Trent smiled weakly, grateful for the cool reason, the fillip of humor, and the underlying understanding from a man who might have been appalled.
“Come admire my roses,” Heathgate said. “We might stumble across a band of pirates, but even if we’re not that fortunate, you could see a specimen Lady Rammel might put to use in your gardens.”
Heathgate needed time to think, in other words, which Trent would happily grant him.
“You met with Lady Rammel?” Trent let himself be ushered out onto the terrace.
“Had breakfast with her, and what a treat she is. If my marchioness had known what a treasure Rammel was hiding in our back yard, Felicity and Lady Rammel would be thick as thieves by now—or pirates.”
“Lady Greymoor has made a condolence call.” Gentlemen must keep one another informed when it came to the ladies’ maneuverings, after all.
Heathgate cut a path across the gardens. “Felicity will do the same and likely dragoon my cousin Lady Amery along, and even our mutual neighbor Lady Westhaven.”
“August company. Are they kind?” Had Heathgate asked his lady to rally this support for Ellie?
“You are protective of Rammel’s widow?”
He would give up his life for her. “Cut line, Heathgate. Of course I’m protective of her. Rammel was a selfish, dog-kissing bore, his lady has no family of her own, and she’s in an interesting condition.”
His lordship’s smile was fleeting. “She’s protective of you, too. Told me I’d best catch Philadelphia Soames and tie him to a chair for a week, or she’d know the reason why. These are my hybrid crosses and among them, my favorite is this little peachy-pink wonder here.”
The marquess was tall, dark, and he would have been handsome, except his features had a saturnine, condescending cast, and those eyes of his… But when the man referred to anything—especially a rose—as “peachy-pink,” and when his gaze kept straying to the corner of the property toward which his children had disappeared, Trent had to revise his opinion.
“So you liked her. Lady Rammel, that is?” Trent asked.
“She reminded me of my dear wife.” Heathgate snapped off a rose and handed it to Trent. “I know of no higher compliment.”
Peachy-pink, indeed. Trent sniffed the delicate bouquet of the flower and looked into its throat. The color at the center was the exact same luscious shade as an aroused woman’s—
“One more question on our earlier topic,” Heathgate said as they turned for the stables.
“I won’t like it.”
“I’ll hate asking it,” Heathgate agreed, strolling along among his flowers. “On your wedding night, was your wife a virgin?”
“Brutally insightful.” Trent cast back, but memories were interrupted by the implications of Heathgate’s question. If Paula had had a lover…
“If her affections had been intimately attached elsewhere, it would explain her disgust of you.” Heathgate spoke as if discussing a planned arrangement of daisies and irises. “Also her desire for children, to justify her marriage when she loved another, and to cover up her dallying.”
“She knew what to expect,” Trent said, the words dragged from him. “I recall being relieved, and I encountered no…physical resistance.”
Heathgate paused, which meant the conversation remained out of earshot of the grooms in the stables up the path. “Sometimes no resistance is detectable, or a considerate mother will have a midwife see to the matter before the wedding night.”
Every one of Heathgate’s attempts to provide a normal, reasonable explanation for the state of Trent’s married life only made the memories more corrosive.
“Paula had been crying before I joined her on our wedding night, though she tried to hide it. She knew what to expect.”
“In a theoretical sense?”
The man was relentless, for which Trent had to both loathe and admire him. “I wish that were so, but in hindsight I’d say her knowledge was of the act.”
“So our circle widens,” Heathgate concluded. “Best send that Runner, or I’ve an investigator who might have time to see to the matter. If Paula had a lover, you need to know who he was and what he’s doing now.”
***
Trent headed for home with every intention of shutting himself up in the Crossbridge library and seeing to a growing pile of correspondence. Arthur chose instead to turn up the drive to Deerhaven, and there to deposit his owner at the manor house.
Trent swung himself off his traitorous beast and handed the reins to a stable boy.
“Might as well put him up rather than walk him,” Trent said. “My intentions don’t seem to be carrying much weight of late, and I don’t intend to stay long.”
The groom gave him a faintly “Oh-the-Quality” look, saluted, and took the horse off to the stables. Trent found Ellie on her balcony reading a pamphlet about breeding horses.
“Unless Greymoor wrote it,” Trent said, “you’re better off talking to the man himself.”
“Trenton!” She bounced off her swing, wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly.
He held her more gently, and in the warmth and fragrance of her embrace, a weight lifted from his spirit.
“I have much to learn.” She eased back and brushed his hair away from his forehead. “About raising horses, and babies. Andy was already three when I got her, so I’ll be on terra incognita come Yuletide.”
“Is that when you’re due?” He let her pull him down beside her, because she seemed to think he belonged there.
And so, for now at least, did he.
Ellie kept her hand in his. “Christmas is months away, an eternity, but it will pass, and then I’ll be big as a house. I think of poor Mary riding a donkey in such a condition, and the Christmas story loses some of its romance.”
“You’ll still be beautiful, but in a different way.”
She ducked her face against his shoulder. “Can you already see I’m carrying?”
See it, feel it, sense it. Rejoice in it. “I can, because I have children and because you were not shy with me yesterday. Are you feeling well?”
Not shy. Had a man ever concocted a greater understatement? She’d been magnificent.
“I am fine.” Her smile was a work of joy, beauty and sheer femininity. “You?”
“Disconcerted,” he said, looking away from that smile.
Ellie’s smile shifted to a grimace. “Heathgate was here for breakfast. He can be surprisingly charming, but that’s almost worse than his glowering, because the charm is convincing, and yet, he’s like a mastiff—he has all those muscles and claws and teeth, even when he’s playing fetch.”
“I’ve just come from his company because Cato, of all people, raised a theory I hadn’t considered.”
“You are troubled about this theory.” Ellie threaded an arm through his and gave the swing a push with her toe. “Should we take a nap?”
He wanted to do the decent thing, for her, in her delicate condition, and for him, all at sixes and sevens. A nap was not the decent thing, though with Ellie, it didn’t feel indecent, either.
“Today you should recover from yesterday’s napping.”
She pinched off a blown pink rose and cast the petals over the balcony. “Tediously prudent of you. Tell me of this disquieting theory of Mr. Spencer’s.”
No argument, no pouting, no sulking. Truly, such a woman was worth more than rubies.
“Cato reminded me that my wife was not happy with her station as Lady Amherst. She was unrelentingly miserable, in fact.”
Ellie pinched off another blossom and let the breeze snatch away the petals. “Then she was a foolish woman, or not quite in command of her faculties.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I went to an exclusive boarding school, Trenton.” Now she tossed two pink brocade pillows off the swing, landing them neatly in the corner of the balcony. “The aristocracy is more inbred than one wants to admit, and in the young female exponents of certain great house
s, the results are hard to conceal.”
A third pillow landed on top of the other two. The lady had good aim. “What results?”
“The school boasted many nice girls, of course.” Ellie’s slippers—also pink—joined the pile of pillows in the corner. “Some were genuinely rebelling against their life circumstances—betrothal to an old man, regardless of his wealth or title, could disconcert any girl.”
“But?”
She scooted around and curled up with her head pillowed on his thigh. “Some of the girls were…”—she waved a hand around her temple—“flighty. One insisted on having her doll learn French with her—a sixteen-year-old, affianced to some old duke. Two others were heavy tipplers, to put it politely, and bribed the staff to ensure their tea was always laced with brandy. They abused tisanes and tonics, which their families obligingly supplied them with.”
And thus Ellie had gained her first glimpse of Polite Society?
“Leah and Emily were educated at home.” Trent’s fingers drifted along Ellie’s hairline. “At university, I heard stories from some of the lads who had sisters. I wasn’t the only youth raised in trying circumstances, but it doesn’t seem fair that the young ladies should be miserable so early in life.”
Ellie rubbed her cheek against his thigh, like a cat, or a… wife.
“Those girls helped me appreciate my steady old papa, I can tell you that. One tried to take her own life, and that was the last we saw of her. Another left under peculiar circumstances, and it was rumored she was increasing.”
“That didn’t close the place down?”
Ellie yawned and settled herself more comfortably on Trent’s person. Only then did it occur to him that her balcony, though near the home wood tree line, might not be entirely private.
“For the two girls sent down, it wasn’t their first boarding school, by any means, and the fees were intimidatingly high. I always thought the same things went on in boys’ schools, because boys are always getting sent down.”
“Not at Eton.” Trent cupped her jaw then trailed his thumb over the silky warmth of her throat. “Some of the wilder fellows made it to university, but one expects that when boys first get a taste of a man’s freedoms.”
“Wenching, gaming and liquor.” Ellie snorted delicately, but her eyes were closed, and she wasn’t going to last long.
“Ellie?” Trent’s fingers slipped into the top of her bodice. “I wasn’t always kind to my wife.” And, God help him, on a few occasions he’d wondered whether some of his father’s flat-out nastiness toward his countess hadn’t had some justification. Even to Ellie, even today, he could not admit that.
“You were kind to her, Trenton. As kind as you could be, though you are stubborn sometimes, and you take too much on yourself.”
“About that nap?”
She blinked up at him. “But you can be reasoned with.”
Reason had nothing to do with it. What Trent sought was oblivion and comfort.
He made love to Ellie slowly, savoring her generosity and sleepy lack of inhibition. He treasured her soft moans of pleasure and welcome, lapped up her kisses and arched into her caresses like a lonely cat. Her hands on his body were tender and wondering and kind, and her loving warm and comforting.
He’d intended to tell her exactly what he’d told Heathgate, that Paula’s family might wish him harm, but instead he whispered to her how lovely she was in her passion, how beautifully she bloomed beneath him, how he savored her touches and sighs and kisses.
When she again fell asleep, her cheek pressed to his chest, he went on telling her his secrets with his hands—how Trent would miss her, how lucky Dane had been to have had years with her, and how Trent should not allow her to become entangled in his life when somebody was trying to kill him.
Chapter Twelve
Ellie awoke to such a sense of safety and rightness, she was sure she must be having one of those deceptive dreams. She’d had them as a girl, and they usually involved bounding from one cloud to another, or pink unicorns, or flowers that tasted like sweets.
She inhaled and caught the clean, savory scent of Trenton Lindsey, the biggest sweet that life had ever dropped into her palm.
“Hullo.” She listened to his heart beating beneath her cheek. “You’re alive.”
“I’ve recently come to appreciate that.”
“I take it your visit with Heathgate was not encouraging?”
“If you are done napping, perhaps we can discuss it?”
“I don’t do it apurpose, though napping puts us into proximity with a bed, and when I get you into bed, delightful things happen.”
“You’re wicked. A sleeping siren.”
She wondered whether she’d ever dare tell him that in her entire marriage, she’d never slept with her husband. “A siren who wants to know about Mr. Spencer’s theory and whatever else plagues you.”
Because something bothered him. She’d felt it in his lovemaking, and she could see it in his eyes when she propped herself along his side.
“Mr. Spencer reminded me that my late wife’s family might blame me for her death.” For all his slow, even breathing, for all the delicacy with which he brushed her hair back, Trent watched her carefully. “My late wife might blame me as well, in a sense.”
“You’ve said you did not suit.” She and Dane had not suited, not really. This made her sad, for them both, but particularly for him, whose short life should have included at least a few years of marital bliss. “I can hardly imagine you not suiting any lady, for at heart you’re an agreeable man.”
“Ever willing to nap, it seems.” Trent’s smile was rueful. “At least with you. Paula and I argued bitterly over whether to have more children, among other things. She became melancholic, to make a long story very short. It might be said she died of a heart I broke when I would not give her more children.”
He clearly anticipated censure for this tale. “Your Paula wasn’t very grown-up, was she?”
“No,” Trent said, apparently relieved somebody would say it for him, finally. “She did not tolerate disappointment easily, and she was very disappointed in me.”
“And you in her?”
“Well, yes.”
Perishing Halifax, yes. “For God’s sake, you gave her three children. I was married for as long as you were, and I was lucky to get a by-blow to raise. Your lady wife was not sensible of her blessings.”
While Ellie spared the woman a pang of posthumous sympathy, her protective instincts were all for the man in her bed. On that thought, she shifted up to straddle him, lest he attempt an escape before the issue of his marital shortcomings had been put to rout.
Trent took the end of Ellie’s braid and drew it down her brow, nose and chin.
“My wife was not sensible of much beyond her own moods, though her family might hold me responsible for her unhappiness, and that means they could be my enemies.”
“This makes no sense.” Ellie saw the preoccupation and introspection in his gaze, so she took both his hands and cupped them over her breasts. “I like it when you touch me here, but don’t feel you must do anything more. I wouldn’t want to be greedy, and you still look tired to me.”
“I am tired.”
“You are also blessed with warm hands.”
Even her compliment didn’t banish the worry from his gaze.
“Ellie, if Paula came by her lack of sensibility by inheritance, then her family will not be reasonable in their enmity toward me. They will be cunning, and determined, but not rational.”
“I’m not rational. I can’t decide whether your touch is more soothing or arousing, but I do know I love it.”
“Perhaps my touch has been merely comforting.”
The dratted man was in the grip of another pang of noble sentiment, when Ellie wanted to ravish him repeatedly.
“Trenton Lindsey, you think you will preserve me from being shot at again by waltzing off on your destrier and leaving me to get fat as a water buffalo in your absence.”
“I think to keep you safe,” Trent said softly, his hands going still. “You and your little water buffalo calf.”
Ellie dragged her sex slowly over his cock, then did it again. “What if the bullet was meant for me, Lord My-Crazy-In-Laws-Hate-Me? What if Drew is a good actor, and he secretly covets the title endlessly? Dane was a bruising rider on a good horse over a familiar fixture.”
“You don’t believe that.” He disconcerted her from further argument by slipping slowly into her body. A delightful tactic, though not entirely effective.
“You don’t know your in-laws have developed a penchant for murder long after your wife has departed.” Ellie began to move with him, braced up on her hands so he could still get to her breasts.
“Heathgate doesn’t think you’re at risk,” Trent said, his thrusts gathering force.
“Heathgate,”—Ellie thrust back quite as stoutly—“isn’t in this bed.”
He rolled her, and drove into her in a deep, steady rhythm. “Say you’ll let me keep you safe, Ellie.”
She bucked up into his thrusts, marveling at how frustration could serve as an aphrodisiac. “Not if it means you’ll become a stranger.”
“Please.” He shifted the angle and hit the spot deep in her body that unchained her reason and rained pleasure down on her in torrents.
“To Halifax with your theorems.” Ellie scraped her fingernails over his nipple and sank her fingers into his muscular backside. “You are afraid I’ll sour on you, as she did, and worried you can’t keep me safe, and even more worried I’ll get too attached.”
The confounded, noble, impossible man went still.
“I’m afraid you’ll leave me, and afraid you won’t?”
Her lover was a quick study. “I’m scared, too, Trent.” She urged him down, so she could hold him close.
“Tell me.”
“I’m scared your horse will toss you into a ditch, and you’ll never draw breath again.” She locked ankles at the small of his back, though he was apparently inclined to hear her out. “I’m scared you’ll laugh at my inexperience, at my broodmare body, at my napping and crying and odd sounds. I’m scared you’ll tire of the novelty and convenience of swiving the widow next door, and I’m very scared you will get up from my bed and convince yourself you must keep your distance in the interests of my safety.”
Trenton: Lord Of Loss Page 17
