Читать книгу The Complete Regency Bestsellers And One Winters Collection - Rebecca Winters - Страница 62

The man stepped out in front of her as she fumbled with the keys on the heavy lock on the Park Street doorway.

‘You are Mrs St Harlow?’ The question was in French.

When she nodded he simply handed her over a letter.

‘She said I was to come back for your answer after you had had a day to look at it. She said you would give me a reply.’

With that he left. Looking around to see if anyone else was about and hoping the rapid beat of her heart might begin to slow, Aurelia let herself in, the unmarked white envelope clutched in her fingers.

She? Could he mean her mother?

Caesar stirred from sleep, stretching and yawning as she untied him and took him outside. Briefly. She wanted to open the note before Kerslake arrived and as an added precaution she snapped the lock behind her when she re-entered the office.

A necklace she recognised as one of her mother’s lay wrapped inside a letter. She instantly knew Sylvienne’s hand.

Lia

I am ill. Sell this necklace, for I have the need of a maid to help me through this ague. My friend will bring the money back to me and can be trusted.

Grasping the table for balance, Aurelia sat, her fingers straying to the chipped and worn beads of the cut-glass bauble. As cheap and worthless as the life her mother now lived.

She had met Sylvienne again four years ago in Paris on a visit, the untarnished beauty she had once been renowned for slipping into something less attractive, the liberal lifestyle so appealing when she had left England now futile and wretched.

Aurelia, just out of a marriage that smacked of the same sort of despair she saw her mother consumed by, had been desperate to help. Women survived in the only way they knew how and with the roles reversed between them, she felt the need to parent Sylvienne. Even then she had been uneasy with the sort of people her mama had been reduced to dealing with, the crammed and squalid conditions of her rented apartment a far cry from her life in London. No wonder she had become ill. But how ill?

She could not just go to Paris on a whim and leave Papa, not with the silk business on the verge of a good profit and Leonora needing to be chaperoned in the company of Rodney Northrup. Perhaps her mother could be brought to London for some rest and respite? A new worry surfaced. Sylvienne had said again and again she would never live in England, the dreary boredom of it sapping her soul.

Closing her eyes, Aurelia took in a deep breath. Outside bells called true believers to prayer and further afield the shrill blast of a horn sounded, an outgoing vessel on the morning tide making its way to a far-off destination with a full cargo and the hopes of pleasant seas. Ordinary lives. Routine departures. Her own existence seemed beleaguered by stress and unease.

With a flourish she inked her pen and set to writing, the words coming quickly as she decided on the course of action that she would follow. She still had the ruby pin Emily had given her and there were a number of books in the library that her father might not miss. Quick cash. Her fingers crept to the pendant at her neck. She could not pawn this, for Hawkhurst’s eyes were everywhere and if he were to find it again…?

Squashing down the rising anger of her thoughts, she locked the envelope in the bottom drawer of her desk and left the warehouse.

‘Kerslake is involved. He has been seen in Delsarte’s company and they look more than chummy. They were at school together, though they were both expelled for stealing.’

Shavvon looked down at the pile of notes he had on his table and then back up to Hawk. ‘What of the woman, Mrs Aurelia St Harlow? What do we know of her?’

‘Nothing much.’ The lies came easily, falling off Stephen’s tongue into the silence of the room. ‘She has an old father who is ill and three younger sisters. The Beauchamp silk mills have been in the family for years and she is busy running them.’

Hawk had never once in all of the time he had worked for the British Service omitted a fact that was important to an investigation. Sometimes, when innocents had perished in the quest for a greater good he had hardly turned a hair, reasoning that in any conflict those close to the perpetrators were bound to be damaged and there was little he could do about it.

Yet here he was protecting a woman who had by her own admission omitted salient details to the courts of England about the murder of his cousin. He breathed out in that slow and careful way he had long since perfected, attracting no unwanted attention.

‘You know her personally, don’t you? Mrs St Harlow, I mean?’

Caution surfaced. ‘Vaguely, sir.’

‘You met her in the library at Hookham’s in Bond Street and then again at the Carringtons’ ball yesterday. It seems both times you had long conversations?’

Hawk smiled. He should have realised that he would have been under observation, as well, for trust was a hard commodity to come by in this game. ‘She was married to my cousin. It would cause more gossip to give her the cut direct.’

‘Then don’t. I need you to get closer to the source of these missives and it seems the Park Street warehouse may lead us right to them.’

Again Shavvon noted something on the book before him, a longer observation, this time, and underlined it. ‘Watch her carefully. I don’t trust her. She has come in front of the courts already and public opinion of her is unflattering.’

Something inside Hawk was breaking as fast as Shavvon was speaking. This would be the last time he would work for the British Service. When he returned he would hand in all correspondence pertaining to intelligence, all the weapons and the charts of countries long at strife with England, all the codes and the books of observances made over thirteen years of spying. It would be finished then, this part of his life, this wandering nothingness that had left him stranded in a place he no longer wished to be.

But first he must warn Aurelia St Harlow that she was being watched and that without due care and diligence she would be dragged in and questioned to within an inch of her life.

Aye, under all the allegiance he felt for the Service another loyalty budded, stronger and more real. He would have liked to have asked what exactly they had on file about her already, but knew that to do so would invite question. So he merely smiled and listened to a diatribe about the inherent dangers of French spies who, according to Shavvon, were crouched like tigers and about to pounce on the very fabric of an unsuspecting British society.

London was as busy as it usually was on a Monday morning just before the luncheon hour. The ruby pin had realised a lot more than Aurelia had thought it would, saving her the task of looking through her father’s library for a few tomes that he might not miss.

She noticed Hawkhurst before he did her, crossing the road at Hyde Park Corner. Tattersalls, she thought. The sales it ran were on a Monday, but it was also the day that gamblers received their winnings or were required to pay their debts. Would Stephen Hawkhurst be like Charles in that way, always looking for the next surefire gamble, the easy money that never came? Somehow she doubted it.

‘Mrs St Harlow. Are you alone?’ The humour she saw in his eyes was unexpected.

‘I am, my lord.’

‘Then perhaps you might walk with me for a moment. I have something I want to ask of you.’

She stiffened. Was the warehouse in Park Street still being watched? Had Hawkhurst some knowledge of her mother’s condition and the need for money? Would he enquire after the Frenchman who had come yesterday, a connection providing him with another way of imagining her disloyalty to the security of the English homelands?

‘My Uncle Alfred is celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday tomorrow evening. A quiet dinner party with only the very fewest of guests. He has asked if you might attend.’

The relief felt enormous. ‘Of course. I would love to come. Is there some little thing He might want as a present?’

‘A good bottle of wine would suit him exactly. He misplaces almost everything else he is given.’

‘It is said your uncle was hurt in the Napoleonic campaigns.’ She had heard the gossip, of course, much of society losing patience with a man who failed to observe the strict rules of etiquette.

‘He took a shot to the head in the second Peninsular campaign under Wellington. That is really the last whole memory he has.’

‘It must be difficult to live for so many years without true recall.’

A wobbly cobblestone had her losing her footing and he tucked her hand through his arm.

‘Most people’s lives are touched by some sort of adversity and in the end it makes them stronger.’

She could not let that pass. ‘Sometimes it makes them more afraid.’

‘You speak of Charles?’

Unexpectedly she smiled. ‘I suppose I do.’

‘When did you meet him?’

‘In the first weeks of my first Season. He was a fine dancer and he wore his clothes well.’

‘Ahh, so shallow, Mrs St Harlow?’

She smiled again, liking the playful tone in his voice. ‘You are the only person I have ever admitted such a dreadful nonsense to. In my defence it did not take me long to realise that the cut of a man’s coat was only a very minor consideration when choosing someone to live the rest of one’s life with.’

‘And your family? Your father? He approved?’

‘Oh, Papa was busy with my stepmother and my sisters and he said my stubbornness reminded him of Mama. It was not a compliment.’

‘So you no longer view the state of holy matrimony warmly?’

‘I do not.’

He laughed at that, loudly. ‘Most women in my company would say the very opposite.’

‘Well, you are safe with me, my lord.’

But when the sunlight caught his eyes, softening green into burnished velvet, she knew that she lied to herself, the memory of kisses he had given her making her heart suddenly hum in her chest and the blood of her cheeks rise.

Disengaging her hand, she stepped back. Hawkhurst was a thousand times more dangerous than his cousin had ever been. She just simply wanted to feel what it would be like to wrap her arms around the naked warmth of his skin and allow him…everything.

And there, right in the middle of a crowded street, with people hurrying by on each side of them, Aurelia understood what it was to truly desire a man. Not any man, but this one: his strength and his goodness, his dangerous solitariness and his secret grief.

Cassandra Lindsay had been right. Elizabeth Berkeley would never understand him as she did, never nurture that part of him that was wild and menacing, never stare into the heart of his solitude and recognise herself in the wasteland.

She looked away.

Something was worrying Aurelia St Harlow, Hawkhurst thought—the talk of marriage, probably, and his roughshod questioning. She had been through hell with his cousin and had made it abundantly clear ever since the first second of meeting at Taylor’s Gap that she was not looking for a replacement. Again, he cursed Charles with a vengeance.

‘I will send a carriage around just before eight tomorrow night to pick you up.’

He knew finances were tight in Braeburn House.

When she nodded in agreement Hawkhurst made certain he did not tarry longer than he had to in case she thought about the matter and changed her mind.

But as he walked away, the red flame of her hair juxtaposed against the familiar dark of her clothes burnt an image into his brain. And he knew without any doubt that tomorrow night would see an ending to the dance of sensual tension that smouldered between them.

Any thought that it might only be a very small birthday celebration was wiped away as Aurelia started down the hallway behind an austere-looking Hawkhurst servant. Voices of men and women were raised in laughter, though recognising Cassandra Lindsay amongst them she felt a little less worried.

Hawkhurst moved forwards to greet her. ‘You look lovely,’ he said, his glance taking in the hairstyle she had allowed Leonora to fashion. Normally she bound her hair back, tight against her head to hide the vibrant colour. Tonight she wore it in a looser style, her long curls tied at the nape. She had dispensed completely with the glasses. Her gown was scarlet silk.

Alfred had also risen, a broad smile on his face. Taking the wrapped present from her reticule, Aurelia handed it to him. The thin lengths of silk in the bow trailed down the side of old thin hands.

Hawkhurst’s uncle took his time to look at it, turning it this way and that, the fabric catching the light of a large chandelier above. Finally he loosened the ties and opened the wooden box.

A ring was inside, a ring she had found in a circus years before with her mother, gaudy and substantial, but beautiful, its cut-glass edges showing off all the colours of the rainbow.

‘Nothing as mundane as wine, then?’ Hawkhurst said this with a tenderness in his tone as his uncle drew the circle on to his finger before leaning across.

‘Thank you.’ Delight made his eyes sparkle.

‘You are most welcome.’

The scar on the side of his head drew the skin around his left eye upwards. Aurelia imagined the pain of receiving such a wound so far away from any hospital and in the middle of a war.

She liked the way Alfred stroked her hand, the expectation and restraints of Victorian society so clearly missing in the uninhibited reaction. She also liked the way Hawkhurst did not hurry him, but waited while his uncle processed what it was he wished to say and do.

The others further away were still chatting as though it was the most normal thing in the world for an elderly gentleman to hold on to her fingers and look deeply into her eyes. Perhaps it was for him, this man lost to time.

‘Rings are my favourite jewellery,’ he finally said and let her go, walking over to show the others his new and wonderful gift.

‘You remembered he liked your pendant?’ Hawkhurst asked the question.

‘Wine seemed too momentary for a man celebrating the length of seventy-five years.’

‘I know he will treasure such a gift. Even the packaging was inspired.’

‘Part of Mama’s heritage, I think. She was never a woman to do things by halves and I always wrap gifts that way.’

Cassandra rose from her place by the fire to join them.

‘Alfred is more than happy, Aurelia. Hawk instructed us to buy wine and we did, but next year we will take your lead and look for something far more original.’

Another woman also walked over, a beautiful, heavily pregnant woman with a white dress embroidered in multicoloured flowers at the neckline. The stitchwork looked like it had been done by a child, the rough sewing out of place against the elegance of the dress.

‘I was just telling Hawk, Lilly, that we shall be taking no notice of his suggestions for presents ever again.’ There was a soft tone in Cassandra Lindsay’s rebuke.

‘Absolutely, Mrs St Harlow, for yours has eclipsed our offerings entirely. I am Lillian Clairmont, and my husband is the one trying at this moment to wrestle the ring from Alfred’s hand. Lucas’s taste in material goods is more than questionable, you see.’ She coloured as she realised her criticism. ‘But I do not mean to imply that I think your present is…tasteless…’ She stopped and shook her head and her hair under the light showed up myriad hues. ‘I am expecting our third child very soon and the good manners that used to be the hallmark of my character seem to have all but deserted me.’

As the others laughed, Hawkhurst then made a proper introduction. ‘Lillian and Lucas Clairmont are down in London only for a few nights. They have a property in the north and children waiting at home for them.’

‘Lucas is the Luc of the dancing lessons at Eton?’ Aurelia had suddenly placed him.

‘Indeed.’ When Clairmont walked to stand beside his wife, Aurelia saw how he wove their fingers together.

‘We met at Stephen’s ball, Mrs St Harlow. I thought your entrance was one of the grander ones I have seen so far in London, though my first introduction to court may have even eclipsed your own.’

‘He arrived brawling with my cousin, blood on his lip and a sneer in his eyes,’ Lillian explained with a smile. ‘Americans like to…turn up with aplomb, you see.’

‘I shall take such information to heart then, Mr Clairmont,’ Aurelia returned, ‘if I should ever find myself in your homeland.’

‘Hawk could bring you. We are due to go back on a holiday next May and I would deem it a pleasure to show you Virginia.’

Surprised by the wash of yearning that was inspired by such an invitation, Aurelia glanced at Stephen Hawkhurst. What would months in each other’s company on a boat out of London feel like? Such freedom would be impossible, unless…She shook away the qualifier as all her responsibilities came crashing back in.

This was what her life could have been like had she married wisely. Family, good friends, a man who even in a roomful of others had her heart beating faster, the small flutter at the back of her throat making her swallow.

She wanted Hawkhurst to take her hand and hold it as Lucas Clairmont held his wife’s, safety and strength imbued in the very action.

Nathaniel Lindsay broke into her thoughts as he hailed a serving man near and offered up thin glasses of white wine to them all.

‘Let’s toast to birthdays and friendship,’ he said, looking over at Aurelia directly. ‘And to marriage,’ he added, this time observing Hawkhurst.

Hawkhurst knew what they were trying to do, each one of them, with their hopeful invitations and their clumsy innuendos. After all, he had spent the weeks since his ball fending off questions about Aurelia St Harlow, both Nat and Luc offering advice about his long-term future.

Tonight Aurelia fitted in like a lost glove. She was not cowed by their teasing—no, far from it, her natural intelligence rising to the jibes with a lively humour and one he had not seen in her before. She fascinated him. She worried him.

This morning a Frenchman had been apprehended outside her warehouse by one of Shavvon’s men after he had picked up a package she had given him. Money and silk and a letter to her mother that alluded to more of the same coming the following week.

God. He pushed his hair back and watched her from the old leather wingchair. A deliberate distance. A difficult reminder of all that he had tried to withdraw from.

Deceit. On mismatched eyes and a face that looked as though it belonged to an angel.

He had argued with Shavvon that the contents of the package were nothing like those found in the heavier silk cargo. As a result he had been charged with the task of being Mrs St Harlow’s personal minder—a grim and startling assignment given all that he was thinking.

He had hoped his ball could have been the beginning of a new and more innocent life after the fright he had given himself at Taylor’s Gap. And instead, here he was pining for a woman who had more secrets in her eyes than any other he had ever known.

But she fitted here, laughing between Lilly and Cassie and allowing his uncle to hold her hand for an inordinate amount of time after she had given him the present of a ring: a colourful glass ring with the engraving of a dragon through the amber and another on the metal in the band.

Alfred loved her. His friends loved her. He noticed how she thanked each servant every time they offered her something to eat or drink.

Even the damn cat, who more usually scurried away at any slight noise, had sidled up against her on the sofa, purring as her fingers ran through his coat.

The laughter closed in about him, removing such introspection and drawing him out.

‘We met at Taylor’s Gap,’ Aurelia was saying.

‘What were you doing down that way, Hawk?’ Nat asked the question, a frown on his brow.

Thinking about ending it all, he might have said, but he stayed silent, waiting for her reply.

‘He was watching the view—’ the edges of her mouth lifted up ‘—and I was inveigling Lord Hawkhurst into giving my family invitations to his ball.’

‘How did you inveigle?’ Nat asked this, a wry smile on his face and when Aurelia blushed, Hawkhurst stepped in.

‘I was down that way to look over Cloverton’s matching greys. The ones you had told me of, Nat.’

‘And did they measure up?’

He was pleased with the change of topic. ‘They are being delivered next week to Hawthorn Castle. You can come down and see what you think.’

Dinner was a beautiful meal, the French chef presenting two main courses of seafood and chicken along with vegetables, savouries, creamy sauces and a selection of cakes.

Aurelia had been placed next to Lillian and Lucas Clairmont and as far away from Lord Hawkhurst as the table might allow, though looking up once or twice, she found his gaze upon her.

Lillian spoke of her children and of a manor house that they were trying to modernise.

‘Hope embroidered the neckline of my dress,’ she said, holding her chest forwards so that it might be viewed properly. ‘She is twelve and our oldest.’

‘You must have been awfully young, then, when you had her.’ Aurelia could not help the comment for Lillian Clairmont barely looked any older than she was.

‘Oh, Hope and Charity came to us in a more roundabout fashion. They were always meant to be ours, but it took them a while to find us.’

‘Sometimes that happens to people. Take Nat, for example. I found him again in the most unlikely of places.’ Cassandra laughed as she spoke.

‘Where?’ Aurelia began to smile.

‘In the bedroom of a run-down boarding house in London. Spying on me.’

‘Protecting you, more like.’ Nathaniel Lindsay, across the other side of the table, was adamant in his understanding of the situation.

‘By insisting that I remove my clothes?’

At Cassie’s interjection everyone began to laugh.

It felt so good to be accepted by a company of people who did not judge and who all had their strange quirks and peculiarities. Hawkhurst, however, seemed to remain outside the hilarity, an observer rather than a participant.

Aurelia wanted to sit beside him and take his hand and make him smile as a way of thanking him for asking her tonight. With delicious food in her stomach, a warm cat snuggling across her feet and a group of interesting and genuine people around her, she could not remember ever feeling quite as relaxed.

Much later, after the best evening of her life, she stood with Stephen Hawkhurst and listened to the departing carriages of his friends. Alfred had sought his repose a good few hours earlier and so they were left alone, a dozen candles on a sideboard and not a servant in sight.

Hawkhurst’s hand came forwards. ‘Stay the night, Aurelia. With me.’

No artifice or pretence. No chance to misunderstand just exactly what he was asking. Just them in a shaded corner of his house, the midnight closing in and the promise of all that had begun at Taylor’s Gap sharp upon the air.

She had dreamt of this, imagined such words in her bedroom late at night, the emptiness inside her calling to be assuaged. But now…now that he had said all that she hoped for, what could it mean?

‘If others knew?’ She shook her head.

‘They won’t.’

‘Just us, then?’ Barely spoken, soft with desire. ‘A secret?’ The words were out, falling into permission. Her sisters never waited up for her and, if she returned before daylight, only John would know of her absence and he was more than loyal.

At eighteen she had never had a chance, but at twenty-six she did and every fibre of her being wanted to know what it would be like to feel the things that poetry and prose wrote of, the ache that lovers died for, the completeness that overrode armies and philosophers and kings.

If she started this in the way she meant to go on, would there be hope for them beyond the call of duty, diplomacy and expedience? She had made so many mistakes that she was frozen with the fear of making another one and yet…for the first time in her life she knew those things society decreed wrong would be so very right for her.

With a trembling breath she made her glance meet his, and a belief in herself, badly battered by Charles, began to reform.

Aurelia’s mismatched eyes were so damned fine and she had painted her nails red, the colour of lust and of the roses in a vase to one end of the mantel, overblown and wilting.

The heat of her was beguiling, her lips full and beckoning. He had promised to take nothing and yet here she was offering him everything, his blood thundering as if she were naked.

When she lifted her hand to wipe away a tendril of hair he saw she shook, a beam of sudden moonlight at the window turning her hair to scarlet.

The tie at his throat felt too tight and the waistcoat, jacket and trousers heavy against a rising want.

There were so many other things he needed to know about her, but his mind could only concentrate on her form and her smell and on the dimples in her cheeks which deepened with the smallest of movements. He wanted to touch her, wanted to run his hands across the curves and the softness until he knew each and every contour of her body. But she stopped him with more words.

‘I am not quite as practised in the sensual arts as you might imagine, Lord Hawkhurst.’

Her admission took him from his reveries with a startling quickness.

‘Charles and I were…distant, you see.’

‘How distant?’

‘Very. He enjoyed women with more experience than I had.’

‘God.’

‘I was glad for it.’

His erection rose up another notch, pushing against the superfine of his trousers. He did not wish to frighten her, but a lust unlike any He had ever known before caught him off guard. How did she do this to him, and so easily? He could not remember one other woman who had affected him as she did.

Reaching out, he pushed the gown gently off her shoulders, cupping the bounteous beauty below the silk.

Heaven. He watched as she flinched at the feel of him against her nipple, his other hand moving to her throat and her cheek and tipping her lips to his own.

Home. He was there as his mouth covered hers and the feel of warm familiar sweetness surrounded him. Deepening the kiss, he pushed inwards, taking all that she would give him and more, force overcoming softness in his need to possess her. Her skin beneath his palms melted like silken liquid, the stain of her red tresses across the paleness sending sense into greater frenzy.

‘I want all of you.’ The voice sounded nothing like his own, hoarse and desperate, and pulling her hair into a knot, he anchored her close, his other hand around the curve of her bottom.

She let him lift her against his chest, his breath on one cheek and his heartbeat against the other.

‘My room is near.’

Up one flight of stairs and then down a short corridor. He carried her as though she were the weight of a feather, though the burden of acquiescence caught solid between them, heavy with suggestion.

When his door shut Aurelia closed her eyes against the four-poster she could see in the corner, and she kept them closed as he lay her down upon the softness, catching breath and counting seconds.

‘I would never hurt you, Aurelia.’

She could no longer dwell in her own darkness. ‘I know.’

Her scarlet gown was bright against pale coverings and white sheets, and when he removed her shoes and stockings she did not flinch.

His touch strayed to a higher place and she waited for denial or for panic. Neither came, although her breathing worried her. No longer controlled or bridled, the crisp feel of cotton beneath her fingers clasped tightly against an escalating need. When he peeled back her bodice she felt the material fall loosely to her waist, her skirt hitched up to join it.

She felt him look at her, felt his glance know her breasts and her legs and the curved sway of hip, felt how he tethered her with her hair, holding her still, inescapable. Her breath in the silence was ragged, wanting the finesse and the adroitness she knew he would be capable of, wanting the torn-away utterness of what it must be like to be truly loved.

Loved. Her lips curved upwards. He had never said it once and he would not. This was lust and passion and desire on both sides, though the expression in his eyes was one she had not seen there before. Redemption, if she might name it. Her thighs fell open with a will of their own, the hem of scarlet silk cool on burning skin.

He did not hurry. He did not plunge in as Charles would have, caring not a whit for any satisfaction that she needed. Rather he tarried, a small caress here, a longer one there, pressure on a place she had not thought to know, her response surprising as she rose to his ministrations.

A midnight magic.

‘Let go, sweetheart,’ he whispered as she tensed against ardour. ‘Let me take you to a place that is wonderful.’

One finger came inside her, widening the tightness, his other hand flat across her stomach keeping her still. Faster and then faster, his thumb hard against the bud of promise and as she cried out he pressed down, her deep muscles clenched together so that she knew a growing restless wave of release, the ache of it arching her back and making her shout out into the darkness. The keening groan held rapture on its edge.

She was boneless, formless, spent. But she was also elated. She had never felt this pull of seduction, this completeness that took her from this world and far off into a place where all she wanted was more. She no longer cared to be soft or docile or gentle. Finally.

As he brought her fingers to the place his had just left and she felt the wetness, she was mute with the knowledge that her body was not ‘dried out and prudish and useless’ as Charles had been wont to label her.

The gift was like a treasure.

A single tear traced its way down the side of her cheek.

‘Never leave me, Hawk.’ She needed to say it, to make him understand. Not just tonight. But for ever.

‘I won’t.’

When he stood to remove his clothes she watched, the sculptured strength of his body revealed with each discarded garment, though as he took off his trousers Aurelia saw a vivid red scar curling down the whole front of one thigh.

Her finger went out to touch the knotted and raised flesh of a wound beneath each pad.

‘Someone has tried to kill you?’

‘More “someones” than you could imagine.’

‘But not now?’

He only smiled and she understood that whatever took him from England’s green and pleasant lands was not finished yet.

She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he had been with a good number of beautiful women. But it was more than just the physical, Hawkhurst thought.

Aurelia was a woman who had reached out to the ice-cold core of him and begun a thawing. He could feel it inside, the tense hard ache of loneliness dissolving.

She had lived and she had lost and yet still she triumphed and it was this more than anything that made hope rise unbidden. Hers was not the innocent purity of Elizabeth Berkeley which he could have so easily ruined, but another quality that held the kernel of a faith surprisingly and exactly right.

For him.

Like two halves coming together as a whole.

Usually he took women quickly because his life had been bound by danger and by little free time and because he did not wish for the commitment that all of those he had bedded seemed to demand. But this time was different. This time he wanted the night to stretch on for ever, the moon across their skins and a joining connecting body and soul.

Rolling on to her, he opened her thighs with his knee, signalling purpose. She was damp and she was ready, the swollen flesh of her sex calling them together. With one hand under her bottom he raised her up so that the angle of their connection might be more conducive to pleasure and, poised at the opening of her womanhood, he waited.

‘I will be gentle,’ he promised as he pushed in. She was tight and small and when her eyes widened at the pain he waited until she could accommodate him. Then with one hard and heavy push he was in her, buried to the hilt, her flesh calling in the ancient rhythm of life. Aurelia was his, her hair wrapped like flame about his hand and the generosity of her breasts between them.

The ache of ownership was the most powerful aphrodisiac Hawkhurst had ever experienced and, emptying himself into heat, he gave no thought to protection or hesitation, just need, desperate and all consuming.

He had bruised her, he thought later, with his fingers as he clung to hope and with the drive of his manhood into softness. But she had stiffened as he did, her nails a-tremble on his skin and urging him into a response he could not stop.

The little death, the French called it—the time when a lover died and went to Heaven and back. Joined by sex they moved inwards, straining, wanting the moment to last for ever, listening to each other’s heartbeat and knowing each other’s breath, the rush of it beaching in relief as wave after wave depleted sanity.

Her fingers strayed, holding the small bud of his nipple, causing Hawk to simply stop breathing.

He would impregnate her; he knew he would, his seed climbing into fertile flesh and growing. He wanted to see the swell of motherhood on her flat pale belly.

Surprise hit him fully as he hardened again, the clenching surge of it taking breath as he turned her against him and pinned her motionless—slowly this time, listening to the rhythms of the long and silvered night. She cried out as his fingers found her desire and brought her with him.

‘My Hawk.’

His name, determined and possessive.

Then sleep came, borne upon the wings of exhaustion.

He woke her as the dawn climbed into the eastern sky, the first flush of pink reminding him of the colour of her skin. He had not slept at all, watching her lie against him, safe and quiet, her hair changing tones as the day bloomed.

‘Aurelia. Wake up.’

Blue and brown snapped open. Disorientation. Fear. And then acceptance. He liked the way her fingers curled into his own, a trusting touch.

‘It is nearly morning. If others are not to know of this…?’ He left the rest unsaid, but already she had risen, her hair falling to her waist as she pulled the bodice up and the creases in her skirts down.

‘Your servants?’

He knew what she asked. ‘Are asleep still.’ He had his own shirt in place by now and his trousers.

‘You cannot come with me, Stephen, back to Braeburn House. I need to go alone.’

With her shoes and stockings on and her hair bundled into its more familiar plait, Aurelia looked impatient to be gone.

‘My cloak will hide any damage,’ he heard her say as they walked back down the stairs, the colour in her cheeks high, but he could not let her go like this. Carefully he took one hand in his own.

‘Thank you.’

She smiled then, a full honest humour across her eyes, and allowed him to hold her fingers as they made their way through the front door to hail a hansom cab. After seeing her into it, he stepped back, his figure receding as she was driven the road.

She was home again in her room, the clock only just striking six and not a movement in the house.

Nothing had changed and yet everything had. She was a scarlet woman, a fallen woman, a woman who had seen a chance that she wanted to take and had taken it, in the bed of a lord who had transported her to heaven and back.

Between her thighs was the wetness of their coupling and her lips were swollen. Crossing to her mirror, Aurelia saw how his loving had marked her, branded her, making real that which she might have otherwise thought she imagined.

The scarlet silk highlighted everything. Her hair. Her pouting mouth. The swell of her bosom where his hands had lingered.

What next? What would happen when she saw Hawk again in the light of day at some soirée with all the manners and expectations of the ton swirling about her? What if she saw him in Leonora’s presence or in Cassandra’s? Would he say something? Would he hold her hand and expect…recognition? Would those about them perceive what she was certain would be in her eyes and on her face, her cursed blushes more prominent now than had been noticeable as a maiden?

She had unstoppered a genie that was both magical and terrible. Lust burnt in her eyes, the glitter of memory having an effect on her stomach and on the places between her legs where he had touched. Throbbing. Craving.

Outside, the first dawn calls of the birds surfaced and the sky was lightening. A new day and a new life. Closing her eyes, she smiled.