by Erica Ridley
“I don’t know whether to kiss you or throttle you,” he muttered.
“I have my preference, if we’re putting it to a vote,” she whispered back.
“Got a bad foot, not bad ears,” Uncle Jasper called.
Meg grinned and pulled the tall stack of books out of her bag.
“I didn’t know if you returned those others because you were finished with them or because you hated them,” she explained. “So I brought a few of everything. I think the intended audience of a book is less important than whether its subject matter interests you.” She fanned out the volumes until all titles were visible. “See anything that interests you?”
Lucien’s dark gaze was not on the books, but on her. “Beaucoup.”
Her cheeks heated and goosebumps of extra awareness danced on her skin.
“English only now,” she said lightly, and picked one of the books blindly. “I brought a pocket watch. For every half hour of study in English, you earn a ten-minute break in French. Ready?”
He visibly collected himself, then swapped the history tome she’d randomly chosen for an illustrated guide to British fauna. “Prêt.”
The half hour flew by surprisingly quickly. Lucien was an apt student, but Meg never lost sight of how private he was and how much of himself he was trusting her with by allowing this tutoring session to happen. Because he was willing to take such a personal risk with her, she was determined to treat these lessons with all the seriousness and respect he deserved.
When the minute hand marked the half hour, Lucien slumped back in his chair and rubbed his temples.
“Headache?” Meg asked with sympathy.
She remembered what it was like to move to France without speaking a word of the language. For a few months, there had been enough money for a governess. Afterward, Meg’s education had been left up to… Meg.
“It gets easier,” she told him in French.
His weary gaze met hers. “I know.”
“Come on.” She pushed to her feet. “Let’s get some air. Why don’t you introduce me to Chef?”
“He loves apples,” Jasper called. “And boots, if you’ve an extra one in your bag.”
Lucien shook his head fondly and held out his elbow. “This way.”
Meg curled her fingers about his arm and felt his warmth all the way to her bones.
Rather than take her outside, he led her to a rear-facing window in the kitchen. A wooden pen stretched in a rough square just beyond the glass. Inside was an enormous black-and-white spotted pig.
“English people prefer dogs as pets,” she whispered to Lucien.
His lips curved. “English people are boring.”
“Not all English people,” she protested in faux offense.
“Maybe not the ones who believe themselves half French,” he conceded.
“The worst are the Frenchmen who refuse to consider themselves even a tiny bit English,” she teased. “Eve told me you already purchased passage home. Why bother learning the language at this point?”
He looked surprised. “I’m not doing it for myself.”
It was her turn to be confused. “Then who are you doing it for?”
“My family.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Annie and Frederick are family now. With both my siblings married, who knows how many more nieces and nephews are on the way.”
She feigned horror. “English nieces and nephews?”
“You don’t get to choose who your family members are,” he said gravely.
“Except when you do,” Meg pointed out. “Désirée chose Jack, Bastien chose Eve, and your Uncle Jasper chose all of you.”
His eyebrows shot up. “How did you know he wasn’t an uncle by birth?”
“He’s English.” She tilted her head. “That’s also how I knew you were part English, too. A true patriot would never claim an English as family.”
“Where’s my valise?” Lucien pretended to look under pots and pans. “I need to run away.”
“You are running away,” she reminded him. “You have a ticket to France.”
“I’m not running away,” he corrected. “I’m going back. Don’t you ever think of it?”
“No,” she answered honestly. “There’s nothing there I want. What’s over there for you?”
“My old life,” he said without hesitation. “The one I would have had if I hadn’t had to come here. It’s too late to change the past, but there’s still time to shape the future. I always thought I was doing it for my siblings’ sake, but now that we’re older, my priority has shifted to providing for my future children.”
“So you are looking for a bride.” Her chest fluttered. “What is your ideal woman like?”
He winced and averted his gaze.
“Let me help,” she said flatly. “Not me.”
It was a good thing she was a determined spinster, or his preemptive rejection might have stung.
“It’s not… not you.” He floundered. “It’s just… I was raised to follow certain traditions—”
“I hate tradition,” she informed him. “Rules are for ninnies.”
“So when I marry—”
“I hate marriage,” she added. “I’d rather be a spinster than a chattel.”
“It will have to be someone of the same class I was born t—”
“You’re an aristocrat?” She took a step back.
He made a face. “That depends how you define aristocrat.”
He was. He was.
Lucien was from exactly the class of wealthy, indolent, have-everythings whose servants fed them strawberries and champagne while people like Meg sewed in cramped attics or breathed in black dust until their lungs stopped.
Her voice shook. “Do you have a title?”
“N-no.”
“Are you in line for one?”
He hesitated. “Yes.”
“Good God.” Her throat went dry.
She tried to remind herself that he was still Lucien. That he hadn’t created the social class system any more than she had singlehandedly caused the Revolution.
But if she was looking for a reason why they could never be together… she’d just found it.
He frowned. “Most women are… intrigued by the thought of a title.”
“Intrigued isn’t the word.” She swallowed hard. “And I’m not most women.”
Not that she could ever tell him why. If she was filled with distaste at the thought of the aristocracy, Lucien would be disgusted to find out her parents had fought on the side of the revolutionaries. They hadn’t won, but they had fought.
And now both sets of parents were dead.
Bloody right, she wasn’t going back. He could have France. She was finished with it.
Chapter 8
As little patience as she had for the flighty indifference of the aristocracy, Meg had to admit that Lucien was nothing like those lords and ladies.
At least, not while he was still here in England.
When they’d returned from their French break, Jasper was no longer in the drawing room. Nonetheless, Lucien had gone straight back to the books she’d selected for him and picked up his pencil. He wasn’t learning English for himself, he had said. He was doing it for his family. For children who weren’t even born yet.
It was difficult to keep a frosty demeanor in the company of a man like that.
This must have been what he was like as an adolescent. The oldest of his siblings; put to work in a hot, grimy smithy of all places, after a life of luxury and coddling. She imagined he would have picked up each strange new tool without question, throwing himself wholeheartedly into any task, no matter how difficult or odious or painful, because it wasn’t for him. It was for his family.
Lucien was many things, but he was not selfish. He was kindhearted and incredibly loyal. Everything he had ever done had been for someone else. Time and again, he consistently put others’ needs first, even to the detriment of his own. Meg snuck another glance at him from beneath her lashe
s.
If the aristocracy had to exist… it could use more men like Lucien.
When the minute hand of the pocket watch reached the hour, he sagged forward and touched his forehead to the table.
“Ten-minute break?” he begged.
She took pity on him. “I think that’s enough for one day, don’t you? Why don’t we work out a timetable. Did you want to do this once a week, twice a week…?”
“Every day, if you’ve the time.” He added quickly, “I can pay you.”
Her shoulders twitched. Meg could use the money, but she didn’t want Lucien’s.
“You can pay me in other ways,” she suggested. “If your turgid member would like to visit my balmy feminine tunnel—”
He walked her to the door. “I am not making love to you for tutoring lessons.”
“Who said anything about love?” She clasped a hand to her chest in faux shock. “You overstep yourself, sir.”
“Do it!” Jasper shouted from the other side of the wall.
Lucien cast his gaze heavenward. “My uncle is a terrible chaperone.”
“He really does have good ears,” Meg said, impressed. “And great ideas. Here’s another one: Don’t answer yet. Tonight, when I’m not about, check with your swollen maypole in case there’s a difference of opinion on how to proceed.”
“I am not ruled by my baser instincts,” Lucien said clearly.
She brightened. “So you admit your first instinct is in fact to surge forth like a great steed, plowing the tender field with a scythe of passion.”
“That’s nobody’s instinct,” he warned. “No one even knows what that means.”
“Esteemed scribe Mr. John Cleland knows,” she informed him primly. “He wrote an entire book about it.”
“About—wait. That’s what you’re reading? The book you tried to give to me in the library is all about…”
“I told you it was more interesting than your books. Now you’ll have to wait. I’m on the last chapter, and I can’t wait to… finish.”
Lucien closed his eyes.
“And when I say ‘finish,’” she whispered, “I really mean—”
“Message received.” His voice was hoarse. “The image of you with a book is now never leaving my mind.”
She smiled earnestly. “The right literature is practically exercise.”
He moaned again.
She stepped closer. “What was that?”
“It wasn’t me,” he muttered. “It was my turgid member.”
“Oh, you two are going to have a lovely discussion tonight.” She clapped her hands together.
He nodded as if in pain. “Many nights. You should go away. And stop talking to me in French. I understand all the words and it’s battering my self-control.”
“As you wish.” Pleased, she turned toward the door.
He stopped her. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
She frowned. “What?”
“No witnesses.”
Before she could quite take his meaning, Lucien took her face in his hands and lowered his mouth to hers.
This was what she had been missing. Any kiss she had ever felt before, any kiss she had ever seen or read about, vanished like steam from a kettle when compared to the heat of his kiss.
She pressed herself against him, heartbeat to heartbeat, close enough to feel his strength and to discern there was indeed a hot, sturdy maypole hoping to make her acquaintance.
Lucien was right. Theirs were not the sort of kisses one could hide in a public park. Theirs were the kind of kisses that must be stolen in secret moments, taken by force when the world conspired against them. She could not keep him, and he could not keep her, but nothing could stop their mouths from finding each other, again and again.
He tasted like the paradox he was; familiar and foreign, forbidden and irresistible. The more she tried to pull away, the tighter she clung to the hard muscle of his arms, the wide strength of his shoulders, the tousled softness of his hair.
When at last they broke apart, neither had any breath left.
“There.” The word scratched from Lucien’s throat. “Now you know. No chemistry whatsoever.”
“And now you know.” She lifted her lips to his ear. “I’ll be thinking of you tonight whilst you’re thinking of me. ”
Chapter 9
The following afternoon, Meg presented herself at the le Ducs’ front step and lifted her hand to knock. The door swung open before her knuckles could graze the wood.
Lucien’s tall, muscular frame not only filled the entire doorway, his domineering presence seemed to fill the entire village, erasing the rolling hills and the soaring castle and the endless evergreens until all that was left was Meg’s pounding heart and the intense heat in Lucien’s brown eyes.
“You missed me!” she said with delight.
He pulled her into his arms, slammed the door closed, and covered her mouth with his.
It wasn’t a punishing kiss or a plundering kiss or any of the other fantasy kisses Meg had thought she wanted. It was a hundred times sweeter, a hundred times hotter, a hundred times better. And over far too quickly.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he grumbled when he finally broke the kiss.
“Just to clarify… you spent the night thinking about me, or ‘thinking’ about me?” She gave a suggestive wink.
He raised his brows blandly. “A gentleman never tells.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “What if the lady wants to know every single sordid detail?”
He led her to the study table and pulled out a chair. “Then the lady will have to use her ample imagination, just like the gentleman did.”
“Well, if the gentleman should ever tire of relying solely on his imagination…” She bit the end of her pencil and smiled.
“Trust me.” He made a pained expression. “The gentleman is well aware that his imagination pales in comparison with reality.”
“Especially when…” Meg pulled a small stack of books from her canvas sack. “Reality consists of reading comprehension practice, starting with the children’s books you previously borrowed from the lending library.”
He held up a hand in negation. “I didn’t actually read them.”
“You will today,” she answered pertly, and handed him the first one. “Out loud, please.”
After showering her with a series of impressively smiting glares, he sighed in resignation and opened the small volume to the first page. “Tom… Thumb?”
She nodded in encouragement. “Just so.”
For the next hour, they made their way through the small pile, pausing after every page to discuss pronunciation and synonyms and metaphor.
When at last they reached the last page of the final volume, he shoved them all aside. “That’s it. I will never pick up those books again. Not even to read to my children. I’ll make up my own stories. French stories.”
Meg was probably meant to chastise him for his insistence in French’s superiority over English, but the image of Lucien before a fire, reading aloud to an eager brood, had overwhelmed her with a strange sense of longing and emptiness.
His gaze met hers. “Do you want children?”
“No,” she answered automatically.
It was true and not true. She didn’t want children with some handsome Town buck who would pass through Cressmouth for a fortnight and never be heard from again. That fear alone had spurred her to employ preventative measures like vinegar-soaked sponges that would prevent Meg from being the one to fill up her cousin’s nursery.
And if some meaningless encounter had resulted in her being leg-shackled to some dandy she’d chosen for how he looked in evening dress, rather than anything he possessed between his ears? Meg repressed a shudder. Heaven help her. Nothing would be worse than losing her hard-won freedom, than becoming the property of a man, than being left at home, alone and forgotten, just as Meg’s father had done to his own wife and child, even before he’d lost all their mo
ney.
No, thank you. That was not a risk she was willing to take for anyone, not even Lucien.
Not that he was asking. He was dreaming of the woman he would ask, once he returned to French high society, and the sort of debutantes an aristocrat deserved.
“I’ll have at least two sons,” he was saying. In French, of course. “And I hope that means I get to have a daughter or two along the way. I wouldn’t be who I am today without my brother and my sister.” His voice softened. “I want a big family for my children, too.”
Meg did not respond. She had been an only child.
If there had been an heir for their fortune, such as it was, would her father have stayed home to raise his son? Or would that have spurred him to chase even wilder dreams, in the hope of creating an empire?
“Do you think about your future children often?” she asked.
“Every day,” he answered without hesitation. “It gives me peace. Their generation will be able to enjoy the life my siblings and I were meant to have. Routs and ballrooms, tutors and university, wealth and comfort.”
A world someone like Meg could not be less suited for. She had not needed the reminder, but perhaps it was good to confirm what she already knew. They would never have anything more than this.
Whatever it was that she and Lucien shared, it would end the moment he set sail for France.
Chapter 10
Lucien’s pencil scratched across a fresh sheet of foolscap as he hunched over the dining room table, towering with stacks of books. In the week since he and Meg had begun daily lessons, everything had only become more challenging. The homework had gotten harder, limiting themselves to just the occasional stolen kiss had gotten harder…
What he was working on now were translations, to test his vocabulary. He was supposed to convert one page of an English children’s book into French, and do his best to translate a page of Voltaire’s Candide into English. He was now on his third page of each. Not because it was easy—translating was like trying to forge snowballs out of fire—but because he wanted to please Meg. To impress her.
