Chapter 24
“What Adelaide wanted, Lord Swindle wasn’t sure he had to give her. A heart for a heart, that was the extent of his offering. He hoped that it was enough.”
Adelaide, Chapter 13
Lady Noelle hadn’t known when she’d bestowed her writing into Fitz’s keeping the night before that he’d turn up at her family home so soon. She’d wanted him to understand why her writing was so important to her, not to take on the mantle of savior.
Her maid had roused her saying that she ought to dress with haste and make her way downstairs, and what did she find?
Fitzwilliam Pomfrey, gorgeously disheveled, and her brother Jasper high-handedly discussing her future without her in the room.
The expectant and obsequious, round eyes of Fitz’s dog Howler only caused further strain to her self control. Of course the cad would have brought along a furry and objectively adorable companion to wear down her resolve.
“Noelle,” He said her name like it sounded delicious on his tongue, melting like a meringue.
“Viscount Ludlowe,” She cast his name, no, his title, out of her mouth.
“Good morning,” he said, stupidly.
He had just propositioned her brother to marry him and all he could say was “Good Morning”?
“You look like hell,” She said, rooted to her post in the doorway.
He didn’t though. Despite her inexplicable frustration with the man, he was sinfully attractive like an angel that heaven refused entry for fear he’d corrupt its other inhabitants.
He proved her right with a well-timed smile, rebutting her with: “And you look like heaven.”
He leaned in his chair and kept his hands behind his head; but his eyes touched her hungrily, raking over her and her silk dressing gown and ribbon tied braid bobbing at her chest.
She tried to pull her dressing gown tighter around her, but it only pushed up her breasts.
She followed his gaze downward, feeling her skin turn scarlet from her ears to her heels.
“Well, let’s get this over with. Lord Pomfrey has something he wishes to ask you,” Jasper said; moving to stand closer to the mantel, turning his back to the two of them (yet still within earshot).
Fitz stood and moved closer to her and reached for her hands.
“I stayed up all night. I couldn’t stop reading Adelaide. I know I’m not a well-read man, but even I can see that it’s a wonder. In the end, when Swindle sacrificed himself to save her identity…after she’d married another man for a title…and she saves him from the gallows? I had chills.”
Noelle couldn’t deny that this was exactly the reaction she’d wanted from exactly the person she’d wanted it from. Her anger with his ham-handedness started to subside as he went on, gesticulating passionately with his hands.
“And then…then, she reveals her secrets to the chambermaid and leaves her part of the fortune. She was setting her up to take her place in her little fraudulent scheme, wasn’t she? However did you come up with it, you clever little minx?”
The admiration in his intensely blue eyes, the sound and the shape of his lips as he called her minx, the way his thumb traced patterns on her hand that rested in his stronger one, elicited all her warring factions inside of her to set down their weapons and surrender at once, to change sides.
She looked down at the place where his hands joined hers.
He seemed to sense her hesitation and gave her hand a squeeze, for courage.
She willed stillness into her voice as she spoke, looking up at him, shyly biting her lip, as though so much of their battle of wills hinged on his reply, “Did you really enjoy it?”
He pulled her close, embracing her with his hands at her back.
She rested one hand at his chest and let the other wrap around his thick hair at the nape of his neck.
The feel of him this close, the softness in his eyes and his voice and his large male body, could, most unnervingly, stop all of her tension in its tracks.
“It revealed something to me.”
She raised a questioning brow.
“I’ve misjudged you.”
“Fitz-”
He traced a finger over the curve of her bottom lip.
“Let me finish. For a wedding present, I’m going to publish your story, however you like. Hang what anyone says, you’re brilliant; and most importantly, you’re going to be mine. So, if you want it in leather volumes with gold script and hand-painted illustrations, you may have it.
If you want to publish it serially in the Gladstone Weekly Gazette, you may have it. However you want to publish it, you shall have it. ”
“A wedding present.” Both of her eyebrows shot up.
“Yes,” he said with a singular, confident nod and a smile that plucked at every string of her heart.
“Who am I marrying, exactly?”
He chuckled sardonically. His voice was low, deep, seductive. She saw why her emotions; her body had changed allegiance. Even a clever woman could only put up so much of a protest in the face of such an adversary.
“Play games with me if you want, but let me be very clear. You know damn well “who” will be a partner to you in every imaginable meaning of the word, protect your secrets and your body, and cherish it every night in the bargain. Me. No one but me, woman. The 13th Viscount Ludlowe.
Fitzwilliam Pomfrey, Lord Ludlowe. I have other titles too if you’d like a full list.”
A sigh escaped her that sounded like an ecstatic “oh,” a protest of no, all at once.
His lips leaned forward enough to tease hers, before hearing a cough over their shoulder emanating from the mantel.
“Hang it all. I’m not proposing to you with Westmoreland holding up the mantelpiece just a few paces to my left like some chiseled gargoyle. He’s just given his blessing. I think. It’s rather hard to separate his threats from his enthusiasm.
I will publish your novel and when you are not expecting it, I will grandly and publicly declare my devotion and ask you to be my wife. Can you accept my terms, my princess?”
He had called her Princess for years. What he hadn’t done up until this hazy, late summer morning, was call her my princess. The monosyllable was possessive, hopeful, beseeching…and set her to fluttering.
His other terms were ornamentation, but my princess was the only term she had needed to convince her to let out a soft, genuine, “Yes.”
Fitz reacted quickly, without regard for the Earl lurking nearby. He crushed her to him, claiming her mouth with his. He sealed their arrangement with a kiss that set her even more to fluttering until they consumed her.
She claimed his mouth as her own in return, clamping her hands on either side of his stubbly jaw.
“Put her down!” The Earl shouted before she even realized that her feet had left the floorboards, or that her mouth was pressed to Fitz’s, or that they were clutching each other so close they were fused together.
The two of them finally released one another and The Earl pointed them to separate settees. He paced over to the side board, muttering as Fitz winked at her.
“God, I’m going to have to uncork the rum for this. The brandy isn’t strong enough to erase this horrific image.”