Earl Crush (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #2)

Chapter 24

I want to say

I wish I could tell you

If you’ll only come home

—from Arthur Baird to Davis Baird, crumpled and thrown into the grate

In the shadowed office at Belvoir’s Library, Arthur watched the rain paint streaks on the leaded-glass window. The duchess, who’d proven even more terrifyingly competent than Lydia had implied, had produced a folding military-style cot from her closet, which she laid out for Arthur to sleep upon. She’d also arranged for a cold supper, a decanter of brandy, and her husband’s valet to attend to Arthur in the morning—a variety of luxuries which he was not used to and did not know how to account for.

He did not know how to account for any of this.

He’d pushed the cot to the far wall and arranged himself with his back against the plaster. From there he could see out the window to the alley where Selina had said Jasper might drop off a note.

Arthur suspected he could not stay awake for the next two days running, but he supposed it was worth a try.

Anything was worth a try. He felt off-balance, uncertain, almost desperate in his need.

He’d hated to be parted from Lydia. It had felt wrong to watch her walk out the back door of the library, to see her pale hesitant expression as she looked back at him.

But he’d had to do it. So many people—Lydia, Huw, Georgiana, now these new companions of Lydia’s—had come to his aid, and their earnest eagerness had sharpened the fear inside him to a razor’s edge.

He did not know what to do with all of their generosity. It had been hard—terribly, painfully difficult—to ask for Lydia’s assistance, and she had been the one to come to him. To ask these strangers for their help was no easier.

Because of him, they could all be in danger. Because of him, Lydia had chased after the Thibodeaux’s coach—and could, so easily, have been harmed by the weapons they’d carried.

Because he had not seen Davis for what he was. Because Arthur was not enough on his own to keep Davis from straying down an indefensible path.

The drawing of St. Saviour’s Church, laid out in plain brownish lines, had felt like the scrape of glass against Arthur’s skin. He had not realized until that moment how much he wanted it all to have been some kind of mistake. He’d thought he’d extinguished the last bit of hope inside him when it came to his brother, but it was still there, impossible to fully root out.

It was dangerous to hope. Hope made the potential for disappointment so much vaster—he knew it did. It was why, with Lydia, his fears seemed to rise in consonance with the desires of his heart. He wanted her—and he was afraid he could never be enough for her. The contrast between their families was all the more stark now: she with her boisterous and loving siblings, and he, frantic to prevent his brother from committing violence. From losing a piece of his soul.

But he could not stop himself. He wanted her anyway. He would do almost anything—

He came abruptly to his feet.

There was someone in the alley, a cloak pulled over their head against the rain.

He was across the office and down the stairs in an instant. He moved as quickly as he could to the rear of the building, found the back door, and pulled it open.

Standing at the door, her hand lifted as if to knock, was Lydia.

He did not think, only reacted. He caught her about the waist—Christ, she was soaked, and the November night was frigid—and dragged her into the building, then slammed the door behind her.

“Is everything all right?” he demanded.

Her hood fell back from her face. Water ran in streams down her hair, plastering her cloak to her body. “Goodness. Yes, everything’s perfectly well. I asked Nora to keep watch for Jasper at the house.”

He had both his hands on her waist now. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you. I… was worried about you. You seemed upset.”

“You were worried about me?”

She flushed at his words, a sunrise of colors in her skin. “I do not think it so absurd.”

“No,” he said immediately. He would not have her feel embarrassed—not because of him. “’Tis not absurd. Only I…”

Only he had not expected it. He could not think of the last time someone had said those words to him. He shook his head against the maudlin thought and tried again. “’Tis only that it’s the dead of night and teeming down out there. How did you come to be here?”

She lifted her chin. “I had a groom and footman bring me in the carriage. This is not the first time I’ve come to Belvoir’s alone, nor even the tenth. I—” She hesitated. “I could not sleep.”

“God.” He pulled her against him, pressing his chin to the top of her head. “You’re wet through.”

She wriggled. His body, fool thing that it was, reacted instantly and vigorously.

“Let me go before we’re both soaked, for heaven’s sake,” she said into his shirtfront. “Let’s go up to the office. I thought… I thought perhaps I could help you keep the watch.”

He had to force himself to release her. God, he did not know why her offers of assistance—so freely made, so generously given—should make his chest ache like a finger pressed to a bruise.

He let her lead him up the stairs, and when she entered the office, he followed and shut the door behind him.

“’Tis a proper Scots rain tonight,” he said, and crossed to the sideboard to pour her a glass of brandy. “In truth I don’t expect Jasper will come before the morning.”

When he turned, her hands were beneath her skirts. She’d shed her cloak and boots, and as he watched, she stripped one damp stocking off.

He bobbled the glass.

She looked up, face a little pink. “I like the weather. Even if it did ruin these stockings.”

“Aye,” he said. Her hair was dark from the rain, and the curve of her mouth was all sweetness. “I like it as well.”

He took himself to the cot, cupping her glass of brandy in one palm. She laid her stockings across the grate and then crossed to him, passing the desk.

As she did, her gaze flickered across the paper-strewn surface and she paused, arrested. “You read my pamphlets?”

He followed her gaze. He’d found the pamphlets here in the office as he’d prowled— Some Reflections upon Marriage ; On the Equality of the Sexes ; Remarks on the Incalculable Evils of Debtors’ Imprisonment —all attributed to H, the pseudonym he knew she’d used. He’d read every one.

He’d felt a hot flare of admiration as he’d read her words. Pride in her ability to make herself heard despite her own shyness, despite a society that pushed women’s voices to the margins. He could hear her in every line, dogged and persistent and devoted to the causes she believed in.

But it had not all been pleasure. As he’d read, he’d seen echoes of the conversations she’d had with Davis in their years of correspondence. And he’d feared—

All sorts of things, familiar and foolish. That he was clumsy and untutored. That he was no fit match for her clever, capacious mind, her clarity of vision. That he could not give her what she needed.

But he forced the fear aside. “Aye, I read your pamphlets. You’ve not frightened me away with your radical ideas, so dinna fash.”

The corner of her mouth came up as she met his gaze. “You’ve not yet read the worst of them. Some are unpublished yet.”

“I expect I’ll bear up somehow.”

Her smile widened. She came the rest of the way to his side and sat next to him on the cot’s thin mattress. He passed her the glass of brandy, and their fingers brushed as she took it.

“You may have to reconsider your desire to abolish the aristocracy,” he mused, “now that you’re to be a countess.”

She tipped her chin up, a little queenly gesture. “If you suppose I will not seek to undermine the system from within, then you are quite mistaken.”

He laughed, and so did she, burying her face in her glass as she drank.

And then, to his perhaps unreasonable surprise, she tucked her legs up under her and eased her body against his. His arm automatically went around her, and she sighed a little, leaning into him.

God. He’d not known anything could feel like this, easy and warm and close-fitting, as though she’d been made to curl up beneath his arm. He ran his fingers along her forearm, relishing her softness.

Could he have this? Night after night, Lydia in his arms, luminous and quick-witted and brave enough to break his heart.

He wanted it. He’d never wanted anything so fiercely, though he knew that wanting was a terrible risk.

She rolled her glass between her palms, slowly, before she spoke. “I’m so sorry about today. About… Davis.”

His grip on her tightened before he made himself relax. “You’re sorry? Why?”

“I know it must have been difficult for you to see those plans this afternoon. To believe that Davis would use the rifle scope for violence.”

He drew a breath, chest tight. “Aye, ’twas not easy. Though in truth I blame myself as much as Davis. Had I not invented the rifle scope, none of this would have happened. If I’d seen him for what he truly was, I’d not have let him know about the device in the first place.”

She tilted up her face, her mouth close to his. “But that’s absurd. You did nothing wrong. You cannot blame yourself for your brother’s sins, Arthur.”

“I assure you, I can blame myself, and most heartily.”

“Whatever for?”

He felt his lips twist a little, and he choked back the bitterness before he spoke. “I should have known better. I should not have been blinded by what I wanted to be true and failed to see what was perfectly plain.”

“What do you mean?”

Her voice was quiet—so quiet in the shadowed room. The coals in the grate had burned low, but he did not get up to stoke them. He only held her—his Lydia, his love—and thought about her family, all that tangled-up protectiveness and misunderstanding and affection.

He thought she would understand.

“I was five years old when Davis was born,” he said, “and I thought he was mine. Our mam said I was afraid of him those first few months, but I don’t remember that. All I remember was carting his fat wee body around wherever I went—the nursery, the kitchen, the burn. He liked jam cakes. For the longest time, he was afraid of fish.”

It still, somehow, made him want to laugh. Davis had been bright-eyed and mischievous, always slipping away from his nursemaid to find Arthur wherever he was—but when Arthur had tried to teach him to catch trout in the river, the little boy had sobbed and then thrown them, one by one, back into the water.

“He was only nine when our father sent him to Eton. Younger than most of the boys there. He…”

Davis had been terrified. Their mother might have put a stop to it, had she still lived. But she had been dead a year already, and their father’s cool authority had held sway then.

“He cried,” Arthur said, “when our father loaded him into the carriage. Said he’d be good—he wouldn’t tease the lambs any longer. I think he’d gotten it into his head that he was being sent away for something he’d done wrong. That was the worst sin he could think of, I expect. Teasing the lambs.”

Lydia turned into him, her head beneath his chin. Her sweet-warm scent filled his lungs.

He locked both arms around her. “I wanted to go with him, but the earl wouldn’t have it. He told me there was no sense in paying for me to go as well, when Davis had all the potential, and I…” He paused. Swallowed. “I was too young and foolish to oppose him then.”

“No,” she murmured. “Arthur. You were a child, and he was your father. You cannot blame yourself.”

She’d abandoned her glass of brandy on the ground, and he nudged it away from the cot with the tip of his shoe. “Perhaps not. But I could have done more. When our father died, I thought things would be different between us.” He’d hoped it would be so, with the cause of so much of their rivalry laid to rest. “I thought Davis would come back to Strathrannoch.”

He’d wanted too much. He’d pressed Davis to return from London, where he’d lived with friends in the year since he’d finished at Eton. When Davis had demurred, he’d pushed harder. He could still remember how he’d felt, his pen pressed to paper as he’d looked around at his office, the shelves emptied of the books he’d sold to keep Davis at school. He’d loved Davis and envied him for so long that he could no longer see his way clear.

“I failed to bring him home. I charged him with neglecting Strathrannoch, and in my guilt and shame, I only pushed him further away. I’d had years to observe the changes in him—to watch as our father—” He broke off, not certain how to say it.

Not certain he wanted to say it. Not to her. Perhaps it was foolish—she was here with him now, was she not? She had chosen to be with him, in the end.

But still and all, he did not want to tell her that the earl had always preferred Davis.

“He pitted you against each other?” she asked softly.

“Aye. You could say that.”

But there hadn’t been much of a competition, not really. Arthur had lost before he’d even begun.

He pressed his cheek to her hair. “I think… ah, God. I think part of me has never stopped seeing that little boy in him. Wanting to be good. Wanting to stay by my side. When he came to Strathrannoch Castle this year, it took no work on his part to persuade me that he was there to stay. I wanted to believe it.”

“That’s not a fault in you—never a fault. You love him. That doesn’t just go away because you’ve been hurt.”

“Aye,” he murmured, “perhaps that’s so.”

So many things he’d thought he’d buried—deep in the past, alongside all his childish hurts—had begun to rise in him since Lydia had come to Strathrannoch Castle. A wish, sweet and painful, for a family of his own. A desire to be chosen for himself.

He could not find the words for what he wanted to say to her, to this woman who would be his wife. He did not know how to tell her that he wanted more than her hand in her marriage. More than her body.

He wanted her heart—her love—their future together. He wanted everything.

But perhaps—perhaps she knew, even without his saying it.

She had come, had she not? She was here, and he was not alone, and he had not even needed to ask.

“Thank you,” he said. He found the delicate bones of her wrists and traced his thumbs along them. He felt a fierce and urgent gratitude as he held her, rising as sudden as desire inside him. “Thank you for everything.”

“Oh,” she murmured. Her hands turned over, so that he might press their palms together and interlink their fingers. “It was not me. It was Selina who arranged it all.”

He gripped her hands in his. “’Twas all you, Lydia. You brought us to Haddon Grange. You got us into Kilbride House. You collected Davis’s letters and papers, and you brought us to the person who could help figure everything out. And you—”

He swallowed against the hot unsteady feeling at the back of his throat. “And you’re here. I’m—very glad that you’re here.”

She turned into him and tipped her face up. Kissing her, he found, was as urgent as his next breath. More.

She was warm and brandy-sharp. Her mouth—God, he never stopped thinking about her mouth, never stopped wanting it beneath his. He tasted the soft plump curve of her lower lip, traced his tongue along the arched top. She made a tiny sound in the back of her throat—a needing sound—and leaned into him, pressing her breasts against the thin fabric of his shirt.

He stroked up her waist, cupping one breast. She twisted into his hand, and he felt the taut point of her nipple through her dress. He teased it delicately with his thumb and forefinger, and she made another sound, louder.

Need tightened his belly and stiffened his cock, but he ignored the demands of his body. He nudged her legs to the front of the cot, bringing her feet flat to the ground. And then he went to his knees in front of her.

He almost did not know what he wanted. He wanted her—the desire to feel her body on his again was almost unbearable—but even more than that, he wanted to make her understand. He wanted to show her that he did not take her for granted. That her pleasure meant more to him than his own.

He wanted her to know she had not made a mistake in agreeing to marry him.

He wanted to believe that himself.

He looked up into her face. God, he loved the look of her from this vantage—the flush in her cheeks, the shadows cast by those rose-copper lashes. He loved the way her legs splayed apart to accommodate his shoulders as he knelt between her thighs.

He pushed her frock up. She wore neither petticoats nor stockings, only the thin dark blue fabric of her dress and her simple white chemise. Beneath her skirts she was all heat and softness, all bared skin. He brought his mouth to the inside of her thigh. “Can I?”

“Yes. Please.”

Her voice was almost ragged. That unsteady rasp worked upon him—blurred his mind, unfocused him from his purpose—and he tried to recall himself.

It was difficult to think clearly. Everything about her aroused him—the hitch in her breathing, the tiny lift of her hips as his mouth trailed closer to her sex.

He found the crease of her pelvis and ran the tip of his finger along the shallow line, then traced the path with his tongue.

She whimpered. Her knees tightened on his shoulders, and her hips moved restlessly. He put his mouth to her sex and licked up, tasting her arousal, finding the tight bead of her clitoris with the tip of his tongue.

Jesus, she was so wet already. The knowledge that she wanted him rippled through him, flooding his body with an urgent, mindless heat.

He wanted to stand and lock her legs around his waist—Christ, he wanted to be inside her again. But he wanted to pleasure her more. He wanted her to come so hard she couldn’t see, and then he wanted to make her come again.

He worked her clitoris with his tongue and ran his first two fingers through her wetness. She made another wordless sound. Her hips rose erratically toward where his hand met her flesh, as though her body felt the same driving need for completion that his did.

He eased back. “Tell me,” he murmured. “Tell me what you want.”

“I—I don’t—Arthur, please .”

Her thighs were trembling. He rubbed one palm soothingly along her leg. With his other hand, he pressed two fingers just inside her. He felt her body squeeze down, drawing him in.

“You want to come, my love?”

“Yes—Arthur—don’t stop.”

God. He loved when she said his name. He loved to hear her, ragged and panting and on the edge. He loved knowing that he could stoke this flame in her, that his mouth, his hands, his body could give rise to the desperate need in hers.

He pushed his fingers all the way inside her.

“I will never have enough of this,” he said. “Of you.” He slipped his free hand to the soft slope of her belly, and she groaned, low and loud, as he brought his mouth again to her sex, as he worked her harder with fingers and tongue.

One of her hands came to his hair, grasping for purchase. Her hips bucked, desperate, and he pressed his palm against her abdomen to hold her in place. She gave a sobbing cry as he did so, at the way his fingers curled up, and then he felt the powerful rhythmic contractions of her body and tasted her release on his tongue.

She was wordless in her pleasure, all breath and heat, and as soon as she stopped clenching around him, he stood. His hands went to the buttons of her dress, unfastening them in a shaking rush, pulling her bodice down to reveal the pale bounty of her breasts.

The cot was too damned small. He caught her to him, spreading her legs to straddle his hips, and brought both of them down to the ground.

She gasped a little as she shifted in his lap, her knees pressed to his sides. There was still a fine trembling in her body that redoubled when he brought his mouth to one nipple. The groan on her lips was unsteady.

He flicked his lips across the taut peak, and she rocked against him. She reached for the fastenings of his trousers, but he would not let her. He locked his hand over hers and dragged their joined fingers beneath her skirts.

“I’m—” she gasped. “I can’t—”

“Aye, you can.” He teased her nipples with his mouth, with his free hand, watching them flush in the dim room. “There’s no rush. Let me touch you a while.”

She whimpered and clutched at his wrist.

He brought her up again slowly, a gentle suction at her breasts and careful rhythm between her legs. He was easy with her—patient—fighting back the clawing need that rose in him at the sight of her nipples wet from his mouth, at the clamp of her thighs around his hips. He brought her hand to her sex and urged her in soft earthy words to touch herself.

Her head tipped back, her throat exposed and her breasts arching forward. He wanted his mouth everywhere on her skin, wanted to taste every part of her. Jesus, he wanted to lick the perspiration that had beaded between her breasts, and then he wanted to slide his cock along that slick valley.

She started to tremble again as their fingers moved together, his inside her body and hers at her clitoris. Satisfaction licked along his skin. Yes, God yes, he wanted her to come again. He wanted—he wanted—

“Say my name,” he said hoarsely.

“Arthur,” she murmured.

The sound of his name on her lips felt almost like a release in itself—a physical pleasure, a throb of need.

He pulled his fingers from her body and she made a wordless sound of protest. Her lashes fluttered open, her eyes all dazed dark blue as she found his face.

“Say it again,” he ordered.

“Arthur.”

He thrust his fingers into her and heard a groan, a gasp, hers, his—he did not know. Her voice was a tactile thing, a pulse of bliss that tightened his bollocks as her fingers moved in time with his own. He felt almost uneasy at the pleasure engendered by his name in her mouth.

He had wanted to show her—wanted to prove to her that he could please her, that he could master his own need and attend to hers, again and again, until she was limp and boneless.

But his desire for her body was nothing to his need for her heart. That need had risen impossibly sharp, impossibly fast. He did not know how to control it. He could not.

Her lashes had fallen again, touching her cheeks.

“Open your eyes,” he demanded. “Look at me.”

She wrenched her eyes open. Her lips were parted; her hair was still wet from the rain.

“Come for me again,” he said.

For me. Those were the words that he couldn’t say alone, the words that clawed at his chest.

He wanted to satisfy her—God, he did, he loved the way she flushed and fractured—but it was not all for her. He wanted to bind her to him with pleasure, wanted her to know that he could shatter her again and again—wanted her never to need anything else but this. But him.

He felt unstrung, undone with desire, shamed by his selfishness and desperate for the feeling of her culmination.

“I want you with me,” she said, her voice jagged. “Together this time. Please, Arthur.”

He would never tell her no. He would give her anything she wanted, no matter the cost.

He wrenched his trousers open and then cupped her buttocks in his hands, lifting her. “Put your hands on me.” His voice shook. “Take me in.”

She did. Her fingers were heady, mind-numbing in their pleasure, and when he eased her down onto his cock, the single, slow, euphoric glide nearly brought him off.

She pressed her head against his shoulder, her soft breasts crushed against his chest. Her fingers tangled in his shirtfront, and her thighs began to tremble. He lifted her, pulled her closer and rocked up into her, small deep movements that took him, shaking, almost to the point of his own release.

She cried out at the moment of her crisis, and the word on her lips was his name.

I love you , he thought as he withdrew, as he spilled himself with a desperate gasp in the cradle of her thighs. Always.

But he kept the words inside him, alive in his heart, as fragile and endless as a flame.