“I want to feel you in me, just a little longer,” she pleaded breathlessly.
“I would stay right here forever if I could.Gemma.”Hal pushed his face into her hair, resting his forehead against her temple.“I will never leave you.”
Her heart ached along the fault lines of the cracks so recently mended.It was the most important promise Hal knew how to make, and it made Gemma’s insides go wobbly and soft with love.
“I believe you,” she told him, lifting an arm to curve shelteringly around his head.His big body shuddered against her, wracked with an excess of emotion that paradoxically steadied Gemma.They would figure it out.
Together.
She didn’t realize they had dozed off, curled in each other’s arms, until a knock on the bedroom door startled her awake.
All at once, she remembered that the Earl of Stonehaven was due to arrive back at Five Mile House sometime that day, hat in hand and ready for her answer, and her blood ran cold at the idea of him finding her naked in bed with Hal.
Stonehaven was too good a man to deserve the shabby way she’d treated him, and guilt propelled her out of bed to struggle into her chemise and stays.
But the hissed whisper through the door wasn’t Stonehaven’s mild, cultured voice.It was Lucy.
“I don’t know what you’re doing, hiding away in there, but you need to come downstairs at once!”
“Why,” Gemma called as Hal roused himself from the bed to tug on his trousers and help her into her dress.“What’s happened?”
“You’ll never guess who’s come,” Lucy said importantly, leaving room for a dramatic pause while Gemma frantically tried to deal with her hair.
“Stonehaven?”she guessed, distracted.
“No!It’s Ashbourn!Our brother, Nathaniel!”
ChapterTwenty-Two
“I should have known you would find your own level.Bad blood will out,” were the first words from the Duke of Ashbourn.“But even I could not have imagined I would have any connection, even one so tenuous as half-blood, to someone running a coaching inn.”
Muscles hardening with anger, Hal stopped stock still at the foot of the stairs, ready to do murder.But the light weight of Gemma’s hand on his elbow stopped him.
Hal looked at her, but her attention was on the man who was standing just inside the front door of Five Mile House.Tall and distinguished, he was dressed conservatively but very finely, in clothing that was tailored perfectly to his surprisingly muscular, athletic build.He had dark hair and eyes that defied easy description—an odd mix of gray, green, and blue.Paired with the set of heavy dark brows that slashed across his angular face, there was a certain something about the way he moved that set Hal on edge.
The Duke of Ashbourn moved like a man who knew how to fight.
But it was the cleft in his strong chin that made the family resemblance undeniable.
Gemma’s older brother.The man who had turned her and her mother and sister out of their home without a penny, before the last duke was cold in his grave.
Protective instincts going mad, Hal looked to Gemma to see how she was handling this sudden appearance of the relative who had rejected her so harshly.He was ready to do battle for her.It would have been his very great pleasure to slay this particular dragon.
But Hal was beginning to understand that he should never, ever, underestimate the woman he loved.Instead of wilting in the face of Ashbourn’s obvious disdain, or fretting over her slightly mussed hair, hastily donned gown, and kiss-swollen lips, her spine went rigid.She held herself like a queen, sweeping into the taproom as though it were her throne room.
When she spoke, her voice was cool and the slightest bit amused.“Well, Ashbourn.My dearest brother.No one has ever accused you of possessing an overabundance of imagination.Welcome to Five Mile House.”
* * *
As she’d expected, Ashbourn’s glare narrowed at her use of the word ‘brother,’ but he appeared to choose not to make an issue of it for the moment.Gemma cocked her head and smiled some more.
She felt as if she’d never stop smiling.
Poor Ashbourn, she mused, not without a bit of glee.He’d come all this way, presumably to disapprove and lord his money over them in person, and he’d found a half-sister who had completely disgraced herself in every possible respect—and who had absolutely no regrets about any of it.
“I have received multiple reports from various sources that my own half-sisters have sunk so low as to involve themselves in…trade.”Ashbourn’s frigid tone could have turned Westcote Brook to solid ice.
“I would say rather that we have gone into the area of hospitality, but I suppose that is a semantic argument that will not interest you.”Gemma felt her smile acquire sharp edges.“Since I know you to be a man for whom the entire concept of hospitality—the generosity of a host toward guests in his home—is entirely foreign.”
