“Kilkenney. I need the practice.”
“Kilkenney, you can’t toss aside everybody who tries to help you step into the earldom’s shoes.”
Ashton’s patience hit the end of its tether. “How long ago did I assume the title?”
“Several years.”
“How long ago were you married?”
“About the same.”
“Do you expect other men to tell you how to manage with your countess?”
“One doesn’t manage with Maggie. One worships from a respectful distance, or an even more respectful proximity.”
“I’ve been the earl for as long as you’ve been her husband. Bugger off, Hazelton, and don’t defend those trying to take advantage of my generous nature. I don’t want the most expensive, respected, well-established firm of solicitors. I want somebody hungrier and less impressed with their grandfathers’ portraits.”
What Ashton longed for were the days when he’d had no use for solicitors of any kind.
“I know of a firm that might suit you. The youngest member is a bastard, in every sense of the word. He uses the family name and was raised in his father’s household, but the talk never seems to entirely die down. He’s surly, does not suffer fools, and has too good an opinion of himself.”
“Sounds eminently qualified.”
Hazelton used the mangled pen to scratch a direction on a slip of foolscap. “Will you come to the levee?”
Ashton set the cat on the desk, careful not to disturb his lordship’s piles of letters. “Wouldn’t miss it. We’ll take my carriage, and then you’ll join me for lunch at my club.”
Hazelton held up both hands. “I’ve apologized. You needn’t belabor the point. I’ll be happy to join you for lunch, though I’d rather be invited than commanded to appear.”
Ashton scratched the cat’s ears in parting. “Your sister always claimed you were a smart lad. What’s this solicitor’s name?”
“Damon Basingstoke. You’ll get on with him famously.”
* * *
Helen was off to groom Marmaduke, or so she’d claimed, and Pippa had gone across the alley to visit with other domestics during the late-afternoon lull before supper preparations. Solomon had left the house at midday and probably wouldn’t be seen again until morning.
Everybody had somewhere to be and somebody to be with, except Matilda. She considered doing some baking, because the last apple tarts had met their fate at breakfast, but baking created a mess and meant she’d have to remain in the kitchen for the next two hours.
She could read, though she’d read her six-book library many times. Other than skimming the morning paper to watch for news of Drexel and Stephen, she avoided the inflammatory drivel that passed for London journalism.
Ashton had brought a few books with him. He’d probably not mind lending her one or two, provided she returned them prior to his remove to the Albany. Matilda started for the stairs, then paused at the sitting-room door.
Was any pretext more transparent than borrowing a book?
A door opened above, and Ashton stepped out of his rooms. “Matilda. I was wondering if I might borrow needle and thread?”
He wore a subdued version of morning attire, though his ensemble was a bit rumpled, as if he had caught a nap on the sofa in the past hour.
“I’m happy to do a spot of mending for you,” Matilda said.
He pulled the door closed and came down the steps, his deliberate tread an echo of Matilda’s heartbeat.
How did one embark on a liaison so temporary, it needed another name? She’d seen Ashton Fenwick’s exquisite finery, heard Helen describe his matched team and his grand rooms at the Albany. Biding at that august address, he’d rub shoulders with the sons and cousins of all the best families.
Which meant that when he left Matilda’s household, he’d be well and truly lost to her.
He stopped on the step above. Close enough that Matilda caught the scent of heather and had to link her hands behind her back lest she grab his cravat and haul him close for a kiss.
“I lied,” he said. “I have my own sewing kit, and I’m as handy with a needle as the next bachelor. I wanted an excuse to seek you out.”
Matilda moved up a step, and then one more, so she was eye to eye with him. “I was about to ask you for the loan of a book.”
“I have several. Do you read French?”
“Yes, but that’s not the point.”
He cocked a hip against the bannister. “I see.”
“I’m glad somebody does. I have no idea what I’m about. You make me feel things in the dark that sunder my reason. Then at breakfast, it’s ‘pass the salt’ and ‘lovely weather we’re having.’ Do I sit in my parlor and hope you’ll come by with mending, take you fresh biscuits, or slip into your bed in the dark of night?”
“Matilda?”
“I’m babbling. This is a novel experience. Even when I was a debutante, anticipating my first waltz, even on my rubbishing wedding night—”
Soft lips pressed against her mouth. “A gentleman doesn’t presume, my dear. The next move belongs to the lady.”
She rested her forehead on Ashton’s shoulder and kept her hands and her kisses to herself.
“You are in error, Mr. Fenwick. Ladies do not make moves. They smile, they favor a fellow with a dance, they tat lace, and go barmy, but they do not march into a gentleman’s quarters and announce a desire to have their way with him.”
Though Matilda would, before that gentleman left for the most commodious quarters in the metropolis and forgot she existed.
“Let’s do an experiment,” Ashton said, taking Matilda by the hand and leading her up the stairs. “I assume the house is empty but for the two of us?”
“It is.”
Ashton opened his door and escorted Matilda straight into his bedroom. “If you would please state a desire for my person now, the experiment will be complete.”
“One hears the Scots are prone to eccentricity.”
“We’re prone to genius, also modesty. Ask me, Matilda.”
The bed sat two yards away, a venerable monstrosity that seemed to be everywhere Matilda looked.
“I’ll feel pathetic,” she said. “Begging you for... for that.”
“Never beg. Simply tell me you want me to be your lover.”
The words made her shiver. “In broad daylight?”
“I want you to be my lover.”
At first, Matilda thought Ashton was instructing her, but as he unknotted his cravat and shrugged out of his coat, she realized he was stating a fact. He wanted her to be his lover.
The shiver took on an edge of pleasurable anticipation. She’d dared elude the law, dared to seek safety in her enemy’s backyard. Surely she could dare to indulge in an hour of passion?
“I know nothing of being a lover, and I was no kind of wife, to hear my late husband tell it.”
“Then he was a blundering disgrace.” Ashton draped his coat over the back of a chair and started unbuttoning his waistcoat.
“What are you about?”
“I’m showing you what’s on offer,” he replied, hanging the waistcoat over the jacket, “in broad daylight. I revel in a daylight loving, myself. A lady at her pleasures is a beautiful creature.”
Matilda had never been a beautiful creature. “Don’t you dare throw that shirt to the floor.”
He pulled his shirttails from his waistband. “I was about to toss it over the chair.” The shirt came off over his head, and Matilda forgot all about daylight and Scottish modesty. Ashton was naked above the waist, and all at once, regret stole over her.
“I never saw my husband unclothed, but he wouldn’t have looked as you do.” The difference would have started with Ashton’s defined musculature and a sprinkling of dark chest hair. Althorpe had been tall, but pale and running to fat. The more significant difference would have been that Ashton Fenwick was entirely at ease without clothing.
Althorpe’s expression when anticipating marita
l privileges had been impatient, imperious, and disdainful. Matilda was to accommodate him, ask no questions, and make no demands.
If she offered Ashton Fenwick mere accommodation, he’d toss it straight out the window.
“Your expression is more disgruntled than eager,” he said, standing directly before her. “Am I taking too long?”
Matilda had no conscious thought to put her hand on his chest. Her hand simply ended up there, over warm flesh, smooth muscle, and odd, crinkly hair. The rhythm of Ashton’s heart beat beneath her palm in a steady tattoo.
“My marriage was miserable.”
She’d thought those words a time or two, but compared to the upheaval following Althorpe’s death, the prison her marriage had become was a detail.
Except, it wasn’t. Saying the words aloud reminded Matilda of months spent immured in the countryside, where she was to read improving tracts, await her husband’s brief visits, and pray to conceive a son. The time spent in Town was worse, ignoring pitying looks on the few occasions Althorpe bothered to escort her.
“I’m sorry,” Ashton said, enfolding Matilda against his naked chest. “Shall I be your revenge on the old boy’s sainted memory?”
“It’s not that simple,” she replied, letting him have some of her weight. “Althorpe was a miserly martinet twenty years my senior. His only son could do no wrong. I was to provide a spare, which I failed to do. The boy took a fancy to me. I wouldn’t know how to entice Solomon over the back stoop with a fresh haddock, but according to my husband, I was Lilith, the temptress.”
Ashton stroked a hand over her hair. “It’s no’ supposed to be like that. Shame on them both, father and son. They’re a discredit to the male gender.”
He spoke softly, but his words were also a sentiment Matilda hadn’t heard from another soul. For Ashton to pronounce sentence so easily, so confidently, relieved a niggle of self-doubt Matilda had carried for years.
“I was glad when Althorpe died. I didn’t wish him dead, but I was glad to be free of him.” The words might once have made her ashamed, but in Ashton’s arms, she merely spoke a pathetic truth.
“I’m glad he’s gone too and will further admit I wish you’d never married him.”
The ultimate regret, and Ashton had had to say it for her.
This exchange was extraordinary in so many ways. Matilda was pressed against a half-naked man and wanted nothing but to press closer. She was being honest about her past. She was exchanging intimacies she’d never thought to share with another, and all of this was transpiring while the sunshine poured through the window.
Revenge wasn’t the right word for what Matilda was about to do, but neither was it entirely wrong. She would finally learn what it meant to be a lady about her pleasures, to have a lover who was also a friend, however temporarily.
“Ashton Fenwick, will you be my lover?”
Chapter Nine
Ashton had made love with angry women, jubilant women, sad women, lonely women, lusty women, bored women, and everything in between. He’d been happy to share an interlude of pleasure and comfort with each of them and hoped they recalled him fondly.
He did not want to be a mere fond recollection for Matilda Bryce. He wanted to be the man who showed her how lovely life could be when shared with a true partner, and he wanted her to show him the same marvel. This was doubtless a form of dementia brought on by the London air, for Matilda wanted nothing to do with partnership of the permanent variety.
“I will be your lover, Matilda, with joy and with pride. I will also be your lady’s maid.”
For a woman who’d been married, Matilda knew nothing about flirtation or bedroom protocol. Her idiot husband had much to answer for, but so did the nonsense that passed for a genteel woman’s education.
“You can’t just get in bed, take off your breeches, and close your eyes?” she asked.
“Take off my—under the covers, you mean?”
A blush crept up her neck. “Or I could turn my back.”
“For God’s sake, woman. I long to bare all my treasures to you, and you want to turn your back?”
Matilda’s face was pink, and the sight of her discomfiture was anything but humorous.
“Turn around, then,” Ashton said, taking her gently by the shoulders.
She jumped when he began undoing the hooks down the back of her dress. The fit was loose enough that she might have contorted herself into the garment unassisted, or maybe Pippa aided her. After the hooks came her laces, and then Ashton gave her a gentle push in the direction of the privacy screen.
“I’ll be under the covers, with my breeches off.”
She rustled away, and Ashton took a moment to lock the door to the stairway, secure the windows against any housebreaking ventures Helen might attempt, and close the door to the bedroom.
When Matilda emerged from the privacy screen in a worn, wrinkled shift, Ashton was sitting with his back to the headboard, the covers drawn over an erection that wanted the merest hint of encouragement to come to full attention.
She took his breeches from where he’d draped them across the desk and folded them tidily. Next she folded his shirt, sleeves precisely matching, collar tucked just so, cuffs smoothed flat. His waistcoat would doubtless divert her for another quarter hour.
“The sunlight coming in the window reveals more to me than you intend, Matilda.”
She scampered over to the bed with the speed of a startled cat. “I’m trying to figure out a way to explain something to you.”
“I know where babies come from.”
“That is not funny to a woman whose sole excuse for taking up space under her husband’s roof was her ability to reproduce.”
Well, hell. “Matilda, have you any reason to believe the problem lay with you? Couldn’t the issue have been on your husband’s part?”
She sat on the bed, her back to Ashton. Why didn’t women grasp that every part of the female anatomy was delightful to behold? The nape of a woman’s neck could inspire ballads, the curve of her spine could make a man ache.
“I suspect he was the problem. Althorpe was not enthusiastic about… That is to say, he put forth great effort…”
Ashton studied the angle of Matilda’s jaw, the set of her shoulders. She wasn’t embarrassed, but she was grasping for vocabulary.
“He couldn’t finish,” Ashton said. “He’d fuss about, heave and groan, flail away, curse, and probably leave you sore, but he couldn’t finish.”
She snatched up a brocade pillow and hugged it to her chest. “Not often, and that was my fault too. I didn’t know what to do, so I asked somebody more knowledgeable than I.”
The goose girl probably knew more about intentionally arousing a man’s interest than Matilda did.
“Who was this expert?”
“She maintained a common nuisance across the square from Althorpe’s town house. They do that, you know. Set up the bawdy houses in the decent neighborhoods. The woman told me her employees were safer that way, made better money, and were more easily available to the men who could pay well for their frolics.”
“I can continue admiring the lovely view of your back, Matilda, or I can put my arms around you while we hold this discussion. The choice is yours.”
More than ever, Ashton understood that the choices must remain hers.
Matilda slanted a glance at him over her shoulder, then cast the pillow away and tucked herself against his side.
Ashton wrapped an arm around her shoulder, lest she wander off into the sunbeams. “What did the madam tell you?”
“That I was the bravest fool she’d ever met. I had often been called a fool, but never brave before. We talked for a long time, and when I was…” She paused to pull the covers up over her legs. “When I was newly widowed, she was very kind to me.”
“She assured you the lack of a son was not your fault?” Whoever she was, Ashton silently thanked the woman.
“She assured me that despite what any physician or midwife mi
ght say, it was nearly impossible to tell for certain why conception hadn’t occurred, but that my husband was likely to blame. I asked her what I could do about it.”
“And she suggested an affair?”
Matilda shifted about some more, until her head was resting on Ashton’s thigh. “Everybody knows more about this business than I do. Yes, she suggested an affair, even going so far as to remind me that my husband’s close family members presented the best hope of siring a child who’d look like him. She also suggested a few intimate…”
“Tricks,” Ashton supplied, searching for the pins in Matilda’s hair.
“For want of a better word. The first time I acted upon one of those suggestions, my husband scolded me for being a slut. What are you doing?”
“Taking down your hair.”
She was silent for a moment, while Ashton freed her braid from a dozen hairpins. When he sank his fingers into her hair and massaged her scalp, she sighed.
“That feels sinfully good.”
“Matilda, if this is your idea of sinfully good, then your notions of sin are woefully unimaginative.”
Through the thin sheet, she bit Ashton’s thigh, not hard. “You inspire me, Ashton Fenwick. I wish I’d met you a year from now.”
He had no idea what she meant, but then, her mouth was inches from his cock, and his store of ideas was growing predictably focused.
“Are you fond of that chemise?” Ashton asked.
“I’m not fond of it, but it’s one of only two that I own. Why?”
“Because I’m not fond of it either. What must I do to persuade you to take it off?”
She rolled to her back and braced herself on her elbows. “One removes every stitch?”
Her question told him volumes, all of it sad. “Your husband came to you after all the servants were abed, probably wearing a nightshirt large enough to double as a sail for the royal yacht, but no larger than the nightgown he never asked you to remove. He climbed under the covers, wedged himself between your legs, and without so much as kissing you, started poking and thrashing about. If and when he achieved satisfaction, he heaved himself off of you without a word and took himself back to his own bed.”
Ashton: Lord of Truth (Lonely Lords Book 13) Page 14
