Chapter Twenty #2
“Sydenham had a change of heart, Ginny.” He said this gently but firmly. “And Hogarth is a fine young man who made a mistake,
and I approve of the way he intends to see it right. And didn’t you find three heart-shaped stones? Surely it was all bound to turn out fine in the end.”
She didn’t reply. But the slight, tender curve of her smile told him she didn’t believe him.
God, she looked lovely today. Irresistibly pristine and proper, in a high-necked yellow walking dress and a straw bonnet tied
with a matching ribbon. But anyone who had the wherewithal to look closely could see how thoroughly loved and ravished she’d
been last night. The faint lavender shadows beneath her eyes. Her lips just a little pinker and fuller, swollen from endless
kissing. The drowsy, sultry heat in her eyes when she looked at him.
He risked tracing her lips with a finger. She kissed the tip of it.
He could hear voices nearby—it sounded like Dot, and perhaps Helga—or he would have stolen a kiss.
When he heard the wheels of a hack approaching, he pulled in a resigned breath.
“I hate to leave you now,” he said quietly. “But I’ve business that cannot wait. I’ll see you tonight in the sitting room, Miss Woodville. And you’ve a standing invitation for eleven o’clock in my room.”
That night, Ginny and Marchand listened to Mrs. Pariseau read from The Arabian Nights Entertainments in the presence of all of her new friends from the Grand Palace on the Thames.
Then Ginny bid everyone a fond farewell. She would be leaving for Sussex the following morning on the mail coach, and that
meant she needed to rise very early, even earlier than the maids. She needed to finish packing her trunks and valise this
evening.
She was hugged and cheek-kissed and patted (Daniel did the patting), and she basked in the shower of genuine affection while
Marchand looked on.
“You’ll have to return to fetch your donkey. But I’m happy to look after her while you’re away,” Mr. Delacorte told her.
“Thank you, Mr. Delacorte. I know she’s in good hands.”
She turned to Marchand.
He bowed to her. “It’s been a pleasure, albeit a brief one, Miss Woodville.”
“Likewise, Mr. Marchand.” She curtsied sedately.
At eleven o’clock that evening, Ginny appeared at his bedroom door in her night rail. She’d thrown a pelisse over it.
His door was already ajar. She pushed it open, closed it, and locked it.
She threw off the night rail and pelisse, kicked both aside, and went naked into his arms.
They made love wordlessly, with a desperate, thorough, tender savagery. Licking, kissing, clawing, sucking, colliding. Sighs,
the slide of hands over skin, their names moaned in begging cadences, and the crackle of the fire were the only sounds.
Finally they lay, spent and sweaty, side by side, hands twined, in silence.
“I cannot bear the thought of never seeing you again,” she whispered finally, anguished. “And I cannot imagine never seeing
my family again. And that’s what might very well happen if I stay with you.”
His heart shot into his throat.
He’d asked nothing of her and demanded nothing of her. He had resigned himself to taking what he could, and to the pain of
missing her when she was gone.
This was the first time she’d mentioned she’d even thought of staying with him.
He scarcely dared breathe, let alone speak.
He considered what to say.
“I meant everything I said to you in the hall the other day, Ginny,” he said carefully. “About what I will give you. What
I will do for you. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you.” Too many endings were nigh; he could not bear the miracle of hope’s
resurrection only to watch that die again, too.
She was quiet. They both sensed the heaviness in the room.
He dragged his hand along the eloquent curve of her waist to the swell of her hip. “Sometimes, Ginny . . . I think you would feel better about this if I was just a little ashamed of being what I am.”
“Never.” She was indignant. “Do not put words in my mouth, just because you want to goad me into an argument so we feel less sorry about parting.”
That made him smile. She was too bloody smart, and so effortlessly able to stand up to him. How he enjoyed it.
“Then perhaps you are a little ashamed of yourself for loving me.”
It mordantly amused him that she actually paused to think this over. “I swear to you, that’s not true. I’m not ashamed of
you, and I’m not ashamed of myself. I think you are remarkable, and I love you.”
“Tell me another word for it.”
She considered this, too. “It’s fear.”
“Fear of shame,” he countered relentlessly.
That was the crux of it, and it stopped her cold.
“You don’t under—” She stopped herself.
His temper stirred. “You know very well I understand. You wish you didn’t have to make a choice, and I wish you didn’t have
to make a choice, but you do. Because whether you want to view it that way, you do have a choice. I am who I am, and you are
who you are. I will give you the whole goddamn world. But I can’t change who I am.”
She half laughed, half groaned. “You’ve ruined me, Gabriel. You’ve ruined me. Not just because of this . . .” She gestured at the bed. “But for anyone who is . . . bearable.”
He laughed shortly. “Oh, have I now? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Miss Woodville, but you were ruined when I met you. That is, maybe your sisters are delicate and precious and your brother is sheltered, because you bravely bore the burdens that turned you into someone who
could love only a man like me. Maybe you developed like whiskey in a barrel while your siblings remained chamomile tea. And
maybe that isn’t fair. But when I met you, you were already meant only for me.”
The possessive, claiming words had the ring of prophesy. They thrilled her to her core and yet scared her, too.
If he was right, what did it mean for their futures, if they remained apart?
The silence was long and fraught.
“Stay with me,” he whispered. His voice was frayed, aching.
She knew how much it cost him to risk saying that.
“I can’t.”
He squeezed his eyes closed as if a vise were clamping his heart.
“But I also can’t imagine never seeing you again,” she whispered.
He threw an arm over his eyes. “All right,” he said evenly, tightly. “Picture, if you will, this version of the future. You’ll
marry the third son of a duke. I will secretly fuck you when you visit the ton because I am and always will be absolutely
helpless to resist you until the end of my days, because I have never known this kind of pleasure with a woman, and you will naturally be helpless to resist me. Because I will take from you,
Ginny, anything you’re willing to give me. Whenever you want to give it. You will have his children. And you will think about
me when he’s on top of you.”
She was appalled. “That’s horrible! You’re horrible!”
“Yes. And yet you love me, so what does that make you?”
She began to softly weep. Gabriel let her do it, even as every tear scored his heart like claws. Even as he half hated himself. Even though all of this pain had been expected. Neither one of them apparently knew how to suffer this in any noble and dignified sort of way.
“You’re not horrible,” she said finally, thickly, wearily. “I’m sorry. I just don’t want to hurt you and I still don’t know
what to do. I just know that I must leave for now.”
He stroked her damp hair away from her face. His throat was tight.
“No, I’m sorry, love. I fight dirty when I’m hurting or scared. But I don’t want to hurt or scare you.”
His voice was thick. He had never confessed such a thing to anyone else in his life, but that was because no one else had
ever been able to strip away all of his defenses in such a way that he’d never felt safer.
“I know. I think you know that I can take it. At least we know how to apologize.”
He gave a soft laugh.
“I do understand why you need to leave. Please know that all I truly want is for you to have what you want, whatever you decide
that may be. I will abide by it. Come back to me if you can.”
She kissed his forehead. She kissed his eyelids, one at a time. Then his temples. With each kiss she hoped to soothe a little
more of his heartache.
When she finally laid her lips over his, he captured them with his own, greedily, latched his arm around her, and took the
kiss deep, and searching, thoroughly claiming, until they were both restlessly aroused.
As he did, her hand wandered over his chest. Traced the gullies between the muscles, savored the powerful rise of them.
She took her lips away from him to drag her tongue down his throat, followed by her fingers. She traced her tongue around
his nipple, then nipped. His legs shifted, stirred, at the sharp rush of pleasure. “Ginny,” he whispered. Mesmerized.
Never, ever had anyone made love to him this way. With devastating tenderness and innocently carnal abandon.
The flat of her hand smoothed over his belly; as his cock stirred and swelled, she slipped her hand between his thighs and
stroked. His legs dropped apart to abet her as she took the head of his cock into her mouth, traced it with her tongue, sucked.
He groaned raggedly. “Oh Christ. Please. Yes.”
She licked and stroked and sucked until he was as hard as lumber.
“Inside you. Ginny, I want to be inside you.”
She rose up over him, and he showed her how to guide his cock into her.
When he was seated her head went back on a gasp.
He groaned low in his throat.
“Move with me, sweetheart.”
She did, but with evil languor, rising slowly, slowly up, sinking back down to take his whole length. Teasing herself, teasing
him.
He gripped her hips and thrust up.
She refused to let him control the speed. She tortured him with leisurely skill, gazing down at him like a conqueror.
He was mesmerized by the sway of her breasts. By the sheen of sweat on her pearly skin. By the hazed, passion-drugged intensity of her beautiful eyes. By the surprisingly talented cruelty with which she was driving both of them mad.
Finally, she moved faster.
He thought his head might explode.
He tasted his own sweat as it poured down his face. He moaned like a man being killed as nearly unendurable waves of pleasure
were banked and banked. “Love, I’m begging you.”
He thrust up again, reaching to stroke where they were joined.
Her head fell back on a cry. She set both of them free.
In a frenzied collision of hips they drove each other to the brink and at last, at last, over it.
His bliss came at him like an andiron. He blacked out briefly, her name a harsh cry, an anguish of ecstasy. He nearly fucking
wept.
He was undone.
She collapsed over him.
He slid his hands down the satiny skin of her back. Over the curve of her arse.
He slipped from her and gathered her in his arms.
Their rough breath mingled as dawn peeked through the gap of his curtains.
“Gabriel, you are precious, and I love you. Now and forever,” she whispered.
She kissed his mouth softly one more time.
He watched her without a word as she quietly dressed.
She gently closed the door behind her when she left.
Mr. Pike brought her trunk and her valise out to the park in front of the Grand Palace on the Thames in the pink light of dawn. He offered to wait with her, but as luck would have it, Mr. Marchand was up early, too. He told Pike he would be happy to wait with Miss Woodville.
Mr. Pike, who was far from naive, left them to it.
Neither one of them could say a word.
Everything had been said.
And then a hack rolled into view, and Marchand hailed it.
He helped the driver load her trunk and valise, and then he turned to her.
“Ask your mother for a sign,” he said shortly.
“I will,” she promised.
“I love you. Godspeed, Guinevere.”
He kissed her mouth, swiftly and hard. Heedless of who might see.
(Gordon the cat and the driver of the hack were the only ones who did.)
And for one final time, he closed the hack door.
It took Guinevere Woodville away from him.
Marchand sank down on the little bench in the park and closed his eyes. He tipped his head back and let the rising sun touch
his lids, his throat. All of it felt gentle on his raw spirit: the little park, the breeze, the cat winding around his ankles.
The birds starting up their songs.
He wanted a home like this.
All along he’d thought St. Giles had prepared him only for a life in hells. When really, viewed from another angle, with one
twist of the kaleidoscope, it had prepared him for the heaven that was loving Guinevere Woodville.
He’d learned that he didn’t need to keep climbing up those ladder rungs forever.
Loving and being loved was all the distance he needed from his past in St. Giles. It was everything he’d needed for so long.
His soul was downright bruised from the infinite stretching it had done lately. But he’d long ago learned that love and pain
lived hand in hand, and the privilege of loving was worth any price. Michael had taught him that.
It wasn’t that he had no fear of what might happen next.
But he was at peace.
Because he knew Ginny was a gambler at heart.
He’d already set their forever in motion. It would be ready when she came to claim it. To claim him.
What she didn’t know was that he held one final card. He’d refused to play it, even though he was certain it was the winning
one. Even though it might have kept her here.
Because that wasn’t the way he wanted to win.