Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
It hurt like hell to wait till the house started to quiet to climb the stairs to Tessa’s room.
Every tick of the hand round the clock felt like a dagger right to Remmy’s jugular.
He’d tried to follow her up after that meeting with her parents, but Kit had caught his wrist, shook his head, and—damn—Kit was usually right about these things.
He had always been smarter, wiser, the heir who’d inherited the brains as well as everything else. And Remmy, with too many emotions clattering through him, grasped for the lifeline of good advice.
He’d waited. Because Kit knew best and because he needed to build up the courage for what he knew he must say when he saw Tessa again.
Hurt seemed a tame word for what he would feel if she answered the same way she had last time.
Thank you! And in such sisterly tones, she might as well have kneed him in the balls.
Made him pause outside her door, fist raised.
He had to do this. Watching her with her family, listening to her mother…
No wonder Tessa didn’t know what to do with love.
She’d never had it from those who should have offered it most freely.
And if he withheld it from her because he was embarrassed, scared, he was no bloody better than they were.
And he wasn’t better than anyone most of the time.
But he was better than that.
He let his fist fall on the door once, a timid knock. Then with courage, louder, two more times.
The door cracked open, revealing a pale, inquisitive face, and he pushed through, shut it quickly behind him, holding a finger to his lips.
“Shh.”
Her smile flickered like a dying candle.
“Tessa,” he whispered, nudging her chin up with his knuckles for a better look. “Have you been crying?”
She sniffed and pressed the heel of her hand into her eyes. “Not at all.”
“Damn them. I shouldn’t have let Kit keep me from you. I should have followed sooner.”
“No. No. I needed to… to breathe.”
“Should I leave?” The easy way out.
“No.” That exit gone, then. Good. He couldn’t be a coward. He walked deeper into the room, scrubbing his hand through his hair. “Tessa…”
“We don’t have to talk.” Her hand landed soft as a butterfly between his shoulder blades.
He turned and caught her hand, placed it on his chest, just over his heart as he inhaled a shuddering breath. “I love you.”
Bloody hell. He’d not meant to say it like that.
Now she was looking at him as if he’d grown a tail or lost his higher-level cognition, and that last was distinctly possible.
“I love you like Romeo loves Juliet. No. Horrible example. They both die. And they’re so foolishly young and—” He cursed. “I’m bollocks-ing it up again.”
“Bollocks…ing what up?”
He sat her on the edge of the bed. “Stay there. Don’t talk.” She did. And she didn’t.
And he took up center stage before her, scrubbing his hands down his face then letting his arms hang dead at his sides.
“I am in love with you, Tessa King. I desire you as a man desires a woman. And I… cherish you as a husband does a wife. It has been years since I last saw you as a sister, a friend only. For ages, you’ve been, to me, the one rare jewel I can never have, no matter how hard I work, the star I can never reach, no matter how far I climb.
You’ve been a dream that dissolves upon waking and— Damn.
I’m no Shakespeare, but even I know that’s too many metaphors to say what plain words might say best.”
He hit his knees before her and took her hands in his. The lines of her palm were delicate spiderwebs, and the pulse that thrummed at her wrist seemed faintingly fast. He swept his thumb across it, trying to soothe it and found the courage to look up at her.
“I love you. I have been too scared to say it. I have been running from it because you have never felt for me what I do for you. And I tried to forget you. The theatre, the actresses, everything one long attempt to forget. I have longed for an amnesiac’s comfort.
But after this afternoon, I want you to know that you are loved for who you are and nothing else.
You do not have to be good or happy to earn my love. You will simply always have it.”
A tear rolled down her cheek.
He wiped it away.
She kissed him, wrapped both hands around his head and held him fast, stole his breath, and forced his heart into a joyous rhythm. He deepened it, pulling her to the floor so he could hold her in his arms, so they could be chest to chest, as close as their hearts would ever get.
She pulled away all too soon and smacked his shoulder while he tried to steal her lips back. This was going much better than expected, what with all the kissing, but there was a rather martial gleam to her eye.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she demanded. “If you’ve been in love with me for years, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did. The day you left, I said those exact words, on the rock—I love you. And you hugged me in a way that might as well have branded me brother.”
“That’s what I thought you meant! You could have corrected me.”
“It was for the best. What would I have done had you known my true meaning? I had no means to support us, and your parents would have never accepted it. I spent most of the next six years living in a back room of a broken-down theatre. You could have remained cozy with my parents, I suppose, but then we’d have rarely seen each other.
By the time life had begun to be more comfortable, you’d stopped writing. ”
“I thought I was annoying you with my letters.”
“I gave up hope entirely. But almost as soon as you returned, I fell again. I’m no good at resisting Tessa King. God, I’ve been jealous.
“I know.”
He shook his head. “Not just Tilbury. Grimsby.”
“You were not. That was years ago.”
“I was eaten up with it. Grimsby was a good decade older than me and not at all bad looking.” Now that she’d not laughed at him and thrown him out on his arse, the confessions came more easily, pouring out like water from a jug, as if they’d been on the edge of brimming over for years, and finally he’d tipped the jug.
Just enough to spill every single secret.
“He had a position that paid, the means to care for himself and to take a wife. And he had your parents’ approval.
He had permission to sit alone with you, to take your full attention.
I didn’t think he deserved it. I went to London to put your painting in that competition because I wanted to be your hero.
I wanted you to rely on me the way Grimsby’s wife would be able to rely on him. I-I-I—”
She rested her head on his shoulder.
The stutter stopped, and he leaned into the small embrace. “I wanted you, then. But I knew I couldn’t have you. So I did what I could for you.”
She curled her hands around the lapels of his jacket, and he wanted to trace every emotion streaming across her face with his lips then make her feel even more by tracing his tongue further south.
He’d done the hard thing. He’d made a fool of himself for her, and she was on her knees with him now. It wasn’t those three little words back, but it was good. He leaned close, set his lips at her ear.
“Tell me to leave,” he whispered, “or wrap your pretty little legs around my waist like you did earlier today.”
Her breath hitched, and slowly she wound her arms around his neck.
He wrapped an arm beneath her arse, and she used it to take flight, to put those legs right where he wanted them.
When he laid her on the bed, her dressing gown gaped open.
A short, snowy white shift peeked through, and his cock twitched.
“Stay there.” The two words crawled their way up his throat.
“Again?”
“Again.” He needed to watch her, needed to make sure with every move he took that she wasn’t doing this out of pity.
He unloosed his cravat, tugged. The slide of the linen against his skin almost made his hair stand on end.
With her eyes on him, it almost felt like her caress, sure and purposeful, teasing and seductive.
He dropped it to the floor. The waistcoat next, then the shirt.
She licked her lips, and his cock tightened.
When she sat upright, folding her legs beneath her, he made a warning sound.
She arched a brow, kept his gaze as she flicked open the buttons of her wrapper.
Bloody hell.
She shrugged out of it with a gentle roll of her shoulders that made it almost impossible to keep his distance.
The only thing that rooted him to the floor was pure determination and the gnawing fear that if he looked away, got caught up in her body, he’d miss a flicker, a clue, a dropped-mask moment where truth lay.
She rocked from side to side, her breasts gently swaying beneath her shift as she freed its hem, lifted.
She paused, gaze dropping to his waist, his fall.
He released a button there.
She lifted the hem higher.
He freed another button.
Tessa gave him another inch—a revelation of creamy skin that included one lovely navel he wanted to lick and the top of a shock of red curls darkening between her legs.
The shift wavered just at her ribs. She’d give him no more than a saucy eyebrow and heavenly lower half.
He’d die for the rest.
But all he really had to do was give everything to her.
The remaining buttons of his fall slipped out of their holes, and he shoved his trousers down and stepping out of them. Next the smalls.
He was stripped before her. Remington Ives the Rake was discarded somewhere on the ground with the cravat and waistcoat, wrinkled, unnecessary. He’d shown this woman more of himself than he’d ever shown anyone, dug out his heart and held it up for her approval.
And she was smiling at him with heat in her eyes, her teeth teasing her bottom lip, and every breath lifting those perfect breasts beneath the cursed shift, as if in invitation.
“Tell me what you want,” he rasped, each word dripping with his desire.
She wet her lips and gave him a gentle grin as she threw off her shift.