Mrs. Grant wiped her hands on her apron and retrieved her coat from a peg by the back door. “Next time I’ll try Miss Hunt’s recipe. Always willin’ to try new things, I am.”
“That is a great virtue, Mrs. Grant,” Ethan said.
“Well, I’m off,” she said, halfway out the door. “Nice to meet ye, Miss Hunt.”
“And you, as well, Mrs. Grant,” Sarah acknowledged, standing again—whether in deference to the housekeeper or in preparation to go he could not tell.
He shook his head and pointed her back to her chair as the door closed behind the housekeeper and the room fell silent. Unmoving, he studied Sarah for a long moment. Wiley, sensing the tension between them, padded softly to Sarah’s side and placed his head in her lap. She began stroking the setter’s head in soothing rhythms. She had made a conquest of his dog. He had long suspected Wiley was a good judge of character.
He drummed his fingertips against the envelope on the table and smiled when Sarah’s face registered horror. Prolonging the moment, he gestured at her bowl. “Tasty, eh?”
“Well, um, yes.”
“In truth, Sarah, only Wiley eats Mrs. Grant’s culinary accomplishments with enthusiasm.”
“She was very kind, Mr. Travis, and I—”
“Ethan,” he insisted.
“—could not tell her that clove and cinnamon are not considered standard seasoning for stew.”
He was pleased that she had cared enough to spare Mrs. Grant’s feelings. “I shall pray she likes your recipe,” he said. He picked up the envelope and tapped the edge against the table’s surface.
She stood again, looking more desperate this time, and her gown made a soft sound as it settled around her hips and legs. “I did not expect to find you here. I intended to put that—” she gestured at the envelope “—through your mail drop and go back to Nica’s. I was unaware that you had servants. I do not recall seeing anyone the night you brought me here.”
“Mrs. Grant does not live in,” he said, not certain why he felt a need to explain himself. “And my groom lives above the carriage house. But why did you come in? You could have refused Mrs. Grant’s invitation.”
“She does not accept refusal well. I tried. I think she intended to discover my purpose in coming here.” She retrieved an embroidered silk shawl with a deep fringe from the back of her chair. “I’ll be going now.”
“Oh, not yet, Sarah.” He inserted his index finger beneath the envelope’s flap and lifted, drawing the moment out. “I confess to a certain curiosity, myself.”
“I believe the note is self-explanatory.”
“Bear with me.” When he unfolded the single page, he was surprised to find several paragraphs. “Well, what have we here? Hmm.
“Dear Mr. Travis,
It is my most fervent hope that you will accept my apology for the many wrongs I have done you. You had a right to know who I was, and I deliberately deceived you as to my identity.”
He looked up. Sarah was studying her fingernails rather intently, flushed, but not yet blushing. He read on.
“I further compounded my error by allowing you to put yourself at risk as a favor to me. No true friend would have permitted that, and I am deeply ashamed of my selfishness.”
Deeply ashamed? No more so than he for using her vivacity and appetite for life to stir his own dormant emotions.
Sarah edged toward the door. “I really must be getting back. Nica will be looking for me.”
He held one hand up to stay her. He was nearly done and wanted to wring the last possible drop of revenge out of this situation before he tendered his own apology.
“I pray that, in time, you will forgive me and remember me kindly.
Your Most Remorseful Friend, Sarah Hunter.”
He stood and dropped her note on the table. “It may interest you to know that I forgave you the instant you disregarded the opinion of society to defend me against my brother’s vilification.”
Her eyes widened. “But you were so angry.”
“I am still angry.”
“I wanted to tell you weeks ago, Ethan, but I was afraid.”
“Of me?” That prospect sobered him. He had deliberately cultivated a dangerous reputation to keep snoops away from his warehouses, but he had never wanted Sarah to fear him.
“That you would refuse to help me. Or tell my brothers out of a misguided sense of chivalry.”
“Chivalry? Me?”
Her gaze came up to meet his full on. “Was it not you who lectured me on the future of the human race depending upon the male’s instinct to protect the female? And was it not you who attempted to reform me by offering better positions at every turn? Time and again, and given every opportunity to the contrary, you have proved that you are a gentleman.”
He stepped closer and stroked the line of her cheek with one finger. “The cost to me has been greater than you can possibly know.”
“No greater than the cost to me, I think.” She retreated until her back was against the wall. She glanced toward the hallway and front door as if measuring her chance for escape.
He followed, pinning her in place with a firmly planted hand to the wall on each side of her. “Do you realize the torture it was—wanting you, needing you and knowing I could never have you? Try to imagine what being with you did to me.”
“Never have me?” Sarah looked up at him with those luminous eyes and he felt as if he had fallen off a precipice. “But I told you…I invited you to…I did not know how to make it more plain.”
To his shame, he gave lie to his good intentions with a firming in his nether regions. Gathering strength, he held her at arm’s length and shook his head. “How could I ruin your future for my own pleasure. One day you will want to marry—”
“I shall never marry.” She expelled the words quietly as if she had said them countless times before.
“You say that now, Sarah, but someone worthy of you will come along. Someone you can love.”
“Stop it!” Tears welled in her eyes and she shuddered with some deep emotion Ethan could not identify. “I am not a virgin, Ethan.”
Her words stopped him. If what she said was true, what unconscionable rake had damaged her and left her without a future? She still had a full complement of brothers, so he had to surmise that she had been successfully avenged.
In the wake of his silence, Sarah pushed against his chest and ducked beneath his arm. “That did not matter when you thought I was a fallen sister. What is the difference now? Do you want me less because I am titled?”
Her anger and hurt confused Ethan. “Would you have me cast your future to the winds, Sarah? Shall I show as little regard for you as the man who dishonored you?”
“ Dishonored me?” Sarah’s voice was closer to hysteria than Ethan had ever heard it. She spun on her heel and headed for the door. “Would that it were that simple!”
Suspicion grew as he watched her reaction. Sarah’s disregard for her safety, as if she had nothing more to lose, her odd mix of innocence and fear, her accusation that pleasure was a male concept, her certainty that she would never marry—all could be accounted for if…but it could not be. Sarah would have fought tooth and nail if a man had attacked her. But if it had not been a single man? “Sarah, how many were there?”
She stopped and her shoulders sagged. A long moment passed and Ethan thought she would not answer. He knew she was considering denial. But when she turned, the proud tilt of her chin told him she was telling the truth.
“Four.” No explanation. No excuse. No appeal for sympathy or hint of weakness.
Afraid he would do or say something that would send her running, he did not reach out for her, but neither did he retreat. He held his ground and hoped for the best. “When?”
“Does it matter?”
“To me.”
The defiance seemed to drain from her and she closed her eyes and shuddered. “It was years ago, Ethan. I cannot…if you must know more, you will have to ask Auberville.”
“Auberville? Not your brothers?” This was a surprise.
She touched his arm in an earnest plea. “You must not say anything to my brothers! Swear it, Ethan.”
They did not know! Dear Lord! Sarah had endured the worst that fate could deal a woman, and had kept it from her own family. He looked down at her hand on his sleeve, small and fragile and trembling with fear that he would expose her to her brothers. “Who are they, Sarah? I will kill them.”
“Auberville,” she said again. “Ask Auberville.”
He nodded his agreement, determined to return to the ball and pull Auberville aside for a private chat this very night.
Sarah sagged against him in relief, her cheek against his chest. He closed his arms around her and dropped a comforting kiss on the top of her head.
“Ethan, my brothers must never know. But I am so tired of keeping secrets, so tired of being afraid and living a lie, pretending to be whole. Being with you made me believe—”
“What? What did you believe?” he asked, tightening his arms with the very rightness of feeling her, soft and pliant, against him.
“That you might not care that I wasn’t whole. That you might want me anyway. And that I might be able to conquer my fear of…of being with a man.”
And suddenly Ethan realized why Sarah had made innocent little attempts to seduce him, and what it was that she needed from him. He lifted her chin with one finger and studied her face. “Sarah, is that true?”
Her dark lashes fell to shield her eyes and a delicate hue of pink swept upward from her bodice until her cheeks burned with it. “Yes,” she said in a voice so soft that he nearly missed it.
He crushed her against his chest and murmured, “God help me, Sarah, I want you enough not to warn you about me.”
She gasped with the force of the current that shot through her. Ethan’s arms, his touch, were like coming home after years of absence—foreign, but somehow right.
He scooped her off her feet, left the kitchen and carried her up the wide staircase. She gave a soft, breathless laugh. “I can walk, Ethan.”
“Not a chance. I’m not letting loose of you this time.” He kicked the door of his bedroom open and deposited her on her feet next to his bed. The door rebounded off the wall and slammed shut again.
The room was as she remembered it, but someone had turned down the covers, placed a log on the fire, drawn the curtains and lit a candle by his bedside.
Ethan hesitated, his hands cupping her shoulders, his eyes burning into her. “Yea or nay, Sarah?”
“Y-yea,” she said. Anxiety feathered the edges of her consciousness, but she attempted to fight it back. Once and for all, she needed to rid herself of the fear.
With a smile so vulnerable that she began to realize how important this was to Ethan, too, he leaned forward and fit his mouth to hers in a tentative kiss, requesting permission. Not his usual challenge, nor an invitation. The kiss was a tribute. The offering of a supplicant.
“Sarah,” he whispered in her ear, “are you certain?”
“Utterly,” she said on a shaky sigh. The silk shawl slipped from her shoulders to puddle at her feet.
He tangled his fingers through her hair, dislodging the amethyst coronet. As it clattered to the floor, he tugged gently to tilt her face up to his in a soul-shattering kiss. He held nothing back. His response was so strong, so transparent, that she felt the power of his hunger.
A muscle jumped along his jaw and he stepped back. “I am going to need a drink.” He went to the table in front of the fire and seized a decanter of brandy and two glasses.
Disappointment filled her. “You’ve changed your mind.”
“Dear God, no!” He laughed and came back to place the glasses on the bedside table. “I just need to slow this thing down before I disappoint us both.”
He removed his jacket and threw it in the vicinity of a chair before he leaned toward her again to kiss her neck. When she reached for him, he stepped away. “Patience, Sarah. This is going to take some time.”
He poured two brandies and snuffed the candle, dimming the room to an intimate glow. He brought her a glass and pressed it between her hands. “Sip. Brandy deserves respect.”
She nodded and took a sip, anxious for anything that would quiet her nerves. He took the glass from her hand and put it back on the nightstand. Coming up behind her, he leaned down to nibble delicately at her earlobe. She felt a little tug, and the sash of her gown slipped to the floor to join the shawl. His hands worked at the buttons down her back to free them of their loops and he peeled one little puffed sleeve off her shoulder before pressing a kiss there, too. Her other shoulder received a similar gift. “Ready?” he asked.
She nodded, glad of the warmth that had begun to radiate outward from her stomach. It took every ounce of courage she possessed to fight her fears back into the ether.
He released her gown and it slid to the floor in a whoosh. She shivered in the sudden cold. Her silk shift fell to just below her knees and afforded no protection for her modesty. She wished she had worn the new French drawers Madame had made for her. Then Ethan released the little straps over her shoulders, and the shift, too, fell to the floor, leaving her in nothing but her white slippers and stockings, and pink garters.
He came around to face her, his eyes darker than she’d ever seen them. “You shame the moon,” he said reverently before lifting her and placing her on his bed. One leg at a time, he pulled off her slippers and tossed them over his shoulder, then removed her garters and rolled her stockings down to her ankles and threw them, too, into some far corner.
Completely naked, Sarah shivered. She reached for the coverlet but Ethan shook his head. “Please, Sarah, give me this much for the sleepless nights you have caused me.”
Warmth of another kind flooded her, and she reached for the brandy instead. As the liquid burned its way down her throat, Ethan began disrobing. His gaze never left her, and she was frozen with fascination. For the sake of modesty, she wanted to look away, but fear would not let her.
With four brothers, she knew enough to know that Ethan was a fine specimen. The muscles in his chest, shoulders and arms were hard and well-defined. A light matting of dark hair on his chest spilled downward in a sharp V past his abdomen to disappear into his trousers. And there, when he pushed his trousers down his narrow hips, her eyes widened. She had never seen Ethan so…distended. His organ appeared rigid and swollen, and standing at attention. Her heart stopped and her gaze snapped upward to his. Her panic must have shown, because he smiled and shook his head.
“Do not worry, Sarah. Everything will fit when the time comes. Trust me in this.”
And then he, too, was naked. She reached for the brandy again. Because she had brothers, and had endured a brutal attack in the night-dark gardens of Vauxhall, she was not completely ignorant of the equipment. But how could she have guessed Ethan would be so generously endowed? She wondered if it was too late to change her mind.
It was. The bed creaked as he added his weight. He reached for her, his hand gentle and warm, and she melted into him. There was nothing yet to fear. The sensation of his skin against hers was the most sensual feeling she had ever experienced. She liked this infinitely better than when he’d kept his clothes on. Under her fingertips, he was a blend of hardness, heat and velvet smoothness. She was fascinated with the texture of his skin and the ways his muscles moved beneath it.
He brushed her hair back from her face and kissed her eyes. “I love your eyes, Sarah. They remind me of violets and pansies in the spring.”
She smiled, welcoming the languor of the new infusion of brandy and the addition of Ethan’s warmth against her. She touched his cheek and sighed. “Ethan, you do not have to do this.”
“Oh, but I do,” he said, and lightly traced the seam of her lips with his tongue, urging her to open.
When she did, he deepened his kisses and slipped his knee between her thighs, then pulled her leg up to ride his hip. “I want to fee
l your heat, Sarah. I want you to feel mine.”
His steel velvet shaft pressed against her mons, and her breath caught on a gasp. She was not shocked. To the contrary, she was deeply and instantly aroused. The slight pressure against her awakened a need for deeper contact. She moved her hips forward, seeking that contact, and Ethan groaned.
“Slowly, Sarah. Anticipate. The longer the delay, the sweeter the release.”
“Have we…not anticipated…long enough already?” she asked, unable to catch her breath.
“Almost, sweetling.” He laughed quietly, the sound sending little chill bumps up her spine. “Almost.”
He blazed a trail of kisses down the line of her neck to the hollow of her throat, and she trembled with the memory of the Black Dog Tavern, and how Ethan had worked some kind of magic on her. His hands cupped her breasts and he shifted his attention there. She thought she would jump out of her skin when, in a series of nibbles and kisses, her breasts became so sensitive and the pleasure so powerful that she whimpered.
“Sarah?” Ethan mumbled, his mouth still against her skin. “Shall I stop?”
“No!” She grabbed a handful of Ethan’s dark hair and held him in place. She would die if he stopped! She needed more. More of that, and more of…of that exquisite pressure at the soft core of her. Thinking that, she opened her legs a little wider and slid her inner thigh up Ethan’s hip.
“Almost,” he murmured again, returning his attention to the firm little buttons her nipples had become.
When the tingling sensation spread to every extremity and she thought she could bear no more, he lifted his weight off her and rolled her onto her side. Before she could feel his absence, he began kissing the nape of her neck and whispering in her ear.
“I do not want to neglect a single part of you, Sarah. I’ve waited too long to miss a thing.”
With that, one hand came around her to cup a breast, and the other hand came around her to dip lower. Even as he kissed her shoulders and began a descent down her spine, her attention was riveted on that other hand. It slid over her mons and his middle finger separated the petals shielding her passage. The heel of his hand pressed enticingly against her as his finger made a shallow entry.
Saving Sarah Page 19
