Harlequin Historical February 2021--Box Set 1 of 2

by Virginia Heath

  She put down the palette and the brush and nimbly jumped down from the scaffold. ‘And they are?’ She didn’t walk towards him, preferring to stand awkwardly several feet away and twiddle with her hands.

  ‘The rest of our motley group of make-do allies—Austria, Prussia, Bavaria. But Russia mostly. The Tsar wanted it done and dusted as fast as possible, and wanted all the credit, so the treaty was too rushed.’ And too damn flimsy whichever way you looked at it. ‘In the end, after much to-ing and fro-ing, and a great deal of table bashing and sabre rattling, Castlereagh refused to sign it. So I suppose technically, even though we are no longer at war with France, Britain is still at war with Napoleon even though all the hostilities have ceased.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘It will be in tomorrow’s papers because I was the lucky messenger who got to bring back the mediocre tidings. But at least that meant I got to come home.’

  ‘And are you and your armchair in one piece?’

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘Were you shot at?’

  ‘Only a couple of times. Thankfully, they all missed.’ He tried to sound flippant. Trying to play the ordeal down rather than admit that there had been moments in the midst of that battle, albeit as an observer on the periphery, where he had genuinely been fearful for his life, but she saw right through the bravado and her lovely eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Oh, Piers… I’ve been so worried about you.’ Then with no warning whatsoever, she launched herself at him, looping her arms tightly around his neck as she cuddled him close. ‘I feared you might never come home.’

  ‘You didn’t need to worry.’ Although Piers was ridiculously delighted that she had cared enough to. He hugged her tightly back, needing the contact, feeling choked at her concern but trying not to allow his silly heart to read more into it than that.

  ‘I’ve been a complete nervous wreck. That’s why I’ve been painting every hour that God sends. Every time I allowed myself to think, I kept conjuring images of you lying dead somewhere.’ She stepped back just enough to run her hands over his face and shoulders as if she needed categoric physical proof he was unharmed. ‘You look thinner. And so very tired.’

  ‘Nothing a good meal and a good night’s sleep won’t sort.’ Although he already felt a million times better just because she was here. ‘I missed you, Faith.’ He didn’t mean to say it, but the words tumbled out before he could stop them. ‘Probably a great deal more than I should have.’ More truth, and perhaps closer to home than he was comfortable admitting, but he felt he had to admit it. Or he was too tired and overwhelmed to hide it.

  ‘I missed you too.’ A single tear trickled down her cheek as she lovingly cupped his face. ‘So very much.’ Her palms smoothed over his shoulders again and down to his chest. ‘And I’ll kill you if you ever make me worry like that again!’ She shook him by the lapels, her body trembling. ‘If you as much as think about ever heading towards a battle again, I shall tie you to your bloody armchair and nail it to the floor! Do you hear me?’ Then she grabbed those same lapels and pulled him to her mouth.

  It was an angry kiss. A relieved and heartfelt kiss, filled with so much emotion it actually hurt, yet it was precisely everything Piers needed in that moment. He just hadn’t realised it until his lips found hers. More than sleep, more than sustenance, more than even air, he needed Faith and nothing more. A realisation which would have been terrifying if he hadn’t already become so lost in her nothing else mattered.

  Vaguely, as his body and heart rejoiced, he was aware of them stumbling back towards the wall which held the canvas. His palms hungrily traced her curves then he filled his greedy hands with her bottom as his tongue tangled with hers, his desire flush against her hips, obvious and gloriously rampant. She moaned into his mouth, her own hands exploring—his back, his chest, his behind—and he lost all sense of time and reason in the carnal fog which engulfed them.

  He must have hoisted up the smock at some point, and loosened the laces on her dress, because suddenly her breasts sprang free of the tight bodice which held them. He reverently caressed them, teasing her pebbled nipples with his thumbs as she thrust them into his hands, basking in the way she writhed and mumbled her pleasure at his touch. One of her legs hooked around his and he ran his hands over her thigh, enjoying the silken texture of her skin above the silk top of her stocking. She wriggled her hand between them to boldly stroke the length of him through the straining fabric of his breeches and somehow, his fingers lazily found her core through the damp curls which hid her sex and her eyelids fluttered closed as she opened for him and he stroked her.

  So soft.

  So wet.

  So wanton.

  So utterly perfect.

  She smiled against his mouth. Whispered his name. Kissed him deeply as her nimble fingers went to the buttons on his falls. Then instantly stiffened at a sound in the hallway.

  The unmistakable sound of several pairs of rushing feet.

  ‘Piers! My darling!’ They had barely managed to jump apart when the double doors crashed open and his entire family spilled in like lava. Thankfully, the capacious painting smock concealed all evidence of Faith’s gloriously sensitive bare breasts and his dusty greatcoat hid his rampant ardour enough, that if his mother noticed anything was amiss, she did not show it as she grabbed him and instantly began to fuss. ‘Thank God you are home!’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ‘Why are you using a knife and not a brush?’ Isobel watched Faith pick up a tiny sliver of the paint she had just mixed on the palette on the tip of the blunt-topped blade.

  ‘Because I am putting the final details on this bark and I want texture. I want the viewer to see a real tree and if they run their fingertips over it, I want them to feel it too.’ It was the last bit of detail she wanted to put into the scenery before she started on the figures which were currently only faint outlines on the huge canvas. She knew she was procrastinating as adding texture was something she usually did as a final flourish, but painting faces still felt like the exclusive domain of her father and she was terrified hers wouldn’t measure up. It wasn’t the only thing frightening her.

  Her intense and uncontrollable reaction to Piers last night was really playing on her mind, to such an extent she had been on tenterhooks all day wondering what she might say to him, or him her, when they finally collided. It was already past three and he still wasn’t up. According to Isobel, he had apparently slept right through both breakfast and luncheon. Not that that was a surprise when he had clearly been exhausted. Beneath the rough but very attractive beard he had grown, his skin had been pale and there had been deep shadows etched beneath his compelling green eyes.

  Yet as appealing as he had been all dusty, windswept and dishevelled, that had not been the reason why she had fallen on him so ravenously and kissed him until she was breathless. She also hadn’t done that because of the heat of the moment or from relief that he was home in one piece—although both those factors had undoubtedly played their part, as had pure unadulterated lust. She had wanted his hands on her body and still wanted his hands on her body. She supposed she should be ashamed of that but wasn’t because it felt right.

  It was none of those things which had stopped her sleeping. It was something more terrifying than that. It was because her reckless, headstrong and often misguided heart was convinced that it had fallen in love with him. Just as it had, with equally petrifying speed, fallen for Rayne. And no matter how many times she told herself Piers was different—that this was different—the unwelcome revelation had sent her wary, jaded head into a blind panic.

  Because it was too soon.

  Even if she counted the long weeks he had been away, she had known him for a grand total of six and a half weeks, and they had spent less than two hours in all that time alone.

  Which meant she couldn’t possibly know him, even though her heart screamed that
she did, and certainly not enough to throw caution to the wind once more when everything about her blossoming relationship with Piers seemed to echo the devastating one from her past. She couldn’t do that again!

  Wouldn’t do that again.

  At least not until she was truly sure she wasn’t making another hideous mistake.

  She sensed him before Isobel squealed her delight and rushed towards him and turned around in time to see her launch herself at him and watch Piers spin the delighted child around by her arms. Until his eyes lifted to Faith’s and he lowered the girl gently to the ground.

  ‘Run along, brat. I need to talk to Miss Brookes.’

  ‘Why can’t you talk to her while I’m here?’

  ‘Because it’s none of your business. But if you scurry away and wait for me in the drawing room without letting slip to my interfering mother or my dreadful sisters that I am up, then I shall take you and Elspeth to Gunter’s as soon as I return.’

  ‘Can I have a violet and a rose ice?’

  ‘I will even throw in a chocolate if you leave right this second.’

  His besotted niece beamed at him. ‘Consider me already gone, Uncle Piers.’

  ‘And close the door on your way out.’

  Faith waited until they were alone before she spoke. ‘This all feels very serious.’ As well as worrying. But there was no point in skirting around the issue. ‘I assume you want to talk about last night. Shall we blame the heat of the moment again?’

  ‘Well, there was certainly a lot of heat.’ His smile did not quite reach his eyes. ‘If we hadn’t been interrupted, I’d have had you up against the wall and we would have probably been caught.’

  ‘One of us would have come to our senses long before then.’ Although she did not fool herself it would have been her. Not when her body still ached to feel him buried deep inside her.

  ‘No we wouldn’t have. I wanted you so badly I had lost all reason and you…’ He sighed as he ran an agitated hand through his dark hair. ‘I am pretty certain you wouldn’t have stopped me either, Faith.’

  She felt her cheeks heat at that truth and looked away, using the excuse of dispensing with her palette and knife to cover her embarrassment at her blatant wantonness. ‘You are suddenly very cocksure in your abilities at seduction.’

  ‘Am I wrong?’ His fingers sought hers and he tugged her to face him, and she saw the same need and turmoil mirrored in his eyes.

  ‘No. I can be stupidly reckless sometimes and forget all inhibitions.’

  ‘And I love that about you.’ His gaze was intense, as heated suddenly as it was wary. ‘I’d like to think things would always be like that between us…if there was an us.’

  Instantly, her foolish heart quickened. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘That I find there is rather a lot I love about you. So much that calls to me and makes me question everything that I thought was chiselled in stone for ever.’ He stared down at their intertwined fingers and then gently pulled his away. ‘So if you are amenable to it, I have a proposition for you.’

  Foolish hope turned to fear and bitter disappointment. ‘If it is to rent me a little house in Bloomsbury, then frankly, you can go to hell, Piers.’

  He seemed stunned at the suggestion. ‘It isn’t. I am not the mistress type. I’ve never had one and am fairly certain I never will. Besides, I have too much respect and affection for you to insult you that way.’

  ‘You have affection for me?’

  ‘A little.’ All the colour seemed to bleach from his face at the admission. ‘Am I daring to hope too much that it might be reciprocated?’ His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, suggesting he was nervous about her answer. That charming uncertainty proved her undoing and she smiled to put him out of his misery.

  ‘I have some affection for you too.’ She held her thumb and index finger an inch apart. ‘Just a tiny bit.’

  His relief was palpable. ‘That’s what I thought… I mean hoped. I mean, I’m hardly the most scintillating and exciting prospect and you are…’ He waved his hand in her general vicinity. ‘Well, you’re rather…um…wonderful actually.’ He scrunched up his face as if mortified at his own words. ‘Can we sit, Faith? Please?’ He gestured to the plank she had stretched between two ladders. ‘Only I’m having the devil of the job not hauling you into my arms and I’d really rather talk to you reasonably, if undoubtedly very inarticulately, before I risk losing all sense of reason again.’

  She sat at one end, and tellingly, he then sat right at the other. ‘What is your proposition?’

  ‘These have been an odd few weeks…unexpected and…um…quite eventful. What with your father’s accident, and Napoleon and everything.’ The stuttering, awkward Piers had returned with a vengeance and she adored it. ‘And I think it is fairly safe to say, these feelings have crept up on us both unawares. Well, at least mine have. I am probably assuming quite a lot to expect you to be feeling it with quite the same intensity.’

  He stared at her then, so longingly, she could feel the intensity of those feelings all the way down to her bones. ‘And if you do miraculously share that, then I also suspect you are as confused and apprehensive of it all as I am. We’ve both been down this rutted road before and we’ve both fallen in massive potholes and neither of us ever want to fall in one again. This has all come on so fast. I think perhaps too fast…’

  In his own endearing and inarticulate way, he managed to say exactly what she was feeling. ‘It has. So fast my head is spinning and that all feels too uncomfortably familiar. I don’t want to feel blinded by lust to the detriment of common sense, Piers.’

  ‘Me either. When in truth we hardly know one another, and I cannot afford to make another mistake. Not after the sheer magnitude of the last one. The scars are just too deep to blithely run ahead.’

  Faith nodded. Strangely relieved and disappointed by his pragmatic and cautious response to their passion of only hours before.

  ‘But it also feels different from before…to me anyway. Like it could be love…if we give it a chance to be. Or is that just me?’

  Her own heart seemed to melt at his words. ‘I feel it too.’

  ‘It’s petrifying isn’t it? I can’t quite believe I actually want to try to entrust another with my poor, battered heart again…but I would like to try. Even though trying scares the hell out of me because I am not even sure I am capable of trusting again. But I want to and I hope you do too.’

  She nodded again, smiling soppily this time because he was smiling soppily too.

  ‘Therefore, I came here to propose we give it a fighting chance.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  ‘The old-fashioned way…with a proper courtship once this painting is finished and our everyday lives return to normal. All this enforced proximity muddies the water too much to trust anything. The lust is all well and good, but we have never even been out for a walk, Faith, let alone discovered if we can tolerate one another’s company for longer than a few stolen moments.’

  ‘This painting is going to take me another month before its finished. What do you propose we do in the interim? Ignore one another?’ Because that was inconceivable after the last three weeks when she had missed his company so very much.

  ‘We could always work on that friendship we started on a few weeks ago? We could chat, gradually get to know each other properly, perhaps even go for the odd walk during daylight hours in densely populated public places which ensure we have to adhere to the strict rules of propriety.’

  ‘And if the lust rears its ugly head again and we find ourselves plastered against each other in another passionate embrace?’

  He answered with a heated stare which was so molten, Faith’s mouth dried and her body yearned at the sight. Then he huffed out a frustrated cross between a sigh and a groan and stared at the heavens as if praying for strength. ‘Then we strug
gle through piously as best we can, with gritted teeth until the time is right and we are certain that this thing between us is not just lust—but trust and love too. And then I’ll happily take you up against any wall you fancy at the merest click of your seductive fingers, you minx.’ Then he stood, looking every inch like a man who was struggling not to carry out that delicious threat right at that precise moment, and stuck out his hand instead for her to shake. ‘Do we have an accord?’

  She took it and shook it, marvelling at the way such an innocent, platonic gesture from him still had the power to make her suddenly weak-willed body want his so very much. ‘We do.’

  ‘Good. Then grab your coat and whichever ridiculous bonnet you’ve paired with that canary-yellow dress today, and come and take a friendly walk with me to Gunter’s. I’ve already arranged two eagle-eyed chaperons to protect your virtue for the duration—and I’m starving.’

  ‘Can I have a violet and a rose ice too?’

  He hoisted her up, his eyes dipping hungrily to her lips, before he scowled and tore them away. ‘If you step lively, and stop looking so damn tempting, woman, I’ll even throw in a chocolate.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Piers stared at the letter again disbelieving.

  There was nothing like the mention of Constança to royally spoil his mood, and things had been going so well of late. Already he could taste the bitter bile in his mouth which he hadn’t missed at all. The unique taste of anger laced with shame and still oddly tinged with unfathomable jealousy, that only his former wife could muster. Odd because he wasn’t the least bit jealous of the Duke. That pompous fool was welcome to her. It was more a jealousy which he rationally understood stemmed from never feeling quite good enough—another thing which he linked directly to her. He had certainly never felt that way before he met her and, thanks to Faith, hadn’t been feeling much either lately. Things had been going too well really, so he might have guessed Constança would do something entirely spiteful simply to ruin it.