Page 111 of Lessons for Marquesses
She bristled. “Yes, but do you know, he gave me his wife’s jewels a year before he died? Cases of the most exquisite gems in settings befitting a queen.”
Nicholas’s hands clenched the reins. The tension caused Teague to halt as Caroline stripped off her right glove and flashed a ring on her index finger: an oval of emeralds surrounding a diamond of extravagant size. Not the weight of the Margate Ruby, but still, to his untrained eye, enough to pay a good portion of Georgiana’s unsecured debt.
“You didn’t give the jewels back to Georgiana after her father died in light of the debt left her?”
“Why would I? I wanted those jewels since my aunt died. It took years of reminding him what Aunt Diana had promised to me.”
“Did she promise them?” Nicholas knew the answer before Caroline shrugged. “She didn’t.”
“Georgiana had no need for them. And he left me two thousand in his will. I shall never see that, I am certain. But if ever Georgiana is whole, my solicitor will remind her. I was like a daughter to my uncle. Like Georgiana could never be. She’s not even beautiful. Do you not see how very awkward she is? As if she doesn’t belong in her own skin.”
Before he did something ungentlemanly, Nicholas urged Teague forward.“She belongs in her skin and is finding her way as we all must.”
“Someone should have put her out of her misery a long time ago.”
He had never hit a woman. He cooled his urge with a satisfied study of Caroline’s swelling nose. “She’s not a sickly calf.”
“My love, do not look at me as if I were a fiend. You know she is an embarrassment. And I did attempt to assist her, dressing her in a gown and doing what I could with her hair.” Dipping her chin, she arched a brow. “You can imagine the sight.”
He could. Georgiana in a gown, the short, vermilion tendrils at her nape. From there, the graceful neck emerging. Regal in the storied sense, a curved elegance for troubadours to laud in verse.
“Do not be unkind,” he said. "It does not become you. In fact, if compassion were the measure of one’s beauty, you look the farthest from beautiful.”
Tomorrow Nicholas would tell Georgiana who he really was. Not really was, Nicholas amended, because he had shown her his true self, more than anyone knew, more than maybe he had known. A man who had become a stranger to himself, and Georgiana had reunited the two men, bringing together the best parts of him. Not ignoring the worst, no. She accepted what she knew.
But she didn’t know.
Georgiana clung to the tower wall. The blood had drained from her arms, no feeling left there or in the toes of her right foot supporting her in the foothold. She held on by sheer will, past Caroline’s indignant shouts, the fall—which she had been too occupied with her plight to appreciate—her screeching, and her departure.
“Georgiana.” Kitty’s voice pierced the silence. “You may come out now.”
Was she more mortified that she had tocome outor that Mr. Wolf had let on that she was hiding? And hiding for reasons that Kitty’s ripe imagination was surely filling in.
After a search for solid stone, she leapt down, crashed against the opposing wall, and bent over her knees. She kneaded her shoulder where Mr. Wolf—Nicholas—had bitten it. And she had moaned. Over being bitten. And licked. She had been consumed by a wantonness, a complete disregard for decency. His hands, his mouth, his body had unleashed something primal within her.
Her heart thundered in her breast thinking of it, what she would have done if not for Kitty’s interruption. The heat between her thighs was still there. It hadn’t been quenched, this fire. And it wanted, wanted, wanted.
It was one thing to be in love, but this was an utter lack of control over oneself. Worse than her St. Clair temper.
“Georgiana?”
She heard Kitty ascending the stairs. Her friend was going to kill herself. Georgiana sprang down the crumbled debris, guiding Kitty back to the bottom of the tower where she gasped at the gaping tear at her middle. Georgiana turned her back to Kitty, clasping her arms over her shirt, and Kitty shrieked. Fumbling behind, Georgiana found another tear below her right buttock.
She twisted back to face her friend. “I forded a hawthorn hedge.”
Kitty held out Georgiana’s coat. “I think you need this.”
Georgiana shrugged into her coat. “Better?”
Kitty seized her sleeve. “Oh, you must tell me everything! And I mean everything. Mr. Wolf smells wonderful, doesn’t he? Like the gleaming edge of a blade.”
“I’ve never smelled a knife.”
“You haven’t?”
“And you have?”
Her shoulders shuddered. “Oh, I am so happy for you. You have your knight. And he has his lady.”
