Chapter Two #2
He wondered if she knew better now. She still looked untouched, so virginal in her prim white gown with its sprigs of red apples that promised luscious sweetness to the man who dared taste.
He dreamed of wrapping around his hands around those masses of dark hair as he pulled her face up for his kiss.
But the rest of her was no longer that slim, coltish girl who had made what she claimed was a rational request, all while she trembled with the hope he would touch her.
She would never know what it had cost him to walk away, to buy them both the time they needed.
Garrick suspected he would not be able to walk away now.
Her brows, dark and delicately arched, met over that long, narrow nose as she frowned at him. “I did not ask you to—”
“Wed you? Yes, you did. You made quite a convincing case. Explained how a marriage would please both our families and cease their plaguing us about finding a match. How marriage would give you a home of your own, and me a shred of respectability.”
He stalked toward her, rounding the desk.
She skirted the heavy leather-upholstered chair in her retreat, but the cabinets behind her blocked escape.
Her scent reached out toward him, sweet and clean and sharp, like lingonberries in a bed of cream.
Her lips were that same red, plush and inviting.
All the features that had been too bold or large on her girlish face had, in maturity, come into the most pleasing proportion. She was mesmerizingly beautiful.
And she still retained that fearless, stubborn spirit he had always admired in her. She lifted her chin.
“I seem to have forgotten that conversation entirely.”
“There’s still something I don’t understand,” he said softly.
He paused in his pursuit when her derriere—as nicely curved as the rest of her—backed up against a low shelf.
“You told me at the time I could carry on with my ways, and you would look aside. Mad.” He scanned her face, wanting to discover those thoughts and emotions that had once been so visible on her countenance.
He wanted to know her as he had all those years ago.
“Why would you allow that? Why wouldn’t you demand more?”
“Rakes don’t reform. Everyone knows that.”
“Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera. Doesn’t he reform?”
“He marries Polly only to avoid being hanged,” she said stubbornly.
“Which is what you were offering me, I think. A shackle rather than a noose.”
She pressed her palms to the sides of her head and closed her eyes. The flutter of dark lashes along those silken cheeks practically invited a kiss. “It was so long ago. Must we discuss it?”
“You deserved more, Mad. You deserved better.”
Her eyes flew open. “Better than you?”
“That man—the man I was years ago—he would not have been good to you. And I knew that.”
“Very well,” she said, forcing a brisk tone into her voice. “No need to rehash the matter. Better to leave it well and truly behind us.” She gestured toward the open doorway. “Shall we return to dinner? They’ll be looking for us.”
He’d been looking for her, certainly. He’d been able to bear no more than ten minutes in that drawing room without needing to see her again. It was like an itch beneath his skin. He wanted to confirm he hadn’t had a momentary vision or a stroke of madness.
Needed to know if it were the mere surprise of seeing her that had jolted him, or if Madelina had become a surpassing dream of loveliness, the chime of a delicious clock telling him that now was the time, now.
Her allure increased with every detail he noted.
The delicate tendrils of dark hair escaped from her coiffure to form a soft halo about her face.
She hadn’t powdered her hair, or applied cosmetics, and the hectic flush of her cheeks was due only to him.
The light frill of lace along her bodice didn’t disguise the delicate flare of her collarbones or the kissable hollow at the base of her neck.
Even her ears were tempting, the soft lobes hung with pearl drops. He wanted to pull the drops—and the flesh beneath them—between his teeth.
He leaned back against the leather top of the desk, marked with Barty’s scrawl, and now his own. “You haven’t said what you wanted from my desk.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Afraid I will find out about your intrigues?”
He grinned. “My mistresses don’t write letters. They make their demands in person.”
She made to sweep past him. “I’ll be missed next door.”
He flung out an arm to halt her exit. He’d been missing her. He’d been missing out on her for three years—for his entire life. But the time for denial was over.
“I don’t know where Constantin is.” That wasn’t entirely true; he had some idea. Guilt pinched when her eyes flared with hurt and eager hope.
“But Barty did. He was writing letters for me. He said he had contacts, knew people.” She swept a hand in the air, a delicate gesture that encompassed the sturdy desk and all its secrets. “He muttered something, in his fever, but it wasn’t coherent. I was hoping to find out what he knew.”
“I would have found it already. Or you,” he added, “as I imagine this isn’t your first time searching my study.”
In truth, he’d found those letters, and had removed them, along with the later ones addressed to him as Barty’s replacement.
He wouldn’t leave sensitive information lying about, and he wasn’t about to share their contents.
He feared the news meant danger, and he couldn’t allow danger to shadow his Madelina.
It meant nothing to put his own neck at risk; that feature wasn’t worth much anyway. But Mad must be protected at all costs.
She scowled at him, and there were so many memories attached to that gesture.
He’d forgotten how much his life was wrapped around her.
All the summers when a petulant Mad had stomped her foot and thrown her thick braid over her shoulder and declared, with a thrust of that lower lip, “I want to come with you.” The dogged way she’d climbed stiles and trekked fields in his wake when he purposely tried to lose her.
She’d been better at climbing trees, keeping her head even at the crown of the tallest beech and poplars.
She’d held her ground against Guy of Warwick, the ornery Wiltshire ram who owned the Glebe Farm and who had more than once snagged a hole in Garrick’s breeches with one of his thick, curling, and surprisingly pointy horns.
Of course such a girl would brazenly stroll into his house and poke through his drawers to find what she wanted. She’d do worse without batting one of those long, dark eyelashes that made her look innocent and seductive all at once.
Her lovely lips drew down at the corners. “Constantin left in July when the National Assembly decreed that French émigrés were to return and prove their loyalty. The deadline is set for the first of the new year. Any émigrés who have not returned by then will be condemned as traitors.”
And as traitors, their lands and property could be confiscated to fill the national coffers. “He will be safe at Chateau Vallon, living a life of reckless dissipation.”
“Like you?” she challenged. “But we have heard nothing. There was the massacre at La Glacière in October—”
“Over the pope, and that was in Avignon, far to the south,” Garrick rushed to reassure her.
It was the Paris massacres she need fear, but he didn’t want to tell her that.
Damn and blast. Keeping secrets from Madelina had always been next to impossible.
She let her curiosity lead her into all sorts of unwise situations.
When she swallowed, the column of her neck convulsed. Such a tender, vulnerable neck. The sight made something hot and thick lodge in his own throat.
“They might have decided we are traitors anyway because he and not my father returned. He could be in prison. Or worse.”
Her frightened expression, the anguish in her voice, had him reaching for her. “Do not think it.”
“I can think of little else,” she muttered.
He needed a way to distract her, console her. Fortunately, he had the ideal tactic at hand.
“I am ready now,” he announced.
She turned wary, those blue eyes growing wide. “For what?”
“To give you what you asked for all those years ago.”
Wariness shifted to alarm. Her lashes flared dark against her fair skin, and the blush waved through her cheekbones like a flag.
High, arched cheekbones; she’d lost the cushion of baby fat that had filled out her face at eighteen.
Now her features were honed into mature lines, her beauty a weapon.
He wondered if she knew yet how to use it.
She stiffened, throwing her shoulders back, which had the most interesting effect of raising her bosom closer to his eye.
The baby fat that had dissolved from other places on her body had apparently gone straight to her breasts; eighteen-year-old Mad had not possessed such magnificence.
Or if she had, she’d been kind enough to hide it from display, knowing the sight of such a décolletage would destroy his ability to reason.
“I have rescinded my proposal,” she said stiffly. “It was unadvised in so many respects. As you kindly pointed out.”
“I was referring,” he said, “to your request for a kiss.”
Her lips parted with a little O of surprise, and that was his undoing.
She was like perfumed dusk rolling into his arms, a cool slant of shade on a blistering hot day. Cold spring water to man parched with thirst. One tug at her hand brought her where she belonged. She matched his height so well, he had only to dip his head and notch her lips to his. Finally.
Finally.
She was in his arms. Madelina, the dream he’d not allowed himself to harbor, because dreams were meant for better men.
Mad, the girl whom he’d watched grow up, but he’d never imagined would be this—a siren come to life.
Her lips were petals of wildflowers. Her skin was brushed silk beneath his fingers as he slid them over her cheek.
She tasted of orange and allspice, as if she’d been tippling the Christmas cider.
He anchored his palms on either side of his face to hold her for his kisses, and the hair brushing his fingers was damask over his callused skin.
She was a cloud in his arms, the fluff of a dandelion smoothing all his hard and brittle edges. She was softness and pleasure and everything sweet, and he was falling headfirst down a deep, deep well.
He wanted to kiss her forever, but he needed air. He needed to understand what was happening. He never lost his head. He never succumbed. He was the master of himself at all times, even inside a daze of sensuality. But this—with Mad—was different.
He stared into her eyes, feeling his breath halt. “Well and good I didn’t kiss you all those years ago,” he said.
Hurt flashed through her wide, deep eyes. “Why?”
Because he would have been lost forever, lost to himself, to her.
He would have built himself around her like a finch weaving its nest. And he never would have found his own balance, something he needed to do.
He would have remained a leaf in the wind, blown about by impulse and longing, and he would never have found work that was meaningful to him.
Here, in his cousin’s home, his cousin’s study, his cousin’s life, Garrick finally realized how much he had longed to have something of his own that mattered.
The first time he was offered it, in the form of this woman, he ran.
The second time, he didn’t have a choice; the burden of Barty’s work descended upon him, like it or not.
Now he had two things that could give his life meaning, and he would have to choose between them.
His work, or Mad. Because he couldn’t have both. Either one would threaten the other, make it impossible.
“If I’d kissed you when you first asked, I don’t believe I would have let you out of bed thereafter,” Garrick said. “And think of all we would have missed.”
That flush climbed her cheeks again. “Oh, you—”
He captured her lips, catching whatever she’d meant to say in another whirling, dazzling, mind-searing kiss.
She was more potent than spirits. He heard chatter in his head, as if his mind were already moving to the future, plotting strategy, laying out plans.
The chatter grew. He pushed it away to focus on her.
The heat of her mouth as their tongues met and tangled.
The soft catch of her breath and the sounds like tiny moans that enflamed him with triumph, with the need to possess.
The incredible soft fullness of her body as he pressed her against him and felt her surround, fit, melt.
“Oh, heavens. If it isn’t my heartless rake of a son seducing another woman,” came his mother’s voice from the doorway.
Her mother’s gasp came next. “Madelina! What have you done?”
Madelina’s expression, dazed, soft, looked as if she’d just emerged from bed.
She would look this way when he’d properly made love to her, had well and truly claimed the woman he’d always known was meant to be his.
She’d been trying to ensnare him for years, with or without knowing how, and he was done running.
He smiled into her sweet, blushing face.
“Mothers, you may be the first to congratulate us. Madelina has consented to be my bride.”
“Truly?” His mother gaped. “Madelina?”
“Oh, thank the heavens. It is long past time,” her mother said.