Page 99 of The Ladies Least Likely

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“ I won’t do it.”

Mal’s voice broke the vaulted silence inside St. Philip and St. James.

They stood alone in the tiny church, a square stone heap that was said to be the oldest church in Bristol.

It had been the home church of the Grey family, where Mal was baptized and Bea married.

It reminded Amaranthe, with a familiar ache, of lovely little St. Cleer where she had grown up in Cornwall.

Coming back to her home country had called up old memories with a fierce, aching clarity, as if the two split halves of her life were knitting back together.

She pushed away the sudden odd regret that her parents would never see her married. They had disliked Reuben and would have hated the circumstances that threw their daughter on his less than tender care.

They would have loved Mal, though.

“Won’t do what?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

They’d returned to Bristol to yet another shock.

An express from Mal’s barrister friend in London informed him that Sybil, Duchess of Hunsdon, was back in the country and renewing her suit to block Mal’s guardianship of the children.

Mal was furious at both her temerity and her timing.

He meant to depart that night, and Bea awaited them at the Green Man with a farewell dinner and fresh linens for the return trip.

But he had kept his promise to let Amaranthe put flowers on his mother’s grave.

Mal stared at the bronze plaque that held Marguerite’s name, her presumed birth date and the all too early date of her death.

The husband who had abandoned her in life had ensured her lasting memory in death with a burial vault inside the church, a coveted and protected space, and in a niche above the vault stood a beautiful plaster cast of her face and head.

He didn’t lift his eyes. “I won’t make that document known. The one you found in your book.”

Amaranthe studied the sweetly curving lines of Marguerite’s sculpted cheek and brow. A small smile lingered on the plaster lips, remote, untouchable.

Some part of her had known this was coming.

Known by his careful silence on the subject during their travels back to Bristol, when he had asked her interminable questions about Reuben, Favella, Thaker, her parents, her life in Cornwall before he knew her.

She’d guessed he was wrestling with something, and she knew him well enough by now to guess what it was.

Any other man would have grabbed the marriage lines from her hand and charged back to London trumpeting about his new station. Malden Grey was the only man alive who would take that evidence and bury it.

“Never?” she asked. The thought of his destroying the evidence compounded the ache in her chest. It was Marguerite’s vindication that the man she loved had not lied to her. It was Bea’s proof that her sister had not been completely betrayed.

“It would take everything away from the children.”

He turned to face her, close enough to touch. She wished she had the right.

“It would take from them everything they’ve been brought up to expect is theirs,” Mal said.

“Hugh’s been bred his whole life to be the duke—you’ve seen his manners, his self-importance.

He stakes his life on it. Ned already knows how to play the part of the second son, the hey-go-mad spare.

And Camilla—she is too young to care now, perhaps.

But she’ll care very much when it is time to be married and no decent man will offer for her. ”

Amaranthe’s throat closed as she nodded. She had thought of this, too, what it would mean to the Delaval children if Mal stepped forward. “It means you remain a bastard.”

“I’ve been a bastard my whole life. I know how to deal with it. They don’t.” He shrugged and let loose a short, bitter laugh. “Who would believe me anyway, producing that document after all this time? They’ll accuse me of making it up. It’s too absurd.”

So that was the core of it. Not just the wish to protect the children, but the belief, bred into him from birth, that he wasn’t worth more. Something greater. That luck had always run against him, and always would.

She gave in then to the urge to touch him.

It was too much to resist: the solid bulk of him standing so close to her, his strength, the troubled look on his face, his enormous heart.

He wouldn’t be the man she loved if he were able to claim his birth and patrimony over the welfare of three innocent children.

She loved Malden Grey, did she?

The knowledge pierced her chest like an arrow.

She meant only to lay a hand on his arm, a friendly, consoling gesture, not too improper for a church.

But he turned toward her at the same instant and her hand landed on his chest, then crept of its own accord around his neck, which he obligingly bent toward her.

His kiss was sweet and hot and unhurried and consuming all at the same time.

She met his fervor with her own. They plunged through tender exploration into demand, and she was just as insistent as he.

Heat leapt between them as he pressed close, and she felt him vibrating with restraint as he clamped his hands on her shoulders, using his mouth to call up the depths of her passion.

She leaned against his hard chest, clinging to his neck in surrender.

Her knees turned to jelly, her mind floated away, and there was only Mal, this kiss which was a declaration and a promise, beneath it the slow burn in her blood, and beneath that the deeper knowledge that this fire between them fed on more than infatuation.

What had grown between them was solid and true and lasting, the kind of bond that could cleave one soul to another through life and into eternity.

The realization was devastating. When he lifted his head to stare into her eyes, his expression as dazed as hers, as full of wonder, she almost sobbed with the weight of this revelation. She closed her eyes as his ragged breath warmed her cheek.

She was his, for always, and she had just sealed that offering with a kiss in a church. In the cool quiet of the ancient brown stone, with the bars of colored light from the stained-glass windows reaching toward them across the stone floor, instead of impious their embrace felt sanctified. Holy.

“You told your cousin you meant to marry me.” Mal murmured the words against her cheek, brushing his lips across her cheekbone, then below her ear and down her neck. She tipped her head to the side, helpless to resist him.

“I did,” she breathed.

“Will you?” He paused with his nose at the high collar of the smart jacket that went with her riding habit, another loan from the duchess.

She squeezed her eyes shut, tears caught between her lashes. More than anything in her life—more than she wanted to start her antiquarian bookstore; more than she’d wanted Mr. Karim to buy her copied manuscripts—she wanted to marry Malden Grey.

“Because I’ll stay a bastard,” he said when she made no answer. She opened her eyes to face him.

“That has never mattered to me.”

His arms came about her carefully, as if she were fragile, as if he didn’t dare move too quickly. “It’s mattered to everyone else.”

“Not to me.” She pressed a firm, swift kiss to his cheek, trying to impress this upon him once and for all.

“Then what is holding you back?” he asked.

It was her perfidy that kept her from opening fully to him, not his birth. But with everything else pressing on his mind, now was not the time to discuss her dubious means of earning a living.

She straightened the neckcloth she’d crushed, pressing herself against him so wantonly. She rested her nose against one of his broad shoulders and inhaled.

“You’ve business to see to in London. I—I need to tell you something, but it can wait until this is settled.”

He stood still, and in his embrace, with his scent and his heat and his powerful arms surrounding her, the muted light sanctifying the room, her head against his chest—where she wanted to be, always—Amaranthe promised herself that she would become worthy of Malden Grey.

He had made a noble sacrifice for his siblings. She would sacrifice something as well.

She would make the Book of Secrets to repay Mr. Karim for his many kindnesses, and she would give the money to Joseph and his bride as a wedding gift to help set up their household since she would not be there, the reliable spinster aunt, to ease things for him and his new family.

One more book, one more secret copy, and then she would be done. Only honest commissions from here on.

Mal’s arms fell away. “I think I should go back to London alone,” he said.

She opened her eyes. “Why?”

He stepped back, and a cold draft blew over her. His expression was shuttered, distant. He looked at the burial plaque instead of her.

“Your reputation. Your cousin thinks we are engaged, but we cannot pose as a married couple back to London, as we did in Tavistock.”

She blinked in bewilderment. They had traveled together, with just the changing round of post boys for company, all the way from Callington. Why was he withdrawing from her now?

“Besides, if Joseph is to be wed, you’ll want to be here, won’t you?”

“I suppose.” She tried to meet his eyes, but he avoided her gaze.

She had lost his trust in her. Because of her hesitation about marrying him? Or because of something else?

Without coming closer he bent and dropped a kiss on her forehead, a small, chaste kiss.

It felt too much like a goodbye. She swallowed an ache in her throat as he moved toward the door of the church, breaking their closeness.

She wanted to stay in his embrace forever.

She wanted to stay in that moment when he believed in her. When he thought her worthy of him.

Only one book more, and then she was finished. She truly wanted to marry Malden Grey, and he was slipping away from her. She might lose him forever once he knew the truth.