He looked up at her. “I’m coming to the cottage.”
It was not a question. It was not intended as a question. He would go anywhere she took him, without question.
But she answered him anyway. “Yes, love.”
It was the answer he had waited his whole life to hear. She was his answer.
She reached, and he took her hand.
The seventh Earl of Ashthorpe was about to see the inside of the Beasley cottage. This morning, she’d left it the same way she’d found it when she’d arrived yesterday evening without warning.
Dando might have tried to do his own housekeeping while she was gone, but his attempts had been feeble. Dirty dishes were piled high. The fireplace was full of ash. His clothes were thrown hither and yon. Celia would not think much of how Susannah had raised her little brother.
“It’s no better than a pigsty right now,” she said to Henry.
He straightened his back and looked every bit an earl in his muddy tailcoat as he made the silliest sound she’d ever heard. Half squeak, half grunt.
“Was that supposed to be a pig?” she asked.
He only raised his eyebrows and caressed her back with his strong hand.
She willed him to look past the mess, for him to see the care she had taken to make this place a home.
But she needn’t have worried. He was only looking at her and touching her hand, her shoulder, her hair as she took him through the cottage. As if he were making sure she was real and the only way to know was to have his hand on her.
That hand made her feel safe and cared for in the place where she had cared for so many others.
She took him to her bedchamber. Small, narrow. There was barely space to turn around.
“Undress,” she said and went to get one of her brother’sshirts.Please let there be a clean one.Miracle of miracles, there were two.
She came back to her bedchamber, and Henry was staring at the floor as if he were measuring it, calculating where she had put her pallet when she had slept here as her mother’s nurse. He hadn’t even started to take off his clothes.
She held up Dando’s voluminous shirt. “It’s patched, but it’s clean. I didn’t dare take his good one. He needs it for the wedding tomorrow.”
Henry took the shirt from her. She saw his fingers run over the edges of the patches, the fine stitches she’d worked so hard to get even and lying flat so there would be no pucker. But they were still patches. Not exactly the same weave, not exactly the same color as the rest of the shirt.
Good enough for Dando when he was working with the horses but not a shirt fit for an earl.
Henry threw the shirt on the bed and enfolded in her arms.
“Oh,” she said. She had been struggling with the ties on the front of her dress, but she got her arms out from between them and hugged him back.
She thought he hadn’t liked the shirt.
“Aren’t we meant to be getting dry?” she said, looking up at him.
“You know how to take something everyone else would consider ruined and make it whole.” His hand cradled her cheek. “You did that for me.”
She almost laughed because she had just thought the same thing in the church, but the other way around.Hecompletedher.
She didn’t laugh because he kissed her, instead. And this was not a kiss to laugh at. This kiss stirred something feral and hot and tight within her. Something she had spent her whole life containing.
She broke the kiss, dropped to her knees, began to unbutton his fall.
“Susannah, you needn’t undress me, I can—oh.”
She pulled his breeches down to his knees, pushed his wet shirt up. He was not aroused, but she didn’t care. She slicked his cock all over with her tongue.
