Slightly Tempted

by Mary Balogh

  “Yes, chérie,” he said, “you must accept that he is dead.”

  She stared at him though her eyes were focused on something a million miles beyond him. Her shawl slipped slowly and unregarded from her shoulders and settled in a soft heap on the carpet at her feet. He released her hands and set his arms around her, one about her waist, the other about her shoulders. He drew her against him, and she turned her head to rest one cheek against his neckcloth.

  “He is dead.” She shivered.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  She wept almost silently. He would hardly have known she wept at all if he had not felt the tremors of her body and the warmth of her tears as they soaked through the layers of cloth at his neck. He held her close and closer. He did not know quite how it had come about, this friendship that was deeper than any other he had known with either man or woman. It was the circumstances, he supposed—the far from ordinary circumstances that had drawn them into a far from ordinary relationship. Certainly it was not something that had developed from the early days of their acquaintance.

  He continued to hold her long after she stopped weeping. She made no move to pull away. If she still needed the illusion of comfort, he would offer it for as long as she needed it. But finally she tipped back her head and gazed into his eyes in the shifting candlelight. Her tears had dried, though her face was heavy and puffy with grief.

  It was the most stupid thing in the world to do. He could not explain it either at the time or afterward. It certainly seemed to be about the most inappropriate thing he could possibly have done—except that he was not afterward convinced that the action was not mutual.

  He lowered his head and set his mouth to hers.

  It was not like either of the two kisses they had shared before. This one was a hot and urgent embrace during which her mouth opened wide beneath his and his tongue plunged inside. Their arms closed about each other and clung like iron bands. It was a deeply, mindlessly, inexplicably passionate kiss. Life making its fierce protest, perhaps, in the face of death? But he had no real excuse, as he admitted to himself later.

  And no excuse whatsoever for what followed.

  He lifted his mouth a few inches from hers and looked into her dazed, passion-clouded eyes.

  “Chérie,” he murmured.

  “No.” Her voice was throaty with need. “Ah, no.” And she closed her eyes and pressed her parted lips to his again and kept one arm about his waist while the fingers of her other hand tangled in his hair.

  He felt her grief, her agony, her need. And he felt his own need to comfort her, to give whatever it was she craved. But it was an emotional response that did not touch upon his intellect at all. He was not thinking. This was not an occasion for thought or cool reason. She needed him. And so he folded her to him, kissing her more deeply, more passionately even than before.

  When she plucked frantically at the buttons of his coat and then his waistcoat, he helped her so that she could burrow closer, so that he could hold her more warmly to his heart. Her hands and arms went beneath his outer garments, one to clasp him about the waist, the other to press upward along his spine, only the fabric of his shirt between it and his bare flesh. He cupped her buttocks with his hands and half lifted her against him. If he could have taken her right inside himself, taken her pain for his own and so relieved her of it, he would have done so.

  He kissed her lips, her chin, her neck, her throat. She rubbed herself against him, her breasts against his chest, her abdomen against his erection.

  “Please.” Her voice was throaty, her lips moving against his. “Please. Ah, please.”

  “Chérie.”

  He drew her backward a couple of steps and sat down on the sofa, drawing her with him. But instead of turning sideways and sitting on his lap, she knelt astride him, and the frenzy of their passion continued unabated. He raised her skirts to give her greater freedom of movement, and then reached under them to stroke her inner thighs and to find the hot, moist core of her.

  She clutched his head with both hands, held it to her bosom, and alternately moaned and gasped. She moved against his hand.

  He unbuttoned the flap of his breeches, drew her into position over his erection, grasped her by the hips, and eased her downward. But she would not let him be gentle. She pressed down hard and cried out as he became fully embedded in her.

  Something in his mind registered the fact that of course it would have known anyway—that she was a virgin—but if instinct alone would have caused him to be gentle, to take her slowly, instinct would have counted for naught. She swept him along with the frenzy of her own passion, and they finished the deed with a fierce, pounding, gasping urge to reach some central core of oneness and peace and forgetfulness together.

  Incredibly—it would have seemed incredible if he had been thinking—she tensed a moment before he plunged one more time and released into her, and she cried out again. But with the abandon of sexual climax this time instead of pain and shock.

  They clung damply together for a minute or two while the world resumed its regular spinning course.

  His first rational thought seemed to come from nowhere at all. But it spoke with clear, malevolent distinctness.

  Now, it said, he had avenged himself on Bewcastle right enough.

  HE WAS SITTING ACROSS ONE CORNER OF THE SOFA, and she was curled up on his lap, her skirts decently about her legs again. His arms were about her while his head was back against the headrest. Amazingly, she thought she had been dozing. She did not believe he had. She thought he was awake though he was not saying anything.

  What had happened between them had been something she needed, and she was not sorry. But she was sorry if it had changed the nature of their friendship. And how could it not have done? She had come to him—because he was her dearest friend in the world. Now, if only for this one occasion, he had been her lover. No, things could never be quite the same between them.

  “You must not blame yourself,” she told him without moving; for she would wager he was blaming himself. “That was not in any way your fault.”

  One of his hands was against her hair, she realized. His fingers lightly massaged her scalp, proving that he was indeed awake.

  “Perhaps, chérie,” he said, “we should not think of tonight’s event in terms of blame. That implies that something was wrong about it. It was not wrong, merely premature. I will talk to the Duke of Bewcastle when I take you home.”

  She sat upright then and turned to stare at him in dismay. She might have known he would react in just this stupid way. He was a gentleman, after all.

  “About marrying me?” she asked him. “You most certainly will not.”

  He smiled lazily at her without lifting his head. “I will ask, chérie,” he said. “You may, of course, choose to say no, though I would not advise it.”

  “Of course I will say no!” she retorted. She blinked her eyes furiously then when they misted with tears—she almost never cried. “Don’t spoil things, Lord Rosthorn. You have been my dearest friend during these dreadful days. Even tonight you have been my friend—you comforted me in the way I needed comforting. Don’t spoil things by believing now that you must offer me marriage.”

  “But perhaps I wish to, chérie,” he said. “Perhaps I love you.”

  “You do not,” she told him. “You feel sympathy for me because of . . . because of Alleyne. And you like me, I believe, and respect me, as I like and respect you. There is a certain love in those feelings, but it is not the love of two people who are ready to commit their lives to each other.”

  “Chérie,” he said, “I have been inside your body. I have had your virginity.”

  . . . inside your body. She could feel her cheeks grow hot.

  “That is exactly my point,” she told him. “If we had merely sat down on the sofa here after I had come and told you my news, you would not now be telling me that you were going to speak to Wulf. Would you?”

  He continued to smile at her but did not r
eply.

  “You cannot say it, you see,” she said. “You cannot lie. I will not marry you, Lord Rosthorn, simply because I have been intimate with you.”

  “Chérie.” He reached up one hand to cup her cheek. “We will not quarrel over this. Not tonight of all nights. I am sorry about Lord Alleyne Bedwyn. More sorry than I can say.”

  The wretched tears sprang to her eyes again.

  “I thought,” she said, “that if I denied the truth long enough, I would be better prepared when I did have to admit it. I expected that my emotions would have been cushioned against the worst of the pain. But they were not. And then tonight when I came here, I thought . . . I suppose I thought . . . But the pain has not gone away. I do not believe it has really even started yet.”

  “No, I suppose it has not.” He drew her head down with both hands and kissed her softly on the lips again. “And I thought to comfort you. But there is no comfort, chérie. Pain like yours is something that has to be lived through. You need to be with your family. You must go home to England.”

  She felt a great surge of longing for Wulfric—and for Freyja and her other brothers. Her remaining brothers.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I will take you,” he said. “We will leave tomorrow.”

  “But I cannot ask such a thing of you.” She frowned at him.

  “You did not ask,” he said. “We will leave early. I’ll escort you back to Mrs. Clark’s now and you can pack your belongings.”

  He set her on her feet and was bending to retrieve her shawl.

  She could not go back to England alone, she thought. Independent as she liked to think herself, there were certain things that even she would not attempt without an escort. Traveling from one country to another was one of them. She had completely forgotten Sir Charles Stuart’s offer to make arrangements to send her home.

  “Thank you,” she said, wrapping her shawl about her and shivering despite the warm evening air now that his arms were no longer about her.

  He held her arm close to his side as he walked her home. She ought not to need such support, she thought, but she was grateful for it. Her mind had opened fully to reality—and pain. Alleyne was dead. Tomorrow she was going home. She was going to have to break the news to Wulfric.

  And tonight she had been intimate with the Earl of Rosthorn. It was no wonder her legs felt distinctly unsteady.

  There was altogether too much to think about, too much to feel. She did not speak as they walked. Neither did he. She did not notice any of the people they passed on the streets. She did not even notice when twice Lord Rosthorn said good evening to acquaintances.

  “Mrs. Clark will doubtless be waiting for you,” he told her as they approached the house. “Go in now, chérie, and rest if you can. It is going to be a long journey.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  He led her up the steps. But even as he lifted his hand to knock on the door, it opened from the inside and Mrs. Clark appeared, her face all anxious concern and relief.

  “Oh, thank heaven!” she said fervently. “I have been almost out of my mind with worry. I am so glad you found her, my lord.”

  “I will be escorting Lady Morgan home to England tomorrow, ma’am,” he said. “I will be back as early as possible in the morning. I will have to see about hiring a maid to accompany her first, though.”

  “That will be the best solution even if not quite ideal,” Mrs. Clark said, “since I cannot go with her myself. Come, my dear.” She set an arm about Morgan’s shoulders. “Come to the kitchen and I’ll make you that cup of tea I promised earlier.”

  Morgan gave in to the temptation to be coddled, at least for a short while. Her mind, her emotions, had overwhelmed her.

  IT WAS A LONG AND TEDIOUS JOURNEY HOME, THOUGH Morgan would not afterward have been able to say if it lasted for a day or a week. As much as she could, she kept herself cocooned deep inside her frozen grief so that she would not have to deal with the rawness of it alone—or in an inappropriate manner again, as she had done with the Earl of Rosthorn in his rooms. She felt deeply mortified that she had forced him into such an indiscretion and had left him feeling guilty and obliged to offer her marriage.

  She had a new maid, a girl who spoke almost no English and knew very little about the duties of her position. But she had been hired, of course, only so that at least some of the proprieties might be observed. Ilse was to return to Brussels as soon as she had accompanied Morgan to London. The Earl of Rosthorn had explained that.

  Morgan scarcely saw him between Brussels and Ostend. He rode beside the hired carriage while she sat silently inside with Ilse. But all that changed during the sea crossing to Harwich in England. Ilse was horribly seasick and could not leave the cabin she shared with her mistress. Morgan, on the other hand, could not bear to stay belowdecks. She needed to pace the ship’s deck or stand at its rail or sit somewhere up in the open, where she could feel the salt air on her face and breathe in its freshness and gaze into eternity.

  She did not care a fig about the proprieties.

  She felt weighted down by the lonely burden of being the only one of her family to know the terrible truth. She tried to rehearse in her mind exactly what she would say, but even in her imagination there were no words. She still could hardly believe the truth of it herself. There was no body, no tangible proof that Alleyne was no more. If she closed her eyes she could see his handsome, laughing face and hear his light, teasing voice just as if he were right there with her. Sometimes she opened her eyes suddenly, as if to catch him there looking at her and laughing at the splendid joke he had played on her.

  The Earl of Rosthorn was her constant and her only companion on the ship’s deck even though there were other people on board with whom they were both acquainted. Morgan could not face being sociable but donned her haughtiest, most forbidding countenance and stood or sat apart from them. He always stayed at her side. Usually they were silent. Occasionally they talked on topics she could not afterward remember. Once, at the ship’s rail when the wind was more like a gale and almost everyone else had gone belowdecks, he wrapped her cloak more warmly about her shoulders and kept his arm comfortingly about her. They stood thus for an hour or more.

  Even through the self-imposed numbness of her heart she was very aware that she now knew him in a different way than before. But it was an incident to which he made no reference, and it was one with which her mind could not cope at present. She was simply grateful that they had somehow found it possible to revert to the friendship they had shared since the night of the Richmond ball.

  If it occurred to Morgan at all that being up on deck thus without her maid was improper, that that fact and her closeness to the Earl of Rosthorn, her escort, might well be instigating gossip among their fellow passengers, and that word might quickly spread once they were all ashore, she would have dismissed the thoughts with contempt. She was no one’s concern but her own—and Wulfric’s, and he would understand once she had explained.

  More than anything else in this world she wanted to be home—at Lindsey Hall, at Bedwyn House in London, anywhere where her sister and brothers were. Anywhere where Wulfric was. Wulfric would take the burden from her shoulders. He would know what to do. And yet going home was also what she dreaded more than anything else in this life. How would she face them? What would she say?

  They disembarked at Harwich on a windy, wet afternoon that felt more like autumn than the height of summer. They would stay at the Harbour Inn close to the quay, the Earl of Rosthorn told her, pointing toward it, and continue on their way to London in the morning.

  “I’ll have you settled in a room there in no time at all,” he promised. “Then I will see about hiring a carriage for tomorrow while you try to rest. One more day and you will be home.”

  She held on to the brim of her bonnet against the wind and looked at him with a frown.

  “How selfish I have been,” she said, “thinking only of myself through the whole journey. You have come t
o England for the first time in nine years.”

  “I have indeed, chérie,” he said with a smile. “And so far I have survived the shock.”

  For the first time it struck her that this journey, this arrival, must be almost as great an ordeal for him as for her. He had to meet people he had not seen in nine years. Somehow he had to pick up the reins of a life he had been forced to abandon when he was a very young man. Had she forced him to come before he was quite ready? She looked at him with deep remorse. She could have been speaking to him about these things during those silent hours on the ship. Instead, she had been self-absorbed. She would make him the topic of their conversation at dinner, she resolved.

  “I hope,” she said, “it will be a happy return for you.”

  Lord Rosthorn took her gloved hand on his arm and smiled at her.

  Ilse, somewhat recovered from her indisposition now that they were on solid ground, trailed along behind them as they made their way toward the inn, their faces bent to the wind and the rain. It was a great relief to step inside the building at last and see a fire roaring in the large hearth of the reception hall. Morgan moved closer to it, shaking raindrops from her cloak, while the Earl of Rosthorn approached the desk.

  How different were her feelings now from those she had experienced the last time she had been in Harwich, not even two months ago. Surely then she must have been ten years younger than she felt now. If only she could go back, make everything turn out differently. But how? Have a tantrum there at the Namur Gates and insist that Alleyne stop what he was doing and take her back to England then and there?

  She held her hands out to the warmth of the fire and turned her head to watch Lord Rosthorn make arrangements for their night’s stay—and found herself gazing at a tall, elegantly cloaked gentleman who was striding across the reception hall in the direction of the outer doors.