What a Lady Demands

by Ashlyn Macnamara

  She might have pointed out what she’d learned: The most rigid of men often hid a secret or two behind that façade. In Anstruther’s case, it was Eversham. But she couldn’t state as much outright. Not without hinting at a situation she’d sworn to keep silent. “I ought to ask why you’d take Eversham’s word over mine. Had you even met the man before today?”

  That gave him pause. He rubbed at his chin. “No,” he admitted. “Not even in my younger days.” Before the war, when he still went out in society, though he’d never make a more direct reference to that time. “He appeared out of nowhere, actually.”

  “Where did you meet him?” There wasn’t even a village pub of any note close enough for Lind to have visited and come back from the rounds of his estate so soon. To make certain, she sniffed. Not even the smallest hint of brandy—or ale, for that matter, which would be far more likely in a mean little village spot. Only the crisp cleanliness she’d come to associate with him.

  “I caught him skulking in the hedges. If you must know, he seemed to be keeping a close eye on your doings.”

  “And you’re willing to take him at his word?”

  “It seemed prudent, given his insinuations. If he repeats them to complete strangers, such as I am to him, he can do you a great deal of damage.”

  “Indeed he can. I’m attempting to prevent him from doing so. He holds a grudge over that ring and our broken relationship. He’d have offered for me, if he could have afforded to keep a wife.” God forgive her for telling such a blatant lie. The keeping part was true enough, but that was as far as Eversham’s good intentions had ever extended.

  She only hoped she sounded reasonable enough while glossing over the fact she’d allowed the man to seduce her. “The man is a thief himself, although I did not realize it right away.” She widened her eyes as far as they would go. “I don’t see at all why you’d believe the story of a complete stranger over someone you’ve known for years.”

  Lind crossed his arms. “I’m not sure I ever knew you all that well.”

  That was true. With nine years separating them, when Lind was a friend of her brother’s not hers, they could never be called anything more than acquaintances in the past. But now Cecelia knew him on a rather more intimate basis…to an extent. As well as she’d known any man, really, besides Eversham. And she knew things about Eversham she’d rather not.

  “For the sake of any friendship you might have had with my brother, you must take my word for this.” She held out a hand to him, pleading, across the desk, but it might as well have been across the room as distant as his eyes were. “Nothing about Eversham is trustworthy. The ring is the least of it.”

  “If you offered more evidence of such an accusation, I might be more inclined to believe you.”

  Drat. No, damn. Such a demand called for swearing and harsher words than anything her brother may have muttered in her presence. “I cannot do so.”

  Not without implicating others. Not without implicating herself. She left that part unsaid, but she may as well have shouted the words. Lind would understand well enough.

  The line of his jaw firmed. “I’ve no choice, then, but to let you go.”

  “No, you cannot,” she protested, even though she’d seen that pronouncement coming. “You cannot turn me out with Eversham lurking about. He’s waiting for me. Don’t you see? He wants that dashed ring, and I cannot give it back to him. He will not be happy to learn I gave it back to its owner.”

  And it wasn’t just the ring, but that was as much as she could tell him if she wanted to convince him to keep her on. “Please, he wishes to ruin me in the most dramatic way he can.” Simply because she’d escaped.

  He didn’t even blink. “Your brother will protect you. I daresay it’s his duty as long as you remain unmarried.”

  No, she couldn’t go back to Alexander yet. He’d demand explanations of her, ones she was no more willing to give him than she was to provide Lind. “My brother demanded you marry me.”

  He scoffed. “And you think this is reason for me to make you an offer?”

  “He’d be within his rights to demand it of you yet,” she continued, ignoring him. Ignoring the fact that he held all the cards here. He stood on the verge of turning her out without a thought. “And what do you think it will do to Jeremy after the progress I’ve made with him? Have you even stopped to wonder that perhaps no one was able to make any headway with him because you changed governesses so dashed often? And if you do so again, will it undo all I’ve accomplished? Do you know he walked the entire way to the Powells’ and back today and didn’t fall once?”

  “That—He did?”

  Good heavens, the way his tone changed midsentence, from barely constrained anger to surprise. Had she stumbled on the key to Lind’s distancing himself from his own son? “Yes, he did.”

  “I saw you.” His brows lowered. “You were holding his hand. If he didn’t fall, it’s because you prevented it.”

  “He may have been using me for balance, but he didn’t trip a single time. My point is, he can be taught, he can learn. He is capable.” She paused for breath. “But you have to give him a little more stability. If you put me out now, the next hapless young lady you hire will have to begin all over again. And start from an even deeper deficit than I did.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  She put a hand over her heart. It was beating so hard, it might ram its way out of her chest. “I’ve no experience or proof, but I have to wonder if every time that child starts over with someone new, he doesn’t build a kind of wall inside. I mean, what point is there in becoming attached if he knows ahead of time that person will be taken away from him? So why should he expend any effort to please her?”

  “Life is full of instances where people are taken away from us.” Lind’s entire being hardened. “He might as well learn.”

  “He’s awfully young to be taught so harshly and over and over again. He’s lost his mother already. You’ve lost your wife.” And that’s what this was really about. Lydia. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s never going to be enough, because it’s my fault. Don’t you see?” His voice was strangled, and twin cords stuck out in his neck. The corners of his mouth turned down in an involuntary spasm of pain. “Lydia is gone because of me.”

  “Oh.” She pressed her fingers to her lips. “Oh, I’m certain that’s not the case.”

  “How can you know? You were not there. No one was.”

  She opened her mouth to reply and closed it just as quickly. She’d nearly questioned him, nearly blurted the story Mrs. Carstairs had told her of the servants rushing to the rescue, but she must remember to protect her source.

  “No one,” he repeated, and something about the emphasis he placed on the words triggered a thought. By no one, he meant him.

  —

  Good God, what had he just said? He’d gone and broken his own cardinal rule and spoken of that day. And not only had he mentioned Lydia by name, he’d all but admitted to his guilt. Because of his inability to move like any able-bodied man, to eat up the frozen ground with a regular stride, he’d been responsible for her death. If only he’d gone on a walk with them, he might have prevented the boy from toddling out onto the ice in the first place. God almighty, why hadn’t he forbidden them from going out?

  But he’d done none of that, and when tragedy struck he’d been unable to act. Unable to reach the pond in time. He hadn’t even been on hand when a pair of the footmen pulled Lydia out of the icy water, her skirts frozen, her face an alarming shade of bluish gray.

  The boy had been in a similar state, but by some miracle, he’d recovered. And how many times had Lind cursed fate that the child survived but his wife had not? As an officer, he was well acquainted with the vagaries of fortune. How one man took a lethal bullet while another survived. How one man succumbed to a mere flesh wound while another recovered from injuries that ought to have killed him.

  After all, he was one such casualty
. He’d cheated death and recovered, when he should have lingered in agony. The surgeons had argued the benefit of removing his leg, but he’d refused to allow it. His wounds had extended onto his lower body and side, to places they couldn’t have amputated even if they’d wanted to. In the end, they saved themselves the effort, reckoning him for a goner no matter what. But the grapeshot hadn’t perforated his intestines. Some strange fortune had preserved him.

  He’d cheated death to pay a worse price when he returned home, only to lose his wife.

  And he’d all but blurted enough in front of Cecelia to arouse her curiosity.

  Even now, damn her, her expression was softening in the way a woman’s did. Sympathy eased the lines of her face into something soft and comforting. He didn’t need such a display. Didn’t deserve it. Especially when he was doing his damnedest to fire her.

  Despite his efforts to look imposing—and he’d had ample practice at that during his stint in the military—she dared approach. She rounded the end of his desk and placed a hand on his upper arm.

  If she’d tried to embrace him, he could have put her off. But she used a man’s gesture of comfort, a hard squeeze to the shoulder that somehow infused warmth into his chest, right where his heart should have been. The very spot he wished remained as cold as that pond water and as hard as the ground in which they’d buried Lydia.

  “Why don’t you tell me about that day?” she suggested.

  “No.” He made a vague, ineffective gesture with his arm. He’d meant to shake off her grip, but he couldn’t quite manage it. No doubt because part of him wanted her touch. The wrong part. For once, it wasn’t his cock. “No, I do not talk about that day. No one talks about that day.”

  “But maybe if you did, you’d come to terms with what occurred. At any rate, it seems important for anyone who wants to teach Jeremy to know what happened to him. They need to learn why he is the way he is.”

  Damn it, why did she have to sound so reasonable? So logical? He could fight off an emotional appeal—the bit he expected from a female—but as with the hand on his shoulder, she’d chosen a masculine approach. One he was more used to in his lonely existence, one he didn’t expect from her, and ultimately, one he had no ready defense for.

  “No. No, you will not turn this around on me. We’re here to talk about your future in my employ, which I was in the process of terminating. We’re not here to talk about the past.”

  She didn’t hesitate, not for a moment. “Even if you don’t tell me, you ought to tell someone.”

  There were only two people in the world he could possibly have confessed any of this to. One lay in her grave. The other had been in India at the time, and too much had occurred in the years before Alexander came home. It was too late. Lind had done his level best to destroy the past, and in the process, he’d destroyed his friendship with the only person who might understand. It was only fitting, though. He didn’t deserve absolution. Not that he asked for it.

  His years in the army had taught him the measure of a man, and that was his conduct. They’d taught him to answer for his actions. Well, he’d be answerable, just as soon as he finished ruining the other player in this farce.

  Rowan Battencliffe.

  That blasted hand still lay on his shoulder, warm and soft, and for the life of him, he could not bring himself to shake it off. He eased his backside out of his chair, but for some reason he could not straighten. His stance remained hunched like an old, broken man.

  Slowly he turned—toward Cecelia, of all people—and she opened her arms to him. He settled against her slight body, and she bore it all. God, he must weigh as much as a mountain for all the burden of the past he carried with him. How could she stand it? Yet she did, quietly, and with an inner force that he never expected her to possess.

  Her hands clasped behind his back, and his head came to rest on her shoulder. He leaned his cheek against her hair and felt the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest. Quiet. Calm. Steady. Inside him, something seemed to tear. The pain was nothing like the sensation of grapeshot ripping through his flesh. It was infinitely worse, a burning that clawed through his ribs and up his throat and threatened to erupt.

  From that day to this, he’d never allowed himself to shed a tear, and he didn’t mean to begin now. Giving in to weeping would only be a release of his guilt, and he wasn’t yet ready to let it go. It wasn’t finished gnawing at him yet.

  But her embrace tightened, and the struggle to keep the emotion bottled inside grew impossible. He closed his eyes and took in her scent. Orange water, clean and sharp, the smell of a woman who possessed everything he needed to comfort him, and yet she was all wrong. She’d broken every last one of his dictates.

  Are those rules so bloody important that you’d give this up?

  God help him, at the moment he didn’t want to. He wanted to lose himself. Forget everything that had happened in the past several years and start clean. Forget Jeremy and Lydia and Battencliffe and Alexander and lose himself. Cecelia freely offered an outlet.

  He shifted in her embrace, and her arms loosened, just enough to allow him to look her straight in the eye. No anger, no pity there. Only softness. Comfort. Ease. Everything he currently craved. His gaze settled on her lips, and they parted.

  And so he took what she freely offered.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Cecelia could not believe his reaction. How in heaven had she gone from being fired to Lind’s tongue twining with hers? Thank goodness he wasn’t sending her packing. That he’d chosen to act on his attraction. That, at least for now, he was just as drawn to her as she was to him.

  The intensity behind this kiss belonged to a desperate man seeking the sort of oblivion offered only by a passionate encounter in bed. Or on his desk. Or up against the wall. Bitter experience had taught her that sort of escape was merely temporary. She ought to have learned better by now. She could not give Lind what he was seeking with any kind of permanency.

  Nor would he give her what she really wanted.

  And what was that? She hardly knew anymore. At one time, she’d hoped for home and hearth, even if it did have to come in the form of an older man like Anstruther. He could have at least offered her a modicum of protection. But even that slim hope lay beyond her reach.

  Lind might well lose himself in her body for a few stolen moments, but he, too, would come to his senses. And worse, he’d have concrete proof she’d misrepresented herself to him.

  She really ought to push him away, but it was difficult to school her mind into submission with his tongue tracing such a delicious pattern against hers. Besides, ever since she’d caught her first glimpse of him naked, she’d fantasized about this moment. She’d never have this chance again.

  So she wrapped her arms more tightly about him, pulled him closer, and responded to his kiss as she’d never responded to any other. She spread her hands across his back, beneath his topcoat, and reveled in the play of muscle under the wool of his waistcoat and the fine linen of his shirt. She’d seen Lind naked and glistening under the morning sun. She could have that sight again, with the added advantage of being permitted to touch, of being able to slide her bare skin against his while he filled her. While he drove them both to crisis.

  Good heavens, the very thought had her hips moving against his, seeking the friction they both needed. And if she wasn’t careful, this would all be over disappointingly soon. She pulled back with both lips and hands, but he followed, setting his tongue to the base of her throat and bending her back. She let out a throaty moan. He’d have her on his desk before she knew it.

  “Wait,” she breathed.

  “No, don’t tell me you want to stop.”

  Good Lord, that was Lind, and he was all but begging her. This proud, arrogant man, and she nearly had him on his knees. She was taking an awful risk here, because if she let him think, he might recall all the reasons he ought to send her on her way rather than continue this interlude.

  “I didn’t say that.” Sm
iling, she let her fingers drift toward his collar to toy with his cravat. “I just mean we might be comfortable elsewhere.”

  “To hell with that,” he growled. He swept his arm across the surface of his desk, sending papers flying. A bottle of ink crashed to the floor. Then his fingers bit into her hips as he lifted her, and set her bottom on hard, polished wood. Nudging her knees apart, he settled himself between them.

  The firm length of his erection teased at her center, so close she could rub herself against it, but that would not bring relief, with all the layers of fabric still standing in the way. She wanted that hard, naked flesh in her hand, pulsing and alive, and then she wanted it inside her, driving, pounding, sending her over the edge with him.

  He leaned forward and ravaged the side of her neck with his mouth, while his fingers tore at the fastenings of her bodice. Yes, and what might that skilled tongue do to her nipples? He pulled at the fabric of her gown, his lips following to anoint each patch of skin newly bared, down and down, until he’d released a breast.

  Her nipple tightened into an aching point as his warm breath wafted over it.

  “Please.” She couldn’t stop herself.

  A devious grin stretched his lips, and the look utterly transformed his face. “I like the sound of that, especially from you. Say it again.”

  Good Lord, had a man ever looked so devastating in his anticipation of pleasuring a lady? With every beat of her pounding heart, she melted just a little bit more. “Please.”

  “No, say it like you did just now, all airy and desperate. And use my name. I want to hear it on a woman’s lips again.”

  “Please, Lind, please.”

  “Please what? Tell me what you want.”

  How infuriatingly arousing. “Your mouth on me. My mouth on you. Both of us bare, and you inside me.”