Chapter 5
It occurred to Christian, as he pondered the green baize of the card table, that he was exceedingly drunk.
He had no idea why he’d let Whitby drag him to Katherine Montmorency’s midnight card party.
Or, wait. Yes, he did. It had been twenty-four hours since Matilda Halifax had propositioned him in St. James’s Park, and he’d been completely out of his head ever since. He’d thought perhaps the card party would prove a distraction.
He squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them again, staring at the cloth-covered table. It was alarmingly green.
She had not propositioned him, of course. She had proposed that she accompany him to Bamburgh to tutor his sister.
It had been an entirely chaste, practically respectable idea, at least as far as Matilda Halifax was concerned.
But he’d had to say no. He’d had to. Because she’d started in on restraints, and erotic pamphlets, and her desires, and Christian had—
He’d thought about her. He’d pictured her. He’d wanted her.
God, it had been a long time since he’d felt that sharp bite of desire.
He had been a young man, a different man when he’d explored the world of pain and pleasure, submission and restraint, in the bawdy houses of the London demimonde.
The fact that she had heard about him in her erotic research almost made him laugh.
He’d been fresh out of Cambridge, had not yet inherited. He had not married Grace.
Perhaps that man—that Christian—would have let Matilda come to Northumberland.
That Christian would have wanted to hear more about her bloody interests, would have offered himself as test subject for whatever sexual experimentation she could dream up.
That Christian would have been amused and baffled and enchanted by her.
But this Christian—the one drunkenly examining a card table as though it held the answer to several important religious mysteries—was …
Oh, for God’s sake. This Christian was all of those things too. But he could not afford to be. He was halfway to hell, and a cynical old bastard besides.
And if, when he closed his eyes, he thought of her—the queen of the milkmaids, her chin tipped up in defiance, her curvy little body naked under his hands—it could never go further than that.
She was too young. Too innocent. Too goddamned bloody sweet.
His life was edged in darkness, and he had no wish to dim her light.
He felt a stab of guilt when he thought of Bea, of course. If he were a better man, he would not want Matilda Halifax tied up in his bed, spread out before him like a feast. He would take her up on her offer, haul her to Northumberland, and let her give his sister the time and care Bea needed.
He was not a better man.
He had just resolved to return to Bamburgh on the morrow when a gentle hand closed over his shoulder.
He flicked his gaze in her direction. Red hair. The same blue dress she’d worn at Denham’s. All sorts of things flared inside him: desire and anguish and sheer delight that she was here.
He smothered it all. She could not be here. He could not let himself ruin her.
And he would, if she kept on this way. He would hurt her just by being near her.
Her mouth was at his ear. “I wanted to speak with you,” she murmured. “Come away with me, Christian.”
She trailed her hand down his arm and caught his fingers, and he let her draw him away from the table.
Katherine Montmorency’s card parties had been legendary for at least a decade. By this time of night, they usually devolved into revelry and determined debauchment. There were darkened alcoves and locked rooms, and every shadowed corner was hidden by a screen for privacy.
He let her pull him into one.
He almost couldn’t look at her. It had been twenty-four hours since he’d seen her in the park—twenty-four hours since he’d held his body a whisper away from hers, and imagined with savage ferocity how she would feel beneath him.
No, he could not look at her. He could not let himself want her that way. He did not know what to do.
“Why are you here?” he asked. He could hear his measured speech—the careful consonants of the inebriated.
He was too old for this. Too old for Matilda.
“I needed to speak with you after last night,” she said. “I—I came here to speak with you.”
Her voice—there was something wrong about her voice. He looked up, but her face was half-hidden in the shadows of the screen.
She sounded—
For the first time since he’d met her nearly a month before, Christian thought that she sounded afraid.
“I—” Her voice shook.
She was afraid. The tremble of her voice was acid, burning his skin. She was afraid of him—bright, fearless Matilda Halifax.
And that, more than anything else, decided him.
There was one way he could make her stop. One way he could persuade her to leave him alone, to go home and never come anywhere near him again. To keep herself far away and safe, where he could not hurt her.
So he put his hands to the curve of her waist, pushed her farther into the darkened corner, and hated himself.
“To talk?” he asked. “Or for this?”
He pressed his mouth to the skin of her neck, and as he breathed her in, some part of his mind realized that he wanted the soft floral scent of her letters. He wanted that familiar scent in his nose, in his lungs. Almost as much as he wanted to taste her.
It was not there. She did not smell like the letters.
“You think you know what you like,” he hissed into her ear. “But you don’t really know, do you? You cannot imagine, little girl, what I want to do to you.”
He felt her shudder, and self-loathing pulsed in him, so he gathered it up and used it to fuel the words he said next. He did not want to frighten her—and yet he had to—and he felt all his muscles lock at the confusion of want and need and hurt.
“I want to tie you to the bedposts with your corset strings,” he rasped. “I want to take my riding crop to your pretty little arse. I want to use you so hard you cannot sit down for a week. I—”
The slap she delivered was so powerful and unexpected that for a moment, Christian went blind.
He let her go. Slowly her image resolved in front of him.
His brain felt thick and muddied, his thoughts a slow, sticky revelation.
Her blue eyes were wide and tearful. The dim candlelight in the room flickered on her face as she stepped forward to dart around him.
It was then—as the light caught on her freckled cheeks—that Christian saw. He understood, finally, what he should have known from the first. What he would have known, had he not been stupid with brandy and anguish and lust.
It was not Matilda, this woman with the frightened voice and all-wrong scent.
It was her twin sister.