Page 10 of The Courtesan’s Protector (About An Earl #4)

CHAPTER 9

T he carriage Ripley showed up with the following morning wasn’t the same one he’d come with before. After Jane settled into its worn leather seats and they began to roll away toward Copperworth, the village where her sister’s school was located, she asked, “Where did you get this rig from?”

“I let it.”

She caught her breath. “Ripley! The cost.”

“Stop,” he said softly. “I have the money.”

She huffed out a breath. He might dismiss his help as nothing, but it wasn’t. She owed him far more than she could ever repay. All her life she had tried to never be in that position. She’d have to find a way to even the scales between them.

A flash entered her mind of his mouth between her legs, of his cock driving into her, but she pushed it away. She didn’t want their passion to be transactional.

She cleared her throat and he arched a brow, as if anticipating her argument. Instead, she asked, “Do you think I’m being right in the way I’m pursuing my sister?”

“How do you mean?”

“There’s a part of me that wants to drive through the night, scream through every town, asking after her. And yet we’re doing this in a measured manner.”

He nodded. “I see. I suppose we could push horses and employees and ourselves to the brink. That’s always an option. But this is a fight, Jane, and I’m the expert on that matter.”

“There’s no denying that.” She pursed her lips. “So what does the expert think?”

“In a fight, it’s better to meter one’s response. To measure strikes before letting them fly. At this point, we don’t know enough to go wild. We’re keeping ourselves from breaking before we need strength.”

She considered that. “I understand. So…how do we do this next part of the fight?”

“We go to the school and question that horrid headmistress who wrote you such an awful message about your sister’s disappearance. It’s easier to dismiss one’s duty by post than in person and she might know more than she wished to share.”

“And if she doesn’t? Or if she won’t?”

His lips thinned like the idea was upsetting. “Then we talk to every schoolmaster and girl who attended lessons with her. All her friends, people in the village who might have encountered her. Anyone who knew Nora.”

Her breath caught at that turn of phrase and she gripped her hands in her lap as fear rose up in her chest and nearly choked her. “Knows,” she corrected, her voice shaking.

His expression fell and he lunged to grab her hands. “I’m sorry. Knows. I’m sorry, Jane. I didn’t mean to say it like that.”

She stared into his eyes. He was so good at hiding his feelings. When she’d first met him, first come to know him, she could never tell what he thought. But over time, she’d begun to see his tells. Little twitches and swiftly buried flashes of emotion. Normally it was a fun game she played for herself.

Today it wasn’t. She saw what he wouldn’t say and she sighed. “I-I realize the worst might happen, could have already happened, to my sister.” She set her shoulders back, tried to stiffen her resolve by straightening her spine. “I don’t want you to think me a fool.”

“Jane, the last thing I’d ever see you as is a fool.”

They were both quiet for a moment as the warmth of that comment eased her a little. He did that so easily, it was almost overpowering.

She drew in a breath. “Do you have siblings?”

He shifted and drew his hands away. “I had a sister. She died at birth.”

“I’m sorry. How old were you?”

“About ten,” he said, and smiled at her. “We were both the much older sibling, it seems, even if I was only that for the span of a breath.”

She nodded. They had so much in common, really. Hard lives punctuated with pain, but also a resilience she often leaned on. She watched him do the same. But she also knew from experience that sometimes cracks appeared in that shell. Then it was precarious to pretend strength. Did that happen to him? Was it possible he sometimes broke?

“I suppose her death,” he continued slowly, as if he had to be careful around this topic, “was just another piece of kindling on the fire of my mother’s sorrow. And I always wonder what that little girl would have been like. What she would be like now at nineteen. How we would have taken care of each other when our mother died.”

“I think she would have been strong,” she said. “Like you.”

He smiled briefly. “What’s Nora like?”

She shook her head. “I hardly know anymore thanks to the estrangement I mentioned to you before.”

“When she was young, then. Before her misunderstanding of your motives drove you apart.”

She closed her eyes and pictured her sister with her dark blonde curls and her snapping blue eyes that were so like Jane’s own. She thought of her bubbly laugh and her constant chatter.

“Sweet,” she whispered at last. “Witty. God, that child was smart. Is smart. She taught herself to read when she was six.”

“But not you?” he asked.

She started, but then recalled she had told him she had only recently learned to read when he offered to share his book with her. “No. I had too much to do to take time to learn.”

He frowned. “You mean you took all your time protecting her. Protecting your mother.”

She nodded. “But that allowed Nora to be carefree for so much longer. Any sacrifice was worth that.”

“I’m not sure I agree,” he said, stretching a long arm out along the back of the seat beside him. Putting her to mind of when he’d done that in the garden of the inn a couple of days before. “But I’m biased. So how did you learn later?”

She hesitated. “Esme taught me.”

His brow wrinkled and she prayed he wouldn’t ask why. She didn’t want to say or be forced to hide that she had learned to read because he’d written her little notes. Words that were so precious that she wanted them all for herself, that she collected and pored over time and again.

And to her relief, he didn’t ask. He merely nodded. “I have a great deal of respect for that, Jane. Now, if it’s not rude, I’m going to try to sleep a bit, I think. I was kept up by most pleasant activities two nights ago and by preparing for our journey last night.”

“I can entertain myself,” she said.

“We’ll stop along the road in a few hours to break our fast and rest the horses. I’ll be awake before then.”

He slouched down in the carriage, leaned his head against the wall near the window and shut his eyes. She found herself watching him, counting his breaths, noting the shifts as he went from alertness to relaxation to sleep. Seeing how his expression changed when it was calm. She noted it all and collected it in the vault of knowledge she had about this man.

Then she looked outside to the scenery along their route and focused her attention there. Focused on where she was going so she wouldn’t disrupt herself with dreams of what might have been in another life.

* * *

I t had been a long day of travel and Ripley’s body felt it. After his nap and their break for food, they had read more. It was a way to separate themselves from the deeper conversations they’d had earlier about family and responsibility, but he also enjoyed sharing the book with her. He loved watching her eyes widen with delight at the adventures he recounted.

But now he set the book aside as the late afternoon bled into evening. Darkness was beginning to set in outside, dimming the light from the windows. “We’ll stop for the night soon.”

She nodded. “Yes. I know without a moon it would be too dangerous to continue.”

“When we do…” he said slowly, feeling nervous, almost like a green boy.

She blinked at the halting sentence. “When we do?” she encouraged.

“I—should I ask the innkeeper for one room or two?” he asked. “There is no pressure either way and if you want privacy or you’ve changed your mind about what we shared before, I won’t mention it again.”

She looked down at her hands, clenching and unclenching them in her lap. Her lips had thinned and her cheeks were flushed when she looked up at him.

“I’m not a mincing virgin,” she said at last. “Sex is a physical need, or it always has been, whether I was paid for it or enjoyed it…or both, occasionally. But it was different with you.”

He sucked in a breath. “Oh?”

“It was better.” She met his eyes. “And I won’t lie and try to pretend that it wasn’t. You’d see through me at any rate. You always do. Being with you helps me forget about my fear for a little while. So, if you want to share a room with me, I won’t turn that down.”

A pressure Ripley hadn’t fully realized was pushing down on him lifted the instant she said those beautiful words. A rush of desire and love moved through him instead, washing away reason and restraint. He knew, even as he leaned forward, that was exactly what Brentwood meant when he said Ripley’s love for Jane was dangerous. That it was a weakness he had to be aware of so he wouldn’t be injured by it, or worse.

He knew that and he still pushed it away, cupped her cheeks and kissed her. It hadn’t even been a full day since the last time he’d done that, and yet it felt like a lifetime. Like he’d been parched in a desert and now she was water. She gripped his forearms with a gasping moan and there was no stopping this heat between them now.

He dropped to his knees before her, pressing her back against the carriage wall, cupping her against him with one hand, tracing her jawline with the other. She lifted into him so there was no space, no breath. It was only them and this and the inevitable conclusion to fire meeting oil in such a combustible way.

It was only that the rap on the carriage door that stopped them. They both startled apart and Jane glanced at the door. She looked at him and then she laughed. For a moment he saw the wicked, playful side of her that had been muted since she took over the shop, certainly since she heard her sister was missing.

“You are a distraction…Cam,” she murmured.

His stomach flipped when she used that name. No one called him that. Even Campbell was incredibly rare. Esme only used it to tweak him like a sibling might. That Jane used the name for the moments when they were alone, when he was hers in body and soul, gave it weight.

“You’ll moan that name next,” he promised, and opened the door. “Place a wager on it, Janie.”

She giggled and slipped from the carriage first. She stretched her back and looked up at the inn they’d reached as he joined her. A gentleman in what felt like an explosion of tweed approached with a wide smile. His Scottish accent was almost incomprehensible as he said, “Aye, there you be. Welcome to the Piper’s Rest. Taron Fergus at your service. Will you be needin’ a room or just a meal?”

“A room for my…” Ripley paused and glanced down at Jane at his side. They’d never see these people again, but he wasn’t about to say anything that might make Jane be seen as less. “My wife and I.”

She drew in a sharp breath when he said it. He had to fight not to do the same. Jane as his wife. There was a thought. One he pushed away.

“And one for our driver, who’s taking care of the stable needs at present.”

“Excellent, excellent,” the innkeeper said. “Let me see what’s available and I’ll escort you up meself.”

He hustled to the low table with a handful of numbered cubbies behind it. As he looked through them for the room he’d choose, Jane glanced up at Ripley. “You didn’t have to say that.”

“What?” he asked, even though he knew full well what she meant.

“That I’m your wife,” she whispered. “I’ve been to an inn with a gentleman lover before.”

He nodded. “Of course you have. And there was nothing wrong with that. We both made our money from our bodies, there’s no shame in such a thing. But I know it makes some look at you differently. Plus, you aren’t in the trade anymore. You’re a respectable lady.”

She snorted. “Hardly. You’re far more respectable than I am.”

He glared at her playfully. “Oh, Jane, are we about to have our first quarrel? Fighting over who has the dubious distinction of respectability?”

She laughed and it was like music. “I wouldn’t dare paint you with such an awful brush. I do apologize.”

“Yes, you’ll have to make it up to me when we get upstairs and—” He turned his attention back to the bustling innkeeper. “Ah, Mr. Fergus. Do you have accommodation?”

“I do. A fine room. Follow me.”

They did so, trailing after the man. After a few steps, Jane slipped her hand into the crook of Ripley’s elbow and a full shiver wracked him at the touch. She’d held his cock in her hand and yet this felt more intimate on some level.

They reached the room and Mr. Fergus let them in. He drew the curtains open with some flourish, even though there was only darkness outside by now, and tossed a log on the low fire. And all the time he talked and talked about the room and the inn and the supper to be had in the dining hall from eight to eleven that night.

Ripley watched Jane the entire time the poor man made his speeches. She was nodding and kindly answering his questions, but every once in a while she shot a playful look toward Ripley. Saucy, he thought some might call it.

“May I help with anything else?” Mr. Fergus said at last.

“Oh no, sir, you’ve been most kind,” Jane said. “My dear husband and I are very tired from our long journey, I fear. We’ll take some rest before we indulge in the sumptuous food you’ve described so eloquently.”

“Very good, very good, madam.” The innkeeper stepped into the hallway and pivoted back as if to speak further.

“Good evening,” Jane said sweetly, then shut the door and turned the key to lock it. She faced Ripley slowly and leaned back with a wicked grin. “I thought he’d stay forever. That we’d have to invite him to play.”

Ripley laughed. “He isn’t exactly my type in men, but if it made you happy.”

There was no reaction from her at that statement beyond another deeply wicked smile. She stepped toward him, hips twitching in the most fascinating way. She wrapped her arms around his neck, her breasts flattening as her mouth lifted just to his lips without touching them.

“What would make me happy is to be very naked and very alone with you.”

He wobbled. The first time they’d been to bed together, it had felt deep. Important. Changing. Tied to her dark emotions, an escape.

But this…this felt light. Playful. Passionate. He slid a hand into the bun at the nape of her neck and dragged his fingers across her scalp to tilt her face closer. “Then we’re halfway there. Seems it’s time to get down to the other half. With great pleasure.”