Damn him. ‘No.’ She looked him full in the face again, and she knew that if there was longing in her eyes despite everything, he would be able to see it.
‘So I may not kiss your delectable lips, but with your consent, I may throw you down on that sofa there andtakeyounow? For example?’
Trust him to put it into words, when she had only thought it. Her voice was almost level, but not quite. ‘If you wish.’
‘If I wish… Viola, you know I have always wanted you. Whatever else has changed, that has not.’ They were chest to chest now, their bodies almost touching, then touching at last, and their breathing was coming faster. Whatever this was, they both felt it.
The tips of her suddenly aching breasts brushed his coat, and she could feel him pressing hard and insistent against the softness of her belly. Heat was pooling there, and lower. ‘Well, then, my lord. My fecundity, as you so kindly pointed out, is so prodigious that I could be with child before we were even wed. Today. Now, before you quit this room. Think of the trouble it would save.’
He let out a crack of laughter. ‘I’m not convinced that I want to save that kind of trouble. If we marry and we time it correctly, for which I depend on you, I will have at the very least a few weeks in your bed before we could be confident of the desired outcome. Whatever else I may doubt in our immediate future, I do not doubt that there would be a great deal of mutual pleasure in that. More – and I cannot believe I am saying this when the immediate prospect is so damn tempting – than fucking you hard and fast on a sofa and then leaving you.’
‘Leaving me, at least, is something you have practice at.’ This was something she had been determined not to say, but it had slipped out.
He reached out again and captured a tear from her lashes, and then, unforgivably, raised it to his lips and tasted it with the tip of his tongue. She had tried so hard not to cry, and he must draw attention to it.
‘I know,’ he murmured. ‘My dear, I do. But it will be the last time I do so, our circumstances being so changed. Soon, you are to be my wife. Mine. And still we have not found a way to seal our bargain. You say we cannot kiss, but a cool handshake will hardly do, I fear.’
Desire was so bound up with anger and regret in her, and with the weight of so many long years of loneliness, loneliness that stretched far back before Edward’s death, that she could not answer him. She wished he had put her over the sofa as he’d said, where she could not see his face nor he hers. She wished he’d pulled up her skirts and freed himself and taken her. Fucked her, hard and fast. It would have stopped her, at least for as long as it lasted, fromthinking. From remembering.
Their eyes locked.
He put his hands upon her waist, where her stays ended. She knew he could feel that; through the material of the gown and petticoats that covered her, his thumb traced the line where the stiffened fabric of her corset met her soft, warm flesh, with only one layer beneath it: her fine lawn shift, covering her belly. Her thighs. Her core.
His touch was irresistible, despite everything. ‘You want to seal our bargain, Richard? Do it, then. Make me forget for a little while. Use your clever fingers and give me a downpayment on all that pleasure you so rashly promised me.’
They were moving before she’d finished speaking. He backed her against the wall, his strong body pressing her to it, and dragged up her skirts with one efficient movement. She parted her thighs eagerly and his hand slipped between them, covering her, cupping her sex. His hand was warm; her body was hotter. She pressed herself against him, urging him on, and his fingers slipped between her lips. He did not taunt her by telling her how wet she was, how swollen her bud, how ready for him despite all her reservations. But when he felt it all, he swore and sank to his knees, his hands hard on her thighs. And as she leaned back against the wall of her private sanctuary and closed her eyes, he began devouring her. He was not slow or subtle; he ate her with a barely controlled fierceness that had her hoping, while she was still capable of coherent thought, that when he had done with this, he would not be able to prevent himself from unbuttoning himself and taking her, here against this wall, on the sofa or on the floor, she didn’t care which, and spending inside her, even though he’d said he wouldn’t. That would feel like some sort of victory, to break the iron control it seemed he had over himself, and she did not.
She came with shocking suddenness, biting the pad of her thumb to suppress her moans, but he did not stop, mercilessly prolonging her pleasure, and only when she began to fear that her legs would no longer support her did she put her hand on his forehead and push him away, not trusting herself to speak. She felt light-headed, sated, and ashamed of herself. She couldn’t know what he was feeling. Triumphant, perhaps – she did not look for confirmation of it in his face. He’d got what he’d wanted, her submission, and he knew she was vulnerable to him still. But then, he’d known that already – or he’d never have written to her.
And then he rose to his feet, kissed her hand and left without a word.
5
It was easy enough to arrange a marriage, it seemed, when both parties were fully of age and the gentleman, even if he could not afford to restore a large, neglected estate in the north of England, could afford an expensive special licence. Viola was not privy to Lord Ventris’s negotiations with the Archbishop of Canterbury (or, more realistically, some representative of his), but if either of those clergymen entertained any qualms, they overcame them, and the licence was granted without difficulty. Ventris’s dubious reputation was apparently not grounds enough for refusal, perhaps because he was a peer now too, a member of the House of Lords, and therefore a person of influence and consequence.
Viola knew she had Sabrina’s support in her equivocal undertaking; she now had the more difficult task of speaking to her mother. She didn’t need her approval, but in common courtesy, she must tell her, and she couldn’t put it off any longer. This would result, she knew, in something uncomfortably close to an interrogation. If a career had been open to her and matchmaker was not considered a profession, her mama could have made a success at the head of Bonaparte’s secret police.
Mrs Constantine, who had been a widow for some years now, lived in a small rented house in Bloomsbury with her three younger daughters, their family estate having gone to a cousin. She had a modest jointure, which would not by itself have been enough to support life in London nor the cost of the younger girls’ come-outs; Sabrina, Viola and their next sister Allegra split the bulk of the family’s expenses between them, and so they went on very well. Nobody could doubt that soon enough, another Miss Constantine would be respectably betrothed, despite their lack of fortune, humble birth and unfashionable residence.
The Duchess found her mother alone when she called in Great Russell Street a couple of days after her encounter with Ventris. She hadn’t seen him since, but he’d been keeping her updated with his progress by note, and they had discussed their plans by this medium, which was perhaps easier than face to face, given what had happened last time they’d met. It seemed the marriage was really happening. Tomorrow morning, early, they would be visiting their lawyers together.
‘Mother,’ she said abruptly, ‘I’m getting married.’
Mrs Constantine had never been one for the social niceties or for any form of pretence. Though she had by the sheer force of her personality found good husbands for two of her daughters and made a most spectacular match for Viola, she hadn’t done it through toadying manners or bowing and scraping to her social superiors. Perhaps she’d simply frightened the gentlemen into offering, or mesmerised them till they were utterly in her power.
‘Sabrina informed me that you had had a proposal,’ Leontina said calmly. ‘And of course, I have heard the gossip about Brummell, which I was not foolish enough to believe.’ She had set down her needlework upon her daughter’s entrance and sat looking at her with sharp, dark eyes. The room was a little shabby, as London lodgings often were, but no one was likely to notice that when she was present, and she did not give a fig about such things herself. ‘I should have realised that you would be vulnerable now that Emily Naismith has left you and you are all alone to brood. Why are you doing this, Viola? Please do not tell me that you are in love with him, whoever he is.’
‘I would not dream of telling you that, Mama,’ she said, feeling herself flushing as though she were eighteen again. ‘That is an obvious absurdity. It is Lord Ventris – Edward’s cousin, who was Mr Richard Armstrong. He has recently inherited an estate and title, but by some quirk of his aunt’s will, he cannot gain the money to support it unless he marries and has a child within eighteen months.’
‘I see why he offers for you; it is eminently sensible of him, so clearly he has a brain in his head. But I do not see why you accept him. You are as secure in life as any woman can ever hope to be, and you have your freedom besides.’
‘The boys need a father, and he is the only man I can trust to care for them as Edward did. Also, I… I’m tired of being alone now they’re growing up. It’s nothing to do with Emily making a life for herself, as she is quite entitled to do. I’m sure she wants a baby before it is too late, and I’d like another child myself.’ Leontina was intimidating even to her own daughters; Viola never felt less like a grown woman with children and responsibilities of her own than when she was in her mother’s astringent presence, struggling to explain herself.
Mrs Constantine considered her dispassionately. ‘Such folly. I speak of you, not Emily, of course; she has done well. I suppose it is of no use telling you to take up a hobby to fill your time. Watercolour drawing, perhaps, or philanthropy. Horticulture. Bee-keeping. No? I understand this man has a very poor reputation indeed, even if one discounts half the gossip, but I see that you are prepared to overlook it. You’ve always been impulsive; it is a fault. Have you told the boys yet?’
‘Not yet. I mean to go and see them tomorrow and tell them in person, after we have met with the lawyers and agreed on the drawing-up of the papers. And then I’ll go home to Winterflood. I hope you’ll come, Mama, and bring the girls. Sabrina and Laurence are coming. We’re to marry there; his estate is too far for everyone to travel, and besides needs extensive renovations to make it more habitable. He wrote to tell me that his aunt, despite her wealth, was allowing the castle to fall down around her ears in recent years. She was too old and stubborn to manage it as she should.’ Before the end of this rather breathless and unnecessarily long speech, Viola was disagreeably aware of her own voice echoing fatuously in her ears. She ceased abruptly.
‘As long as he does all this work with his own money and not yours. But do you think Winterflood is a good idea? Might it not be simpler to be married in London?’
