Chapter One #4
The length of her hair fell forward like a rope as she said these words, like a mythical goddess fashioned in flesh.
‘Hell.’ The curse escaped because for this moment on this night under a passing storm he felt lighter.
He wanted to kiss Wilhelmina St Claire but he understood that of course he could not and should not.
So instead he took her hand, warm and fragile in his own, and simply held it, liking the way her fingers curled up to reach for him.
His blue eyes were rimmed in silver and if she saw questions there he did not voice them.
He held her as if she were made of glass, a brittle and fragile thing, easily broken. Outside the wind was loud but in here the crackle of the kitchen hearth fire was gentler.
A house that had withstood sorrows and change. Willa had heard so much said of the Elmsworth lords in Society that it was hard to believe even half of it.
And yet the truth of Phillip Moreland’s hurt was here, in his silence and stillness. So much so that she sought to help him.
‘When you allow the past the power to mould you it is difficult to find a future.’ Her words were softly said as he pulled his hand away.
‘There were times when I barely wanted one…’ He stopped at that, his body rigid as he stood. ‘I should not be here speaking to you of these things and alone at night…’
‘Because it is easier to live with grief than to imagine something different?’
‘Easier and safer, Mrs St Claire.’
At that she stood too, seared in the shock of what was erupting inside of her. She had never felt like this before, never felt the aching thrust of pure want rush across sense, and it scared her.
‘You are so very beautiful.’ The words came from her unbidden, but the truth was there in every syllable and she could not take them back.
‘Lord.’ His pupils flared and the mask he wore so tightly seemed to shatter as his mouth came down upon her own.
Lionel’s kisses had always been damp, weak things, lacking in ardour.
But Phillip Moreland’s lips held the full onslaught of the sensual, his hands in her hair turning her to the kiss, deepening and exploring.
She opened to him as she never had to her husband or to the one disappointing lover she had taken after Lionel’s death, and the room spun, fantasy hovering within passion, his strength and beauty both glorious and shocking.
Tipping her head, she opened her mouth wider, allowing him to taste her, to know her, to seize all that he wanted, and when she cried out in a voice she hadn’t heard herself use before, the voice of a want so desperate, there was no tempering it.
And take he did, with his lips and his tongue and the strength of his hands until roiling waves of desire boiled upwards and beached between them, waves she enjoyed without shame or question.
A fully clothed triumph. A startling discovery. Nothing unhidden. Warm against cold. Soft against hard. Delight amidst wonder. There was no answer to the question of what this was. There was only feeling, the candlelight flickering and the wind outside.
When he finally brought her against him and held her still she felt the rapid beat of his heart matching her own and was pleased he did not whisper untrue things, for this was enough and she could not have borne lies.
Her whole world had been turned upside down and what risks she might have believed in at the beginning of the night were nowhere near as certain now.
No future. No permanency. No ties.
A simple connection and then a severance. Just this moment. When he raised his head so that he might see the time on the long-case clock in the corner she knew that she had lost him. The kitchen was no place to be caught together, for the scullery maids would be up early.
She felt drained, her dressing gown loose and her hair tangled.
‘I need to go.’ She would get in first before he said it.
His glance swivelled around to her own, intense and forceful, but he did not move.
‘We cannot be found here.’ Her words hinted at other things.
He stepped away then, his shirt pale in the moonlight and his hair dark. She felt him there still on her body in the places that were different.
And then she left, quietly through the kitchen and up the staircase, each footfall taken as though she were walking through mud. In her room she shut the door and leaned against it, an emptiness inside.
The eighth Earl of Elmsworth, Phillip Moreland, was not for her. They had stolen a fine measure of passion but now it was finished, banished to memory. To the impossible.
Tomorrow she would leave the estate and she might never see him again. Even if they did meet at some Society event he would ignore her because he should. What had happened tonight was completely untenable, a small, forbidden connection in the long and complicated road of life.
Yet her body felt alive in a way it never had and the memory of those years lying with her husband whilst he completed his marital duty was suddenly horrifying.
She had thought that was what intimacy was.
A necessity. A thing to be endured. But now she knew the wonder in it, the delight and the enchantment.
Phillip Moreland had shown her that at the grand old age of thirty and she would have to live with this knowledge for the rest of her life. Alone.
He loved his wife. Gretel. He had whispered her name as he’d held her and she understood from his tone how much he missed her.
Swallowing, she shook her head. She would survive this because she had survived everything else and for years and years and years.
She had independence now and the ability to live well.
This would not beat her and she would not relegate their kisses to a mistake either.
She had wanted him and he had wanted her and they had hurt nobody at all.
It was their secret to do with as they wished and one day she would look back and think that this was one of her most remarkable moments.
He had whispered Gretel’s name as he’d held her.
Hell, he hoped Wilhelmina St Claire had not heard that.
He had whispered his wife’s name to stop himself dissolving into a person he didn’t recognise and it had not worked.
He had been caught in the pleasure and thrill of a kiss that was unlike any other he had known.
She had been selfless and daring and giving.
She had kissed him with the honesty of a woman who held nothing back.
He would have kept going too, but the clock had stopped him, its hands turning to the hour of three and the possibility of those who saw to the running of the Elmsworth kitchens not far from awakening.
He sat back against the hardness of the table-top, and was glad for the reminder of discomfort.
Mrs St Claire would be gone tomorrow, gone to London and away from Hampshire. Phillip resolved to be far from the house when she went, out on one of the horses stabled here, riding on the hills above the estate so that he might watch her leave, at a safe distance.
He was not looking for another wife and besides, she had told him she had no want at all for a husband.
She was undeniably pleased to be a free woman and one who was financially independent to boot, and if she waded occasionally into the sensual with others from time to time then that was her choice.
But not his. He felt as if Gretel watched him closely from her realm in the afterlife, not in some malevolent form but in the way of one who was sorry.
Sorry for the weaknesses and the mistakes and for the sad times, too, when the dreams of a child conceived together had begun to slip further and further away until the illness had staked its claim.
A flirtation was not for him, no matter how tempting or sweet.
He was too old for it, for one thing, and too exhausted by all that had happened for another.
A simple, quiet life with easily defined boundaries and no risk at all was preferable after the years in chaos.
No surprises, no broken dreams or hearts, no feelings of failure or loss that sent him to the place his mother had always said he would linger in.
He needed peace to heal and to make him stronger. His fingers shook in his lap and he cursed the inherited affliction.