“I am sure even you know what a rake is, Claire,” he said. “Florence has six of them as her guests. I include myself, you see. You have no business being here with me.”
“I can look after myself,” she said. “I am not a helpless innocent.”
“You must know what I have set myself to do since this morning,” he said. “Don’t you?”
She dropped her chin to her chest. Yes, she had known, she supposed. She was not quite as naive as she sometimes pretended even to herself to be.
“Yes.” Her voice was a whisper.
“I am not the sort of man to be satisfied with kisses for three days,” he said. “And three nights.”
She covered her face with her hands for a moment before turning to look up at him. He had set the candlestick down beside the bench when they sat down earlier. His face was in shadows.
“Perhaps I am not the sort of woman to be satisfied with a few kisses for a lifetime,” she said, hearing the words almost as if someone else were speaking them, but amazing herself with the truth of what she was saying.
She heard him draw breath and expel it slowly.
“I am not used to situations like this, Claire,” he said.
“Neither am I—Gerard.”
He touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek as he had done downstairs earlier. “You are offering yourself to me for two days and three nights,” he said. “You are worth more, Claire. Far more.”
“Life has always been bleakest on Valentine’s Day,” she said. And she wondered somewhere far back in her mind when she would feel horror and embarrassment at having so bared her lonely soul.
“Has it?” His hands framed her face gently, his fingers stroking back the hair from her face. “Has it, Claire?”
And then his arms were about her and drawing her against his body and her own were up about his shoulders and neck, and his mouth was on hers, warm, light, open. Without conscious thought she arched herself against him, feeling hard masculine muscles pressed to her thighs, her stomach, her breasts. She sighed with contentment and parted her lips beneath his so that she could taste him too.
He had been wrong. He had been quite certain that it could not be accomplished this first night. Perhaps tomorrow night, he had thought. More probably the last night. Possibly not at all. But he had been wrong.
She was his. His for the taking. He knew it the moment her arms came up about his neck and her body arched to his and her mouth opened beneath his. He knew it as he slid his tongue into her mouth and fondled one of her breasts and felt the taut nipple with his thumb. He knew it as both hands moved down her sides to her small waist and down to her shapely hips and behind to spread themselves over firm buttocks and she neither cringed nor pulled back. She was his.
He returned his hands to her waist and lifted his head. She opened her eyes and looked into his. She was utterly beautiful, he noticed for the first time. Oh, perhaps not in the most obvious of ways. In many ways she was not as lovely as any of the other five ladies belowstairs. But then their beauty was all of the surface. Hers shone from within. Her whole soul looked at him through her eyes.
And he saw Claire. Not just a woman from whom to take his pleasure, a woman on whom to use the sexual expertise of years. He saw a woman whose family and whose own sense of duty had taken her past the usual age of marriage and motherhood. A woman who had compensated outwardly with a quiet dignity. A woman who had allowed him to cut a chink in her armor so that he had glimpsed all the longing and all the loneliness within. A woman who, as he had told her, should have been in her own home at that moment with her own family. But who instead was with him.
She was his, he thought again, with a pang of regret for conscience and for years of life wasted on pleasure and the constant restless search for more pleasure.
“Then we will have to make sure that this is a Valentine’s to remember, will we not?” he said.
“Yes.” She searched his eyes with her soul.
“Romance,” he said. “That is the word, is it not?” It was a word he knew nothing about. “We will avoid the more sordid of Florence’s plans together, you and I, Claire, and seek out romance for two days instead. Shall we?”
She nodded, but she was still looking deeply into his eyes. “Will I be ruining your party?” she asked. “Do you wish to be with the others?” She hesitated. “Do you regret that you picked up my valentine?”
“No,” he said, bending his head to kiss her softly beneath one ear. “No to all of the above.”
“Thank you,” she said, and a smile hovered about her lips for a few moments, so that he found himself inexplicably holding his breath. But she did not allow it to develop.
“It is far too early to go back downstairs,” he said. “We did not get very far in the telling of our life stories, did we? Shall I tell you something of mine? I was my parents’ sole darling for six years before my brother arrived—he is just your age, Claire—and then four sisters in quick succession. I do not believe I have ever recovered my temper.”
He sat down with her again on the bench and took her hand in his, setting it palm down on his thigh and playing with her fingers while he talked. He did not spend much time with his family. He resented their disappointment with his way of life and their occasional reproaches. He hated his eldest sister’s matchmaking schemes, though she had given up her efforts of late. He felt uncomfortable with the fact that they were all married and all parents, even Sarah, the youngest.
However, it was not of his adult estrangement from his family that he talked, but of earlier years when he had been the adored and pestered eldest brother and when he had loved and hated and played and fought with his brother and sisters and felt all the unconscious security of belonging to a large and close family.
“My father died quite unexpectedly,” he said, “when I was only twenty-four. He was the sort of man one would expect to live to a hundred. It was a nasty age to be suddenly saddled with all the responsibilities of a dukedom, Claire, and all those of being head of a family. My mother collapsed emotionally and my brother and sisters resented my authority. And I rebelled.”
