“Alistair,” he replied, and the sound of his own name in this room, this library where his father had once sat as a boy enduring lessons he never spoke of, felt like both a surrender and a declaration.
He reached out to grasp her elbow and draw her closer. She came willingly, a small intake of breath the only indication that the contact had surprised her, and then her face was tilted up toward his, and his mouth found hers, and the last of his resolve slipped beneath the waterline and was gone.
The kiss began gently, tentatively, the careful first contact of two people who had been holding themselves apart and had suddenly, recklessly, stopped. Her mouth was soft and warm and tasted faintly of mint tea, and there was an uncertainty to her response that told him, with a conviction that lodged in his chest like a blade, that she had not been previously kissed with any tenderness.
That thought undid him more thoroughly than any act of deliberate seduction could have done. He cupped her face in both hands, tilting her head back, and kissed her again with a thoroughness that had nothing tentative about it. She made a sound against his mouth, a soft, startled whimper that was not protest but discovery, and her fingers came up to grip the front of his waistcoat as though the floor had shifted beneath her. He felt the precise moment she stopped thinking. Her body softened against his, her lips parted, and the kiss deepened into something raw and graceless and entirely mutual.
His arm went around her waist to pull her flush against him, and … He stilled. He was not an inexperienced man. He knew the architecture of a woman in her stays, knew those lines the way a man learns anything he has paid close attention to. These were wrong. The familiar taper of waist to hip was altered, a subtle fullness where the lines should have drawn cleanly inward.No amount of structured mourning wool could entirelyconceal at this proximity, not from bodies pressed together and paying this close level of attention. He pressed her closer, his palm flat and certain, and there was no mistaking it.
He yanked his mouth from hers in astonishment.
“You are with child,” he accused, his mind reeling with the implications.
The blood drained from Josephine’s face as she blinked up at him, still befuddled from their kiss. “You cannot …” She stopped as if to draw courage. “You cannot tell the old woman.”
“She is bound to notice sooner or later!”
Josephine bit her lip, looking up at him with those cool, gray eyes that made him feel so rooted to the moment. Once again, he experienced the calm she solicited from the very depths of his over-lively soul.
“Perhaps we can wed?”
It was his turn to blink in confusion.
“It will render the baby legally meaningless. If it is a boy, you will be its father. Even if he inherits the title, you will be in control!”
Alistair frowned, noting the desperate edge to her tone. He might worry that the young woman was an accomplished seductress if not for the awkwardness of her kiss. If not for the babe, he might have thought her to be an inexperienced maiden. With no small measure of horror, Alistair considered the unappealing thought of his uncle and Josephine engaged in bed sport as he began to suspect Jerome Oxley had been a selfish and untalented lover.
Giving his head a quick shake to divest himself of such undesirable notions, he grabbed hold of the thread of their discussion. She had proposed marriage to ensure his legal dominion over the title.
“And why is that important?”
“Because … you have …” The widow seemed anxious. “You can loosen the dowager’s grip over me, over the girls. We need you.”
He did not want to be needed. He had already gone through something like this once before. A young man enjoying his university studies, only to be summoned home after his father collapsed. Suddenly, Alistair had to take the reins of his father’s textile empire, had to take care of his mother, four younger brothers, and his sister when he would not even reach his majority for six more months. Fifteen years ago, his life had turned upside down. Now it was turning a second time.
A potential heir could free him from these responsibilities, but his gaze fell on her wan face and he observed genuine fear in the crystalline depths of her fascinating eyes.
Recalling his reaction to meeting his four wards, Alistair had a sinking feeling that he was already trapped in a family quagmire and it was far too late to pull loose of the mud sucking at his boots. He thought about the neglect his cousins had suffered at the hands of the late duke. And, if the widow’s inference was anything to go by, the bitter old dowager was just as dangerous to their peace of mind.
But he did not have to like it or accept it willingly.
“What is this? Are you some sort of sacrifice to protect the girls? An offering to tempt me into a marriage?”
Her large gray eyes filled with tears. “We need you,” was her singular reply, and Alistair growled in frustration.
“So our attraction is a pretense!”
The widow blushed, looking away with an expression of shame. “Not wholly.”
It was an admission of guilt, and Alistair was taken aback at the feeling of betrayal that coursed through him to settle as a heavy brick in his gut. The Oxley girls needed his blunt and hisleadership, and Josephine was the bait to ensnare him in this family melodrama.
He forced his attention back to the matter at hand, because feeling things was a luxury and there were still questions that required answers. “How far along?” he asked.
She blinked, as though she had steeled herself for recrimination and the plainness of the question caught her off guard. “Four months.”
Four months. Conceived in November, within the marriage. Jerome dead in January without ever knowing. Alistair was quiet for a moment, doing the arithmetic he could not stop himself from doing, and considered returning to his seat. But this was not a sitting conversation.
“You understand the legal position,” he said. It was not a question.
