Page 52 of Ravishing Camille
His silver eyes locked on hers. “I’ve come to realize while I’m here that I want to stay here. I’ve talked with Victor briefly about it. We need to discuss it more. But I think that I left the company in good hands, and I’ll return occasionally. They will prosper without me.”
“I’d like to go.”
He smiled, warming to her sentiment. “We’ll have to see that you do. You will enjoy it.”
With you, I would go anywhere.Still, she realized he had not committed to take her himself. She swallowed her disappointment in favor of learning more. “Do you still miss her?”
“I do. Time does help. She taught me much. And I will always remember her for her courage and her ingenuity. She taught me to think of women in a fuller way. As those who can and should be aggressive and claim what they want. Votes. Power. Money.”
She grinned at him, but sobered at an old nagging question about his view of one woman in particular. “And your thoughts on Elanna?”
“Ah, well.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin and poured more draughts of brandy into each glass. “I thought her assertive, argumentative, surely. But wrong-headed. Her husband was no better, demanding she be the idealized wife, loving, sympathetic, passionate. Yet he showed her none of that. What one gives, one gets. I sympathized with her. But she was a creature of a prison made by her husband, by society and by her own willful capacity for destruction. She paid for it. Dearly.”
He sat for a moment, contemplating his brandy. “What you saw in me was my obsession with her. She was a firestorm, a catastrophe that destroyed all in her path. She was a tragic figure, lovely beyond imagining but erratic and foolish. Locked in a prison others had made and she made worse. I’d never met a woman who had so much life and so much desperation.”
“Nathaniel is the one who truly suffered for it all.” Elanna’s and her husband’s son had lived a horrid life with the two of them and only after his father’s sudden and outrageous death had the little boy gone to live with his uncle Julian and his wife, Lily, Pierce’s oldest sister.
“Thank heavens for Lily and Julian to take the boy in and give him the home and family he should have had.”
“One thing this family does is support all its own.” She reached across the small expanse to cover his fingers. “You and I won’t tear it apart.”
“Never.” He got to his feet, her hand firmly in his, and lifted it to open her palm and kiss her there. “We will be careful.”
The words robbed her of breath.
“I’ll take you to your room now. You’ll need that ice again.”
She stood and went into his arms. Aching to lie against him in his bed, she pressed her forehead to his chest and wound her arms around his waist. “I’d rather stay with you.”
“And I’d rather have you here.” He lifted her chin. “ But we mustn’t. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”
Chapter 14
That morning, Pierce took the stairs down to the breakfast room at a run. He’d slept late, exhausted from last night’s events and his preparations for his speech to her. Eager to get on with his discussion with her, he quickly donned informal trousers, a shirt, braces and a morning jacket. Having asked his valet if he knew if Miss Bereston was awake yet, he’d been surprised to learn that she’d dressed and dined more than an hour ago.
Where had she gone? He wanted this business of their future out in the open.
He reached for the pull in the empty breakfast room.
Brisbane appeared quickly. “She said she’s going cycling, sir.”
“Cycling?” She was that recovered from last night that she’d take out a bicycle?
“I believe, sir, you might still catch her in the mews.”
He turned on his heel for the more convenient servants’ stairs and took the exit to the family stables in the mews.
She was emerging from the door. She was dressed in a white cambric shirt, light tweed waistcoat of green and purple, and black balloon knickerbockers down her little half boots. Her legs straddled the black steel frame of a tall two-wheeled bicycle and her delicate ankles in fine purple stockings reminded him of last night when she had lain nearly naked against him.
“Good morning.” He smiled.
She didn’t. Nor did she meet his gaze. “Morning,” she said with a brisk tip of her tam-o-shanter Irish hat.
Very well. Pretend last night did not happen? That won’t be possible.“Brisbane said you were going out.”
“I am.”
“Where?” He would know. She shouldn’t go anywhere alone, not with the likes of Aldridge Connor in town.
