“Nathan, I—”
He spun on his heel as if suddenly alerted to her presence, as if he hadn’t been aware that twenty beats of the clock’s grating rhythm had passed since she’d taken her seat.
Alexandra’s heart sped up as it always did when he trained that beautiful sapphire gaze on her. She still couldn’t fathom that he, in all his stunning demonstration of male beauty, should have deigned to notice her. She could never tire of appreciating him. The six-foot, lean, lithe form. The sinfully dark curls that complemented his olive tone. The perfect, strong lines of his face, marred by a slight bend in his nose from a break that had never healed properly. Alexandra found it only added to his charm.
Her heart thumped against the wall of her chest so loudly he could surely hear the telltale beat. This time the intensity with which he studied her caused something other than happiness to quicken her heart.
“I counted twenty beats on the clock,” she said nervously.
She waited for that slow, seductive smile that he always reserved just for her.
Except this time, no teasing smile tilted the corners of his lips. This time, there was no witty rejoinder. Nor a playful flick of one of her errant curls.
“You are scaring me.” She flinched at the edge of fear lacing her words.
Nathan opened his mouth, paused. Whatever he’d been about to say remained unspoken.
His arms fell to his sides, and he paced the floor.
“That is hardly reassuring,” she muttered in an attempt at levity.
He paused mid-stride and suddenly crossed to Alexandra. He dropped to a knee beside her and claimed her hand in his. She studied the two hands entwined like old lovers. Hers pale and delicate, his olive-toned and powerful.
She shoved aside the cloying fear threatening to overwhelm her. “Why this darkness today?”
“I must offer my apologies.” He rose and sat next to her. “It is not my intention to alarm you,” he said. “There is a matter of business that distracts me today.”
In spite of his close positioning, it seemed the gulf between them remained greater than Westminster Bridge.
Still, Alexandra calmed at those words. She and the rest of ton were aware of the shambles the previous Lord Pembroke had left for his son. The Fourth Earl of Pembroke had been something of a lecher, a known reprobate who’d squandered much of his wealth at the gaming tables. Alexandra could say definitively, Nathan was nothing like his predecessor.
“Maybe it will help to speak about it?” Alexandra suggested.
A hollow laugh, devoid of any mirth, escaped him. The sound raised gooseflesh along her arms.
“No one and nothing can help me.”
She reached for his hand and pulled it close, squeezing it for reassurance. “Regardless of the problems you face, I will always stand beside you. You must be assured of that.”
His throat bobbed up and down, and then he raised his eyes to meet hers.
The agony reflected in those blue pools nearly bowled her over.
“If only I could erase your hurt,” she murmured.
Alexandra reached a hand up and made to caress his cheek, but he flinched, and she let it fall uselessly to her side.
Nathan reclaimed her hand and carried it to his mouth. He placed his lips sweetly, caressing the top of her hand, and then turned it over. His hot breath fanned the inside portion of her wrist, and she shivered. “Do you know the moment I fell in love with you?” he asked on a hoarse whisper.
Her breath caught and held when his lips achingly loved her wrist. Her eyes slid closed. She was incapable of words. “Mmm?”
He ceased his ministrations and raised his head. “The moment I saw you come to the aid of a child being spanked by his nanny in Hyde Park. I fell in love with you then.”
Tears popped behind her lids and her vision blurred. “I love you.”
He winced. “Your father is right. I am not worthy of your love.”
She tapped his cheek with a finger. “Don’t say that. He is wrong. Those words couldn’t be more untrue.”
“Why do you love me?” he persisted. “Why, in spite of what my father was, in spite of the state of my holdings, why would you choose me as the man to give your love?”
There was desperation to Nathan’s words, words that shook with the force of his emotion.
Alexandra’s lips turned up. “Silly man. Why ever would I judge you for the faults of your father? You are not like him. You’re not,” she insisted when he made a sound of disagreement.
“I like the card tables.”
Alexandra rolled her eyes. “Really, Nathan. Name a gentleman who does not.”
He settled back into his seat but didn’t argue the point.
“Come, let us speak of something altogether more pleasant.” She picked up the forgotten book of poetry resting at her side, a very special gift that Lord Byron had given to Nathan. Nathan had, in turn, given the personal collection of poems to Alexandra. She handed it to him now.
He opened to a random selection and studied the title. His lips twitched in the first real amusement she’d seen from him that morning.
Alexandra glanced down at the poem he’d landed on and read aloud. “Maid of Athens, ere we part,” she muttered.
He fanned through several pages and opened to—
Nathan froze.
Alexandra cursed quietly, words unfit for a lady. “Epitaph to a Dog?” She freed her arm from his and tugged the book from his hands. “Oh, do give me that. You really must speak to your friend about his penchant for writing such grim poems.” She very deliberately scanned through the volume until settling on Lines Addressed to a Young Lady.
She thrust the book back into his hands. “Here. Now read.”
Nathan laughed, not the frighteningly aloof sound he’d mustered earlier, but the one which always filled her with happiness. He tugged one of the pale, golden curls artfully hanging beside her cheek. “How can I deny such a lovely request?”
He proceeded to read in his mellifluous, silken tone that had the power to warm her through like a summer sun.
“The sentence I should scarce deplore;
It only would restore a heart,
Which but belong’d to thee before.
The least atonement I can make
Is to become no longer free…”
The final words faded to a faint quietness so that Alexandra strained to hear.
He traced distracted circles with his finger over the poem. “I cannot do this,” he said into the silence of the room.
Alexandra’s gaze studied the movements of his fingers. Six-Seven-Eight-Nine-Ten.
“Ten circles,” she added inanely.
He snapped the book closed and leapt to his feet, as though the settee had sprung metal spikes.
“Nath—”
Nathan dragged her to her feet and, before she knew what he intended, his lips found hers. Her body liquefied under the seductive pull of his kiss. His arms wrapped around her, tugging her close to his center so her breasts were crushed to the hard wall of his chest.
He had kissed her before. But never like this. Never this unrestrained feeling that the world could end and they’d be just fine as long as they were wrapped safely in one another’s arms.
In his arms, she felt…beautiful. She forgot that she was short of stature and a bit too plump for Society’s dictates. Forgot that she had a smattering of freckles along the bridge of a slightly bumped nose.
She moaned, which allowed him to slip his tongue inside her mouth. She stiffened at the unexpectedness of the sensation, until a wave of heat crashed over her, engulfing her in a conflagration. Alexandra tentatively touched her tongue to his. When he groaned in approval, she responded in earnest.
She twined her hands about his neck and angled her head to better avail herself to the full onslaught of his expert kiss. She wanted more. Needed more. But didn’t know what more was.
Then just like that, he set her away from him. The sound of harsh
, fast breathing filled the room. Nathan’s chest rose and fell; her heart raced. She couldn’t say whose breath it was.
He devoured her with one long, lingering stare, as if he were attempting to ingrain the image of her on his memory. “Goodbye, Alexandra,” he said softly.
And then he was gone.
Alexandra stood rooted to the spot he’d left her, chilled by trepidation and uncertainty. An ominous shriek rent the air, followed by the quick rhythmic click of boot steps, cementing the fear in her belly.
Her father, the portly Marquess of Tewkesbury, filled the doorway, his face florid with barely suppressed rage, her mother sobbing at his side. He brandished a paper in his hand.
“What—”
“Where is that scoundrel?” her father bellowed and took a quick turn around the parlor, his eyes conducting a sweeping scan of the room.
“Mother?” Alexandra looked to her pleadingly.
Her mother was incapable of words and instead shook her head and blubbered into a handkerchief.
Her father strode over to Alexandra and thrust the paper at her. “Here,” he barked.
With hands that shook, she unfolded the copy of the Times.
Her father jabbed a finger halfway down the front page. “Take a read there. That’s the gentleman you fell in love with.”
Fear stabbed at her, making it difficult to breathe. In spite of her father shaking the paper at her and insisting she read the damning story in print, and despite her mother’s noisy sobbing, Alexandra couldn’t make her fingers move to accept the paper.
“Take it!”
She took it and…
Lord W reported that the Earl of P placed a wager in the books at White’s with the timeline of when he’d wed Lady A, the granddaughter of the Duke of D. The information recorded by Lord P was—never.
A whistle hissed from between Alexandra’s teeth, as the paper fluttered uselessly from her fingers, spilling to a miserable heap on the floor.
“Whatever shall we do?” her mother cried. “How will we ever show our faces out in Society? That cad has marked you as unmarriageable, ruined your name, Alexandra.”
Alexandra watched her mother’s mouth moving, heard her father’s rambling tirade, but could not process either of the thoroughly confounding words. The sting of betrayal robbed her of clear thought.
“I must send around our regrets for Lord and Lady Williams’ annual ball. Oh, and you do know how I so love Lady Williams’s soiree.”
Her mother’s pronouncement only vaguely registered through the thick haze of confusion Alexandra moved through. “No.”
Her father folded his arms across his chest, eying her with a mocking condescension. “No? After he’s made a laughingstock of your name, you’d still show your face in front of Society.”
Alexandra tossed her shoulders back and squared her jaw. “Yes.”
That was just what she would do.
~ 2 ~
Because of both her mother’s friendship with Lady Williams’s and her desire to attend one of the most revered social events of the winter, Alexandra had convinced her they should continue with their plans of attending Lady Williams’s ball. Alexandra couldn’t quite stifle a sense of guilt. Her intentions for the evening were not honorable. She did not, however, feel guilty enough to alter her intention.
Ignoring the stream of shocked gasps and gaping stares she left in her wake, Alexandra moved at a near run through Lord and Lady Williams’s ballroom. Ten hours. It had been ten interminable hours since she’d learned she had never meant anything to Nathan. Six hundred minutes since she’d discovered he’d merely been toying with her. Thirty-six hundred seconds since she’d found her father had been right all along.
Focusing on those distracting numbers, she skirted the dance partners twirling close to the edge of the dance floor, all the while moving with deliberate steps towards the gaming room.
Not pausing to consider the next scandalous steps she would take, she hurried into the card room and did a quick survey of the gentlemen seated around the gaming tables. And her gaze collided with his—the one gentleman not gaping or gasping. The sight of him, so aloofly collected, made her quiver with a combination of fury and agony.
Damn him.
Seated behind a faro table, Nathan eyed her with a moment of pain. It was gone so quickly she thought she’d imagined seeing anything in his unreadable expression, which only infuriated her all the more. How could he be so casual? How, when her entire world had been destroyed, did he manage to appear so indifferent?
That indifference made her chest hitch painfully. Her movements had been too fast. His table was closer than she’d anticipated, and she stumbled awkwardly against it, sending chips and cards flying. The gentlemen seated there let out exclamations of displeasure that Alexandra ignored.
Alexandra’s hand clenched and unclenched at her side.
Nathan waited calmly, almost expectantly.
And it was that casualness that propelled her hand forwards.
There were further gasps as Alexandra flung a fistful of notes in his face. They fluttered uselessly like winter snowflakes back down to the table.
Her theatrics brought her no solace. Instead, she somehow felt worse…and then, of course, was the dawning realization of the scandal her actions that night had caused.
Her breath hitched painfully. Say something to me. Beg my forgiveness. Spare me this humiliation.
He sat there as cool as ever.
“You bastard,” she whispered.
“Come away, my dear,” her mother said quietly.
She staggered back a step, as her mother’s hand grasped her at the waist and guided her backwards. Alexandra shook her head, and suddenly reality penetrated the fog of pain.
She refused to release Nathan from her accusing stare until her steps had carried her away from the sight of him, and the choice was no longer hers.
Her theatrics had brought the evening’s entertainment to a screaming halt. The eerie hum of silence enveloped her.
“Just keep walking.”
Were those her words? Had she spoken? No, that had been her mother.
“Mother, heavens, forgive me,” Alexandra said achingly. Humiliation and despair tugged her closer to the precipice and threatened to pull her over.
Her mother gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. “Not here.”
There was no reproach in that order, which only made Alexandra feel…reproached.
Alexandra made the mistake of looking around the room, and bile rose to her throat. She was going to be ill. The wide-eyed, eager stares directed at her, coupled with the fans raised to conceal the gossip, hammered home the implications of her actions that evening.
To focus on something, anything other than the gleeful eyes of the ton, Alexandra counted steps. One…two…three…
All in all, it was the longest two hundred fifty steps she had ever taken.
Lord and Lady Williams’s Italian marble floor stretched before her and seemed endless. She estimated they had another fifty steps before they reached the door that would carry them down the stairs to the carriage, and then…Oh Heavens, I am never going to be free of this hell.
Silence filled the foyer and settled eerily around her. The orchestra plucked the beginning strains of a waltz, the sound echoing off the recess of her mind, blinding her with a headache.
Alexandra folded her arms across her chest and rubbed, although the friction provided little warmth. Even when a servant rushed forwards and dropped her green taffeta cloak over her shoulders, the chill refused to leave. It’s because it is your heart, you ninny. Your heart is frozen, and is freezing you inside-out.
At long last they were led outside, down the steps, and assisted up into the carriage. She’d been wrong. There had been an additional sixty-five steps to the sanctuary of the carriage.
She burrowed into the far corner of the coach and pulled back the curtains to stare out into the street. Except the panel was frosted. Swiping
a hand in slow circles until the heat of her skin warmed the glass, she traced a distracted pattern along the frosted window.
“Alexandra,” her mother began slowly.
Alexandra’s finger paused. A discussion with her mother following the scandal she’d caused had been inevitable. Yet she’d desperately hoped that perhaps she’d dreamed the evening’s events and no discussion would be forthcoming.
“Mother.” The words came out as a hoarse whisper.
“Oh, my dear, whatever possessed you?” Her mother’s tone did not sound scolding, however. She sounded maternal, and it crushed Alexandra. Had her mother been the same woman concerned with the opinion of the ton, it would have been easier to bear than this warm, compassionate person before her now.
It was too much. A silent tear streaked a path down Alexandra’s cheek, then two, then three, and then she was blinded by a torrent of tears. They were the noisy, desperate kind.
Her mother opened her arms, and Alexandra launched herself across the carriage the same way she had when she’d been a small girl of five years and her father had given her puppy away because he was, as he’d said, ‘allergic to the things’. Oh why couldn’t it be as simple as crying over a puppy? Not this, not a broken heart.
The carriage ride home was remarkably short. Alexandra was grateful when they jerked to an abrupt halt. The driver lowered the steps, and her mother guided her to the double-doors, which immediately opened and she was swept inside.
Her mother tugged her gloves off. “I will join you upstairs shortly, Alexandra.”
It was a vague dismissal that told Alexandra next to nothing about what her mother was thinking or feeling. Accepting it as a reprieve of sorts, she hurried up the stairs, down the hall, and into her own chambers.
Leaning against the closed door, she closed her eyes, welcoming the solitude.
“Oh heavens, that is a dire expression.”
Summons From the Castle, Regency Christmas Summons Collection 3 Page 13
