Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
Lucy didn’t get another moment alone with Jack.
The rest of the evening passed in a whirlwind almost as hard to believe as that moment in the library, and throughout it all she still felt the brand of his lips on hers, sure it must be visible, written in scarlet across her face.
Both the kiss and the whole hot weight of sensations it had unleashed.
Caroline was beaming on the carriage ride home, pleased as a cat with cream.
She followed Lucy into her bedroom and stayed chatting merrily for some time until she stopped short, tutting to herself.
“You’re exhausted, poor dear! And here I am, prattling on.
Forgive me.” She got to her feet and enveloped Lucy in a rare, tight hug, her bantering tone absent for once. “I’m so very, very happy for you.”
“Caroline…” Lucy caught her friend’s hand as she turned to go, her clutch desperate. “I am not an heiress.”
“What does that matter?”
The panic swayed beneath her, finally having space to break through. “His whole family will hate the match once they realise.”
“It’s not them you are marrying.”
“But Jack… He…” He didn’t ask me to marry him. She was too cowardly to speak it out loud. He didn’t ask. We were caught.
He was forced into it.
Yes, he had kissed her. And yes, doubt had felt impossible while his mouth met hers and he whispered things against her skin. But she was worldly enough to know there was a great deal of difference between a man wanting a woman and a man wanting a wife.
“Jack,” Caroline said firmly, squeezing Lucy’s cold, tight fingers, “is currently the happiest man alive.” She glanced up as a noise came from outside the window. “And I think that is my cue to leave.”
How she could possibly guess Jack was outside, Lucy had no idea.
The drapes were closed and the idea of anyone being at the window was improbable and absurd.
But Caroline, Lucy had come to learn, always seemed to know a great deal more than anyone could guess.
She left the blushing Lucy with a smile, and Lucy stood up, heart pounding, and went to the window.
She was still in her evening dress, had only tugged off her gloves, hands too hot as waves of fear had spiked again and again during the carriage ride home. She pulled the drapes aside and dragged up the uncooperative sash, not quite able to look properly at the dark figure who climbed through.
“Lucy.” His voice was rapturous. But though he took a step towards her, he paused.
“You don’t mind me coming? I promised I would.
” He turned to close the window and draw the drapes, then came closer, taking her hand between both of his.
There was a smile in his voice. “And I think we need to talk about what happened.”
“Yes.” Lucy nodded. “Yes,” she repeated more briskly. She let go his hand and sat down on the end of her bed. Jack stayed standing, looking down at her with concern.
“What’s the matter?”
“You do know, Jack,” she said, pleating the coverlet by her hip, the words thick and tremulous on her tongue, “that I am not really an heiress?”
“Yes. And no.”
She looked up in confusion, and he came to kneel before her.
“You don’t know either, Lucy. You may well be—what could be more natural? The rumour has good foundations. But the real question is why does it matter? Why are you raising it now?”
“Your whole family thinks—”
“My family,” he said, taking her hand and smoothing the restless fingers, “are even more stupid than me. And that’s saying something.”
Lucy breathed a laugh.
“Is that what’s troubling you?” he asked gently.
“You did not ask,” she blurted. “And you need not, you know, marry me, just because we were caught. No one can make you—”
“Lucy, nothing on earth could stop me. Unless…you do…you do want to? Marry me?”
“You kept trying to persuade me I should still marry George!”
“You can’t imagine what that cost me.”
“And the things you said in the park that day! That you have no wish to really marry me, that you’ve never thought of me that way at all—that you loved Caroline!”
Jack huffed a wry laugh, grimacing as he squeezed her fingers.
“Don’t remind me. No wonder you punished me the way you did.
You’re right. I did deserve it.” He gave her a quizzical smile, half amused, half proud.
“But how did you even come up with the idea? Cooked it up between the three of you, is that how it was? Though I suspect it was largely Caroline’s work.
I sense her ruthlessness behind the scheme. ”
“Oh don’t! I can hardly think of that day at all. I was in such confusion, so stupidly upset! It was the thought of having to pretend—of that being all it would ever be to you: a joke!—when for me it was, was…”
“Real?” he said softly. “I understand. And I’m sorry. A hundred times so.”
She sniffed, and it was her turn to squeeze his fingers, grateful, embarrassed, taking comfort from him. He looked up at her, a dark glow in his grey eyes.
“But, Lucy,” he said, starting to smile, “look at me now, on my knees before you. Shall I do the thing properly? Marry me. Please.”
Annoyingly, she could only nod and sniffle, her throat choked.
“I’d rather you said it, Lucy,” he teased.
“Yes. Yes, Jack. I’ll marry you.”
He let out a breath, eyes shut for a moment, a man setting down a heavy load, or a man finally free from the darkest prison. Then he got up and sat down beside her on the bed.
They were silent for a moment, her body humming, his shoulder hard and warm beneath his coat where it brushed up against hers.
“I’d very much like to kiss you again,” he said. “If I may.”
“Oh, Jack. Don’t make it absurd!”
He laughed, but there was nothing to laugh at in the way he turned to look at her, his hand brushing up under the curls at the nape of her neck. He was entirely serious now, an intensity in his look that made her breath catch.
“Jack…” she breathed, needing to say something, do anything, to break the tension of the moment because the anticipation was unbearable. He smiled softly, with his eyes, and his hand slid from her nape to her cheek, his thumb brushing the corner of her mouth.
“Here,” he murmured, eyes on that point where the pad of his thumb had made her lips tingle. He pressed a featherlight kiss there, and, “Here,” he murmured again as his mouth moved to the centre of hers.
Every light touch left a tingling trail, made her breath catch and a coiling heat swoop right down through her centre.
He kissed her fully, as he’d done in the library, his hand sliding once more to the nape of her neck, finding pins and freeing them while his lips slid, seeking, across hers.
His tongue touched her lower lip, and she gasped.
Then he stroked inside her mouth, tilting her head back as he groaned.
Lucy moaned too, the kiss no longer in her control.
It was a breathless, intoxicating thing, a surrender to a part of her that was new and yet not new, a creature spreading wings—wings she’d often felt the touch of, waiting.
“Let me look at you,” Jack said huskily, pulling back as the curls he’d freed fell all around her shoulders.
“You beautiful thing, you,” he murmured, already kissing her again, the pressure of it coaxing her to lie down.
Jack moved with her, mouth on hers. His hand moved down her throat to her chest—to her breast. The sensation of his palm, the pressure of his caress, and the low noise he made, sent a new wave of heat thudding through her.
“Jack…”
“You’re right, I’m sorry. We should stop.”
He sat up, his breathing ragged, his cheeks flushed. He flexed the fingers of his hand as he gave her a dark-eyed, laughing look. “I should probably go. Or at least sit on the other side of the room.”
“No.”
“No?”
She sat up too. “I don’t want you to go.”
Then, not exactly shy, but still tentative because it was all so new, she touched his cheek, the faint roughness of his jaw. “You will marry me? Soon?”
“As soon as I can.”
“Then I don’t want you to go.”
He went very still.
“I want you to stay, Jack.” She looked at her hand on his jaw, noting every minute rasp of stubble against the whorls of her fingertips.
It was a strange dichotomy, this acute awareness of the smallest thing while her heart pounded and her whole self felt caught up in a storm wave.
“I want you to stay,” she said again. “I want… I want it all, Jack—with you. I’m not even embarrassed.
It doesn’t feel wrong, does it? Not us, not being this close. ”
He still said nothing, though his hand came up to cover hers and press it more firmly against him. The rest of him was motionless, as though caught on a precarious tipping point.
“Am I terrible for speaking so?” she said. “But I have wanted you, and wanted you, and now, like this, you in my bed… It feels like a dream, but it also feels like coming home… Won’t you say something? Am I…am I too shocking? But I always say too much to you…”
“You say what I don’t have words to. I love you. God, I adore you. I want you, so very, very much. But—”
He stopped talking because she leaned forward and kissed him.
His eyes sank shut, and he let out a long, painful breath, his every muscle rigid as she sat back and observed her handiwork.
For a moment, his eyes stayed closed, then they snapped open, a hot gleam in them.
Good. It seemed she was doing things correctly.
She wiped the gleam from his face as she reached behind her back and began to unhook her dress.