Chapter Seventeen
Ginny took advantage of the four-nights-a-week-in-the-sitting-room rule to hide in her room that night, right after dinner.
She wished Marchand were more subtle about staring at her during dinner, but then, she wouldn’t know he was looking at her
if she hadn’t been looking at him. She’d, in fact, been dangerously unaware of anyone noticing their mutual fascination.
Dot had loaned her The Ghost in the Attic.
She didn’t read it.
The turmoil taking place inside her was sufficient drama.
She crawled into bed instead and listened to the wind rattling the window.
There were the things she wanted, and the things she needed. She might have made a list and put them into columns, as she’d
done with the clues about Hogarth’s gambling debt, except they swirled like leaves kicked up in a storm. She could not discern
one from another.
What she wanted was to know every single thing Marchand could teach her about sex.
But her body begged to differ. Her body insisted this was not a want but a need, as surely as hunger was a need. It’s an appetite, he’d once said to her, with something like condescension, outside of Henrietta Parker’s house. He had shown her that desire
could bank and bank as though it was leading somewhere very important, somewhere extraordinary. He had shown her it had gradations.
This afternoon, he had lit her body on fire and left it smoldering, and obviously he was the only one who could quench it.
What she wanted was not to want him.
But that would mean she never would have met him.
What she wanted was to never have met him.
Because now her life was distinctly before him and after him, no matter what happened.
Her throat was thick.
She rested her forehead on her hands.
What she both wanted and needed was to return to Sussex able to tell Hogarth his debt to the house had been paid, and that
they would have at least something with which to negotiate marriage settlements for Felicity and Fiona.
What she wanted was to stop being afraid. She wanted one damned moment when she was not afraid. Because fear was sawing away at her being and she had begun to feel as though it was only
a matter of time before it snapped completely. She wasn’t certain Marchand truly comprehended this.
And then she told herself that there was a certain symmetry to it. Her family’s recent misfortunate had originated with Gabriel.
Why shouldn’t he also be the path to salvation?
With the four-thousand-pound debt forgiven, she could perhaps negotiate a marriage settlement of two thousand pounds each for Felicity and Fiona, plus a percentage of the anticipated rent of the entailed estate they had inherited, once they found a tenant.
It was still paltry. But it wasn’t nothing.
It wasn’t insulting. It might be enough to save her sisters’ futures.
But she would still need to explain why the dowry amounts were so low, when the understanding had been so different when their
fiancés proposed.
It left nothing for her dowry, of course. That hardly seemed to matter when she didn’t even have a marriage proposal yet. She would survive, somehow.
This was the dangerous run of her thoughts when lust and desperation colluded.
One night out of her entire life.
One night in Gabriel’s bed, and she could get both what she wanted and what she needed.
And surely no one else would be the wiser?
She closed her eyes and pictured herself moving up the stairs, down the hall toward his room. Knocking on the door.
His eyes would go hot when he saw her. She felt the jolt of his gaze now, as if she stood before him.
With that thought want pierced right through her, as if her body was telling her, adamantly, that she was on the right track.
She could quench a curiosity. Solve a mystery.
She could look up into his fierce eyes as he covered and claimed her.
The rush of blood to her head at that thought nearly made her sway.
She could eradicate at least one fear. The bliss of that. The bliss of that.
She would walk away with a memory.
But what kind of memory? Would she cherish it? Would she bury it, because it would bring crippling shame every time her thoughts
touched on it?
Or would she be just another desperate woman in the annals of time who had done exactly what she needed to do when offered
an option?
Could she be just that pragmatic?
To get what she wanted, she decided she could.
And as her resolve began to solidify, her heart began to thud, thud, thud as if it were falling down one stair at a time.
She sat up on the edge of her bed. My room is at the end of a corridor opposite a candle that snuffs out mysteriously. It seemed kismet now that she knew this. And perhaps he’d deliberately told her for this very reason.
Was he lying awake thinking about her, even now?
The clock downstairs struck eleven o’clock.
Slowly, as if in a dream, she reached for her pelisse and slid her arms into it. She took up her lit candle.
And set out to take another mad leap into the unknown.
Nerves somehow compressed time. She hardly recalled her journey up the stairs to his room.
Finally, she tapped at his door with two knuckles, on the theory that a decisive knock would echo like a gunshot at this time
of night.
The courage that had propelled her up the stairs was dwindling as the cold bit through her night rail and even through her pelisse.
She decided she would not knock a second time. She would count to five, and then flee down the stairs if he didn’t answer.
On four she heard the scrape of the bolt sliding.
The door opened.
“Guinevere.” He looked stunned.
He wore only a shirt and trousers. His sleeves were rolled up. His feet and throat and forearms were bare. Aggressively masculine-looking
curly hair sprang from the V at his throat and the hair on his head was tumbled every which way. She sensed he had rolled
out of bed and hastily dressed.
All this ungarnished gorgeous manliness went to her head like a punch.
“Good evening.” Her voice had gone thready.
And that’s when her nerve sputtered out.
She could say nothing more and merely stared. There was no light at all in which he did not look fascinating, and that included
flickering candlelight.
She tried not to glance at his trouser fall, behind which was his penis. If all went according to plan, she would become better
acquainted with it.
“Is that what you came to say?” he whispered. Still tense, but a little amused now.
She still couldn’t find her voice. “I.” It emerged more as a croak than a word.
“Is anything wrong?” he asked urgently.
Her heart swelled. God help her. It sounded as though he was ready to do murder for her, if necessary.
She swallowed. “I’m . . . I thought . . .”
He wasn’t helping her at all. Likely because he’d just fully realized she was wearing only a pelisse over a night rail. His
eyes traveled the length of her and returned to her face, and now his eyes were dark and fixed.
Queasy with fear and shame, and despite all that, despite the madness of what she was doing, there was a nearly unbearable,
pulling yearning between her legs.
Why hadn’t she rehearsed this?
“I’m . . . I’m here about your offer.” Her pounding heart made her voice tremble.
It sounded as though she were applying for a job.
“My offer.” He repeated it carefully. Whispering.
He was going to make her say it out loud?
She swallowed. “I’ve decided to . . . when first we met, you said you would . . . if I . . . one night . . .”
He pulled in a long, long breath. “Oh. I see.”
The following silence was deafening.
A draft tugged at the candle flame.
“I’m afraid that’s no longer possible,” he said.
Oddly, the fact that he’d said it so kindly made the words ring as stunningly hateful, because she was at once excruciatingly
embarrassed.
Even though there was nothing of condescension in them.
She felt like a child who had just done something ridiculous.
“Go back to bed, Guinevere.” He said this slowly, firmly yet so tenderly.
Why was his voice shaking?
She remained frozen.
“Go,” he repeated, urgently. Hoarsely.
What would he do if she reached out and touched him now? What if she traced that open V at his throat, as she longed to do?
She knew the two of them were fuse and flame.
He would combust. He would seize her like he had the day in the cemetery.
He closed the door.
And threw the bolt.
She stared at it, stunned.
She enjoyed one merciful instant of numbness before humiliation poured through her body in acidic torrents.
Like a ghost, she returned to her room, on legs she couldn’t feel. Later she couldn’t remember getting there at all.
Gabriel slid to the floor and pressed his back against the door.
“Holy Mother of GOD . . . ” he breathed.
What the bloody hell had just happened?
How had he not anticipated this?
He stared, stunned, into the shadowy depths of his room. Reeling as if he’d taken a fist to the jaw.
You mad bastard, his body howled. You mad, idiot bastard. She’d been right there, within reach. He’d seen the curve of her breast beneath her night rail outlined in candlelight and shadow, and he could,
right now, have been peeling that night rail over her head and touching his tongue to her nipple. Sliding his hands over her
satiny skin. Why are you surprised? Wasn’t this always the game plan? Why are you not exulting?
He’d barked “GO” at her instead.
It had been pure instinct, a reflex, originating someplace more primal than desire. A survival instinct.
Who, exactly, was he protecting?
And if it was her . . . why was he shaking?
At first, Ginny wished she could wad herself up into the smallest imaginable ball like a handkerchief, tuck herself into some
dark, hidden corner, and quietly finish expiring from shame.
It was almost gruesomely funny that this was not an option, as the rules of the Grand Palace on the Thames required her to
join the other guests at dinner and in the sitting room. She might have offered herself up to be ravished in exchange for