A Reckless Desire

by Isabella Bradford

  “How in blazes could you spoil the wager?” he asked, his misgivings increasing by the moment.

  “If I were not the inexperienced actress that Sir Edward believed me to be when he chose me,” she said. “If that no longer made your wager fair.”

  “What, because Everett unwittingly gave me an advantage?” he said, relieved, and hoping against hope that this was all. “He chose you, not I, and if I benefit from his choice, so much the better. I intend to win this wager, and I require your presence to do so. So I have guessed correctly?”

  She sighed forlornly. “Yes, my lord, in a way,” she said. “One summer I did do what I said. When I was younger, I did travel about with a circus company, speaking pieces from a wagon while the hat was passed. And I did wear a pink silk gown, too, and though it wasn’t new, it was the best I’ve ever worn.”

  “You weren’t alone, were you?” he said, picturing all the dangers to a young girl in such a situation. “Who was passing that hat?”

  “Not Mr. Willow,” she said with a sad attempt at a smile. “It was my papa.”

  “Your father,” Rivers repeated carefully. He was relieved more than he should have been that it wasn’t the phantom husband, but a father—an irate, outraged father…who could raise an entirely different set of problems. “You’ve never mentioned him before. Does he know you’re here at the Lodge?”

  “He’s dead,” she said, the words brittle with old sorrow. “He died three years ago December. My mother died so long ago that I can only just remember her. I’m all that’s left.”

  “I’m sorry, Lucia,” Rivers said. No wonder she’d seemed so vulnerable to him. She was. He’d always been surrounded and protected by his brothers, his father, and the rest of his extended family of cousins and wives and their children, and at first he’d assumed that she’d enjoyed the same security in that den of Di Rossis. But she’d let enough slip about how little they regarded her, he now realized that parting with them had been a relief, even if it meant she was every bit as solitary as she appeared now: a small, brave figure who was achingly alone in the world.

  “Thank you, my lord,” she said, her voice reduced to little more than a whisper. “It was consumption that took him in the end, but it was strong drink that broke him. That summer when we were with the circus, after he’d quarreled with Uncle Antonio, he’d sworn he’d stop drinking, and he nearly did. He’d do comic dances between the acrobats’ tricks while I said my pieces before the show, and the circus folk were kind to us. It was the best time of my life, doing that with him. But then the cold weather came and the circus stopped, and Papa took to drinking again, and that—that was all.”

  She raised her hands and let them drop, as final a gesture as Rivers had ever seen. But now he understood why she’d refused to drink with him in the carriage, and inwardly he winced to recall how he’d unwittingly tried to tease her from it, even when she’d claimed then that liquor only brought “trouble and sorrow.” For her that was undeniably true, and for her sake he resolved not to drink in her company as long as she was here with him at the Lodge.

  “I am sorry,” he said again, painfully aware of the inadequacy of the words.

  “You needn’t be, my lord,” she said, a quick refusal of his sympathy. “None of it was your fault or concern. When Papa died, I wasn’t left to fend for myself like most orphans would’ve been. I’d a place and lodgings with the company.”

  “I should think so, given that they are your family,” he said. He had been very young when his own mother had died, but he recalled how as bereft as his father had been, he had done his best to ease the grief and suffering for Rivers and his brothers. They had all supported one another, as a family was supposed to do. “Whether you’re part of the same dancing company or not is inconsequential. You’re related by blood, and it was their duty to look after you.”

  “Yes, my lord,” she said, hedging. “But it would have been a much easier duty for my uncle if I hadn’t been so—so disappointing to him.”

  “An inability to dance should hardly qualify as a disappointment,” Rivers insisted, unable to imagine how anyone could feel this way about her. She didn’t deserve it, not one bit. “I cannot begin to understand why your uncle and Magdalena don’t show you more kindness.”

  “I understand completely, my lord,” she said with a resignation that chilled him. “Ballet must be perfect. Each dancer, each step must be in harmony, or the whole is destroyed. My uncle danced for kings and queens. He was such a great dancer that on the night of his last benefit, the House of Lords canceled their debates so that the lords could attend.”

  “But that has nothing to do with you!”

  “It has everything to do with me, my lord,” she said firmly, bunching the coverlet around her shoulders like woolen armor against her fate. “Uncle Lorenzo was perfect, and he expects perfection from everyone in the company. I could not give it to him. I was like the one broken wheel that keeps the entire clockwork from working, and he could not help but loathe me for it.”

  He fought the almost irresistible urge to wrap his arms around her, to hold her and tell her how that damnable uncle was an ignorant bully without the brains to appreciate her. It would be easy enough, natural enough, and she was less than an arm’s length away from him. But it would not be right, even if he’d never wanted to do anything more in his life. Instead he simply stood, his arms folded across his chest in order to keep them where they belonged.

  “But your father never felt that way, did he?” he asked, striving to say only what he should. “He looked after you while he lived, didn’t he?”

  “As much as he could, my lord,” she said sadly. “Santo cielo, the fights he had with my uncle over me! Of course it grieved Papa that I could not dance like either him or Mama, but he never faulted me for it. Instead he believed that one day I’d be a great actress.”

  “A wise man,” Rivers said. “It’s a pity he didn’t live to see you make your debut as Ophelia.”

  She smiled wistfully, her eyes luminous as she looked up at him.

  “He would have liked that,” she said softly. “He was the only one who ever believed I’d the talent to act. The only one, my lord, until you.”

  He could think of nothing to say to that, and any words that could be formed into a sensible reply had fled his brain. She had never seemed so achingly alone, and he longed to prove to her that he did, in fact, believe in her, as she’d just said. He just wasn’t sure how to do it, because jumbled together with that was the distinct and ungentlemanly awareness of how, at this moment, she was also achingly desirable. He’d always thought himself to be a rational man, a man ruled by his head and not his passions, yet there was nothing rational about what he was feeling right now as she gazed up at him.

  And so with a little grunt of capitulation, he stopped trying, and did what he’d been working so hard not to do. He took the last step that remained between them and cupped her face in his hands, turning it up toward his.

  “I do believe in you, Lucia,” he said, lightly stroking the underside of her jaw with his thumbs. “Have no doubt of that.”

  She didn’t smile, or answer, her eyes wide and searching. She was holding her breath, and he didn’t know why. Surely he’d said enough to reassure her, hadn’t he?

  Impulsively he leaned down and kissed her forehead, the slightest brush of his lips over her skin. He’d meant it as a gesture of fondness, of regard, nothing more. But instead of stopping there, that innocent kiss pushed his gallant resolve clear from his brain, and in the next instant his mouth was kissing hers, exactly as he’d been wanting to do.

  But until their lips touched, he hadn’t realized how much he’d been holding back. If he was honest, he’d wanted to kiss her when she’d appeared at his doorstep with her belongings in her arms, her face filled with such eagerness and life that he’d been instantly drawn to her. That was when he’d first (and belatedly) realized that it was her spirit that made her beautiful to him, and desirable as w
ell.

  It was no wonder, really, that now he kissed her hungrily, possessively, as if she’d some special secret that he wanted to taste. He thrust his fingers into her hair, the heavy waves falling over his wrists like a silken caress. He slanted his mouth over hers, coaxing her lips to part so he could deepen the kiss. She swayed toward him, as delicate as an angel, and with one hand he cradled the small of her back to draw her closer.

  He was acutely aware of how warm and soft her uncorseted body was beneath the coverlet, of how yielding she would be in his arms, in his bed. The bed that was beckoning in the next room, only a few steps away. It seemed like such an old story, the stuff of bad novels and plays. How many other young women had been swept off to similar convenient havens by other gentlemen—young women who, like Lucia, were of such inconsequential stations in life that their virtue, or lack thereof, wasn’t really an issue?

  And yet she wasn’t like them, not at all. In her kiss he tasted not wantonness, but eager inexperience, the same eagerness with which she’d greeted every other challenge he’d set before her. She had courage. That was Lucia, and what separated her from all the other dancers and milliner’s apprentices and lady’s maids in London, and it only made him desire her more.

  She made a small, shuddering gasp of surprise when his tongue pushed into her mouth, and he took his time to let her grow accustomed to the heady new sensations. He wanted her to want him as well, and not be frightened. While she didn’t fight him or try to break free, she’d let the coverlet slip forgotten from her shoulders to a woolen puddle around her feet, leaving her clad only in the rough white linen shift she slept in. With her hands slightly raised at her sides, the full sleeves hung around her arms like wings, and her fingers fluttered uncertainly beneath the drawstring cuffs like little birds.

  He tried to keep his eyes closed and his conscience at bay, and focus instead on the endless pleasure of kissing her. But he couldn’t quite forget those little fluttering hands, nor those last words she’d said about how he was the only one besides her father who believed in her.

  Because she trusted him.

  With a muttered oath aimed at himself, he tore his mouth away from hers and stepped back from her, dropping his arms to his sides.

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Willow,” he said, his voice harsh from the exertion of breaking away from her, and staying away when all he wanted to do was haul her back into his arms. “I regret that I have, ah—”

  “No, my lord, do not say it!” she cried. He wasn’t sure how he’d expected her to behave after he’d taken such patent advantage of her—a tear or two of calculated shame, perhaps, or a bowed head to hide a mortified blush—but the fire he now saw in her dark eyes wasn’t it. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips ruddy and full from kissing, and her hair was tangled around her face. She snatched the fallen coverlet back over her shoulders, and those fluttering hands were now clasped around the edges in determined fists.

  “You were going to say you regretted kissing me, my lord,” she continued with fierce indignation. “I know you were, because you apologize about everything, and—and I won’t hear it!”

  “You’ll hear it if I say it,” he said, taking another step back from her. “I shouldn’t have kissed you, and I regret it.”

  “Why, my lord?” Her small chin rose defensively, and she shook her hair back from her face. “If you will not speak the truth, then I shall. Am I too common for the son of a duke to kiss? Am I too plain, too small, too slight in my figure?”

  “Lucia, I have never once so much as thought any of those things of you.” He was determined to control his temper; of course, as was always the case when he tried to employ reason over passion, he failed. “Damnation, not once. I regretted kissing you only because you trusted me to behave as an honorable gentleman should, and instead I behaved like a selfish, arrogant boor, and if I wish to apologize to you for that, then I will.”

  She studied him with guarded eyes, unwilling to give up her assumption.

  “You’re a gentleman, my lord,” she said warily. “You needn’t be honorable with me, because I’m not a lady.”

  “Your station has nothing to do with this, Lucia,” he said. “You deserved better from me, just as you deserve my apology, if only you’d be agreeable enough to accept it.”

  Abruptly her face lost its wariness and softened, and her eyes glowed too brightly. She tried to smile, and instead her mouth trembled and crumpled. He knew what that meant. Blast, he’d made her cry.

  “Here now, Lucia,” he said gruffly. “No tears, or I’ll have to apologize all over again.”

  She lowered her gaze and shook her head, and then, before he quite knew what was happening, she threw herself at him. Small she might be, but she hurled herself forward with such force that he staggered back, catching her around the waist to steady them both before they crashed to the floor.

  Not that she cared. She was kissing him, kissing him with the same fervor (if not the same experience) that he’d employed whilst kissing her earlier. She’d once again lost the coverlet that had given her a semblance of modesty, and with it she seemed to have lost her reluctance to touch him. Those once-fluttering hands were now firmly locked around his shoulders and her body was pressed so close against his that he felt the curve of her breasts through his coat and waistcoat and shirt.

  She kissed him eagerly, ardently, and as soon as the shock had worn off—a quick process—he realized that, because it had been so unexpected, being kissed by her was perhaps even better than when he’d been the one kissing her.

  Finally she slipped free and retreated, her gaze never leaving his as she caught up the coverlet and wrapped it tightly about her body.

  “I—we—should not have done that, my lord,” she said breathlessly, shoving her hair back from her forehead with one hand. “It wasn’t right, not for either of us, and—and I must go.”

  “You can’t go now.” He reached for her, but she slipped away.

  “I must, my lord,” she said, hurrying toward the door. “Good night, my lord.”

  He stared at the closed door after she’d left, perplexed. He hadn’t meant to kiss her, but he had, and she hadn’t meant to kiss him, but she had, too.

  Yet she was perfectly correct about none of it being right. It wasn’t because of the usual reasons against falling into bed with a particular woman: she wasn’t a lady, or the sister of a close friend. Being a Di Rossi and also clearly of a passionate nature would have been reason enough. But she was beneath his roof for the sake of the wager, not for a dalliance. What the devil would they say to each other tomorrow morning? Could they return to Hamlet as if this hadn’t just happened between them?

  He ran his hand along his jaw, thinking of all she’d told him this night, of her father and her aspirations of becoming an actress, and of how much she’d endured from her wretched family. He’d never have guessed any of that, and yet still she’d said he was the only one to believe in her, the only chance she had to make her dreams become real.

  To him this was only a frivolous wager with a friend; to her it was her life. He sighed, thinking of how she’d felt pressed against his chest, and how warm and wet and sweet her mouth had been when they’d kissed. He couldn’t simply forget that, nor was he entirely sure he wanted to.

  And he’d still five and a half weeks with her to figure it out.

  It was one of the worst nights that Lucia could ever recall. Guilt could do that, and as she’d raced down the hall from Rivers’s rooms to her own, she’d never felt more guilty, or more confused, in her life. Her heart racing, she’d locked her bedchamber door in case he tried to follow her, and then a quarter hour later, she’d unlocked it again for the same reason. She didn’t know what she wanted or what she expected, beyond that kissing Lord Rivers Fitzroy had been at once glorious, and thoroughly, hopelessly disastrous.

  In one impulsive, foolish moment, she could have ruined everything. She should never have gone to his rooms in her nightclothes in the first place. Wh
at was he to think? What more obvious invitation could there be than that? Surely he must judge her to be exactly like her cousin Magdalena, available to any wealthy man who could purchase her fancy.

  But she wasn’t, not at all. He’d likely never believe it, but that kiss had been her first. She was twenty-three years old, old enough to qualify as a spinster, and she’d never had a sweetheart, let alone a noble lover. She remained a virgin not so much by choice, but because she’d never known a man worthy of her surrender. Surrounded by the more brilliant beauties at the playhouse, she’d always gone unnoticed, an undistinguished and lowly weed among so many exotic blossoms.

  But here in the country, Rivers (for in her head she’d abandoned his title) hadn’t overlooked her. Although the wager had brought them together into a kind of partnership, she hadn’t expected the intimacy that would come with it. He did believe in her, in her talent and her ambition, but there was more to it than that.

  When she was with him, she felt a kind of spark, an energy she couldn’t find words to explain. It wasn’t just that he was clever, and charming, and as handsome as sin itself. He made her feel as if her life were richer, more vibrant, more filled with possibilities. He made her feel more alive, if such a thing were possible, as if the rest of her life had been spent in a dreary, gloomy sleep, and he alone had the power to wake her. No one else could do that, and knowing she’d little more than a month with him had only served to make the time in his company more precious.

  All of which was why she’d run to join him last night as soon as she’d heard him return home. All she’d wanted was the pleasure, the excitement, of sharing her understanding of the play with him, and instead she’d unwittingly destroyed what they had together.

  One kiss, and they’d ceased being simply partners in the wager. Two kisses, and they’d become something else entirely: a wealthy lord and a common little girl from the playhouse, a passing amusement for his entertainment and nothing more.