She felt as if her heart had been gutted with the finesse of a fishmonger plying his trade. “I cannot.”
“Cannot?” He spanked her bottom again, inciting a deliciously wicked ache. “Or will not? It feels as if we have tread on this tired ground before, my love.
“Both?” she asked, half question, half response.
He gripped her hips again, guiding her onto her knees, bottom thrust upward. His fingers splayed on her thighs, urging them to part. And then his tongue was upon her, inside her. He worshipped her with his mouth, his fingers finding their way through her folds to the wanton bud within. She was slick and engorged, and the combination of his tongue and gentle, knowing pressure wrung a sudden, violent climax from her.
She surrendered. Gave in to him. To everything. To her heart.
“I love you,” she moaned. “I love you. I love you.”
With a satisfied groan, he replaced his tongue with his cock, sinking deep inside her in one swift, hard thrust. “Finally, my love,” he gritted, withdrawing slowly only to slide home again.
And again.
And again.
And nothing had ever felt so real. Nor had it ever felt so perfect. If only the morning sun never needed to rise.
Chapter Seventeen
“Oh, Miss Turnbow, orange cheesecakes,” said Nora with a sigh. “How lovely!”
Whilst Nora’s enthusiasm for the dessert plated before her was decidedly unladylike, Crispin had to admit Jacinda had managed a great deal of improving transformation with his hoyden sisters. Indeed, the entire household was ablaze with the light of her presence, and it seemed that no one—not even the ordinarily stalwart Nicholson who currently presided over dinner with an uncharacteristic smile—was immune to her charms.
“This is even better than the Portugal cakes, Miss Turnbow,” added Con, her eyes rolling in imagined bliss.
Jacinda flushed, her gaze meeting his for a moment before flitting wildly about the table, as if she searched for a safe place to look. He was staring, but he did not give a damn. All he could think of was her sweet voice telling him she loved him in the night.
She loved him. How impossible. How wonderful. She. Loved. Him. Him—the most imperfect, unlovable, unlikable bastard in the realm. He had spent the entirety of the day since their secret return from their night of indulgence reliving every second of it. His besotted mind had complete control over all the rest of him. It seemed that he could only see, hear, and smell her.
How he longed to be tasting and touching her as well.
But that would have to wait for a more opportune moment than when he sat at the table with his maiden sisters, servants hovering at their elbows. How he longed for privacy. To have her alone. For her to be his alone. If she loved him, surely there was a way he could convince her to give them both what they wanted.
“Crispin, will you not try Miss Turnbow’s cheesecake?” Nora asked him then, tearing him from the wicked bent of his thoughts—a constant state, he was afraid, whether he was in Jacinda’s company or removed from it. “I promise you, it will be the very best thing you have ever eaten.”
Oh, he very much doubted so. But he wisely kept that reflection to himself.
Slowly, his sister’s words pierced the perpetual fog of lust clouding his brain. He looked down at the creamy dessert before him. Ordinarily, he did not eat desserts, preferring spirits to sweets in an effort to preserve his flat middle. But this—what Nora had just said—gave him pause.
His gaze fell back upon Jacinda. Damnation, she was lovely even back in her governess weeds and that infernal cap. Hers was a beauty that burned from the inside out, uncontainable. “You… made this, Miss Turnbow?”
The notion was almost impossible to comprehend. Rusty as he was in the ways of polite society, he knew that ladies did not toil in the Cook’s domain. His mother had never stepped foot inside the kitchens of Whitley House in her entire tenure as duchess. How was it that whilst he had been thinking of her and moping about like a love-starved greenhorn, she had been baking a bloody confection?
“Yes, Your Grace,” she said softly, her brilliant gaze still avoiding his. The pink kissing her delicate cheeks deepened.
He could not look away. She had been belowstairs. In the kitchens. Working. Like a servant.
Because she was one. Or at any rate, she was a slight step above one. Such was the place of the governess, not truly part of the family and yet not completely a servant, hovering in social purgatory. Belonging nowhere and to no one.
He knew all this, of course. But the stark evidence of it, lying seductively on a plate before him, gave him pause. As did the thought of her toiling in the kitchens, her capable hands whipping together her ingredients. For a brief, shameful moment, he imagined approaching her from behind as she was distracted by her task, lifting her skirts and gripping her hips, sliding his cock home inside her. Kissing her neck, tearing open the front of her gown so that he could palm a breast and tease a hungry nipple.
“Crispin?”
He tore his gaze from Jacinda, settling it instead upon Con. “Yes, Con?”
“You have yet to take even a forkful,” she pointed out. “Do you wish to pay Miss Turnbow insult?”
He cleared his throat, wondering when in the hell the minx had begun chiding him for his cursed manners. “Forgive me.” He forked a small portion of the cake and brought it to his mouth.
The instant the creamy sweet reached his tongue, he suppressed a moan of delight. Beelzebub and hellfire, the woman knew how to make a divine dessert. But of course she would. Did her skills know no bounds? Would her allure never end? For while he had certainly never imagined that a woman’s culinary skills might give him a cockstand, hers did. That she could use her dainty hands to produce something so masterful and delicious appealed to him in a fashion he could not have previously envisioned.
She was not just intelligent and kind and good and beautiful, not just giving and compassionate, but also capable and useful. She was the sort of woman who was unstoppable, and he wondered how in heaven’s name she had ever found herself in her current predicament, earning her bread at the mercy of others. It occurred to him while he knew her body quite well, he had yet to learn her story.
He swallowed the bite of soft, rich decadence. “Miss Turnbow, this is indeed perfection.”
Much like you.
He left those three, troubling words unspoken.
If his gaze was overly fond and warm when it found her once more, he did not give a damn. He wanted her to see the way he felt for her. Hiding it felt more and more like a travesty with each day that passed, particularly when she had been so generous with her heart.
A pleased smile curved her lips. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
He would have said anything just to be the recipient of that smile. Damnation, she took his breath.
“Miss Turnbow makes the best sweets,” Nora said, recalling his attention to her. She grinned like the imp she was.
A foreign sensation settled in his chest as he sat there, forking up another bite of Jacinda’s heavenly cheesecake, his sisters happier than he had seen them since his return from war. He was filled with so much bloody pleasure and yes—damn it all—happiness that a realization struck him.
This was right. The four of them, seated round the table, smiling and joyful and content. It was a family. Family. The word echoed in his mind. He had not been part of a family since before he purchased his commission and left for war. But now, the notion took root like a seed, sprouting.
And that was the precise moment he knew, on his second bite of orange cheesecake with Jacinda’s sherry eyes twinkling into his, he was going to marry her. It was the only way. He could not let her go, and she belonged here at Whitley House. She belonged with him, at his side, as his equal.
As his wife.
The realization sucked the breath from his lungs. He ate the rest of the bloody cheesecake in a haze as he worked out the particulars of what he needed to do.
&nb
sp; *
Jacinda stood on the threshold of Crispin’s study, the knowledge of what she needed to do swirling a sick tide of bile in her stomach. Had it just been a mere day ago she had dressed in a gown she could never dream of affording and made love with him as though their days together were endless? It was so far away now, so far removed and untouchable it could have been a lifetime ago instead.
How easy it had been for her to hold the inevitable at a distance, to pretend the devil would never come calling, asking for his due. But by the harsh morning light when she had dressed in the gown of the day before and ridden in secret with him back to Whitley House, slipping back to her chamber through an old corridor the servants did not typically use, her shame and guilt had threatened to consume her. She had known then something must be done.
She could not bear to remain in Crispin’s life and in his bed, to love him as she did, and continue deceiving him. And so, she had managed to disrobe and hide her beautiful gown, replacing it with a serviceable brown muslin, and headed to the kitchens where she knew she could find a spare corner to craft a dessert and put her mind at work finding a solution.
Jacinda had attacked the problem in much the same way she approached ciphers: with careful deliberation, application of logic, knowledge of possible outcomes and likelihoods. No matter how many ways she looked at her situation, and no matter how much she had loved basking in the quiet happiness of Lady Constance, Lady Honora, and Crispin at dinner, there was only one answer.
Only one way for her to put an end to it all.
With a deep, steadying breath, she lifted the latch, careful to avoid detection. The hour had not yet grown so late that she was confident other servants were not yet about, but she had no notion of when Crispin would return from his sudden departure for his club, and she could not afford to wait.
His disappearance had made the decision much easier. For while she had hardly expected him to follow at her heels like an adoring puppy, neither had she anticipated his indifference. Or just how much it would cost her to sit at the table as his servant once more, unable to call him by name or touch or kiss him. Once more the secret that he kept, the woman he would take to mistress but never to wife.
And despite herself, despite knowing she was not being truthful or even fair to him, the ache in her chest would not dissipate. They had always been doomed, and neither her love for him nor his lust for her could alter that.
She entered his study, closed the door at her back, and found her way to his desk in the darkness by heart. Once there, she lit a candle, beginning the thankless task of riffling through the private correspondence of the man she loved. Her hasty inspection yielded nothing new: innocent correspondence with the steward of his country seat, yet another fond letter from the dowager Marchioness of Searle, a note of gratitude from a foundling hospital.
At last, she reached the locked drawer. Her heart beat a rapid staccato as she withdrew a pin from her hair and set to work attempting to unlock it. She had never before picked a lock, but she understood the way the mechanism worked, and it did not take long for her to feel the lock give way.
The drawer slid open. She knew a fresh wave of shame for invading his space so thoroughly. Her fingers hovered over a small collection of leather-bound volumes, knowing instinctively she had reached the point from which there would be no return.
But she had no choice. If she unburdened herself to Crispin, he would loathe her for her deception, she would return to Kilross empty-handed, and she and Father would be cast into penury. If she did as the earl bid her, she at least had a chance of keeping a roof over her head. She had no widow’s portion from James, and the one man she had depended upon had somehow squandered everything. Her sole hope was that this search, like all the others, would yield no fruit and she could return to Kilross with an honest heart and report Crispin was not in possession of any enemy ciphers.
She extracted the first volume from the drawer, thumbing through it. She recognized his neat scrawl, dates and places, and knew it must be a journal he had kept during his time at war. Naturally, he would wish to keep the content private. How horrible it was of her to intrude upon his innermost thoughts.
A folded paper fluttered to the thick carpet.
Frowning, Jacinda retrieved it, unfolded it, and her heart sank to her slippers. Written in clear script was a collection of letters that formed no coherent words or meaning. No. It wasn’t possible the man she had come to know so well could have been lying to her. She refused to believe it.
Frantic, she sifted through the rest of the pages of the journal, finding another loose page. It too contained a cipher. Sick, Jacinda removed each volume from the drawer, sifting through it. All told, she found seven enciphered letters. Hands shaking, she tucked them all into the secret pocket she’d sewn into her gown.
She returned the journals to their drawer, locked it once more with her hairpin, and snuffed the candle. The leaden weight of dread hung on her chest as she carried her ignominious loot back to her apartments. She had candles aplenty, and nothing and no one would stop her from discovering the contents of the ciphers this very night.
For either she had just betrayed the man she loved, or he had been deceiving her all along.
*
Despite the inordinate amount of time and funds he had spent within its walls, the last place Crispin wanted to be that evening was The Duke’s Bastard. But when he had received Duncan’s urgent summons as Con and Nora prepared to retire for the evening, he had known he must go. Much as he would like to ignore the troubling papers he had found stowed in his desk drawer, he could not.
And so, it was that he found himself ensconced in Duncan’s office once more, this time with a whisky in hand because his friend had insisted upon it. The news his friend had for him could not possibly be good. Duncan settled into his Persephone and Hades chair, his unnerving blue gaze unreadable.
“I can bear the suspense no longer,” he drawled as if he had not a care. When in truth, he had every bloody care. He did not like hardness of Duncan’s expression, as if it had been hewn of granite. “I assume you have had word from your little birds. Tell me, what have you discovered?”
Duncan was solemn. “I am afraid it is not good, Cris.”
Crispin’s blood chilled. Dread sank its fangs into his gut, and the tension spread throughout his body like poison. His hand tightened upon his glass, but he did not raise a drop of the poison to his lips regardless of how tempting it was. “Tell me.”
A muscle in Duncan’s jaw ticked. “It has been brought to my attention a lord who serves the Foreign Office was deep in his cups this evening. He was crowing about his impending glory to anyone who would listen at the hazard table, claiming he had evidence that would prove there had been a plot against the Marquess of Searle. That he was going to be a bloody hero.”
The words defied Crispin’s expectations so severely for a moment, they rattled about in the air and his dumbstruck mind could not ingest them. Could not make sense of them. Taken apart, they made sense. Foreign Office. Plot. The Marquess of Searle.
He could not have been more shocked had Duncan withdrawn a bayonet and proposed to run him through. “A plot against Searle? What in the bloody hell? I was there the day in the farmhouse when the guerillero turned on us.”
“That is not all,” Duncan said quietly. “Following his decimation at the hazard tables, he turned his attention to one of my ladies. She sought me out after their encounter because he mentioned your name.”
“In what fashion?” he demanded, his grip upon the glass so tight he feared it would shatter into a thousand angry shards.
Duncan tossed back a long swallow of his own whisky, grimacing and exhaling before continuing. “He told her you were responsible for the plot against Searle. That you led him to his death because you were colluding with the French.”
Silence descended. Words floated through his mind, but he could not make sense of them. They made no cursed sense when strung together.
>
Plot against Searle.
Colluding with the French.
You were responsible. You were responsible. You were responsible.
Crispin closed his eyes as a wave of unwanted memories returned to him. The pain exploding in his head, the darkness, waking up to the grisly sight of the captain who’d been burned alive. The corpse’s face had been scorched into a contortion of agony. All the blood. Morgan’s hand, neatly hacked off and lying in the pool. Heat prickled him, then cold, then heat again. His heart pounded. It was as if a band had been fashioned around his chest, squeezing the life from him until he could scarcely breathe.
Everything returned at once, full force. His entire body tremored beneath the force of it.
There had been so much blood. The scent of death and burnt flesh. A raven had flown in through one of the broken windows, ready to peck at the dead. El Corazón Oscuro’s threat returned. You will regret your words, Searle. I will take great pleasure in making you eat them before I let the birds peck out your tongue.
Bile clamored up Crispin’s throat.
He slammed his fist into the desk, banishing the memories, beating them back with the pain that radiated up his arm. Silencing them with the rage that coursed through his veins. He had been helpless on that day, unprotected and taken unaware. He had not been able to help himself or Morgan.
But he would be damned if he would not defend himself now. “I was beaten and left for dead,” he told Duncan tightly. “I woke with a roasted enemy captain hanging above me, with a broken rib and a badly beaten skull.”
Duncan winced, the pity in his eyes as undeniable as it was unwanted. “According to my lady, your accuser suggested your injuries were elaborated upon, and that they were staged as part of the conspiracy.”
“My accuser,” he spat. “Who the hell is he, Duncan, and when did this supposed information make its way to the Foreign Office?”
Regency Scandals and Scoundrels Collection Page 22
