Anne’s head fell back. “Harry,” she pleaded.
“You still want me. Don’t you, sweet?” he rasped. He worked the bodice of her gown lower, exposing her cream white breasts to the cool night air. The pink-tipped breasts puckered from the chill. He lowered his head and drew a nipple deep into his mouth. He stole a glance up at her.
Her mouth hung open and desperate gasping pants escaped her.
Harry lowered her to the ground. “Crawford can never give you this.” Desperate fury punctuated his words. He’d leave his impression with her, make her writhe with knowing all she’d given up when she’d chosen her damned duke. “He will make you his duchess, but he’ll never make your body sing like I can.” He reached for the hem of her ruffled skirts. Sweat beaded the top of his brow and he looked at her. Skin flushed, curls disheveled, breathless moans escaping her lips. God help him. “I cannot do this.” He didn’t recognize the garbled, agonized voice as his own.
She blinked up at him, dazed. “Harry?” A question hung in that one word, his name.
He rolled off her. Anne deserved more than being tumbled like a strumpet in Vauxhall Gardens. He stared at the twinkling stars overhead. They mocked him with their shimmering brightness. With a groan, Harry laid his forearm over his eyes. Who’d have imagined that he, Harry, 6th Earl of Stanhope was…honorable?
Goddamn it.
The soft whoosh of delicate skirts and the crinkle of muslin ruffles split the quiet. Lemon and berry, a sweet, enticing scent flooded his senses. Anne touched a hand to his chest. “Why did you…? Don’t you…?” Her unfinished question teemed with disappointment.
Perhaps if the words she’d uttered had been demanding and worldly he’d have shoved her back down and made hard and fast love to her as he ached to do. Only, the trace of innocence reminded him that even as he wanted her, he could not take her and certainly not in this manner like she was a common whore. If he did this thing, he’d hate himself forever. “I might be a bastard, Anne, but I’ll not take your virginity.” That honor and privilege would belong to Crawford. Bile climbed in his throat and he feared he’d cast up the accounts of his stomach.
She slipped her hand into his and squeezed. He lowered his arm and looked at her. “Even if I want you, too?” A desperate glimmer set the silver specks of her eyes aglow. She lowered her lips close to his. It took every last vestige of his control, but Harry turned away. Her kiss grazed his cheek.
He set his jaw at a stony angle. “I’ll not merely be the man who soothes the ache betwixt your legs.” He wanted more of her than that. Not without marriage. And she’d been abundantly clear of her marital aspirations.
She flinched as if struck.
Harry shoved back guilt. She’d been the one to cut him from her life. He’d not be made to feel guilty for rejecting her. Not when he made the greatest sacrifice in preserving her virtue for another. Ah God, this would kill him.
He stood, carefully tucking his shirt back into his breeches and rearranging his cloak. Wordlessly, he held a hand out to her.
She eyed it for a moment, and then her glance slid off to a point beyond his shoulder. “I’ll stay here.”
Rutland’s actions nearly a week ago blared as a loud reminder of the perils of leaving her. “I won’t leave you without a chaperone.”
A hard, ugly smile wreathed her face, a smile so patently not Anne, it chilled him. “I’m not your responsibility.”
No. She was not. She’d been quite clear in who…or rather, what she desired. Crawford’s bloody title. He lowered his hand. “Goodbye, Anne.”
“G-goodbye.” The moon’s glow shone down upon her heart-shaped face; the crystal tears filling her eyes, nearly undid him. “Harry?”
He froze when she called out to him. Please tell me you want me. Tell me I matter more than Crawford and his damned dukedom.
“I’m not marrying the… that is...” She cleared her throat. “I am to be wed.” His heart turned to stone inside his chest and with every stammered word, she chiseled away at each piece until it crumbled into a pile of rubble in her pliant hands. “I’m marrying…” The crucial end to those words faded into silence. “I just thought…” She looked away. “Goodbye, Harry.” He strained to hear that final pronouncement.
He exited the gardens and stopped, setting himself as a sentry until she took her leave. A display of fireworks lit the sky in burnt orange and crimson red hues. He wrenched off his mask and tossed it aside where it fluttered about in a night breeze and then landed in a heap.
Harry raked his hands through his hair. Oh God. She was to be married. To the duke. His stomach roiled. She would wed another. Bed another. Give another children.
I want you, Harry.
He pressed his eyes closed. She wanted him, even as she’d take another man as her husband. She wanted the pleasure of his embrace and nothing more.
The sight of her, broken and shattered penetrated the horror of her revelation. He began to pace, grinding the gravel under his booted feet.
We’ll always have ribbons and spectacles.
The crowd’s merriment in the distance came as if down a long empty corridor. He fished around the front of his cloak and withdrew a familiar orange scrap of fabric.
He turned the cherished item over in his hands, passing it back and forth between his fingers.
With the exception of one burnt orange scrap…
“Ah, there you are, friend.”
The memento given him by Anne fell from his fingers. Harry bent to retrieve the scrap of Anne’s past. “What the hell do you want, Edgerton?” His voice came out as a nasty growl, but he was in a foul mood and wanted to be free of this damned place…and his confounded thoughts about Anne.
“I was concerned about your sudden disappearance.”
“Have you fashioned yourself as my nursemaid now?”
Apparently undeterred by Harry’s snappishness that evening, Edgerton spread his hands in front of him. “I’d merely imagined with the word that has begun to circulate, you might benefit from some drink and company.”
“With the word—?” Harry’s heart thudded to a slow, staggering halt. Anne and Crawford. He dragged a hand across his face. “What the hell are you on about?” Invariably, he knew, as surely as he knew the letters of his name that Edgerton in some way referred to Anne.
He quirked an eyebrow. “According to the whispers of gossip, it would seem your Lady Anne is to be wed.”
Harry crushed the orange ribbon in his hand. Ah, hell. He’d known it was coming and yet Edgerton may as well have taken a claymore and cleaved him in two.
“That is hardly the interesting bit,” his friend continued, not comprehending Harry’s very thin grasp on control.
“…a mere Mrs.…”
He loved her.
“Hardly in line with the grasping…”
He could not live without her.
“…a beauty, but no grand beauty…”
Harry wanted to throw his head back and rail like a savage beast. He examined the ribbon in his hand.
…They claimed every last blasted scrap of satin. It will forever remind me of the perils of love…
He eyed the fabric so long, seconds passed into minutes, which may have passed to hours. Edgerton’s words ran together as one. And his heart pounded hard, even as his tumultuous thoughts sought to make reason to that which he’d not allowed himself to consider before now.
Why would she give him this ribbon? Why, if he meant nothing to her? Why…?
“Certainly capable of making a better match than…”
He went stock-still as the truth crashed into him with the force of a fist being plowed into his midsection. The breath left him on a slow exhale. He looked at the satin frippery as Edgerton’s voice droned on and on; a ribbon, the sole precious strip Anne had clung to when her entire world had fallen apart. She’d given it to him. As a parting remembrance. And he’d been too enraged, believing the absolute worst of her that he’d not allowed himself to see the
truth…until now.
“…even Lady Anne deserves more than being wedded to a depraved bastard like Ekstrom…”
I love her.
He— Harry blinked. “What?” he asked, the raspy one word utterance seemed to belong to another. Surely he’d heard his friend wrong. It had sounded as though he’d said she was to wed—
“Bertrand Ekstrom.” Edgerton waved a white-gloved hand. “A cousin, it would seem. Next in line behind the… Christ, Stanhope, where are you off to? I imagined you’d want to know…”
His words trailed after Harry as he charged back into the Vauxhall maze, onward. His breath came in great, gasping spurts from the force of his emotion, and he staggered to a halt. Anne stared wide-eyed up at him, in the exact spot he’d last left her. “Anne…”
“Harry…” her broken whisper ravaged him. She shoved herself up on her elbows. “What are you…?” She cocked her head. “Why are you staring at me like that?”
“Why are you still on the ground?” he shot back.
For a moment, the past week melted away and she was the sweet, smiling Anne he remembered. She sighed and gestured to her ankle. “I fell.”
“When?” He dropped to a knee beside her and pulled back her skirts.
“Earlier. I…what are you doing?” She shoved her gauzy shepherdess costume down.
He pushed it up once more and probed the skin in search of a break.
She swatted at his shoulder. “Harry, you shouldn’t…” She winced when he touched the bruised flesh. “I was going to suggest your actions were improper, but now I’d ask you to stop because it’s really rather unpleasant.” She wrinkled her brow. “Which I suspect is because I’ve gone and injured it.”
“Yes. It is sprained.” He shoved her skirts down and cursed. “You were going to allow me to leave you here?”
“You shouldn’t curse.”
His lips twitched. “That’s all you’d say?”
She screwed her mouth up. “It’s really not at all appropriate.”
Ah, God…I love you. Why was I so afraid to admit that to you before now? He studied her face, more precious to him than his own. She’d deserved those words from him. Long ago. Another firework illuminated the sky, bathing her face in a pale glow. He reached into the front of his cloak and fished out the small, metallic frames he kept close to his heart. “Here.” He perched the spectacles on the bridge of her nose.
“What…?” She touched her fingertips to the frames almost reverently. “I don’t understand.”
“You need them, Anne. They help you to see.”
“To read,” she corrected, taking them off. She dropped her fathomless gaze to the pair.
“Though I suspect it is I whose vision has been significantly impaired, Anne.”
“You’d have my spectacles?” she asked, perplexity underscored her question.
He snapped his gaze to hers. “It was because of me. The morning in Bainbridge’s office.”
She folded her hands into fists, clenching them so tight the blood drained from them and they stood a splash of white in the dark night.
Agony lanced his heart. “You believed I…that Margaret…” the words went unfinished at the confirmation in her tear-filled gaze. She’d released him of any and all obligation toward her, so he could be free to pursue Margaret. Even as it had portended her own ruination. “Oh, Anne,” he said achingly. He reached for her.
She batted his hand away. “I don’t want your pity, Harry.” The words eerily reminiscent to those uttered another time in their tucked away copse at Hyde Park, when she’d professed her love and he’d not managed even a hint of the declaration she deserved. “And I’ll not come between you and your Miss Margaret…the duchess.”
“I don’t love Margaret.” Loving Anne as he did, he could now recognize that in his youth, he’d looked upon Margaret with the same reverence one might a prized piece of artwork—to be admired and coveted, devoid, however, of the emotional connection he shared with Anne. No, he didn’t love Margaret. Perhaps he never really had.
“You don’t?” A single, crystal teardrop slid down Anne’s cheek.
“No, you silly woman.” He captured the moist bead with his thumb.
“A-and I’m not crying,” she said, her words breaking.
“Of course you’re not.” He caught another teardrop.
“I’m not,” she insisted, “and not simply because you d-detest tears.”
He’d always seen a woman’s tears as a ploy to manipulate. Seeing his proud, dignified Anne battling back all show of emotion reminded him of just how erroneous he’d been—about so many things. Mostly the things he’d thought he’d known about her. He gathered her close. Anne stiffened in his embrace and then the tension seeped from her. She went soft in his arms. “You silly, silly fool,” he managed on a ragged whisper.
She shoved against him. “That is hardly endearing. You’re supposed to be a rogue with all manner of wicked words to entice a lady. I’d imagine not a single one of your ladies would care to be called a—”
“I don’t care a jot about any other woman. Surely you must know that?” Her lids grew shuttered. He’d not managed a single thought of anyone—except her. He touched his lips to her closed lashes. “Surely you realize there is just you. That there has only been you since you stole into Lord Essex’s conservatory and stole my heart.”
“N-no.” Her lips trembled. “I-I did not know that.”
“I’ve been a fool.”
“Yes. Yes you have.” Anne sucked in a shuddery breath. “Though my mother claims it is I who has been the fool.” She discreetly brushed at her tears, wrenching his heart all the further. “She reminded me of the pain in being wed to a man who would always love another.”
With her cynicism, the countess had shaken her daughter’s faith in Harry and her confidence in her own self-worth. God, how he abhorred the woman. The sole worthwhile thing she’d done in her life was the gift of Anne she’d given the world. “Look at me, Anne.” His harsh command forced her gaze upward. “I could never betray you.”
“The papers have said you’ve begun carrying on as you had before…me…before us…” Her throat worked.
His lips twisted wryly. “I couldn’t even begin to feign interest in another. You’ve ruined me for all other women, love.”
The tremulous smile on her lips illuminated her face. “Have I? I don’t believe you’ve ever said anything so…” Her words trailed off. “Love,” she whispered. She touched a hand to her heart. “You called me love.”
He blinked. “Why, yes, I believe I did.” He took her lips in a slow, soft caress. “I imagine that is vastly suitable when a man loves a woman as hopelessly and helplessly as I love you.” He lowered his lips to hers yet again.
Anne drew back. “Are you teasing me, Harry?” She looked at him through hooded eyes. “If this is some wicked—”
He took her mouth under his and the feeling of coming home washed over him. The meeting of lips an aching reunion. She wrapped her fingers about his neck and held him in place. The metallic spectacles crushed against the back of his head as she returned his kiss, kissing him as though there was no other place she’d rather be but here, in his arms.
Anne drew back. She dropped her gaze to his cravat. “I’m to wed another.”
His heart thudded to a momentary halt. “Who?” he demanded, loving her so much he willed the unspoken name to be the pleasantly handsome, unfailingly polite, and wealthy duke she’d always desired and not the wicked reprobate, Ekstrom.
“My cousin, Bertrand Ekstrom.”
He strained to hear the faint whisper. Ekstrom. His gut clenched. He’d hoped Edgerton’s words were no more than a gross rumor circulated by a gossipy ton. Harry touched his fingers to her chin, forcing her gaze back to his. “Bertrand Ekstrom?”
Her fingers curled around the spectacles and he placed his hand upon hers, until she lightened her grip. “That is what I said,” she spoke between gritted teeth.
“Hardly a duke. Why?” he demanded gruffly.
Her shoulders lifted in a slight shrug. “I didn’t think it really mattered.”
He sank back on his haunches. “Not matter?” Not matter when her search for a duke had brought her into his life in the first place? Not matter when she’d sent him from her life, cruelly throwing her desire for a duke at him? He’d imagined there could be no greater hell than imagining Anne wed to Crawford. He’d been so very wrong. This, the idea of her married to Bertrand Ekstrom, that foul deviant shredded him inside. He loved her that much that even as it would kill him, he’d see her with her pleasantly handsome, unfailingly polite, and wealthy duke…
On the heel of that was the quite humbling, if staggering, truth. She’d rather wed Bertrand Ekstrom than him. And because it made little sense when rolling silently around his mind, he said, “I offered for you, yet you’d rather wed Ekstrom than me?”
More Than a Duke (Heart of a Duke Book 2) Page 28
