Chapter 17 #2
“I see.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid not. I have never seen a woman matching that description in my establishment.”
Mary’s hands tightened in her lap.
Evander stood and placed a stack of banknotes on the desk. “For your time and discretion. If you hear anything further, send word to Blackholm House.”
Madame Fontaine swept the money into her drawer. “Of course. And please know that you and your duchess are welcome to enjoy any of our rooms this evening. Compliments of the house.”
He blinked.
Mary’s cheeks had turned pink. She stared at the edge of the desk and did not look at him, and Evander suspected that whatever image had just crossed his mind had crossed hers as well.
“That will not be necessary.”
“Pity. You make a handsome couple.”
“An Italian woman.” Mary’s voice cut through the dark carriage.
The driver had tied her mare to the back, and they sat opposite each other, the lantern swaying outside the window, while the road back to London stretched out beneath them.
“Your brother had a lover. A woman he met every night for months while my sister was carrying his child.” Mary’s hands gripped the seat. “Charlotte was pregnant, and frightened, and planning to run, and your brother was spending his evenings in a pleasure house with an Italian mistress.”
Evander pressed his lips together. “We do not know the full story.”
“We know enough,” She gritted through her teeth.
Evander turned his signet ring on his finger.
“I am sorry,” he said. “For Richard. For what he has done to your sister. For the position it has placed you in. I will find them. Both of them. And I will see this put right.”
Mary held his gaze for a long moment. The anger did not leave, but something else joined it.
Charlotte, alone somewhere beyond London, with no word from the man she was supposed to marry.
Evander’s brother, Richard, was spending his nights in a pleasure house with another woman while the mother of his child waited.
And Tommy, sleeping in a crib at Blackholm House, gripping Mary’s collar every morning, with no idea that his father had been warming someone else’s bed instead of coming home.
“My sister…” Mary’s voice was low and hard. “Charlotte gave up everything for your brother. Her family. Her reputation. Her future. And while she was carrying his child, he was here. With another woman. In a room he paid for by the night.”
“We don’t know—”
“I know enough.” She pressed her fingers against her temples. “I know that my sister is missing, and your brother is a liar. Unfortunately, Tommy is the one who will pay for all of it.”
The carriage swayed. Mary dropped her hands and stared out the window. The dark fields slid past, and her reflection stared back at her, pale and furious, and she looked at it for a long moment before she exhaled.
She looked out the window. “That was my first time in a pleasure house.”
Evander heard her tone, much lighter now, as though she were pulling herself back from the edge, trying to focus on any other inane thing than their impossible situation. “I would expect so.”
“It was more… theatrical than I imagined.” She turned back to him. “You speak as though you know these places.”
“I’ve been to many brothels in my search for Richard.”
Mary’s eyes narrowed. “Only when searching for Richard?”
Evander heard the accusation she had carried for weeks, the late nights she had cataloged, the narrative she had built that cast him in a role he had never played.
“Mary…”
“It is a fair question.”
Evander leaned forward. The carriage rocked, and the lantern light shifted, and Mary’s face moved between shadow and gold. He reached across the space between them and placed his fingers beneath her chin, tilting her face up until her eyes met his.
“I have not touched another woman since the day we married.” His voice was low and certain. “Not before the wedding, and not after. Whatever you have imagined about my nights, that is not the reason for the distance between us.”
Her breath came shallow against his fingers. “Then what is the reason?”
His thumb traced the line of her jaw. “I do not trust myself around you.”
Mary’s eyes widened.
“That is a terrible reason,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“Then why?” Mary did not pull away from his hand.
Her jaw rested against his fingers, and her breath came warm and uneven against his wrist. “Why keep your distance? Why leave every night and come home in the dark and walk past my door without stopping? If it is not indifference, Evander, then what is it?”
“Mary, leave it.”
“No.” She leaned closer. The carriage swayed, and the distance between them shrank, and her eyes held his, unblinking. “Tell me.”
Evander’s thumb stilled on her jaw. His pulse hammered against the inside of his wrist, close enough to her skin that she must have felt it.
The carriage was too small. She was too close.
The scent of her hair, lavender and warmth, filled the space between them, and every room they had walked through tonight pressed against the back of his mind, the candlelight and the sheer fabric and the couple kissing against the wall.
“Because I want you.” The words came out low and rough, scraped from a place he had been guarding since the kitchen.
“Because I have wanted you since we wed. Because every morning I sit across from you at breakfast and it takes everything I have not to cross the table. Because I hear you singing to Tommy through the floor of my study and I grip the edge of my desk and I do not move, because if I move, if I come upstairs, if I touch you again, I will not stop.”
Mary’s lips parted. Her breath caught.
“I have a duty to that child,” Evander said.
His voice was strained, barely held. “I have a brother to find, a scandal to contain, a household that depends on my judgment… And my judgment ceases to function when you are in the room. When you are close to me. When you look at me the way you are looking at me now…” His gaze dropped to her mouth.
“If I give in to this—if I put my mouth on yours and take what has been keeping me awake every night for months—I will lose my mind. It will consume me… And I cannot afford to be consumed.”
The carriage rocked. The lantern light swayed across Mary’s face, gold and shadow, and she was inches away, and her pulse beat visibly at the base of her throat.
“The kiss,” she said. Her voice was barely audible. “In the kitchen… I have thought about it every night since. Every single night, Evander. I lie in that bed, and I feel your mouth on mine… Your hands in my hair… I cannot make it stop; I do not want to make it stop.”
Evander’s grip on her jaw tightened. His breathing came raggedly. She was so close he could feel the warmth of her lips without touching them, and the space between their mouths was a distance measured in fractions, and holding it open was the hardest thing he had ever done.
“Mary…” he whispered, both in a haze and tentatively.
Mary’s hand came up and gripped the front of his coat.
“Yes,” she said.
He kissed her.
Evander’s hand slid from her jaw into her hair, and the walls he had built cracked down the center.
This kiss was slower than the kitchen. Deeper. Mary gripped the lapels of his coat and pulled him forward, and Evander went because resistance was no longer something his body recognized when it came to this woman.
Her mouth opened beneath his. The taste of her flooded through him, warm and sweet, and the sound she made against his lips sent heat rushing through his blood.
He pulled her closer, his arm circling her waist, and she came willingly, pressing against him until no space remained between their bodies.
The pleasure house, the rooms they had walked through, the couples they had seen, all of it had wound something tight inside both of them…
And now, it unraveled.
Evander’s mouth left hers and found the line of her jaw, and Mary’s head tipped back against the carriage seat, and the sound that escaped her was quiet and unguarded, pulled from a place she had not known existed until his lips found it.
“Evander…” she moaned.
Every nerve in her body was awake, and she did not want it to stop.
“I have thought about this,” he murmured against the hollow of her throat. “Every night in that study. Every morning at that breakfast table. I have thought about what you sound like when no one is listening.”
Mary’s fingers threaded through his hair. The words traveled through her skin and settled low in her belly, warm and liquid, and the image of Evander sitting at his desk, listening to her footsteps through the ceiling, wanting this while pretending he did not, made her pull him closer.
His mouth traced her collarbone. His lips were warm, his breath unsteady, and when his teeth grazed the sensitive skin where her neck met her shoulder, Mary gasped, and the gasp seemed to undo something in him, because his grip on her waist tightened and his mouth pressed harder against her skin.
“Evander.” His name on her lips, breathless and broken in the middle.
“You say my name so perfectly,” he whispered against her collarbone. His hand found the curve of her waist and traveled lower, tracing the shape of her through the fabric of her dress. “It belongs in your mouth.”
She pulled his mouth back to hers and kissed him.
His hand gathered the fabric of her skirt, drawing it upward by slow inches, his fingers finding the warmth beneath. Mary gasped against his mouth. Her body arched toward him, and Evander braced his other arm against the seat behind her and watched her face.
“Look at me,” he whispered.
She opened her eyes. Evander’s face was inches from hers, his gaze dark and intent.
The look he gave her was not the look of a man fulfilling an obligation.
It was the look of a man who wanted to memorize every flicker of response, every catch of breath, every shade of pleasure that crossed her face.