Page 60 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
‘Here? Alone? Just us?’
She stood stock still and quiet against the backdrop of his dimly lit library. Her lips were pursed and her hair was jammed under another of her horrible hats. There was a pin in the felt, enamelled in the colour of the butterfly wing he had seen in Bullock’s Museum, the one that had exactly matched the blue of her eyes.
‘I was young and foolish and my mother had just died and I was lost in thrall to you, lost in the hope of something I had no knowledge of. That is why I came here, then.’
A tear ran down her cheek, the splash of it darkening the lighter collar of her cloak, but she made no attempt at wiping it away, merely watching him through the awful horror of truth. She looked beaten and some hard-formed part of him broke with her distress as he stood to move forward.
‘It was not your fault, Eleanor. It was all mine. I was older than you and arrogant, and what I desired I took. I am sure that that was how it was and it should not have been so.’
But she spoke then with the utter conviction of the damned.
‘No. When you kissed me that first time at Lackington’s I wanted it all, more, everything that you knew. Two days later I peeled away my bodice even as you tried to stop me in your bedchamber and by then it was far too late for the both of us. I had not worn undergarments, you see.’
‘Hell.’ He did see. The most beautiful woman in all the world offering her naked body to him without conditions or reservation. Even a saint would have had a hard job denying such a gift and he had never been one.
Had he said he loved her? Had he at least given her that to hold on to as a troth in the many years of his absence? He could not ask because a negative answer would lessen everything. He needed to make things right. He needed to court her in the way the sister of a duke would expect to be. He needed to reinstate her absolute value.
‘Come to dinner tonight, Eleanor. Here. With me.’
For a moment he thought she might not answer him at all, but then she did.
‘Why?’
‘I want for you to understand that it was not all a lie, our past. That the truth was there, too.’
‘What time should I come?’
‘Eight o’clock.’
He breathed out because the relief was so great.
‘I am not sure of who I was six years ago, but I was not the man I should have been and I am sorry for it.’
She smiled at that. ‘Perhaps I was different, too. Sillier. More unwise.’
He shook his head. ‘I cannot even imagine you as that, Eleanor.’
‘Immature then. Impossibly romantic.’
* * *
She could sense his closeness and his urgency and the stretched want of him and she knew a madness that had been there before in her. Uncloaked again. Let free.
Touch me and we shall both burn down to ashes.
She wanted to warn him as she had not, then. She wanted to shout such concern out loud here in the quiet of his library in the dulled light of a grey morning.
But she didn’t because every single part of her tingled with the need to feel him against her. She had never met another like him. Then and now. But especially now with his strength and his distance and a hardness that had risen from all that was softer.
‘May I kiss you, Eleanor?’
‘Yes.’ The word tangled in her throat even as she whispered it when he came closer. An elemental knowledge. The shivers chased each other across her skin and pulled up her spine.
Yet she didn’t go lightly into his embrace, for she was no young girl any more, the tears from before dried salt upon her cheeks. No, she went with hesitation across the few footfalls and came up against warmth; the quiet silence between them full of sound, breath and heartbeat.
Her defences were breached and broken, every reason she knew she should not be here drowned by the arguments that she should. Her arms came around him and she closed her eyes against the moment, only feeling. With trepidation she took in a breath and waited.
One finger touched the line of her cheek, feather-light. ‘You are so very beautiful, Eleanor. More beautiful than any woman I have ever known and you are brave, too, which I thank you for.’ She looked at him then, directly, as his hand travelled upwards tracing the tip-tilt of her nose and the shape of one eye and then threaded through her hair at the temple, all the time the pressure building.
