He looked down at her. Her mask still covered half her face, hiding her identity, but it couldn’t hide the wonder and the sadness of those bright eyes. He felt an instant desire to ease the second, to encourage the first. As a rake who had lazily fucked his way through life until now, neither was a comfortable desire. And yet he couldn’t resist somehow.
“It wasn’t with your husband?” he asked while he gently untangled a chestnut curl from the tie of her mask.
Her lips thinned and the sadness in her increased. “We had an arranged marriage. I was very young, he was…well, he wasn’t. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t trouble you with all this.”
“I asked. I want to know, if you want to share.”
She let out a shaky sigh and then continued, “I-I tried to love him. I tried to want him, but it didn’t work. There was nothing there and in the end, it was all very empty.”
“I’m sorry,” George said, and meant it. For both of them. After all, wasn’t he about to enter the exact same scenario? Miss Westinghouse inspired no desire nor deeper feelings in him. She was twelve years younger than he, just eighteen. When they talked it was always of surface things because they had nothing else in common, or at least nothing he’d found yet.
Would they end up just the way this siren in his arms had with her late husband? Empty? When he was dead, would she feel nothing about it but relief?
“Is that why you came here tonight?” he asked, shoving those desperate thoughts aside so they didn’t mar this perfect experience. “To experience what you never did with him?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t give much thought to it at the time, honestly. Many marriages are like that, aren’t they? At least I was told it’s a way of our world. But then recently my friends began to marry and they were all inlove. So much love, so much passion, you couldn’t avoid seeing it, feeling it pulse in the air. It was like being put in a prison of other people’s desire. What I believed was normal and to be expected suddenly became sad and pathetic. My life shrank. And, yes, I wanted to feel a little bit of what I now realize I missed. So I came here.”
He stared down at her. She was telling a story so like his own that it surprised him to hear it from another person’s lips. “And I did I fulfill that?”
“Oh, yes,” she whispered, and reached up to trace his lips gently. Her fingers were so soft against his mouth, so comforting. He could have lain like that forever, died in her arms and been perfectly content with this one, shattering night.
He blinked. But he couldn’t, could he? This was his last stand and he had taken it. Tomorrow he would leave London and go to be a groom to some other woman. And so he had to extract himself from this shocking connection that only seemed to grow with each word spoken. To do anything else was unfair to all parties.
“I’m glad of it,” he said, shifting reluctantly.
She rolled away from his arms and watched him as he got up and tugged on his trousers. There was a hint of disappointment on her face. She wanted him to stay as much as he wished to. That somehow made it all worse that they both felt that unexpected connection, that powerful longing, that could now not be explored or fulfilled.
“I hope I satisfied you, as well…Ares,” she said. “Even though I wasn’t experienced or likely very talented in such things.”
He froze in his gathering of his things and pivoted back to her. “We’re strangers,” he said softly. “Who will likely never meet again, so I’ll be honest with you even if I should not. Tonight was remarkable.Youare remarkable. And I won’t forget this, no matter what comes next.” He leaned down and kissed her once more.
Her arms came around his neck and she expelled a broken sigh against his lips. Everything in him told him to collapse back into the bed with her. Or to gather her up and run away with her, figure out the rest later.
He didn’t. He pulled away instead and bent to pick up her discarded gown. “Now then, let me help you dress.”
She nodded and got up, but as he assisted her and finished dressing himself, as they walked out of the back room together, their fingers intertwined before they reached the outer hall with all its debauchery and sound and light, he couldn’t help but feel he lost something.
And that left an ache in his chest that he hadn’t expected when he kissed her knuckles at last and they parted with only one final glance of farewell.
CHAPTER4
Thanks to a sudden, heavy rainstorm, the journey to Pembrooke Hills took half a day longer than it should have. Normally that would have troubled Lily, for she hated to be late. Even on time felt a little like too far for her taste.
But this time? This time she had welcomed the extra hours to herself in the journey because she couldn’t stop thinking of her night at the Donville Masquerade with the mysterious man, her Ares. She shivered even now as she flashed to the feeling of the brush of his soft beard on her thighs, his mouth on her sex, his eyes boring into hers and giving her a glimpse of…
Well, it was best not to ponder what she’d had a glimpse of in those startling gray-blue eyes. It felt too strong and instant and foolish to believe it could have truly been there. Was she so pathetic that she felt a powerful deeper connection with a stranger where there was only surface pleasure?
“Are you well, Mrs. Manning?”
She blinked and looked across the seat toward Susan. Her maid had given up engaging her much in conversation in the last day because of Lily’s increasing distraction. But now Susan frowned as she looked at her.
“Oh, I’m fine, just enjoying the scenery,” Lily lied, and motioned out the window to the bright green of the rolling hills as they neared Pembrooke Hills and the estate and wedding gathering waiting there for them.
“You seem…troubled,” Susan pressed. “Are you still worried about Miss Alice?"
Lily cleared her throat. She ought to thank Susan becausethiswas what she needed to focus on, not a night that would never be repeated. And if her face was so readable that her troubles were clear to her maid, she definitely had to refocus because she didn’t want to reveal that vulnerability to strangers, nor to her stepmother, who had often taken any opportunity to strike against Lily in the past.
“I suppose I can’t help but worry,” she admitted. “I know so little about the man my sister is to marry. And what I do know cannot do anything but trouble me.”
