Margaret Moore (21 page)

Neville rolled onto his back and stared upward. “I don’t have any friends. Not anymore.”

“I find it hard to believe that a man of your many attributes is left completely friendless,” she said, sidling toward the door.

He turned his head and grinned. “Do you like my attributes?”

“You are not unattractive, my lord, but I dare say you know that well enough without hearing it from me.”

He sat up. “I could never tire of hearing my praises sung from your lovely lips. I’faith, I could never tire of anything from your lovely lips. I think I would find curses delightful if they fell from your lovely lips.”

He must be in his cups to spout such nonsense.

She was nearly at the door. “Surely there are ladies who would be your friend.”

He was off the bed and at the door before she quite knew what was happening. “As you would be the king’s friend?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m only a little drunk and not at all stupid,” he said, leaning against the door. “The
whole court is buzzing with the news of your conquest, although I think the king an easy continent to claim.”

“The whole court is wrong,” she retorted, eyeing him warily. “Please go!”

“Where? Where would you have me go? You have taken my place here.”

“Surely Sir Richard—”

“Would probably offer to meet me in a duel if I showed my face at the theater tonight.”

She moved away from him, across the room. “Why?”

“We have quarreled.”

“What about?”

“You.”

“Me?” she cried softly, putting her hand to her breast in surprise.

Not taking his gaze from her, Neville nodded slowly. “He’s going to try to seduce you. It’s quite obvious, really. Even a countrified miss should be able to tell.”

She frowned, but continued to regard him just as steadily. “Then it would seem he is very like every other man in London.”

“Not every man.”

“No,” she agreed. “Lord Cheddersby is the soul of propriety.”

“That puppy!”

“Ah!”

“There you are again with that ejaculation. Why “ah” now, Lady?”

“Because I think you have quarreled with Lord Cheddersby as well. Why?”

Unexpectedly, his gaze faltered. “Perhaps because he would presume to marry you.”

Of all the explanations he might have given, she had not expected this one.

Then, just as suddenly and unexpectedly, he lunged for her and pulled her against his hard chest so that the breath was nearly knocked from her. He captured her mouth in a fiery, passionate kiss that again unleashed an incredible burning, fierce desire within her.

This was not weakness. This was a strength she didn’t know she possessed, a yearning so potent, it must and would dominate her.

“You want me as much as I want you,” he murmured, pressing heated kisses upon her temples, her cheeks.

As he gently nibbled on her earlobe, her arms encircled him, seemingly of their own volition. His arm tightened about her, holding her like a band of iron, leaving his other hand free to stroke and caress her.

She moaned softly as he cupped her breast and his thumb brushed across her nipple. It was so tempting to give herself over to the passionate excitement sweeping through her body, to yield completely until she knew the fulfillment of release from this thrilling tension building within her.

To surrender, even though she knew it was wrong.

If they did not stop immediately, she would do what every lustful particle of her body was urging her to do. She would weaken and go up in the flame of passion like so much tinder—and risk her soul for sin.

She summoned all that remained of her righteous resolution and placed her hands against his broad chest to push him away. “Stop,” she murmured.

“That is your Puritan father speaking,” he muttered as his lips trailed across her collarbone.

He ground his hips against hers in a primitive, lascivious action that had nothing to do with love or affection but only lust.

“No, it is Arabella.”

He stopped and stepped back, his gaze hardening. “I perceive I have underestimated you, Arabella.”

“I … I don’t know what you mean.”

“You are very clever, my coy and teasing lady. You spur me on one moment only to withdraw the next, knowing that to do so only whets my appetite. Is this the strategy you would use upon the king?”

“I am not being clever! You surprised me!”

“It amazes me that you can always be caught so unaware. But I forget—it is time for the virtuous virgin to appear upon the stage,” he said
scornfully. “This wench who kisses with such blatant desire is all righteous indignation now.”

“I am not a wanton!”

“You enjoy my kisses.”

“No doubt that is how you think every woman reacts to your embraces,” she replied defensively.

“If they do, they do not dissemble. What is it you hope to gain by this?”

“Gain?”

“My devotion? You had that, for tonight at least.”

“I do not want anything from you!”

A smirk twisted his face. “Apparently not. Or at least, not for the moment. I have to wonder if this is but a feint that I am supposed to parry.” He sighed dramatically. “To think I was beginning to believe you were the innocent you seemed! You belong upon the stage. You would be a great success—in many ways.”

“I think you would be better, for you feign sincerity so well.”

“I feign sincerity?” he scoffed with a laugh. “What about you? I see full well how you manage my father and poor dim Foz. I wonder what they would have thought had they ventured into this room a few moments ago. Their countenances would surely have been amusing.

“There would have been nothing amusing about it.”

“Really? Then you do not have the sense of humor I credited you with. I’faith, I more than half believed that is what led you to entertain thoughts of marrying Foz. Either that or greed. Tell me, does my father know of your propensity for entertaining visitors in your bedchamber like my lady Castlemaine and others of her sort?”

“You invade my privacy and then think to criticize me?”

“You are hardly the embodiment of virtue my father thinks, and I have the proof.”

“Why?” she demanded. “Why would you seek to destroy me in your father’s estimation?”

“Oh, please, Arabella, no more of this coyness!”

“I do not understand.”

“Then perhaps your stupidity explains why you had such difficulties interpreting your father’s silences.”

She gasped as if he had stabbed her. Tears started in her eyes. “Get out and never speak to me again!” she ordered, her voice quavering slightly.

“Arabella, I’m sorry!” he cried softly, meaning it as much as he had ever meant anything in his life. “Forgive me! I should not have said that.”

More, he knew he should not have acted as he had, alone here with her. He had behaved like a despicable cad, a rake, a libertine—like Buckingham and Sedley and their ilk. He, who always prided himself on his self-control, had been no better than the most selfish brute, because he wanted her so very, very much. Just being alone with her robbed him of his self-control.

She remained motionless, glaring at him. She looked like an avenging angel standing there, her curling hair a halo in the moonlight. “You sneak into my bedchamber, press your kiss upon me, and now you request my forgiveness?”

“Yes.”

“Since I am a Christian, you have it.” She pointed imperiously at the door. “Now get out and never seek to come near me again.”

He held out his hands in a placating gesture. “Please, Arabella, do not send me away before I can explain.”

“There can be no good explanation for your conduct in this room tonight.”

“Except a little too much wine and a great deal of human frailty.”

“Or madness,” she proposed harshly.

“All three, perhaps.”

“Then truly, my lord, you do not belong here. You should be in Bedlam.” He walked toward her cautiously. “Perhaps
I am in Bedlam. I think I have been half mad ever since you arrived, or perhaps Bedlam has expanded its boundaries to encompass me.”

“My lord, I—”

“It is your fault, Arabella.”

“Mine?”

“For being so beautiful that you make every man desire you.”

“I cannot help how I look.”

“As I cannot help how I feel. Please do not marry Foz.”

“Who told you I was going to marry him?”

“My father and Lady Lippet approve, do they not?”

She did not respond, and he knew he was right. “You don’t love him, do you?”

She stared at the floor, still silent.

“Do you no longer wish to marry for love?”

“I have been given to understand that is no longer the fashion,” she murmured.

“You told me once that if you could not have love from your parents, it was your dearest wish to have a husband’s love.”

She raised her eyes, which seemed to glow in the moonlight like the North Star guiding a lost soul home. “You do remember!”

“You were very certain then.”

“We were both younger then.”

“Yet when I first saw you here, you did not seem so very different.”

“You did. What happened to you, Neville?”

“I grew into a man and came to London.”

She sighed softly. “I wish you had not.”

He turned away and went to the window. “I had little choice about coming to London. Life with my father was unbearable.”

“Because he criticized you?”

He turned to face her, the moonlight casting a long shadow. “Constantly. Unendingly. Nothing I do or have ever done has earned me one good word from him.

“But I am not a peevish child, Arabella. There is more amiss between my father and me than those apparent faults he declares so loudly and so often. Another reason he could not bear my presence, and one that I can never amend.”

She took a step closer. “What is it?”

“I am like my mother.” He swiped a hand over his perspiring brow as he turned to look out the window again.

He was reacting like a fool. He wanted—required—her to believe herself in love with him, and if painful revelations were necessary to accomplish that, he would make them.

But that was the only reason he would speak of these things. “She liked music and dancing and games. She craved amusement and joyful things. You have seen my father. You can guess that they did not exactly suit.”

“Yet your father took me to the theater,” Arabella said. “He has gone to Whitehall and, indeed,
seems to enjoy himself there.”

Neville sighed. “Well, I suppose they might have managed well enough, or as well as plenty of other noble couples do. But then came Cromwell and his Roundheads. When the king was executed, my father would not leave England, and she would not stay.

“By then, of course, I had been born and I had lived. The succession was secure.

“So also by then,” he continued, hostility creeping into his voice, “they each had a lover. My mother went to France with hers, my father stayed in England with his—and his child, who resembled his absent wife in feature, voice and disposition.”

“She left you?” Arabella asked, her voice full of pity, her heart aching for him. “How terrible. But it must have been difficult for her, too. I’m sure she felt she had no other choice.”

He turned around and cocked his head. “As much as I would like to believe that, I know it is not true. She was being what she always was—selfish. Her lover would not welcome me, so she left me behind.”

“How do you know this? Your father—”

“Never spoke of her again for good or ill. I found her in France a few years ago, and she told me this herself in her own charming way, shedding the falsest tears I ever beheld. Then she asked me to leave. She was expecting a man—her latest lover, without doubt—and
didn’t want him to think she was being unfaithful.”

Then he laughed, but it was the most ghastly, unnatural laugh Arabella had ever heard. “Have I not been blessed in my parents? Honor thy father and thy mother, indeed!”

“Neville, I am so sorry!”

“You need not be,” he replied, and this time, she heard the bitter pain beneath his flippant tone. “All you need do is understand that there is more than childish petulance where my father and I are concerned. He hates me.” He straightened his shoulders and resumed his cavalier air. “I should be glad his hatred and resentment got me out of Grantham.”

“Don’t!” she cried softly, hurrying to him.

“Don’t what?”

She put her arms around him in a gentle, loving embrace. “Don’t talk that way! It is not you!”

He stood as stiff as a sentry. “What, pray tell, is me?”

“You are yet the boy in the garden!”

He glanced down at her. “By the world, you would have time stand still?”

“I am certain you are not so completely changed. You have built a wall of flippant composure around yourself, but the Neville I knew is there, hidden behind it.”

Her arms went around his neck, and then she kissed him tenderly. Lovingly.

A kiss of affection, not lust. Of a love he had never known before. Of a love he never wanted to lose.

His embrace tightened about her as their kiss deepened. He would keep nothing back but would give her all his love.

Tonight and for the rest of his life. For as long as his heart continued to beat, it would be hers.

Moaning softly, she opened her mouth, and with heady delight he plunged his tongue inside its welcoming warmth.

How the languorous dance of her lips over his aroused him! And her fingers—each light brush of their tips seemed to set him aflame.

He needed her so much!

Still kissing her, he stripped off his jacket and let it fall to the ground. She tugged his shirt from his breeches and put her hands under it, slowly moving them upward over his naked flesh.

“Oh, sweet heaven,” he groaned as he pulled off his shirt.

She leaned forward and kissed his bare shoulder, then lower, until she took his nipple in her mouth.

With fumbling fingers, he untied her satin-soft hair so that it fell freely about her smooth shoulders. He took her chin in his hand and lifted her face to press another passionate kiss upon her succulent lips.

He would love her as he had never loved a woman, he vowed. He would love her with his heart and soul as well as his body.