A gentleman took care of his bastards, that went without saying, but Lily wasn’t one of the demimonde, nor a woman used to such arrangements. “We’ll do what we can to prevent that, of course, but if that should come to pass, I won’t abandon you.” His heart raced in his chest, his pulse drummed in his ears. He wanted Lily with him on whatever terms she would accept. “It happens sometimes, you must know that. Even when a man is careful. Even when the woman is careful.”
She chewed on her lower lip.
“I’ll find a home near Syton House and buy you a town house in London. You can come to Town when the Sessions are on. Or we’ll chose someplace halfway between Syton House and Bitterward and see each other there. Say yes, Lily. Say yes.”
“You’ve given me a great deal to think about.”
“So long as your answer is not no out of hand.”
“It’s not.” She put her hand on his arm and they returned to the house. They didn’t speak again until they were in the corridor that led to her room. She faced him and said, “May I ask you a question?”
“You know you may.”
She frowned. “I know why Ginny dislikes Fenris, but why do you?”
“When I was new to the title, hardly a man and rough about the edges, he was of the opinion, freely shared, that I still stank of dirt and manure. I confess that did not endear him to me.”
“I don’t imagine it would.”
“I was offended, as anyone might be when they discover they are disliked for themselves.”
She patted his hand. “I’m sure he’d say different now.”
“If I were wearing my new clothes, yes.”
“So you admit I was right.”
He laughed softly. “Blast you, yes.”
“New clothes or not, you are completely splendid, Mountjoy.” She stroked his waistcoat, one of his old ones.
He leaned closer. “Don’t refuse him because I don’t care for him.” He hated himself for playing devil’s advocate with her. “He will provide you much that you deserve.” But not love. Not the adoration she deserved. “He may be a prig, but he’s an honorable prig. He would take care of you.” He couldn’t stop himself from brushing his fingertips along the side of her face, and then along her lips.
“Now there’s a recommendation. An honorable prig.”
“Wellstone.” Mountjoy put his hand under her chin and tipped her face toward his. She closed her eyes, and he leaned in and kissed her eyelids, one then the other, and he didn’t give a fig about the possibility that a servant might come upon them. Or even Eugenia. He drew back, and she opened her eyes, and he kissed her lips this time and hers were soft beneath his. Familiar now and every bit as devastating as the first time he’d kissed her.
No chaste or tentative kiss between them. Not from the very first.
He didn’t have enough sense to stop, or pull back, or keep his damned tongue out of her mouth. Or his hands from wandering. Nor his brain from shutting down any and all objections his good sense might assert.
She closed the distance between them and slid her arms around his shoulders. She kissed him back. It was a lover’s kiss, he did not delude himself about that. The kiss was carnal. Wicked. A prelude to sex. She kissed with the unreserved passion she had for everything she did. Her kiss was full of life and spirit, and he didn’t want to give that up.
Her lips softened under his, accepted his ardor and returned it. He’d been waiting for this for too long. Her arms slid around his shoulders and drew him down to her, accepting his greedy need. One of her hands snaked through his hair and covered the back of his head. His body went taut with anticipation, ripe with lust.
He pulled back. “I want to make love to you in a bed, where there’s room for us both and more.”
“My room?”
He stood. “No. Mine.”
“No, Mountjoy. We’re safer in the tower room. That’s ours together.”
He took her hand in his and wondered why her answer pained him so.
Chapter Thirty-one
“THE BUTLER TOLD ME I MIGHT FIND YOU HERE.”
Lily looked up from the garden bench and rested the letter she was rereading on her lap. “Good afternoon, Lord Fenris.”
Mountjoy was right. He was a relation of her mother’s, and he had reached out to her. He was family. And she owed it to them both to see what sort of ties they might form. One did not choose one’s family, after all.
He stopped in front of her, hands clasped behind his back. His coat was a deep claret with a wider lapel than was usual and silver buttons embossed with the coat of arms of her mother’s family. He carried off the boldness quite smartly. “Am I disturbing your letter reading?”
“I’m rereading it. Do sit.” She made room on the bench. If she’d had a brother, he might have been a great deal like Fenris. “It’s from a dear friend from the days when I still lived in my father’s home. She’s married now, the mother of two beloved children and soon a third to kiss and hug and lavish with affection.”
The corner of Fenris’s mouth slid up. “You sound as if you long for children of your own.”
“Long for them?” She straightened on the bench. Where on earth did the man get an idea like that? “No, I don’t think I long for them.”
“Don’t all women?”
“I’ve no notion what other women do. I’m not always certain what I want. Do all men long for the same thing?”
“No,” he said. “But it’s natural for men and women both to long for children. Don’t you agree?”
She liked the easy way he asked the question. “We don’t all have the life we would wish. Not everyone marries, my lord, just as not every married couple has children.”
“Some things are in God’s hands, Miss Wellstone.”
“Do you long for children?” She wondered how they’d ended up on the subject of children. Well, she’d asked him, hadn’t she?
“I do.”
“Out of duty?”
He nodded solemnly. “Yes, but for more than that. I want children because I think I would love them very much. A son like me. A daughter with my eyes.” He gave her a considering look. “But not you,” he said, slowly.
“You must think me unnatural.”
“No,” he said. “I think you stopped thinking of children whenever it was you decided marriage was not in your future.”
“Am I so obvious?”
He took her hand in his, and she allowed him to hold it. “What if you were to marry? Is it not possible that you would then change your mind about children?”
“Did you come here to turn me inside out?”
“I make you no reply to that,” he said, and with a smile that made her notice how handsome a man he was.
She looked away and stared at the horizon. Her heart deeply misgave her. “When I was a girl I used to imagine the children I would have. I thought there was no question I would one day have them. But then, I dreamed as well of exploring the world and discovering a comet.” She returned her attention to him. She would have wanted Greer’s children. If he had not died, she would have married him. “But that is not what befell me. I haven’t explored the world or found a comet in the sky.”
“You might yet have your friend’s life. A husband and beloved children.” He turned on the bench to face her. How cold of him, she thought, to offer marriage to a woman he did not know. To decide that a stranger ought to bear his children. “A proper home, with a husband to manage what is not your domain.”
“I’ve become settled in my ways.”
He nodded. “As I am settled in mine. I admit that to you. Can we not embark on the adventure of a new life together?” He gave her a quick grin. “I will buy you a telescope so you may search the heavens every night.”
“Lest you think my friend nothing but what a woman ought to be, she is also a poetess of no small talent.”
“Is she?” His eyebrows rose. “Many times blessed, then.”
“Yes.”
He s
aid, “Even a mother’s life can be more than the demands of home and hearth.”
“Her powers of observation are acute, sir, and I do enjoy reading and rereading the verses she copies into her correspondence to me. Little rhymes, she calls them, but they are far more than that. One day I intend to publish them for her.”
“A lady publisher for a lady’s verses.” He crossed one leg over the other. “You might sell a copy or two, I suppose.”
She folded the letter and slipped it into her pocket. “I daresay you are not here to listen to me rattle on about friends you’ve never met and publishing ventures of which you disapprove and children I shall never have.”
“I don’t disapprove, Lily. May I call you that?” She nodded, and he turned a little on the bench. “It’s unusual, I grant you that, but from the moment I saw you, I could see you are not the usual sort of woman.” He lifted her hand between them.
She met his gaze over her hand. His eyes were a lighter brown than hers. “I cannot change my essential nature, sir. More to the point, I will not.”
Fenris nodded in answer. “Nor I. I would be a poor man if I expected you to transform yourself into another creature entirely, just to please me.”
She pulled her hand free of his and clasped her hands on her lap. In her head she heard the laughter of children. A family. A husband. Children she would love and cherish. “Don’t think I’m not flattered. I am, sir. But I don’t wish for such an alteration in my circumstances. I have arranged my life exactly to my tastes. I would miss all the things to which I’ve become accustomed.”
“Such as?”
“I go where I like, when I like. If I wish to travel, I can. I came here, for example.” Her stomach contracted to the size of a pinhead.
“Do you travel often?” He smiled, and she had the unsettling idea that he knew she rarely left home.
“That is beside the point. The point, sir, is that if I wished to leave England and visit China, I could.”
“Without a husband?”
He was right about that. A visit to China on her own would be fraught with difficulties. “I don’t want to visit China. That was merely an example. Be that as it may, I could certainly visit Bath or York or even Edinburgh if the fancy took me. I could sail to America if I wished and I could do so without consulting anyone or asking anyone but my banker for the funds to do so.”
“If you had a husband, you could visit China.” He rocked back on his heels. “With very little notice. You might even find that all the details had been taken care of for you and that more of the mystery of that country would be open to you simply because you have a husband with connections.”
She looked him in the eye. “Well, I haven’t got a husband.”
“Miss Wellstone. Lily. You know why I am here.”
For a bit, they said nothing.
“What are we to do, my lord?”
He leaned against the bench and extended his far arm along the top, away from her. “Marry. We ought to marry.”
“Without any hope of love?”
He glanced at her and there was a world there that he was not admitting to her or, she thought, to himself. Lord Fenris, she realized, was in love with someone else. He had, for whatever reason, given up hope of winning the woman’s heart or he would not be here with his offer.
“Does your father know what you’re about? Asking me to marry you?”
“No.”
She frowned. “You intend to bring home a bride you know he dislikes and a wife you do not love.”
He turned more on the bench, until he was nearly facing her. “No, Cousin Lily. I will bring home a bride who is beautiful, charming, and unique. A bride who is an heiress and whose antecedents are, in fact, as impeccable as my own.”
“And whose fortune once belonged to your family.”
“It’s your family, too.” He took her hand in his again but this time he lifted it to his lips. His eyes locked with hers over the top of her hand. “Come now. It’s a sensible solution. Marry me, Miss Wellstone, and you will make me a very happy man.”
Her life stuttered.
“Everything come right at last. Our family whole at last.”
“My lord.” She jumped to her feet, dislodging her hand from Fenris’s. He, too, stood, though more slowly. “You do not know me.”
His expression darkened and again, she had the sense there was a great deal he wasn’t telling her. “And you do not know me. That will change.”
“What if I told you I’d had a lover?”
He clasped his hands behind his back and frowned. Not at her but at some internal thought of his. Then his attention fixed on her. “Have you?”
“All men want a virgin on their wedding nights. Well, you would not have one in me, sir. If you married me, you would not have the sort of wife you imagine.” There. That flash of disapproval on his face reminded her of why Ginny disliked him, though in this case, could she blame him? The women men like him married were supposed to be pure, and she was not.
“Thank you for your honesty.” He tipped his head to one side. “Are you with child?” he asked softly.
She let out a sharp breath. “No.”
Fenris said nothing.
She stood her ground. She had long experience with men who disapproved of her. “I’m sorry you came all this way only to learn how horribly unsuitable I am.”
“My offer stands. In any event, you and I needn’t hurry to the altar. We can wait several months. A year.”
She shook her head. He meant, of course, that he would marry her after the birth of any child she might have conceived. “Chivalry ill becomes you. It will only turn to resentment.”
“And yet, my mind is unchanged.”
“Why?”
“Lily.” He took her hand again but just held it. “I don’t mean to force you to accept me.” He frowned. “But we will suit. You’ll see.”
She cocked her head, and everything Mountjoy had told her rushed into her head until she was dizzy with it. “My lord, if I were to marry, it would be to a man who makes my heart race. I want my stomach to drop to my toes, my limbs to quiver with passion.”
Fenris studied her in his quiet way. “Are you convinced we would not have that?”
“I haven’t the faintest notion.” Her words came out too quickly, her breath too short.
“Sometimes affection between a man and a woman grows slowly, upon deeper acquaintance.” He flushed, and that made her wonder if he was thinking about the woman he loved. The one who’d broken his heart. “Love is not always a fire that roars through you. It can be a flame that is small yet steadfast over the years.”
“I want my husband to love me and admire me and believe he cannot live without me.” She took a step away and threw her arms wide. “I wish myself to be madly in love in return, Fenris. Can you promise me mad love? Can you imagine yourself so desperately in love with anyone that you would rather lose your soul than lose her?”
He stood straighter, but she recognized the bleakness in his eyes. “Yes.”
“Not with me,” she said. “Can you really imagine yourself in love with me? Be truthful or there’s no hope for us. None at all.”
He eyed her. “I imagine there are very few men who cannot envision themselves madly in love with you.”
“Can you? Could you?”
“I am not a man of public passions.” He held her gaze and then smiled. “That does not therefore mean I have no passions, I assure you of that. Marry me,” he said in a low voice, “and that will change. I promise you. My family will be doubly your relations. They will recognize you and accept you.”
“Marry you and I’ll have everything I’ve ever wished for?” She frowned. “Is that a threat, my lord?” She lowered her voice to a basso note. “Marry me or you will never meet your uncle the duke.”
He had the audacity to laugh at her. “I wouldn’t call that a threat. Quite the opposite.”
“What would you call it?”
“P
ersuasion.”
She stopped smiling. “Tell me true, if I say no, will I lose any hope of reconciliation? If I’m not your wife, is there any circumstance under which Camber will accept me?”
“No matter what my father says or does, you are my cousin. And Camber’s niece. I won’t turn my back on you merely because you refuse my offer of marriage. I am a man of quieter passions than you,” he went on, “but not shallower ones.” And then he gave her a penetrating look. “One hears that Mountjoy will soon be married to one Jane Kirk.”
Not Wicked Enough Page 29
