God help him.
*
Once he hadreturned to the carriage and it began to move, neither of them spoke. She had her book out again and he wanted to rip it from her hands. She was even holding that infernal pen, as if he hadn’t told her what her ink-stained fingers did to him. Was she trying to entice him? Or just trying to read? She was impossible. How could she sit there, reading about people who had been dead for a thousand years, when he was struggling to breathe?
He knew he needed to start the discussion about what had happened last night. He needed to tell her it could never happen again. He couldn’t approach it face on, however. He wanted some indication first that she felt anything for him at all other than indifference. After last night, he knew she must feelsomething, even if it was just the most banal of lusts, but her manner right now confounded him. He had never seen her so cool and collected. He had considered her poised before, but thishauteurwas unknown to him. Was this how she behaved after being pleasured? He had never known a woman to react in such a way.
He needed to master himself. He needed to make her understand that the past made anything between them impossible.
“What are you reading?” He felt confident that this overture, at least, was a safe start.
“It’s your book. So surely you know.”
“Just because I own it doesn’t mean I have read it.” He heard the scowl in his voice but was unable—like so much else—to control it. “I think my father bought them.”
He had said it without thinking. She looked down at the book, which had been comfortably tucked in her lap, as if it had betrayed her. He half expected her to fling it from the carriage. Instead she merely kept her eyes on the pages, once again not responding to him at all.
Bollocks.Everything he said was wrong.
“Are you still working on your history book?”
“What?” Her eyes flew off the page and to his face.
“You said—at Tremberley—that you were writing a book.”
“Yes.” Her eyes widened but her tone remained neutral. “It’s not finished. I have published a few short histories in newspapers under the name C.M. Forster. They don’t want a woman publishing such things, you know, and it’s easier to request higher payment when they think I am a man.”
He could have read one of her articles in the past seven years without knowing it. The idea mingled pleasure and pain. It angered him that she didn’t feel safe publishing as herself. As if a person needed to be a man in order to write a goddamned newspaper article.
“Newspapermen are bigoted fools,” he bit off.
She merely raised her eyebrows in response.
He shrugged but his mind was whirring.
It felt good to abuse someone, anyone, to relieve the tension inside him. And he was always happy to deride the monsters who had written such horrible things about his mother, his father, his sister (and himself and his friends, for that matter) and would continue to do so if they got the chance. Then it occurred to him that they would do the same toher, the beautiful, intelligent woman sitting across from him, if they could. They would rip her soft flesh from her delectable body and not even pay her to do it. She couldn’t put her real name below her little histories of England but they would splash it across the papers for the sake of scandal.
“I am hoping to collect them into a volume, eventually, for sale,” she continued, her manner making clear that she didn’t care what he was brooding about, “but I don’t have enough yet. I have about two dozen, not enough for a book. I need to visit more sites, but, with my current pecuniary limitations…”
“Is that what you will do with the money? The ten thousand pounds?”
“In part.” As she said the words, her lips curled in a little smile.
It occurred to him, not for the first time, that she might have a lover. Could she have a loverandhave ridden him like that last night? Of course, he thought, he shouldn’t be naïve. How else would she have learned how to find her pleasure with such skill? She hadn’t seemed like an innocent, he realized for the first time. Her kiss had been too scorching. Her response to him too ready.
“You have plans.” He worked to keep his tone dry. “A lover, perhaps? You could marry him with this money if he isn’t a man of means.”
“A lover?” she said faintly, looking up from her page again.
“I’m not a fool. You made perfectly clear last night that you have had lovers. I’m not a schoolboy.”
She studied him for a moment and then burst into laughter.
“Lovers?”
“I don’t see what’s so comical.” He shifted in his seat. He really didn’t, especially as she was now laughing hysterically and wiping tears from her eyes. She repeated the phrase, “Spinster whore,” between breaths.
He wanted to command her to stop laughing and to repeat that he had never called her a “spinster whore,” but he suspected that would only make her laugh more. And damn her, but of course he found her gasping and shifting arousing.
