by Mia Marlowe
Meg glared at him. “You wouldn’t.”
“Don’t try me, Miss Anthony. I never learned to bluff.”
“Then I’m sorry I helped you, Westfall.”
As the window banged down behind him, he was a little sorry, too. Not only had he angered one of the few people he might consider a friend, now he was honor-bound to act on the knowledge she’d given him.
He walked slowly around the perimeter of the cloister toward his chamber. The moon had risen, painting the statue of St. Francis in the center of the open space in shades of gray. He wandered out to study the art, wondering at the placid, sightless eyes of the saint staring unconcernedly into the distance. Was the real Francis’s soul truly that peaceful?
Saints weren’t supposed to love their lives so much they were afraid to hazard them. Pierce was no saint, though he wasn’t afraid to die. But in this case, more than his life would be at risk.
He feared for his mind.
They say that Lucifer is armed with temptations aplenty, but I think there’s only one thing that tempts him—human happiness. If we are happy or think we will be, the devil turns his minions loose to wreak havoc in our lives with redoubled efforts.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been warned against wanting something too much.
~from the secret journal of Pierce Langdon, Viscount Westfall
Chapter Eighteen
As soon as he opened the door to his cell, he was nearly knocked over by an intruder.
“Where have you been?” Nora said as she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him close. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
She didn’t wait for him to answer. Instead she pulled his head down for a long kiss. She didn’t really want to talk. She wanted him.
He was more than happy to give himself to her. When he opened his mind to hers, only thoughts of him rushed in to greet him. Her mind was full of him, pressed down and overflowing. He was determined to fill the rest of her, too.
The first time they took each other that night, it was hard and fast. She didn’t seem to want nuanced lovemaking from him. She was looking for something primal. Her touch was tinged with the same urgency he’d sensed from her while they had searched for Emilia. An emptiness demanding to be filled. She was welcome to all that he was, and he gave himself without reservation, pumping away with abandon for the sheer animal joy of rutting.
Spent and gasping, they clung to each other. Then, he took her slowly, savoring every inch of her. He drew out her climb till she ground her teeth in frustration. When he finally let her come, he covered her mouth with his hand to stifle her cry of release.
He knew without being told that as much as she wanted him, she wanted just as fervently not to be discovered in his bed.
Then they lay together, simply being still without speaking, for hours, snuggled close, touching lightly with hands and lips, reassuring each other of their bond. They had no need for words. Their bodies had said what was needful.
You are mine. I am yours. There is no space in between that we cannot fill with the glorious us.
Honora drifted to sleep in his arms.
Pierce didn’t let himself follow her into oblivion. He didn’t want to miss a moment of being with her. Even though he couldn’t pry into her dreams, he sensed she was content, perhaps for the first time in years. Her happiness wrapped itself around his mind, caressing, soothing, calming him.
Just watching her sleep rested him. He wished he could look forward to a lifetime of lying beside her. Wished he could put his ring on her finger. Whether he would be allowed to or not was an open question, so he let it go as one of many things beyond his control.
Instead, he tried to commit every bit of this night to memory. He might need the comfort of such remembrance in the days to come.
As the moon set and the eastern sky began to lighten to pearl gray, he kissed her brow, and she stirred.
“Hello, you,” she said, her tone sultry as she rolled toward him.
Pierce began to peel back the sheet to expose her luscious skin to the last of the moonlight streaming in his window. “Hello, you. Look what I discovered—an angel in my bed.” He ran his thumb along the edge of the sheet, skimming under her breasts, then along her ribs and the curve of her waist.
“I’m no angel.” She ran a hand down his flat belly and cupped his genitals.
“You are to me.”
She leaned over and nipped his earlobe. “Allow me to convince you otherwise.”
Her kiss swallowed up his laugh.
When will the man get on with it? Her thoughts were tight, as though she were thinking them with clenched teeth.
Not yet. Pierce nuzzled between her legs, drunk on her scent. He was desperate to draw this loving out, but equally desperate to sink into her sweet flesh and find release.
He knew it was the last time they’d be together for a long while. He wouldn’t let himself think forever. He had to make it go on a little longer.
Nora arched herself into his mouth. He devoured her and didn’t stop until he thought he detected the slightest pulse of a contraction in the soft lips of her sex.
When he pulled back, she moaned low in the back of her throat. His balls tightened in response to her need.
He moved up her body, poised to slide into her wet heat. His cock screamed at him to hurry.
It was past time.
He rushed in with one long stroke, and she molded around him in a warm, slick embrace. His balls drew up into a tense mound, coiled for release as pressure built in his shaft. He held himself motionless, willing the urgency to subside so he could revel in the joy of Nora a little longer. Only a little. His heartbeat pounded in his cock.
Her mouth gaped softly. Her brows tented in distress. He couldn’t keep her suspended within finger-widths of her release. He couldn’t withhold pleasure from her any longer. He loved her too much to keep any good thing from her. He had to let her go.
He covered her mouth with his and flicked his tongue in, loving her with his tongue and his cock in tandem. She moved beneath him, urging him in deeper with little noises of desperation that shredded his control.
He pounded into her as deeply as he could. Then he felt it start, a frenzy of pulsing.
Now, Nora, now.
Pierce arched his back, driving in as his life shot into her in a steady rhythm. Her walls contracted around him. It was like being born, only backward, trying to come in instead of fighting his way out.
She was his center. The source of all that was good and right and whole.
Her body convulsed under him. When it was over, he slumped down on her, breathing her air, inhaling her musky sweetness to his toes. Her chest rose and fell under his. Then he lifted his weight onto his elbows.
“Nora, I…”
She snored softly. She’d slipped off to asleep again. He’d unraveled her every kink and she’d sunk back into blissful slumber, too fully relaxed to maintain consciousness.
He’d meant to tell her he loved her again. Well, he supposed she knew. And if she didn’t believe him now, she would hereafter.
He stood and began dressing in the dark. He was dimly aware that the euphoria of loving Nora had dissipated. He shut down, experiencing no feelings at all, save for the numbing despair that stole over him. If his plan didn’t work, he’d lose everything, starting with Nora and his chance to be useful to the Order.
And ending with himself.
Pierce managed to saddle a horse and slip out of Lord Albemarle’s stable without attracting any attention from the groomsmen. It bothered him that he was technically stealing his mount but, when weighed in the balance against the greater good, a little larceny was a small matter.
With any luck, Nora would think he’d risen early to ride before she tiptoed back to her own chamber. When he didn’t appear at breakfast, it would cause no undo comment. He often took a tray alone, waiting until the evening to brave the company of other minds. He’d have most of the day to put as much distance be
tween himself and Albion Abbey as he could.
Once they realized he was missing, he was counting on them believing he’d returned to Camden House in London and sending someone to search for him there. He could depend on Meg Anthony’s silence. The last thing she wanted was to incur the duke’s wrath by admitting she’d disobeyed him. And Meg was the only one who knew his ultimate destination.
But even Meg didn’t know the route he intended to take to reach it. No one would expect him to return to Westphalia and his uncle’s untender welcome.
His family’s countryseat was two days distance from Albion Abbey, but he didn’t stop at an inn when night fell. Instead, he turned aside from the deserted road, hobbled his mount, and slept in an open field. For his purposes, if he arrived in a less than well-turned-out state, so much the better.
At the end of his second day of travel, when he crested the final rise and saw the manor house in the distance, he expected to feel something about his return. After all, he’d grown up there. Been hidden away there, in truth, since his parents had kept him at home long past the age when other boys were off to school. They had protected him, he realized, and had been anxious to keep his unusual condition from becoming public knowledge. From the chalk hills in the east to the silver strip of river that defined the western boundary of the lands attached to the viscountcy, Westphalia had been his whole world.
But it didn’t seem all that familiar. Instead, it was as if he’d never seen the ash grove, never played in the hollows and hills, never learned to ride in the paddock or do his sums in the third floor schoolroom of the staid, Tudor-style manor house. Even the fateful oak, the one he’d fallen from that had started the voices clamoring in his head, seemed like any other hundred-year-old leafy giant.
Westphalia was just a place. And even though the estate was technically his, he felt no pride in it, no surge of warmth for the land stretching out around the brick and mortar manor.
Perhaps when he saw a familiar face.
But there were none to be found. He was ushered into his own home by a stiff-lipped butler he’d never seen before, who looked down his long nose at him when Pierce announced himself as Lord Westfall. Of course, the general scruffiness of his person didn’t lend credibility to his claim. However, he was asked to wait in the parlor while the butler fetched someone who could meet with him.
The someone turned out to be his Aunt Beatrice instead of his Uncle Horace.
“Oh, my!” the little bird of a woman said when she saw him. However, she recovered quickly and skittered across the room to him like a sandpiper running along the shore. She extended a frail hand, palm down. The veins stood out on it like a meandering map of her life. Pierce bowed over it correctly.
“Hello, Auntie. It’s lovely to see you again.”
“Er, likewise, I’m sure,” she said, sounding not at all certain. She indicated that he should sit in one of the wing chairs and perched on the settee herself. It had been his mother’s favorite piece, but Aunt Beatrice had re-covered it in an abominable floral pattern whose loud colors made Pierce’s stomach queasy. She rang for tea and made innocuous comments about the weather while they waited for the snooty butler to bring a tray. When it arrived, Pierce fell on the finger sandwiches and petit fours as if he hadn’t eaten in two days, which he hadn’t.
His aunt sputtered her amazement at his gauche behavior, but didn’t take him to task. Instead, she took refuge in the homely ritual of pouring out tea for both of them.
“Milk and sugar, if you please,” Pierce said. “Four lumps.”
Her eyes flared at the excess, but he supposed the more imbalanced he seemed, the quicker matters would progress.
“We understood you were in London with His Grace, the Duke of Camden,” she said cautiously. “Of course, we have been concerned that your…medical treatment had been suspended, but the duke sent us every assurance that you’d be well cared for.” She narrowed her eyes at his lapel where a foxtail was firmly embedded in the fabric. Clearly, she didn’t feel the duke had lived up to his part of the bargain. “Your uncle will be so…surprised to see you.”
“I expect he will. I’ll be surprised to see him, too.” Pierce licked the excess icing from one of the sweets off his fingers and then wiped his hands on his shirtfront. “Never thought we’d meet again in this life after he sent me off to Bedlam.”
Appalled at his lack of manners, his aunt stared as if he’d sprouted a second head.
“About that…” She took a fortifying sip of her tea. “You must understand. Your uncle thought it best at the time.”
“Best for him, you mean.”
“No, dear boy. Best for you. How else will you ever get well?”
Her thoughts were like squirrels chasing each other around a tree trunk. Pierce struggled to catch one by the tail.
“Don’t worry. Just because I’m back home, it doesn’t mean I’ll put you and my cousins out, Auntie,” he assured her. “I’m not the vindictive sort.”
But his uncle was. Horace Langdon ruled over the viscountcy in Pierce’s absence like some decadent pasha, master of all he surveyed. He treated his family with the same heavy-handed domination.
“You needn’t fret about that other thing, either, Aunt Beatrice.”
“What other thing?”
“I can’t see the bruises he left on your arm through your sleeve and neither can anyone else.”
Her right hand covered her left forearm reflexively. “How did you—”
“You were thinking about how hot a day it is and what a shame it was that you’d have to wear long sleeves at supper this evening.”
Her brows shot up. “Then you still think you can hear the thoughts of others.”
“I don’t think it. I know it. And so do you. I’m not mad,” he said firmly. “I’m just different.”
Her gaze swept the floor. “No, I won’t believe it.”
Pierce slurped up the last of his tea. “Well, you will when I move back in and take my rightful place.”
Her spine straightened at that. She’d been kindly disposed toward him when she thought him helpless. Now he threatened not only her husband, but her children. There might not be any love lost between her and Pierce’s uncle, but she was like a sow bear when it came to her offspring. With Pierce out of the way, her son would someday be Viscount Westfall.
“We’ll see what your uncle has to say about that.”
“So we shall.” Pierce stood and stretched. “Dinner at eight, I assume. In the meantime, I’d like a place to rest.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, nephew, but your travels have not been kind to you or your wardrobe. Clean clothes and a bath would not come amiss, either.” She bared her teeth at him. He did not mistake the expression for a smile. Then she rang for the butler again. “Mr. Dickens will sort you out. Ah, there he is. Show Lord Westfall to the Blue Room, if you please.”
“No need. I’ll just claim my old chamber, if it’s all the same to you,” Pierce said as he stood, sketched a quick bow, and strode out.
He ought to have felt a hole being bored into his retreating back. If looks could indeed kill, his aunt’s glare should have reduced him to a quivering puddle. He heard the virulent, whispered conversation behind him as he walked away.
“Shall I tell Cook to set another place for dinner?” the butler asked.
“No need,” she said. “I doubt my nephew will be staying that long.”
It is said that no matter how close, no matter how intimate one’s relationships, we never really know another because we are not privy to their secret thoughts.
But Pierce knew mine.
And knowing how I feel about him, how could he have vanished into thin air without a word?
~from the secret journal of Lady Nora Claremont
Chapter Nineteen
“I’m that sorry, yer lordship, but we can’t find Lord Westfall anywheres.” The head groom ran the brim of his thoroughly disreputable hat through his thick, work-roughened fin
gers, clearly distraught at having to bring Albemarle this unwelcome news. “We had the lads out beating the bushes all night. If he’d run into mischief here at Albion, we’d have found him. I’ll lay my best shirt, he’s not on the estate no longer.”
Albemarle eyed his employee critically. Losing this man’s best shirt would not be much of a loss but, poor grammar and personal habits aside, Harkins was an honest sort. If he said Westfall had quit Albion Abbey, he surely had. Nora hoped Benedick wouldn’t be harsh with the groom. It wasn’t his fault Pierce was missing.
The man shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“I take it there is something you have not yet told me. Spit it out, man,” Albemarle demanded.
“Your piebald Thoroughbred is gone, as well.” Harkins winced as he spoke the words. “I don’t know how it happened, my lord. No one never heard Lord Westfall in the stable so I can’t say when he made off with the gelding.”
“So you’re suggesting one of my guests stole a horse?”
“No, no, o’ course not. Well, not exactly. I’d never accuse his lordship’s guest of such a thing. But it seems both Lord Westfall and the gelding have gone missing at the same time, so it’s hard not to jump to conclusions, if you see what I mean,” Harkins said, clearly distressed. “When we noticed the horse gone yesterday morning, we assumed you’d given Lord Westfall permission to ride whenever he chose.”
“Rightly assumed. And since the viscount is no horse thief, we must also assume Lord Westfall has met with foul play. Extend your search, Mr. Harkins, to include His Grace’s property. Perhaps Westfall decided to ride back to Camden End. Off you go.” He waved his groom away and sank into the chair behind his desk.
“I shall send Mr. LeGrand to London,” the duke said from the wing chair before the cold fireplace. The continuous drumming of his fingers on the arm of the chair belied the air of calm His Grace tried to project. “We must consider that Lord Westfall might have returned to Camden House. He is most at home in the conservatory there.”
