“Because you are . . .” The minx. She flicked her gaze down to his breeches. “Incapable? Oh, dear. How unfortunate.”
“Not for any anatomical reason. But because I’m here to protect you.”
“From what?”
He looked about, catching sight of a maid at the end of the corridor. She was out of earshot, but this was not the sort of conversation one had before servants. Tugging at Georgette’s hand, he pulled her into the nearest chamber and knocked the door shut behind them.
It could serve equally well as a parlor or a storage room, so full was it with furniture. A wardrobe stood against one wall; a trio of wing chairs were arrayed before the cold fireplace. A small pianoforte was stacked with sheet music, and ornaments cluttered the mantel. It was all free of dust, which meant the servants had likely finished in here for the day.
This would do. This would do very well.
“What do you think you must protect me from?” Georgette shook free of his grasp, then walked to the wardrobe.
Her question ought to have been easier to answer. “From . . . from . . . danger,” he fumbled. Sentences were more difficult to form when make love to me echoed in his ears like the silence after a gong was struck.
“I’m not in danger right now.” She pulled open the wardrobe doors, one after the other, and peered inside. “Oh, how cunning. Look, the right is all drawers and shelves. The left could fit all my gowns and leave room for me besides.”
Suiting her actions to her words, she stepped inside the cavernous piece of furniture. “Without any gowns in here, I think there’s room for two. Won’t you join me?”
“Your wish today is my command.” He crossed to stand before the wardrobe, then eyed it with skepticism. “I understand wanting to avoid the servants, but why must we go into a small enclosed space?”
She pressed against the far wall of the wardrobe, crouching. “So you can’t get away from me.”
“I’ve no desire to.”
“Good, but not good enough.” She swallowed. “What do you desire?”
“Many things.”
Her eyes were clear as the morning sky. “Please be more specific.”
He stretched out his arms, bracing each hand against the partition in which she stood. His wounded muscle hardly twinged now. “Do you want a hypothesis? A hypotenuse? A hypocaust?”
“No. I want . . . a purpose. A plan. Now that you’ve caught me in the wardrobe—”
“Is that how it went?”
“—surely you’ve a plan for me.”
She looked so desirable, all flushed with hope and a beckoning smile. Not a siren at all; just Georgette, joyful and clever. When she turned the full force of her enthusiasm on him, a delightful sort of quiver raced down his spine.
He tried to fight it. “It smells horribly of camphor in there. You cannot think I could seduce you under such circumstances.”
“It’s not a seduction if I ask for it. And you can consider the camphor a challenge. Can you bring me to pleasure without the help of a barrel of Madeira?”
If she put it that way . . .
He clambered into the wardrobe.
It was even more awkward than he’d expected it to be. His shoulder banged the back of the piece; his boots trampled the hem of her gown. The wardrobe was not quite as tall as Georgette; it required a slight duck of her head and made Hugo crouch. Or bend—but if he bent, his face was almost in her bosom.
Very well, he’d bend. And he’d swing one of the doors shut around them too. “I’m only doing this because you begged me,” he said. “Though if you’ll give me a moment, I shall beg you.”
“For what?” She sounded breathless. In such tight quarters, in the near dark of the wardrobe, every word echoed, every movement of hers pressed against him.
Lord Hugo Starling, youngest surviving son of the Duke of Willingham, always made the intelligent choice. The logical choice. The choice with the long view in mind.
“To touch you,” he said. “A bit. Or a lot, but—not irrevocably. I don’t—mustn’t—”
“You hesitate now?” She found his hand in the darkness. “As if a few minutes in a wardrobe would mark the difference between propriety and ruination?”
“That depends on how those minutes are spent.” He had ideas. He had nothing but ideas.
The first of them was lifting their linked hands to her breast.
She moaned, pressing into his touch. Her hand slid up his arm to his shoulder. “We have passed days and nights together. If we were compromised, it happened long ago.”
But she had not been, because he had seen to that. He’d spent wakeful nights on the floor, or locked into a chamber down the corridor from hers. He’d seen her safely to bed, and safely to rise.
Now, though, she’d been compromised beyond a doubt. He had seen to that, too.
“Compromise,” she added, “is only a word for rules made by others.”
Strictly speaking, she was right. “So is law.” His fingertips made slow circles about her nipple, drawing it to a tight peak within the bodice of her gown. “So are other ideas with which we live, like propriety. And manners.”
“None of which is relevant right now. Oh—oh, I like that. What you’re doing with your fingers—do that forever.”
He was hard, stone-hard, and getting harder with each caress. “If I weren’t watching out for you, I’d do so much more than this.”
“I never asked you to watch out for me.” Her legs opened to a wider angle, knee bumping the door of the wardrobe. She slid up the line of his thigh, riding it.
Oh God, he could feel the warmth of her. He wanted to be in that sweet heat, plunging deep. “I know, I know.” He thumped his head against the low ceiling of the wardrobe. “I’m doing it because it matters to me. I want you to be all right.”
“And why would groping me only a little be the thing that keeps me all right?” Her hips rolled, pressing her more firmly against him.
So many clothes, so little space, and the scent of camphor was making him dizzy.
“Damn your unassailable arguments,” he said, and ignoring the protest of his injured shoulder, took her in his arms. Booting open the door to the wardrobe, he half dove, half toppled, landing on the carpeted floor of the little room. Georgette fell atop him in a tangle of limbs, laughing.
But when he caught her lips with his, she stopped laughing at once—and she returned the kiss with delightful enthusiasm. It deepened, sweetened, flamed hotter, and then her hands were in his clothes and his hands were in her bodice, and she was stroking his belly as he rolled and pinched one of her nipples.
He hadn’t planned for this. He had planned a hospital, he had planned to leave, he had planned—oh God, she was undoing the fall of his breeches and taking his cock in her hands.
With her gold-and-white skirts rucked up, she straddled his thighs. A bridge to temptation. She held his shaft, and he had to grit his teeth not to pump his hips. “What are you doing?” he groaned.
“How will you love me?” she asked.
“With my hands.” He gasped as she stroked him, long and hard. “With my mouth. But not with my cock. I can’t—we can’t.”
Her cheeks flooded with pink. “I never thought to hear you say that word.”
“You thought about me saying cock?”
“I have thought about many things”—she worked his length in her fist, taking cues from his every twitch and quiver—“that you would never suspect.”
“I’m getting the idea now.”
“And why can’t I have everything?”
“It would”—he shuddered from scalp to toe—“it would take away your choices. You could never choose another to be your first.”
The movement of her hand paused. “And?”
He cast about for threads of sense. “If you fell pregnant, we’d have to wed. You’d have to tailor your life to suit mine.” An image flashed through his mind: Georgette, surrounded by papers and plans, joyless. “I wouldn’t force
those choices on you, or take from you any others.”
“I see. Very noble.” With a slow slide, she began stroking him again. “Very logical.”
“Ugh.” Nobility and logic were stubborn bastards. And he was only human, and if she kept touching him like that, with her sex visible and lovely when he did no more than lift a drape of her skirts . . . oh, it would be the sweetest disaster imaginable. Right now they wanted the same thing, but only in this moment. Eventually the future would become the present and split them from each other.
“What will you give me instead, then?” she asked, and he had an idea.
“You’ll like this,” he said. “I think.” He shifted to sit upright, and they faced each other—sitting on a carpet in a near-forgotten room of a near-forgotten Northumberland manor house, their clothes awry, both desperate with arousal.
“We can do this together,” he suggested. “I’ll touch you, you touch me.”
Her eyes fell closed. “Yes. Yes.”
Their bodies moved closer together, close enough for hands to roam. For him to pluck at her hard nipples, to stroke her neck and the soft skin of her inner thighs. To wait until she was rolling her hips, making little moans of anticipation, before he caressed the folds of her sex. He sank one finger deep, then pulled free and buried two in her. She was wet and tight and wonderful, wriggling and coaxing, her touches on his shaft growing ragged and fractured until, riding his hand with a cry of passion, she climaxed.
He had waited only for that, and he spilled with a force he had not experienced in years, jetting hard and hot over her fist. The shock of it seemed to go on forever, to end far too soon.
Georgette flopped down beside him. Spent and panting, he drew a handkerchief from a waistcoat pocket and wiped her hand clean, then tucked the soiled cloth away.
“That was wonderful,” she said. “I loved it. Both of it. Them. The—thing you did . . .”
“Likewise.” He was too fuddled to say more. He’d meant to honor her birthday, but he had received this unimaginable gift. An interlude of passion and sweetness, respect and mischief.
He never wanted to leave this room. Which was just as well, because he couldn’t move. He felt as pliant as if he’d melted into the carpet.
After an interlude of recovery, during which sense returned in a slow wash, he shoved himself to a seated position and righted his clothing. Stretching and drowsing, Georgette did the same to her bodice and skirts.
How much time did they have? He pulled out his watch—oh, no he didn’t. Damn. He still had not got it through his head that his watch was gone. Well, there was a clock on the mantel, and if it had been wound aright, they had several hours before patients would arrive at Raeburn Hall for treatment.
“Come sit with me,” he said. Shoving his way between the too-large wing chairs, he settled into one and held out his arms in unmistakable invitation.
She accepted it. “Thank you,” she said.
That was all she said, and he could pretend it referred to anything. Everything. Thank you for being awkward with strangers so I could dress as a boy and harangue them. Thank you for stopping the carriage so I could pet a sheep. Thank you for planning a wonderful hospital.
Thank you for holding me.
“You are welcome,” she said, nestling against his uninjured shoulder—and he realized he had spoken his last sentence aloud. “Does this hurt?”
Yes. It hurt. But not because of the bullet wound.
As she settled deeply into his arms, he felt a great weight on his chest. It was the pain of a heart being squeezed, the heaviness of knowing she had had to live so long without being treasured.
Today, he hoped he had made her feel treasured. But what about all the days after? Who would be there for her then?
She would say, he knew, that she didn’t need anyone. But what she needed and what he wanted her to have were increasingly disparate.
“Let me take out your pins,” he said. “So you can be more comfortable.”
She lifted her head, obliging. Pin by pin, he loosened her hair. Only one side, the side that she wanted to rest upon him, then he set the pins aside and held her again.
He cradled her like that, looking into the empty grate at nothing in particular. Just sitting, being with her, minute after minute. Time ticked by, and there was nowhere else he wanted to be, and no one else he wanted to be with—and then a light snore told him she had fallen asleep.
He smiled. “I told you you snored,” he whispered.
She snored again. It was a sweet little sound, not one that would ever wake him from slumber. It was quiet, a sound of peace and comfort.
“I wish you had been adored every day of your life,” he said.
“Mm?” Without opening her eyes, she made a questioning sound.
“Nothing, nothing. Go ahead and rest.” With the arm that embraced her, he pulled free the rest of her hairpins, letting her hair down in long waves. They spread over her shoulders and back like a cloak, not like an intimacy revealed.
“You have me,” he whispered. “For now.”
She didn’t hear him, dozing as she was, but he shouldn’t have added “for now.” He had always planned for theirs to be a temporary alliance; it seemed he needed reminding of that fact. Soon enough, he would be back in London, and she’d be with her brother, and they would all plan themselves a tidy little life.
Logic. Forethought. He must remember these. For when he was guided by anything else, the result was pain that lasted a lifetime.
Chapter Seventeen
The mind of Lord Hugo Starling tended to be a cluttered place. His thoughts were scattered between what was now and what was next, budgets and books, hospital plans and memories he would prefer to avoid, people to visit and letters to write.
Writing these things down eased the chaos within. Order without made him feel more at peace.
But in the wardrobe with Georgette, in the wine cellar with Georgette, on the beach with Georgette, he had written nothing, yet he had been at peace. He had been then, wholly then, and he had enjoyed the moment as he dwelled within it.
He had held her, and it had been a gift.
The realization came that afternoon, as he scanned the patients gathering in the makeshift waiting-space of Sir Frederic’s largest parlor. He felt as though he could diagnose any ailment, cure any ill.
It was a feeling unbolstered by fact or evidence. But it was a nice feeling all the same.
And he hadn’t done so badly by these people. There was the boy who’d come in the previous week with a throat complaint. He was sitting in his mother’s lap, wiggling and chattering to Georgette as he—ate honey from ajar with a spoon? Georgette. There was nothing she would not do for these people. He only hoped the bees of Northumberland were up to the task she set for them.
Keeling was here, which meant he wasn’t with Linton, which was to the good. And there was Mr. Lowe, working his laborious way across the rich parlor carpet on makeshift crutches. His booted foot held his weight; the heavy bandage on the other was dirty and dusty—but not, as far as Hugo could see, stained with signs of infection. Good, good. He had been walking about, then, not always using the crutches.
When Hugo left here, as he must, these people would be all right without him. He’d met the apothecary the day before. A young man named Simpkins, he had brought an ingenious traveling case full of tinctures and tonics and compounds and unguents in stoppered vials. Hugo had taken note of their arrangement, with thanks; Simpkins had requested recommendations on a few medicinal volumes, with the same.
Best of all, Simpkins did not feel called upon to bleed those who purchased items from his shop. If people kept all their blood, they had a far better chance of healing.
Or so Hugo thought. But he was generally right about what he thought.
He had cleaned his hands and was emerging from behind the folding screen, deciding whom to see first, when he spotted Jenks. Jenks, moving among the chairs, making some brief inquiry of each pe
rson followed by a penciled note in a pocketbook.
Hugo crossed the room to his side. “Mr. Jenks, what are you doing?”
“Checking who’s been here in the last week. Need to put you on the list, don’t I?” The Runner wrote another note, then turned toward the doorway. “Here we go, then.”
Servants were filing into the room: housemaids, kitchen maids, scullery maids, footmen. Grooms and stable hands, with straw in the mud of their boots. Gardeners, their hands dirty from their work. The cook, the butler, the housekeeper. Linton entered too. As each filed in, mystified—and the maids more than a little horrified at the state of the carpets—the room grew closer. Crowded. The farmworkers already present shifted their chairs or vacated them entirely, pressing against the far wall of the room.
Last of all, Sir Frederic entered. His bulk filled the remaining space nearest the doorway. “What’s all this, then, Mr. Jenks? Are we to put on a show for you?”
“You summoned the entire household?” At Jenks’s nod, Hugo’s bewilderment grew. “Did some contagion pass through? Does everyone require treatment? I’ve no supplies for inoculation, but I could—”
“It’s not a medical matter, Doctor.” Jenks tucked away his pocketbook and pencil, then clapped his hands. “Your attention, please. Your attention, everyone.”
Hardly did he lift his voice, but silence rippled through the room, stilling every tongue. Every eye turned to the Runner, curious or wary.
Hugo took a step back. Whatever Jenks had planned, it surely didn’t involve him. He didn’t need to be in the man’s pocket. In fact, he could check over the medical supplies and make sure the servants had laid everything out as he—
“Don’t think to slip away, Mr. Crowe,” Jenks said.
Hugo halted, startled. “I beg your pardon?”
Jenks turned his attention back to the room as a whole. “I’ve gathered you all here because you were in this house sometime over the past ten days. That is when I last searched the house and found it free from criminal evidence. This morning, I found a cache of the sovereigns that were stolen from the Royal Mint in May.”
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