Chapter 24
“Never underestimate the power of love. The way to love anything is to realize it may be lost. The heart has its reasons that reason does not know at all.”
~Lord Byron
As Julia sang her love to Licinius, Henry finally looked at Fleur.
And at last, Fleur had her answer—this was all in vain. Everything Lord Cassian, Jeremy, and Linnie helped put into motion, the nudge is what they had called it. The hate blazing from Henry’s eyes had burned the last of her hope.
Io tremo… eppure t’amo.
I tremble… and yet I love you.
His loathing and mistrust pressed in—too great for them to overcome. There had never been love there to begin with, not from him. Hers, yes.
Allora vieni!
Then come with me!
Sì… ti seguirò.
Yes… I will follow you.
But then his note had arrived, and he had signed it a friend, and once again she had gone and made something more out of nothing.
Mustering a dignified grace she didn’t feel, Fleur excused herself from the room and went in search of Linnie and Jeremy, stepping into the hallway where unfamiliar voices echoed.
They needed to take her from this place, take her far—.
Suddenly, someone snaked an arm around her waist.
As Fleur found herself snatched inside an alcove, she opened her mouth to scream the theatre down.
A familiar voice whispered against her ear, three words. “You and Kilmartin,” His whisper, harsh like cut rocks.
Fleur went absolutely motionless. Her heart thumped so loud that Henry must hear it.
“Henry,” she whispered.
“You did this to make me jealous.”
His expression turned black. So black she wanted to lie. She gave it a real thought, but then decided nothing was better.
She trembled.
And she wanted to ask if it had worked, and wanted him to say yes, because then it would mean he cared about her. It would mean that she wasn’t the only one suffering at the sight of him with another, and that he suffered too, but then she needn’t have asked anything after all.
“Quale silenzio funesto!”
What dreadful silence is this!
The faded sounds of a tenor’s song whispered into the alcove.
“You blasted minx,” he rasped, pressing her against the wall, “Giving that smile of yours to Kilmartin to enrage me.”
“You big-headed lummox believing everything is about you,” she whispered furiously. “I gave Lord Cassian nothing.” Fleur thrust her shoulders out. “He earned my smile. You, on the other hand, have earned my ire.”
His eyes narrowed to slits. “I deserve your disdain, even your hate, for how I treated you. Your presence is a torment, because I lose myself when I’m with you.
” He captured her hands, pinning them above her head as he had done before.
“Tell me you don’t want this—tell me you don’t want me—and I’ll go. ”
Those latter words held her still; words once spoken, but in a gravelly French.
“Dis-moi que tu ne veux pas de ca—dis-moi que tu ne veux pas de moi—et je m’en vais.”
Was he showing her he recalled it was her from that masquerade? Or did he merely speak to her as he did every other lover?
Fleur bit her lip and, in saying nothing, told him—she was all too happy to be exactly where he had her. He had made her body sing before. Now, she would have one more song before he married another.
While in the shallow, darkened space, their every breath rose and fell like the rumble of a dawn thunderstorm. The heat between them was a blaze.
Hart anchored Fleur against the wall; his broad arms framing either side of her, the heady night, that all too fleeting moment they’d shared surged forward.
Everything was stripped away—feuds, fights, friendships. They were but two lovers who had only known each other once, and who needed one another with a longing that would not be denied.
The slow, triumphant grin that curled his lips belonged to a cocksure man who knew exactly the effect he was having on her.
Fleur met his mocking gaze with her defiant one; she tipped her chin up.
Her fast-falling chest, the red flush that covered her body, made Fleur out for the liar she was.
Trembling from the feel of his big chest—goodness, how she loved his big chest and all its contoured muscles—longing for the harsh lines of his lips on hers, devouring her as he did twice.
The memory of him and his kiss and his touch was indelibly imprinted on her soul and body.
her body, which still carried the echo of his worship; her nipples pebbled in anticipation.
That old, now familiar ache throbbed between her thighs where wetness gathered.
Without a word, Henry silenced her trembling lips with his, the intensity of his kiss mirroring her own frustrated longing.
She didn’t want to pretend anymore. She didn’t want to pretend she didn’t like him, or that she didn’t love him.
She didn’t want to pretend she wanted Lord Cassian; that she wanted anyone other than the man who now held her.
And so, she sighed and surrendered, and lifted her arms about Henry’s thick, muscled neck.
The low, hungry, approving groans that made his chest tremble said he approved.
And she was so tired of him not approving, and without any hope where Henry was concerned, she reveled in the greatest praise he could have bestowed upon her—his lack of restraint.
There were no words—neither of them could have managed—just the thick, heavy respirations of their broken breaths.
Henry tore his lips from hers. At the Rutland masquerade, she had cried out: an innocent young woman, believing that what had started had ended too soon.
Now, she shivered in breathless anticipation, knowing what came next, and still wholly unprepared for the feel of his lips as he moved them down the column of her throat. Sucking her. Biting her.
There was no gentleness. She didn’t want his gentleness. It had been so long—too long. He’d awakened a fire within her that long-ago night, and the banked smoldering embers roared to a full conflagration.
Henry shoved her neckline down. He filled his palms to overflowing with her heavy, swollen breasts.
Groaning like a dying man in a desert who had just found water, he lowered his head and consumed them.
He licked and sucked and flicked his tongue along the pebbled peaks, more sensitive than they had ever been.
The pleasure, somehow, was far greater than the first time Henry taught her the misery and exquisite bliss to be had from having her nipples played with.
Only his was no game.
Panting, aching, Fleur slipped her fingers through the thick, silken strands of his dark hair.
He drew each aching tip deeper into his mouth. Loving and laving first one, and then the other.
To keep from crying out, Fleur bit hard at her lower lip and instantly tasted the metallic tinge of blood.
All the while, like some sort of master builder, he sculpted her breasts in his big hands.
The soft whisper of satin sliding as she moved her hips, searching for him.
Then, he was sliding to the crimson carpet, and bringing her skirts up, and Fleur knew what was coming, because she had been here before.
Well, not here, precisely. But in this position, with him kneeling before her.
The pose of supplication was even more intoxicating now that she knew the proud, powerful man who knelt before her.
Then, her skirts fell, to the distant thunderous applause of an approving theatre house, and Hart was moving his tongue inside her.
Yielding it like a blade of flesh, he slipped inside her channel and retreated.
Slow. Meant to torture. Meant to make her beg.
At Lord and Lady Rutland’s, Fleur had begged him before with incoherent words and shamefully wanton sounds from her throat.
This time, she slumped against the wall at her back and rocked her hips against his mouth, letting him feel her need, making him taste it, showing him her want.
Fisting his hair and gripping him hard so he knew without any words needed that if she did not have him this way, she would die, and it would be all his fault.
He groaned his acknowledgment against her mound; the reverberations set off a fresh wave of pulsing.
Their urgency grew.
She told him, in the only way she could: I love you. I want you. I am yours, please, let me be yours.
And he, giving all he was able of himself to Fleur.
That exquisite pressure built between her legs, and this time she knew what was coming.
“Viens à moi, mon doux amour.” Come for me, sweet love…
Henry reached a hand up and slipped three fingers inside her mouth to suck, to hide her screams, and Fleur shattered. Lights flashed. While she worked his fingers with her mouth, she ground her hips into his face, against him as wave after wave of pleasure tore through her.
Henry was unrelenting. He kept up his onslaught.
And only after her body was replete did he position himself between her legs.
And the way his long, powerful fingers shook as he tried to free the front-falls of his trousers touched new corners of her heart that he hadn’t yet touched.
And even though she knew the not-so-lovely part came now, she wanted him inside her.
To have him as close as close could be. Joined as one, when they could not be joined together.
Tears pricked her lashes.
Then, he was sliding home, and there wasn’t pain. Not this time. There was just the achingly exquisite feel of him stretching her, filling her, like he was meant to be there. He moved inside her, with a tender reverence that hadn’t been there the first time he made love to her.
He drove himself into her, touching her deep, to the quick, and every nerve-ending in her being came alive.
Fleur tried to fight back a moan. She truly tried.
Henry swallowed her moans, kissed her, and consumed her.
They strained against one another. He drove into her, and Fleur lifted to take more of him. To take all she could. Here and now, there was no world outside. There were no questions about tomorrow, and no uncertainties about tomorrow’s tomorrow.
Their movements became more frenzied. Fleur felt that pressure between her legs building to a point of no return. She tensed. Wanting it. Climbing. Reaching for it.
Then, he pushed her to soar, just the same way he had that long-ago night when they were strangers.
“Abandonne-toi à moi, mon amour. Rien qu’à moi.”
And she was weeping, this time, his name. Henry. Henry. Silently in her head, she cried out to him.
Fleur gave herself fully to him, and then their tongues twined and twisted in the same lover’s dance.
Henry buried his fingertips in her hips, and with a final thrust, spilled himself inside her. And unlike before, there was no French letter; this time, he flooded her womb with his seed.
That place where their babe even now rested.
Fleur’s eyes slid closed. Reality crashed in.
She became aware of everything at once: the latest round of applause from the theatergoers—like a mocking acknowledgment of what she and Henry had done and what she had achieved. What he had helped her attain.
She knew the moment Henry, the Duke of Hartwell, returned.
His body turned to stone.
Snatching a kerchief just as he had done another time, he helped clean her and then combed her hair.
How very strange. So much had come to pass since that first night together as lovers. There had been Chilton’s auction and Rundell’s and betrothal rings and friendship and waltzes and tears and…a babe.
And yet for all that, the stiff tension between them now better suited the strangers from that stolen night than everything they were.
“I have to leave. I have a thing that needs attending to,” he said quietly. Before kissing her brow.
To Lady Angela.
“I-I know.”
Henry dragged a fist through his hair. But then, as dukes did, he hurriedly set those neatly combed locks to right.
Please God, do not let me cry.
And somehow, as he straightened his garments and left her in yet another stolen room, Fleur had one of her prayers answered—she did not cry.
“Je te suivrai partout,” she whispered.
I will follow you everywhere…
Only when he left did she let the tears fall.