by Claudia Dain
“It offends me,” Cranleigh said, his arm just barely touching her shoulder. She ought to move away. She didn’t. “There is no list. There is no competition that involves her.”
“Of course there is, Cranleigh,” Iveston said, coming up from behind them both. Iveston had brushed off the worst of the dust and looked none the worse for his altercation with Cranleigh. As to that, Cranleigh no longer looked annoyed with Iveston. Did brothers often do that? Hit each other by way of sport? Most peculiar, though there were times when she wanted to hit Hawksworth. Being male might have slight advantages, but only of the violent sort. “Everyone knows there is a list. There’s no denying it. There’s also no denying that every man in Town wants his name upon it.”
“That’s absurd,” Cranleigh barked.
Iveston shrugged. “It might be absurd if any other woman but Lady Amelia had compiled a list of potential husbands, as most women on the marriage mart are not nearly so discriminating. As she so clearly is, being on her list is something of a major coup. I, for one, am delighted to have been included.”
And, lovely man, he bowed to her at the end of his very detailed explanation of things as they presently stood.
“There is no list!” Cranleigh said, a bit loudly as more than a few people in the library turned from their conversations to look at them. One of them her father. “There is no honor in being upon it! If there even was one. Which there isn’t.”
Raithby turned to Calbourne and said, “I take it he’s not on the list.”
Cal shook his head and shrugged dismissively.
“Oh, is he not?” Iveston asked her politely. “I should hate to see my brother so maligned. Could you not see a way to put him on it, Lady Amelia?”
Cranleigh looked almost close to bursting a blood vessel. It was rather funny to see him so abused. Certainly, after the entire shawl experience, he deserved some slight abuse.
“I do not believe Lord Cranleigh wants to be on my list, Lord Iveston,” she said with as much charm as she could manage. She could manage quite a bit for such a worthy cause.
“Whyever not?” Calbourne said.
“That can’t be correct,” Edenham said. “All men of quality and distinction want to be acknowledged, publicly if possible, for their quality and distinction.”
“But not by a woman who has complied a list of men she might consider for marriage,” Cranleigh said hotly.
“How else should I have proceeded, Lord Cranleigh?” she replied, just as hotly, not that she should have shown these lovely gentlemen that sordid side of her nature, but Cranleigh deserved a hot rebuke and she was going to give him one. “Should I have, oh, perhaps, succumbed to the first man who got me alone in a corner and kissed me?”
By the look on his face, perhaps her rebuke needn’t have been quite so hot.
“Would it even require a corner, Lady Amelia?” he shot back.
Iveston cleared his throat into the stunned silence that followed that insult. Amelia, quite able to ignore Iveston and his throat, Calbourne, and Edenham to focus all her attention on Cranleigh, answered, “Better to ask if such a man would even require getting a woman of good family and careful upbringing alone, Lord Cranleigh. Such a man would grab his chance where he could, wouldn’t he? Grab as grab can.”
“Catch as catch can, Amelia,” he snarled. “And what can be said for a woman, no matter what she says of her family and breeding, who allows herself to be caught? Does not the catching declare all?”
“Even the innocent may be caught, Cranleigh. In fact, it is the innocent who are most easily snared. As I am quite certain you know.”
“When the lure is tempting enough, anyone may be snared,” he answered, his eyes like chips of ice in blue glass. “Even a man of good family and careful upbringing.”
“Hence the marriage dance, Cranleigh. A lure, a snare, and a marriage,” she said sharply. “Not my invention, I assure you, but finding myself upon the hunter’s field, what can I do?”
“What can you do?” he said, his voice dropping, though all in the room listened regardless. “Amy, you can retreat. You can go home.”
“Cranleigh, I am home. Look about you. I am encompassed.”
“And not at all unhappy about it,” he said.
“No, not at all,” she said softly, gazing up into his eyes, captured once again by the look in them. It was this approximate look that had snared her that first time. Every time. “Cranleigh, I will marry.”
“Someone on your list,” Iveston said quietly into the web of unspoken words that surrounded Amelia and Cranleigh. Amelia jerked slightly. Cranleigh did not, but he did allow his gaze to shift to his brother.
“But not you, Iveston,” Cranleigh said. It sounded nearly like a threat.
“No, not I,” Iveston said. This time Cranleigh started. “Lady Amelia, having conducted her interview, found that we would not suit.”
“Would not? Why not?” Cranleigh asked, shifting his gaze back to Amelia. She wished he would stop doing that; she found it very difficult to concentrate on being perfect and lovely when Cranleigh stared at her.
“Because, Lord Cranleigh,” she answered, “we did not suit. Did you think I would simply go to the highest bidder?”
Cranleigh provoked her by merely raising an eyebrow in answer.
“We know that you will not go to the tallest,” Calbourne said.
Edenham smirked. Amelia smiled in spite of herself.
“I do have my standards, after all,” she said.
“Hence, the list,” Iveston said, “which I have admired from the start and, even finding myself elimated from it, continue to admire. But, Lady Amelia, please do consider adding Cranleigh to your list. If only for familial pride, I must entreat you. How would it look to have him omitted from the most famous list in Town? Why, ’twould be in the vein of getting sacked from White’s.”
“Hell and blast, Iveston,” Cranleigh muttered, shaking his head in disapproval. “Don’t encourage her in this idiocy. She’s in deep enough now.”
“Lord Iveston,” she said, ignoring Cranleigh completely, which he hated thoroughly, “you can see my problem. Your brother is … unacceptable, and worse, he is happy to be so. What is a woman to do with such a man?”
It was not, perhaps, the wisest way with a phrase, for Cranleigh, suddenly, and with just that barest of provocations, gave her such a look that her heart stopped beating for a full five seconds. Starting up again, it pounded against her breasts. Yes, her breasts, for that is where she felt the full effect of Cranleigh’s attention. Without a by-your-leave, he took her by the arm and led her, not at all gently, from the room, bowing an excuse or an apology, impossible to tell as he said not a word, to her father, and nearly dragged her out of the room, into the drawing room at the rear of the house. It was a large room, as they all were, but it was not inhabited and that made it a very dangerous room indeed. Lord Cranleigh had quite a history going of what he could accomplish in an empty room.
“Unacceptable, Amy?” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper in the vastness of the drawing room. “Is that what I am? Because I am no duke nor ever will be, unless both my father and my older brother die? Am I to wish for that so that I may have you? Is that what you would drive me to?”
“No!” she said, wrenching her arm free of his grasp. He allowed it. She knew enough of his strength to know that. “And do not pretend with me, Cranleigh. You had to know from the start what I wanted and you would not … and still you kept on and on, kissing me. What am I to do? I want to marry!”
“A duke,” he said, the light from the north facing windows illuminating his face with a chill cast.
“Why should I not think of dukes, Cranleigh? Whom else should I think of?” she said, lifting her chin.
“Aldreth wants this for you, that I know,” he said.
“I do not see Aldreth often enough to know what he wants for me, Cranleigh,” she said, staring up at him. “I have made my own plans for my life. What else was I to do?
”
“And what of what I must do, Amy? What of my plans?”
“What plans? To return to the sea?” she whispered. “I know nothing of your plans. Don’t you see that I must plan for myself?”
“I see only you, Amy,” he said, taking her face in his hands. “Only you. If I ever had a plan beyond that, it is lost to memory.”
And then he kissed her. Gently, a soft nuzzle against her face, the corner of her mouth, the line of her jaw. She lifted her face to him, giving herself to him. She always did, from the very first kiss to this, possibly the very last one. It was what she told herself every time he kissed her, that this time could well be the last, that this time, this moment, this stolen and hushed moment might be the last time he touched her, breathed upon her, against her, in her.
Cranleigh slid his hands to her arms and took her shawl from its drape across her elbows, dragged it down, down, until it was snug against her hips. And then he pulled the ends of the shawl behind him, forcing her body against his, his mouth against her throat, kissing her skin, robbing her of thought.
“Want me, Amy,” he breathed against the pulse point at the base of her throat. “Want me above every other want and every other man.”
She shook her head, but that was all. She did not fight him. She did not end the moment, this last moment, for it had to be the last. She could not do this for one more day. Having him without having him was killing her.
“Kiss me,” she said, wanting him to kill by kisses all the whispers in her head, all the longing and rejection that collided whenever she looked into his cold blue eyes.
He did. His mouth moved up her throat, caressing her as his hands never did. He never truly touched her, in all their kisses, he barely, rarely touched her. Even now, the shawl held her against him, not him, not his hands, not the firm grasp of his muscular hands.
She had studied those hands that would not touch her, studied them from the golden glimmer of the small hairs on the backs to the angle of the veins to the shape of his knuckles and the precise shade of pink of his fingertips. She was more than half mesmerized by his hands, by the hunger in her that grew month after month to have him touch her with them. But he only used his mouth, which was enough, but just.
With his mouth, he devoured her.
With his tongue, he invaded her.
With his teeth, he nipped her.
With his lips, he caressed her.
And with his hunger, he seduced her. But only her mouth. Could a woman be truly seduced with only a mouth upon hers? Two years ago, before that first kiss, she would have sworn it to be so. Now she knew better that a man’s mouth, his kiss, could torment and tease, but not truly seduce. Not truly. For if truly, she would have been ruined and she was not.
Cranleigh had sworn to her after that first time, that first kiss in her father’s house, that he would never ruin her. That he had more honor than that and that he honored her more than that. She’d believed him. She’d been right to believe him. He had not ruined her.
There were, perhaps, worse ways to be ruined. Or rather, other ways.
If he would not marry her, she’d marry elsewhere, a duke perhaps, why not? Did it matter? If she could not have Cranleigh, and he could not truly want her, could he? If not Cranleigh, another man. She would marry. She would not wait any longer for an offer that never came. She would marry and marry well, a duke, and Cranleigh would disappear over the sea. And she would somehow survive. She would be a duchess and that would have to sustain her because Cranleigh would not make her his countess.
Why? Because she had welcomed his kisses too soon and too well? Even thinking that, she could not stop. He was a hunger inside of her and she demanded to be fed.
When Amelia thought of marrying her duke, she never thought of kissing him. Kisses were Cranleigh’s domain. She would leave kisses behind, leaving Cranleigh behind with them. She would be a duchess and she would give her duke heirs, and it was even possible that her duke might touch his lips to hers every now and again. But he would not kiss her. Not like this. There never would be anything like this again.
So, she kissed him. She kissed him whenever she could, whenever he reached for her, whenever his mouth moved down to claim hers, she lifted herself up to be claimed.
And when she dreamed of her duke, she did not dream of this.
“Touch me,” she said against his mouth, pressing her breasts against him. “You never touch me.”
“You are not mine to touch,” he said, nuzzling her ear, kissing her throat.
“Yet you kiss me.”
“I must eat. I must drink. This is that, to me,” he said hoarsely. “Would you starve me, Amy?”
“No,” she said, “but I should stop you. We must stop doing this.”
He pulled the shawl taut, forcing her breasts to rub against his chest. Her nipples ached in delicious torment, her breasts heavy and full. She wanted his touch more than air.
“Stop me,” he said. “Can you? If you cannot, then it will not be done for I cannot stop myself from tasting you. You must know that by now, Amy. Only you can stop me.”
But she never did, and she never would.
The sound of footsteps against the polished wooden floors stopped them both. He released her shawl and it dropped to the floor, a blue stain upon the golden wood. He did not step away from her. She did not know if she could. Her knees were weak and her breathing ragged. She took a half step back, turned to the windows lining the north-facing wall, and tried to catch her breath. She had not quite caught it before Hawks opened the heavy door into the room.
“Aunt Mary is here with Eleanor, Amy,” Hawks said. “You should greet them, shouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I will,” she said, turning to face Hawks. “I’m coming.”
And with that, he was through the doorway and back into the library, and so was she, and so was Cranleigh. The library was even more crowded than when she’d left it.
Standing on the other side of the room were Aunt Mary and Eleanor. Aunt Mary looked outraged. Eleanor looked intrigued. It was never to be a peaceful, pleasant encounter when Eleanor had that particular look. They were speaking to Sophia, who looked entirely pleased to see them, and to the Duke of Edenham, who looked entirely disinterested to see them, which was rather nice of him.
But then Sophia called out, across the room, mind you, showing not a jot of discretion. “Oh, Lady Amelia. You’ve returned. How nice. But where is your lovely shawl? Not ripped, I hope. That would be a peculiar coincidence and it would put Lord Cranleigh in the most unflattering light.”
And then, naturally, every one in the room, Aldreth included, stopped speaking to stare at her, and she didn’t have her shawl as she’d left it on the floor of the drawing room because Cranleigh did have that effect on her, of making her forget precisely where certain items of her clothing were at any particular moment. And, because everyone was staring at her she couldn’t think of a thing to say, but of course Cranleigh could because he was so very good at stepping in and cleaning things up, as it were.
“Lady Amelia and I enjoyed a cordial conversation just now and I convinced her to give up her rather nice shawl to Miss Prestwick. As a gift. By way of exchange. For the red shawl that became entangled on her rose shrubs. Lady Amelia thought it was a splendid notion and—”
“And I,” she continued, “I told Yates to bundle it up and send someone right over to deliver it. Now. As doing it as soon as possible would be the nicest gesture.”
At which point Yates left the library, where he had been standing near the door to the vestibule and clearly not in any position to have been spoken to even a second earlier, and, to make matters even worse, that young Indian, Matthew Grey, the one who had looked the most innocent of the lot of them, which wasn’t saying much, came through the door from the drawing room with the shawl wrapped around his neck. He looked ridiculous and yet not one bit amusing, treacherous somehow, which had to be absurd as he was only a child of Eleanor’s age, but what was
worse and really the entire point was that he clearly proved by way of that shawl that everything she had just said was a complete lie. Naturally, lying was perfectly acceptable in certain extreme circumstances, but only if no one knew a lie to be a lie.
She had just been proven as a liar.
She truly was horrible at it. She should have left it to Cranleigh. He lied with aplomb. Every kiss had been a lie, hadn’t it?
“How very thoughtful of you, Lord Cranleigh,” Sophia said, “to consider so thoroughly both Miss Prestwick’s feelings about her ruined shawl and Lady Amelia’s reputation in Society. Though, perhaps a bit late on both counts?”
“I beg your pardon?” Cranleigh said, nearly scowling at Sophia.
“Not at all necessary, Lord Cranleigh,” Sophia replied. “Though perhaps you should beg pardon of Lady Amelia. If not for the extraordinary perfection of her reputation, she might find herself in a most peculiarly uncomfortable situation now, her standing in Society quite ruined. But as she is quite above suspicion as it has been her practice to be nearly unnoticed and certainly unremarked upon these past two Seasons out, no one can bring themselves to believe anything but the most innocent of explanations now, which is entirely to her credit, isn’t it?”
Amelia felt her lungs shrink and her heart explode at the insult, for what else was it? No one thought her capable of attracting a man in any degree that would result in her being ruined? Why, she could have been ruined many times over by Cranleigh. Countless times, in fact, if not for the inconvenient truth that she had counted them. Forty-three encounters, with multiple kisses exchanged on thirty-one of them. She certainly did not think any other proper girl in either Town or Country had nearly that number. Why, Louisa had been ruined for a single misstep in a single evening. Sloppy bit of work, to be frank. That she had been flitting about kissing Cranleigh nearly at will and not a bit of suspicion cast in her direction was to her credit, not to her shame.
That she felt shame now was entirely due to Sophia’s phrasing.
“As well as to mine, I should think,” Aunt Mary added, which was entirely off point as Aunt Mary was perhaps the worst chaperone ever to be conceived.
