Chapter 5
A Sound Plan
Nathaniel Greystoke did not remember ever leaving Hounslow Park so angry. In truth, he had never fought with Statony. It was true he had had a fair number of run-ins with his best friend’s sister, but not with him.
Vivid in his mind was the study door closing at his back, the dull pain in his jaw, and the blood on his lip.
The most lamentable thing was that he had lost his composure entirely at three-and-thirty.
She was too young for him, he had always known it.
It was not that men of thirty or more did not marry girls newly out of the shell, for that was the usual thing.
Besides, Eveline, for all her recklessness, had always struck him as very intelligent.
Whom did he wish to deceive? He had restrained himself only because she was his best friend’s little sister.
Merciful God… The expression he saw on Statony’s face when he shouted that Eveline was his…
He did not regret that part. Perhaps he should, but he did not.
It was liberating, though it would have been more sensible to have managed to behave like the irreproachable gentleman all England believed it knew.
The only thing he regretted was not having said it sooner.
Impossible! That witch called Eveline unsettled him completely.
The carriage rolled towards London with a rattling that could not impose itself over his thoughts.
Arden sat facing forward, his gloves between his hands and his gaze fixed on the landscape, though he saw neither the hedges, nor the fields, nor the milestones marking the distance to the city.
He was still in that garden, savoring Eveline’s mouth, the heat of her body.
He had kissed her.
Plundered her, as his friend had insisted on reminding him ad nauseam. Everything that had been locked away for years had found a way out without his express authorization.
Until that afternoon he had managed to deceive himself with a skill bordering on the admirable.
He had told himself that he watched her out of loyalty to Statony; that her recklessness irritated him because it was dangerous; that he followed her with his eyes because any concerned man would have done the same with a young woman who insisted on turning every social occasion into a challenge.
For years he had clothed his weakness for her in acceptable words such as: duty, prudence, honor, and protection.
Lies.
The hell of it had begun at Eveline’s coming-out ball, when she was eighteen years old and London decided that the younger sister of the Duke of Statony deserved to be regarded as the diamond she was.
During that party, Arden had watched her enter the ballroom and, for the first time in his adult life, discipline had served him no purpose.
It was not only that she was beautiful. Many women were.
London was full of girls schooled to bow their heads gracefully, smile sweetly, and pretend to be unaware of their own beauty.
Lady Eveline Hartwell had been different from the first instant.
She wore her dark curls pinned up with more effort than success, her chin high, and a lively, impatient gaze incapable of staying still.
She seemed made to defy any rule that tried to reduce her to a pretty figure beside a wall.
And she did not fear him.
That had condemned him.
Their first conversation had been a disaster, as was usual.
Arden had made the mistake of remarking on the advisability of her not disappearing from the side of the lady charged with chaperoning her, and Eveline had answered him with a smile so sweet that no one but he would have detected the venom.
It had fascinated him.
Afterward he had had to dance with her out of obligation.
Statony asked it of him, and he agreed because to refuse would have seemed strange. That was the explanation he gave himself. The one that did not oblige him to admit that, on seeing her surrounded by young gentlemen far too eager, he had felt an immediate hostility towards them all.
He danced with Eveline because he had to.
Also because he wanted to.
The contact of their gloved hands ought to have been irrelevant.
A social courtesy, nothing more. Yet Arden remembered the lightness of her fingers, the way she looked at him on realizing he was not going to flatter her, and that tense conversation, in which he discovered that the most closely watched girl in the ballroom needed no one to lend her worth. She already had it. Too much, perhaps.
When the piece ended, he knew he was in danger. Not because she could ruin him, but simply because she was Statony’s confounded sister, and he wanted to be near her.
And a man like him, who had seen his father’s sentimental ruin, learned early to fear that kind of desire.
His father had married for love. Arden had grown up hearing that phrase from the lips of servants, severe aunts, and gentlemen who, on drinking more than they should, forgot that a child could understand everything.
The previous Earl of Arden had loved his wife with a devotion no one in the family judged advisable.
The countess, on the other hand, never belonged to him.
Not even at the beginning. She had accepted the marriage, the title, the house, and the fortune, but she gave her heart to another man and one morning she left.
There was no public scene, only an absence that spread through the house like an illness.
His father even aged ten years in a single season.
They conceived only one child, which was fortunate, because the former Countess of Ashbury fled with her lover and left behind a husband in love and a son who learned, with brutal swiftness, that to love was the slowest way of humiliating oneself.
His father never fully recovered.
Nathaniel did. Or so he had believed. He had built himself upon self-vigilance.
Order, measure, and duty. He would never allow himself to depend on a woman.
He had had a few very discreet liaisons with a pair of widows.
Nothing serious, because he would not be a pleading man, nor an abandoned husband, and, of course, he would not become an idiot capable of handing his soul to someone ready to trample it.
That was why he had rejected the idea of marriage for years.
And when Statony mentioned Eveline to him after the Tentwall scandal, he had almost felt that the universe was mocking him with a very evident cruelty.
He marry her?
Eveline?
The girl who already robbed him of sleep?
The woman she had become over those four years had him so subdued that he had not managed to restrain himself any longer and kissed her without a thought for anything else.
His best friend’s sister!
Should he have married her when his friend told him he could do so to silence the scandal?
Arden had certainly reacted with horror when the suggestion was put forward, because it was the only possible defense.
Statony believed he was scandalized at the idea of joining his life to a reckless young woman; nevertheless, the truth was rather more shameful.
Arden was scandalized because, for a brief and dangerous instant, he had imagined accepting.
He saw Eveline in his house, at his table, under his protection, within a world where no one could take her from him.
And yes, lying in his bed, burning for him.
He imagined possessing her every night while she demanded more and more of him.
And he hated himself for it.
Since then he had done the one thing he knew how to do well: watch over her.
He followed her through the country balls and steered her away from unsuitable men.
Eveline, of course, detested him a little more each day.
She saw him as her brother’s best friend, an unappealing nuisance sent to protect her.
She believed he judged her because she displeased him—he was sure of it, given that Arden had striven to bring it about.
The reality was otherwise.
He was obsessed with her.
The word love struck him as poor. Mild. Almost ridiculous for defining that force that had been occupying his chest for years, with the patience of an illness.
Lust did not suffice either. The desire was there, fierce, often shameful, but it was only one part of something a great deal deeper.
Eveline stirred tenderness in him when he saw her with Henry, anger when she exposed herself to scoundrels, pride when she stood up to anyone who tried to belittle her, himself included, and a dark need to have her safe, near him, and to make her his.
And in the gazebo he had kissed her.
There was no turning back now.
The carriage took a curve. Arden rested his head against the squab and closed his eyes.
The memory returned to him again and again.
Eveline’s mouth opening beneath his, first to accept him and then to claim him just as he did, her hands clutching the lapels of his coat, that senseless whisper begging him not to stop…
If the guests had not appeared, he did not know how far he would have gone.
He would have made love to her right there.
For too many years he had denied himself what he most desired.
He clenched his gloves between his fingers.
Statony had insinuated that he would free him from the marriage.
Free him from what he most craved! Arden had almost laughed when he heard it, though there was no humor whatever in the sound that rose to his throat.
Free him from what? From Eveline? From the only woman he had desired to the point of turning desire into pure discipline and frustration?
From that which he had denied himself for years out of honor, fear, and loyalty?
No.
He could no longer turn back, because he had kissed and caressed her.