Chapter 11
“Is something troubling you, my love?” Verity asked that evening as she lay in his arms, both of them spent and sated.
Her unbound hair flowed freely around her, some of the tendrils tickling King’s chest as he inhaled slowly, trying to find the words that would soothe her.
She was an inviting, warm and silken weight atop him, her curves molded pliantly to his body.
He had fucked her three times today, and he still wanted her a fourth.
They had both been wrong earlier in his study.
Verity wasn’t a poison or an antidote. She was a need, as necessary to him as air and water and the sun.
How he had lived for so many years without her was a mystery to him.
He could not fathom ever having wanted another or desiring anyone else again.
The depth of his pull to her was a sobering revelation for a dedicated sybarite such as himself.
But then, it had not been King’s only realization of the day.
Just a fortnight into his marriage, and Verity was changing him.
Changing him so thoroughly he didn’t recognize the man he had become.
One who wanted to speak of his past pain with her, who allowed the desiccated husk of his heart to open for a small child, who wanted to bask in the love of one woman alone.
In truth, it was possible he had begun to change before her blow to the head.
He had admired her and been drawn to her even then.
It hadn’t been her beauty alone, though Verity’s loveliness was undeniable.
Rather, it had been her boldness, her sweetness, her good heart.
It had been the way she had chosen to live her life on terms of her choice.
Terms he had inadvertently taken away from her.
Guilt speared him anew at the reminder that the Verity he knew before the fire had been determined to live for the memory of her beloved. She had chosen never to marry but to remain unwed, perpetually in mourning for the beau she had lost.
But she was his now. So perfectly, wonderfully his. He didn’t regret taking her from a ghost. But he did regret the way it had happened, her amnesia making her forget certain threads of her past and allowing him to insert himself into her world instead.
“King,” she said, jolting him from his tumultuous thoughts. “Are you asleep?”
He was very much awake. In need of something to chase the grim introspections haunting him.
“Why should anything be troubling me?” he asked, because a question was so much easier than an answer.
So much easier than the truth.
“You have been unusually quiet.”
He kissed her crown, idly sifting strands of her hair. “Can a man not simply admire his wife in the darkness?”
“You can’t see me.”
“Wrong.” In the silvery moonlight seeping through the windows, he could see her silhouette, lovingly delineated. “I can see enough of you to tempt me anew.”
She made a purring sound of delight, stirring against him as she caressed his shoulders. “You are insatiable, husband.”
“When it comes to you, angel, I am.”
She kissed his chest. “If this is the reception I receive when I come home, I shall have to take tea at my brother’s town house more often.”
He chuckled. “And which one of us is insatiable now?”
“You have quite thoroughly debauched me,” she murmured.
“I suppose I should beg for forgiveness, but I haven’t a single regret in that regard.” He stroked the patch of skin at the base of her spine, so smooth, so soft.
“Nor do I.” She pressed her nose to him and inhaled deeply.
“Did you just smell me, woman?”
“Yes.” She breathed in again. “I love your scent. It reminds me of something that I can’t seem to recall. Something at once decadent and familiar and yet new, all at once.”
“Good, then, I trust?” he rumbled, bemused by her description and the unsettling reminder that parts of her memory could return at any moment.
Parts of her that might one day return and bring a whole new host of demons to claim them both.
“Quite good,” she said, pausing in a way that suggested she had something more to say.
He could sense it.
“And?” he prodded.
“And I like to be surrounded by you,” she said softly. “Because…I don’t know how to explain it. I feel like I almost lost you, and all I want is to breathe you in and wrap myself around you and soak in every second of you that I can.”
A tightness started to build steadily in his chest. He hated knowing that she wasn’t speaking of him just now, but that she was thinking, somewhere in the locked recesses of her mind, of Lord Leopold.
He wanted those words to be about him with a ferociousness that startled him.
He was jealous, so very painfully, achingly jealous, of a dead man.
One whose place he had taken without compunction.
One whose place he would seize again unrepentantly, if it meant he could have Verity in his arms like this.
“You didn’t lose me,” he said at last, his voice rusty with emotion. “You’ll never lose me, Verity.”
But he could lose her, came the bitter, unwanted thought. If she remembered, if she discovered what he had done, if her feelings for Lord Leopold and her buried memories of him returned…
So many possibilities, all of them bloody terrible.
And suddenly, with a clarity that seized him so powerfully he could scarcely take a breath, King realized he had begun to fall in love with the woman he had married on a selfish whim.
He didn’t know when it had started. Likely the day he’d seen her in her mourning weeds, hiding away from the revelers at her brother’s ball, still holding the candle of her love for a dead man ten years after he was gone.
Or when he had learned of her affection for orphans, her sheer dedication to them.
Or when she had driven with him to Rotten Row, the way her laugh had rung like a bell as they had set on their path, echoing off the stern and elegant facades of town houses.
“You shan’t lose me either,” Verity said, sliding up his chest to give him a long, lingering kiss.
When she broke the kiss, he cupped her nape, marveling at her in the darkness, this stunning, courageous, loyal woman who by some stroke of fate had come to be his. Ghosts could bloody well remain where they belonged. She was his now, and he was keeping her.
Until she remembers, whispered a voice from deep within.
A voice he summarily silenced.
There was the chance she would never regain her memories, and he selfishly hoped for it.
Wished for it, even. Because if she remembered, she would hate him for his deception.
She would hate him for marrying her, for taking what she had intended for Lord Leopold.
Had she intended to go to her grave a maiden, saving herself for her dead betrothed? He couldn’t bear to think it.
What manner of man was he? He almost didn’t recognize himself, the man he had become.
She lifted her head, staring down at him, and he wished he could see more of her face. Her expressive, pale-blue eyes, specifically. He wanted to know what she was thinking.
“Your mind is busy,” she said, reading him far too well.
She already knew him. Knew him better than he knew himself, it sometimes seemed. He wanted to resent her for it, but he felt nothing but the aching sense in his chest that he was too late to stop himself from falling completely under her spell.
“I am thinking,” he admitted.
“Do you want to tell me?”
Her hesitant question filled him with self-loathing.
It was a miracle she had forgiven him for the way he had reacted to the sight of her in the nursery that night, holding Daphne’s blanket.
For confiding only pieces of himself in her whilst she remained so open and giving, so willing to love him when he was the least deserving of her care.
There was a place he could start, he thought.
The child. Even if he couldn’t tell her the truth about her memories and the past they had shared, he could give her something she wanted.
He had meant to tell her earlier, but he had been so overwhelmed with desire, so filled with emotions he had no wish to study, that he had simply fucked her on the desk in his study instead.
And later, there had been dinner and port, and they had kissed for hours in the library.
She had read him poems, and then they parted to prepare for bed, and when he’d seen her in her transparent nightgown, her nipples hard and inviting, he had lost all coherent thought.
“If you don’t want to speak of whatever it is that has been weighing on your mind, I understand,” she said tenderly.
And he hated himself anew. Because he wasn’t worthy of this wonderful woman’s empathy. Wasn’t worthy of her in any way. But he was a greedy bastard who was all too content to take her anyway and fight to keep her.
“Miss Emma,” he forced himself to say. “I did want to speak with you concerning her future.”
Verity stiffened in his arms. “Oh?”
“Having her in the household hasn’t proven the disturbance I feared it would.”
He felt the tension draining from Verity at once.
“Do you mean that?”
“I do.” He cleared his throat, still feeling out of his depths, mired in new emotions he had believed himself incapable of feeling. “If you wish for the girl to make her home with us instead of returning her to the orphanage when it is rebuilt, I am amenable.”
How stiff and lordly he sounded, he thought wryly.
Verity didn’t seem to mind.
“You are saying that Emma can stay with us?”
Before he had married Verity, the mere notion would have made him shudder. But no longer.
“Yes,” he said firmly. “If that is your wish, and if the child wishes it as well, then she may stay.”
Verity kissed him again, sudden and hard. “Thank you, my love. You won’t regret it, I promise.”