Earl Crush (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #2)

Chapter 12

… action was now a necessity to desires so much on edge as ours…

—from Lydia’s private copy of FANNY HILL

Oh shite , he thought. Oh hell.

She seemed at once to understand what he was about. She tipped her head to the side with a gasp, making room for him to press his cheek against her skin. Her hair fell down around him, shielding his face.

And then she lifted one leg and hooked it around his waist, and he went ever so slightly mad.

Oh God , he thought. And Lydia. Lydia.

She was a step above him, but he was still taller, and her skirts fell back as she tightened her leg around him. He untangled his fingers from her hair and caught her leg beneath her knee. It was not layers of skirts and petticoats he felt there, but the thin silk of her stockings, and beneath that the warmth of her flesh.

Oh Jesus, she was soft and warm everywhere. His hand slipped down the outside of her thigh, hitching her higher and tighter against him.

He felt the vibration of the sound she made as he did so, a breath that was not quite a moan. He could feel her breasts rising and falling unsteadily, and oh God, he wanted more. More of her. He wanted to slide his hand farther up that soft, lush thigh until he reached the bow of her garter and then past it. He wanted skin.

But ah yes, he already had skin—right here, where his mouth was pressed against her neck. His lips parted, and he tasted her, her sweet skin, her racing pulse. He dipped down, a little farther—her collarbone, God, yes , a perfect ridge for his teeth and tongue.

She gasped a little and tilted her head and then—ah, then she pushed her hips up into him. Like she wanted. Like she needed him too. He tightened his grip on her thigh and pressed her harder into the wall, and she whimpered and tangled one hand in his hair. God, it felt good—she felt so good, the almost-ache where she pulled his hair, the almost-surrender of her beneath him, her leg drawing him tighter, crushing his body to hers. He dragged his hand from her waist up—to her rib cage, to the side of her full breast, cursing the fabric between them. He wanted nothing between them, nothing but her breasts’ heavy weight in his palms and his body rocking into—

“Aye, mate, wait till you have her in your room!”

Arthur froze.

It was the laughing, raucous voice that they’d heard from the bottom of the stairs.

It was the reason he had begun this charade in the first place, the reason Lydia stood beneath him, her leg wrapped around his body.

He was not trying to shag her on a staircase, for God’s sake! He was trying to hide .

He kept his face pressed against Lydia’s décolletage, his hand still clutching her thigh, and tried to control his breathing.

“Oh,” Lydia said, and Christ, her voice was breathless. She laughed a little, that soft surprised laugh that he loved. “Newlyweds. Our”—Arthur’s fingers tightened on her in surprise, pulling their bodies together, and she gave a little gasp—“our honeymoon.”

Well, hell, it was as good of an excuse as any for why he’d been a hair’s breadth from public copulation.

“The room’s too damned far, my love,” he rasped. He did not have to feign the desperate, lust-drunk sound of his voice, by God.

The unseen voice laughed again. “And the servants’ stairs are awfully busy for your lady wife, but I’ll not opine further. A happy marriage to you, indeed!”

The man’s voice had faded as he spoke, the last words called down to them from above.

Arthur stood stock-still, his mouth an inch from the top of Lydia’s breasts.

“Ah,” she whispered finally. “He’s—ah, he’s gone.”

“Aye,” Arthur said. Her hair was around his face, strands of it tickling his mouth—God, he loved it all, her hair, her sweet-warm scent, her soft curves and softer skin—

“You can let me go.”

“Aye.” He exerted his will. He made himself lift his head and loose his fingers from her thigh. Slowly, slowly she uncurled her leg from around his waist and dropped it to the ground.

He looked down at her. Her eyes were brilliant in the dimly lit stairwell, her cheeks flushed, her lips parted. She looked—she looked—

Oh God, she looked like temptation. She looked the way he had not let himself imagine she would look: soft and roused and hungry. The way he had wanted her, every night and every morning, from the moment he’d first held her in his arms.

“We should go,” she whispered.

Christ, she was right. He could not stand there in the stairwell, staring down at her and wondering if she felt anything like what he felt right now. Wondering if he’d imagined the gasp and whimper she’d made when his mouth had found her skin.

He wanted to ask. He wanted to know if she’d been pretending or if she’d been as lost and frantic as he.

He wanted to know how she’d felt when she saw her own name, pressed by Davis’s hand into his papers. And he could not bring himself to say it.

In his and Davis’s lives, Arthur had come first only once: in the order of their birth. He had been lucky in that, in the eyes of the world—his was the earldom, his the vote in the House of Lords. But their father’s unforgiving expectations had also been his, and the responsibility of a failing estate and hundreds of tenants.

He had never lived up to those expectations. He had tried—God, for years and years he had tried—but it had been a useless project. He could recall with ice-edged clarity the day he’d come home after dark, damp and muddy, exultant over the afternoon he’d spent with one of the tenants. They’d built a small mill, powered by a waterwheel of Arthur’s own design, and the man’s wife had been beside herself with delight, crowing over the time she would save in pounding grain.

His father had taken one look at Arthur’s disheveled state and cracked a laugh. “And now do you understand,” he’d said, “why they will never take you seriously?”

The earl had left then—Davis in tow—for an evening out.

His father had made it clear, in a thousand large and small ways, that Davis, not Arthur, ought to have been the heir. Hell, everyone thought it. Davis was charming, easygoing—who wouldn’t have preferred that to Arthur’s awkward bluntness, his reclusiveness, his unrelenting intensity?

So he’d stopped trying to please them. He’d stopped trying to win approval when the outcome was always failure, the finish line ever further out of his reach.

Until now. God, now, with Lydia, he wanted to come first. Wanted it as he’d never wanted anything in his life. And he knew—he knew how setting himself up in competition with Davis would go. How it had always gone.

He could not ask her how she’d felt about Davis’s papers. He couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

“You’re right,” he said. “We should go.”

He turned and made his way down the stairwell and out the back door. Lydia stayed close behind him.

Outside the building, Georgiana and Huw awaited them.

“What took you so long?” Georgiana demanded. “I was on the verge of a rear assault on the building—”

“We were waylaid,” Lydia said quickly, “but all’s well. He was not recognized.”

“Good,” said Huw, “now let’s go. It’s a long, dark ride back to Strathrannoch Castle, and the dining room is starting to empty.”

It was true. Around the side of the building, Arthur could see people emerging from the front door, making their way to their homes or carriages.

“We’ll keep to the shadows,” he said. “Back here, amongst the trees, and find our way back to the coach-and-four before—”

It was a good plan. It would have been a good plan, at least, if the next voice he heard had not been one he was intimately familiar with.

“Strathrannoch? Good heavens, boy, is that you?”

And from around the corner of the building—my God, the woman must have the eyes of a hawk—came Lady de Younge.

She was tall and slim, her silver hair piled atop her head in a style faintly reminiscent of the previous century. She wore a white turban and white plumes, and a cloak over her severe purple evening gown.

“Ah, yes,” he said. There was no help for it now. “Lady de Younge, a pleasure.”

She came closer, and Arthur realized Lord de Younge was there as well, trailing his taller wife. Lord de Younge placed a hand on his wife’s lower back and then raised his quizzing glass.

“I say, Maggie, you’re right! Strathrannoch, m’boy! What brings you to Haddon Grange?”

“A bit of—a bit of—” He was an idiot. He had no idea what to say. A bit of arson followed by some casual groping in a stairwell?

He was saved from having to reply by the laughing voice he’d heard on the stairs, now pitched rather higher in tones of shock.

“Lord Strathrannoch!” The man stepped out the back door, his face flushed and his eyes trained upon Arthur’s damned conspicuous form. “I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize you at once, my lord—and—and—my lady!”

Arthur’s mouth opened. Not a single word emerged. He watched the proceedings in a kind of silent daze, as of one watching a runaway carriage plunge toward the edge of a cliff.

The man from the stairwell—Arthur was fairly certain he was the third son of a former land steward—dropped into a bow at the waist.

Lord de Younge, meanwhile, pressed his quizzing glass closer to his face. “ My lady? ” he demanded. “Is there a Lady Strathrannoch now?”

“Aye,” said the steward’s third son, rising from his bow and looking even pinker about the cheeks. “Newlyweds they are—and celebrating here in Haddon Grange!”

Lady de Younge’s smile went practically incandescent. “Lady Strathrannoch! Oh, Arthur! Where have you been keeping her? A new countess!”

“Ah,” Arthur said again. “I—”

Lady de Younge pressed her hands to her bosom. “Your mother—oh, your mother would be so happy! Come here, child, let me have a look at you!”

And then she plucked Lydia from her place at Arthur’s side and wrapped her in an embrace.

The carriage in his mind hit a rock, launched into the air, and sailed over the precipice.

The moon had barely risen by the time Huw halted the coach-and-four at the entrance to the de Younges’ manor. The couple had, naturally, invited them to stay the night and celebrate their nuptials.

Bloody bollocking hell.

“This is a disaster,” Arthur hissed.

“Not at all,” said Georgiana. Her face was set with purpose and ever so slightly terrifying. “This is an opportunity!”

On the brief ride from Haddon Grange to the de Younges’ residence, Kilbride House, he and Lydia had shown her Davis’s papers, as well as the invitations from Lady de Younge to Davis that they’d stolen from Davis’s chamber. She’d appeared absolutely delighted, muttering beneath her breath about cryptography and investigative research .

“Huw can go back to Strathrannoch Castle in the morning and gather your things,” Georgiana went on gleefully. “If you can persuade them to host you for several days, I can pretend to be Lydia’s lady’s maid and sleep belowstairs with the servants, while you pry information from the de Younges themselves. Imagine what we can discover! You could not have planned this better if you’d tried.”

“Except for the part where we have to pretend we are married !” said Lydia. Her voice was somewhere between a whisper and a despairing moan.

Despair. That was how she felt about the idea of being his wife. Despair. He might remind himself of that the next time he felt compelled to lick her collarbone.

Unfortunately, he also suspected that Georgiana was right. “’Tis not as though we’d be making it worse, I suppose, by keeping up the pretense—the de Younges already think we’re wed. We can invent a story—tell them we met in Edinburgh, perhaps. There’s no reason anyone need learn your true identity. No one from London knows you’re here.”

Lydia looked up at him, eyes an even darker blue in the moonlight. She reached out and grazed his knee with her fingers, then pulled her hand back as though she’d been burned. “Arthur—Lord Strathrannoch—I’m so sorry for saying that we were married. It was the first thing that came to mind when that fellow stumbled upon us—I never dreamed he would come back!”

“’Tis not your fault.”

“Of course it is!” Her cheeks had gone pink again, and what he really wanted to do was put his mouth there and feel the heat of her skin.

Which was the worst possible thing to be thinking about . Christ, the woman addled him. One taste of her and he’d gone straight out of his head. She ought to be bottled and sold as a mind-altering substance.

Georgiana cocked her head. “And what exactly were you two doing that made the man think you were newlyweds?”

“Nothing,” Arthur said, at the precise moment that Lydia burst out, “Kissing!”

Georgiana’s eyebrows shot toward her hairline.

“Not—not really—that is, we were pretending to kiss—to hide Arthur’s identity!”

“Naturally,” Georgiana said.

Lydia buried her face in her hands and made another one of those despairing sounds.

“Dinna fash,” he said, because the sight of her with her face hidden did something uncomfortable to his insides. “Perhaps we can, er, have the marriage annulled.”

“We are not actually married!”

“Ah, no. I meant that’s what we can tell people. When you disappear from Scotland, never to be seen or heard from again.”

The words sent a queer, sharp pang through him, like a bell chiming in his bones.

Lydia emerged from her hands. “Surely that will be an embarrassment to you. Truly, I am so sorry.”

He didn’t think. He reached out and took her hands in both of his. “I told you. Dinna fash. I don’t mind it. You were clever on the stairs, quick-thinking and brave. I wouldn’t blame you for such a thing, not even if it hadn’t worked at all. And it did work.”

“It worked well beyond your expectations,” said Georgiana, and Arthur recalled himself enough to drop Lydia’s hands. “And now you have an opportunity to finish what you started and find out how the de Younges are connected to Davis.”

Though he had not intended any of this, he had to admit that it did provide them with a clear path forward. And he meant what he’d told her. He did not mind.

Of course he did not, damn it. He would not mind pretending she was his, not when he wanted it to be real.

Lydia, meanwhile, was fighting with the tangled ribbon at her waist and looking miserable. When she had finally wrestled it into submission, she glanced up at him. “Yes, I suppose we cannot let this chance pass us by. Only—I shall embarrass you. Pretending to be your wife.”

He blinked. “When you go, do you mean? Because I’ve been thrown over?”

She appeared slightly agonized. “No—well, yes, that too, come to think of it. I only meant—at a house party full of strangers, I shall be an utter disaster. I may well cast up my accounts into a potted palm. It would not be the first time, as you well know.”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “I don’t care about such things. What part of my ruined castle and rampaging rodents would lead you to believe I did?”

“Of course you care.” She twisted her fingers together in her lap. “It will affect how everyone sees you. Their opinions of you.”

This time, he considered Lady Georgiana’s proximity, and decided it was worth it. He reached out and caught Lydia’s chin in his hand. She sat frozen, staring at him, and her skin was so soft beneath his fingers that his grip gentled almost without his intending it.

“They’ll think I’m a bloody lucky bastard for marrying a woman so bonny and fine. No doubt they’ll wonder how I’ve man aged it. But I don’t give a fig for what they think. I’ve no need for their approval of me or my wife.”

Her eyes were wide and blue, fixed on his, and God, she was so lovely, he almost could not think straight.

She took a few breaths before she spoke. He liked how she did that, how she calmed herself and considered her words at the same time. Her fingers worried the ribbon at her waist, a busy gesture, not quite a caress.

“All right,” she said at last. “I’ll do it.”