The Companion's Secret

by Susanna Craig

  Her heart threw itself against her ribs, as if it were trying to break free and go to him. “Gabriel—”

  “Don’t.” The fire painted his expression with streaks of light and shadow. She wished she could see his eyes. “I know now that it was a sickness. Of the heart. Of the mind. But I couldn’t understand it then. The week before my tenth birthday was one of his good weeks. We read Robinson Crusoe and declared this Stoke Island and tromped through the woods on the lookout for cannibals. For my birthday, he promised to take me out and teach me how to shoot a stag. I imagined making a suit of its hide, patterned after poor Crusoe’s, though his was made from goatskin, of course.”

  He paused, and she leaned forward too, apprehensive of what was to come. “I was up and dressed before dawn,” he continued. “I’d even slept with my gun at the ready beside my bedroom door, just like Robinson in his cave. As soon as there was light to see by, I picked it up and went downstairs to my father’s room. All was dark, quiet. When he didn’t answer my knock, I went in and—and found him. He’d taken his gun to bed too. Don’t,” he said again, though she’d been careful not to make a sound. Tears glimmered on his cheeks, but he warned off her sympathy with the wave of his hand. “He had no manservant. No one had heard the shot. And all I could think—” A rattling, rasping breath shook his shoulders. “All I could think was that he’d go to hell if anyone found out what he’d done, and he’d never see my mother again. So I—I opened the window, and I fired my gun into the air. Then I called for help, and when help came, I told them I’d done it. That I’d killed my father.”

  Camellia dug her fingers into the arm of the chair to keep herself still. “And they believed you? You were a child….”

  “I thought it was my fault he’d done what he did. I wanted them to believe me. I made them believe me. And when my Uncle Finch arrived, he was only too happy to think it was true. He seemed sure I’d be hanged for my crime. But there wasn’t even an inquest. The magistrate declared the shooting had been an accident, I went to live with my Uncle Will, and that was that. It wasn’t until I went away to school that I learned everyone seemed to know my history—and they were only too willing to believe the worst of me, thanks to Uncle Finch. I couldn’t deny having done it, of course, or I’d tarnish my father’s name. Even Fox does not know the truth.”

  She wanted to contradict him, certain Mr. Fox knew more than Gabriel realized. But she didn’t, conscious as she was of the enormous trust he had placed in her. Stories were powerful things, whether told or untold, and to hold such a story inside, for twenty years…

  “I buried myself in my schoolwork,” he went on, his voice calmer, more distant. “But there were no books, no lessons, deep enough in which to drown my guilty secret, or to hide me from the taunts of my peers.”

  “But—but you weren’t really guilty of anything,” she protested.

  The familiar, cynical smile crept across his lips. “If that’s true, I’ve made up for it since. I discovered I had a certain knack for cards. As well as what dear Foxy calls ‘a way with women.’ I ceased to be Gabriel and became ‘Lord Ash.’ Blackening reputations and charring hopes, remember?” he said wryly, repeating what he’d told her the night of the Montlake ball. “One year, I was to spend Christmas with Fox’s family in Sussex, probably the last respectable household in Britain in which I was grudgingly welcome. I fixed that by indulging in a flirtation with his sister Victoria, which nearly cost her Dalrymple’s more serious affections. The old earl had had enough and tossed me out on Christmas Eve. Uncle Will had died the year before. I was utterly alone.”

  A small noise of pity escaped her throat, but he seemed not to hear it. Certainly, he had made it clear he did not want it.

  “I had cut myself off from polite society,” he continued. “The only place I felt at home was at the card table, and when my peers sneered and called me ‘Lord Ash,’ I decided to drag them down to hell with me. Like your Granville, I was ruthless. And I made more enemies along the way. Fortunately Fox was, well, dogged in his affections—he refuses to let my soul go without a fight. He ignored his father’s dictates and dug me out of the pit time and again. But in the end, I found a way to ruin him too.”

  “No,” she breathed.

  “Oh, yes. He’s more than half in love with Lady Felicity, and I would not be surprised to learn she returns his affections.” He glanced at her. “I would have married her in spite of it.”

  And in spite of your feelings for me, she wanted to add, though she was neither brave nor foolish enough to speak the words. She rather feared he might say he would have married her cousin because of them.

  “I don’t—I don’t understand,” she said instead. “What made you decide to marry to begin with?”

  A faraway look settled in his eyes. “My cousin Julian, my Uncle Finch’s only son, has been raised with the expectation of one day becoming Marquess of Ashborough. I’ve always known it, though for most of my life it had been easy enough to ignore. Then one night, I overheard him gambling against what everyone believed to be his future inheritance.” One hand lifted to gesture at the room, at Stoke. “I realized I couldn’t let my uncle win that bet….” A sharp shake of his head, as if clearing it of the memory. “I decided to spite him. I would take a wife, get an heir on her, and cut him off.”

  Her gut churned. How lightly men sported with women’s lives. And one another’s. “What made you choose Felicity?”

  He lifted one shoulder in a guilty-looking shrug. “Her brother’s note happened to be at hand. Though she seemed a perfectly pleasant young woman, I felt no particular attraction to her when we met—which was exactly as I’d hoped.” Cami’s surprise must have shown on her face. “As my history would suggest, my…affection can lead to no good end. I did not want a wife for whom I felt…anything,” he explained. “I meant what I said: she would have been perfectly safe from me.”

  You, on the other hand…

  Even the memory of those words against her lips had the power to send a secret thrill of longing through her. If the attraction between them was dangerous, Cami didn’t want to be safe. Hadn’t been safe for some time.

  “What happened to change your plans?” she asked.

  “Uncle Finch was not willing to concede defeat. Some weeks back, I made the mistake of trying to help a young Frenchwoman.” A bitter laugh barked from his lungs. Vaguely, she recalled the gossip column’s quip about the Frogs he had been said to kiss. “He learned of it and spun yet another tale. Now she’s in the Tower, suspected of involvement in the assassination attempt on the king—wrongly, I might add. And I am very shortly to be accused of treason as her associate.”

  She popped to her feet, and his coat slithered off her shoulders and onto the chair. Unable to contain herself any longer, she took two unsteady steps toward him. “But—that’s—that’s preposterous. Treason? Why—why on earth did you leave London? Why not stay and fight? Did you come here thinking to—to—?” A horrible suspicion had begun to form in her mind.

  “To take my father’s way out?” He looked up at her with another grim smile. “You needn’t worry. I haven’t his courage.”

  Warily, she moved closer to him, as one would approach an injured animal. When he did not object, she perched on the edge of the cushion in the narrow space between the rolled arm of the sofa and his body, not touching him. Just there. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, watching the flames lick along a stout log. “Sorry for what you suffered as a child. And for being the cause of your having to relive it tonight. But what you’ve told me only increases my certainty: Your uncle must be stopped. You must go back. You must defend yourself.”

  “Lord Ash has done too many indefensible things.”

  “Lord Ash? Are you speaking of the same man who tried to help a poor émigré? Who spared Felicity’s feelings? Who kept her brother from debtors’ prison? And all of it to their benefit, not your own. You’re no
t a villain, Gabriel.” Two hot tears rolled down her cheeks, but she did not try to check them, not wanting to draw his attention. “Oh, I thought myself so clever when I began Mr. Dawkins’s revisions. I n-never th-thought…” The tears came thicker, faster, clouding her spectacles.

  Suddenly, she felt his hands on her shoulders, gently turning her to face him. His face too was streaked with tears. Carefully, he unhooked her spectacles from behind her ears and set them on the table beside the sofa. Then he wrapped his arms around her, and she laid her cheek against his chest, as she had done that day in the carriage. Her fingertips played in the knot of his cravat, stirring up the warm scent of his cologne, and she nestled closer to draw it in, draw him in.

  They fit together, two sharp edges locked tight and smooth, and she knew then that she would fight his demons bare-handed if she must, but they could not, would not have him. He was hers.

  “Oh, Gabriel. I never thought I might be adding to your pain.” His heartbeat muffled her whisper. “I never thought to fall in love with you, either. But I have.”

  Chapter 18

  Still trembling from the release of his confession, weak from laying down the burdens of his past, Gabriel tried very hard not to hear her.

  No, no, no. The denial scrubbed through his brain with the pounding of his pulse.

  But her words were more insidious still, slipping past his hard shell, his thick mask, to wend their way into his bloodstream. Heat bloomed in his belly and spread to his limbs in a tingling rush. His arms tightened around her.

  Yes, yes, yes.

  Malevolent forces had been at work in his life from the beginning. In time he’d even come to court them. But surely, surely, their appetite had been sated. They had taken so much. Mightn’t they let him have this? Just for now? Just tonight?

  Because, of course, he dared promise her nothing more. He’d spent a decade or more making enemies of the very men who would decide his fate. He’d likely be convicted—if he hadn’t been already.

  Cold terror came rushing back, creeping through his veins the way frost spreads across a stream and turns its merry babbling inexorably to ice. He forced himself to set her away from him before they both froze solid.

  “I think, my dear, you cannot have been paying attention,” he said, looking at her with what he hoped was his customary mocking expression. “Did you not hear me explain what has happened to the people who care for me, or for whom I have dared to care? I’m damned, Camellia. I ruin everything I touch.”

  As he spoke, he watched an unexpected sternness settle over her features, the face of a woman who had scolded and cajoled five younger siblings out of their childish fears. When she parted her lips to speak, he spoke first.

  “Please.” He certainly was not a child, in some ways had never been a child, but he was not above begging. “Please don’t let me ruin you too.”

  If anything, his plea only served to etch the expression deeper. “It seems I am not the only one who hasn’t been listening,” she said. Shifting, she settled on her knees facing him, palms flat against his chest. “I do believe I told you I cannot be ruined.”

  “Camellia.” It was his turn to be stern. “I’m quite serious.”

  “As am I,” she said, laying a string of whisper-soft kisses across his cheeks, tracing the path of his tears. “I am used to being in control of a plot’s twists and turns. But every encounter with you has been something unexpected. You sent all my careful planning out the window. From this point forward, however, I’m taking back the pen. This is my story too.” Her lips were at his ear. “And I’m not going to leave you tonight, no matter what you say.”

  His tears kept flowing, melting away the mask he’d worn for so long—it had only ever been papier-mâché—but he let them come, let her see the grief he’d been hiding. Her fingertips whisked the moisture away, but she did not tell him not to weep. Instead, she held him, murmuring words against his hair, in a language no one had ever spoken to him before. Beneath her gentle ministrations, the shudders of anguish became tremors of need.

  After a time, those fingers moved to slip loose the buttons of his waistcoat and slide the knot from his cravat. Though he knew he should stop her, he did not. The heat of her touch on his chest was a brand, and he could not resist her claiming. They were here, together, at Stoke, and she knew and still wanted him. Still…loved him. Ah, God.

  Laying his arms across the back of the sofa, he opened himself to her, let her have her way with him. What her lips lacked in experience, they made up for in eagerness. As she traveled from his earlobe, along his jaw, down his throat, he could feel her little hums of pleasure vibrating against his skin. Her hair smelled of wood smoke and spring rain and every simple comfort he’d never known. Her fingers tickled through the hair on his chest, then traced his collarbone, before gripping his shoulder for balance as she lifted herself higher and settled astride him.

  Then, with one hand on either side of his head, fingers tangling in his hair, she parted her mouth over his. He dropped his hands to her hips, circling first, then kneading, sliding lower, over her thighs, down her legs, to slip beneath her skirts and petticoats and shift on an illicit quest. When his fingers at last found her bare skin, she whimpered, and his self-control began to fray. Using her slight frame to steady himself, he shifted higher on the seat. She was still above him now, but only just, and he met the searching strokes of her tongue with more demanding ones of his own. The silken skin of her thighs invited his touch.

  No sooner had he dared to slide his fingers between them, grazing her crisp curls and wet heat, when she moved again, wobbling to balance on her knees as her hands scrambled down his shirt front to the buttons of his fall.

  This would not be the leisurely pleasure-seeking of two nights past. Just raw, unvarnished need—a feeling he doubted she had ever let herself own. Something he had never let another see.

  At first she did not even break the kiss. Her eyes were closed, her fingers determined as they worked the buttons loose. But when the task was done, she pulled away just enough to see what she’d wrought. One hand dropped to shove his shirttails away and his cock stood between them, hard and eager. Her bright eyes darted back to his—seeking permission, he thought, as she reached out one daring fingertip to sweep up his heated length. But then she snagged her lower lip between her teeth and did it again, her eyes roaming to take in every grimace of pleasure that streaked across his face as she stroked him.

  “Taking more notes for your book, my dear?” he managed to tease, before her increasingly sure touch turned the possibility of speech into nothing more than a gurgle of lust at the back of his throat.

  “No need. I’m quite sure Granville is not—ah!—anything like this,” she said with a breathless laugh as his own fingers slipped over her damp, swollen flesh. Raising her skirts higher, he pulled her closer, lower, until her wet heat brushed his groin. “Yes-s-s-s.”

  He captured that hiss of sound with his mouth as he entered her, relishing the feel of their joining. In this position, he was utterly surrounded by her—her arms, her legs, her sex. Utterly hers. She moved experimentally at first, a trifle unsteady. But with his hands on her hips to guide her, she soon mastered the rhythm, and was well on the way to mastering him. Her hair tumbled loose, and he reached up one hand to tug her bodice down to free her breasts. Releasing her mouth, he caught one pink bud between his lips and sucked as she arched against him.

  When the tremors of her climax began, he knew his own could not be far behind. Darkness edged his vision, and he was on the point of surrendering to it when a voice niggled at him. The memory of her voice. The voice of reason.

  “Ah, love,” he gasped, digging his fingers into her hip bones to slow her, to free himself. “We can’t—I’ve got to—for your sake—” He could not leave her with child.

  “No. Don’t.” Her thighs gripped him tighter, like a rider urging a wary mount o
ver a jump. “I want you—all of you,” she pleaded, sensing his weakening resolve. “Together…please.”

  It was not a particularly well-reasoned argument, but he found it surprisingly persuasive. And after another stroke, it was a moot point. He hadn’t the strength to deny her, to do more than meet her downward thrust with an upward one of his own, and he was coming…with her, in her. Beyond reckless. Beyond ecstasy.

  Afterward, with her body slumped against his, he let sleep claim him, refusing for once to let his mind go to work calculating odds.

  * * * *

  Cami wasn’t initially sure what had woken her. A noise? Without opening her eyes, she took stock of her surroundings. The late marquess’ study. Birdsong. Sunlight pressed on her eyelids. Gabriel was warm, relaxed, asleep beneath her. They lay chest to chest, his head tipped back, her arms flung around his neck, one hand dangling off the back of the sofa, her cheek resting against the top of his shoulder. She was—oh, dear—still sitting astride him, and that cool draft suggested her skirts were still hiked to her waist. Between her thighs, she felt heat and stickiness, and she recalled what she’d urged him to do last night. A risk, yes. One of many.

  And she would not be sorry for taking any of them. No matter what happened.

  She shifted slightly and realized she also felt…him, hard and eager, even in sleep. Before she could decide what, if anything, to do about that, she heard again a strange snuffling sound and something wet swiped across her hand. Licking her. She cracked open one eye and drew in a sharp breath. Titan was standing behind the sofa, his broad head tilted to the side, studying her with sad brown eyes. When she didn’t move, he nudged her hand again, clearly trying to decide whether she was edible, or…perhaps, asking to be petted?