Page 55 of My Darling Mr. Darling

Violet swallowed hard, striving to focus. His chest was—justthere. It would be so easy to simply reach out and touch him. Her fingernails bit into the hard wood of the desk in an effort to curb the impulse. “You were saying,” she managed shakily. “About your grandfather.”

A soft huff of derision. “He resents my very existence,” he said, and his hands slid up the outside of her thighs, pulling her toward the edge of the desk, where he nudged her knees apart. “To hear him tell it, you’d think I was the Devil’s spawn. I disappointed him at every turn, but likely never more so than when I went into business with your father. The very thought of any relative of his—no matterhowunwanted the connection—working, well…it was too much for him to bear. I was an embarrassment to him.”

Violet shifted closer, lifted one hand tentatively, her fingers curling. John caught it in his, settled it on his shoulder. Muscles flexed and bunched beneath her fingertips, the heat of his skin searing her palm. “I’ve never understood why the nobility turn their collective noses up at the thought of work,” she said.

“Nor I,” he said. “Of course, now he’d very much like for me to do my duty to the family fortune. By which I meanhiscoffers, which have been dwindling for years, as he cares far too much for thoroughbred horses and not nearly enough for reviving his failing estates. Not too long ago he hosted a lavish wedding for his new bride, who was barely out of the schoolroom. Of course, he hadn’t the means to pay for it, so he had the bills sent round to me. I declined to pay them, of course.”

One of his hands was at work gathering up the layers of her skirt, while the other drifted down her back in search of her buttons. Her heart beat against her ribs like a caged bird straining for freedom as he nudged her shoes from her feet and kicked them away, his hands searching beneath her skirt to roll down her stockings, peeling them away from her skin. “I’d have declined to pay them as well. The audacity.”

His lips touched her jaw, her cheek, her temple. His fingers trespassed beneath her skirt once more, smoothed a warm trail up her thigh, and caressed the tender spot at the juncture. “Indeed,” he said. “So I don’t answer when he writes—and all he has ever written has been to make demands of me, of what he thinks I owe to him by virtue of carrying his name. His attempts to exert control over me have fallen flat so far, but he hasn’t ceased trying.” Though his voice was hard and uncompromising, his lips were soft as they brushed over hers. “As much as I resent him for seeking to use me now that it is convenient for him to do so, I’m perversely grateful for his neglect in my childhood. The years he ignored me after I was left in his custody were the best of my life.”

Because the duchess had taken him in and raised him alongside her own son. Violet wondered if John had any idea how deeply the duchess cared for him. But the thought escaped her even as she tried to hold onto it, because the back of her gown gaped open and she felt John’s fingers working the laces of her stays. Then the constriction of that, too, eased—and his palm flattened between her shoulder blades, rubbing lightly. It was a possessive, proprietary touch, but oddly comforting. There was a part of her that wanted to lean into it, to test the strength of that hand…to determine if he had the fortitude to bear her burdens in addition to his own.

As if they were no longer such an intrinsic part of her, but instead had become something separate entirely—like a valise that she could simply hand over to him to carry for a time.

No; that wasn’t quite right. More like a coat, or a shawl—something that, when removed, left her just a little more vulnerable, a little less armored. One more layer that she had enshrouded herself within peeled away, as easily as he had worked the buttons of her dress and the laces of her stays. And the warmth of his hand at her back, the light pressure of his fingers massaging the nape of her neck—they made it all seem palatable.

She had so many more questions, but they had all faded into a distant murmur at the back of her brain; a storm fading over an ocean of tranquility as her starved flesh soaked up tender touches, soft strokes, dizzying warmth. Distantly she was aware that she had somehow hooked her free arm around his neck, anchoring herself to him as if she might somehow be swept away. Her thighs were splayed indecently to admit the teasing foray of his fingers between them, where her private flesh had grown dewy with desire.

A guttural, satisfied sound rumbled in his chest as he slid his fingers inside her and curled them, touching a place so sensitive that she shivered convulsively as her hips tried to lift into the motion. Her fingernails dug into his flesh, and she made a helpless whimpering sound that might have shamed her, had she been in full possession of her wits.

“Enough,” John rasped near her ear, and cool air swept in around her as he dragged himself away from her. “Come to bed, Vi.”

She was a disheveled mess; her gown drooped off her shoulders, her hair was tangled in its half-loosed pins. Carefully she tipped herself off of the desk, surprised that the floor itself had not shifted its position beneath her. Her head swam as if she had imbibed a bit too much wine, and she plucked at her falling sleeves even as John swept up the candle and settled one hand at the small of her back, guiding her toward the door.

She balked at the threshold. “Wentworth,” she gasped. “He can’t see me like—likethis.”

“He went up to bed ages ago,” John said. “He made quite a racket about it, too. I’m surprised you didn’t hear him.”

Listening for Wentworth’s footsteps on the stair hadn’t precisely been at the forefront of her mind at the time.

“You made a promise to me,” John said, and the deep, dark tenor of his voice drew her along behind him like a lamb to the slaughter. “You keep yours…and I’ll keep mine.”

Chapter Twenty One

Violet paused just inside the door, her right hand going to her throat. Even in the dim circle of light provided by the candle, John could see the rapid rise and fall of her chest—and above the faint hiss of the candlewick, he could hear the strained whistle of her breath through her teeth.

As if her lungs could not draw enough air. As if she were slowly smothering here in the darkness. The office was a large room; one well-suited to a businessman who frequently brought his work home with him. But this room had been intended as a guest room, and it was the smallest in the house. It suited John well enough—between dormitory life at Cambridge and the spartan little room he’d boarded in when he’d worked for Townsend, the close confines of this room had felt more comfortable to him than had any of the others, for all of their luxury.

But Violet’s eyes darted about as if she suspected the walls would begin closing in on her at any moment, and she made a terrible muted strangling sound, her fingers tearing at the collar of her chemise, revealed beneath the sagging bodice of her unlaced gown.

John muttered a curse beneath his breath and strode to the window, slipping the latch and throwing it open. There was a kiss of rain in the air, but the breeze that blew in was cool and scented with flowers that grew in the garden below. He set the candle upon the nightstand and rummaged in the drawer beneath it to retrieve a few more candles, arranging them in a line across the surface and scattered a few more upon the dresser for good measure, to drive back the edges of the darkness that had so rattled her.

“You’ll be all right,” he said to Violet in what he hoped was a soothing tone of voice, reaching out to turn her toward the window, to feel the fresh air on her face. “Just—”

“Don’t,” Violet warned through a wheeze, “tell me tocalm down.”

A laugh scraped out of his throat. “I was going to say, ‘Justbreathe.’” His fingers snarled in the laces of her stays, and he plucked at the mess of knots he’d made as she wrenched the sleeves of her gown from her shoulders and shoved it to her waist.

“That’shelpful,” she said, but despite the sour tone of her voice, it was not as strained as it had been. As he pulled free the last lace, she drew in a huge breath and yanked off her stays, dropping the garment to the floor.

She attacked the tie of her chemise and John helped her slide it from her shoulders, shoving at the crumpled mass of her dress where it had drooped to her hips. Bracing one hand on his shoulder, she stepped out of the heap of her dress as it fell to her ankles, and then she was beautifully—wonderfully—naked. Without modesty, unashamed, she turned her face toward the window and drew deeply of the cool night air even as a burst of chill bumps broke out across her shoulders. He smoothed them away with his hands, gratified when she leaned back to soak up the warmth of his chest. Slowly her hands came up, sifting through her hair for the pins that bound her curls in place, collecting them one at a time.

“Did you know,” she said, almost conversationally, her voice pitched low, “when it’s dark enough, you can hear the size of a room?”

He hadn’t, but then, he’d never had reason to pay attention to such things. Never a reason to fear the darkness, or enclosed spaces.

But she hadn’t truly expected a response of him. “It’s the way the sound reverberates off of the walls,” she continued. “You can hear it. Even if you can’tseethe size of a room, you can hear it. Sometimes,” she said, and her voice took on a strange, reflective tone, “you can hear your own heartbeat. Your breath, as if it were someone else’s, right in your ears. Sometimes, you can hear yourselfstopbreathing. When the air gets too thick, and the walls are too close, and all that exists is the darkness, you can lose everything, a piece at a time. Your breath. Your mind. Yourself. They just…slip away from you.” The pins that had once held up her hair trickled from her shaking palm, landing one at a time upon the nightstand.