He stood tall and handsome, his lips dark and glistening from the pleasures he had just visited upon her. She forced herself to her feet, disliking the way he towered over her. Disliking herself most of all.
“Don’t what?” she asked, frowning.
She had been intimate with this handsome, unnerving stranger. How absurd it all seemed.
He watched her, his countenance unreadable. “Don’t feel guilty for living. It’ll eat you alive, from the inside out.” And then he bowed. Bowed as if they had just met and shared a dance in a ballroom instead of doing the wicked things they had done. As if he had not just seen into the heart of her where she’d believed no one else was capable of looking.
“Your servant, Marchioness,” he added.
With that, he turned his back on her and walked from the salon, leaving her alone with her flickering candles and regrets. Shaken, Pamela retrieved her dressing gown and fastened it with trembling fingers. Her folio and porte-crayon mocked her from the chaise longue, a reminder of her true intention in coming to the salon. Grimly, she snatched them up before snuffing out the candles and making her way to her chamber through darkened halls.
Ensconced in her bed at last, Pamela fell quickly into a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER9
Another uneventful night—at least in terms of intruders—had passed at Hunt House. Theo finished speaking with the last of his guards stationed in the passages below the terrace, confirming that there hadn’t been any attempts to enter the home through the evening and early-morning hours. Mind still preoccupied with those stolen, forbidden moments with Lady Deering in the salon, he thanked his men and told them to retire to their beds in the carriage house for a few hours’ rest. He would watch the perimeter this cool, crisp morning because he needed the solitude, the chance for reflection.
Alone in the passage, he checked the three exterior doors, trying to keep his body and his mind equally occupied so that his thoughts wouldn’t return toher.
His Marchioness.
Not his, not truly. He had left her in a furor of pent-up need, sought out his lonely bed, and had immediately stroked himself to completion before falling into a deep, sated slumber the likes of which he hadn’t known in as long as he could recall.
His reaction to her vexed him. Because he saw himself in her, because he somehow, instinctivelyknewher. Not just the taste of her on his tongue, the way her body responded to his. But in a far-more-profound sense. And he couldn’t afford to form attachments to anyone. Most especially not to brokenhearted widows.
As he reached the final door, the need to step outside and breathe in the moist, foggy air overwhelmed him. He thrust back the latch and found himself on one of the many gravel paths wending through the gardens. The erotic dream of the night had given way to a bleak morning. Mist was falling blearily from a leaden sky.
A cold breeze whipped his too-long hair across his face, and he found himself recalling Lady Deering’s hands grasping the strands, tugging, the way she’d undulated beneath him with breathy gasps and low moans that sounded as if they had been wrung from the very depths of her soul. At the thought, his prick went half-hard in his trousers, despite all the reasons why he knew he must not surrender to temptation again.
If only she’d told him her given name. He wished to know her as something more familiar than Marchioness or Lady Deering. But that was a dangerous desire, too, one which should be ignored just like all the others in relation to her.
A sudden flurry of movement in his peripheral vision alerted Theo to the fact that he wasn’t alone before the crunching footfalls did. He slid his hand inside his coat, hand unerringly finding the hilt of his dagger. And the instinct was a correct one, the urge to reach for his weapon, because the person who emerged from the other side of the boxwood hedge was indeed his opposition.
Lady Deering drew to a halt when she spied him on the path, the creamy jaconet muslin of her gown fluttering about her ankles. She was wearing a jaunty little bonnet atop her golden hair and a copper-colored spencer that only served to emphasize the luscious curves of her breasts. Scarcely any time had passed since they had parted in the candlelit salon, but his body reacted to the sight of her as if it had been starved.
He forced himself to bow. “My lady.”
She was carrying a basket, the handles resting in the crook of her elbow as she dipped into a small, answering curtsy. “Sir.”
Her formality did nothing to quell the rising tide of desire within him. He looked at her and recalled her sweet scent, the musk of her desire mingling with the clean, floral fresh soap she must use to bathe. He remembered how wet she’d been, sleek and hot, pulsing on his tongue.
Theo swallowed hard. “I trust I’m not disturbing you, Marchioness?”
She blinked, as if she too were caught in the same sensual spell. “Of course not. I thought to harvest some rosemary, thyme, and sweet marjoram before the frost takes it. I keep a small patch of herbs in the eastern corner of the garden.”
She was speaking quickly, as if she were in a hurry to be freed of his company, and he did not miss the twin patches of pink staining her cheeks. But he couldn’t blame her for the shyness; he was feeling a bit of his own this morning. He hadn’t expected to cross paths with her again so soon either. Hadn’t thought, last night, beyond the desperate need of those wild moments when his face had been between her legs and he’d been making them both mindless. He hoped to hell she didn’t regret allowing herself the freedom of feeling. She’d been drawn tighter than a knot.
Theo seized on her words, trying to remain unaffected by the longing that threatened to consume him. “You keep herbs?”
The notion of her toiling in the soil intrigued him as much as it surprised Theo. Many years ago, when he’d been a lad in Boritania, his mother had kept a small garden just beyond the royal apartments, in the inner courtyard. He harbored a few sacred memories of sunlight and salt air, his mother’s lilting voice humming as she tended her flowers. When she had been imprisoned in the castle dungeons, the gardens had been the first of many things that were important to her which his uncle had destroyed.
“I do,” Lady Deering said softly now, pulling him back from the relentless grip of the past and all its demons. “Would you care to help me with the cuttings?”
Her invitation shocked him as much as her appearance on the path had.
There was something about her this morning, he thought, that was different. There was a softness about her that had been previously absent. And he found himself wanting to conserve that softness. To keep it there. To please her any way he could. For he had the impression that the Marchioness of Deering was a woman who had denied herself far too many times in her grief.
“If you wish it, my lady,” he allowed, not particularly eager for the memories he might have to confront watching her harvest her herbs.
