I Kissed an Earl: Pennyroyal Green Series (39 page)

He denied her.

“Asher…” she begged.

It was what he wanted to hear. And this time he breeched her, but slowly, so achingly slowly she had no choice but to experience as if for the first time the thick heat and power of him, to recognize how tightly they joined, how right it felt. So slowly want and anticipation rippling outward everywhere in her body, pressing against the very seams of her being, a dam in danger of dangerously breaking.

See me. Feel me. Only me.

This was his intent.

He pulled back, and slowly moved again.

“God…” she whimpered. “Please. Faster.” She choked the words shamelessly. And he shifted slightly. A strategic shift to be sure, because his next swift precise thrust sent pleasure arcing through her like a lightning strike, so total and shocking it nearly blacked her consciousness.

So this was a sensual attack, a conquering. She struggled silently with her thoughts: This is just pleasure, and pleasure is temporal, and needs are met, and I can live without him. But he moved again, in just the same way, against the same place inside her. And again. And then again. So slowly, until a long primal groan tore from her, half pleasure, all agony of want. She was lost; he’d won. There was only Flint and what she needed from him. She begged, with his name, with threats, to give her release. He gave a short dark laugh. She thrashed her head back, fought with him for her hands so she could claw him into doing her bidding, pummel him, urge him on.

He kept her trapped. He wanted her to feel only where they were joined. He gave her no mercy.

He knew how intense the pleasure could be. He would allow her no less. He moved again, and now she moved with him, taking him deeper than she knew possible. And again.

And again.

She heard him fighting against his own need to drive himself home, his breath shuddering now, his palms hot and slick with sweat with the effort of his restraint. His body shaking. And still it built and built in her, a crisis of pleasure.

“Asher…God…I’m going to…I…” She was frantic, careening toward an edge from a height she’d never dreamed existed.

He growled then, and unleashed himself and plunged, all but slamming into her like a man outracing death, fighting for his life or for hers, and her release at last crashed through her. She screamed the white-hot bliss of it as though she was being murdered. As though she were being born.

Quiet, perspiring, nude, dark.

Impressions flicked on like fireflies around her. She was sated. Limp. Killed and possessed and humbled in the most pleasant of ways. She’d actually screamed. Asher.

Rosewood box.

Oh damn.

“Violet.”

“Mmm?”

“You would tell me if aught were amiss?”

Her heart stuttered. She was fully alert now.

“Aught? The weather, the food, the accommodations, your attentions to my body, things of that nature?”

“Yes. Or your health. Things of that nature.”

His delivery was light. But the question was not.

And at first she doubted it was the question he truly wanted to ask. Perhaps he hoped he’d made love to her until she was his senseless slave, and thus helpless not to answer his questions. She considered it likely the beginning of the interrogation she’d feared all night; that he would ceaselessly pelt her with little questions until he jarred loose the big secret throbbing in her conscience.

He was concerned for her health? Touching.

But…

Ohhhh. Her health.

She was a woman, a pampered one but less sheltered than her mother would have preferred to believe, and she knew precisely what indiscriminate lovemaking could lead do. And so did he. Bastard children.

In an instant she was grateful for the dark, because she was certain she was scarlet everywhere. Her skin glowed with the heat of self-consciousness. From wanton lovemaking…to motherhood? Inadvertently she inched a little away from him. Space in which to think of what this might mean.

The price of recklessness. Of slipping her family tether. Of learning who she truly was. But she wanted a family.

And he wanted a dynasty.

But between them it was impossible, because tomorrow likely meant the end of this.

“I would tell you if aught was amiss.”

Which was tantamount to a lie, because she wasn’t certain this was true. Even if she were with child, she might or might not tell him, for his sake as well as her own. But it was what he wanted to hear.

Conversation ceased.

A moment later he drew his finger slowly, lightly down her spine, tracing each pearl of it. Tentatively. Almost whimsically. It was affection. Possession. Entreaty. It changes nothing, she thought, and she knew he knew it, too. He will undo me, she thought. Her felt heart swollen in her chest. He was asleep soon after.

When he was sleeping soundly, snoring with an abandon and respiratory variety impossible to fake, she slid out of the bed and crept into the next room, where the fire still burned with some life.

The box sat on the small writing table, splayed open, exhaling tobacco. As soon as she touched it guilt poured through her, for heaven’s sake, as surely as if she were a little girl again, sneaking into Lyon’s bedchamber to root out her brother’s secrets. Ha, Lyon. I may save your life this time.

She snatched it crouched swiftly near the fire.

Which is when one of her knees cracked like a pistol shot.

Holy—!

She squeezed her eyes closed. Went very still. Seconds later the fire, like a co-conspirator, obligingly popped just as loudly, and threw up a shower of sparks to boot. Mercifully, the man in the next room continued snoring.

She settled the box into the hammock made by her crossed legs and night rail and ran her fingers over the bottom of it, pressing precisely, searchingly, firmly, like a physician seeking the source of an ailment. The passing minutes stretched her nerves tight as pianoforte strings, until she feared any stray breeze would pluck a minuet from them. Finally, her thumbs worried, pressed, a place near the bottom right corner. And the bottom of the box rotated completely, and the contents thumped into her lap.

She fished the first thing out, as it was a book, and the corner of it dug into her thigh. She plucked it up; the must of age fluttered up from its pages. A quick fan through it revealed they were covered in a sprawling, arrogant hand. It was a journal of some kind. She quickly turned it over to read the cover, leaned nearer the fire.

The ground dropped out from beneath her.

And she kept falling, and falling, but each time she read the words they were precisely the same.

Property of Captain Moreheart, commander of The Steadfast.

Bloody hell.

Proof. Proof that the person who possessed this had indeed sunk The Steadfast. She quickly fished the second thing out of her lap. But she already knew what it was. She’d found it in this box the first and last day she’d pried into it. And here was the definitive proof that Lyon was Le Chat.

It was Violet who’d discovered what he’d kept in that false bottom when he was a boy. It was the first secret she’d ever bothered to keep, too, because it made her oldest brother seem that much more romantic and heroic, and even at a young age she knew what their father would have done to Lyon had he learned it. She wondered now about how different the lives of so many would be if she hadn’t kept that secret.

She held the miniature of Olivia Eversea, the woman who had sent Lyon away, the woman who, indirectly, was the reason Violet was sitting here in the dark while a sated earl she loved more than her next breath snored in the next room. It was like every miniature portrait in that it didn’t capture the essence of its subject. A person Violet had known since she could remember, whom she’d seen in church every Sunday apart from the few times a fever had kept her away, a person inextricable now from Redmond family history. Olivia Eversea’s face was faintly heart-shaped; there was a wicked innocence, something of the imp, in her chin and the cant of her eyes, which here had been rendered whatever blue the artist had to hand. The color, Violet knew, was not quite right. Her soft dark hair was piled a little too haphazardly for Violet’s elegant tastes, but then everything about the Everseas had always been a bit too haphazard for her tastes. Her neck was long and fair, and around it was a locket; she’d been painted in a green, low-necked dress.

The Everseas admittedly weren’t an ugly clan.

Violet was tempted to hurl Olivia’s miniature into the fire along with the book and that box. But now that she knew about love, and how unlikely and inappropriate and inconvenient and consuming and cripplingly serious and operatically ridiculous it could be, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Olivia was Lyon’s folly and downfall. Just as the earl was hers. As much as she hated to admit it, throwing Olivia into the fire would be like throwing Lyon’s heart into the fire.

She knew a quick righteous fury, imagining her brother Lyon Redmond, the family heir, forced to flee so quickly he’d jettisoned the thing she knew was most precious to him. Unless it no longer was.

Or unless he’d purposely left it.

But why, and why?

And suddenly she was almost certain he’d left it for her to find. She gave the book a little shake, and a sheet of foolscap slipped out of it.

Somehow I’m not surprised it’s you who found me, even though Miles is the family explorer. Father will kill you, of course, when you go home. For you will go home. And when you begin reading Captain Moreheart’s journal, you’ll understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, and for whom I’m doing it. You’ll also, when you reach the end of it, know why I can’t go home—not yet—and why I suspect you’ll go home and won’t tell anyone you’ve seen me, or what you’ve read here. But I will leave that up to you. I leave the fate of the journal up to you, too. Do you know what she said to me? You haven’t any real courage, Lyon. You’d never stand for anything. You’re your father’s invention, and you’ll have your father’s money. How can I love you when you don’t know who you are?

I know a little bit more about who I am now. But it’s not whom I expected to be. I entrust her image to you.

Much love to you.

So she quickly began to read through the journal. A few pages confirmed her darkest fear: The Drejeck Group was indeed participating in the lucrative, illegal, horrific Triangle Trade—

trafficking in human beings.

And Captain Moreheart had more than once captained one of the ships. There were logs of slaves bought and sold.

But it wasn’t until she saw a name on the last page of that journal, a single name in a list of investors, that she understood why Lyon, who had likely set out to do something heroic, now needed to protect the reasons he was doing what he was doing until he’d finished off the Drejeck group altogether.

And why he couldn’t just leave what he’d discovered up to the authorities. Oh God.

She felt jittery from the incompatible combination of exhaustion and nervous excitement and the fitful firings of her brain as it tried to assemble facts. She needed to think, but emotions slammed her in waves, one after the other, fury and love and fear, and there never seemed enough space between them to clear her head. She dropped her face into her palms hard, an almost-slap, and breathed in hard. Think like a man, she told herself. She remembered again what Asher said about being shot, about how there was a moment of blessed numbness, of surprise, really, before the agony set in. Steady breathing came from the room next to her. For a disorienting moment her breathing swayed in time with his, and it was as though she breathed for him and he breathed for her. She huddled next to the fire with her arms wrapped around her knees, surprised, to realize how strong she really was. She could thank the earl for it. She remained that way until her stiff, cold toes and fingers told her the fire had burned low enough to cease giving off heat. She straightened her spine, and took a deep breath, and pushed her hair away from her eyes. She felt a surge of fury with herself when her fingers came away damp. Damn, damn, damn. She could think like a man, she could act like a man, but she was a woman after all, and women wept.

And then got on with what they needed to do.

She quietly opened up the writing desk, found the quill and a pot of ink that hadn’t clotted, and wrote two notes.

One said:

Forgive me. But I know you understand why I did it.

The other said:

He knows you’ll be in the Plaza de Mina tomorrow.

P.S. I love him, Lyon. Did you ever think such a thing would happen?

Love, your sister Violet

She sprinkled sand over both.

The first she left where it was, on the writing desk.

The second she folded in half and kept gripped in her hand as she quickly slipped into her day dress, leaving the laces undone. Speed was of the essence. She seized her shoes and her portmanteau. She knew she couldn’t linger, couldn’t silently kiss him or gaze one last longing time at his sleeping form, because he had that knack for knowing when she was watching him. She had no doubts she’d wake him up with a yearning gaze, despite the fact that their lovemaking had clubbed him into a stupor.

And so she hardened her heart in the hopes she could prevent it from breaking before she could accomplish what she needed to do, and she tiptoed out the door to the sound of the man she loved sleeping peacefully.

Chapter 26

F lint awoke before dawn, and even before his eyes opened he knew she was gone. Gone, gone.

He didn’t hear breathing. He couldn’t feel her presence. He quickly sliced a hand over to her side of the bed; it was too cool for her to have rolled out simply because she’d wakened early. He shot out of bed and strode, nude, into the next room. The fire was dead, the room lit by the gray light of dawn, and the plundered rosewood box lay splayed on the floor. He knelt, gingerly, as if over a body. Then gently lifted it up. So it had a false bottom. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

And she’d watched him surgically go at the thing last night with a hairpin. She must have known the entire time about the bottom.