Chapter 19
Nineteen
Alix sat facing her reflection in the dressing room mirror, the darkness of the room falling like a reassuring cloak around her shoulders.
After her encounter with Rafe, she’d told her mother that the crush of the ballroom had given her a headache.
Madeleine, with only the slightest look of disapproval, had given her permission to return to Lady Melbourne’s.
As the carriage had rolled through the darkened streets, the horses’ hooves echoing on the cobblestones, Alix had stared enviously out at the lighted windows of the houses of Mayfair.
They looked so warm and inviting; she couldn’t help imaging that the people inside all enjoyed happy and uncomplicated lives.
It was a ridiculous fantasy. She knew those walls concealed their share of unhappy marriages, ailing family members, and financial insecurity.
It was just that she had made such a mess of her own life, she thought unhappily, unclipping her pearl drop earrings and letting them fall carelessly into a velvet-lined jewelry box.
Ginny had been up earlier to help her into her nightdress, but she had been unusually quiet, and when she’d complained of stomach cramps, Alix had willingly sent her off to bed.
Alix began to pull the pins from her hair, the heavy tresses snaking softly down her back.
How had she ever imagined she could pretend she and Rafe had never met, or that she could behave as if they were vague acquaintances?
When he’d looked at her it seemed as if his eyes saw into her very soul and when he touched her...
Alix scattered the pins, she didn’t like to think about how her body betrayed her at his touch.
She picked up an ivory-handled brush and, as she did so, heard the bedroom door open.
“Ginny, truly there’s no need to trouble yourself; I can get myself into bed without help.” The door closed, and she heard footsteps too heavy to be the maid’s cross her bedchamber floor.
“But I want to help you,” Rafe said in low tone, taking the hairbrush from her motionless grasp.
As he had done that afternoon by the fire in Paris, he began brushing her hair in long, slow strokes.
Alix sat mesmerized by the sight of him reflected in the mirror.
He was still dressed in his evening clothes, black velvet and crisp white linen.
His tawny hair was unpowdered and the candlelight made it look like it had been threaded with gold.
His hazel eyes were cast in shadow, unreadable as they locked with hers in the mirror.
“How did you get in here?” she asked, breaking the silence.
Rafe smiled slightly, “Jervis has a way with locks and women.”
“Ginny?”
He nodded.
The thought crossed Alix’s mind that she should complain to the duchess, then vanished almost as quickly as it had come. Revealing that the Earl of Moreham was in her bedchamber would cause more trouble for her than it would for the maid.
“I could raise an alarm,” she said.
“You could,” he agreed. “What do you think we should tell the duchess and her staff? I could say I was taking a stroll and decided to pay a call on my wife.”
“What of the scandal?”
“Damn the scandal.”
Alix pulled the hairbrush out of his hand. “What do you want Rafe?”
His eyes darkened as he turned her chair to face him. “I want you to stop running and listen to me Alix. I want to finish the conversation we started this evening.” He ran his finger gently down the curve of her face. “And most of all, I want you.”
She pushed his hand away. “When you look at me like that I can’t think straight, and when you touch me, I do things I know I shouldn’t...”
“Why do you fight so hard against something that feels so right, my love?”
“Because I’m afraid that it’s all that we have between us. What happens if you no longer want me, and you begin to regret you didn’t marry the woman you had planned to make your countess?”
Rafe’s eyes swept down the curves of her body, barely hidden by her thin nightdress and he wondered if his desire for her would ever fade. “I won’t Alix.”
The words seemed to echo in the room and resonate in her soul. Don’t you understand, she wanted to scream at him, I can bear it all, the loss of my father, the loss of my home, my titles and fortune, but I cannot bear to give you everything that I am, body and soul and lose you, too.
“But you can’t promise that can you?” she said quietly.”And even if you did, how do I know that I can trust you?”
“I’ve never lied to you, Alix.”
He’d never lied to her, it was true, but she couldn’t forget all the deceptions he’d practiced. “Why didn’t you tell me when we were wed that you were an earl?”
How could he explain to Alix what he’d felt when he’d heard the revulsion in Anne Dinsmore’s voice as she talked about bedding him?
That when he’d kissed her that night in Paris before they were married, somehow even then, he’d known they were meant to be together?
He’d wanted to be sure that she desired him as a man and not a title.
“Would it have made a difference Alix? And why didn’t you tell me you spoke English?”
“Because I didn’t trust you...”
They sat in silence for a moment, aware of the chasm that suddenly yawned between them.
“So what do you want Alix?” he said finally.
“An annulment.”
“The time for that has passed,” he said softly.
“I can’t restore your innocence and I don’t believe you’re the kind of woman who would go to another marriage bed pretending your virtue was intact.
” He saw her stiffen at the impact of his words.
“Tm sorry Alix, but neither of us can put things back they way they were.”
“So what do we do now?”
“There will be no annulment, but I won’t rush you into living with me.
I will give you two months to become accustomed to the idea of being my wife, the Countess of Moreham.
In the meantime, I will ask your mother for permission to pay court to you.
We will go riding together, and we shall dance together, and we shall go into supper at parties together.
And in December we will announce our intention to wed.
We can go through with another, more appropriate ceremony if you like then, with flowers and a gown and”—he lifted the signet ring between her breasts— “a proper ring.”
As he toyed with her wedding band, Alix wondered how Rafe felt.
He hadn’t mentioned Lady Dinsmore. Was Anne for him, like Valcour was for her, a part of the painful past that now seemed lost forever?
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Because she knew that Rafe was right, the time for an annulment had passed, just as she knew she would want no other husband than the man whose hazel eyes were focused so possessively on her. She would be the Countess of Moreham.
“Very well, my lord,” she said. “I will remain in the marriage.”
It was the answer he been waiting to hear, but somehow he felt cheated. Was she happy?
He brushed his misgivings aside. He’d make her happy he swore, as he took her face between his hands and gently kissed her.
Her lips warmed and softened beneath his kiss.
The familiar heat flared between them, and in that moment, Rafe realized he’d do anything to keep her from slipping away from him again.
He would draw her with his body, and then he would bind her with his heart.
He sank to his knees in front of her, his hands around her ankles.
He began trailing teasing kisses around the inside of her foot and along the curve of her ankle.
Alix giggled and tried to pull her foot away.
He held it fast, his lips nipping at her calves and the back of her knees.
He caught the hem of her nightdress and slid it up.
As his hair brushed the inside of her knees and his lips and tongue traced languid trails along the soft inner flesh of her thighs, he heard her laughter change to a gasp.
Alix caught his head between her hands. “Rafe, I don’t know... this seems... it can’t be right.”
“Sweetheart, it was right before and it will be again...” He flashed her a wicked grin. “Consider it a simple test of my trustworthiness.”
Alix shifted nervously as his hands slid up to her hips, pulling her firmly back down into the chair.
His thumbs moved in gentle, ever-widening ovals down around her hipbones and as his tongue meandered upwards to meet them.
And then his hands left her hips, his fingers parted the folds of her moistened cleft and his mouth settled on the sensitive flesh within.
“Oh God, Rafe,” Alix moaned softly, her body flushed with embarrassment and desire.
His soft chuckle vibrated against her skin, his breath hot within her. ‘Trust me again Alix,” he whispered.
Her last coherent thought was that there was nothing simple about the way he made her feel.
She pressed against him, her fingers clasping the muscle of his shoulders, as he licked and teased.
His mouth drew her relentlessly toward climax, waves of pleasure rippling through her and surging upward.
She flung her head back against the chair, her eyes closed, her teeth gripping her lower lip, fighting to restrain the cries welling up in her throat.
Rafe lifted his head and pulled her off the chair and down onto the thick woven carpet. As he did, her nightdress caught and twisted upwards and his mouth quickly followed its path, nipping and sucking at each measure of newly exposed flesh.
Alix grasped his hair, dragging his head up, kissing him and tasting herself salty and sweet on his lips.
She fumbled with the buttons of his waistcoat, pulling the linen of his shirt from the constraints of his waistband and pushing the tangled mass off his shoulders and out of the way.
Her hands gloried in the remembered feel of the hair on his chest, the smooth skin tight across his ribs and the muscles of his back.