Chapter 16 #2
“How so?” Giselle asked. “Surely she was once in love, too, or she would not have defied her parents for you.”
“Oh, Lily was in love, all right,” he said acidly. “She was in love with my money, rank, and consequence, the usual things women of her kind are in love with.”
She caught her breath, praying he did not see her that way, too. “How do you know that about her? Because your father said so?”
“Hardly. At the time, I wouldn’t have believed a word he told me concerning her.” He thrust his fingers through his beautiful hair. “No, I found out when she wrote to say she was soon to be married.”
She was married, this former love of his? “Oh, dear. That must have been difficult for you. How long after you left England did she tell you?”
He shrugged. “Only four months, even before Father and I were sent to Verdun. A letter from her came to our lodgings in Paris, saying that she regretted to inform me, but she had found a new love, a man named Samuel Pritchard.”
“The merchant?” Giselle asked.
“You’ve met him?”
“No, but his name is everywhere in Bath. He owns many mercantile shops, does he not?”
Heath narrowed his gaze on her. “I can’t believe you know that.”
“I do like to shop occasionally, Heath,” she said primly. “Not very often, grant you, but once in a while. And what else am I to do while Maman is soaking in the baths?” She made a face. “I do not like the waters there. They have a smell.”
“True,” he said with a faint smile. “Anyway, I had known Samuel Pritchard was courting her, but she hadn’t seemed to take him seriously. Suddenly, they’re in love? Suffice it to say, he was wealthy and consequential enough even then to gain her interest.”
“But he must have been far older than she,” Giselle mused aloud, starting to feel a little sorry for this woman. A very little, anyway.
“I don’t know. And I don’t care, either. Until she wrote me, I was still making plans to return and marry her myself. But after that . . .”
She reached over to grab his hand. “You were hurt, of course.”
“Not just hurt, but furious.” When she squeezed his hand and then tried to withdraw it, he kept it between both of his.
“I had tried to marry her and for what? So my father could drag me off to France and berate me for the rest of our time there? So I could be separated from those I held most dear for years? I had risked all of that for her, and she not only didn’t care, but she blithely went off looking for another rich dupe of consequence. ”
“Remember, she was young, too,” Giselle said. “And you do not know if her parents forced her to make the match.”
“I doubt that. They were the very definition of doting parents. Besides, she never wrote such a thing in her letter—she wrote that she had found a ‘new love.’ I remember it well.” He hunched forward, still holding her hand in his.
“And just like that, my father’s words made sense.
She had eloped with me solely because I was the heir apparent to the Earl of Heathbrook.
” His voice turned bitter. “If I had been Rupert Oakden, the farmer next door, she wouldn’t have given me a moment’s notice. ”
“You cannot possibly believe that,” she protested. “You are a charming man, not to mention a clever and responsible one. Any woman would have been lucky to have you. I am sure she felt the same.”
He sat up to shoot her a skeptical look. “You’re going to defend her now?”
“Of course not,” she mumbled. “I am merely pointing out that you have attractive qualities which have nothing to do with your title or fortune.”
“Such as?” he asked in a husky voice, and slid his arm about her waist.
“Stop that,” she said, though she did not remove his arm and he continued to hold her hand with his free one. “Finish telling me the rest.”
He huffed out a breath. “There’s nothing left to tell.”
“Ah, but I have more questions.” When he stared at her, she had to look away. “When you . . . um . . . kissed me that day in Verdun, were you wishing I was her?”
“Good God, no.” He squeezed her waist. “Surely you remember that you didn’t come to Verdun until over a year after the rest of us did.
I had long before emerged from the fog of romantic fancy that Lily had wrapped me in, enough to know that I had made a lucky escape.
Though at that point I would never have admitted it to my father. ”
Now, he did release her hand, only to tip up her chin so she was staring into his solemn eyes. “Nor did seeing her tonight change my mind about that. Lily was never my ‘one true love.’ She was my first boyish infatuation. Whereas you . . .”
He bent his head as if to kiss her, and she murmured, “Heath, perhaps we should not do this.”
“We probably shouldn’t,” he whispered against her lips. “Or at least not until I confess to the one lie I have indeed told you.”
Her heart sank. “Oh?”
Brushing her lips with his, he said, “That day at Freeman’s Inn, when you asked what I would’ve done if your father hadn’t threatened to call me out, I told you it didn’t matter since we couldn’t change it now. Remember?”
Her breath quickened. “I-I remember.”
“I lied,” he rasped. “It did matter. And we can change it. I want to change it.” He took her mouth with his so tenderly, she thought she’d dissolve into the bedcovers.
Slipping her arms about his waist, she gave herself up to the kiss with enthusiasm. So, it was some minutes before he drew back to speak again.
“Know this, Giselle,” he said, his voice resonating through her. “You are to Lily as the sun is to a candle. Brighter. More thrilling. The greatest temptation I’ve ever known. And I don’t want to fight it anymore.”
“Nor do I.” What was the point? If she could not be with the man she had always wanted, did she really want to be with anyone else? “But we must be quiet. If Maman should happen to knock, or, fearing the worst, ask a servant to let her in—”
“My servants would never do such a thing without asking me first. You are my fiancée, after all. But if it will help assuage your worries . . .” He stood and held out his hand. “Come with me.”
Heathbrook’s blood pounded in his temples, and he itched to grab her hand, lift her into his arms, and carry her off to where they could be sure of not being disturbed.
But it had to be her choice. Bad enough he was breaking his own rule—never deflower an innocent.
He had done that once with Lily, and that had been a disaster in the end.
He did not want this to be a disaster for her.
Then she took his hand in hers with a shy smile, and he exulted. She was his at last.
Now he must make sure she stayed his. He couldn’t think beyond that, couldn’t consider the ramifications. All he wanted was to show Giselle that she meant more to him than Lily ever had, and making love to her seemed the best way to do that.
You’re thinking with your cock again, man.
He was. He didn’t care. He needed Giselle, and she wanted him, and that was all that mattered. He tugged her up into his arms and gave her a hard kiss to mark her as his.
Then he said, “This way, mon petit chou,” and brought her to the servant door placed discreetly in a corner of her room.
She tensed as they passed through it. “Where are we going?”
He pulled her close to whisper, “My bedchamber, through the servant passage.”
“Are you not worried about running into servants?” she whispered back as he maneuvered the passage, the way he’d done so often as a boy.
“Not right now. They’re all still dealing with guests downstairs. We merely have to avoid your mother . . . and Zack, who was sent up to bed a while ago.”
After that, she remained quiet until they had slipped into his room. Then she stood staring about her as he walked into the adjoining dressing room and dismissed his valet for the night, making sure the fellow went out the servant door and not through his bedchamber.
When Heathbrook went back in to join her, half-afraid she might have fled like a nymph disappearing into a mirrored pool, he was relieved to find her still rooted to his Aubusson rug, though barefoot now, looking more like a dryad than a naiad.
Of course. Because she was a creature of the earth and plants and gardens, not of the water.
“I would not have expected this.” She swept her hand to indicate his room.
“All the simplicity. You seem so comfortable with the elaborate French decor in your town house that these furnishings of walnut and rosewood and all the blues in your bedclothes and rugs surprise me.” A teasing smile crossed her lips.
“No ormolu clocks? No gilded chairs and curved settees? No fur rugs?”
“My father’s tastes were different from my mother’s.
He liked showy and ostentatious. Mother liked .
. . simple. This is Mother’s room. I moved into it thinking I would redo Father’s in time.
But I’ve grown to like this one.” His heart racing, he walked up to take her in his arms. “Especially with you in it.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “You, sir, are too ready with lavish compliments.”
“Aren’t lavish compliments generally preferred by women?” He reached up to tug off her nightcap, bringing her gorgeous chocolate-brown hair cascading down over her shoulders and making him itch to have it spread on a pillow beneath him.
Apparently ignoring her own quickening breaths, she answered saucily, “I do not know about other women, but I prefer honest to lavish any day.”
“And I don’t see why compliments can’t be both.” He buried his hands in her hair, marveling at the shimmer and glorious excess of it. “For example, you, ma chérie, have the most luscious head of hair I’ve ever seen on a woman. It should be in a painting.”
She opened her mouth, and he put his finger to it. “Before you chide me, I must point out that my compliment is perfectly honest . . . not to mention, lavish, since your hair itself is lavish.”
“You are ridiculous,” she protested, clearly trying not to smile.
He untied her wrapper and pushed it off her shoulders, then caught his breath to see so much of her at once, barely veiled by her paper-thin linen nightgown. “And you are the loveliest thing ever to grace this bedchamber. Is that honest enough for you?”
“Honest and lavish,” she teased.
“Perhaps not all of the overwrought feelings have been wiped out of me, Miss Practical.” He skimmed the back of his hand over one breast through the linen, exulting when her nipple beaded up beneath it and she blushed crimson.
“Will I get to see you without your clothes, sir?” she asked.
“If you wish.”
“Oh, I definitely wish.” She pushed his coat off his shoulders, then folded it primly and carried it to a chair where she centered it on the seat.
When he chuckled, she returned and went to work on unbuttoning his waistcoat. “What do you find so funny, my lord?” she asked, sounding missish.
“You and your careful ways. I would have tossed my coat aside willy-nilly. Like this.” He wriggled out of his waistcoat and sent it flying.
“Your valet will not appreciate that,” she said, clearly biting back a smile.
“I pay him well enough not to care.” He slipped off his shoes, then tore at his cravat so unsuccessfully that she said, with laughter in her voice, “Stop that! All you are doing is knotting it more.” She took it over and had his cravat unknotted in no time.
“This is why I never wore elaborate cravats in Verdun or Bitche,” he said, working the buttons of her nightgown loose, now desperate to see her without it. “I’m not good at being my own valet.”
“Clearly,” she said in a throaty voice that notched up his arousal. “But you excel at being a lady’s maid.”
“At the moment, I’m well motivated to be so.” Just the sight of her breasts thinly veiled was rousing his blood.
When she went to work on his shirt buttons, he was too impatient to wait. Catching a hank of her nightgown, he began to raise it up her legs, then sucked in a breath to find them long, shapely, and bare.
“Good God,” he muttered. Keeping her nightgown raised with his other hand, he smoothed his hand up over one cheek of her bottom. “Well, well, what have we here? No drawers, Giselle? How wicked of you.”
“Maman always said drawers are wicked.” She caught his hand. “No touching until I get to see you bared, too.”
“Then stop taking so long undressing me.” Brushing her hands away from his buttons, he tore off his shirt, then unfastened the fall of his breeches before shoving them off, too.
He dragged her close to kiss her long and hard so he could fondle her breasts through the linen.
When she made a little needy sound low in her throat, he began walking her backward to the bed.
“I want to make love to you, my faux fiancée. But first I want to see if the unclad you matches my dreams of the unclad you.”
“ ‘Unclad,’ ” she echoed as he halted just short of the bed. “What is that? I have never heard that word.”
“Without clothes. Naked.” His heart thundering, he dragged her gown slowly up over her head and off. “It means naked.”
He stood back to survey her. She was as perfect as he’d known she’d be, her skin golden, her breasts just large enough to fill a man’s hands comfortably, and her belly and mons . . . “What a wonderful naked it is, too,” he choked out, his cock feeling close to bursting out of his drawers.
She tipped up her chin. “A very lonely naked. Because you are still not naked, sir.”
“I can easily remedy that.”
Then he slid off his drawers.