“Will it hurt?”
In truth, he did not know. Deflowering virgins lay far outside his experience. He’d heard stories, of course, and expected she had, too. No doubt the disapproving voices who had found it necessary to keep her in the dark about the pleasures of intimacy had been only too happy to warn her about its pains.
He only knew he could not bear to hurt her.
“No.” A rash promise. How would he find a way to keep it?
By being careful, gentle, slow—the very opposite of everything his body demanded. The vision of her lying beside him—the glow of the firelight across her skin; her dark, wild hair streaming across his bed; her shift loose and bunched so as to hide almost no part of her—did nothing to help his case. Far from offering any resistance when he touched the hem of her meager garment and made as if to strip it from her, she rose to her knees and lifted it over her head for him.
Ah, but she was beautiful, from her deep brown eyes, to her large dusky nipples, to the lush curve of her thighs. Rising to his own knees, he tugged his shirt from the band of his breeches, eager to join her in her nakedness. Before his hands were free of his cuffs, her hands were running over his shoulders and down his arms with undisguised eagerness.
He tossed aside his shirt and caught her fingers in his before they could travel lower. Something about the position—kneeling together, hands clasped—made his heart leap. He wanted this moment, yes, but now that he was on the verge of experiencing it, he found he wanted the promise of something more along with it.
But an offer of marriage was out of the question. Had he learned nothing from the first rash proposal he had made? Was he willing to tempt fate again? He could not count on her to refuse him. And he was not sure he wanted her to.
He had come here intending to put an end to his father’s legacy. He had imagined himself prepared to allow the family line to die out, for the title to pass to someone else’s hands.
He hadn’t counted on Jack.
Or Charlotte.
As he raised their joined fingers to his lips, she lifted her face to his, waiting.
But what else did he have to offer her? Just himself. And beyond what he could give her tonight, he was still not certain he was a gift worth having.
At his hesitation, her gaze flickered anxiously over his face. “Have you—have you changed your mind?”
Which answer was she hoping to hear: yes or no?
Dipping his head, he avoided her question. “There’s something I need to say.”
He could not give her only part of himself. She deserved more.
She deserved the truth.
Chapter 15
Although she knew it was a childish response, Charlotte caught herself holding her breath. If she had not, she might have stuck her fingers in her ears. She did not want to hear what she knew he was going to say.
Her father had abandoned her. No one in her family had ever shown her affection. Even George had been unable to muster the enthusiasm to perform his husbandly duty.
Now, she had shocked Edward with her eagerness. Disgusted him. And as a result, he was about to add himself to the long list of people she had loved who could not bring themselves to love her.
Love? How could she claim to have loved her father, when she had never met the man, and likely never would? And as for her family . . . well, there had been a sense of obligation to them, certainly. A few, very few, moments of affection between them. But amour? Non.
On the short list of people who held a place in her heart, the only person who had some right to be there was her late husband, and if what she had felt for him had been love, then how could she use that same word to describe—?
Bah! Had she really been so unutterably stupide as to have fallen in love with Edward Cary? And for what? Because he had snatched her from harm’s way on a cold, rainy day, brought her to this run-down estate on the edge of nowhere, and then touched her—
Her heart. He had touched her heart with those big, strong hands of his.
And now, he was about to break it.
She shuddered, giving him an excuse to snatch up the blanket from the floor beside them and wrap it around her, looking all the while at the fire rather than at her, as if he could not bear the sight of her. When he sat back on his heels, she did too.
“You are better than I am at telling stories, Charlotte,” he said, after a moment. The words, not at all what she had expected, caught her reluctant attention. “I have not your gift for inventiveness. I lack your cleverness.” Inventive? Clever? No one had ever applied such words to her or her tales—her lies. “Any other time, I would far rather listen to you, but this time, I must do the talking. Your version of my childhood was interesting. But not . . . quite accurate, I’m afraid.”
As he spoke, he fiddled with the hem of the blanket where it lay between them. Just moments ago, those long, calloused fingers had been stroking her with such heart-stopping gentleness. It felt now almost as if he still were.
She fought the impulse to jerk the blanket from his reach.
“You were right about one thing,” he said, turning his blazing blue eyes on her at last. “I was born here.”
“In Little Norbury?”
A shake of his head. “At Ravenswood.”
At Ravenswood? How? She clenched the blanket more tightly around her, remembering his strange behavior the night before, still feeling the cold weight of that mysterious toy soldier in her hand.
“But my father did not send me away. I ran.”
So far, their pasts were still more similar than different. “I ran once too,” she confessed quietly. Afterward, while doling out her punishment for that display of base ingratitude, her uncle had insisted she ought to be ashamed. But Charlotte had only ever been ashamed that she had failed to get away. “You were more successful than I.”
“That, my dear, depends on your definition of success,” he said with a humorless sort of laugh. Though he was still looking in her direction, his gaze drifted until she felt as if he were far away. “I was just nine years old, but I got from here to Bristol without much trouble, and I had no difficulty at all finding a ship’s captain to take me on. I was tall for my age, and strong. Captain Keswick told me I’d make a fine addition to his crew, and I—I believed him. Like most boys, I suppose, I was eager for adventure. But I had never been to sea before. I was so ill at first, that I did not realize where we were headed.”
“To the West Indies, you mean.”
Another shake of his dark head. “To Africa. The Pearl was a slave ship.”
“Quel malheur!” she breathed, drawing backward without conscious thought.
The movement did not escape his notice. “You needn’t fear that I am about to regale you with its horrors. Even if I wanted to, I—I haven’t the words. It was a long, gruesome voyage. Sometimes, I still have nightmares. . .” A shudder passed through him. “Suffice it to say that more than a year later, I found myself in Antigua, tied by the neck to a hitching post outside some vile tavern.” His hand crept to his throat, as if the sensation of rough hemp rope abrading his flesh had not faded, even after all those years. “It’s not uncommon for the captains of slavers to abandon a portion of their crew in those port towns; it takes fewer men to sail the ship back to Britain, and there are always unlucky souls who can be made to sail out again. But Keswick had no intention of leaving me behind. In a fit of despair, I had told him who my father was, you see. I hinted there would be a sizeable reward for my safe return.”
From what Charlotte could tell, Edward’s criticism of his abilities as a storyteller had been too self-deprecating. He seemed, at the very least, to have managed to convince this Captain Keswick that a man who had carelessly fathered a bastard would be interested in whether he lived or died.
“What happened?”
“Thomas Holderin found me there. A religious man would call it providential, I suppose. I learned later that it was not a part of St. John’s he typically frequented. When he a
pproached, offered to help, I was skeptical. He looked like a planter, and I had already seen enough to know that there’s usually not much difference between the men who sell slaves and the men who buy them. But his eyes were kind. And he had his daughter with him, a fiery-haired thing not half my age. I learned later that Mrs. Holderin had died not long before, and so he took his little girl everywhere with him. She—Tempest took my hand, though I was filthy and ragged. She chattered at me while her father worked at the knot around my neck. He had almost—”
His fingers fidgeted absently at his throat. That emotion she had sometimes glimpsed in his eyes gleamed there now, and she understood why Mari called it fear. At last, she understood of what Edward had once been afraid, and why he had never fully recovered.
“Another moment, and he would have succeeded in getting me loose, I think, but someone must have alerted Keswick, for half the Pearl’s crew came pouring out of that pub, knives drawn, and surrounded us.”
In his words, she could feel the heat of the tropical sun, smell the stench of those villainous men. Despite herself, she leaned toward him, reminded him of what he seemed to be in danger of forgetting. “You got away.”
“Yes. Mr. Holderin stepped between me and them. Ugly words flew back and forth. While her father talked, Tempest worked at that knot with her clumsy little fingers. I didn’t know it then, but as I soon discovered, she never fails at what she sets out to do. Once I was free, Mr. Holderin reached into his pocket, took out a handful of coins, and scattered them on the cobblestones at the men’s feet. While they scrambled after them, Mr. Holderin grabbed my hand, picked up his daughter, and we ran.”
Her heart raced as if she had made the narrow escape with them. “He took you in?”
“More than that. He raised me like a son. A year or so later, he apprenticed me to a shipping company. Showed me how to take care of property. Taught me things. A bit of law—enough to make a sound contract and spot a bad one. Doctoring of one sort or another, when the need arose. Even,” he added, mustering something like a smile as he settled his gaze squarely on her for the first time in what felt like hours, “a smattering of French. And many years later, when he grew ill, he arranged to have me take over as manager of his father-in-law’s plantation, Harper’s Hill.”
“I understand that you felt you owed this man a great deal—”
“Everything,” Edward corrected. “I owed him my life.”
“But even so . . . twenty years? Why did you not try to come home, in all that time?”
She had not expected her question to strike a nerve. Pushing himself up from the makeshift bed, he strode to the rain-spattered window and stood looking out. When the firelight flickered over his skin, she saw the cross-hatched pattern of old scars on his back—a permanent reminder of his days aboard the Pearl, she could only guess. Certainly, she would never dare to ask.
“I couldn’t. You . . . you must understand. My father could be a vicious man, particularly to women. I sometimes thought, when I was in Antigua, that he would have fit in well there. He—he beat my mother. Many, many times. And one day, I overheard her telling the vicar’s wife that when I finally left home, went to school, she would leave too, would go live with her sister. I decided not to wait. I ran away the next day. I—I thought I was saving her life. I thought if I stayed away, she would be safe.”
She strained to catch every broken, whispered word. From the way his shoulders lifted and sank, she thought he must be fighting back sobs, but she hesitated to go to him. Would he even want her comfort?
“But he killed her just the same. And you have seen the proof.”
Mon Dieu. The room. The blood. No wonder . . .
She felt hot tears sting her eyes, the back of her throat. Struggling to her feet, she made her way to him, the blanket tangled around her body and trailing behind. When she stopped beside him, she stood in silence for a long moment before freeing one hand to lay it on his back. Beneath her fingertips, the old scars were faint ridges and valleys. Did they pain him still? What if—ah, c’est pas vrai—what if they had been made by his father?
Although everything beyond the window was black, he was staring fixedly in the direction of Little Norbury. “Was your mother a girl from the village?” she asked.
“No. She was his wife. And Jack is not the Earl of Beckley.” He shrugged away her touch and turned burning eyes on her. “I am.”
Truth be told, it was the least shocking of his many revelations, the last piece of a complicated puzzle falling into place. She managed, somehow, to nod.
A searing, searching look. “You would be well within your rights to doubt me. I have no proof. But before I—that is, before we—” His eyes darted uncertainly toward the rumpled bed and back again. “I wanted you to know the truth. Who I am. What I am.” Slowly, he raised his hands to cup her face. “Ah, Charlotte.”
Just as his palms were about to caress her cheeks, he froze. “In my veins runs the blood of a man who . . . who raped. And—killed. How dare I touch you with these hands?” With wild eyes, he inspected his work-roughened palms, as if aware, like Lady Macbeth, of the damned spots they bore, invisible though they might be to others. “I threw myself into the crucible of the West Indies, hoping to burn away the taint. If you can survive this place without being tempted to violence, I told myself, surely that will prove you have risen above your father’s nature. But what if it’s not been enough? What if—?” He clenched his hands into fists, the strain cording the muscles of his forearms and streaking his face with anguish. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “What if I hurt you?”
Releasing her hold on the blanket, though she was still naked beneath it, she put her hands over his, gently coaxing his fingers to relent, until she could press his palms to either side of her face and hold them there. “These are the hands Thomas Holderin and his daughter took in theirs. Mari has told me what a kind, gentle man he was. It sounds to me as if he was the one responsible for shaping you into the man you have become. These are strong hands, capable hands,” she insisted, though they trembled now, like those of a man burning with fever. “For twenty years, you have been using them to keep others safe. I am not afraid of them. I am not afraid of you.”
He lowered his head and dragged her closer for a crushing kiss—fueled, she would have said, by a very different sort of passion than his earlier kisses had been. But was it? The pieces and parts of his life, of him—once scattered from the West Country to the West Indies—seemed suddenly to have coalesced into a single point, the place where their lips met. Yes, he could be gentle, careful, tender.
But this hardness—this desperate need—was him, too.
He dropped his hands to her shoulders—her bare shoulders, for the blanket had slithered unnoticed to the floor between their feet—and held her at not quite arm’s length, breaking the kiss. “Understand, Charlotte, that I may never be able to claim my title. And even if I can . . . well, you’ve seen Ravenswood.” His fingers slid higher, caressed her throat, tangled in her hair. “I wish—oh, how I wish—I could offer you something more . . .”
Something more? She did not want more, did she? Certainly not an offer of marriage. She had come here with the idea of testing her independence, of living for herself.
Drawing her closer, he leaned in as if for a kiss and whispered across her lips, “But perhaps you do not want anything at all from me, knowing what you do now.”
“I want what I asked for,” she said, pushing aside her doubt, slipping soft kisses between her words. “You.”
A wrinkle etched his brow, and he gave one slow, incredulous shake of his head, before lifting her into his arms and bearing her back to his bed.
The straw-filled mattress rustled beneath her weight, and before she could form a wish for the blanket to cover herself, he was lowering himself onto her, kissing her, skimming one hand over her hip, along her ribs, to her breast. The coy game of question and answer had been abandoned. Neither spoke, the room’s silence broken only
by the occasional wordless murmur, gasps and groans of delight, and the pop and hiss of a dying fire.
His kiss was firm, hungry—his touch, more so. After ravaging her mouth, his lips descended to her breast, sucking her as he had the night before. Only this time there was no barrier between them. Then, she had been bewildered by the spark of sensation that had leapt from her nipple to the secret place between her legs. Now, last night’s mystery came clear. She shifted beneath him, ran one hand up his arm, craving his touch.
And he obliged. One nimble finger slipped between her legs, circling that most sensitive spot, then sliding easily into her core. When a second finger joined the first, he raised his head up to kiss her lips, swallowing her gasp—of surprise, not pain. She felt stretched, full, and this was only the beginning.
She moaned her loss when he drew his hands and his mouth away to shuck off his breeches and drawers. Longing to touch the skin he had bared, but suddenly shy, she contented herself with allowing her eyes to graze over him . . . his lean, muscled legs, his firm buttocks, his—oh. How—?
Tucking one finger beneath her chin, he lifted her gaze to his and broke the silence with one whispered word.
“Yes?”
Trying and failing to produce a sound, she could only nod. Yes. With one hand, she reached up to pull his mouth down to hers, letting him kiss away her worry. In another moment, he was easing her thighs apart, kneeling between them, and she could feel his sex at the entrance of her body. Instinctively, she exhaled as he entered her. She expected it to be over in one hard, quick thrust—and painful, despite his promise.
But he moved now with exquisite care, easing them together with tenderness that made her feel strangely like weeping. It was too much, too much. And, oh, so much more than the mere joining of bodies. Then he was right inside her, filling her, surrounding her. No pain at all. His arms trembled and his head came to rest against her shoulder. Spearing her fingers into his dark, wavy hair, she pressed herself against him, needing somehow to be closer still.
To Seduce a Stranger Page 19
