But that would have to wait for a more opportune moment than when he sat at the table with his maiden sisters, servants hovering at their elbows. How he longed for privacy. To have her alone. For her to be his alone. If she loved him, surely there was a way he could convince her to give them both what they wanted.
“Crispin, will you not try Miss Turnbow’s cheesecake?” Nora asked him then, tearing him from the wicked bent of his thoughts—a constant state, he was afraid, whether he was in Jacinda’s company or removed from it. “I promise you, it will be the very best thing you have ever eaten.”
Oh, he very much doubted so. But he wisely kept that reflection to himself.
Slowly, his sister’s words pierced the perpetual fog of lust clouding his brain. He looked down at the creamy dessert before him. Ordinarily, he did not eat desserts, preferring spirits to sweets in an effort to preserve his flat middle. But this—what Nora had just said—gave him pause.
His gaze fell back upon Jacinda. Damnation, she was lovely even back in her governess weeds and that infernal cap. Hers was a beauty that burned from the inside out, uncontainable. “You…madethis, Miss Turnbow?”
The notion was almost impossible to comprehend. Rusty as he was in the ways of polite society, he knew that ladies did not toil in the Cook’s domain. His mother had never stepped foot inside the kitchens of Whitley House in her entire tenure as duchess. How was it that whilst he had been thinking of her and moping about like a love-starved greenhorn, she had been baking a bloody confection?
“Yes, Your Grace,” she said softly, her brilliant gaze still avoiding his. The pink kissing her delicate cheeks deepened.
He could not look away. She had been belowstairs. In the kitchens.Working.Like a servant.
Because she was one. Or at any rate, she was a slight step above one. Such was the place of the governess, not truly part of the family and yet not completely a servant, hovering in social purgatory. Belonging nowhere and to no one.
He knew all this, of course. But the stark evidence of it, lying seductively on a plate before him, gave him pause. As did the thought of her toiling in the kitchens, her capable hands whipping together her ingredients. For a brief, shameful moment, he imagined approaching her from behind as she was distracted by her task, lifting her skirts and gripping her hips, sliding his cock home inside her. Kissing her neck, tearing open the front of her gown so that he could palm a breast and tease a hungry nipple.
“Crispin?”
He tore his gaze from Jacinda, settling it instead upon Con. “Yes, Con?”
“You have yet to take even a forkful,” she pointed out. “Do you wish to pay Miss Turnbow insult?”
He cleared his throat, wondering when in the hell the minx had begun chiding him for his cursed manners. “Forgive me.” He forked a small portion of the cake and brought it to his mouth.
The instant the creamy sweet reached his tongue, he suppressed a moan of delight.Beelzebub and hellfire, the woman knew how to make a divine dessert. But of course she would. Did her skills know no bounds? Would her allure never end? For while he had certainly never imagined that a woman’s culinary skills might give him a cockstand, hers did. That she could use her dainty hands to produce something so masterful and delicious appealed to him in a fashion he could not have previously envisioned.
She was not just intelligent and kind and good and beautiful, not just giving and compassionate, but also capable and useful. She was the sort of woman who was unstoppable, and he wondered how in heaven’s name she had ever found herself in her current predicament, earning her bread at the mercy of others. It occurred to him while he knew her body quite well, he had yet to learn her story.
He swallowed the bite of soft, rich decadence. “Miss Turnbow, this is indeed perfection.”
Much like you.
He left those three, troubling words unspoken.
If his gaze was overly fond and warm when it found her once more, he did not give a damn. He wanted her to see the way he felt for her. Hiding it felt more and more like a travesty with each day that passed, particularly when she had been so generous with her heart.
A pleased smile curved her lips. “Thank you, Your Grace.”
He would have said anything just to be the recipient of that smile. Damnation, she took his breath.
“Miss Turnbow makes the best sweets,” Nora said, recalling his attention to her. She grinned like the imp she was.
A foreign sensation settled in his chest as he sat there, forking up another bite of Jacinda’s heavenly cheesecake, his sisters happier than he had seen them since his return from war. He was filled with so much bloody pleasure and yes—damn it all—happiness that a realization struck him.
This wasright. The four of them, seated round the table, smiling and joyful and content. It was a family.Family.The word echoed in his mind. He had not been part of a family since before he purchased his commission and left for war. But now, the notion took root like a seed, sprouting.
And that was the precise moment he knew, on his second bite of orange cheesecake with Jacinda’s sherry eyes twinkling into his, he was going to marry her. It was the only way. He could not let her go, and she belonged here at Whitley House. She belonged with him, at his side, as his equal.
As his wife.
The realization sucked the breath from his lungs. He ate the rest of the bloody cheesecake in a haze as he worked out the particulars of what he needed to do.
*
Jacinda stood onthe threshold of Crispin’s study, the knowledge of what she needed to do swirling a sick tide of bile in her stomach. Had it just been a mere day ago she had dressed in a gown she could never dream of affording and made love with him as though their days together were endless? It was so far away now, so far removed and untouchable it could have been a lifetime ago instead.
