Love in Disguise (The Love Trilogy, #1)

by Edith Layton

  “I’ll be at the Golden Horse, outside town,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s a coachmen’s stop, there’s a pretty red-haired wench there who could make a man forget his own name, if only for a night.”

  And then he picked up his hastily assembled portmanteau and let himself out.

  When his butler scratched at his door moments later, Waiwick looked up.

  “The viscount’s left, sir, and so Cook was wondering when you’d like dinner laid. And as Mr. Epford generally has this night out, he was wishful to know if you needed him.”

  Mr. Fox, in London, would have known all these answers, but Warwick was glad that his country butler had broken his reverie. This was, Warwick decided quickly, amused at the thought, not a time for thinking, after all.

  “As I don’t know what I’ll be needing, tell Cook to lay out a cold collation and then take the night off. Mr. Epford may leave whenever he wishes. I’ll not need him this evening,” Warwick said, realizing he needed neither valet nor cook, nor butler, nor baker, nor candlestick maker. Because all he needed now, and very badly, was wisdom, good fortune, and a miracle, he thought as he took a deep breath, arose, and left his study to try his luck.

  She wore a green frock, and with her bright hair done up in high curls, she looked, he mused, very like a daffodil. And so he would have told her when he came in the drawing room, despite the fact that her high breasts, slender waist, and rounded hips gave him far more than a flowery image, if he hadn’t seen her face when she turned to him. She looked so woebegone his hopes sank, and wondering if she were already regretting her decision, he reported tonelessly, “Julian’s left.”

  “Oh dear,” she said sadly, “I’m sorry. Would it have been better if I’d left and you two stayed on here? I mean,” she said at once, seeing his surprise and remembering Lord Moredon’s ugly accusation, and never wanting him to do so, “since there are two of you and only one of me, it might be better if majority ruled. That is to say, Julian said it was my reputation that concerned you the most.”

  “No,” he said quietly, “your happiness concerns me most.”

  “I couldn’t marry him,” she said, turning her head from those watchful eyes. “I’m not a great lady, after all.”

  “Ah, unequal stations in life and so on, so that’s why you denied him?” he asked with a small laugh, thinking, yes, she refused to save him from gossip, and the clunch never guessed it, it’s only a simple misunderstanding after all, they’ll have it patched up within hours after they meet again, why have I left myself open to such unhappiness?

  “No, of course not,” she protested, spinning around and staring at him. “I only meant that ladies are trained to take marriage as a business arrangement, and I’ve not been. I’ve grown up quite a bit, but I’ve still got some romantic notions. Because some of them are good. I couldn’t marry where I didn’t love.”

  “Oh,” he said, “yes, now I recall. Julian said there was another man on your mind.”

  He grew still, with the quiet, listening tension that was his hallmark. His eyes were half-lidded, yet she knew he missed nothing in her expression as he waited for her to speak again, and she wished he’d speak instead. She was not a fool. She knew, now that she permitted herself to know how she felt about him, just how he’d always felt about her. Yet here he stood, cool and watchful, and she began to wonder if she and Julian were not the only ones who’d changed in these past weeks. Although she believed Warwick had been grown-up from the start, perhaps because he’d not been allowed to be a boy for very long, and so had always been more constant than either of them, it might be that because of it he’d also had no use for futile yearnings and so had already found another who reciprocated his love. If, she thought in sudden shock, it had been love, and not another, simpler sort of yearning he’d felt for her.

  “But you’ve been under careful observation here,” he said, when it seemed she wouldn’t speak, “so I wonder who the lucky fellow could be. And the only name I can come up with is Lion’s. I do hope that’s not true,” he said wistfully. “I’d like to come to your wedding, but I think having Bow Street as your witnesses is a trifle much, and it’s more than a bit risky having ‘my Sally’ as your flower girl. But then, who else?” he pondered, putting his hands behind his back and staring at her, his head held to one side. “Mr. Epford? Mr. Fox? Not Lord Beccles?” he gasped in horror. “You’ll never find a marriage bed big enough for him, his mama, and yourself.”

  “No, of course not,” she laughed.

  “Who then?” he asked quietly, very seriously.

  There was no sense in running anymore, she was weary of it anyway. It seemed she’d passed too many years running after ephemeral goals, too many years running from reality. And too, she realized, whatever happened after today, this part of her life was over. Even as she stood in the drawing room with Warwick Jones, she saw that she must leave soon, or he would, and like a traveler about to depart forever from some well-loved place he knew he might never return to, it was then as if the very room she was in lacked reality, and was already fading into memory.

  “You, of course,” she said sadly.

  Before he could step closer, she added, “You, always, I think.”

  He studied her face closely as he came up to her and put his arms about her.

  “Would you say that again, please?” he asked, amazed, his dark blue eyes searching her face for mockery, or jest, or truth.

  “You, Warwick,” she said, finding it simpler now that she’d admitted it the once. “I do so love you. At first for the way you made me laugh, and then for the way you made me think, and then at last for the way you made me feel. When I couldn’t sleep at night, it was you who teased my mind. When I was in danger, I thought only of you. When I looked upon death, it was the loss of you I feared most. Oh, Warwick, Julian was a dear, safe dream. I thought I loved him when I first looked upon his face. And for all you’re very handsome,” she said so earnestly he knew she thought she spoke the truth, “I knew I loved you only when I came to know you. But you frightened me very badly, you frightened me straight into growing up, I do believe.”

  “Do I frighten you?” he asked as he drew her closer. “Beauty and her Beast, is it?” He smiled.

  “Oh, you make me angry,” she cried. “Can’t you understand that you’re very attractive? Why, even Sally told me that she fancied you and said she preferred your looks to Julian’s because she’d never keep company with a fellow who looked like he just stepped off a pedestal in a museum, because she’d always worry if she matched him.”

  “I see,” he said, deliberately, wickedly obtuse. “I make you look magnificent by contrast.”

  “If you didn’t persist in befriending someone who looked like an oil painting,” she said furiously, “you wouldn’t always be going on about being a ‘gnome,’ you know.”

  “That’s ‘goblin,’” he corrected her, while he still remembered, for the word already sounded alien to him.

  “Whatever,” she said, calming. “Your looks please me very well, it’s you yourself that frightened me.”

  “Odd, you absolutely terrify me, you know. Yes,” he said with a wistful smile, “and with good reason: you can be fatal to me. You can annihilate me with a word: that word is ‘no.’ You can kill me with another: ‘good-bye.’ What an arsenal, my love. Do you know your power? No one’s ever had such power over me.”

  “And what if I said yes?” she asked, her lips inches from his.

  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “You never have.”

  And then he gave her no chance to, and as he dared not say another word lest she change her mind, or lest he’d heard wrong, and because he could no longer think at all when he held her so closely, he kissed her. Then he had no more doubt. She clung to him as if she needed him as much as he did her, and had longed for him fully as much, although he knew that wasn’t possible. Her mouth was welcoming, her body completely yielding against his, her arms came up around his shoulders to ho
ld him closer. He never wanted to end their embrace, and when he did, he knew why. For when he looked down at her to enjoy the felicity of seeing that lovely face before he kissed her again, he saw she was weeping.

  “Changed your mind so soon?” he asked, hoping for a chuckle, hoping it was a jest.

  “Oh, no,” she managed through all her tears.

  “Susannah, love, please,” he said, “what have I done? Or not done? Or ought to do? You’re destroying me, you know,” he said helplessly. “At least tell me, however bad it is.”

  “It’s stupid,” she said wretchedly, “but knowing it makes it no better. I t-told you that I love you.”

  “So you did,” he said. “Is it that I didn’t tell you how much I love you? But I expect, I hope, I presume,” he added anxiously, wiping away a tear that started up at his words, “that you’ll give me at least the next fifty years of your life in which to do so. I expect you’ll marry me,” he said at once, wondering if she thought otherwise for a moment, horrified at that thought of her estimate of his morals, of his affection for her. “In fact, I’ll keep you here at gunpoint if you don’t. It’s not right to toy with my affections, I’ll have Mr. Epford swear out a deposition saying that you’ve dishonored me, else. Or is it that I didn’t vow fidelity? But how could I ever betray my own heart? Susannah, please,” he said desperately, “what is it?”

  “I’ve given up a great many childish illusions, Warwick,” she said at last, as best she could with quivering lips, “but some cannot, will not leave me. I’ve never read a romance, Warwick, nor have I ever heard of one, in which the heroine declares for the hero. No, I have not,” she said bravely as he gazed at her with dawning understanding and what looked like rare delight, “and don’t smile, for it’s not foolishness. Why, just think,” she said on an indignant sniff, “of a few decades from now.”

  “All right,” he said wonderingly, “I shall. I am. Now what?”

  “If you grow angry with me, if you grow vexed, why then, you’ve only to throw it in my face. ‘You,’ you can say with perfect justification, ‘declared for me, after all, and I, in all courtesy, had to accept.’ And the point is, Warwick, you are a gentleman, and decades hence or no, how shall I ever really know you’re not just being kind and overly n-nice about it?” she concluded, new tears falling.

  If she began to realize at that point that it was her own nervousness at her incredibly profound reaction to his touch that had unsettled her, as well as maybe being her own last defenses being thrown up at the thought of abandoning fantasy forevermore to actually take to herself such a live and vital love and lover as Warwick Jones, it was still too late to stop the trembling, much too late to stop the tears. And if he saw the same thing, and perhaps a little more, realizing she might very well be as unsure of love as he was, if not more so because she’d never experienced the physical part of it, he knew for the sake of that future pleasure, he must stop, if not her weeping, at least her fears.

  “Ah,” he said, thinking deeply as she blotted her cheeks with the handkerchief he’d handed her, “yes, it will do. Susannah,” he said with a mysterious smile, “say nothing, ask nothing, but only come with me now.”

  He put out his hand, she took it, and he led her from the room. She followed him up the long curving stair and walked with him quickly along the long, carpeted upper hallway. They went down a corridor she’d never seen, her room being at the other side of the great house, and then he opened a door and led her into a chamber, shutting the door behind them. He gave her only enough time to look about the huge, high-ceilinged room, and then he led her forward again, this time to a huge canopied tester bed. Then he put two hands on her slim waist and picked her up, seating her on the high bed. He took a long step and sat down beside her.

  “This,” he said, a little breathlessly, for he’d taken the journey speedily, “is my bedchamber. This is my bed. This,” he said, putting one hand against her cheek and the other in back of her head, as he bent to her, “is my kiss.” It was a long while before he raised his head again, and this time he was even more breathless than he’d been before.

  “You see?” he said softly. “Not just simple lust. Although, heaven knows, there’s a great deal of that going around these days. No,” he said as he kissed the base of her throat and recovered himself enough to try to ignore the shapely white breasts he could so clearly see from this new vantage point, “not just that. For now, you see, I’ve compromised you. No doubt of it. I’ve emptied the house, lured you to my chamber, placed you in my very bed, and compromised you thoroughly. Now you must marry me. So when I’m villain enough to claim a few decades hence that you declared for me, you’ve only to retort, ‘Ah, but, wretch, you compromised me, remember, and thoroughly.’”

  He sat back and smiled at her in triumph. That smile, she thought, looking at him in the late-afternoon sunlight that came in his high windows, that endearing smile transformed that thin aristrocratic face and made him truly more beautiful than any other man she’d ever seen. But for all he smiled, his eyes were worried. And for all his worldliness and facility and charm, he was, she realized in that one moment, very anxious for her approval, entirely bent on her happiness, and as totally vulnerable to her as she was to him. She hadn’t thought she had that much more growing up to do until that moment, when she saw that love was precisely this, this equal thing of giving and fear and want. And then she felt as though she’d come a long way and finally come home to herself.

  “Warwick,” she said gently, no longer afraid of him, or even herself, “no. It won’t do. Because,” she said, lowering her lashes, even as his dismay showed, for grown-up or no, she had a rigid code to surmount, “I don’t see where you’ve compromised me…thoroughly.”

  “Oh,” he said, entirely at a loss for words.

  But then he realized that he didn’t need them. He took her back in his arms and answered her, for a long, delicious, thorough time. It was when he realized how very thorough he’d been that he recalled himself again. By then, she lay back against his pillows, her flaxen hair spread out over them like another silken coverlet, the lovely green gown down to her waist, her white, pink-tipped breasts against his cheek, the taste of them burning on his lips, his hands slowly slipping the green gown further down so that it would impede them no more.

  “Susannah,” he said, raising himself on his elbows, trembling a little with the effort, but then quickly covering her nakedness with himself so that he’d not be tempted by what he saw, before he realized how unbearably tempted he would be by what he felt. “Susannah,” he said in an agony of desire he tried to conceal, “it began as a jest. I’ve gotten a bit carried away and though I’m delighted at how well I can carry you away, I think I’ve compromised you fairly thoroughly by now.”

  “Oh,” she said, her mind still scattered by the new things she’d felt, her senses still taking control of her sense, “have we done that?”

  His body trembled, but with laughter now. “No, love,” he sighed, moving a regretful inch away, but convinced by her question that it was the right, if not the most comfortable, move to make, “we have not. And in a week, at the most two, for I won’t wait longer to marry you, you’ll understand why that might have been construed as an insult. Or at least,” he laughed, “I hope you will.”

  It was the laughter that decided her. For it was his laughter that she loved as much as anything he gave her.

  “I don’t consider myself compromised thoroughly, then,” she said stubbornly.

  “Susannah,” he said seriously, his eyes searching her face a breath away from hers, “I can wait, you know. I don’t have to take this further unless you’re sure, I don’t want to hurry you, I only want what you want.”

  “I’m sure I want you,” she said just as seriously, “and perhaps I want you to be sure as well. And perhaps I want to show you that without a doubt.”

  She was terrified, of course. As staggered as he was by her answer. This went against everything she’d ever been taugh
t. She’d always known what Warwick seemed to want, but in these last few days since she’d grown up, she’d come to see what he needed. And that—reassurance—was a thing she knew she could provide him by giving him herself, without reservation. But she quaked, and hoped he’d take it for a tremble of passion as he took her in his arms again.

  The look he gave her as he did made her forget her terror. For she thought she’d never seen such an expression in any man’s eyes, and had never expected to see it in Warwick Jones’s sad face, but it suited him, that incredulous look of tender joy. Worldly as he was, it was likely he knew the difference between fear and desire. Perhaps he also knew her purpose, and knew that with her upbringing she could show no greater trust than to give herself without wedlock, and knew that to deny her because of his own moral reservations was to refuse to understand the enormity of her gift to him. Or it may have been that he was too moved by her now to put her aside for any reason.