Page 120 of Lessons for Marquesses
But her room was no better. The window seat offered an improved view of the front prospect to obsess over. Then the most miraculous sight appeared between the stone piers at the gatehouse: Nicholas, racing toward the house atop his colossal hunter, soaking-wet in a black, caped coat and rain pouring from his cocked hat.
Georgiana sprang to her knees. She pressed her finger to the watery pane and traced his powerful figure as it rounded the fountain, jumped from the saddle, and whipped the reins to a wrought-iron hitching post.
This was her chance.
For all the Kitties in the world, she would not let it pass her by.
Tufton’s coach crawled north through the rainstorm while Nicholas rode out with Teague, his patience thinning with each mile. Like chasing his quarry in the American forests, his reckoning had to be hard fought. It wasn’t a sunny day. Nor was there a breeze in which to organize his thoughts or provide any promise for the task that lay ahead of him. No. It was an arduousmarch in unremitting rain, each sheeting gust a slap for his treachery and his absurd hope to be forgiven.
South of St. Neots, the coach broke a wheel. Already two hours late, Nicholas spent another hour riding into town, securing a mount for Tufton, and returning to the coach. He didn’t have to threaten Tufton with his life if the man decided to turn tail back to London, but he had been prepared to do so. Instead, Caroline’s husband promised to be at Farendon by the next day and remove his wife.
Nicholas rode like hell for Chedworth to meet his judgment and damn if Georgiana hadn’t chosen the perfect place for it. Nine years ago, his brother had been murdered, Nicholas accused of a crime he hadn’t committed, and judged. Today he would murder Georgiana’s love with a crime he had committed with every ounce of malice and forethought in his despicable soul.
He raced through the gates of Chedworth, dismounted, and lashed the reins on a post. Stalking through the vestibule, he tore off his coat and hat, slewing water across the marble floors.
“Attend to my horse,” he barked to an old manservant. His boots squished under the arcade into the hall where Oliver burst forth agog at Nicholas’s sodden presence. “Where is Georgiana?”
“Have a drink first, Nick.”
Without a man to attend to his accessories, he searched for a suitable resting place and found none. “Am I to search the house?”
“I think you should wait. Have dinner. Get reacquainted.”
“I’ve been gone a week. It’s unlikely she’s forgotten me.”
He had ceased to wonder how this had happened. It had, and like Edmund’s death, his exile, the war, it just was. Georgiana St. Clair had taught him that his years of dark reflection had been poison, leading him down a destructive path. So he would do it no more. There was now and whatever followed.
He started walking.
“She is in her room,” Oliver called after him.
Nicholas took the steps of the massive staircase two at a time and tread the hall, surveilling the doors for the telltale escape of light onto the threadbare carpet. The same hall he had walked to his reckoning nine years past, just in the opposite direction. As he stopped at the door and knocked, he felt his heart, as he had the first time he had seen Georgiana in the Hazard Room. At the softcome in, he opened it and his heart wrenched in his chest.
Georgiana stood alone at the foot of the bed bathed in candlelight. A beautiful vision of woman and strength and courage, clad only in her linen breast binding and drawers.
He fought for patience. He locked the door with every intention honorable.
“George.” His throat was tight. He was breathless like a green boy, hard and determined like a man.
She bit her bottom lip and curved it into a shy smile. “Nick.”
By all that was holy, all that was right in the world, she was beautiful. Her faults laid bare were not faults but flawless gifts of taut flesh curved in exquisite lines. The small waist, the flare at her hips, the sleek shadows at her abdomen. Slender thighs, legs so long as to make him ache, to lose all sense of duty. Her feet. She turned an ankle outward, curling her toes under his gaze. He had loved those feet the first time he’d seen them.
How could he have known that Georgiana St. Clair could be so warm and lovely and vulnerable at the same time she was brave? And when she gave herself to him, her eyes would widen briefly under her cap of glorious sunset hair.
“I want to know,” she said. “I want to feel what it is to be a woman.”
Stupid poets. They were right. A man’s knees could threaten to give way from love.
“You are a woman,” he said.
“But I want to feel it, Nick. With you.”
Nicholas dropped his great coat and hat, wandering like a man lost until finally he sat in the wide, deep-bayed window seat. He raked through the rain in his hair and removed his frock coat while she waited. If he told her now, if he rejected her as she surrendered, what would it do to her?
He held out his arm. “Come here.”
She walked like a woman on a high rope across the room. He curved his arm around her hip and guided her down to sit beside him. That was enough to change the order of his plans. If not, her tremulous smile was, along with her fingers sliding down his ruined cheek and the sweet kiss she bestowed, parting his mouth, shyly slipping her tongue between his lips.
