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“I’m so sorry. I didn’t intend—”
“Oh, no apology needed. I’ve found it a most useful decoration. Would you know, it has actually driven one particularly lovely woman to touch my cheek?”
Her hand stopped on his chin, where she’d been tracing an unconscious circle. “You’re putting a good face on it. But—”
“None of that, now. It’s as I told you—this is how men make friends. If you know what drives a man to anger, you know him.”
She shook her head. She still hadn’t moved her fingers from his skin. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. “That can’t be rational.” Even less rational was the fact that she was still staring into his eyes.
“We are speaking of men, are we not? Most of us are base creatures, little more than bundles of animal instinct. Friendship is one of our least rational responses.”
As close as he was, he’d made no move to touch her. Another man who’d shown half of Ash’s interest would have closed his arms about her by now and assaulted her lips. But despite the husk in his voice, he didn’t strain towards her.
Her fingers still rested against his skin.
“Friends?” Margaret said. “Is that how you think of me?” She pulled her hand away, and lowered herself down from the tips of her toes.
He followed her down that inch and a half, canting his head over hers. A light sparkled in his eyes. “I spoke only by way of analogy. When I think of you, I want nothing so pale as friendship. I want more. I want decidedly more.”
He was going to kiss her. She could feel it in the greedy hunger of her lips, tilting up to his. She could feel it in the clamorous beat of her heart, yearning for that completion.
“I lied to you that first evening we spoke.” His breath felt like little brushes of butterfly wings against her lips, sweet and tremulous.
“Oh?”
His voice had gone deep, so deep it seemed to reverberate in her bones. His finger reached up to trace her mouth. “I do want to take that kiss.”
Her heart stopped. Her lips parted. She felt a flush rise through her—and still he didn’t press his lips to hers. Instead, he exhaled and she drank in his scent, sweet and warm.
“Oh,” she breathed.
“But—” he said, and it seemed an unfair word, that but “—I want you to give me one more.”
It would have been easy to shut her eyes and let him kiss her. To have the choice taken from her in one heated, passive moment, with nothing for her to do but comply. But he was asking for more than her artless submission. Not deference, not docility, but…defiance.
“I want you to choose me,” he said, “well and truly choose me of your own accord. I don’t want you to wait at the crossroads in the hopes that I will force the choice upon you.”
What he wanted was more perilous than a kiss, more fraught with danger even than letting him slide his hands down her aching body.
“And why must I be the one deciding?”
“Because I decided upon you more than a week ago.”
At those words, she drew back. He didn’t look as if he were joking. In fact, he seemed almost solemn in that declaration. Still, his words jarred her back to reality. They weren’t sweethearts, exchanging promises. They were not lord and lady, agreeing to court. He believed she was a servant, and Ash Turner was a wealthy, handsome duke’s heir.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t tell me falsehoods. You’ve treated me like this since—”
“Since the first time I laid eyes on you?” His words came out on a growl. “There’s not much to me but animal instinct. Don’t look to me for a logical discourse on your charms. I like the set of your chin. I like the way your eyes beckon me to follow you down dark, forested paths. I like that I can’t bend you to my will—that you’ll send me to the devil if you think I’m in the wrong.” She wanted to be wrong, wanted to believe that he proposed more than a simple joining of bodies. But one didn’t decide such a thing the instant one clapped eyes on another person.
“You know almost nothing about me.” Not even her name.
“I don’t need to line up a collection of facts to understand how magnificent you are. I’m not wrong. I’m never wrong. Not about this.”
“Such humility, Mr. Turner.” Her disappointment tinged her words with bitterness. “Everyone’s wrong, eventually.”
“I’m not. I’ve no education to speak of. I know nothing of the classics. But I have this: I can look into someone’s eyes and see the truth. It’s how I made my fortune, you know.”
She swallowed. If he’d seen the truth in her eyes, he’d not stand so close to her now. “How do you mean?”
He must have heard the warning note in her voice, because he straightened and expelled a sigh.
“Everyone else is hampered by figures and facts, projections based on rationality. Every contract must be examined for soundness by a horde of solicitors; every word in it laid upon a coroner’s table and prodded until it divulges its last secrets. It takes days for most people to reach an accord. Sometimes months.”
“And you?”
“I make up my mind in seconds. Speed matters, these days. Prices fluctuate, rising and falling with every ship that comes into port.”
“What do you do, then? Sign contracts without having them looked over?”
He bit his lip. For a long time, he pressed his lips together, his expression abstracted. Then he whispered, as if imparting a very great secret, “If I trust a man, I’ll sign without reading it at all. Words on a page can’t stop a true betrayal. All they can do is muddy up the aftermath in Chancery. And as I’ve said, I’ve never been wrong.”
Margaret took another stunned step backwards. “Doesn’t that frighten you? To judge so quickly with so little evidence?”
He shook his head slowly—not an answer to her question, but a thorough rejection of her premise.
“I don’t think that is at all what you mean. I think what you really want to know is whether you are frightened to have been judged so swiftly. You fear you might come up wanting. You fear that when all is said, and a great deal more has been done, you’ll have nothing else I want, and I’ll be done with you.”
He described them so precisely that she could almost believe he had seen her fears. But these were not just idle nightmares, to be dispelled by the coming dawn. Once he discovered her name, he would turn his back on her. And this—whatever it was—would be finished.
He tapped one finger against her lips. “Kiss me,” he said, “when you’re sure that foolishness is wrong.”
MARGARET RETREATED TO HER room in the servants’ quarters with a pounding heart. She could feel the pulse in her neck beating in confused arousal. She eased the door shut behind her and stared at the yellowing whitewash.
There were very few truths in this world. One of them, though, she understood deep in her bones. A man like Ash, with his fortune and his prospects, could have anyone. She doubted he intended anything so casual as a single night’s seduction—he’d devoted far too much of his energy to wooing her to discard her so quickly.
But he couldn’t want her honorably. Dukes’ heirs didn’t marry their mistresses.
She had no sooner to think that than realization struck. Dukes’ heirs did marry their mistresses. She could think of one who had once done so: her father.
The sordid tale had been in all the papers when Ash had filed suit in the ecclesiastical courts. The events had been no less salacious for their being fifty years old. It was hard to imagine her father young and headstrong, but he must have been so once. When he had turned twenty-one, he’d married his mistress in a hushed-up ceremony held in a tiny town in Northumberland. He’d quietly brought his wife to meet his parents—and they had just as quietly threatened him with penury if he persisted in his foolishness.
But parents—even parents who were a duke and a duchess—could only do so much. There were no legal grounds for annulment. And so that impetuous, imprudent wedding had never been spoken about. The girl had bee
n threatened with God only knew what—destitution, dismemberment, dyspepsia. She’d been bundled off to America, where she had wed a wealthy financier.
She’d shown neither hide nor hair in England in the decades that followed, until she made more than a minor sensation of herself, testifying on the matter at Ash’s behest.
So, yes. Dukes’ heirs did sometimes marry their mistresses. But Ash surely knew that it never turned out well. Not for the duke in question, nor for the mistress and most especially not for the family, waiting in confusion on the margins.
Thoughts of family made Margaret think of Richard’s letter. She’d tucked it into her lap desk, so that she might answer it at a more fortuitous time. She was supposed to tell him what she’d discovered about Ash. She was supposed to be finding evidence to undermine his claim before Parliament, not yearning for his kiss.
And yet, without attempting to do so, she’d succeeded. All she would have to do was write a letter that looked something like: Mr. Ash Turner believes the notion of class is an antiquated delusion. Additionally, he is so hasty that he doesn’t read his contracts before he signs them.
