Thump.
She groaned. The insistent knocking was coming not from her door but from her window, like a branch had fallen from the tree in last night’s storm and decided to amuse itself by beating her awake from a dream that had seemed so, so close to finally delivering some blessed relief.
Which was appropriate, given the whole world seemed to be conspiring to make her as wretched as a cat in a river.
Thump.
She dragged herself out of bed and stomped to the window, prepared to give the insolent branch a beating of her own. She yanked open the curtains to find that the window was being assaulted not by a tree but by a man.
An unusually handsome one, who was rain-soaked and bedraggled, as though he had tromped halfway across the city in the drizzle at an hour that barely qualified as dawn to creep into the Rosecrofts’ garden and thrash at her shutters while she dreamt about him.
“Apthorp?” she hissed. “What are you doing here?”
“I have a key to the mews.”
“Yes, but why are you attempting to break into my room in the middle of the night?”
He looked at her from below his lashes. “I need to apologize. For what I said to you.”
Her heart constricted more than she liked at the sadness in his eyes, so she crossed her arms and took an insolent tone. “I prefer my apologies to occur after sunrise.”
“I couldn’t wait. I’ve been up all night, turning it around in my head. May I please come in?”
“No. If you are caught in my rooms, you will be forced to marry me at once, which will make ending our engagement impossible.”
“That’s why I’m here. I don’t want to end it. I want to marry you.”
He said this with all the enthusiasm with which he might announce he wished to be buried at sea when he died young of plague.
“Oh, dear God,” she muttered. She turned, walked directly back to her bed, threw herself upon it, and drew the bed-curtains around her for good measure.
She heard him clambering through the window and laughed bitterly to herself, for making hysterical scenes before dawn was really more in line with her sensibilities than his. Her love for theater must be rubbing off on him.
“Constance?” he said in a low, ragged voice. “Would you please come out? I’ve been up half the night thinking this over, and I can’t do this anymore.”
He pulled the bed-curtains open and sank to his knees. He took her hands in his, and looked into her eyes with an impossibly tragic expression. “Please marry me.”
To think that mere minutes before, she had imagined those same hands doing all sorts of unspeakable things to her. She would, in fact, prefer that they do unspeakable things to her than clutch at her while he performed a guilt-induced offer of marriage.
“Why are you asking me this now?”
“Because of what you said. What you’re giving up. What my family will suffer. I’m asking far too much of all of you when there’s a simpler solution.”
“There is nothing simple about marriage.”
He leaned forward. “Constance,” he said, looking at her pitifully. “If we marry, you won’t have to leave. You won’t have to be alone.”
Her heart shriveled like a leech in salt. Of course that was why he was here.
In her moment of frustration she’d been weak. She should never have spoken of her loneliness to him. For now not only would he look at her like she was pathetic, as he was currently doing, but he would feel like a villain for letting her sacrifice her happiness for his. Given his need to regard himself as the most exemplary man who’d ever lived, he could not stand to think himself a villain. He would prefer to consign them both to a lifetime of misery and resentment.
She had accidentally built a trap. She had to set him free, lest he spend the rest of their lives torturing them both.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Apthorp,” she said in her coldest voice. “I would never marry if it were not for love. I don’t love you. And God knows you don’t love me.”
His face performed a series of somersaults, as though this assertion was somehow surprising or debatable.
“But, Constance,” he said quietly. “What if I did?”
He had never intended to say these words to her, but he was wet and tired and sad and now he couldn’t seem to stop them. “Constance, what if I told you that I’ve loved you all along? For years.”
It felt so good to finally say it, to admit it, after so long of hoarding it away that he couldn’t help but smile. He couldn’t stifle a small laugh. He felt such a pang of lightness and pleasure in finally saying the words aloud—in admitting, finally, the wrongheaded thing he wanted, even though it made no sense—that he half expected the sun to rise and the rain to clear and the room to fill with birdsong and pots of gold and unicorns and a fairy who might play a lute in the corner as they danced.
Instead, Constance’s eyes went a shade of icy blue akin to a winter’s frost.
“How dare you say such a thing to me?”
The birds and unicorns disappeared as abruptly as they’d descended. Of course she would not respond romantically to such a declaration. He’d gone so far out of his way to hide the truth that it could not seem anything but insincere to her.
He reached out and smoothed her pretty hair, all mussed from sleep. “I know it may seem unlikely, but it’s true.”
She laughed in a glacial way that matched the coldness in her eyes and tossed her head out of the reach of his outstretched fingers. “I may be young and foolish, Julian, but I know that love is not something you declare at someone when it happens to suit your motivations. Nor does it manifest overnight in a fit of guilt. In the future I’d suggest you allow me to be the cynical, conniving one between us; I’m much better at it.”
The cold in her voice began to seep into his bones. “I’m not saying this to assuage my guilt,” he said quietly. “I’m saying this because it’s true.”
“It could not possibly be true, because love is not a declaration. It is a system of behavior. If the treatment I have enjoyed from you over the last five years amounts to your way of showing love, I’d do anything to avoid such adoration for the rest of my life.”
He flinched, because the pain in her voice was unmistakably real. If he’d learned one lesson in the last two weeks, it was that his efforts to protect his heart had bruised hers.
“Oh, don’t look so distraught,” she said coldly. “I know I made you feel terrible earlier, but I was only manipulating you to win an argument. The truth is I’ve let a gorgeous villa on the sea near Santa Margherita, and I’m going to write plays and take handsome lovers and eat myself plump on pistou. You needn’t worry I shall die of unhappiness deprived of the chance to expire from boredom sewing doilies and making charity boxes in some freezing Tudor hovel with your sister.”
He closed his eyes. “You don’t need to be so contemptuous of my life.”
“And you don’t need to save mine,” she said firmly.
He stared at her, and she was so absolutely certain of herself that he could only admire her even as the truth crushed down on him: he had lost her.
Not a month ago, when he’d asked about proposal gifts.
Not weeks ago, when he’d learned that she’d exposed him.
He’d lost her years and years and years ago.
And he was not going to get her back.
She sat up in bed, staring at him with an appraising glint in her eye. “But you’re right. We can’t go on like this.”
“Like what?” he asked, utterly defeated.
She waved her hand between them. “All this fawning over each other in public and then quarreling in private and then having to pretend to be in love ten minutes later. It’s just too difficult. It’s confusing us both, and if we slip, this entire ordeal will be for nothing. We must do a better job. I propose a truce.”
“What kind of truce?”
She met his eye and smiled. “For the rest of our time together, let’s pretend to be in
love.”
He groaned. “Isn’t that what we have been doing?”
“I don’t mean just in public. In private too.”
She smiled angelically. “I will not bedevil you nor meddle in your affairs. You will not accuse me of treachery nor lecture me on my behavior. For nine days we will simply help one another, and be infatuated and sweet. And then, when it’s over, we need never set eyes on each other again. Do you agree?”
He looked at her sadly. “Yes, Constance. For nine days, we will simply be in love.”
And what he meant, he knew, is that they never would be.
She took his hands in both of hers, and looked up at him with an expression so guileless he’d be powerless to deny her anything.
“Julian, my dear friend, I am going to insist that you prove it.”
She reached out with both arms and pulled him into her bed.
Chapter 13
In his surprise he collapsed down on her rather inelegantly, and she liked the way his weight crushed her, and his rain-dampened clothes brushed her skin, and the scent of his woody hair oil mingled with the smell of her freshly laundered sheets.
Despite her anger, the remnants of her dream had not yet faded, and his body beside hers brought back that urgent feeling that if he would only touch her, she would feel so much better.
She scrambled for his hands and put them on her breasts over her nightdress.
“Prove it,” she whispered again, reaching up and finding his lips with hers and nibbling him the way she knew he liked. The way she could not stop thinking about ever since the wig closet.
His hands moved down to cup her back, and his body turned in toward hers, and she kissed him more deeply, shocked and pleased that he was doing exactly what she wanted.
But when she dared to put her tongue against his, he suddenly pulled away.
“What are we doing?” he gasped.
“Pretending to be lovers. Come back.”
“No, Constance.”
“Why not?”
He was scrambling for distance. “Because it isn’t right. This isn’t real. You just explained in very vivid detail why you do not wish to make it real.”
“That’s the point, Julian. We’re pretending.”
“This is not pretend. I should leave.”
Next time, just tell me what you want.
She knew what she wanted. And this might be her only chance to get it.
She wished she had her courtesan costumes from Valeria, because he was looking at her like she was a child.
“Julian, I can’t stop thinking about you. About that day, in your house, with the ties. I can’t stop imagining—”
“I should never have done that.”
“I wish you had done more. Don’t play innocent with me. I’ve read your journals and seen what’s in your trunks. I know that you can teach me and I want to know. When I leave, I want to be a woman of the world, not some frightened virgin who has to be lectured on how to kiss. If you care about me at all, give me this.”
He closed his eyes and was silent.
“Someone will teach you, eventually,” he finally said. “Someone you like.”
“I don’t want someone I like—I want you. I dream about you. You kissing me and … other things. I awaken and I feel uncomfortably distressed. In my body.”
He swallowed.
“What is it exactly that you want?”
“I want you to make love to me.”
He held himself very still, not trusting himself to respond until he controlled his racing heart. And other body parts that were behaving in a way that was not in keeping with his private code of conduct. Which did not extend itself to corrupting gently bred virgins, no matter how strongly they claimed to desire corruption.
Were they to be married, he would toss her over his shoulder and corrupt her to her heart’s content. Were they on Charlotte Street, he would give her whatever she desired without a second thought.
But they were in Mayfair, where he despised the kind of men who did what she was asking. Joining their ranks would make him the worst kind of hypocrite.
“Julian,” she whispered. “Please. If this distress persists, I shall go mad. And since you caused it, you must make it stop. If you want to do one kindness for me, do this.”
She gestured at herself. Her lips were swollen from his kisses, pink from abrading against his unshaven skin. Her nipples were hard beneath the thin fabric of her girlish nightdress. Her arms and chest were flushed.
She was, indeed, the picture of distress.
Exactly the kind of distress he was, quite literally, an expert at relieving.
Would it be so wrong to offer her a kind of … lesson? Like he might teach her how to string a bow if she’d expressed interest in learning archery?
“I’m sorry, but I can’t do what you ask,” he said slowly.
Her lovely brazen confidence seemed to deflate all at once.
She buried her head beneath a pillow. “Of course,” she muttered. “I don’t know why I ever expect anything from you beyond dejection. I’m sorry I asked. I’m sure it’s perverse of me to even want it.”
Fuck.
He’d already bruised her so many times. The last thing he wanted was to embarrass her for making such a vulnerable, intimate admission. For years it had been a kind of calling to make his lovers feel safe expressing their desires, no matter how unusual. He would not fail on this count with the woman he treasured above any of them.
For someone who was so candid on other matters, Constance rarely spoke about her feelings. He realized he knew little of her private dreams, her secret heart.
He’d never asked.
Damn him, he’d never asked.
Perhaps if he had, he would not have ruined things before they’d ever started.
He put his hand gently on hers, until she peered out at him from beneath the pillow’s edge.
“Constance, there is nothing about you that is perverse. But I can’t … touch you. And not because I don’t want to, or because it’s wrong for you to wish for it, but because it isn’t right for me to take such liberties if there is to be no future between us.”
She groaned.
“But I could offer you some guidance in soothing the … distress … if you would like.”
She played with the corner of a lacy sham. “Oh?”
He was speaking with exactly the same tortured vagueness she had used, and he rolled his eyes at himself. He was a grown man with a history of having far more frank and detailed conversations on such matters with women he’d known for as many minutes as he had fingers. “What I mean is, if you don’t know how, I can help to teach you how to come.”
Constance blinked. “To come?”
“To experience a relief from distress … a sort of climax of pleasure. You don’t need a lover for that. You can do it yourself, whenever you like.”
She widened her eyes at him in a way that suggested she had not discovered this on her own.
“To come,” she said. “What a strange expression.”
“The French call it la petite mort. You can call it whatever you like. The important thing is not what you call it, but how it feels.”
“And how does it feel?”
He could not even begin to answer that question.
“There is really only one way to find out.”
What had she just convinced him to do?
Surely, judging by the way Apthorp’s voice had grown low and gravelly, he thought that whatever it was would land him very thoroughly in hell.
Which did nothing to change the fact that she very much wanted whatever this death was, particularly now that Apthorp was perched beside her in her bed. One could not be held responsible for the effect that such a sight engendered in one’s most private places. The sticky heat between her legs that had plagued her whenever she spent too much time recalling their encounter in the powdering room was more insistent than ever, and the nagging pulse of it went straight to he
r brain.
If there was a cure for this restlessness, by God or by Beelzebub, she must have it. Her mortal soul was no doubt intended for the inferno anyway, if Mrs. Mountebank had anything to say about it.
“What do I do?” she asked.
Apthorp—no. Julian, for she could not think of him as stiff Lord Apthorp when he looked at her that way, his eyes banked fire, the heat of his body making her bedsheets so warm her skin was prickly to the touch—swallowed a breathy noise. Half laugh, half sigh. Like a man who longed for something that he didn’t want to want.
“Lean back on your pillows,” he said huskily. “Try to relax.”
She could not imagine being relaxed with Julian in her bed.
Nevertheless she arranged herself as he instructed. But now that she had asked for this, she felt very, very shy.
“I am not relaxed. Quite the opposite. I’m terribly nervous.”
He nodded. “That’s all right. It can be hard to let go in the presence of another person. Try closing your eyes.”
“Perhaps if you kissed me, I would be less nervous. Is that not how this works?”
“I told you. I won’t touch you. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t touch yourself.”
“Being rejected does not induce in one the desire to be witnessed touching oneself by the very person who finds one undesirable,” she said, taking a prim tone because if she said it any differently, she might burst into tears. Tortured elocutions were the only comfort she had left.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was smiling at her.
“Is that what you think I am doing? Rejecting you? My God, Constance. I … Look at me.”
She did so, reluctantly. His eyes were dark, the way they had been when he kissed her.
“Not there,” he whispered.
He looked down to his lap, and dragged a hand across his breeches, which strained with the evidence of male excitement.
“Do you see how hard I am?” he asked in a low voice. “I would love to do what you ask. But I can’t. So instead, know how badly I want to, and close your eyes.”
She did. And knowing that she was not alone in this bloody state of wanting made the wanting so much worse. She felt frantic with it. Like she’d do anything to make it go away.
The Earl I Ruined Page 16
