The Veiled Heart (The Velvet Basement Book 1) (15 page)

“I have never told you exactly what I do.”

“I am not sure how I feel about that.” How could she trust him and not really know anything about what he did, who he really was?

“Well.” His hand slipped around her shoulders and twisted her to face him. He kissed her ear, her cheek, the corner of her eyes. “I suggest whatever wonderful fashion you decide to wear for London’s interested eyes that you wear nothing underneath. I want”— his lips moved over hers, soft and coaxing—“I want you in a dark corner where I can lift your skirt.” He tugged up her skirts.

“We don’t have time for this.”

But her voice wasn’t convincing as heat flared through her.

“We have more than enough time.” He reached out with his free hand, found his cane, and thumped it on the roof again.

Miriam wrapped her hands around his neck and tugged his mouth closer to her, but he stopped just above her lips.

“When I get you in that dark corner, I’m going to slip my fingers in right here.” Her hips tilted forward as he touched her sensitive folds. “And then, I am going to make you come with the sound of the music around us, with people an earshot away.” His mouth covered hers; and the heat of him as he touched her, kissed her, washed away the concern and worries about who he was, even the damn carriage, and to whom it belonged. Instead, she pulled him closer than she ever imaged she wanted anyone to be.

Max moved just enough to free himself, put on a sheath, and slip into her. His hands pushed her knees wide, firm, commanding, they held her down on bench and he started quick, hard thrusts. The fullness of him inside her, the thrusts, her head got foggy, light with pleasure as her body spiraled out of control.

“More. More, Max.” Need made her goad him on faster. She pushed into him as if she hadn’t had him, as if they hadn’t just made love and been satiated. She wasn’t. She may never be where he was concerned. There was something about him. Just looking at him made her want more out of life, made her want him, a life she had wanted way back lifetimes ago.

“Come on, Lily.” His fingers dug into her buttocks.

She grabbed his arms and pulled herself closer to him. Max hitched her closer, leaned over her and kissed her deeply. Part of her rubbed against the fabric of his trousers, and just like that, she slipped over into that pool of blinding light, throwing her far into the sky as she hung onto his shoulders with all the strength she had as every bit of her broke apart and reformed.

Her heart pounded. Her breath raggedly sawed the air as Max lifted his head and looked at her, lifted his hands to either side of her face as he pushed up in his need. His eyes devoured her as he made his final thrusts, yelled out, and pulled her tight against his chest.

They sat there like that, her pressed against him, their heads next to each other.

“You know, not all men are bad, Lily.”

She wriggled off him for a second time tonight.

“You’re not like men of my class, Max.”

The warmth in his eyes tightened into annoyance.

“Can’t you just see me as a man and not a station?”

He disentangled himself.

She had offended him.

“I didn’t mean that as an insult, rather a compliment. Because you are not of my class, I can be here with you now. I… we can talk like we do.” She reached out and touched his cheek. “I can trust you.”

His hand came over hers, holding it to her face.

”Do you trust me?”

“I wouldn’t be here otherwise.” And that was the truth. She did trust him; even with his secrets, she still trusted him.

“You know I have done what I thought best for both of us?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

The odd tension she felt earlier back into her chest.

“Max, why do you make me wonder about you just when I think I trust you?” She was tired and this was starting to get frustrating.

The carriage came to a stop and the driver knocked his heel to the footboard a few times. They had arrived.

He kissed her. Stroked her face.

“I remember a day when I was a boy.” He picked up her hat. “It was late summer. There were bees flying all around my mother’s rose bushes. The smell of them as you walked past was pure heaven.

There was a girl. One look and I was lost, it was like I had been put on earth just to be with her. She saw me too, played coy but I knew. I followed her, talked with her, made her laugh.. I managed to lure her away and kiss her.”

“I bet you did.” She huffed under her breath. An uncomfortable tightness was closing around her chest.

His mouth curled up at the corners.

“I was young, nothing to get jealous about; that all happened a little later.”

“I’m sure.” Of course he would have fallen for women over the years.

He picked up her veil; the pins were nowhere to be seen in this light. He laid it over her hat and face.

“I knew with absolutely no reservation that she was mine.

Now, a boy has no idea what that means, but somehow I knew enough to understand my path was set.”

Her shoulder lifted and her jaw tightened.

“This is all very touching.” She tried to push his hands away.

He laughed, and tucked her veil in around her face and hat.

“Did you get her, this paragon of femininity?”

He held her chin up. “No, her family thought I was too poor; I lost her. Life isn’t a fairy tale, Lily. You know that.”

She huffed at him. This was not what she wanted to hear even if he was a boy when this all happened. She went to leave the carriage but he blocked her movements.

“I don’t want that to happen again, Lily.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Max kissed her again then opened the carriage door, stepped out, and handed her down. He walked her to her gate.

She went to walk past him. He coaxed her up against him. “Not again, Lily.”

Max straightened, then turned and walked back to the carriage. She watched him go. The streaks of soft light from the moon flickered over his back through the trees lining the street.

He definitely was not what he seemed.

A ripple of unease trickled through her; but then again, there was an awful lot about herself she didn’t share with anyone. Her nightly outings, where she went, and what she had seen. Each person was something else underneath; her husband had shown her that.

Worthington stood at the entrance of the breakfast room and the smell of bacon and an after note of vanilla from the porridge, filled the air. Why they continued to bring the porridge to the breakfast buffet Worthington couldn’t fathom. His mother said it was his favorite; he’d replied, “when I was ten.” She’d smiled and ensured it was always there. There was now an obligation to eat it.

It was good to be back in England, back in London. There was a beat to the British life that went on oblivious of the fact that the new world was charging ahead, unrestrained by the conventions that made up so much of the fundamental fabric of the continent and Great Britain.

Back then, there had been no strong calling to leave London despite his interest in business and the freedom to make so much happen in America and later Canada. No, he’d left because he had to.

He couldn’t stand the idea he would meet them somewhere around town at social events. Mr. and Mrs. Rothbury, the darlings of London’s social set. The couple who built an icon of how marriage could be.

He’d traveled on the Orient Express to Shanghai, lounged in opium dens, and then shipped to Los Angeles. The journeys were a blur of absinthe, cards, women, and fights.

The last few years he spent time in Canada. Five years wasn’t really that long. But he had time enough to live in a manner which gave him a taste of life, of women, of culture and lifestyles. He had found business interests and opportunities, which helped him improve the family position.

He was now London’s most eligible bachelor. He would have been very eligible on his own efforts alone; but something about a title got everyone excited. Everyone but Lily, ironically. A hive of women, mothers and their single charges, buzzed round him at social events.

Instead of starting to sort through them all, he’d pushed down his pride and headed over to the widow Rothbury’s house, to be turned away time after time. He thought if he could just see her, it would all fit in place. But the note came that final time confirming Freddy had behaved. He had been the ideal husband. One she didn’t want the memory of tarnished, and she was still in so much pain, she could not see whom she considered his close friends.

Fool that he was, he’d believed her. Had drunk himself into quite a stupor in his study and been determined to whore her out of his system despite the fact that strategy hadn’t been successful in the past.

Then that fateful meeting at The Velvet Basement, the night he was buying sheaths to go on a banquet of feminine flesh. It was as if some thread had connected them back on that summer day and had never broken. For him at least that had always been true.

“Max, darling, don’t stand in the doorway, dear.” His mother twisted around in her chair to look at him, beautiful angular bone structure in a face that would have laid men to their knees in her youth. “I have the Everetts coming for afternoon tea today. You’ll be here, won’t you? The eldest is so charming.”

He leaned down and kissed his mother’s cheek.

“I’ll be here for you. I’ll meet the Everett girl everyone is raving about; but I have someone in mind, so don’t get too carried away.”

His mother straightened in her chair to give him her full attention.

“Have I met her?”

“Yes, I think you have.”

“Well?”

“Well, I’m not ready to tell you who she is yet. I’m simply telling you to stop wasting my and their time with tea.”

“Is she coming to the ball?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

His mother leaned over and pulled the invitation list out from under a pile of correspondence.

“Has she replied yet?”

Worthington laughed. “You will not guess, and I have no idea if she has sent her RSVP back or not.”

Those wonderful eyes of hers looked over the rim of her reading glasses. “Are you really going to make me wait?”

“I’m afraid so. But, with any luck, not for long.” That didn’t feel like wishful thinking anymore. They had done things together, real things independent of the passion. She trusted him and saw him as a co-creator of her new venture. These should be excellent examples of what a life with him would be like. What their life would be like together, as husband and wife.

His mother then proceeded to look through the multiple cards of where they were both invited to and the RSVPs.

“Oh, look, I wouldn’t have thought… she has been so reclusive. And that strange dinner migraine… Miriam Rothbury has accepted along with her aunt.”

“That’s nice to hear, Mother.”

He poured coffee and prepared a plate from the buffet, then sat opposite his mother at the head of the table.

“We will be quite the talk of London. Absolutely everyone has tried to draw her out. Her mourning was finished some months ago and she stayed tucked away.”

“Word at the club is that she is championing a cause.” His voice was convincingly light. He was rather proud of that. His mother could detect a maneuver at fifty paces, but he had learned a thing or two over the years being her son. “If you are interested in getting her to grace your parlor, that would be an enticement: a chance for her to find some patronage amongst your friends.”

His mother put down what was obviously Lily’s acceptance of the ball invite. And proceeded to butter her toast with a look of concentration. A good sign.

“Everyone is saying she must have loved Freddy deeply to stay in mourning so long. To stay out of society even now she is back in London.” She lifted her gaze to his.

So he hadn’t been as subtle as he thought.

“You knew Freddy, Mother. That seems highly unlikely. More like she was enjoying the peace and quiet.”

Her gaze dropped back to her plate and put a large dollop of marmalade on the toast.

“I don’t know why you disparage Freddy. He was a funny and charming boy, although something disastrous always happened when he came. It was like he was fated to be part of a dark comedy.

“Do you remember that we found Sylvester dead on that first summer he came to stay with us? Where did his parents go to again?”

“Safari. They would go on safari.” His chest tightened. Sylvester had been the household cat.

“Yes, that’s right. The year before he had gone with them and there was some nonsense about bullying. They felt he was perhaps not mature enough to embrace primitive cultures and behave appropriately.”

“Cultures.” His voice was terse. Why did Freddy have so much support over all the years amongst the breadth of society? He was seen with fondness and in the best light.

“I beg your pardon?” His mother bit into her toast and raised an eyebrow.

“Cultures, Mother, not primitive cultures.”

He put his coffee down and looked down the table at his mother. She was making notes to the side of her plate.

Since his father’s death, and then his own absence overseas, she had slipped back into the country and stepped back from the social schedule she liked to keep. He hadn’t realized it before, but so much of her enjoyment was to help his father and, it seemed of late, him. Socializing for a reason and purpose.

Of course, it was to secure him a wife and reintegrate into London social life. Not too much of a challenge, as five years was not the longest time to be away. In fact, it made him a much more interesting person to have at events as he could add something new to the otherwise endless repetition of local news that invariably was over embellished and tinged with sour feelings of long-held differences.

Lily had effectively saved him from most of that for the last couple of weeks. Weeks that felt like months. He ached for her. And it was an ache. A tightness in his chest when they were separated.

Most likely, because he wasn’t sure what she would be up to; but the truth was, losing her now might just do him in.

This secrecy about who he was. Her ongoing distrust. He understood it. After Freddy, she would have set up a framework on how to move forward. Wiping out an entire social strata of men was rather rash, but he understood it. It was just time to break through that.

Knowing what he did about Freddy, suspecting more, her position was understandable but the logic was erroneous. She needed to place the blame fairly at the feet of those responsible and claim a full life unmarred by odd restrictions and limitation of thought.

“Mother?”

She looked up. “Yes, dear?”

“Mother, did you realize that these are most likely not coincidences? That, in fact, wherever Freddy went, at whatever age and on whatever continent, he left a trail of something broken, beaten, or dead in his wake?”

Her face looked perplexed. “I am not sure I fully understand what you are inferring. That Freddy was accident prone?”

“I am saying that it was a by-product of Freddy’s character. That not only did these events find their way to him, if you want to take the kindest of interpretation, but that he actively sought them out and created them.

He was not a man I had ever wanted to associate with and was never grateful for father’s insistence that I room with him because he had roomed with Freddy’s father. And, quite frankly, Freddy was not that pleased about the matter either.

“Are you saying you weren’t the best of friends? Why, I told many people about you being the closest of friends, that you were inseparable.”

A cold sudden clarity washed over him.

“What do you mean, you told everyone?”

“You know how women and mothers are. We talk about our offspring. I talked about you.”

“You said I was inseparable from Freddy?”

“Yes, dear, and I understood you were.”

“We weren’t.”

Her eyebrows rose. “I stand corrected.”

Who would hold that view? Most likely every mother, every woman in their circles. He had regularly been invited to events, weekend house parties, and always with Freddy in tow. He had wondered how it had always turned out that they were together.

Suddenly Lily’s absolute conviction in the evil nature of Worthington’s soul, his close likeness to her husband, fell into place.

Now, after all this time and now that Freddy was dead, to rectify that misconception with any statements of them having had a falling out would be seen as strange and distasteful.

“Freddie was a very cruel man, Mother, even as a boy. As a young man, he was exotically cruel. My association has not done me any favors.”

“Pff.” His mother shook her head. “You forget how powerful he was. His father involved your father in many business ventures in which he may not have otherwise been included.”

“Indeed.”

“Well, it will be wonderful to see his wife at the ball. She was out for only two weeks, betrothed, and, for some odd reason, whisked away from events. The wedding was grand and then they went immediately to the Continent to tour. They spent most of each year abroad.”

He didn’t want to hear any of this. He didn’t want to think about what her betrothal was like. He knew that she was whisked away. They were whisking her away from him.