by Sara Ramsey
When she came again, it was with Max’s hands on her body, Max’s low groans in her ears, Max’s cock buried deep inside her. It was some kind of magic, feeling like they were the only couple in the world who could possibly feel this good. He followed her moments later, thrusting into her and emptying his seed inside her.
They collapsed together, curled up on the daybed with the remnants of their clothing as cushions. She may have even dozed for awhile — the first time since before the party started that she’d felt able to relax. She’d never dreamed how much pleasure she could find in one of these hidden grottos.
She’d never dreamed how safe she could feel in someone else’s arms.
When she was fully awake again, she drew little circles on his chest with her finger, wishing that she had as much daring as her ancestors.
“I should kidnap you,” she said, splaying her hand out over his heart. “Our descendants could tell stories of how the mad Lucretia Briarley kept an earl as her pleasure slave.”
He closed his hand over hers, kissing her forehead. “That’s not such a bad ending, actually. Would you keep me fed?”
“Absolutely. I wouldn’t want you to lose your strength.”
He squeezed her fingers. “And would you use me as cruelly as you did today?”
“Worse,” she said solemnly. “I’d want to have you in every room of Maidenstone. That’s a lot of walking.”
“And a lot of riding,” he said, sliding his hand over her breast.
She laughed. But they fell into silence as their dream faded around them. They couldn’t lie there forever.
She sensed him pulling away, even though his body was still beside her. No matter what she did to convince him, she wasn’t enough to overcome his doubts.
He was sure they couldn’t have this. But she realized that, in her heart, she was already preparing to let him go.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Many hours later, after dinner, Max stood alone in a corner of the drawing room pretending to watch the party move around him.
He really watched Lucy.
She sat with Emma on the other side of the room. She wore yet another gorgeous confection — she hadn’t repeated any dresses in the days he’d been in Devonshire. Something was different about her tonight, though. Every previous night, she’d worn simple pearls or coral beads. Tonight, Lucy was dripping in emeralds.
They glinted dangerously, the color of poison and envy. Her back was ramrod straight. She never once looked his way.
That was what he’d asked for. After they’d made love in the grotto — an act he would probably remember as he took his dying breath — they had dressed quietly, not quite ready to return to reality. He’d helped her with her clothes, but there was nothing to be done with her hair. If anyone saw her with Max while she looked like that, it would be completely obvious what they’d done.
Maidenstone, as always, took care of its own. Lucy had given Max a crafty smile, picked up her chatelaine, brushed a few vines aside, and unlocked a secret door in the back wall of the grotto.
At the time, all he could do was laugh. “Of course there would be a secret passage. Have I mentioned recently how mad you all are?”
“You’re just as mad,” she said. “Will you light a candle or shall I?”
A pile of tapers and a tinderbox sat inside the door. He lit candles for both of them. She ushered him inside, locking the door behind them before leading him down a steep flight of stairs that submerged them fully underneath the garden. It wasn’t comfortable, especially since Max didn’t care for dark, enclosed spaces. But it was tall enough that he could walk without banging his head on the ceiling.
“Let me guess. A Briarley earl built this to have an escape route from a murderous brother,” Max said as they walked toward the house.
“It’s older than that. The abbey had an escape route, but the last abbot didn’t use it to evade execution — he didn’t expect to be betrayed. The first earl improved it. My great-grandfather added the folly at the other side when he expanded the gardens. The tunnel used to end in Maidenstone Wood before most of the forest was cleared.”
Only the Briarleys would have maintained a tunnel of this distance and complexity for three hundred years — long after the age of marauding warlords and Viking assaults. He was going to make another joke, but as they approached the stairs at the other end of the tunnel, his candle illuminated something on the wall above.
They climbed the stairs. As Lucy fumbled with the lever to open the abbey door, Max held his candle up.
A portrait hung on the wall opposite the door. Two girls posed together in the Maidenstone clearing — Lucy and Octavia, if he wasn’t mistaken. His boots disturbed something on the floor. He looked down and found candle stubs and dried flowers.
This didn’t feel like an escape route. It felt like a shrine.
Lucy opened the door to the abbey. A tapestry covered the opening and the room beyond was dark and cool — they’d emerged into the Gothic wing. The door didn’t admit much more light than what their candles produced, but his candle was enough to see the way Lucy stood in the painting. Her hand was on Octavia’s shoulder as though she could protect her cousin from anything.
“Why is there a portrait here?” he asked.
Lucy glanced over her shoulder. “This used to hang in the portrait gallery, but I can’t bear to see it most days. But sometimes I’ve needed a place to remember her. This seemed appropriately macabre.”
She said it lightly, as though she really hadn’t missed Octavia all that much. But he’d seen the conflicted emotions on her face when Octavia had returned the previous night. It matched how she described her parents, in some ways — she really didn’t talk about them, but for a few minutes at the top of the Gothic spire the other day, he’d caught a trace of buried grief.
She didn’t talk about her grandfather either, come to think of it. She’d never said a word about her cousin Julian, other than that he’d died in a duel that was partially her making. She could talk all day about previous generations of Briarleys. But the ones who’d surrounded her in this house — the ones she’d loved before they’d left her — were never discussed.
Standing in the drawing room hours later, Max still mulled over that realization. His Lucy didn’t deal well with grief.
If he’d assumed that she would grieve when he left her, he was wrong. She’d probably do her best to forget she’d ever met him.
Ferguson strolled up to him, interrupting his contemplation. “This party is too boring for words,” the duke complained.
Max could think of a lot of people who would be thrilled at the idea of a month of idleness paired with endless food and drink. A few weeks ago, he would have been one of them. Right now, though, he was counting down the minutes before putting his plan into action.
He didn’t want to leave Lucy — not like this. But if he was going to do it, he wanted to get it over with.
He still had to be polite to Ferguson for a few hours, though. “Why do you find it boring, your grace?”
Ferguson gestured around them with his quizzing glass. “I invited all these perfectly nice, kind, boring people to attend this party. And yet every few nights, I find that the most dangerous man in the room is staring at a Briarley heiress like he wants to throw her over his shoulder and run away with her.”
“Is that how I look?” Max asked.
Ferguson nodded. “I’ve had similar chats in this very room with Thorington and Rafe about Callie and Octavia. You’re looking at Lucy in a way that will draw attention.”
“My apologies,” Max said coolly. “It won’t happen again.”
That seemed to be the wrong answer. Ferguson looked at him differently. Some of his façade slipped. Behind the mask of the careless, bored aristocrat, Max saw a man who was deeply concerned about those around him.
“That’s not how this is supposed to be played,” Ferguson said. His voice was still light, but now it was at odds with the serious
ness of his eyes. “I’m supposed to warn you away from Lucy. You’re supposed to realize you can’t give her up. Then you do something stupid, like propose to her in public or run away with her, and I act very upset, and then the two of you are blissfully happy together for the rest of your days.”
“Is that what happened with Callie and Octavia?” Max asked.
Ferguson nodded. “I really wasn’t all that happy about Thorington initially. He was a bounder of the first order before he met Callie. But at least I knew what he was. You, however — you’re a mystery, aren’t you, Mr. Vale?”
Max didn’t like this line of questioning. He was so close to being safe — he only had to survive three more hours until it was time to meet Cressida and Antonia and finish their mission.
“Is there something about my background that concerns you?” Max asked. “I know that owning a tea shop isn’t quite the thing.”
Ferguson snorted. “I don’t care if you own every abattoir and tannery in the East End. If you’re the heir, I’ll do what’s necessary to make sure your claim is validated.”
But then he adjusted his cuffs. “Of course, if you forged it all, you could hang. Perhaps even be drawn and quartered. But I’m sure you know that.”
Ferguson suspected something.
Max’s blood ran cold.
Suddenly, Lucy’s questions that morning made sense. He hadn’t thought of them after the fact. It had felt better than he’d expected to tell her the truth. And he’d been more preoccupied with the secrets she’d told him — and the hazy afterglow of sex. She was the most intriguing, complicated, wonderful woman he’d ever met. The fact that she had a secret child should have knocked her from her pedestal — but, if anything, now that he knew the grace with which she’d handled her previous heartbreaks and her current pressures, he only loved her more.
He loved her.
He’d known it already — even told her, although he’d bungled it — but the knowledge still stunned him every time. He glanced at her and caught her watching him. She nodded briefly, as though they were mere acquaintances, and looked away.
It was what he’d asked for that morning. After she’d closed the door to the secret passage, they had stood together in the Gothic wing and adjusted each other’s clothes again, brushing off spiderwebs and making themselves as presentable as possible. They agreed that she would go first, using the servants’ passages to evade discovery, while he would go outside and walk around to the front like he’d come back from the stables.
But then she had leaned in to steal a final kiss from him. He’d frozen.
“Why can’t you let us have this?” she’d asked, in a voice that said she fully comprehended the pain she was about to feel but wasn’t ready to accept it. “You seemed eager last night. You wanted me an hour ago. How many times do we have to have this conversation?”
He’d taken a step back — when all he’d really wanted to do was pull her into his arms. “You’re right. We can’t keep having this conversation.”
She gaped at him, slowly comprehending what he meant. “No,” she said. “We found proof that you’re the heir. It’s your duty to stay. The title will die without you.”
She didn’t mention how she would feel — already closing up with the grief he was about to give her. He shook his head. “I have other duties. First among them is keeping the ones I love safe. While Durrant still lives, you’ll never be safe with me.”
It was the closest he’d come to a declaration of love. He thought he saw a spark of happiness in her eyes, but it died before it could catch fire. “You have more power than you think you do, Max. You don’t have to keep running.”
“Power isn’t everything,” he said. “You’re the granddaughter of an earl and you still wouldn’t survive the scandal if anyone knew about Julia.”
She shook her head impatiently. “Not the same. Women simply cannot have bastards without being labeled whores. And the bastards are never fully accepted unless their father is a king. That’s true no matter what class a woman is from.”
“Maybe so. But you have infinite money and a supportive family. You have more options than you think.”
“And you’re about to be an extraordinarily wealthy earl. Unless this magistrate is actively trying to harm you, there are plenty of ways to deal with that threat.”
“Ways that don’t involve gossip leaking out about my past?” Max scoffed. “Imagine the reaction in the ton if I were invited to parties in houses I’ve robbed. I might not hang, but I’ll never be accepted. If you married me, I would be the last person who could help Julia overcome the stain of her birth.”
She didn’t have an answer for that. He watched her face as she considered and discarded several alternatives. Finally, she said, “There has to be a way to convince the magistrate not to say anything about you. He might not even remember you. He probably had hundreds of street orphans working for him.”
He hadn’t told her that Durrant was in the neighborhood. He didn’t want to tell her now. She’d probably go looking for the man and try to solve the problem herself, never understanding how dangerous he really was.
“If I paid him off, he would demand more and more until he bled the estate dry. The only way to prevent that is to kill him. And for all my faults, I’m not a murderer.”
“Then maybe you’re not a Briarley after all.”
She’d said it with a smile, but she still sounded angry.
He’d taken a breath.
And then, without thinking, he’d said, “What if we went away together?”
Her jaw dropped. She recovered quickly, but he’d shocked her. “Where do you wish to go?”
He gestured in the direction of the sea. “Anywhere. Anywhere but England. We can take the first ship we can find. Let’s pack your things, pack up Julia, and go tonight, before anyone realizes what we’re doing.”
“Do you realize how mad that sounds?” Lucy said.
He shrugged. “You’re the one who said you wanted an adventure. Come with me. We can always come back to England if I hear the magistrate is dead.”
“By then the estate will be settled. It will be hard to get Maidenstone back if Callie or Octavia hold it.”
“We don’t need Maidenstone. We can sail around the Caribbean and you can be a pirate queen.”
“Have you ever sailed?” she asked.
“No. I’d never seen the ocean before this week.”
She laughed, but she sounded pained. “This isn’t a real plan, Max. I can’t uproot Julia and run away with you. We’re not even married.”
“We can change that. Ship captains can perform marriages.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you asking me to elope with you?”
“I think so?”
Sounding unsure was a fatal mistake. Lucy scowled. “Even Chapman made a prettier proposal than that, and he was lying to me. I can’t run away with you. My duty is to Julia and to Maidenstone.”
“You can do your duty to Julia if you take her with you. And Maidenstone can look after itself. Look how many of your ancestors went off to foreign lands. Maidenstone’s still here.”
“Most of them went off to die in foreign lands,” Lucy retorted. “That’s not much comfort.”
“So you’d rather stay safe than take a risk?” he asked. “That’s exactly why I told you that you shouldn’t put your faith in me. I’m not safe.”
“I can take the risk of getting on a ship,” she said impatiently. “But why take that risk with a man who isn’t sure he wants to marry me? You’ve spent your entire time at Maidenstone with one foot next to me and one foot on the road back to London. You’ve made it very clear that your choice is the road. It’s rather self-serving to invite me to go with you when you have no intention of committing to anything but your own happiness.”
He stared at her slack-jawed. She flushed and looked a little sick at the same time. “I’m sorry,” she said.
But then she stiffened her spine. “No, I’m not sorry.
I can’t go with you. I won’t put all my faith in your promises, only to be abandoned half a world away when you decide it’s what’s best for me.”
“I would never abandon you,” he said.
“You’re planning to abandon me here,” she pointed out. “Why would I believe that you won’t do the same thing elsewhere?”
His head hurt and he felt like he couldn’t catch his breath. “I love you. I would only ever do anything because I thought it was best for you. That includes leaving you here if I can’t protect you from Durrant.”
She closed her eyes. So much pain flashed across her face that his resolve faltered. Maybe there was a way to stay and take on Durrant. Or maybe he should accept the risk of execution — at least if he gave his neck to the hangman, Lucy wouldn’t live her life thinking that he hadn’t cared about her enough.
But it was too late. When she opened her eyes, he saw all the resolve he lacked. “I wish you didn’t love me. I wish I didn’t love you. But it doesn’t matter. You’ve made your decision, and I’ve made mine. I won’t tell anyone why you left, but I think it’s better if you go.”
She was right, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth — words he had no desire to hear — he wished he’d chosen a different path.
But to choose that different path, he would have had to go all the way back to the first time he chose to steal bread rather than go to bed hungry. He’d made infinite choices that had led to this moment.
He was getting exactly what he deserved.
“I’ll leave in the morning,” he had promised — a promise that was so hard to say aloud, even though it matched his plan to the letter.
