delicious heat engulfed her.

“Ah, yes. I really love that.”

She did it again.

“Talk to me,” he whispered. “Tell me what you feel. What you want.”

“Touch me,” Margaret whispered. “I want you to touch my back.”

His hands fluttered up her back in slow, gentle caresses. She rose up on him again, finding a rhythm. Her hands found the curve of his biceps; her legs clasped the steel of his thighs. “You feel hard.”

“Hard is good.” His voice was husky. He thrust inside her.

“And big.”

“Big is better.”

His hands slipped to her hips and helped the rhythm along. She could feel her tension build, a slow fire stoking deep inside her, growing hotter and hotter with every stroke. His teeth gritted; the night air could no
longer cool her skin, and her temperature rose. He insinuated his hand between their bodies, and as he pressed his fingers to her sex, ecstasy overtook her. It crashed over her in wave after glorious wave. When he'd wrung every bit of satisfaction from her body—when the fire that filled her had flared up into a bright pillar and burned everything from her—then he pressed his head into her neck.

“You feel like Margaret,” he whispered. “And Margaret is best of all.”

As she slumped bonelessly against him, he lifted her again, thrusting inside her. She hadn't imagined there was any pleasure left in her, but it came. It came in little sparks at first. Then it caught fire in her soul. He gasped once, and then, just as she was cresting into her own orgasm, he came, too.

For long moments after, he said nothing. Instead he put his arms around her, holding her close. He was warm. And hard. And big. She didn't want to think beyond those moments, didn't want to admit that there was anything else to say. But as their clean sweat began to grow chilled, he spoke once more. “I'll be damned, my dear, if this is the last time I have you.”

He was wrong. Utterly wrong on both counts. He wouldn't have her again, and they were
both
already damned.

For the first time in months, Margaret felt the full weight of loss settle on her shoulders.

But she'd shouldered heftier burdens on her own. Her eyes stung, but this time she didn't lean on him. She didn't weep. Instead she moved his hands off her shoulders and disentangled their bodies. Disentangled his life from hers.

 

B
Y THE NEXT AFTERNOON,
Margaret had left her family home and her lover.

She sat on the squabs opposite her brother. From the road, she could hear the creak of the carriage, the clop of horse hooves. They made a regular procession: this conveyance, another for the servants and luggage and yet another carefully converted to transport her father to London. They had been traveling for some hours already, and given the leisurely pace of their travel, days of their journey still waited. Those days were going to be very long, if she and Richard spent the entire time not conversing with each other. They would seem even longer if he chose to lecture her.

But so far, he hadn't said a word. He'd simply looked out his window at the passing landscape, watching hill after hill disappear into oblivion. And she'd waited, her fists clenched together, for the coming explosion.

She could already predict what he would say. It was nothing she hadn't told herself before. A lady's virtue was her most precious possession, and she'd squandered hers not once, but twice—the second time on the man who sought to destroy her family. No doubt her brother was wondering if he could trust her. Or any of the reports she'd sent.

Richard sighed heavily, and turned away from the landscape that flitted by the carriage window.

“Are you going to rip up at me?” Her voice sounded stilted and formal. After their hours of silence, it also seemed unexpectedly loud. “Because if you are, I should prefer that you get it over with.”

Richard cocked his head and squinted at her. Margaret held her spine straight and met his gaze. She wasn't going to let him cow her. If she was in the wrong, it was only because there was no right choice to be had.
It took her a few moments to realize that he was squinting not in an attempt to intimidate her, but because his eyes had been dazzled by the sunlight reflecting off the lake outside.

“Do you see me as such a monster, then?” he finally asked.

She had no response. Had he been Edmund, he would have heaped aspersions on her head. But Richard was quieter than their middle brother—quieter and, she'd always thought, kinder. More understanding.

He sighed. “No, Margaret. I'm not going to remonstrate with you. I should think you've had enough of that.” He shook his head. “Tell me—was Father as horrid the entire time I was away as he was this morning?”

“At least he's speaking now.” Margaret shook her head. It had almost been a relief, when the first words out of his mouth had been to call Richard a girlish idiot. “He's been worse. Far worse.”

“Egad.” Richard sounded tired. “Well. Edmund and I got ourselves as far away from him as we dared. And we gave not the first thought to what it meant for you to be left behind. It destroys me to say it, but that Turner fellow was right. We haven't done well by you.” He turned his head to look at her thoughtfully.

That Turner fellow
had another name, and Margaret could not but think it—
Ash
—without conjuring up his face in her mind. That cleft chin, those solid cheekbones. And best of all, that hint of a lazy smile that took over his face as he looked at her and called her a magnificent creature…