He stared into her eyes with intimidating effect. “You say that with such feeling, I almost believe you.”
“It’s true. I don’t know what lies between you and Alex. But I don’t share his depth of feeling about you.”
He nodded slowly. His eyes seemed to burn with some emotion she couldn’t place. “I think you’re a kind person. I am very sorry you had to cross paths with Alexander Dalton.”
He paused and looked off to the side. She studied his face, wishing to see a trace of a clue about what could have made the two men hate each other so.
“What’s your feud with Alex over? He’s the soul of kindness to everyone. I don’t understand—”
He turned and his eyes riveted on her. “Soul of kindness, eh? You didn’t know him as I did. He was an arrogant, insensitive boy. A snot-nosed little prince. He served on the ship but he was not held to the same rigours as the others.”
“But he’s your cousin—”
“On his mother’s side. We’re the poor relations, always beholden to the Daltons for having risen us up from the dregs of poverty.” He wagged his winger at her. “But he was weak from being cosseted and spoiled as a child. He fell into a fever just when strength was needed most. I was in full vigour—I could fend for myself. I could run. He couldn’t carry his own weight.”
“I don’t understand! Explain. Please.”
He waved her off. “You understand, too well.” He closed his eyes.
The moments passed with the strains of music echoing to them.
“I don’t think you really want to hurt me. You covered for me already. You told Rachel I wasn’t the girl at the Blue Duck.”
For long moments there was nothing but the occasional whistle of the chilly wind. She shivered…and waited.
“Mr Green?”
He released a long breath and opened his eyes again. “Very well. If you promise to keep my secrets, I’ll keep yours, too.”
He backed away from her, then turned and walked back to the gardens.
She watched him disappear between the hedgerows. Then she shook herself, smoothed her skirts and walked back into the ballroom.
Frantically searching the crowd, she spied Alex, tall and golden-headed, his back turned to her as he chatted with some older, bewigged gentlemen.
He looked up at that moment and his face instantly sharpened.
Alex took one look at Emily with her pale face and wild eyes and the last of his patience snapped. He would not let her paint him the villain tonight. He made his excuses and went to her. He took her hand. She said nothing, just stared at him with eyes that glistened with tears.
“Come,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
She nodded mutely.
In the carriage he turned to her. She was staring at her lap and would not look at him. She was that sore vexed with him, was she?
His anger got the better of him. “I did not appreciate what you did tonight.”
She glanced up. “What?”
“With Maggie. You made it impossible for me not to dance with her without becoming rude. Why would you do that when it clearly was not what you wanted and nor was it what I wanted? Then you sulked for the rest of the evening and disappeared. Was this some kind of a game to make me look the villain?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Then stop acting so hurt now. I won’t stand for these sorts of machinations from a woman.”
She finally turned and faced him. “Well, I won’t stand for a man who wants to rule over my life.”
“Rule over your life?”
“Yes, telling me I may not have wine in my chambers and that I may not go walking alone. I am not sixteen.”
How could he tell her about his own youth after his escape from Turkey, about the struggle he’d waged to overcome the addiction to the drugs he’d been given while a slave? That he didn’t wish to see her become addicted to wine, or anything else, for he understood how easily a young person could slide into such habits unawares? He would never speak of his weaknesses like that. He couldn’t.
“In any case, it was clear to me that you and Maggie were lovers and that you were only turning her down out of politeness. I don’t need any man to make sacrifices for me like that.”
“If I want to dance with another woman, I shall certainly be able to speak for myself. Why are you letting this overset you? I have told you what I am. How my life with women has been. Did you think I was lying?”
“Yes, you’ve told me you shall tire of me soon enough. Do you think I am in danger of falling in love with you?” Her lip curled up. “I am not that much of a fool. I shall never love you.”
Her words were like whisky tossed carelessly into a fire. A desperate hunger arose in him, taking him over.
Alex turned to her and the look in his eyes was so blazing that she jumped back on the seat. He took her by the shoulders and lowered his head, sweeping down to kiss her. His lips seared her, his tongue hungrily ravishing hers. She’d never guessed it could be like this. That she could be angry with him and yet still want him. She clasped his broad shoulders and moaned.
He stopped kissing her, pulled away and stared down at her. Then he set her away and rapped on the forward wall of the carriage. The vehicle rolled to a stop and he got up and left. When he returned they rode in silence with something dark and almost dangerous sparking between them. When the carriage stopped again, he reached out and took her hand. At that touch, the sparks between them ignited and suddenly he crushed his mouth down on hers again. Her nipples beaded and wetness flowed down the insides of her thighs.
He lifted his head and pulled on her hand. “Come.”
She let him assist her out of the carriage. They were at the boarding house where he kept his rooms. And she understood why they were there. Yet she still allowed him to pull her along as he walked swiftly up the stairs and down the corridor to his suite. She didn’t completely understand herself. She was furious with him, yet as she watched him unlock the door, she was also trembling with desire.
Once inside, he pulled her into his arms, tight against his hard body, and kissed her with almost brutal passion. Every particle of her being came so vitally alive that she feared she would burst with it. There was nothing to be done with such intensity of feeling but to give it back to him by returning his kisses and caresses measure for measure. A coppery taste made her aware that she’d nicked him with her teeth, or he had her—she wasn’t sure which until he groaned and grasped the back of her hair.
He lifted his head, turned with her in his arms and pushed her against the wall. A few moments of shuffling and shifting with their clothes, and his bare cock was pressed against her, throbbing with urgency.
He murmured something, then he cupped her buttocks and lifted her. Instinctively, she wrapped her legs around his waist. His erection touched her entrance. She was so slick for him that he slid in on one thrust.
He groaned and twined his hand into her hair, pulling her head back and taking her lips again. He pressed her to the wall and thrust in and out of her, swift and hard. Her back slammed against the wall each time he went deep enough to send pleasure jarring through her. She didn’t even care. Each stroke, each hot, wet slide of his flesh into hers, drove her deeper into madness and she gripped his shoulders with her hands and hugged his waist with her legs. She forgot that she was furious with him, forgot where they were, forgot even her own name in the wildness of their fucking.
She came, crying out into his mouth as her cunt contracted and contracted on his huge, hard cock. He jerked within her and his seed jetted hotly, triggering her second release, deeper and harder this time. He lifted his mouth and took deep gulps of air. Her whole body went weak and she sagged against him with her sex pulsing.
He still throbbed hard within her.
After a moment, he withdrew, picked her up and carried her into the bedchamber. He laid her on the bed. It was dark and the sheets were cold beneath her. He covered her with his body, pres
sed her down into the feather bed and pulled her arms over her head. He held them pinned with one hand while he positioned himself to enter her again.
He moved within her in long strokes, nearly withdrawing then sliding slowly back in. Her body reacted with desperate hunger, her hips arching up to meet him, her cunt drenching him in wetness. Each thrust of his cock pressed her inner pleasure point and rammed the very depths of her in a way that sent waves of bliss that was almost pain up her womb and down her thighs. Even the soles of her feet tingled with it.
Her nub was swollen, achingly erect, and her hips arched harder, straining to meet that sensitive part of herself with his pelvis on his every downward stroke. She needed to come. She was dying to come, yet he held back, fucking her slowly when she craved him driving her swiftly to completion.
She struggled against his hold and he used both hands to pin her arms flat to the bed on either side of her head. She begged him and he laughed, a low, dark sound.
“Now you know how it feels for me…wanting you…needing you…craving you so desperately and having no control over it.”
“Please, please, please… Oh God, please.” She moaned the litany over and over.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Tell you…what?” she panted.
“You know what.”
“I love you.” She arched up, trying to drive his cock as deeply as it would go, trying to press against his pelvis to stimulate her own climax.
“Again,” he said, his voice full of hunger.
“I love you. I love you.” She gulped for breath. “I love you.”
He groaned and lowered his body over hers to take her lips again in a searing kiss. He thrust fiercely, rapidly driving into her. Her walls contracted on him and pleasure exploded within her, carrying her up to the stars. There was nothing for her but the pulsing of her sex on his, then she was falling, falling into a warm darkness that swallowed her up.
Alex panted for breath, his cock still pulsating within her as he slowly came back to his senses. That had been forgetfulness. The kind he had always prized and sought. To lose himself totally in his own sensual feelings and in the responses and fire of the woman in his arms. He’d come tantalisingly close to finding it so many times, yet never completely until here, tonight.
But he’d come inside her, exposing her to the risk of pregnancy. And more than that, he’d taken the woman who mattered the most to him in the heat of anger. Demanded that she admit to him that which she wasn’t ready to admit on her own. He’d shown her the darker side of passion, and that could only contaminate her with his own darkness. His spiritual bankruptcy.
His put his lips to her cheek. A gesture of atonement when no atonement could be made for the corruption of innocence.
Emily awoke to find herself beneath the covers. Firelight glowed on the walls and Alex was sitting beside her in the bed.
“Alex?” she asked, not knowing where they stood with each other.
“I am going to go away for a time.”
His words fell on her like frozen rain.
“Away?”
“Yes. I think I shall take a trip to New Orleans. I’ll be gone for six months, a year. I don’t know. However long it takes.”
“What takes?”
“For you to forget about whatever you thought we would be and find yourself a husband who truly deserves you.”
She should have felt relief. She wanted—no, needed—to separate herself from him. His solution was for the best. Yet her chest grew so tight that she could barely breathe. Logic seemed to have no place in this moment. “So you’ve decided this all on your own and I am to have no say?”
“Oh, Christ, Emily, don’t. You’ll be better off. Even you will see that in time. Look at tonight—at how unhappy I made you at the ball. Even you sense that something shall always hold me back from you. Only it won’t be other women—it will be the corruption in my own soul.”
“You’re wrong about the ball. I wasn’t that upset about Maggie and Brigit.”
“When you came back inside, you were near tears.”
She took a deep breath. “Green was waiting in the gardens. Waiting for me.”
Damn it. Alex gritted his teeth against the wave of self-recrimination that hit him. He should have known Green would try to get to her. “Emily,” he said, taking her hands, wincing at their icy coldness. “What happened in the gardens?”
She told him, in halting tones. Her voice choked at the end and she seemed wholly drained from the telling. “It can’t be true, it just can’t be. My father would never have traded in slaves.”
He pulled her into his arms and cradled her to his chest. “I don’t know, love. But I can find out.”
That was something he could do for her before he left for New Orleans.
In silence, he let her rest against him, listening to her breathing and bearing the restless shifting of her body as she slipped into what seemed to be a fitful slumber. But his blood seethed the whole time. Richard Green’s social status and background didn’t rate an invitation to one of Mrs Hazelwood’s balls. Mrs Hazelwood looked down on that branch of Alex’s family. Which meant Green must have been lurking in the garden, waiting for Emily. The man was insane. But until this moment, Alex hadn’t fully appreciated the degree of that insanity.
She lifted her head. Absently, he patted her back. “I’ll take care of Green.”
“Your cousin didn’t mean to upset me. I think, in an odd way, he meant to make amends for what happened at the Blue Duck.”
Her self-confident, compassionate tone sent a chill through him. She was really capable of sympathising with a man like Green. Green was always on the look-out for weakness, foolishness to exploit. Emily wasn’t foolish and she wasn’t weak. But she was still terribly naïve and the worst thing was she refused to admit the depth of her inexperience. And she was determined to see his every attempt to educate her on that point as some nefarious plot to control her life. As tired as he was of fighting with her over it, he knew he must make her see this situation clearly.
He took one of her hands and gave it a little shake. “He’s totally insane, Emily, and you are to be wary of him.”
“I don’t think he’s insane, at least not in a malicious way. I think he is just very mixed up inside and feels misunderstood by others.”
“Aye—mixed up inside and unaware of himself. He’s a dangerous man, make no mistake about it. He does feel misunderstood by others and he hates them for it.”
And he hates me above all others. Because I know…
It was even more reason for Alex to leave. He could leave Zachariah here to watch over Emily—there was no one in the world he’d trust more in that role—but in the meantime, if Green believed that Alex no longer cared for Emily, he would stop trying to harass her.
“I don’t think he’s evil. I think he’s just very scared inside.”
A dull ache set up between Alex’s eyes. She must be difficult over everything, even this.
“Emily, I know him. I know him better than probably any person living does, and I am telling you that the man is dangerous and you must take care for a time.” He caressed her hand. “He hates me—you know that.”
“I don’t think he hates you as much as he fears you.”
“He hates me because he fears me. That’s a powerful thing for a man.”
She turned to face him. “He fears you because of something that happened in Algeria?”
Cold, leaden weight settled into his chest. He let go of her hand. “He hates me and that’s all you need to know.”
“Why won’t you tell me of what happened?”
He stared into her eyes, glittering in the fire’s light. “You just need to listen to me and stay clear of him. Be watchful for a while and don’t go out alone.”
Emily stared at Alex’s closed expression. He would share nothing of himself—nothing deeper than carnal pleasure and his money. He never would.
The thought turned her blood as co
ld as the icy slush pelting the window outside. She sat up and hugged her shoulders.
“Zachariah will see you home.”
She started. “You will not see me home?”
“I have other business to attend to.”
“Oh…” She watched as he moved away from her and left the bed. “I see.”
She knew his appetites. He was fully capable of visiting Maggie or Brigit after she’d gone home and was tucked safely in her bed, in his house. What good did it do to be upset? She could do nothing about it.
She didn’t even care.
She wouldn’t care.
They had had their fling and now it was winding down. She could recover from it like a woman, not a girl. It was a learning experience.
An image of Maggie sprawled across Alex in bed, her red-gold hair spread over his chest as she licked her way down his belly, flashed across Emily’s mind.
She felt so staggered that she fell back against the pillows and gasped.
“I meant what I said, Emily.”
She looked up.
He was dressed in his breeches and was buttoning his shirt. “You are not to leave the house alone at any time for the foreseeable future.”
“What about after you leave for New Orleans?” she asked, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.
“Most likely even then.”
So he would have his freedom—freedom to see Maggie and Brigit and to go to New Orleans—and she would have none.
“And, Emily, I don’t mean merely that you should go out with Nancy or Sally. If I am not home, then James or Zachariah must accompany you.”
“James or Zachariah? Neither one of them can abide me! I would never dream of asking either of them.”
“Then you’ll have to wait until I can accompany you.”
“But you’ll be gone, to New Orleans.”
He gave her a stern look. “Then you’ll have to make your peace with Zachariah, won’t you?”
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