The Greatest Lover Ever (31 page)

She closed her fingers around his cock, until she held him in her fist.

Her voice was husky. “Like this?”

Beckenham’s body tensed, fighting the urge to spill in her hand.

“Show me how you want me to touch you,” she whispered.

“You’re doing a fine job,” he gritted out.

“Tighter?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes.”

“Like this?”

“God, yes.” He made an involuntary thrust with his hips.

“Now what?”

He gave in and wrapped his hand around hers, showing her what he wanted, everything she desired to know. His chest felt like it might burst and his head spun as he climaxed in powerful, hot jets of seed.

He pulled her hand away from his cock, then he kissed her, reversing their positions, standing to swing her out of the pool and onto the edge so that her legs dangled over the side.

Water sheeted from her body as if she were Venus arising from the waves. Her lovely nipples beaded with moisture, hard and pink and delicious. Kneeling on the step, he tasted each of them in turn, laving, licking, sucking until she’d braced her hands on the floor behind her, thrusting into his mouth, crying out with the pleasure of it.

Then he gripped her thighs and tilted her to him. Spread her wide to his gaze.

She gave a shocked little murmur. “Oh, no…”

He glanced up at her. “You are beautiful,” he said. “Don’t deny me.”

Her lips quivered. Then she tilted her head back and closed her eyes.

He took this for acquiescence, sliding his hands up her legs to place them over his shoulders. Then he bent his head and feasted.

*   *   *

Much later, when they lay together in a surfeited daze, her head on his chest, Beckenham said, “I think I know why that happened before. With the blindfold.”

She didn’t look up at him or speak, just continued stroking his chest.

He’d felt like a damned fool. He owed her an explanation, though. It was time she knew the truth about him, anyway. Not that he’d concealed anything deliberately, but the blindfold, not to mention the forthcoming confrontation with Pearce, had brought it all flooding back. If they were to be husband and wife, she needed to know about the darkness he carried inside him.

“You will have heard of my grandfather,” Beckenham began. “Living in this district, how could you not? His … eccentricities were stuff of legend.”

“Yes. I’ve heard of him. What was he like?”

He stroked her hair. He couldn’t tell her some of the unspeakable things, but he could give her a fair idea. “He used to strip naked in the middle of the night and take his gun out with him. Hunting poachers, he said, though I’m told all he ever shot was ducks. He drank too much, gambled too much. He gamed away Cloverleigh, as you know. He was incomprehensibly extravagant. At the time of his death, he owned seven hundred pairs of handmade riding boots.
Seven hundred.
While some of his tenants struggled to keep their children fed.”

She pressed her palm against his chest. “You changed all of that.”

Certainly, he had done what he could for his tenants, a process begun by the Duke of Montford when he’d become trustee of the estate. But there were too many wrongs that could never be set right.

After a pause, she ventured, “Did he … Did he beat you?”

He shook his head, though she couldn’t see him. “He was never violent toward me. Not directly. I was the heir, you see.” He’d been lucky compared with the others in that household, compared with anyone in his grandfather’s power.

He thought Georgie lay slightly heavier against him, as if that disclosure had eased some of her tension.

“No, there was no physical cruelty. But there was always a cruel edge to my grandfather’s exploits. Things were almost bearable when my father was alive, but once he died…”

Beckenham swallowed hard.

“The old earl made my mother’s life a living hell. Again, not beatings—strangely, that would have been against his code—but cruelty of the mind. Screaming abuse, threats and the like. A stable hand gave Mama a puppy. It was one of my grandfather’s hunting dogs, the runt of the litter.”

For a moment, he couldn’t trust his voice. Then, huskily, he went on. “You should have seen how happy it made her, such a silly little thing. We called him Scamper. In one of his rages, my grandfather picked up Scamper by the scruff of his neck and threatened to throw him in the fire.”

“Oh, no! He didn’t do it, did he?”

“No, but we thought he would. Only the previous night, he’d forced a bottle of port down one of his horse’s throats and killed it. What would a puppy matter to him?” His grandfather had always kept a horse in the house, like a companion animal. One was always dodging piles of manure in the halls.

She shuddered. “What happened to your poor mother?”

He set his jaw. Even now, more than twenty years later, the memory tore a hole in his chest. “She died of a fever. I think in the end, her soul gave out. She struggled hard to stay alive for me. She just wasn’t strong enough.”

“Poor lady. And poor little boy.”

He felt hot moisture seep onto his chest. Georgie’s tears, he realized. But she still didn’t look at him, and he was grateful for that. He hated sounding like a puling whiner. He hated being the cause of her tears.

He would get this over with, though, and then never speak of it again. His throat grew tight, as tight as it had when he’d donned the blindfold. “For, oh, perhaps a month, it was just my grandfather and me and the servants. God, I was only five. I was terrified of him. Even though he never raised a hand to me, just being surrounded by all of that unbridled violence and insanity without my mother to turn to was frightening enough.”

He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry again. “There was a—a concealed cupboard. A priest’s hole, really. Whenever he went on one of his rampages, I would shut myself inside it and listen and wait for the storm to pass. It was very close and very dark in there.”

She didn’t say it and he knew he didn’t need to. That must have been why he’d had such a strong reaction to the blindfold.

A muted wail broke from Georgie then. Her shoulders shook and he held her close while she sobbed, stroking her back and murmuring soothing nothings to her. “It’s all right. It’s all in the past now.” And having finally admitted to her what he’d never said to another soul, he thought he spoke the truth.

She raised her head, dashing at her lovely eyes with the back of one hand, her anger flaring up. “But my parents, your other neighbors, your relatives, why did no one
do
something?”

He reached up and smoothed back her curls, tucking them gently behind her ear, wondering at his good fortune in having such a fierce champion. She looked as if she wanted to hurl herself back in time and shoot the old earl through the heart.

“My grandfather was a law unto himself. No one had the power or the right,” he said. “Until my mother died and the Duke of Montford took a hand. I don’t know how His Grace did it. I’ve always thought he must have threatened the old man with Bedlam if he didn’t surrender me. Whatever the case, the duke took me to his estate at Harcourt to live, and when my grandfather died a few years later, the duke became my trustee and guardian and I became the earl.”

After a pause, she said thickly, “I’m going to burn that blindfold. I could kill myself for putting you through that.”

“Georgie, you weren’t to know. How should you? I didn’t know myself until the past all came rushing back like that. I am the one who should be apologizing. You made a special evening for us. Thank you, my darling.”

He pulled her down to his kiss. When she drew back again, her nose shiny red and her face a little puffy, her eyes glazed with unshed tears, he took her face between his hands and smiled up at her. “I love you.”

The words were inadequate to express the complexities of his feelings for her, and yet they were completely and utterly right.

A look of half disbelief, half joy spread across her tearstained face.

“Oh, Marcus!” And then she buried her face in his shoulder and wept in earnest.

Chapter Twenty

Beckenham left for Brighton the following morning, without relenting in his determination to leave Georgie behind.

Any plans she might have had to cajole him, threaten him, or otherwise circumvent his plans might have survived the shocking disclosures of the previous night. They’d died a quick death when he finally related the truth about his history with Lord Pearce.

“What I didn’t tell you last night,” said Beckenham heavily, “is that Pearce’s grievance stems from something my grandfather did.”

He glanced at her, not seeming to know how to go on.

“Is the story too delicate for my ears?” she asked, slightly amused at his reticence.

“No, it’s not that. Well, it
is
a shocking story, but my hesitation wasn’t for that reason. I…” He broke off, eyeing her, rubbing his chin with the back of his thumb. “You seem to be taking this news well.”

Her brow furrowed. “I don’t know what the news is, so how can I—?”

“I mean, about Pearce. He targeted you to strike against me.”

“Oh, I
see,
” she said on a spurt of anger. “You thought my vanity would be bruised if I discovered he wasn’t enamored of me? Good God, Beckenham, why should I care the reason Pearce pursued me? If he’d truly loved me, he wouldn’t have coerced me into writing that letter.”

When Pearce had transferred his attentions to Violet, that hadn’t injured her vanity, either. She’d been too fearful for her sister to consider herself slighted. All she felt for Pearce was loathing and—yes, she admitted it—fear. No matter how strong and clever Beckenham might be, he simply could not comprehend the depths to which someone like Pearce might stoop. She was afraid for him, that his innate goodness would be his undoing.

There was an odd expression on Beckenham’s face. After a long hesitation, he shrugged. “Men do strange things in the name of love.”

“Men of honor do not do
that
kind of thing.”

“I don’t know, Georgie.” Beckenham stared out across the gardens to the lake. “I used to believe a man’s honor mattered more than anything else. Now, I think that sometimes, honor is a luxury a man can ill afford.”

She narrowed her eyes. Did he mean to
defend
Pearce’s actions? The mind boggled. If that was Beckenham’s intention, they were unlikely to find any common ground there.

She turned the conversation back to the matter at hand. “What connection can Pearce possibly have to your grandfather?”

Beckenham cleared his throat. “Well, besides his madness and violence, my grandfather was also very, er, promiscuous.”

Randy old goat
was a phrase Georgie had often heard to describe the old earl.

“No different from many of his peers, I should suppose,” she said with a grimace.

“One difference,” said Beckenham. “One significant difference. My grandfather was Pearce’s father.”

“No!” Georgie said. Then she frowned. “How can that be? Pearce is the firstborn son. He inherited the title.”

It was common for ladies of the first rank to bear children who did not belong to their husbands. But to introduce a bastard into the marriage before one had borne a true heir simply wasn’t done.

Beckenham looked grave. “Lady Pearce might not have been a willing participant in the act of consummation.”

Georgie felt the blood drain from her face. “He … he forced her?”

“That’s what Pearce believes. Knowing my grandfather, I do not doubt it. No one else outside the family and me knows of it. The elder Lord Pearce acknowledged him as his own son. He didn’t discover the truth until later.”

“One can only imagine how furious he must have been.”

Beckenham nodded. “That is why Pearce needs this inheritance. Old Lord Pearce left every unentailed asset elsewhere. Once he’d acknowledged the cuckoo in their nest as his son and heir, he couldn’t change the effect of the entail or keep the title from Pearce. But he
could
make the boy’s life a misery and deprive him of all the privileges due to a son of the true blood. He deliberately let the entailed property go to wrack and ruin.”

Astonished, Georgie took a moment to assimilate what he’d told her. “If this is not generally known, how do you—?”

“That night. The night Pearce came to me with the lock of your hair, the story came spewing out of him. It explained why he has always hated me.”

“But you didn’t do anything! His hatred of you is wholly unjust,” she said.

“But none the less potent for that. After all, my grandfather, his parents, all the players in the drama are gone. I’m the only one left to blame.”

“I suppose,” she said slowly, “that explains why he brought the lock of hair to you, doesn’t it? He wanted to force a reckoning between you. Our argument and the broken betrothal were an unexpected boon.”

“He chose you in the end, though,” said Beckenham grimly. “Believe me, I have not forgotten he missed the duel to run away with you.”

She gripped both his hands tightly in hers. “Promise me you will be careful.”

He promised, but she knew it was a promise he might be forced to break.

As she waved him off some time later, Georgie thought about Beckenham’s words.
Why
had Pearce thrown over the duel for her? Had he imagined himself in love with her? Had he wanted Cloverleigh? Or had he merely decided that stealing her away would cause greater pain to Beckenham than a bullet wound could ever do?

Oh, her mind buzzed with speculation and worry. She was too restless to sit inside and mind her stitches. The day was a fine one, so she went to see if Violet would accompany her on a ride.

She found Violet taking tea with Lady Arden and two young gentlemen, who rose upon her arrival in the drawing room.

“Oh!” said Georgie. “I didn’t realize we had callers. How do you do?”

Good Gracious, Lady Arden wasn’t letting the grass grow when it came to securing a husband for Violet. Georgie recognized Mr. Wootton and Lord Palmer as two of the most eligible young bachelors in the county.