The Book Of Scandal (36 page)

“Only if he knows the pattern of the streams, sir, and went up into the hills,” the man said. “He knew the lay of the estate fairly well.”

Nathan felt completely impotent.

That night, after persuading Evelyn to take a sleeping draught and sending her up to bed in the company of Kathleen, Nathan discussed the matter with the sheriff and made a decision: If they couldn’t find the culprit in Eastchurch, which, apparently, they could not, then the answers had to lie in London. Only this time, he would not leave Evelyn behind.

It was after midnight when he peeked in on her.

A snoring Kathleen had nodded off in a chair, and jumped when Nathan touched her on the shoulder. He quickly held a finger up to his mouth, cautioning her to be quiet. He then beckoned her to follow him.

In the corridor, he told her they would be leaving for London in two days and to have Evelyn’s things readied. Kathleen seemed surprised by it, but nodded.

“You may return to your room,” he said. “I will watch over her,” he assured her.

With Kathleen toddling sleepily down the hall, Nathan stepped into Evelyn’s room again. The fire was low, and in the dim light, she looked like a small lump beneath the bedcovers. He moved quietly to her bed and looked down at the golden tail of hair that spilled over her pillow. He had just turned away when he heard her speak.

He paused, wondering if she’d spoken in her sleep—and heard it again. Nathan eased down onto his haunches next to the bed and saw that her eyes were open. He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know what I know, Nathan, I swear I don’t. But you must believe me—if I knew, I would tell you.”

He stroked her cheek.

“There is something I want to tell you.”

“Of course.”

“I am…I am afraid.”

Something surged up inside him, something primal and raw. He had an innate need to protect, and to hear his wife tell him that she was afraid—for her life, of all things—twisted painfully inside him. It was the last thing he wanted to hear. It was the last thing he thought he would ever hear. He felt inadequate and weak, just as he had when Robert had died. “You are safe, darling.”

Evelyn looked deeply into his eyes as she reached for the tails of his neckcloth and used it to pull herself up, lifting her face to his. “I am afraid of losing you,” she whispered as her gaze moved to his mouth. Her lips parted and she pressed them lightly to his.

That small, simple kiss was as erotic as any he’d ever experienced. It surged through him like a current, inflaming every male instinct within him. He touched her hair, her face, and traced a line down her neck and then followed it with his mouth, to kiss the small hollow of her throat. “Don’t leave me, Nathan,” she whispered as she pushed her fingers through his hair.

“I would be mad to leave you,” he said brusquely, and rose up, crawling over her on the bed. He pressed his lips to her hair and closed his eyes, breathing her in, the scent of lavender. “Mad,” he murmured again as his hand ran down the side of her body.

Evelyn sighed deeply, her breath warm on his scalp. She moved her hands inside his coat, pushing it off his shoulders, helping him when Nathan paused to shake out of it, then pulled his shirt free of his trousers and slipped her hands beneath his shirt, sliding up to his chest. Nathan pressed his mouth to the open vee of her gown, in the valley between her breasts.

“I am the mad one,” she whispered into his hair. “I should never have left you.”

The regret in her voice floated around his heart.

“I would do anything to change all that has happened,” she said as she slid her hand down his body, cupping him. “Anything.”

God, he needed her. Her scent, the taste of her skin, and the love he’d always had for her was pushing him past his pride and into her arms. He took her breast in his mouth.

Evelyn moaned, grabbed his face, and forced him to look up. She kissed him with surprising strength, her tongue sweeping into his mouth. She seemed to need him just as much, and Nathan was happy to oblige her. He moved over her, forcing her onto her back. “Love me,” he demanded as his hands moved over her body.

She pushed him onto his side and kissed him while she stroked him with her hand. Nathan kissed every patch of skin, her neck and the curve of her shoulder, and the swell of her bosom above the bodice of her gown. He moved his hands down her back, her hips, and her legs, slipping in under the hem of her gown, moving up her thighs.

Evelyn groaned low when he caressed the soft flesh on the inside of her thigh and closed her eyes, reveling in his caress.

His desire was not of this earth—it was incomprehensible, far beyond his understanding. It was intense and filled every bit of space in the room, pushing at the walls, threatening to explode from its confines. Every stroke of his hands prompted another small sigh or groan, every stroke of her hands pushed Nathan closer to the edge of his control.

“I love you,” she said breathlessly, lifting up to fill him with her breath and her tongue.

He was moved by the earnestness in her voice. He pushed her gown up to her neck, slipped his hands to her hips, and greedily took each breast into his mouth as she pressed against him.

He would never know the moment they had managed to cross the invisible chasm that had separated them, but it was beginning to feel as if they’d never been parted, as if they were still as bound to one another as they’d been when they stood before the king and queen and took the marriage vows.

He paused in his attention to her body to look into her eyes; Evelyn watched him as she pulled her nightgown over her head and tossed it aside. The hazel in her eyes was as deep as a well, and the look of them seductive, bewitching. This is what would guide him, he realized. To love her, protect her, defend her—it was what had been missing from him for so long. This was his guide.

“Nathan?” She touched the bit of hair that had fallen over his brow.

“I love you,” he said hoarsely. “I love you.”

She smiled with warm affection. “I love you.”

He pressed his hand to the soft flat of her belly and caressed downward, to the springy tuft of hair at the apex of her legs. An ungodly fire was melting him inside out. He went up on his knees, shrugged out of his shirt, and unbuckled his belt.

Evelyn admiringly slid her hands over his shoulders and his arms.

He lay over her again, felt how small she was against him, felt her warmth seeping into his skin, filling him up. He moved his mouth down her body, to the softest place of her. “Oh,” she gasped. “Oh my.”

With a groan, Evelyn drew one leg up. His senses filled with the scent and the taste of her as he moved lower still. When his tongue slipped between the folds of her sex, she gave a strangled moan and her body jerked with pleasure. But Nathan was deliberately slow, his heart beating harder each time she bucked against him. When he closed his lips around the tiny core of her pleasure, her body spasmed and she gasped for breath, squeezing her legs around him, sinking away from him. A moment later, she rose up on her elbows and kissed him madly as he fumbled with his trousers, pushing them down over his hips, then sliding in between her legs. He kissed her roughly, passionately, possessively as he parted her legs with his thigh and lowered his body to hers, pressed the tip of his cock against her wet body, and slid deep inside her.

“I am enraptured,” she murmured, and closed her eyes, letting her head fall back. She opened her eyes and slid her hand between their bodies, toying with him, and smiled seductively. “Take me, Nathan,” she said breathlessly. “Ravish me. Seduce me until there is nothing left of me.”

He smiled wickedly as he slid out again, to the very tip of him. “As you wish, Mrs. Grey,” he said, and thrust into her again.

Her hands began to stroke his back as he moved fluidly within her, sliding deeper with each stroke, sliding closer to his release. He rolled onto his back, letting her take her delight on him, directing the pace, sliding up and down, sighing with ecstasy when he was buried deep inside her. When he could stand it no more, he rolled her onto her side, draped her leg over his hip, and began to move fast and hard.

Her body moved with his, her hands gripping his shoulders, her hips lifting with each stroke.

His breathing grew shallow as raging desire built in him and exploded inside her. He collapsed to her side and rolled onto his back.

Evelyn propped herself up on her elbow and pressed her hand against his wildly beating heart as if to hold it in place. “I have missed you,” she said softly. “I had not realized how much I have missed you until I came home.”

Nathan closed his eyes, put his hand on top of hers. He remembered the morning she had left for London. He remembered standing on the drive thinking he would never see her again, and that he hardly cared. But he’d been fooling himself. He’d been a broken man, he realized now, pieces of him breaking away each day, incapable of mending himself without her.

They slept wrapped in one another’s arms until the early morning hours when Nathan finally untangled himself from her limbs and quietly dressed before Kathleen came in with her hot chocolate. When he had dressed, he sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on her shoulder.

Evelyn, in the middle of the bed and buried deep beneath the bedcovers, groaned.

“Wake up, Evie,” he said, and leaned over her, kissing the back of her neck.

“Don’t want to,” she muttered.

“You must. We’ve a lot to do before we depart for London on the morrow.”

A moment passed before she seemed to understand him. She suddenly pushed herself up on her elbows.

“London?”

“Our answers are in London.”

“But…” Evelyn scrambled to sit up, pulling the bedsheet over her breasts. “But isn’t it dangerous?”

He leaned over and picked up her dressing robe and handed it to her. “It is the only way, Evelyn. Either we go and confront whatever it is, or we flee England.” He leaned over and kissed her softly.

T hey took Nathan’s father’s house in Mayfair and had not been in residence a pair of nights before engraved invitations began to flow in the door, piling up in silver trays in the foyer, all wanting Lord and Lady Lindsey to attend this function or that.

How Benton, who’d accompanied them to town, managed it all was beyond Evelyn’s ability to understand. She felt completely overwhelmed by it.

Evelyn knew very well that after her infamous departure from London, everyone would be anxious to see the unhappy couple and feast on their misery. She looked with dismay at several of the more important invitations arrayed on a desk before her.

At Nathan’s request, Mr. Nelson, the marquis’s secretary, had been dispatched to London to help them navigate the social waters. The marquis and marchioness were beside themselves with joy that Nathan and Evelyn would re-enter society, as they saw it as a sign their relationship had changed and the scandals would be put behind them.

If only they knew the truth.

Mr. Nelson was happy to accommodate his employer’s son—he had confided to Evelyn that he much preferred London to the marquis’s county seat. “It can be rather rustic in the winter months,” he’d said in a tone so nasal that it sounded a bit like a whine.

“Indeed,” Evelyn said, and picked up an invitation. It was engraved on heavy vellum, and was requesting their presence at the Duke of Cumberland’s for a small supper party. The duke had handwritten on the back that all of her “dear friends” would be in attendance. Evelyn was afraid of precisely that.

“It would not do to decline an invitation from the Duke of Cumberland, particularly given your association with his sister, Princess Mary,” Mr. Nelson opined in that dreadful nasal tone, his pencil poised at the ready on a sheet of vellum.

Nathan had told her to accept all invitations. “The more we are in society, the more we will learn,” he said to her over supper last night in response to Evelyn’s complaint that he’d left her with Seth and Kathleen all day to visit his old haunts.

“Affirmative?” Mr. Nelson prompted her.

“Yes,” she said simply, and pressed her hands to her belly.

She’d been feeling rather ill for a few days now.

“Here we have an invitation to join the Prince of Wales at the opera Thursday next, and a tea with the queen and the princesses for you, my lady. She requests the honor of your presence a week Friday.”

“Yes, yes, to all of them,” she said with a flick of her wrist. Her stomach roiled; she felt as if she would be ill at any moment. As Mr. Nelson busily made notes, Evelyn stood abruptly. “Will you excuse me a moment, sir?”

The man quickly came to his feet, barely managing to hold on to his things in his haste. “Of course, madam.”

She was already moving, walking quickly to the door that adjoined the sitting room with the grand salon, a room that was, fortunately, seldom used except when the marquis and marchioness were entertaining on a lavish scale.

She scarcely made it to an empty porcelain vase behind one of a pair of hand-painted Oriental silk screens before she was ill.

When she was certain she was through being ill, she turned her back to the wall in the salon and sank down to her haunches, the back of her head resting against the wainscot behind her.

She could no longer deny what was so obviously true—she was carrying a child. She had first begun to suspect it when they’d arrived in London, and she had realized, in looking at her appointments calendar, that her courses were more than a fortnight late. The nausea had begun in earnest in the last three days.

“What will I do?” she whispered tearfully to the painted ceiling. The thought of another child overwhelmed her. She had thought of the possibility, of course she had—but she had gone for several years before they’d conceived Robert and had supposed—oh, who was she fooling? She’d been enthralled with the renewed relations with her husband and had not been as cautious as she should have been.

Another child! What would Nathan think? Would he want this child? Would he fear another sickly boy? How many times could he lose an heir? How would she bear it if this one were ill? How could she bear to lose another child?