Page 52 of A Lady of Means (Roses and Rakes #1)

Chapter Forty-One

Can we not miss each other tonight? Clairville House.

After dinner.

* * *

She had to see him again, for herself. Before she embarked entirely in the opposite direction, she had to know if it was real. If he was real.

And now she was in a cloak, in a moon-shrouded mews behind Clairville’s London house, heartbeat racing two steps ahead of her horse’s four hooves and her own common sense.

Devyn’s firm hands settled like taut ropes about her waist as she slid down from her horse. She watched the flexing angles of his arms and shoulders, feeling her mouth go dry. She licked her lips to wet them before remembering to look away.

He had her now on firm footing and grabbed her, pulling her into his arms as he moved the horse out of their way. Devyn buried his head next to her hair as he pulled her in so tight she felt his skin, his sweat, mixing with her own.

He was supposed to be dead. She was supposed to marry another man. A Duke. A good man. They weren’t supposed to be clinging to each other outside the mews of his brother’s London house like time had stopped moving around them.

“My god, Moria,” Devyn breathed as he pulled away. “Every damn time, it’s like I just remembered how to breathe at the sight of you.”

“Kiss me so I can breathe again, too.”

He crushed her to him, marking her with a kiss that revived her and shattered her at once. She heard all the words he couldn’t say, she was speaking them back with every lathe of her tongue against his. His hands tightened, flattening her against him.

“I should go,” he broke the kiss to say, but he didn’t move a solitary corpuscle. She was the first to move, keeping hold of his hand as she stepped toward a stone edifice.

“No, please come with me,” she said, motioning toward the small cottage behind the mews.

For a moment, she thought he was going to deny her again; but finally, he relented. Nodding, he let her take his hand and followed a step behind her.

The dark, lively world of London at night during the season obscured the sound of her skirts over stones, two pairs of boots over pea gravel, one gold-tipped cane to steady his steps, as he followed her into the small cottage beside the stables.

He’d followed her into a willow tree, a library, to her family’s chapel, her bedchamber, an alcove at a masquerade.

“Devyn,” she breathed, his name synonymous with prayer upon her lips as she closed the wooden door behind her. As soon as she latched the bolt, he was on her like a scent.

He was at her back, removing her hood with the most reverent touch despite his large hands, then trailing one of those large hands down her thick blonde plait, down her back.

Over his shoulder, she took in the room around them.

It was neat, there was at least a decent sized bed that looked clean and there were thick curtains pulled over the windows.

There was no fire in the grate, but he’d make her one if she’d asked.

Hell, he doesn’t need a fire to keep me warm.

His breath, heavy and full of heat at her back, was already warming her, from the space where his breath fell on her skin, to her insides.

She stole his hands and wrapped them around her breasts.

She instantly felt the answering sensation lower down, his shaft pressing against the folds of his buckskin breeches, against her back.

He was solid, not the preening and self-indulgent aristocrat she’d taken as a lover once; he was a beautiful specimen of a man who ached for her.

“What do you want from me, Moria?” His hands gripped her waist. He planted a kiss in the space where neck met shoulder. His lips traced over bare bits of skin, dropping kisses lush and soft as a man reacquainting himself with a lost idol.

She wheeled around to face him. “Devyn, I need you.”

The words undid him. She could see the way they hit him, causing him to step backward, his gorgeously lashed eyelids a flutter, his lips without words.

“You’re promised to someone else, Moria.”

The scar along his face added credibility to the pain that lashed across his features.

Moria reached for him, the way she’d never been able to stop herself from doing.

“I lost you, and that very night, I had an impossible choice to make. Devyn, I chose myself that night. And I made a promise. I made my bed and now, I must lie in it.”

He took another step back. “You torture me.”

“I torture myself, Devyn!”

At the emotion in her words, he came to her. His hands gripped her by the hips and ground her against him. It was coarse and not full of any of the tenderness from before, but she leaned into it. She wanted his anger and his harsh, crude words. That she could bear, not knee-crumbling tenderness.

“You say my name while you intend to take that of another man. No, Moria. It is you who tortures all of us.”

She stepped away from him then, drawing back her arm, and slapped him across one cheek. He was so much larger than her, he could easily have stopped her. And as her eyes fixed on the reddening mark across his cheek, she thought, maybe he had.

“Are you done, woman?” he asked, reaching for her.

She knew she was blowing hot and cold, but that didn’t stop her from emphasizing each word.

“No, I most certainly am not done, Devyn.” She advanced on him, punctuating her syllables with little jabs of her small finger at his chest.

“You left. After you properly courted me. You proposed to me. You made me promises that didn’t seem to hold as much weight as your vows to your uniform.

You led me to believe that no longer was I the girl that men loved in secret.

That I was worth being loved out in the open.

” The tears streamed down her face and she let them fall for once without wiping them away.

Let him see.

“You did all the things I romanticized a beau doing for me. And then you committed the most unthinkable crime. You died. And I…I couldn’t remember if I told you that I loved you. I was left with nothing but my pretty face and my reputation and my pride, for however long I could rely on them.”

She turned from him, hugging herself to shore up her resolve. He was just standing there, taking her in, not making a move to quiet or comfort or touch her while she got the words out. She loved him more then for what he didn’t do.

“And then he was attentive and he was generous. And he was a duke. I won’t say I hated the attention that I received from everyone else, but it was his attention that won me.

While you were…well, I knew what you were to me, but I had to mourn you in secret.

Now you want to say that I am hurting you? ”

She gave a small humorless laugh, feeling like she’d slowly become unhinged at having to relive this entire saga in front of him, at the spell that had been uncast as she said it aloud.

“Perhaps now you can begin to know what I have suffered.”

He thundered his response, the muscles at his neck and temple alive with outrage. “You think I didn’t want to give you all those things? That I wouldn’t sell my soul to the devil if he showed up knocking right now to give them to you?”

She looked at him warily. He stepped closer, taking her face in his dwarfing hands.

“My girl, I have loved you quite desperately since the first time I saw you underneath that willow tree,” His chest heaved against her own. “I’ve been desperate for you; to tell you how you haunted me, how you traveled down to hell and led me out each day, with the hope of seeing you again.”

His fingertips brushed tenderly against her cheeks. “But I could never have given you the things for which you were born, the things you deserve. Now that you have found someone who can, and should, I’m so angry. And proud of you…and jealous too.”

She had been staring at the wall of his chest as he spoke, not realizing he was backing her up. When her knees collided with the bed, she let out a little breath of surprise.

“So, Moria, if you want to punish me, then do it.”

Her brows kissed in the middle, not understanding. Her eyes followed the movements of his hands as he pulled at the cravat at his throat revealing a tanned triangle of skin that weakened her knees, her resolve. Realization did not dawn until he placed the wadded piece of fabric in her hand.

All the air left her, left the room. Left England. Words lodged themselves in her throat, trapped against the frantic beating of her set-upon heart.

“Go ahead,” he said, motioning to the wooden headboard with his jaw, extending to her his two wrists, firmly clasped together.

“Dear god,” she breathed.

He stood still and expectant, his dark eyes trained on her with compelling force. She looked down at the strip of fabric he’d proffered into her hand.

“You’re serious. You want me to-”

He stole the shock, the words, the air from her mouth with his own. In their place, into the parted seam of her lips, he gave her everything.

There was a world of pain between them, woven into their past, but they could create something wholly pleasurable together.

He pulled her tighter into him, the bulge of muscles, less corded than once before but still stronger than most men, straining against her.

Her core was suddenly alive with longing for this man.

She reveled in the feel of his large jaw muscles working against her own as his tongue slid deeper and deeper inside her mouth, gliding over her teeth, the silk of her bottom lip.

She drank him in as well, her world closing in around only this man, only the touch of his body where it met hers, only his breath.

He reclined on the bed. She let him pull her down with him. She toppled onto him, a mass of tangled and needy limbs.

“I want you to do whatever you want to me. Use me. Love me. Let me love you in return.”

“Devyn,” She sighed his name on a feverish breath. “What about before—that you wanted to put a ring on my finger—” He stilled her words with a finger to her lips.