by Sophia James
She laid her hand gently down across his damaged hand, feeling the ridge of bandages end under the fabric of his sleeve.
‘Once, I hoped that you loved me.’
There, it was said and she did not wish to take it back. If she was to trust him, she needed to have faith.
His other hand came down over hers, warm and solid.
‘Hoped?’
‘You did not say it, but...’
He swore softly, their fingers intertwined. ‘Sometimes I barely even like the man that I was and I should not have—’
She didn’t let him finish.
‘Being together was a mutual decision and if you didn’t say the words then—’
He placed his finger on her lips to stop her from admitting more.
* * *
She was frightened. He saw that her whole body shook with it. She had given her eighteen-year-old self to him, then he had disappeared and ever since...?
He was still dangerous to her, the attack from the early hours of yesterday morning leaving him agitated and on edge. He should make her go home to her brother and to safety, but in her words there were things he could no longer ignore. Nicholas had to tread carefully for it seemed that last time he had not.
‘Our daughter looks like you, but her eyes are mine.’
He could see her listening. Lucy was the centre of her world and it was a way in.
‘She has dimples, too.’
That brought a nod.
‘Could I meet her as her father, Eleanor? I would very much like to do that.’
He was gentle with his request. He took nothing for granted with his rights to see his daughter. It was her decision alone to allow it...or not.
‘Yes,’ she whispered, her eyes meeting his exactly and the fright there eased.
The soup was finished now and he knew he should open the door and ask for the next course to be brought in, but he couldn’t move.
One finger ran across the length of her thumb and across to the forefinger. She had freckles on the bridge of her nose and he looked at the smattering with a smile.
‘How could I forget this, Eleanor? How could I forget you?’
His whole mind struggled for a glimpse of her from back then, at Gunter’s or Lackington’s or here, but there was nothing save the ache of the trying for recall in his temples.
‘Last time we were here it was summer and the candles were warm because there were so many. After the dinner you loosened my hair...’
He stood at that and drew her up with him, their bodies almost touching as his hands rose to the pins she had tied it back with and he carefully drew them away. The brown curls fell in a curtain down to her waist, unravelling into silk.
Unravelling like his caution and his ever-present distance.
* * *
The floor tilted as he pulled her to him and took her mouth, not with softness but with a hard and desperate need, his hands at her nape as he slanted the kiss.
‘Eleanor.’ Her name was groaned in a broken whisper as he brought her closer.
He kissed her completely differently now. Before he’d left England he had been more careful and softer, but now he held a scorching sensuality that made her head spin.
She clung to his heat and took the offered breath as he seized what he wanted, quick and desperate. She heard the guttural sounds she made, but could not stop them, her breath slowed into only desire, her body melting into need.
‘Nicholas?’ Breathed out as his tongue came around the fullness of her lips, the feel of it shocking.
Her own mouth opened and she let him in to taste and to savour. There was no reason in their kisses now, logic lost beneath feeling until he turned her abruptly and his teeth fastened on the skin of her throat. She keened into the silence and pressed into him with demand.
Every touch he gave her left her more naked in spirit than the one before. She was stripped down into an intensity that held no fight whatsoever.
He could do as he wanted with her and he knew it. She could see it in the velvet brownness of his eyes which were so like her daughter’s.
‘Let me make love to you, Eleanor.’
When she nodded he took her up into his arms, striding towards a door at the far end of the chamber and opening it.
His room was filled with blueness, the same wallpaper as before with its patterned cut flock. The bed was a different one, however, the coverlet now a patched quilt of mismatched fabrics.
It was here he placed her before crouching down at her feet so that their heads were level.
‘This time it is your choice, Eleanor, and I need you to be sure...’
‘I want you.’ She gave him her answer without thought because she did. She was certain in a way she had never been before.
‘And if I never retrieve my memory?’
‘Then we will make new ones. Together.’
‘Starting now?’
She reached out to run her hand across his cheek, the skin rough beneath the pads of her fingers. ‘I wish I had been there for you when this happened.’
‘And I thank the God above that you were not.’
Tipping his forehead down against her own, he sucked in breath.
‘I have slept with other women, Eleanor, both here and in America, and while I have not been a saint I promise from now on it will only be you in my bed. For ever. Is that enough for you? To take all the parts of me that are damaged and still want what is left?’
His voice shook and she knew the depth of all he was saying, his years of lostness marked in sorrow. And, now, honesty.
She had loved him as a boy, but she loved him twenty times more over as this man. Strong. True. Hurt. Dangerous.
Her hand dipped into her bodice and she showed him the ring that hung at the bottom of her chain.
‘You gave me this one of the last times we were together and I have not taken it off since.’
The gold caught the flame in the fire and she saw the flash of it in his eyes, his pupils distending and tightened into brown as he looked away.
* * *
It was like turning a key in a lock and the door finally opening. He remembered. He remembered laughing with her as he had bought the ring from a small shop in Piccadilly after their kiss at Lackington’s. It was a celebration gift to go with the wine and hamper from Fortnum and Mason.
Her blue eyes had matched the stones and she had loved them. Zircons, the man had called them. Imitation diamonds.
And with that small crack in memory other walls began to teeter and fall and it all came tumbling in, his lost days and weeks.
He cursed as his hands flew to his head because colour slammed into his temples, not quite painful, but almost. Rushing words and images and the noise of voices. And there in the very centre of everything was Eleanor, laughing, crying, lying there beneath him with love in her eyes.
‘I saw you at the Vauxhall Gardens. You were with your grandmother and we met in front of the rococo Turkish tent.’
‘You remember?’
‘It was evening for the lights had just been turned on and you had dropped your coin purse as I passed you and I bent to pick it up.’
Her blush surprised him.
‘You told me your name was Antoinette? Why?’
‘I’d recognised you and yet you did not seem to know me and with all the stories that circulated about your exploits I thought I should be a more interesting acquaintance if my name was exotic.’
‘You spoke with a French accent?’
‘An accent and name which you knew as false in the first moment of conversation.’
He began to laugh. ‘Your grandmama called to you to come back to her and you grabbed my hand and ran.’
‘I was fresh out of the schoo
lroom and it was said by everyone in society that you were reckless and fascinating. It was my chance for an adventure and I took it.’
‘Six days?’
‘Pardon.’
‘We were here six days later. At Bromley House in bed together.’
‘Are you shocked I was so shameless?’ Her teeth sat on the fullness of her bottom lip.
‘No. I thank the lord that you were.’ Frowning he sought for another recall. ‘Ellie? I called you that, didn’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were a virgin.’ He sobered. ‘And it was my fault. If you had never been at the Vauxhall Gardens you may have been spared.’
‘Spared?’
‘Of all that came next. It was my arrogance that led to the incident in the alley behind Vitium et Virtus. If you had not met me...’
He stopped because he could not quite say it.
You were the Duke of Westmoor’s only daughter with all the possibilities in life that such a position implied. And I took that away.
He saw her swallow and find her answer. ‘If I had not met you then we would not have Lucy?’
‘I want you, Eleanor. I promised myself that I would go slowly and let you choose the time and the place. I told myself that I could wait and court you, do it properly this time, with good food and the finest wine and music. But I can’t. I swear I can’t.’
Her hands came up to both sides of his face and she brought him in. ‘Then that is a good thing, for I do not wish any more to love a ghost.’
Love? The word vibrated on the end of his tongue, in question and in relief, but the heat that lay between them was building, a desperateness that held no mind of circumstance or propriety.
He wanted to claim her as his own, keep her here in his bed so that she might never leave him. He wanted to know every part of her as well as he knew his own body.
His mouth came down across hers in a single movement, her lips opening to his own, so that he could come inside and taste. Her sweetness and her fear.
‘I will not hurt you, Eleanor.’ He whispered this against the alabaster of her cheek.
‘I know.’
He should be careful, he should be gentle and tender, but he could be none of those things. He kissed her as though she had always been his. His. To keep and to hold.
His hands were on the long row of tiny buttons now at the back of her gown, fumbling, shaking. He could not recall a time he’d been so desperate or so clumsy.
And then the fabric gaped, exposing the lawn below and the skin beneath. Her breasts were round and pink tipped, the stuff of dreams and hope.
‘My God,’ he said quietly, as she simply stood there naked to the waist, watching him. ‘You are so very lovely.’ One finger trailed along the fullness to the nipple and he quickened the movement to run back and forward so that it tightened into hardness. She stretched, taken unawares, and his mouth fell to the corded elegance of her throat.
She was breathing hard now, the sound of it loud in the room, as she melted into acquiescence, shivers chasing each other across her skin. Undoing the gown further, he was pleased when the yellow wool pooled at her feet and the lawn of her petticoat covered only the thin lace of her drawers.
The chill of the room came across her bareness, her skin alight with the flame of the fire and the heat inside.
He was careful as he dealt with the last of her clothes and then she was naked before him, save for the silk stockings with the garters pulled up by pink ribbons and the soft silver slippers on her feet.
‘Eleanor.’ He moaned this, the breath of him reaching across the small distance between them and he knew only pain as he bent to lift her into his arms, close against his chest, because if he hurt her again he would never forgive himself.
Chapter Fourteen
He was fully dressed and she wore almost nothing, yet Eleanor understood the truth of all that she had imagined. Her legs opened and his hand rested in the junction of her thighs before slipping lower, into the place that was hidden and wet with her want of him.
He looked at her without blinking, the movement of his fingers deepening and quickening, like a maestro or a magician, and she pressed back into the patched quilt and only felt. The rush of lust, the dislocation of time, the wet warmth of her and the thick need of him.
Higher and higher she went as he came on to the bed above her, his swollen manhood replacing his fingers, the smooth sheath of it penetrating deep and then deeper.
Filling up the loneliness and despair.
When he tilted her with one arm beneath her waist her eyes flew open and she kept him there tight with her muscles, regulating movement, in wildness and in ecstasy. When he changed the rhythm of it there was a loosening, the spiralling lack of control sliding over an edge into the realm where everything impossible could happen, where life was changed into before and after, where her whole body jolted to the beat of the music he made. There was no question in it but certainty, clawed together in the chant of a melody that was eternal, a fine unbearable pain cleaving them into another world, as she reached for all that was offered.
She felt the waves of release and rode them, on and on into the nothingness and the light, her heart beating along with his, their breath melded in the heat. Bound by something neither of them could forget.
Afterwards they lay together on the bed and listened to the crackle of the fire and the wind at the shutters and the rain on the glass. Her head was tucked into his shoulders and his arm lay heavy across her, the smell of sex and sweat in the air and exhilaration, too, a memory that had not been faulty, a known pleasure that filled her heart with joy.
‘It was just like the last time...?’
His half-question was filled with such awe it made her heart’s blood sing.
Her reply held the same wonder. ‘Almost, but even better.’
The counterpane was across them now, the stitchery rough and frayed. Like their lives, patched from bits, making a new whole pattern from all the pieces of what had been.
She smiled and his eyebrows raised up.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I was wondering where this quilt came from.’
‘Remember I told you of the reverend in Boston?’ He waited until she nodded. ‘His wife made this for me and it represented hope for a long while after. But now...’ His voice tailed off into the silence and he began again. ‘Now my hope is here with you.’
He pulled her across him, his bare chest tickling her. He had removed her stockings and the remainder of his own clothes after they had made love and settled her against him so that they might understand more of each other in the closeness.
‘If you had not returned, Nicholas...’
He stopped her. ‘I am here and I shall never go again.’
‘You promise?’
He lifted his hand and removed his signet ring, the gold of it heavy in the light.
‘For you, my love, in troth.’ He fitted it across her thumb and the crest of the Bromleys was easily seen in the fire flame. She covered the piece with her other hand so that it was tucked into warmth.
But the magic had seeped in again between them, the enchantment and the need as he sat her above him and came into her centre, without warning, watching her all the time.
‘I like looking at you when you are breathless and I like the way your hair hangs like a curtain hiding us from the world.’
‘Can we stay here for ever? Just the two of us? Like this.’
He’d begun to push in further, lifting her with the movement, her knees on each side of him steadying balance and his hand tightening around one breast.
‘Come with me, sweetheart. Come with me to the edge of reason and beyond.’
She laughed at that, though the sound was not simple. Rather it was
layered with lust and passion and desire.
* * *
Later she awoke to hear bells pealing out the hour of three, soft in the winds of winter.
Nicholas was not in the bed. He was sitting at the window with a blanket about his nakedness and his long hair loose, one curtain drawn back so that he might look out into the night.
A fierce night, she thought, with the raindrops hitting hard against glass and the stripped branches of bare-leaved trees swaying in the force of breeze.
The fire was banked now, only embers, small flares of occasional orange banishing back darkness. Suddenly she was afraid for them both, unreasonably and forcibly.
As if he knew what she was feeling, he turned, the scar on his cheek in the moonlight raised in a relief so that the shadow of the wound enveloped the whole of one side of his face.
* * *
He had remembered other things in the night as he sat at the window, darker things and less ordered. He recalled feeling full of shame and regret the first time they had made love because he knew that he was not worthy of Eleanor and yet he had taken her virginity without a backward glance. She made him hopeful and foolish for things that might never come to pass, good things, proper things in a lifetime that had been remarkably dissolute and disordered.
Once he’d had nothing much to forfeit, but now...
‘If I ever lost you again, Eleanor...’ He stopped, unable to carry on. He did not hold back his honesty though he wished there was more warmth to his words instead of a bleakness, empty of belonging, devoid of hope.
He had never had someone stay in his life. Not since his mother had kissed him goodbye and told him she would be home before he knew it, the mis-truth in her words still there in his mind. Love did not conquer fear at all, it amplified it and made it stronger, the loss a hundred thousand times worse because the promise had sounded so very sweet.
Eleanor had risen, the quilt draped about her. ‘You won’t. You won’t lose me again.’
His heart was beating so fast at her words he wondered if she might hear it and when she came against him he opened the blanket and she sat upon his knee, all warmth and softness and violets. He pulled the quilt tightly in about her, banishing any drafts. She felt the tension in him, rippling through his body.
