Courtney Milan Read online

  The first time he’d seen her, she’d been sitting at a pianoforte, preparing to play. She hadn’t looked at anyone or anything, not even the sheet music in front of her. She had simply sat, seeming so distant and far away.

  Then she had begun to play, and John had been utterly lost. It wouldn’t have mattered who she was or where she’d come from. He’d heard her play, and that was the end of all rational thought. And so he’d pursued her as assiduously as he’d ever done anything, holding his breath the entire time. He understood machinery and chemicals and germination; all he knew about women was that they giggled when he came near.

  But Mary hadn’t giggled. She’d smiled. They’d talked. Conversation had led to courtship.

  And then one night, he’d handed her down from a carriage and found himself utterly unable to relinquish her fingers. His other hand had stolen about her waist, and he’d pulled her to him until her skirts surrounded his legs. He’d set his lips to her neck, not quite daring to touch her mouth.

  But she’d turned her head, letting him kiss her.

  They hadn’t said anything. They had only breathed in tandem, wanting, and he’d known then that he would ask her to marry him—and that she would say yes.

  He wasn’t good with women, but he’d thought that moment was real. When he found out she’d lied to him…

  That space between waking and sleep was slippery. It took the fury that he’d worked so hard to maintain during the day and turned it sideways. He couldn’t work himself into a rage. He couldn’t sustain any emotion more lasting than regret. Longing and anger twined together, and as usual, he drifted into sleep…and a dream that gave voice to desires he had not fully relinquished. He didn’t want just a kiss, but an embrace. He didn’t imagine the entwining of their gloved hands, but their bare bodies, skin to skin.

  He could almost feel the warmth of her body next to his. But this time, there was no threat of discovery, no need to restrain himself. He didn’t need to be angry with this version of Mary. She was nothing but a dream, nothing but phantom caresses, haunting kisses.

  She was naked, as women in sensual dreams often were. She trailed her hands down his chest to touch his navel, the waistband of his loose trousers. Somehow, his dream shifted to some nondescript bed in a nameless room. In the way of dreams, she straddled him—soft and warm, a welcome weight on top of his hips. He was hard beneath her, hard and desperate.

  But for all her brazen nakedness, dream-Mary’s touch was hesitant. She didn’t grab his member (alas) or take him inside her (double alas). She touched her fingertips to him—lightly, in threes.

  It reminded him of watching her play the pianoforte that first time—as if she were finding chords on his body. If only he could listen well enough, he might make out the melody. But his dream was silent…and still too chaste.

  “Ah God, Mary,” he said. “Put me out of my misery already, and suck my cock.”

  Speaking shattered the pretense of dreaming. He’d said those words aloud—he could feel his vocal chords vibrating in a way that brought him back to reality.

  The moment before he opened his eyes seemed impossibly long. It wasn’t some indeterminate bed under him, but the sofa in the front room at Oak Cottage. The night air was still warm around him, disturbed by the soft sounds of wind. And there was someone atop him.

  His hands rested on hips. Warm, bare skin met his fingers. Muscles tensed in those hips, and the weight shifted above him.

  He fought for consciousness, breaking into wakefulness, and opened his eyes.

  “Holy Mother of Christ,” he swore, pushing himself up on his elbows.

  Because Mary was really here. She was naked on top of him. And she’d only hesitated that instant before her hands went to the drawstring of his trousers, no doubt to implement his last command.

  It was her eyes that shocked the last vestiges of drowsiness from him. They were pale and flat, entirely devoid of desire.

  He caught her hands at his waist, pulled away from her, and pounded his fist into the cushion of the sofa in sheer sexual frustration. “I swear on Ovid and the Bible. What the hell are you doing, Mary?”

  You don’t have to stop her.

  Yes. Yes, he did.

  “I’m delivering a full accounting,” she said. No tone in her voice. None at all. She removed her hands from his and reached for his trousers once more. “Shall I continue?”

  He brushed her hand away. “I was asleep. I didn’t mean what I said.” But his cock thrummed, putting the lie to his words. “And what do you mean, a full accounting? I don’t want your…your person.” More lies. He tried to concentrate on her face, but he couldn’t help but take in all of her—those small, round breasts, so close to his face; the curve of her side in the moonlight. Christ alive.

  She raised her chin. “But it won’t balance without me. That’s what I came here to tell you. Would you like to know where all that money went? It went to a select finishing school in Vienna. It paid for journeys to and fro—for a private companion, and a German tutor, and lessons on the pianoforte from a true master. My father knew I loved playing, and so spared no expense. He stole all that money for me.”

  God, those words sounded so bitter.

  “Ah, Mary.” He wasn’t sure what to think, what to say.

  “All that money, and now the only thing of value that I have is—”

  He put his hand over her mouth, but she moved away.

  Her chin rose. “I know the way of the world better than I once did. I’m not a lady any longer. Everything about me can be traded. My labor. My time.” Her voice faltered, but she drew a deep breath. “My body.”

  And a very lovely body it was. He didn’t mean to keep looking at her, but the faint starlight from the window illuminated everything to her waist. And as for the portions below, hidden in shadow—they were inches from his hands. He could explore them, find out everything that was cloaked by darkness. She’d always smelled of sugared lemon, and this time, if he tasted her, she wouldn’t stop him.

  Hell, she’d just volunteered for the task. It wouldn’t even be wrong. Well, maybe only a little wrong.

  “Bloody temptation.” He pushed himself to his feet and strode back to the bedchamber. “Stupid, bloody cock,” he muttered, giving the offending organ a thump. It made no response. “No morals to speak of.” Still rock-hard. Still desperate. Reprimands, clearly, did no good. He yanked a blanket from his bed and marched back into the front room.

  She was sitting up and watching him, her arms crossed over her breasts.

  He dumped the blanket over her shoulders, covering up all that luminous, tempting skin. He could still smell her.

  “Christ,” he muttered and grabbed a chair from across the room. This he placed a good two feet away from her, and then he sat.

  She didn’t say anything. Silence enveloped him. Her breath was shallow.

  “Calm yourself. I’m not going to accept your offer.” Which was a true act of heroism. “I don’t hate you that much.”

  She didn’t look at him. She wasn’t even really hearing what he said, he realized. “I know it can’t make up for what you lost,” she was saying. “I’m simply sick, thinking of those thousands of pounds just stuck in my skin with no way to give them back. It wouldn’t be enough, but can’t you just…take it anyway?”

  Couldn’t he, though? For a moment, he indulged in a fantasy. He could make it good for her. So good, she’d lose the flat intonation in her voice. She’d smile again, a warm smile that would encompass her eyes. He’d be generous, and she’d be happy, and…

  And that was lust talking again, not logic. How exactly would that happen? Because he had a cock made of magic? Unlikely.

  Temptation was a bleeding monster.

  He sighed and reached forward, wrapping the blanket more firmly about her shoulders. “It would be like trading oranges for moonlight.” He tucked one corner about her waist like a belt. “Besides, even if the exchange had made sense, it wasn’t my money at risk.
It was my nephew’s. He’s seven years old.”

  She looked up at that. Their eyes met, and this time, he wasn’t even sure what passed between them.

  “How awkward,” she finally said.

  Her hand rested on the cushion next to her. Her fingers moved, making unconscious chords. This time, if he listened, he could almost hear the music—a sonata by Mendelssohn he had once heard her play.

  “I can’t make this right.” Her voice was low.

  “Maybe,” he suggested, “if you tell me everything that happened…”

  “I—” She choked on the remaining words. Her shoulders trembled. Her breathing grew even more ragged, and she pulled her arms around her, swaying from side to side. “It was—”

  If this was an act, she had incredible control over her body. Tremors passed through her in waves, too swift to be manufactured. She let out another shaky breath, and looked over at him. “Can’t you just…take me,” she asked, “so that I no longer have to fear the worst?”

  Whatever his body might have preferred, the word fear killed the remainder of his desire. “I don’t take women to bed who are dreading the experience,” he said bitterly.

  She lied to you. She stole. She cheated. She’s hiding something, and she’s using her body to do it.

  All quite possibly true. But he hadn’t lied to her earlier when he said that he saw systems. And this one—his understanding of Mary—no longer seemed to hang together. It was a mess of discordant notes, of impossibilities and unlikelihoods. It was a tangle of lust and—as he watched her shoulders heave under the weight of his blanket—unfortunate affection, diluted by a good measure of anger.

  He didn’t know anything any longer.

  She had never seemed so impossibly far away as she did at that moment—naked, and two feet away from him. He could have had her body, but Mary herself—whoever she was—had vanished. And for the first time, he realized that this wasn’t just about the money. It was about the truth. About the words she’d said that still smarted.

  I don’t love you.

  “Come,” he said. “It’s late, and we’re both rather worked up. Get dressed, and I’ll see you back to Doyle’s Grange. We’ll talk on the morrow. And, Mary…”

  She looked up at him.

  He held out his hand. “Stop dreading. This is me we’re talking about. I should think you’d know me better than this.”

  Chapter Five

  MORNING CAME, AND WITH IT a full slate of duties for John. Yesterday’s digging had brought a new round of chores, none of them interesting. The tile drains that had been installed in the upper fields years ago were laid too shallow. They’d cracked, and were poorly positioned besides. Supervising their replacement would take weeks. He would have resented the time twenty-four hours ago; now, he suspected he would need every extra day to try to entangle the business of Mary.

  As he plodded along the hill, just under the line of trees, he had to wonder how Mary fared on the other side. Had she been caught returning to the house at the dead of night?

  And more importantly…

  He took a shovel from one of the men, more than happy to throw himself into physical labor. But the repetitive motion didn’t distract him from his thoughts; instead, it focused them, bouncing them off one another in a repeating echo in his head.

  Mary’s behavior last night had left him with a welter of emotions. Anger. Sadness. Physical lust so powerful that he’d had to take care of himself not once, but twice, after she’d left. He’d been so surprised—and so randy—that he’d not had time to consider what her actions meant. But now, with nothing to do but shovel dirt, he considered. And slowly, over the course of the ever-growing ditch, he grew suspicious.

  He might think a great many ill things about Mary. But if she’d been the sort to try to cloud his mind by offering up her body, wouldn’t she have tried it back in Southampton? He might explain her behavior by calling her an amoral, greedy slut—but if she truly had been one, wouldn’t she have found it more profitable to throw herself at him eighteen months ago?

  If she’d been able to fake that careful, innocent unfurling of passion that they’d begun to explore during their betrothal, she could easily have inveigled him into marriage. He’d been loath to let her go, and so enamored of her that a touch, a kiss, an entreaty would have bought her everything.

  But she hadn’t even asked. She’d fled to this—a life of demeaning service.

  And then there was the matter of her eyes—the way she’d set forth her plan to provide compensation in the form of her person. Nothing about her history—born into a well-to-do family, pampered, showered with affection and cosseted at every turn—would have brought her to his bed in that way.

  The girl he had once known wouldn’t even have considered offering her body. Not only had she not known such desperation, it wouldn’t have crossed her mind to see herself as currency. To see it so much that she’d begged him to take her, to free herself of debt.

  No. There were no two ways about it. If the Mary he had known—the sweet, sheltered girl who had loved to play the pianoforte—had become this woman, it was because something had happened between now and the time he’d last seen her.

  In these last eighteen months, someone had done a grave harm to Mary. His fists clenched around his shovel at the thought; he slammed the tool into the ground with such force that it clanged against the old tile a foot beneath the soil.

  Maybe she had brought it on herself.

  But he couldn’t believe it. Even if she’d lied and cheated and stolen, it wouldn’t justify what he’d seen last night.

  She’d been willing to offer him her body in exchange for his silence. What threat could he make that would wrest the truth from her? Nothing he would consider doing to her was as bad as what she’d been willing to do to herself. No, if he wanted to have the full truth from her, he wasn’t going to get it by yelling and blustering.

  “God damn it,” he swore.

  “Your pardon, sir?” They’d dug far enough to reposition new tile, John realized. And he’d spoken aloud. The laborer who stood next to him was frowning in consternation.

  “Ah, nothing.” He stared up the hill, at the cottage he couldn’t see. “I think, though, that I have…”

  Why was he making excuses to this man? The laborer was used to working with Beauregard, who couldn’t see fit to bestir himself from his house before nine in the morning.

  “I have other things to see to,” he said. “Up until we hit that little rise up there—just dig up the old and lay the new flat. I’ll want to look it over before it’s covered again.”

  A grunt was the only reply.

  He didn’t need more. He left to wash his hands—and to make his way up the hill to find some answers.

  IT WAS A MORNING precisely like yesterday morning: The sun was hot in the sky, breakfast was spread on the table, and Mary sat in the shade of the rowan.

  It all felt fragile and unreal to her, as if her mouth were full of cotton. As if she were encased in a bubble of false, cozy normalcy, and the slightest pinprick would send her crashing down.

  “Falls of lace,” Lady Patsworth was saying, “thrice gathered over undersleeves of brocaded silk—”

  Sir Walter stopped abruptly. “What in blazes is he doing here?”

  Mary looked up. There was her pinprick—not just one, but a dozen vicious points of cold, pressing into her skin. John Mason was coming up the road; she could see him over the low hedge.

  She wasn’t sure whether what had happened the previous night had been ill luck or good. In the firm light of day, she wasn’t even sure it had really transpired. She remembered the events of the evening as if she’d read them in a story—as if they’d occurred in some strange, distant person’s life. Another woman; not her. But John was coming. It had really happened to her.

  Ill luck. It had all been ill luck. She had no idea how Sir Walter would take the news that John had to deliver. The truth of what she’d done last night woul
d get her sacked, and no magistrate would listen to her claim for back wages if they heard that sordid tale. Without realizing what she was doing at first, she closed her hand around the silver teaspoon by her plate, hiding it away in her fist, as if she might secret it in the folds of her skirts.

  Don’t be a fool. Of all the things you are, at least you’re not a thief. Not yet.

  Sir Walter stood as John came up to the garden gate and moved to put himself between the table and the intruder.

  “Mr. Mason,” he said in clipped tones. “How may I be of assistance?”

  He was standing in the way. She couldn’t see John’s face with Sir Walter standing there. Was he angry? Or did he think that what transpired last night was a mere amusement? She could just imagine that smile she’d once adored creeping up. This time, though, the joke would be on her.

  “I noted the good care you took of your ladies yesterday.”

  If the morning hadn’t been so silent, Mary might not have made out John’s reply. She concentrated, so as to catch every word.

  “I don’t know if the women of your household go out walking,” he said, “but I’ll be directing laborers on the neighboring field for the next few days. You might want to have them turn away from the west, if you would.”

  Sir Walter rubbed his hand against his head, a gesture that Mary recognized as confusion. She felt similarly dazed. He wasn’t going to disclose what had happened?

  Stop dreading. He couldn’t have meant it, though. Not really.

  John continued. “I’ve heard from Beauregard that you’re protective in that regard, so I thought I’d pass along the information.”

  “Thank you,” Sir Walter said. “It was most considerate of you to bring that message.”

  “We’ll be tromping around in the trees near the windbreak until sunset—and possibly after.” She still couldn’t see him with the gate and Sir Walter in the way. But he’d said last night that they would talk. Clearly this was his way of letting her know when and where. Not a reprieve, then. A temporary cease-fire.